Badluck Way: A Year on the Ragged Edge of the West

by Andrews, Bryce

  Roger, surprisingly, wanted to know about me. He asked about my background and my reason for coming to the Sun. I told him my story in a nutshell—that I had come to the ranch because I liked the work and loved the land. I enjoyed being alongside the wilderness and making my living from it.

  He gave a slight nod in the affirmative.

  “What are you going to do when the grazing season’s over?”

  The question wasn’t new to me. In my rare quiet moments, after dinner in the bunkhouse, or in between daytime tasks, I often wondered where the coming winter would find me. There were plenty of options, ranging from embarking on a career as a lifelong cowboy to applying to the University of Montana to get a master’s degree in something useful. Standing on Badluck Way, I tried to keep things simple.

  “I want to stay out here,” I told Roger. “Do something that keeps this place wild, open, and undeveloped.”

  I launched into a vicious little tirade about subdivisions, specifically the one that huddled against the foothills of the Madison Range just across the ranch’s north boundary. Ranchettes I said, were blights on the landscape, perversions of the Western dream.

  “Sure,” Roger replied, “but you’ve got to be reasonable about it. Agriculture doesn’t pay the bills on a place like this. I don’t see how it could, which means the whole thing’s unsustainable on some level.”

  He went on to say that the ranch was deep in debt and that the profits from our summer grazing barely balanced the cost of hiring help, servicing equipment, and keeping the buildings standing. It fell short of the land payment by a couple of important decimal places.

  Roger explained that he believed a truly sustainable ranch could be built on a tricornered foundation. The first main enterprise was ranching—often of the seasonal type that we engaged in on the Sun. The second leg was a combination of tourism and recreation—hunting, fishing, and all the other earthly pleasures offered down at Papoose Creek. The last part of the equation was limited, responsible real estate development.

  “Nobody likes it,” he said. “Least of all me. But look at the math. A place like this can’t survive by breaking even on cows. Elk hunters aren’t going to pay the mortgage, either, no matter how much we charge them.”

  A homesite on the Sun would sell for a few million, easy, especially if it came with hunting rights, access to the rest of the property, and privileges at a lodge like Papoose Creek. Sell a handful of them, and the ranch would be out of the red in a hurry.

  He stopped there and looked away to the west. The sun was gone, but the sky still burned orange above the Gravellies, and the scattered clouds were lit from beneath with a white light so intense it made me squint.

  Roger pulled off and folded his sunglasses. When he looked back toward me, no trace remained of his customary smile. Without its usual shield, Roger’s face looked grim and exhausted.

  “Hell of a place,” he said.

  “That it is.”

  He wished me a good evening and drove off toward the Big House. When his car had passed from sight, I climbed onto the truck’s flatbed and leaned against the headache rack to watch the day end. I had a hard time arguing with Roger’s logic. Ranching didn’t pay, and a couple more houses might not make much difference in the grand scheme.

  Still, I hated picturing the office, somewhere in Ennis or Virginia City, where a filing cabinet held a map of lower Squaw Creek crisscrossed with property lines, utilities, and new roads. Building a house in the wilderness was easy. It took paperwork, lumber, and a few other details. On the outskirts of Twin Bridges, Whitehall, Sheridan, and a dozen other nearby towns, an army of contractors waited to be unleashed. One phone call and a little pile of money, and the deal would be done.

  After the consultant left, I looked southeast and saw the moon rising, nearly full, above the Madison Range. Somewhere out there the wolves were waking up, stretching out, and getting ready. The elk were moving, too, along with countless other creatures. As I pictured them all traveling by moonlight, unwatched and largely unbothered, a cold dread settled like anesthesia in my stomach.

  We had an old radio receiver, a leftover from the summer when a pair of graduate students had stayed on the ranch to track the movements of elk and wolves. The receiver looked like a chubby version of the radios we carried to communicate with each other, except it had a cord at one end that connected to a collapsible metal antenna.

