I handed the gun back to James and told him that if stinking had become a capital offense, he better save a bullet for each of us. He shrugged and muttered something, then goosed his horse forward and shot pop-pop-pop-pop until the skunk crumpled in a heap.
As the echoes faded, I saw movement out of the corner of my eye and turned to watch Bee disappear into the trees, headed back the way we came. She ran flat-out with her nub of a tail tucked. “Darn,” James said as he spurred his horse ahead. He had three dogs and all of them were gun-shy.
On his last workday, James and I took the four-wheelers up to the North End together. Our rigs were loaded down with sacks of salt, and we drove a big clockwise circle around the Flats. It was Friday, and on Sunday, James and his family were headed back to their house on the Utah-Idaho border for his final year of college.
I was staying. A week before, Roger had offered me a permanent job and I had taken it, agreeing to work through the winter and into next spring. I got a raise, from $1,650 to $1,800 a month, and health insurance. Jeremy said I could move out of the bunkhouse and into the little log house we called the Wolf Shack. Not bad for a ranch hand.
As we whizzed across the ranch, past cattle grazing in dark bunches and mountains scraping up against a clear blue sky, James must have been a little jealous. He was headed for the world of examinations and fluorescent light, while I got to stick around and have adventures.
We were gripped by separate euphorias. James was making the most of his last moment in the sun. He spun doughnuts through the grass and club moss and caught air across more than one ditch. I followed him, ecstatic in the knowledge that I did not have to leave and could work the ranch for years if I wanted. I pictured myself toiling until my body wore out, then buying a cabin by the river.
We drove fast, scattering cattle. I raced south toward the bench above Wolf Creek, and then watched James bail off the edge.
I followed him. That, after all, had been my policy all summer, and it had worked well. The slope looked steeper than anything I had yet descended, but I reasoned that if James could do it, I could, too. I shifted my weight back, dropped the transmission into first gear, and headed straight down.
A lot can happen in the weightless moments between a mistake and its consequences. I looked down as the front left tire hit a basketball-sized rock. I felt the back wheels leave the ground.
The four-wheeler rolled forward into space, and the ground rushed toward me. There was time enough to glance downhill and see James watching with a look of horror, time to realize that people die this way and to think bitterly that the rear rack was empty, the front one was full, and all this was happening because I forgot to balance a load of cow salt.
I hit hard, facedown, with the four-wheeler rolling over me. The handlebars bent against my shoulders, and a crushing weight pressed into the small of my back. I could not draw a breath. The four-wheeler moved on, flipping end over end downhill. I lay with my head against a rock as James climbed toward me.
In the city you call an ambulance for something like that. You keep the victim still until the paramedics arrive with a backboard. On Wolf Creek, James waited until I could take a normal breath, and then we talked it over. I could feel and move my legs, so he flipped my four-wheeler right side up and I rode it back to the shop.
Later, in Ennis, the doctor checked me for internal bleeding.
“Bruised ribs,” he said. “You’re lucky.”
He told me a handful of stories about other people who hadn’t been.
James owned the cattle dog on paper, but it was his wife, Kendra, who had raised him from a pup. She had nursed Tick back to health after a horse stepped on him and broke all his ribs, so it was she who had to give the dog away. Kendra had loved Tick from the beginning, but when she and James decided to start breeding border collies, the heeler had to go. They offered him to me.
They couldn’t have failed to notice that I liked Tick. Often, after work, I would spring the dog from his kennel and take him jogging in the hills. They must also have guessed that winter on the Sun Ranch would be lonely, and figured that a dog would be better than nothing. After a couple of days’ deliberation, I accepted.
Tick was strange, even among the muttish race of cattle dogs. His coat wasn’t the usual merle or grizzled red, but deep brown with a light-gray frost—like a chocolate truffle rolled through ashes. He was taller, leggier, than most heelers, with a half mask and disproportionately large head. That head was always the first thing to catch a person’s attention—a blocky, equilateral triangle, made mostly of jaw and teeth. From certain angles, it looked almost crocodilian.
