A River Runs Through It and Other Stories, Twenty-fifth Anniversary Edition

by Norman Maclean

  The address he had given me was on the north side, which is just across the tracks, where most of the railroaders lived. When I was a kid, our town had what was called a red-light district on Front Street adjoining the city dump which was always burning with a fitting smell, but the law had more or less closed it up and scattered the girls around, a fair proportion of whom sprinkled themselves among the railroaders. When I finally found the exact address, I recognized the house next to it. It belonged to a brakeman who married a tramp and thought he was quite a fighter, although he never won many fights. He was more famous in town for the story that he came home one night unexpectedly and captured a guy coming out. He reached in his pocket and pulled out three dollars. “Here,” he told the guy, “go and get yourself a good screw.”

  Jim's place looked on the up-and-up—no shades drawn and the door slightly open and streaming light. Jim answered and was big enough to blot out most of the scenery, but I could see the edge of his dame just behind him. I remembered she was supposed to be southern and could see curls on her one visible shoulder. Jim was talking and never introduced us. Suddenly she swept around him, grabbed me by the hand, and said, “God bless your ol’ pee hole; come on in and park your ol’ prat on the piano.”

  Suddenly I think I understood what Jim had meant when he told me early in the summer that he liked his whores southern because they were “poetical.” I took a quick look around the “parlor,” and, sure enough, there was no piano, so it was pure poetry.

  Later, when I found out her name, it was Annabelle, which fitted. After this exuberant outcry, she backed off in silence and sat down, it being evident, as she passed the light from a standing lamp, that she had no clothes on under her dress.

  When I glanced around the parlor and did not see a piano I did, however, notice another woman and the motto of Scotland. The other woman looked older but not so old as she was supposed to be, because when she finally was introduced she was introduced as Annabelle's mother. Naturally, I wondered how she figured in Jim's operation and a few days later I ran into some jacks in town who knew her and said she was still a pretty good whore, although a little sad and flabby. Later that evening I tried talking to her; I don't think there was much left to her inside but it was clear she thought the world of Jim.

  I had to take another look to believe it, but there it was on the wall just above the chair Jim was about to sit in—the motto of Scotland, and in Latin, too—Nemo me impune lacesset. Supposedly, only Jim would know what it meant. The whores wouldn't know and it's for sure his trade, who were Scandinavian and French-Canadian lumberjacks, wouldn't. So he sat on his leather throne, owner and chief bouncer of the establishment, believing only he knew that over his head it said: “No one will touch me with impunity.”

  But there was one exception. I knew what it meant, having been brought up under the same plaque, in fact an even tougher-looking version that had Scotch thistles engraved around the motto. My father had it hung in the front hall where it would be the first thing seen at all times by anyone entering the manse—and in the early mornings on her way to the kitchen by my mother who inherited the unmentioned infirmity of being part English.

  Jim did most of the talking, and the rest of us listened and sometimes I just watched. He sure as hell was a good-looking guy, and now he was all dressed up, conservatively in a dark gray herringbone suit and a blue or black tie. But no matter the clothes, he always looked like a lumberjack to me. Why not? He was the best logger I ever worked with, and I barely lived to say so.

  Jim talked mostly about sawing and college. He and I had talked about almost nothing during the summer, least of all about college. Now, he asked me a lot of questions about college, but it just wasn't the case that they were asked out of envy or regret. He didn't look at me as a Scotch boy like himself, not so good with the ax and saw but luckier. He looked at himself, at least as he sat there that night, as a successful young businessman, and he certainly didn't think I was ever going to do anything that he wanted to do. What his being a socialist meant to him I was never to figure out. To me, he emerged as all laissez-faire. He was one of those people who turn out not to have some characteristic that you thought was a prominent one when you first met them. Maybe you only thought they had it because what you first saw or heard was at acute angle, or maybe they have it in some form but your personality makes it recessive. Anyway, he and I never talked politics (admitting that most of the time we never talked at all). I heard him talking socialism to the other jacks—yelling it at them would be more exact, as if they didn't know how to saw. Coming out the back door of the Dakotas in the twenties he had to be a dispossessed socialist of some sort, but his talk to me about graduate school was concerned mostly with the question of whether, if hypothetically he decided to take it on, he could reduce graduate study to sawdust, certainly a fundamental capitalistic question. His educational experiences in the Dakotas had had a lasting effect. He had gone as far as the seventh grade, and his teachers in the Dakotas had been big and tough and had licked him. What he was wondering was whether between seventh grade and graduate school the teachers kept pace with their students and could still lick him. I cheered him up a lot when I told him, “No, last winter wasn't as tough as this summer.” He brought us all another drink of Canadian Club, and, while drinking this one, it occurred to me that maybe what he had been doing this summer was giving me his version of graduate school. If so, he wasn't far wrong.

