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

by Andrews, Bryce

  Eventually I could scratch him on the neck and shoulders, and even lay my hand on the poll of his head—the spot he had scraped bald from fighting during breeding season—while he pressed gently back against it.

  When my father came to visit I took him out to see Moses. In a photo he snapped I am bent over at the waist with my hands on the ground. My forehead is against that of a sleek black bull. It looks as though we are pushing against each other and I am winning. I showed the photo to Jeremy.

  “That’s a pretty stupid thing to do,” he said. “That bull could sneeze and break your neck.”

  He went on to give me a list of good reasons why people don’t give names to the livestock or play around with them, at least not on a spread this size. Most of them boiled down to this: singling something out with a name allows it to become unique. There is no room for this in the modern agricultural world, where efficiency has become the highest law and most calves never live to see their third birthday.

  How It Started

  The sun edged above the Madison Range, warming the air. There was wind enough to rustle in the grass and keep the mosquitoes down. I was alone on horseback and had been riding toward what promised to be a perfect day when I found the heifer. She stood by herself in a meadow just below the fence that separated the ranch’s deeded ground from the high pastures we leased from the Forest Service. Only a day had passed since we had gathered up all 790 of our heifers and pushed them southeast into the hills and convoluted valleys of Squaw Creek, so I wondered if she had jumped back or whether we might have left her behind when we moved the herd. I rode in close and began to walk her up a nearby fence.

  But then I saw the bloody stripes just under and to the right of her tail. It took me a while to believe that they were there. Red is hard to see on black, and looking at her meant squinting toward the rising sun. It was only after I saw the rip in her bag, which closed and opened with each step, that I realized what had happened. I trailed her that way for a minute or so, thinking about my options. Some small part of me, knowing the chain of events that had been set in motion, was tempted to push the heifer into the forest and never say a word.

  But the greater part burned with a rage that grew as I rode behind her. I watched the torn flesh above her udders yawn darkly open and drizzle blood in the dust. I noted the labored way she held her head and how she looked longingly over her shoulder at the lower pastures, where she had been safe.

  It seemed that I had failed both wolf and cow by dint of my inability to prevent an attack. I pulled my radio from where it hung on my belt, put it to my lips, and said nothing. For a long moment I wondered what would be the right course of action. When nothing came of that, I settled for what was necessary: I pressed the talk button down.

  “Jeremy,” I said, “do you copy?”

  His usual measured reply came quickly: “Go ahead.”

  We had to be cautious with the radio, since our repeater was capable of sending a signal nearly to Bozeman. Because I could never be sure who was listening, I chose my words with extreme care.

  “We’ve got a situation up here. One heifer—torn up pretty bad. Over.”

  I waited, but nothing issued from the speaker. Finally, my radio came alive with static. It hissed for a few long seconds, enough time for me to picture Jeremy standing outside the Moose Creek shop with the talk button pressed down, putting his answer together.

  When Jeremy finally replied, he sounded tight and monotone, as though speaking through clenched teeth.

  “What’s your twenty?” he asked.

  “On the road, below the Squaw Creek fence.”

  “Stay right with her,” he said. “I’ll be up in a minute with the trailer. Over.”

  A minute, it turned out, wasn’t too far off. I turned back toward the heifer and tried to read the number on her ear tag. When I looked back down the road, I could see a dust plume rising high into the blue sky.

  Jeremy skidded to a stop beside me and stepped down to take stock of things. The heifer watched nervously as he walked in a slow circle. When Jeremy got straight behind her, he stopped and let out a low whistle.

  “The sons of bitches,” he said. “She’s done.”

  We parked the trailer in the middle of a nearby gate and, after a few clumsy, bloody attempts, got her to step inside. Jeremy told me to make a short loop through the pasture to look for other casualties, then head down to meet him at the Wolf Creek shop.

  I rode slowly toward the Squaw Creek hogback. At a corner in the fence, I found a wire gate torn to shreds and thoroughly trampled. The damage looked too extensive to be the work of a single heifer—even one with a pack of wolves behind her—and so I rode through the gate to see what I could find.