James and Kendra made me a present of the dog and then left the ranch in a rattling convoy, bouncing down the gravel road to Highway 287. In spite of the pain from my ribs, I waved at the vehicles until they disappeared and then watched the road dust settle. Tick stood by my side and wagged his bobbed nub of a tail in the new and perfect silence.
A week or so later, James called me on the phone. He wanted to know if I was healing and how Tick was working out. I told him things were going well on both fronts. Tick had a new collar, a dog bed, and several other egregious luxuries. After a few initial moments of linoleum-induced panic, he had decided that he could get used to the indoor life. My ribs had improved to the point where I could make my rounds through the cattle, ride a horse, and breathe deep without much pain.
“That’s great,” said James, and then launched into a story about riding in his hometown rodeo. He was back behind the chutes, sorting out his rope and gear, getting ready for an event. A man rode up to him on horseback, with a pristine black Stetson and a brand-new pearl-snap shirt. James recognized the guy, though he couldn’t think of his name, as a salesman from the car dealership downtown. The man rode up, shot James a look of contempt, and said something to the effect of “Get out of here—you ain’t no cowboy.”
James’s laugh boomed through the phone. “Guess it was because he hadn’t seen me there before.”
James described the classes he was taking at Utah State and which bits of them applied to the Sun Ranch. In the midst of a case study in which cattle had been conditioned to seek out and consume invasive weeds, he stopped abruptly to ask:
“Have you seen the wolves around?”
I hadn’t seen or heard them. Our radio receiver, despite regular use, hadn’t picked up a signal from any of the Wedge Pack collars.
“Well, that’s good. How’s things otherwise?”
Listening to static on the line, I thought about how best to answer. For several evenings I had been walking up Moose Creek to listen in vain for the pack and mourn the wolf that I had taken-from the world. Each night, as the sun’s glow faded and no howling broke the silence, I headed home with grief and guilt sitting heavy as stones in my chest. Though I wanted to tell James all this, I supposed he’d understand none of it.
“Except for the dog,” I finally said, “it’s quiet.”
A Hard Wind
Fall swept into the Madison Valley in a hurry, as though anxious to be farther south. One morning I woke to find hoarfrost on my truck’s windshield. By the next afternoon the aspens were turning yellow-gold from the low country up, gorgeously dotting and banding the landscape. For a week, maybe more, it lasted. The air was clear, crisp as the first bite of an apple. I relished it and rode when I could, trotting my horse along the old irrigation ditch to the North End Flats, where our heifer herd was finishing out the grazing season.
Tick trotted alongside, and when it came time to move cattle, he ran enthusiastic arcs behind them, harrying the stragglers and magnifying my impact on the stock. The dog stayed in constant motion, seeming never to tire. With Tick’s help, I gathered hundreds of heifers into tight bunches and moved them across the breadth of the Flats in search of good grass. Those were the best days.
Mostly, though, because James was gone and I had miles to cover, I had to take the four-wheeler and vibrate across the landscape in a haze of dust and no
ise. One morning in late September I gassed it up, loaded the front and rear racks with sacks of salt, and buzzed out to the Flats under an overcast sky. Going north, I had the wind in my face, colder than it had been since spring, with a new bite that licked through the weave of my Carhartt and raised goose bumps. It came in wild, urgent gusts, panting like a messenger with bad news.
Nuzzled down into my collar, I turned north from Badluck Way, buzzed past a spot where the bulls stood bunched together, and dropped down to the North End Flats to find our heifer herd dotting the range like flies on a picnic table. At intervals there were other, lower specks in the grass, truck tires surrounded by ten-foot circles of bare dirt and cow shit. I stopped at the first one and shut off the engine, then sliced into two fifty-pound sacks—one straight salt and the other a rust-colored blend of minerals. I poured them side by side into the old tire, listening to the gentle rain sound the grains made against the salt tub’s plywood bottom. I stirred the two colors together with my boot, muting each with the other. When I looked up, the heifers were ringed around me.