  An hour before sunset I stood on a hill, switched on the unit, and held out the antenna like a dowsing rod. I faced the mountains and turned slowly through the points of the compass. With the receiver pressed against my ear I listened to the hiss of static. I turned the volume up and swept the horizon until a faint click came out of the speaker, indicating that one of the collared wolves was within a few miles.

  The noise was slow, and regular as a metronome. It began when I pointed the antenna at Bad Luck Canyon, increased in volume as I swept south, and then died away at the end of the Moose Creek hogback. I dialed down the gain until the clicking stopped and flipped the antenna perpendicular to the ground. I swept again, narrowing the scope of my search. I repeated the process, decreasing the gain and volume until the noise was confined to a small slice of the Madison Range. Sighting down the antenna, I decided that the wolf we called Rotten Teeth had stopped to rest in a little draw just north of Moose Creek.

  Rotten Teeth was old—the lupine equivalent of a septuagenarian. He often left the pack and wandered solo. In the pictures taken when the Fish, Wildlife & Parks guys collared him, his mouth was an awful mess of decay and blunt stumps. According to the biologists, the smell was awful. Mostly wolf teeth look like the sheer scarps of the Madisons, but Rotten Teeth’s dentition brought to mind the worn, smooth nubs of the Gravelly Range. Given the condition of his jaws, it seemed a miracle that he stayed alive.

  Setting down the antenna, I punched a new radio frequency into the receiver and began to search for another member of the pack. I swept the eastern skyline with the gain and volume high. Rotating in a full circle, I heard nothing but the usual electronic hiss and roar. When I turned south toward Squaw Creek, I thought I heard a single faint click but couldn’t be sure. Holding the antenna still, I listened for another. Nothing came.

  The problem with tracking wolves is that they do their most interesting business at night and live in a complex, mobile, and fluid society. From day to day, it is impossible to be sure which wolves are running together, which are off on some private errand, and which might have left the pack altogether to try their luck in other drainages. All I knew for sure was that the Wedge Pack lived higher than I did on the mountain, often rousted out at sunset, and crossed the landscape seemingly without effort.

  We had two collars in the pack and wanted more. Since the signals were easily interrupted by topography, and much of the ranch consisted of steep hills, keeping tabs on the pack was difficult. With a feature like the Moose Creek hogback breaking the connection between transmitter and receiver, it was possible to be quite close to the wolves without ever picking them up.

  Mostly we heard nothing on the receiver. One strong signal was a notable event, and two constituted a red-letter day. Mike, the valley’s Fish, Wildlife & Parks wolf biologist, took a similar view. To him, more collars meant more information and a better account of how the Wedge Pack used the land. During the long days of mid-July, Mike visited the ranch more frequently, aiming his receiver at the mountains, hypothesizing about the location of den sites, and finally setting a toothless leghold trap in hopes of laying hands on a new wolf.

  Unable to locate a wolf, I shut off the receiver, folded the tines of the antenna, and strapped it to the rack on the four-wheeler. A dirt road took me to the top of the square-mile pasture where our stock was settled. The sun was low enough to set the bunchgrass glowing, and the grazing cattle looked like shadows. I parked, shut off the engine, and began to walk along the pasture’s upper end.

  Two kinds of fence surrounded our cattle. The inner fence was perma
nent and made of barbwire, the outer one was the temporary construction called fladry, a technology which we’d borrowed from European shepherds. Tired of losing animals to predation, they had designed a movable barrier intended to keep wolves away from their herds. The fladry we used was just a string of bright-red plastic flags set a foot apart and hung so that their free ends brushed the ground. Small fiberglass posts, the same sort we used for temporary electric fence, supported the line. Since the wind blew almost all the time, the flags stayed in constant, chaotic motion. They flapped, flailed through the grass, and slapped against each other. This was supposed to scare the wolves.

