In those days I had ample time to think. Jeremy had left on a well-earned vacation, and I stayed behind as the sole caretaker of the ranch, spending my workdays in a struggle with the elements. Pipes froze. Pilot lights went out. A storm blew over power poles, plunging the Big House into frigid darkness.
For the most part, my work ended when the daylight gave out. I spent long evenings reading voraciously and watching Tick clean the ice sores between his pads. Sometimes, when the night was still, the unearthly whistling of elk came through my walls. I’d creep to the window and see shadows moving through the yard. The noise came from both sides of the house, so I’d walk from room to room, listening. A cow chirped through the kitchen window and a calf answered from somewhere beyond the couch.
On such nights I thought often of the wolves and could not blame them for the wrecks of summer. We had brought the cattle to them, after all. We bred animals for meat and docility and then dropped them on the doorstep of the howling wild. As we did it, we talked about shoehorning livestock into the ecological niches of wild grazers, the cattle functioning as part of the ecosystem. I decided that we had been a bit too successful. We had moved our stock across the land like so many buffalo or elk, and the wolves had taken notice. After a little while they’d begun to act naturally.
Neither could I fault the ranch crew much for all the rage, blood, and bullets. Like the Wedge Pack, we did our best to make a living from a hard place. Like them we came to the Madison Valley and staked our claim to the land.
I lost a lot of sleep over the wolf I’d killed, worrying endlessly over whether my actions were right, just, or ethical. I never came to a lasting conclusion. It seemed more germane and natural to say that the killing was necessary, unavoidable, and unfortunate, and then move on.
The word coexistence cropped up everywhere when talking about livestock and wolves. It was in my job description and on everyone’s lips when we told stories about the summer’s carnage. We tried like hell to coexist with the Wedge Pack, and we’d succeeded, though not in the way most people might imagine.
Our relationship with the wolves was bloody, ugly, and tortured at times, but it had worked. Over the course of the summer, the wolves killed less than 1 percent of our cattle. Despite Orville’s grousing about weight, the yearlings probably made him a decent profit when they went to the stockyards. The Wedge Pack, for its part, suffered hard losses but lived to hunt another season. When all the accounts were totted up and the bones picked clean and scattered, our efforts at living with the wolves had borne real, if bitter, fruit.
On January 30, in the morning, the weather beat hard against the windows of the Wolf Shack and shoved down the chimney, kicking ashes across the floor. The house itself creaked like a wooden ship in swells. I waited out the worst of it. At noon the storm abated as quickly as it had come, and I went outside.
I plowed snow. Drifts abounded, thick and deceptively substantial. I got the truck stuck twice. The first time, I tried to push through too much of a bank up at the Big House and got mired to the axles. I dug around the wheels for a while, until the truck bucked free.
The second time, I slid off the road while pushing a big pile. I felt the tires spin and the truck lurch sickeningly off level but did not cut the gas as quickly as I should have. Instead I gunned the engine, tried to bull through, and ended up in the ditch with all four wheels spinning and snow halfway to the low-side windows.
Outside there was a frostbite wind that made it hard to stay calm while shoveling. I sweated from the work, but still had to hunker for shelter behind the cab. The wind blew steadily, knifing through my layers. It gathered loose ice crystals from the road and nudged steady streams of them into my diggings. It poured in with each breath and stole heat enough to remind me that lives end here, and winter takes them.
I fought off the shakes and went on working. Finally I found the frozen ground and chained up with numb fingers. When the truck broke loose in four low, it was like coming up from underwater.
At night the wind abated and left a half-moon in a cloudless sky, shining down on drifts of snow.
For all my plowing and driving on snow-choked roads, I never once had to be pulled out. I’m as proud of that as almost anything. I got stuck, sometimes for hours, but never so badly that I had to call Jeremy on the radio. When I felt close to giving in, I stepped out into the cold, unhooked the shovel from the headache rack, and dug until I could see dirt around my tires. Most people weren’t so lucky, careful, or stubborn.