  The heifers hadn’t gone far. No more than a half mile from the gate they stood high on a hillside, bunched together in a tight group. Figuring they’d be wild and ready to bolt, I rode a wide circle before starting to ease them back uphill. None looked to be gravely injured. They had, however, been harassed in the night and it showed. Up close the heifers looked exhausted. They moved in jerky fits and starts, sticking together and balking when I pressed them uphill toward the broken gate and the mountains.

  I rode back down, unsaddled my horse in the barn, and met up with James and Jeremy. Listening to them talk, I realized that the course of our summer had been irrevocably changed by the morning’s discovery.

  Jeremy had already reported the attack to Montana Fish, Wildlife & Parks. FWP, in turn, had contacted Wildlife Services, a division of the U.S. Department of Agriculture tasked with predator control. For their part, Wildlife Services pledged to send a government trapper to the ranch, to verify the attack and discuss potential courses of action. In the meantime, we were instructed to keep the heifer alive if possible.

  James and Jeremy rode all afternoon, checking on the cattle. I watched as each of them lashed a rifle scabbard to his saddle. Jeremy took the Tikka .243 he always kept in his work truck. James brought an old .30-.30 that he once told me was his first real gun. I strapped our radio receiver to the front rack of the four-wheeler, loaded up the back with wire and fencing tools, and then headed uphill to fix the ruined gate.

  Up there I switched the receiver on and made a thorough sweep of the hills. I tried every frequency: Rotten Teeth, the newly collared yearling, and two more that belonged to a pack from the Gravelly side. When my efforts yielded nothing but the hiss and crackle of static, I started in on the gate.

  Since most of the wooden stays were broken and all the wires were snapped, I decided to rebuild the thing from scratch. I worked with the volume on my ranch radio turned all the way up, so I could hear James and Jeremy talking as they checked the herd.

  A wire gate is simple. In all it consists of five barbwires strung between two stout end stays, with a few lesser sticks in between to maintain the spacing of the strands. The gate hangs between two H-braces, secured to each of them by loops of wire. One end is rigged to open, with loops that can slip off the top and bottom of the end stay.

  Stringing up a bunch of wires is easy. Building a good gate—one tight enough to stop stock, loose enough to be opened by most people, and sturdy enough to stay that way for years—is an art.

  I began by fastening loops of smooth wire around the posts of the H-braces. I made four, one for the top and bottom of each side. As I twisted wire and drove staples, I tracked James’s and Jeremy’s progress through a landscape I knew by heart. I listened when Jeremy laid claim to riding the high loop—up over the hogback and along the big ridge that separated the forks of Squaw Creek. He sent James on a lower trail—down through the timber along the North Fork of the creek.

  The radios went silent for a while, and I immersed myself in the work of fencing. Choosing two straight poles for stays, I trimmed them to the right size with a chain saw and stuck them through the wire loops at either end of the gate’s opening. I pulled a heavy spool of barbwire from the four-wheeler, secured one end to a stay, and rolled more o
f it out across the ground. I snipped it off with my fencing pliers and used a wire stretcher—an ingenious metal ratchet that can put hundreds of pounds of pressure on a strand—to snug up the wire. With the stretcher’s help, I looped the tail of my wire twice around the end stay and then tied it off with four tight twists.

  I strung the top wire, then the bottom one. After tightening each strand, I checked the tension of the gate by pressing my shoulder against the end stay and slipping off the wire loop. From time to time I heard James and Jeremy raise each other on the radio.

  “James, what’s your twenty? Over.”

  “I’m still working down the North Fork. Not seeing much for cattle. Over.”

  “Plenty up here, but they’re all bunched up. Over and out.”

  They fell silent for a while and I strung my last three wires. I added a few stays to the inner span of the gate, marking the wire spacing out on each. Just as I began to staple up the wires, James’s voice boomed out of my radio.