  Now that I had seen what wolves could do to elk, I was as skeptical that flags could stop them as the rancher who’d offered me her rifle. The wolves were smart and ravenous, but I figured that any sort of deterrent was better than none at all. As the crow flies or the wolf trots, the cattle were no more than a mile and a half from Rotten Teeth. For an animal that maintains a territory of more than a hundred square miles and lopes up mountains without any signs of visible effort, a mile and a half is inconsequential.

  I walked along the fladry, untangling flags that the wind had knotted and adjusting the tension of the line. The sun had set by the time I got back to the four-wheeler. As I rolled out my sleeping pad, the wolves began to howl.

  The sound is arresting, strange, and beautiful. Biologists offer detailed, clinical descriptions of the howl—its frequency, amplitude, and variability—coupled with impressive accounts of how the pack reacts once the first wolf lets loose. Yet even the experts wonder what howling means to the animals that do it. Howling has been construed as a summons to the members of the pack, a call meant to draw far-flung animals together. It’s also thought to be a challenge to other wolves, an aggressive advertisement of a pack’s ownership of the landscape. Howling has been characterized as a celebration of the hunt, an expression of pure, unadulterated joy, and half a dozen less plausible things.

  I suspect there’s no simple answer to what howling means to the wolves. I’ve heard them sound eager, hopeful, and confident, like athletes running through a pregame chant. I have awakened in the night to a single, mournful voice from the dark and wondered at how it managed to transcend the bounds of species and language to leave me wide-eyed and heartsore.

  With my back against the wheel, I listened to the ascending notes of that foreign language for what seemed like a long time. The howling stopped as abruptly as it started, leaving only the hiss of wind-jostled grass and the rhythmic crunch of grazing. I settled down to sleep between the wolves and the cattle, under a bright moon and a clear black sky.

  The pups grew quickly. As spring became summer they ceased to be a mass of writhing, squalling fur balls and learned to run. They left the den, following the other members of the Wedge Pack up Bad Luck and over the stony divide that looks out toward Hilgard Peak and the ranch’s South End. The pups trotted along, poking at old bones and learning the paths on which they would soon have to make a living. They waited at rendezvous sites—hidden places in the thick timber and deep ravines along the edge of the Lee Metcalf Wilderness—while the rest of the pack hunted.

  When the wolves returned, the pups mobbed them for food. They pressed in close, whining and licking at muzzles until the hoped-for, half-digested wads of meat and gristle came up. The pups consumed everything ravenously and fought each other for the largest scraps. As they ate, they got stronger. Big canines, carnassials, and molars pushed out their milk teeth, and the pups sprouted long, thin marathoners’ legs. They soon put those legs to use following their elders on great, looping circumnavigations of the Wedge Pack’s territory.

  The pack numbered nine without the pups. Including them brought the total to thirteen animals—thirteen mouths to feed. For a bunch like that, a white-tailed deer amounted to an appetizer and an elk carcass didn’t last long.

  In winter, when snow had kept the vast herds of elk bunched together in the low country, getting their fill had been simple enough. When the elk dropped their spotted calves in early June, it was downright easy. As July passed, however, things began to change. With their calves bulked up on milk and green grass, the elk began their annual migration to the high country. In groups of a few, a dozen, or a hundred, they made the arduous climb up Moose Creek to Finger Lake, then on through the boulders of Expedition Pass. Once they crossed into the Gallatin drainage, the herds broke up and vanished into the thick forests and innumerable alpine valleys of the Lee Metcalf Wilderness.

  The older wolves knew what hard hunting waited for them up there. In the high mountains, with lush grass everywhere and no snow to restrict their movements, the elk were nearly impossible to find and kill. The wolves remembered ranging far and going hungry, and they stayed in the foothills as long as the food held out. It worked for a while. Late elk calves and stragglers died by the dozen, but soon the pack had thoroughly gleaned the North End.

  So they hunted south, down past Moose Meadows. They still visited the northern part of their territory, traveling frequently across the face of the Pyramid, through Badluck, out into the Mounds and beyond. They made occasional kills there, but the vast expanses of the North End were a shadow of what they had been—largely barren of elk and too full of the sight and sound of man.