Roger slid off Badluck Way once. He called me on the radio and I arrived to find his Subaru leaning into the borrow ditch at a wonky angle, its back axle resting on the ground. Not long after that, a visitor jammed his Jeep into a snowdrift, panicked, and spun his wheels until they dug in deep. Somebody got stuck every few weeks, but most of the time it was easy to get the vehicle back on the road. I kept a tow strap in the pickup truck, along with two sets of heavy-duty, cleated tire chains. With the chains on tight and the truck in low gear, it took only a couple of solid tugs to fix most problems.
The only real wreck we had was when Roger’s son came for a visit. He brought a friend along and borrowed a truck to show him the ranch. They followed Wolf Creek upstream past the spot where it pops out of the mountains, tried to cross an icy drift, and slid down into the creek.
The kids flew back to California in the morning, but Jeremy and I worked all day with the plow truck and backhoe to save that pickup. Our final solution involved two hundred yards of heavy-duty cable, a pulley attached to the trunk of a thick tree, a high-stakes heavy-equipment balancing act, and at least a couple of moments when I doubted we would both survive the day.
Afterward, we drove out of the high country, gassed up the truck, and headed to West Yellowstone through an awful snowstorm. The flakes were so thick in the headlights that the yellow line flicked in and out of view. In other circumstances it would have seemed like pretty nervy driving. In the rescued pickup, which we had taken as a sort of trophy, the weather was just another reminder of our success and competence.
We ate pizza and drank beer in West Yellowstone, and Jeremy picked up the tab on the company credit card. He called it overtime, but the meal felt more like tribute paid from the people who owned the land on paper to those who bought it daily with measures of sweat and skill.
Moving On
In March, consultants began to arrive for meetings with Roger at the Big House. The enthusiastic foreman from the summer survey crew returned to talk about “eco-communities” and present his findings in a neat show involving an easel, transparencies, and a dozen overlays. He showed maps of “Wildlife Habitat,” “Migration Corridors,” “Pastures,” and “Easements.” The last one was titled “Potential Homesites.” From there it was a short step to glossy brochures featuring the ranch brand and full-color photos of the mountains.
One early-spring morning, I hiked the overgrown logging road that ran up Squaw Creek. At an old clear-cut, I looked uphill and saw the dark dirt of fresh diggings. Bear? Wolf den? I climbed the slope. A bright ribbon on a survey stake caught my eye. I walked up the Squaw Creek drainage, following a set of backhoe tracks from one test pit to another.
I could have stayed. James was still in school and Jeremy had left in March to run one of Ted Turner’s bison ranches. During my final month on the place, I was alone, and worked to clear the last of winter from the roads. Every Tuesday I met with Roger, the lodge staff, a rotating cast of consultants, and a newly hired chief financial officer.
I daydreamed through most of those weekly meetings. As Roger and his managers discussed the lodge’s balance sheet or hashed out a plan for advertising the lots on Squaw Creek, which was soon to be renamed Sun Creek, I looked through the window at the still-frozen wilderness outside. I remembered the way that, during a winter storm, stepping from the sagebrush flats into the forest on some north-facing slope or saddle felt as if I were dunking my head through the surface of a lake. The wind stopped. Everything went qui
et. The air pressed cold and thick against my face. Snowflakes corkscrewed downward in the spaces between trees. They went slow, like bubbles in reverse.
Toward the end of each meeting, Roger always asked me for a report on the state of the ranch. Because it was winter, and most of my time was spent keeping the machinery running and the houses warm, I often had a hard time coming up with an answer that sounded interesting enough.
“Plowed some snow,” I’d say. “I paid the bills and checked fences.”
Before he’d left, Jeremy teased me about stealing his job. He made some business cards on his laptop that read, “Bryce Andrews, Interim Manager, Sun Ranch,” and had a graphic of our rising-sun brand in one corner. I liked those cards too well to give them away.