  “Jeremy, you copy?”

  “Go ahead.”

  “You better get down here. It’s . . .”

  The radio kept up a thin, crackling whisper.

  “It’s a wreck.”

  He was down at the water gap, a spot where the fence jogged back and forth across the creek so that animals on either side of it could drink from the same stream. Before James signed off, he asked if I could hear him.

  “Go ahead,” I said.

  “You’re gonna want to come down here, too. Bring the receiver.”

  I drove along a bench that ran roughly parallel to the North Fork of Squaw Creek, figuring that when the going got tough I could walk the rest of the way down to the water gap. I parked the four-wheeler where the land dropped off, unstrapped the receiver, and started to hurry downhill. Fifty yards above the creek, I skidded to a stop on top of a little ridge with a big view.

  From up there I could see it all. James, off his horse, stood beside Squaw Creek. Upstream of him, a black heifer lay sprawled, bloated, and partially consumed—half in and half out of the water. Not far above her on the hillside, jammed into a ninety-degree corner in the fence, a group of ten or so heifers stood paralyzed with fear.

  We wrapped the heifer’s carcass in a plastic tarp and weighted the edges down with stones. The idea was to make it look unfamiliar enough to deter scavengers, and preserve the body until the government hunter could come and declare a cause of death. It worked that day and the carcass was undisturbed when we brought Chad out to see it in the morning.

  Confident and square-jawed, Chad was a man who had found the right line of work. He wore no recognizable uniform, just a snap shirt, faded Wranglers, and a pair of boots with slight military overtones. Chad loved to track, trap, hunt, and kill predators—wolves most of all. He had, in fact, been a hunting guide before he went to work for the USDA. To hear him tell it, after their reintroduction to Yellowstone, the wolves had gobbled up most of the trophy elk in the drainages where he used to take clients, eating him out of a job.

  Jeremy led Chad down to the body, and I joined them there after making a short lap through the herd. Chad pulled out a small pocketknife and began to skin the heifer, looking for bite marks and bruising beneath the hide. Since the hair and thick skin of cattle tend to hide damage, peeling the body was often the best way to determine how an animal had died. The presence or absence of hemorrhaging also indicated whether the heifer had been alive or dead when the wounds were inflicted.

  He started skinning at the base of the skull and worked his way down from there. I marveled at the effortless way he stripped hide from flesh and how little mess it made. Chad went looking for damage and found it in spades. Beneath the heifer’s black shroud of hide, she was stippled with a hundred canine-tooth punctures. Some of the holes in her neck and high on her flanks were ringed with bright blood, confirming that she still had a heartbeat when they were made.

  “Definitely wolves,” Chad muttered. “Not that you guys were wondering.”

  Chad walked over to a five-gallon bucket and began pulling out leghold traps. Thinking he was going to be at it for a few minutes, I sat down on the trunk of a fallen tree. He must have seen the movement, because Chad wheeled around.

  “Don’t sit!” he snapped.

  I jumped up as though bitten.

  “Every spot we touch—they smell it. Set your ass on something and they’ll know from a mile away.”

  He went back to fiddling with the traps. After a while, he turned to Jeremy and said pointedly:

  “I’m going to be at this for a while.”

  Taking the hint, we left him to his work. As we walked out, Jeremy filled me in on a couple of things. First, he said that we had been authorized by the state to shoot two wolves on sight. Second, he told me that when Chad volunteered to fill our permits from a government helicopter, Roger had told him no.

  Killing would be done, Jeremy said, and unless Chad’s traps caught something in the next couple of days, the ranch crew would do it. The hope was that, by chasing the wolves on the ground or trapping them off a carcass, our retribution against the pack would be less capricious. We might be able to kill strategically and drive the pack far back into the mountains in the process.

  From then on, time picked up speed until events and actions ran together like watercolor. There seemed never to be enough time between sunrise and sunset. I did chores with my eyes on the foothills and slept in the back of my truck beside the cattle.