  Nearly all our talk, though, was about logging, because logging was what loggers talked about. They mixed it into everything. For instance, loggers celebrated the Fourth of July—the only sacred holiday in those times except Christmas—by contests in logrolling, sawing, and swinging the ax. Their work was their world, which included their games and their women, and the women at least had to talk like loggers, especially when they swore. Annabelle would occasionally come up with such a line as, “Somebody ought to drop the boom on that bastard,” but when I started fooling around to find out whether she knew what a boom was, she switched back to pure southern poetry. A whore has to swear like her working men and in addition she has to have pretty talk.

  I was interested, too, in the way Jim pictured himself and me to his women—always as friendly working partners talking over some technical sawing problem. In his creations we engaged in such technical dialogue as this: “‘How much are you holding there?’ I'd ask; ‘I'm holding an inch and a half,’ he'd say; and I'd say, ‘God, I'm holding two and a half inches.'” I can tell you that outside of the first few days of the summer we didn't engage in any such friendly talk, and any sawyer can tell you that the technical stuff he had us saying about sawing may sound impressive to whores but doesn't make any sense to sawyers and had to be invented by him. He was a great sawyer, and didn't need to make up anything, but it seemed as if every time he made us friends he had to make up lies about sawing to go with us.

  I wanted to talk a little to the women before I left, but when I turned to Annabelle she almost finished me off before I got started by saying, “So you and I are partners of Jim?” Seeing that she had made such a big start with this, she was off in another minute trying to persuade me she was Scotch, but I told her, “Try that on some Swede.”

  Her style was to be everything you wished she were except what you knew she wasn't. I didn't have to listen long before I was fairly sure she wasn't southern. Neither was the other one. They said “you all” and “ol'” and had curls and that was about it, all of which they probably did for Jim from the Dakotas. Every now and then Annabelle would become slightly hysterical, at least suddenly exuberant, and speak a line of something like “poetry"—an alliterative toast or rune or foreign expression. Then she would go back to her quiet game of trying to figure out something besides Scotch that she might persuade me she was that I would like but wouldn't know much about.

  Earlier in the evening I realized that the two women were not mother and daughter or related in any way. Probably all three of them got strange pleasu
res from the notion they were a family. Both women, of course, dressed alike and had curls and did the southern bit, but fundamentally they were not alike in bone or body structure, except that they were both big women.

  So all three of them created a warm family circle of lies.

  The lumberjack in herringbone and his two big women in only dresses blocked the door as we said good-bye. “So long,” I said from outside. “Au revoir,” Annabelle said. “So long,” Jim said, and then he added, “I'll be writing you.”

  And he did, but not until late in autumn. By then probably all the Swedish and Finnish loggers knew his north-side place and he had drawn out his card from the Missoula Public Library and was rereading Jack London, omitting the dog stories. Since my address on the envelope was exact, he must have called my home to get it. The envelope was large and square; the paper was small, ruled, and had glue on the top edge, so it was pulled off some writing pad. His handwriting was large but grew smaller at the end of each word.

  I received three other letters from him before the school year was out. His letters were only a sentence or two long. The one- or two-sentence literary form, when used by a master, is designed not to pass on some slight matter but to put the world in a nutshell. Jim was my first acquaintance with a master of this form.

  His letters always began, “Dear partner,” and always ended, “Your pal, Jim.”

