Indian Creek Chronicles

by Pete Fromm

  As I got lower, coming down from the mountains that afternoon, the crust gave away and I had to put on my snowshoes. Shuffling along, I ate the last of the little blocks of Wisconsin cheese my aunt had sent in for Christmas, things like Edam and Brick and Gouda that I didn’t remember having eaten before, when I lived in Wisconsin. Cheese wasn’t something I’d brought in and the new flavors were something I’d tried to dole out to myself, to savor. In the wild, warm sunlight I threw my hoarding to the winds.

  I was switchbacking down the last steep southwest slope above the old Nez Perce ford when, at the base of a towering, red-barked, ponderosa pine, I stumbled across open dirt. I just stared at it for a moment. It was the first ground I’d seen in four months.

  I chugged across the hill and sat down in the two foot circular patch. The dirt was actually thawed, muddy, covered with pine needles. I dug my fingers into it and laughed. It smelled like mud and wetness, with the hot scent of the dead needles. Some of those things I hadn’t quite realized had smells.

  Boone rushed over when she saw me on the ground and soon we were rolling in the mud and the snow. I threw snowballs at her that she caught without slowing her mad charges into my chest.

  As I picked myself up a sudden whistling, whirring rush filled my ears, and I ducked instinctively, as if someone had launched some kind of missile. I glanced up in time to see a pileated woodpecker streak by, wings tucked firmly to its sides, screaming through the air. It flared above the trees below me and disappeared in the branches. I’d never seen one fly that way before, and once I recovered from the noise of its rush I wondered if the return of the sun was turning everything a little wild.

  I remembered the eclipse, and though I knew it was not an event connected with weather, I couldn’t help associating it with the changes taking place. The blue glow of the snow in the momentary darkness seemed to foretell the changes I saw now, as if the energy beneath the ice was finally emerging. I couldn’t keep away from it, and I spent the following day up top, too.

  This time I went north, chasing herds of mule deer from draw to draw, bumping into an occasional elk or two. I decided to stretch my walk to Sheep Creek, thinking I might be able to see some bighorns, the animal whose picture had drawn me out to Montana in the first place.

  The crust acted different today, slushing over the same as ever but occasionally giving away beneath me even way up high. Breaking through unexpectedly was unpleasant, like miscounting the number of stairs, jarring my hip and knee that way, and I strapped on my snowshoes and kept on, worried more about the effect of the coarse, wet snow on the rawhide webbing than I was about the lack of traction the snowshoes gave on the sidehills. On the really steep sidehills I’d take the snowshoes off, kicking in steps with my boots, leaning uphill.

  I pushed on for Sheep Creek but the ridges began dropping away in cliffs I couldn’t get around and I kept looping farther to the east, until I was worrying about how far away from home I was getting. I worked my way into a corner and I started to hurry a little, not bothering to take off my shoes for the next steep pitch.

  My feet went out from under me so fast I hit the ground before I knew I was falling. I built up a head of steam in an instant. I tried to dig my knees and elbows into the snow but the crust was hard here and I only scratched away the surface slush. There was a cliff below me someplace and I thought I was going too fast to ever stop when suddenly my knees grated over rock and I grabbed with everything I had, ripping open my fingertips. I came to a stop, breathing so hard I wasn’t sure if I’d ever get another breath.

  I waited a minute, making sure I was really there, then reached to my belt for my knife and cut myself a knee hole. With my knee wedged in I cut a handhold. I kept going, as I had up the pinnacle to watch the eclipse, but this time I was trembling, and I concentrated on not looking away from the rough surface of the snow immediately in front of me.

  I didn’t stop cutting holes for myself until I reached a tree I was able to straddle. With a leg safely around each side of the trunk I peered down my path. The track of my slide—the bright crust wiped clear of slush—went right over the edge of the cliff. I closed my eyes and rested my face against the bark of the tree. My feet must have been dangling in space. My heart began to race, as after a close call in a car, when the driver’s had a moment to think of what has just nearly happened.