I moved across the Flats, salting the tires and then watching the heifers converge to orient themselves like filings around the pole of a magnet. I bent down to fill the last tub, and stood up in a blizzard.
Snow was nothing new. On the ranch it snowed every month of the year except August. There might have been a flurry that August, but I don’t remember it. At six thousand feet, a dusting, even at the height of summer, is unremarkable. But this was altogether different from a summer snowstorm. The wind pushed harder, flattening the bluebunch and forcing my eyes shut. Snow fell sideways, pricking my skin and melting in spots usually protected by my hat brim. Flakes sped toward the ground at acute angles, so close together that it seemed there was more substance than space in between.
Northward there was no horizon, just a blurred-out space where the grass and the sky dissolved into white unity. I cupped a gloved hand across my eyes and peered out through the fingers. I walked forward into the wind for a few steps, and then glanced down to find my chest, jacket, and pants coated with pure, unbroken white.
I turned south and found the tub, the heifers, and the front end of the four-wheeler covered. Against the storm they seemed tentative, like studies or recollections of the things they were. The heifers held their heads above the salt tub, staring at me as if awaiting instructions. None moved or lowed or, so far as I could see, breathed. We had been swallowed by the storm—whitewashed and frozen together.
For a moment I was sure, dead sure, that I wouldn’t escape. The white would draw tighter around us. It would fill the air until we choked on it, and then blanch our insides. The four-wheeler was nothing but an artifact, a line drawing. It would not start.
Then a heifer moved. Before the snowfall she would have been a Black Angus, slick-coated, wide-eyed, and fat. Now she dropped a ghost’s muzzle into the tire and kept it there. I waited nervously. Her movement was a hope.
Her head rose slowly. Ears, eyes, and the long bridge of nose emerged from the tire. And then there was a hole in the storm: wet and jet-black, her muzzle appeared. It was caked with grains of salt. She chewed and a trickle of mineral fell from her lips. Red on black—the colors were enough to break the spell. I slapped the snow from my jeans and jacket and headed for home.
As fall changed to winter, all manner of animals took notice. The cattle grazed more intensely, tearing off great mouthfuls of sun-dried grass to stoke their boilers against the rising cold. Elk began to trickle out of the mountains. As more of them quit the high country each day in search of relative warmth and easy pickings, they began massing into larger herds. Moving across the foothills like a tide, they trailed down to the open country at night and back to the safety of the peaks with daylight.
The wolves followed close on their heels. After weeks of silence, our telemetry unit clicked to life again. Jeremy and I listened as the pack found its way back over the mountains, across the face of the Pyramid, and into Squaw Creek.
We both anticipated trouble. Even before the wolves started moving north onto the Flats, Jeremy began to send me out among the herds more often. Carrying a rifle and the radio receiver, I spent most of my waking hours with the cattle.
In spite of our preparations, the bloody day came as a surprise. I rolled out early in the morning, zipped north to check the herd, and found fifty yearlings bunched up tight beside Wolf Creek. A few hundred yards beyond them, two ruined heifers tottered through the grass and sage.
The wounds were familiar—big gashes down the hindquarters, missing bags that yawned open and shut with every painful step, flayed tails, and a pulpy mess of blood and cow shit where the rectum was supposed to be. I raised Jeremy on the radio and started the wounded heifers back in the direction of the corrals at Moose Creek.
It was a long, awful march. I tried to stay calm and take things slowly, but the heifers would have none of it. After a night of terror, they wanted only to stay with the herd. We moved in fits and starts across the land. Every hundred yards or so the heifers would turn, drop their heads, and try to rush past me. I headed them off with the four-wheeler, sometimes getting sprayed with little drops of blood as they dodged away.
At the foot of the Stock Creek bench, things went from bad to worse. In a few spots, the grade increased until I had to walk alongside the four-wheeler. The heifers were exhausted, and at times I had to nudge them along with my front bumper. Up close, their wounds looked much more extensive. The holes and scrapes were nearly symmetrical, giving the scene in front of me the aspect of a macabre optical illusion. Staring across the handlebars, I saw two identical ragged holes, each drizzling a slow stream of blood. Where flesh showed, it gleamed surreally red.