  You can be sure I ignored any shadow of suggestion that I work with him the coming summer, and he never openly made the suggestion. I had decided that I had only a part of my life to give to gyppoing and that I had already given generously. I went back to the United States Forest Service and fought fires, which to Jim was like declaring myself a charity case and taking the rest cure.

  So naturally I didn't hear from him that summer—undoubtedly, he had some other sawyer at the end of the saw whom he was reducing to sawdust. But come autumn and there was a big square envelope with the big handwriting that grew smaller at the end of each word. Since it was early autumn, he couldn't have been set up in business yet. Probably he had just quit the woods and was in town still looking things over. It could be he hadn't even drawn a library card yet. Anyway, this was the letter:

  Dear partner,

  Just to let you know I have screwed a dame that weighs 300 lbs.

  Your pal Jim

  A good many years have passed since I received that letter, and I have never heard from or about Jim since. Maybe at three hundred pounds the son of a bitch was finally overpowered.

  USFS 1919: The Ranger, the Cook, and a Hole in the Sky

  And then he thinks he knows

  The hills where his life rose …

  —Matthew Arnold,

  “The Buried Life”

  I was young and I thought I was tough and I knew it was beautiful and I was a little bit crazy but hadn't noticed it yet. Outside the ranger station there were more mountains in all directions than I was ever to see again—oceans of mountains—and inside the station at this particular moment I was ahead in a game of cribbage with the ranger of the Elk Summit District of the Selway Forest of the United States Forest Service (USFS), which was even younger than I was and enjoyed many of the same characteristics.

  It was mid-August of 1919, so I was seventeen and the Forest Service was only fourteen, since, of several possible birthdays for the Forest Service, I pick 1905, when the Forest Division of the Department of the Interior was transferred to the Department of Agriculture and named the United States Forest Service.

  In 1919 it was twenty-eight miles from the Elk Summit Ranger Station of the Selway Forest to the nearest road, fourteen miles to the top of the Bitterroot Divide and fourteen straight down Blodgett Canyon to the Bitterroot Valley only a few miles from Hamilton, Montana. The fourteen miles going down were as cruel as the fourteen going up, and far more dangerous, since Blodgett Canyon was medically famous for the tick that gave Rocky Mountain Fever, with one chance out of five for recovery. The twenty-eight-mile trail from Elk Summit to the mouth of Blodgett Canyon was a Forest Service trail and therefore marked by a blaze with a notch on top; only a few other trails in the vast Elk Summit district were so marked. Otherwise, there were only game trails and old trappers’ trails that gave out on open ridges and meadows with no signs of where the game or trappers had vanished. It was a world of strings of pack horses or men who walked alone—a world of hoof and foot and the rest done by hand. Nineteen nineteen across the Bitterroot Divide in northern Idaho was just before the end of most of history that had had no fourwheel drives, no bulldozers, no power saws and nothing pneumatic to take the place of jackhammers and nothing chemical or airborne to put out forest fires.

  Nowadays you can scarcely be a lookout without a uniform and a college degree, but in 1919 not a man in our outfit, least of all the ranger himself, had been to college. They still picked rangers for the Forest Service by picking the toughest guy in town. Ours, Bill Bell, was the toughest in the Bitterroot Valley, and we thought he was the best ranger in the Forest Service. We were strengthened in this belief by the rumor that Bill had killed a sheepherder. We were a little disappointed that he had been acquitted of the charges, but nobody held it against him, for we all knew that being acquitted of killing a sheepherder in Montana isn't the same as being innocent.

  As for a uniform, our ranger always wore his .45 and most of our regular crew also packed revolvers, including me. The two old men in the outfit told the rest of us that “USFS” stood for “Use 'er Slow and Fuck 'er Fast.” Being young and literal, I put up an argument at first, pointing out that the beginning letters in their motto didn't exactly fit USFS—that their last word “Fast” didn't begin with S as “Service” did. In fact, being thickheaded, I stuck with this argument quite a while, and could hear my voice rise. Each time, they spit through the parting in their moustaches and looked at me as if I were too young to say anything that would have any bearing on such a subject. As far as they were concerned, their motto fitted the United States Forest Service exactly, and by the end of the summer I came to share their opinion.

