Indian Creek Chronicles

by Pete Fromm

  After all winter of wishing to get out for a few days I didn’t hop in my truck and go. I stayed in the mountains, watching the spring come in, changing everything I knew.

  20

  It snowed hard the day after they opened the road, but the next day heated right back up and within days of the road’s opening I began to have visitors. Lots of Forest Service people came in, seemingly for little reason. The wardens came back too, staying a little longer now that they could drive around anywhere they liked. They all had horror stories of how rough the pass was, still nothing more than two wheel ruts through the snow, but they kept coming anyway. I even saw Brian, the lion hunter, and we had a drink together. He was gearing up the Paradise outfitter camp for the influx of bear hunters.

  But now that we weren’t bundled up to our eyeballs against the cold, and now that everybody could just pop over the pass without a thought, a difference between the outsiders and me became apparent. They were clean. They weren’t the lion hunters who stayed in for weeks at a time. The Forest Service guys and the wardens wore spotless, ironed uniforms. Even Brian looked less rough in his light clothes and shampooed hair.

  I looked like I lived in a cave.

  The first nice afternoon I had I hauled my washtub out beside my tent and stoked the stove full to bursting, setting the big pot on top. As usual, it took hours to heat the water, but I was able to stay out of the sweltering tent this time, and when I poured the water over my head in the sunlight it felt quite a bit more luxurious than it had in the dark of my tent with the below-zero drafts eddying around me.

  I danced around naked in the sun, drying off, but before long I began to imagine I could hear the distant rumble of truck engines and I dodged into the tent for my clothes. Turned out I had just imagined them, but sitting on the stump in front of my tent, my freshly washed hair still damp, I began to realize that this place was no longer mine alone.

  The weather kept improving, even hitting seventy one day, a temperature I was certain I’d never see on the Forest Service thermometers. Wildflowers sprang up everywhere as the snow melted and I walked around with a wildflower guide my sister Ellen had sent in. Trillium came in just before the dogtooth violets and now spring beauty and ground nut were overrunning my meadow. Large, dark butterflies with yellow or white wing borders, along with smaller orange and black dappled species, added themselves to the clouds of the tiny sky-blue ones that had been around nearly since the melt-off.

  I even saw a snowshoe hare, its white coat already gone completely to gray.

  And, for the first time since my job began, I finally saw my fish. They began to leave their hideout in the rocks to start their long swim. They were about an inch long, pinkish with dark vertical splotches down their sides. A scrap of red yolk sac still bulged from their bellies. They were too small to do anything, let alone swim eighteen hundred miles. I felt sorry for them.

  They schooled up in the pool below the falls I’d chopped ice off of all winter, some of them so weak that the current through the screen pressed them against the mesh and they couldn’t swim off. They died there.

  I counted the living in a glass measuring cup, putting in an ounce of water and adding fish one at a time until I had two ounces. They averaged one hundred and ten fish to the ounce. Hardly keepers. I began to release them daily from the pool. Soon I was releasing fifteen hundred a morning.

  The trout, of course, went wild. A few salmon would slip by the holding tank, enough to keep the trout lined up at the channel exit, waiting. One morning I even found two ambitious cutthroat in the holding pool. They must have squeezed through the headgate and wriggled the entire length of the channel, through an inch of water, and thrown themselves over the waterfall at the top of the pool. I had them for breakfast. They were stuffed with my tiny salmon.

  I had always understood why there were two and a half million eggs in the channel. I’d understood the reproductive strategy of the salmon—a swarming method, flooding the waterways with more fish than could possibly be consumed. But seeing the opened trout bellies, spilling salmon fry and fry parts, I really knew what that strategy entailed. After surviving the harrowing ice of winter, the tiny fish had been set up for a massacre.

  After the first rush of traffic the open road appeared to lose its novelty and things began to settle down again. I still hiked all day after releasing my fish, not wishing to be caught in my tent where I’d have to talk to anyone who might drop by. Up top I was alone and now, instead of going just for the sun, I went for the snow, a reminder of the long winter so rapidly disappearing.

  The road had been open for a couple of weeks, and after spending another day all on top, on snowshoes, I slid down the mud of the old Nez Perce trail as evening closed in. I hit the Selway at the ford and started up the road the last four miles to my tent. It was nearly dark, but with the road wide open I’d been easing my rules about being home before dark.

  Soon I heard engines. I stepped out of the road and at the last second dropped back into the bushes with Boone. We watched two trucks go by, Texas plates, headlights on, two people to a truck, guns in the racks. I scratched Boone’s ears. The bear hunters had arrived.

  When the trucks were gone I walked on slowly in the darkness. I wasn’t happy to see all these strangers. It was hardly fair that after all winter people could just drive in here, like it was nothing. This wasn’t just some place you could come into to blast a bear or two. It wasn’t just that.

  I remembered how much fun I’d had in the fall with the few hunters who had invited me into their camps. I’d been embarrassed to talk to them, because they seemed to know so much about all this mountain stuff. Now there were more hunters coming in and I didn’t want them.