Comparing the heifers, I could see only that one was missing her asshole altogether, while the other’s parts had just been sliced and torn to pieces. This, I knew, made all the difference between life and death. Holes could be stitched up. Big gashes could heal. The tail end of the digestive system, however, was irreplaceable.
For all their similarities, the heifers were marked for divergent paths. They plodded along, one potentially salvageable and the other doomed, and I followed on the four-wheeler. When the worse-off animal stopped, spread her hooves, and drizzled urine across her ruined flesh, I stepped off my machine, doubled over, and shook with dry heaves.
Both heifers moved under the weight of obvious and constant pain. When we reached the top of the bench, I did not want to push them on. It was only Jeremy’s arrival in his truck, and his insistence that the heifers wouldn’t be safe until we reached the small pasture adjacent to our barn and shop at Moose Creek, that kept me going.
We eased them onward, step by horrible step. Toward the end, when we were within a couple hundred yards of our destination, one of the heifers turned to fight. She ran at me, but I gunned the engine and scooted out of the way. After a few more charges, she tired and stood facing us. When Jeremy drove up close to move her on, she dropped her head and pushed in desperation against his front bumper. He honked, revved the engine, and shoved her out of the way, to no avail.
The heifer refused to walk. She stood unsteadily for a moment, then crumpled in the grass and stayed there. Jeremy thought it over, then got out and grabbed a nylon tow strap from one of the toolboxes on the truck bed. He made a loop from one end, walked up to the heifer, and snugged it down around her front hooves. I hooked the free end to his trailer hitch, and he skidded her across Badluck Way. The other heifer followed us nervously through the gate, and we left them there together.
Later in the day, while Jeremy reported the depredations to Fish, Wildlife & Parks and called Orville for a tongue-lashing and some guidance on what to do with the injured stock, I hauled water and a little grain to the heifers. They remained as we had left them—one standing and one on the ground. Hoping for the best, I set the water and feed within reach of the prone one, who lay with her head up and eyes wide.
Wake, hunt, work, hunt, sleep in a tru
ck bed with wind screaming all around and a dog for warmth: it amounted to a hard, unforgiving rhythm. I ate meals quickly, hardly tasting them, and grew intimately familiar with the look of sunrise spreading across the expanse of the Flats.
The wolves were always there. Our radio receiver picked them up frequently, and faraway howling often served as the sound track to dusk. The Wedge Pack had come home for winter, but for the first week we didn’t see them. I spent hours in likely places with binoculars and a scoped rifle, but the wolves always waited me out.
The only thing I killed during that time was the ruined heifer. I had been filling up her water bucket for several days when the word came through from Orville. The morning before I put her down, I hunted all the way up the bottom of Wolf Creek for wolves, carcasses, or fresh sign, but found only a pair of moose that caught sight of me and shoved their way through narrow passages in the willows until they disappeared from view.
The shaggy memory of the moose later reassured me somehow or at least distracted me enough to still my nervous hands and draw a bead, as per Jeremy’s instructions, one inch behind the ear of the maimed heifer. When I pulled the trigger, a bloodred stream leaped out of the heifer’s skull. It formed a graceful arc—smooth, shining, and big around as my pinkie finger—on the way to the ground.
The heifer went stiff, tipped over, and flexed into a flat, recumbent semicircle—a shape that brand inspectors call a lazy C—and began to move her hooves in slow ovals. A breath rattled out, and then she was nothing but a cooling mass on the great, warped plain of the Madison—one more casualty in a landscape of bones.
Since the heifer’s carcass was so close to the barn, and we didn’t want bears prowling around, I dug a massive hole with the backhoe and used the bucket to set her down inside. The morning after that was done, a storm blew in.
Badluck Way: A Year on the Ragged Edge of the West Page 15