  Although our ranger, Bill Bell, was the best, he did not shine at cribbage. He put down his cards and said, “Fifteen-two, fifteen-four, fifteen-six, and a pair are eight.” As usual, I spread out his hand and counted after him. All he had was an eight and a pair of sevens, a hand he always counted as eight. Maybe the eight card gave him the idea. “Bill,” I told him, “that's a six hand. Fifteen-two, fifteen-four, and a pair are six.” Being wrong always made Bill Bell feel somebody was insulting him. “Damn it,” he said, “can't you see that eight card? Well, eight plus seven…” The cook, still wiping dishes, looked over Bill's shoulder and said, “That's a six hand.” Bill folded up his cards and tossed them into the pile—whatever the cook said was always right with Bill, which didn't make me like the cook any better. It is always hard to like a spoiled cook, and I disliked this one particularly.

  Even so, I had no idea how much I was going to dislike him before the summer was over, or, for that matter, how big a thing another card game was going to be. By the middle of that summer when I was seventeen I had yet to see myself become part of a story. I had as yet no notion that life every now and then becomes literature—not for long, of course, but long enough to be what we best remember, and often enough so that what we eventually come to mean by life are those moments when life, instead of going sideways, backwards, forward, or nowhere at all, lines out straight, tense and inevitable, with a complication, climax, and, given some luck, a purgation, as if life had been made and not happened. Right then, though, I wasn't thinking of Bill as being the hero of any story—I was just getting tired of waiting for him to make the next deal. Before he did, he licked his fingers so he wouldn't deal two or three cards at a time.

  It was hard to figure out how Bill could be so different when he had a rope in his hands—with a rope he was an artist, and he usually was doing something with one. Even when he was sitting in the ranger station he would whirl little loops and “d
ab” them over a chair; either that or tie knots, beautiful knots. While the crew talked, he threw loops or tied knots. He was a sort of “Yeah” or “No” guy to human beings—now and then he talked part of a sentence or a sentence or two—but to his horses and mules he talked all the time, and they understood him. He never talked loud to them, especially not to mules, which he knew are like elephants and never forget. If a mule got balky when he was shoeing him, he never reached for anything—he just led him out in the sun and tied up one front foot and let him stand there for a couple of hours. You can't imagine what a Christianizing effect it has, even on a mule, to stand for a couple of hours in the hot sun minus a foot.

  Bill was built to fit his hands. He was big all over. Primarily he was a horseman, and he needed an extra large horse. He was not the slender cowboy of the movies and the plains. He was a horseman of the mountains. He could swing an ax or pull a saw, run a transit and build trail, walk all day if he had to, put on climbing spurs and string number nine telephone wire, and he wasn't a bad cook. In the mountains you work to live, and in the mountains you don't care much whether your horse can run fast. Where's he going to run? Bill's horse was big and long-striding, and could walk all day over mountain trails at five miles an hour. He was a mountain horse carrying a mountain man. Bill called him Big Moose. He was brown and walked with his head thrown back as if he wore horns.

  Every profession has a pinnacle to its art. In the hospital it is the brain or heart surgeon, and in the sawmill it is the sawyer who with squinting eyes makes the first major cut that turns a log into boards. In the early Forest Service, our major artist was the packer, as it usually has been in worlds where there are no roads. Packing is an art as old as the first time man moved and had an animal to help him carry his belongings. As such, it came ultimately from Asia and from there across Northern Africa and Spain and then up from Mexico and to us probably from Indian squaws. You can't even talk to a packer unless you know what a cinch (cincha) is, a latigo, and a manty (manta). With the coming of roads, this ancient art has become almost a lost art, but in the early part of this century there were still few roads across the mountains and none across the “Bitterroot Wall.” From the mouth of Blodgett Canyon, near Hamilton, Montana, to our ranger station at Elk Summit in Idaho nothing moved except on foot. When there was a big fire crew to be supplied, there could be as many as half a hundred mules and short-backed horses heaving and grunting up the narrow switchbacks and dropping extra large amounts of manure at the sharp turns. The ropes tying the animals together would jerk taut and stretch their connected necks into a straight line until they looked like dark gigantic swans circling and finally disappearing into a higher medium.