  In the steep hills and dense thickets of Squaw Creek, however, summer came later, the elk stayed longer, and humans rarely ventured in, sticking to a very few roads and trails when they did come. In Squaw Creek, the Wedge Pack found its summer home. The wolves slept through the hot hours in day beds along the creek, hidden from the world by a warren of fallen timber and treacherous boggy ground. At dusk they rousted out, howled themselves ready, and ran elk by moonlight.

  They did well, but must have felt their fat days were numbered. Every morning, more elk departed for the mountains. Every night, the wolves had to work a little harder, run a little farther for their food. Men from the ranch came more frequently to Squaw Creek, checking fence and leaving their sign and scent in the heart of the Wedge Pack’s territory. As July wore on, the wolves could not have failed to notice that the season was changing.

  Leaving the Road Behind

  On the hunt for a handful of missing cattle in high summer, I ended up on the South Fork of Squaw Creek, which must have been the greenest, most overgrown place in all Montana. The standing trees grew close together, and downed ones lay like pick-up sticks, and everything was covered with layers of spongy moss. I rode carefully along a game trail with my horse stepping over logs high enough to graze his belly, passing moldering, scattered bones.

  I can’t say for sure how I lost my way—it felt as though the trail deserted me, as if it quailed and fled from under the hooves of my horse. It was just gone and I was left playing Twister with fallen timber on a hummock between two little streams of water.

  The horse was afraid. He would go no farther and balked at turning back. The bog or something in it paralyzed him. When I forced him across one of the streams, the ground gave way and sank him to the girth. There was no warning, just a sucking sound and then my boots were on the ground. I dismounted and crawled out with my horse plunging wildly behind me. I judged the place to be worse than Bad Luck Canyon and could not shake the sense that something watched my struggles with hungry interest.

  That was the way of things in summer. Every place, it seemed, belonged either to the ranch crew or the wolves. As a rule the open, grassy places were ours. Dark, overgrown spots like Squaw Creek belonged to the Wedge Pack.

  The boundaries were far from settled. They changed with the weather and every time day gave way to night. Both the crew and the pack crossed often into each other’s domains. When darkness fell, the wolves trotted through our pastures with impunity. They pissed on gateposts and killed elk in disconcerting proximity to the cattle herds.

  We made more extensive forays into the wildest parts of the ranch. James and I checked miles of fence, looked for lost cattle in places that hadn’t seen a human in year
s, and rode scouting trips in hopes of finding rendezvous sites used by the pack and better understanding the way the wolves moved through the foothills. We pushed farther and farther into the heart of their summer hunting grounds, taking our livestock with us into the high country.

  The tension between the ranch crew and the Wedge Pack had wrought a change in me. That summer I began to look differently at the land. I peered harder into the shadowed depths of the forest, rose earlier, and stayed outdoors longer in the evenings. Because of this I saw more animals than I had before—deer, antelope, elk, coyotes, bears, badgers, and wolves.

  I changed my routes across the landscape. As a runner, I always went out jogging after work. Even on long days, exhausting ones that started early and ended with the setting sun, I swapped jeans for shorts, cowboy boots for running shoes, and took off across some chunk of the ranch.

  When I first arrived on the Sun, I kept mostly to the gravel roads. In July, as we began to push more seriously against the wolves, I switched quickly from gravel to dirt tracks. In short order, I left the ruts in favor of game trails.

  Every night, at or after sunset, I ran the benches and hills of the Sun Ranch. I’ll admit that I was looking for trouble. When I saw deer or elk from a long way off, I tried to sneak up on them. Using the features of the land—little bumps and hollows I had never noticed before—I did my best to get close.

  It was wicked, feral fun. I drew near herds of deer, elk, and antelope, sometimes crawling on my hands and knees to stay hidden in the sage and grass. When the animals saw or smelled me, I sprinted toward them, scattering them to the horizon. They always left me in the dust, alone and smiling under a many-colored sky.