  They didn’t know anything about this place. They didn’t know about skies turned back at the pass, or about nights at forty below with the stars so sharp they seemed within reach. They didn’t know that snow had sat here four feet deep for months, that the dregs of snow they saw in the meadows were my winter trails, hardpacked, still lingering despite the sun. They would see it as it was now, without knowing what it had gone through to get like this. That was not right. I felt like I had paid my dues, and now freeloaders were driving in for what I’d earned.

  When I passed Raven Creek, where the bobcat had died, things didn’t seem any more fair. I walked out the last two miles and when I entered my meadow and found the two trucks parked by my tent I sat down in the trees, waiting for them to leave before I crossed the dark clearing.

  The following morning I’d just started walking to the channel when the trucks returned, driving upriver from Paradise. I was trapped this time, and they unloaded from their trucks, a pair of husbands and wives. They came down the hill to the channel and me.

  They introduced themselves and we shook hands. One of the women went nuts over Boone, squatting down and stroking her head, ooing and aahing about how pretty she was. Boone had grown into a large, handsome dog, mostly shepherd, with some husky showing though. She was barrel chested from the miles she had covered, up and down mountains, throughout her puppyhood. Now she sat beside me, unsure of what to make of strangers.

  The men said the rangers at West Fork had told them I’d been here all winter, and if anyone knew where the bears were, it would be me. They said they’d waited half the night for me at my tent.

  They were somewhat interested in the fish, and in my winter, and they drove their trucks back to my tent as I walked. I gave them coffee and all they wanted to know about was bears.

  As little as I wanted them to be impressed with my winter I was somehow put out by the way they brushed over it. I told them I hadn’t seen any bears. They didn’t believe that. They had done their homework. The Selway was crawling with bears. In fact, it was one of the few areas where a hunter was allowed to kill two.

  They finally figured I was trying to keep all the bears for myself and they laughed about that. The woman never left Boone alone and I think Boone enjoyed the attention. Actually th
ey were pretty nice people. I just wasn’t ready for anyone to get my country handed to them on a platter.

  I saw these people nearly every day. They’d stop with iced beers in their coolers and want to know where I had seen the bears. I’d tell them where, if it was more than six or seven miles from the road. They’d laugh then, and say they didn’t have horses. I’d laugh too.

  More hunters came in, and the guides returned with their own. These were all the cat hunters of the winter and I was glad to see them. We tuned it up a few nights in their tents, with the gas lanterns hissing and the clients shoved a little to the side while we traded winter stories.

  One morning Brian skidded to a halt beside my tent, slamming his door viciously. I was out whittling a new ramrod for my rifle and Brian charged over, jerking a thumb back at his truck, where two hunters sat looking at the dashboard. They’d been driving down the road, Brian said, looking for bear sign, when they’d spotted a bear itself, shuffling through the thick stuff across the river. Before he could stop him, one of the hunters had leapt out and shot at the bear.

  “He hit him too,” Brian said. “But I don’t know how good.”

  Brian had chewed him out, asking him how the hell he planned to cross the river to get it, how he thought they’d bring it back even if he had killed it? The hunter had been excited, and hadn’t thought of that.

  Brian and I walked down and looked at the river, which was still on the rise, looking bigger and angrier every day. “This is the best place I could think to cross.” Brian said. I went through the river in my mind and had to agree.

  During the winter I’d told Brian something about my swimming. He’d said he wasn’t much of a swimmer. Now he asked if I felt like going over with him. I said, “Sure,” but looking at the race of water I knew being able to swim wouldn’t make much difference.

  We cut staffs and Brian tied his rifle across his shoulders. Then we stepped into the water and began shuffling across, leaning heavily upstream against our sticks. Before I was halfway across my feet and legs were completely numb and every time I lifted a foot the current swept it downstream. Without the staffs we wouldn’t have had a chance.

  Once across we sat down and rubbed at our legs. The pain was lip-biting sharp as the feeling returned. We swore and grinned at each other and started up the bank to get the blood pumping again.

  Within an hour we were at the sight of the shooting, a torn-up area in the undergrowth by the river. Blood flecks spotted a few leaves and some of the saplings were snapped off clean, where the bear had bitten in rage. We glanced around and Brian took out his rifle off his shoulder. I had a hatchet in my belt and I took that out. I laughed at the idea of fending off a bear with it. More Hugh Glass idiocy.

  We trailed the bear for more than a mile but the blood got thinner and then gave out all together. Finally we couldn’t find the trail anymore and Brian swore again about the hunters. I thought of the bear, shot somewhere, its roly-poly gait maybe slowed by a carried paw, and then of the hunters, waiting in the truck, complete strangers to this place.

  Brian and I tried to cross the river twice before we were forced to give up and hike back to my tent and cross there. Brian said thanks and without saying a word to his hunters jumped into his truck, soaking wet, and roared off.

  I had one visit from nonhunters, a young couple in a Honda. They’d been reading their map in some peculiar way and thought they were on a shortcut to Idaho. I couldn’t help but laugh. They’d made Idaho all right, but it was a hell of a way from here to Boise.

  They stayed a day and a half, hiking up to the top with me, where we shot a blue grouse for dinner. He was a chef someplace and he cooked the grouse like someone who knew how. It was quite a treat from the single way I’d fixed them all winter.