It wasn’t loneliness that ultimately drove me off the Sun, though I sometimes got lonely. It wasn’t the fact that my friends were gone. I left the ranch because I could feel something changing completely and irreversibly, like summer becoming fall.
Roger didn’t carve the ranch into twenty-acre chunks, and I don’t think he ever would have done that. Development would be limited to a dozen or so high-end homesites, each one worth five million dollars and sited so as to do the least possible amount of ecological damage. As far as subdivisions go, it was benign. It was a compromise, Roger said, that would keep the land pristine and allow the ranching operation to go on, while providing revenue enough to keep him from losing the place.
I could see what he was aiming for, but the devil was in the details. And having worked the ranch, I could imagine the details as well as anyone. With the homesites would come new, wider roads. Yard lights would fleck the night like cancers on a brain scan. Domestics would come and go, and in winter the home owners would slide into ditches and need rescuing. Eventually one of them would call to complain about cattle shitting on his driveway, eating his plantings, or ruining his view of the mountains.
He would call, and we would have to listen. That’s what people expect for five million dollars, plus a hundred grand a year in home owners association and maintenance fees. We would change our grazing rotation, leaving the cattle longer in some other pasture to keep them away from the new houses.
The interests of cows, wolves, and elk would collide with the desires of millionaires. When they did, our stewardship of the land would suffer. I felt my job, life, and purpose on the ranch sliding into obsolescence. And so I decided to leave.
When Roger knocked on my door in mid-April, I thought he had come to wish me well. The thirtieth was my last workday on the ranch, and the Wolf Shack was in the state of thorough disarray that always precedes a move. But Roger didn’t mention the fact that I was leaving, or even seem to notice all the boxes and bags strewn around. He stepped into the living room and, breathless with excitement, told me that he had seen a light-gray wolf in the vicinity of an old den at Stock Creek.
“I want you to go up there,” he told me, “and see if it looks like they’re using it.”
I knew the spot well. In contrast to most of the places the wolves favored on the Sun Ranch, the Stock Creek den was easy to find and simple enough to monitor with a pair of binoculars from the shelter of the Mounds. It was an old hole—one that dated back to the days of the Taylor Peak Pack in the early 2000s, and had been used sporadically ever since. Because the den site was so exposed, and Stock Creek had served as the backdrop for autumn’s last paroxysm of violence, I doubted that the Wedge Pack would choose to spend much time there.
Still, I told Roger that I’d take a look and found myself in the Mounds with binoculars, waiting for dawn’s first color to leak across the dogtooth peaks of the Madison Range. Though the temperature held below freezing, I could feel the season coming around. Light trickled back into the world, revealing the ground that two weeks of warm afternoons had gained against winter. Drifts of snow lingered on steep north slopes and behind all the bigger sagebrush, but most of the grasslands were melted bare.
As soon as I could see well enough, I trained my binoculars on the little grove of trees that held the den. Fresh, dark dirt spilled downhill from its mouth, but that proved nothing on its own. Coyotes, badgers, and skunks sometimes lay claim to old holes. Bears happen by and get curious. As I sat waiting for a wolf to emerge, I turned away from the den and began to study the land around it.
I stared south across a landscape I knew by heart. From the lofty perspective of the Mounds, I followed the familiar lines of pasture fences as they angled across the topography of the ranch. Looking west along Stock Creek, I recognized the spot where Jeremy had put down the last heifer. A few scattered bones still marked the flat where we had left her. Farther out, my gaze lingered on gates I had fixed and places where cattle moves had gone well or haywire. I looked one last time at the dark, gaping mouth of Bad Luck Canyon and recalled the hours I’d spent mucking out the spring box in its shadow.
Given time, some simple tools, and a reasonable supply of resolve, a ranch hand is capable of scrawling his name across the land in a wide variety of ways. My own relics would long outlast my presence on the Sun. Twenty years from now a visitor, walking along any fence, but especially one running across a hilltop where elk like to hang, might find my particular brand of wire splice. Perhaps she would go walking with a ranch map and find a little spring or a hollow named for me, or something notable I did.