  I stayed there several minutes, wrapped tightly around that tree before I reached out to unhook my snowshoes. With the snowshoes looped across my back I circled around the way I’d come until I found the first chance to drop down the side of the mountain, leaving the last of the cliffs behind.

  Clouds were closing off the sky before I reached my tent that evening and I never did see a sheep that day. And I never did get over how close I’d come to wiping myself out.

  The rains resumed during the night and for several days I was content to lie around my tent again, cooking and reading, listening to the steady patter on the canvas. I read all of Atlas Shrugged, a gift from my sister, and followed it up with Tales of the French Foreign Legion, a book my dad had included to lighten up the Graham Green and Franz Kafka he’d sent in the same box. As the rain mumbled on and on I marched through the baking desert with the legionnaires.

  I was just attacking a Muslim-held outpost in the sand when I heard a pair of snow machines whine upstream and abruptly turn silent. I snapped the book shut and grabbed my coat and headed out. In a few moments I saw the warden and a Forest Service ranger walking into my meadow. They’d been running around the new slides, out onto the river ice, threading through the trees on the opposite bank wherever the slides had run clear across the river. But when they reached the last one, just a little way above my meadow, they said the ice looked too rotten, and they’d decided to hoof it in from there.

  They carried an armload of mail and apples and oranges, even some eggs and bacon. After the standard channel inspection they stayed long enough to have some sardines and crackers for lunch, the three of us cramped in the small, smoky tent. They were gone within an hour, and, as usual, I was tearing into my mail before I heard the last of their snow machines.

  All the mail was great, but the highlight of the whole stack was a rare letter from my little brother, Joe. A senior in high school, he’d been swimming for four years and his letter told of his trip to the state finals. State! I couldn’t believe it. The state meet had been nothing but a dream for any of us when I’d been swimming. He’d clipped an article from the school paper, including a photo of him with his head shaved. State and a shaved head! My punky little brother! I just couldn’t believe it.

  I whooped, startling Boone, but when she saw how excited I was she dove in and we wrestled around like pups. I’d send her flying, shouting, “Can you believe it, Boone? Joe shaved his head! Joe made it all the way to state!” when she’d land Boone would already be turning back to me and we rumbled for nearly an hour. Then I went and read my mail all over again. I read Joe’s letter and his article three times, whispering, “Way to go, Joe!”

  But that night, for the first time since my first or second mail run, my high was followed by a swooping low. Joe comes out of nowhere to set school records, to go to state. For all I knew Rader was already married to a girl I hadn’t even known he was dating. Again it seemed as if everything was slipping away without my having a chance to join in on any of it. That fast I could go from thinking I was living the world’s greatest life to feeling I was trapped in here forever.

  To take my mind away I dove into a new book that night, Papillon. The story of a man condemned to Devil’s Island, with long accounts of years of solitary confinement, it did little to help.

  When the weather cleared again I unpacked my fishing rod and carried it downstream a few miles, to a wide riffle that had opened up, the first big stretch of open water since early December. Below the riffle the old ice bulged up in blocky chunks against the still frozen river, but I studied the moving water, seeing an alternative to my chili diet. As a k
id I’d fished hundreds of lakes, yet I really didn’t know what to look for in fast water.

  Even so, I’d brought a secret weapon—one of the night’s mice. I’d been carrying on a limited battle with the rodents all winter, and with the sudden warming they were everywhere. I trapped them in droves.

  As I stood beside the rushing flow of clear water I sank a hook through the entire mouse. I cast it out, letting it bob through the rapids to no avail. My only fishing experience was in Wisconsin, for vicious predators like northern pike, fish that wouldn’t think twice about swallowing a mouse, or a squirrel, or probably small dogs. I wondered if the delicate and fabled trout would be different. I wondered how idiotic I was being, expecting them to come charging after an entire mouse. I wondered if their mouths even opened that wide. I didn’t know a thing about them.