  Not long after the first attack, James and his family started staying nights in a little cabin up Squaw Creek. The shack was without electricity and running water, and getting to it meant a long, jostling trip along grown-in two-track roads. If he or his family ever missed the comforts of home, I never heard them complain. Over a campfire dinner up there, James told me that he would do all he could to keep the heifers safe, and the wolves on the run. He was as good as his word, and wore out horses in the course of keeping tabs on the herd.

  When I think of these things, or anything else from the end of July, it is impossible to escape two images from a dream I had at the time. The first is a pile of dead heifers that grows each time I look at it. All are in states of decay and consumption. Some are bloated and some are bones. The second image is a low, gray wolf-shadow, moving constantly through the corner of the frame.

  A little before dusk, the wolf crossed through Squaw Creek’s dense timber, stepping lightly over toppled logs and detouring to avoid the soft, treacherous ground near seeps and water holes. He moved cautiously, eschewing well-worn trails for more tangled routes. From time to time he stopped to watch his pack mates find their own ways through the brush.

  Change had come swiftly: one morning, the wolves returned from a fruitless night hunt and bedded down at the confluence of the North and Middle Fork. Within hours, cattle began arriving by the hundreds. Bunched up in tight, bawling scrums, heifers walked out of the low country and into the foothills. Riders and dogs followed the herds, pressing them toward the scattered timber and lush grass of the mountains.

  Cattle spread across the landscape like a hardy, alien weed, trampling grass and leaving massive shit piles at the creek crossings where they came to water. At first, unnerved by all the dust, bustle, and noise, the pack steered clear, retreating toward the South Fork of Squaw Creek, the most remote and impenetrable corner of their domain.

  The sun was gone and the twilight fading by the time the wolf crossed the long, stony ridge that stands like a battlement between the South Fork and the rest of the valley. He chose to follow a familiar trail, sniffing at important trees and pissing often to mark his passage. Behind him, the other wolves staked their claims in similar fashion. Down where the trail crossed an old logging road, he picked up a fresh scent and decided to follow it.

  It was full dark by the time the wolf found a small bunch of heifers grazing in a meadow above the North Fork. A dozen bovine heads jerked to attention when he stepped from the timber. For a moment, nothing moved. The
cattle did not spring away and vanish like deer, or gather up and run together like elk. The wolf took a single step forward. One heifer pawed the ground and shook her head from side to side. Another let out a low, guttural noise like a cough, spun on her hind hooves, and disappeared into the forest.

  Her panic was contagious, and it scattered the rest of the herd. Heifers ran pell-mell in all directions, snapping branches in their hurried flight. In an instant the wolf was running, closing the gap between himself and the nearest yearling. The pack was at his heels, and they pulled her swiftly to earth.

  The wolves ate well that night, and they learned something. From then on they looked differently at the strange creatures that had come into their mountains.

  The Brush Gun

  The Bad Luck spring box needed to be checked every day, wolves or no. I sat beside it staring up at the foothills and the gray stone peaks behind them. With the volume high on my radio, I could listen to the others talking as they hunted. James and Jeremy discussed the location of fresh sign. James had heard howling early in the morning.

  My world had filled up to the brim with wolves. I watched for them all day while I worked, and when I had to piss I did it on the gateposts and trees they used to mark territory. In the evening I went home, ate a quick dinner, and drove out again to sleep among cows and listen for the far-off howling of the pack.

  We checked cattle obsessively. Day after day I went out on horseback to ride through the steers and heifers. I borrowed one of Jeremy’s rifles, slung it across my back, and spent hours with the herds. At home when I took off my shirt and looked in the mirror, my lower back was bruised purple in the shape of breech and bolt.

  James and Jeremy made their own rounds. Both were practiced hunters, having each brought down their share of deer, elk, and other game. They had camouflage coats, good binoculars, familiar guns, and scabbards to carry them in. They did not have to practice the movements of chambering a round or check endlessly to see whether the safety was off or on, as I did.