Man marks landscape. He does it quickly, ubiquitously, and to such an extent in some places that it becomes impossible to tell what was there before he started. But a place also marks a man. I was born a Seattle boy, a water child who looked at the clouds through holes in the trees and at the sun through holes in the clouds. Seattle has an easy climate, provided you can stand the rain. The land is fertile. When I spat apple seeds on the ground and walked away, I expected trees to grow.
Not so in the Madison Valley. Seattle tends toward soft, damp claustrophobia, but the Sun Ranch was characterized by exposure. A wide-skied place where everything but the hard essentials dried up and blew away, the valley and the ranch’s two predominant qualities were beauty and brutality.
That dual nature was in the weather: all summer I watched thunderstorms roil along the horizon, blackening the sky like bruises. One day a lightning bolt licked down and roasted a steer in his tracks. Duality was in the animals, too: there was nothing as eerily eloquent as the Wedge Pack’s howling and nothing messier than a kill.
Waiting in the Mounds for the emergence or arrival of wolves, I thought back to days and nights hunting them: the thrill of chasing big, dangerous creatures through close-set timber, the pinprick stars that kept me company at night, and the guilt I lived with after finally pulling the trigger.
I shuddered to remember some of the work I did on the Sun. I had killed: an elk, a deer, a wolf-maimed heifer, and the wolf that probably tore her up. Through the long, dark months of winter those actions returned to keep me up at night. Often, I was tempted to construe ranching as nothing more than a protracted act of violence.
I thought hard about that until the sun rose high enough to light the faraway timber of the Gravelly Range. The temperature increased and a handful of deer popped in and out of sight as they negotiated the close-set hills of the Mounds. I took another look at the den’s mouth, but found no motion there.
Daylight began to warm the world, melting bits of snow on the sleeves of my coat. I watched jagged little crystals of ice subside into droplets, one after another, as the sun climbed my arm. As the drops soaked my jacket’s canvas shell, they seemed to argue that on a place like the Sun, things were always moving forward. Cattle got eaten. Wolves met bloody ends. Ranch hands arrived, sweated, and tried to stand against the wilderness long enough to make a living. Owners came and went, leaving their legacy in the form of strange structures and a mixed bag of place-names.
There was an element of tragedy in it, of course, but the main thing was that the land kept on. Day followed wild day, and over time amounted to a process of seasonal change. Immersion in that constant
cycling was the ranch hand’s highest privilege. The thought of summer coming on, the whole drama starting over with green grass, spotted fawns, and high expectations, made it hard to think of leaving.
I waited in the Mounds for another hour. When the wolves didn’t show and the sun pulled away from the highest pinnacles, I gathered my things and walked to the base of the little pine grove that held the den. The wet dirt and old snow down there held a few tracks, but the process of freeze and thaw had reduced them all to ambiguous blotches.
I squatted in front of the den and peered inside. The dark oval of the mouth exhaled the thick smell of freshly turned earth. A few feet down the tunnel, pinched between the splintered fibers of a chewed-off root, a small tuft of pale fur caught my eye. I stuck my arm in after it. I couldn’t reach it, so I lay down on the ground and wriggled into the hole. The bulk of my shoulders blocked the light completely, so I had to feel blindly around in search of my prize.
I nearly had my hand on it when I heard the first sound. From somewhere deeper in the hillside came a scratching noise, and then the dull thud of something readjusting its position. Though the noise didn’t seem aggressive, it was enough to make a strong impression on a man wedged face-first into a hole. With my heart beating in my throat, I scooted backward toward daylight and safety, pulled free of the den, and was about to flee when the second sound reached me. Though at first I couldn’t believe it, I heard the pups mewling from the underground dark.
Badluck Way: A Year on the Ragged Edge of the West Page 17