  So I reeled in and I pulled the mouse apart, using only the brightly colored insides as bait. On my next cast I hooked a fish immediately. The fish ran wildly and for a moment I wasn’t standing alone in three feet of snow beside a fifty-yard-long opening in river ice. I was back in the north woods, surrounded by my father and brothers, stunned by the first real fish I’d ever caught, a walleye, after years and years of hooking little panfish. I held down an urge to shout, “I got one!” as I had then.

  The fish jumped over and over again, clearing the painful sparkles of the sun on the broken water, and I became unduly worried that it might get away. I cranked and cranked on my reel, bulling it through the water, running down as close to the bottom edge of the opening as I dared, trying to take the stress of the water’s current off the line.

  When I finally had the fish beside the bank I realized I couldn’t reach in to lift it out. The snow created too steep a bank, the water too deep to step into. Holding my breath, I reached back on the rod and manhandled the fish out of the water, hoping the line and its lip would hold. The fish, a sixteen-inch cutthroat, flopped weakly on the clean bank of snow, large white crystals of the icy snow sticking to its curved side.

  I cracked its head and held it up proudly, one of the few trout I’d ever caught, certainly the biggest. That fast I was able to forget the foolishness of casting an entire mouse and congratulate myself for having the smarts to discover mouse guts, a readily available bait. Another feast—a whole new season of feasting—was on its way.

  I hooked a finger through the gills of the trout and started back for my tent. Soon I couldn’t just walk in the warm, sunny air. I was so excited I began to jog, then finally sprint. The crust was still strong in the shade of the trees, and I cut into the deep timber, running as hard as I could possibly run, swerving through the branches, my moccasined feet as light as air.

  I dashed across the rotten ice of Indian Creek, half expecting to crash through, but laughing at the risk, daring the world to try to get me. When I shot clear of the trees into the rear of my meadow, where the sun had been working on the snow for hours, my feet crashed through the crust and I sprawled out, throwing my fishing rod out in front of me, out of harm’s way. The trout slid off my finger too, skittering away across the snow. I was already laughing when Boone crashed into me, running right over my back, chasing the slippery fish. With the run and the laughter, I barely had the wind to call her back before she made off with my fish.

  I tried cooking baked potatoes that afternoon, to complement my fish, and after banking the fire I crawled up Indian Ridge to the base of one of its huge ponderosas. I took off my shirts and stretched out in the open dirt there, dried already by the day of sun, and I soaked up the rays. I found a herd of ladybugs milling about in the pine needles and wondered where they had come from. They were bright and colorful in the brown dirt circled by white snow and I watched them until I was afraid I’d burned my potatoes down to hard, black raisins.

  Beginning to establish a pattern, the rain resumed as soon as I grew used to the sunshine. I hiked through it, carried by the momentum of the bright days, but soon was spending more time in my tent, reading more and more of Papillon’s solitary confinement. I wondered if I’d be able to handle anything like that.

  The dawn before the first day of spring I lay in bed, knowing by the dim lighting of my tent that I was faced with another silent gray morning. Instead of throwing back my covers I lay there, studying the mildew stains in the dingy canvas roof of my tent. The stains made patterns, heads and faces, that by now I could trace blindfolded. The grayish light reminded me of the socked-in times of midwinter, long after the crystalline cold snaps had silenced the country. The midday light of the drizzly February avalanche weather had been just like this.

  I tried to stop thinking of the months of cold and of the thaws, and I wondered if any ice had built up on the channel overnight. There hadn’t been any ice-up lately, but chopping it was my only duty. So I lay in bed, looking at the mildew stains, wondering if the winter might not really be ending after all.

  And then a cannon shot reverberated down my tight canyon. I sat upright and looked around, as if I could see a sound through the walls of my tent. There were often sonic booms back here, but this was not that.

  It was as silent as ever after the shot and I was wondering if I really had heard anything. Then there was a rumble, soft crackings and groanings. I pushed up on my elbows and murmured the word “Ice.” The river was opening up.