  I liked those two. They reminded me of myself seven months earlier. They didn’t pretend they knew anything about these mountains. Happy ignorants, without the pretense of knowledge that had come to seem a prerequisite to hunting here.

  But if Hondas were making it in, everybody would soon be driving in. And that’s what happened. I began to get weekend crowds—people anxious to do anything, even just a long, rough drive, after the cold, holed-up winter. The road, which had only been uncovered from four feet of snow for a month, began to grow rutted with their tracks.

  Eventually I drove out to Missoula. My friends were all still there and we had another round of parties that tried to rival those in the fall, but the desperation wasn’t in it for me anymore. I wasn’t afraid to go away. In fact, I wanted to go back, only afraid now that Indian Creek was no longer what it had come to be. Now, it seemed, it was anybody’s.

  While I was out I made a call to Nevada, where I had my Park Service lifeguarding job waiting for me. Yes, they said, they could use me early. I called Idaho Fish and Game and talked to the warden. He said he thought they could get someone to spend the last few weeks releasing the last of the fish. It was no problem finding someone to do it for a few weeks in the spring, he said. Nothing like getting someone to commit to an entire winter.

  I went back to Indian Creek. There were two new tents in my meadow, bright green and orange affairs. I drove past them and disappeared into my tent. It was still spring, just the middle of May, but the real spring, the opening of the mountains after the winter burial, was gone now. I couldn’t stay around and watch all these strangers come in one after another.

  I climbed up Indian Ridge a last time with Boone. For a long time I sat under the tree I’d hung my snowshoes on all spring. I scratched Boone’s ears and tried not to think of what I would do with her. In my brief trips to Missoula I’d discovered that Boone had been brought into the woods too early. She didn’t have a clue about city life. She didn’t hang by me in town like she did in the woods, and on my last trip in she’d spent another day out on her own, lost. She also had a tendency to chase cars from the front as if, like deer, they would turn and run from her. The Park Service didn’t allow dogs in seasonal housing either, but I couldn’t picture Boone tied up anyway, waiting at the end of a length of chain for my days of work to end.

  Finally I stood, thumping her side and taking one more look at everything from up here. The mountains lined out as far as I could see. There were the big, burned-over hills to the northwest, still open and bare from the fire in the forties. Due west was the giant cirque that had filled with blue ice after a freak rain last fall. The needle-littered dirt beneath me still had that fresh, heavy smell to it, the one the winter had made me forget was possible. At last I took my snowshoes from the branches and strapped them across my back. Everything was packed down below. These were the last things I had to collect.

  I stepped over the log the strutting blue grouse had stood on to boom out his throat sacs and I dropped down from the ridgetop. The sun had been out and strong long enough that instead of slithering down loose mud my moccasins puffed up tan dust. Boone, as usual, charged down ahead of me, skipping the switchbacks, thrilled by the speed the drop gave her. Every so often she’d whirl around in a cloud of dirt and dust, just to make sure I was still coming along.

  When I reached the bottom I dropped away from the trail and followed Indian Creek to my tent. Rader was there already, waiting to pick me up and take me out. I got into his station wagon and, instead of turning out, we drove down the road to Paradise. There was really only one thing to do with Boone.

  The Texas bear hunters were still camped at Paradise. Rader pulled into their camp and stayed behind the wheel studying his fingernails while I got out with Boone. Three bear carcasses hung from the meat racks, skinned. A skinned bear looks eerily like a human being. I didn’t know that until then.

  I turned away from the bears as the women and their husbands came out of their tent. The woman infatuated with Boone dropped right down and started her petting. They were just mixing their happy hour and wanted to make an extra for me. I didn’t have time, I said. I asked if they were still interested in my dog.

  Of course she
was interested, the woman said, looking up from Boone, if I really thought I could give her up.

  I’d brought this up with them before, and I said again that I didn’t have much choice.

  The hunters lived on a five-thousand-acre ranch in Texas. Or fifteen thousand, or fifty thousand—I wasn’t picking up everything they said. They told me Boone would have the run of the place, that she wouldn’t be tied up there. I was in such a hurry to get this over with I didn’t even think to get their address.

  I shook hands all around, leaving Boone’s rope leash in the hand of the woman who would take care of her now. I got back into the Deerslayer then and Rader started to drive toward the pass without saying anything. First thing we had to do was pull over for more incoming trucks.

  I looked through the window at the tight, dark, wet looking walls of the Selway, and then down at the wild jumble of water. The river was growing in strength every day and my tiny salmon were in there somewhere, fighting to survive in the chaos.

  When the road was clear for a moment we started to roll again, leaving Boone, my spring and my salmon behind. Although I’d come here simply to have a story of my own to tell, it was quite some time before I could think of anything to say.

  EPILOGUE

  After another summer lifeguarding at Lake Mead, I spent the following winter backpacking in New Zealand before returning to Missoula and graduating in wildlife biology. I was working as river ranger on the Snake River four years later when my salmon fought their way back upstream from the Pacific, through the dams and the fishermen. Of the two and a half million eggs I’d guarded, fewer than twenty fish returned to Indian Creek.