  I dressed as I ran but when I reached the Selway it was over. The river was open. In the last few weeks small spots had been opening, but the ice that broke away jammed up at the first unopened spot. Along with the snow slides that had dammed the river, huge ice dams had formed, blocking the river and flooding some of my old trails.

  The shot I’d heard had been the last upstream dam bursting after being hit by the rush caused by all the other broken dams farther upriver. Now large blocks of rotting ice battered against the rocks and slipped by and broke apart, or held up until other blocks slammed into them.

  The air crackled with sound. Not the grinding and bashing of the ice, but the sound of the river. The normal gurglings and hissings and rushes of moving water. My world was no longer silent. I remembered in the fall the noise had followed me everywhere, surrounding me. At night, as the lantern fluttered and died, the sounds would change to voices, or music—echoes of my father’s symphonies, that wove through the darkness as I shivered waiting for the blankets to warm.

  I stayed by the river all day, moving up and down stream, checking out old favorite spots, smiling stupidly, just listening. Walls of translucent blue ice with white snowcaps still hemmed in the water but the river roared. Those voices had been buried all winter, under the ice and snow. Somehow, as I’d fished the one open stretch, I hadn’t noticed their babble. I’d missed them without knowing it.

  That night I lay in bed again, and as soon as the lantern sputtered and went out the voices took over, and I hummed along to the mysterious music I was so glad to have back.

  It poured the day after the ice-out and I walked around by the river just to watch the water, the rain pocking its black surface even as the current raced along. I did some work at the channel, slipping boards into the headgate, reducing the amount of water entering the channel as Indian Creek rose. But I was soaked and cold in no time and I slogged back to my tent, settling in for a day of cooking, baking corn bread and rice pudding in the stove and a huge batch of chili on top.

  It was a long, quiet day and I went to bed that night after dinner and one more long stint with my book.

  I woke around two in the morning, an incredible pain knifing through my belly. I lay in the darkness, holding the flashlight I’d used to check the clock, and I waited for the cramps to subside. I was sweating hard and suddenly had to vomit and defecate at the same time. I stumbled out naked into the blackness and squatted in the soggy snow, knowing I didn’t have a chance of making it the eighty yards to my outhouse. But, once outside, I couldn’t’ make anything happen at either end and I crawled back into the tent. I was still covered in sweat but I stoked the fire anyway, not sure wh
en I’d be able to do it again. Just that much work exhausted me, so much so that I considered pulling my blankets off the bed and curling up directly in front of the stove.

  I slipped back into bed though, leaving the image of the fetal ball before the stove as a last resort, something I could still do if things got really bad.

  I made more unsuccessful trips outside that night, spending the time between trips sweating and trembling, knotted into a ball by the twisting squeeze inside me. By first light I finally managed to move my bowels, which seemed to only make matters worse, rather than bring any of the relief I’d hoped for. I’d tried to put it off, but now I brought my first-aid book to bed and read about appendicitis. The symptoms did not seem to match, but I couldn’t put it out of my head. Lewis and Clark had lost one man. Only one in two years, over all those miles. Not to accident or Blackfeet, but to a ruptured appendix. I read the symptoms again, and told myself my appendix couldn’t be exploding, and for comfort I flipped to the section on food poisoning. I had to breathe with my mouth open, taking short, panting breaths.

  Regular food poisoning, the kind that lasted twenty-four hours, I read, could be caused by many things, the only one pertaining to me being eggs. I’d used several making the corn bread, and they were all five months old, from the food cache, but I’d been baking with them steadily since I’d been here.

  Botulism, it continued, characterized by vomiting, stomach cramps and muscular weakness—and often fatal—was frequently caused by canned corn. I did have some of that for dinner, but I’d eaten half the can two days before, and had lived through that. I couldn’t really be certain what was happening to me, if I’d be over it by tomorrow or not, or what I could do about it. The words "often fatal" lay with me in the bed as the gray light of morning seeped through the canvas.