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

  Advance praise for Badluck Way

  “In this unforgettable memoir, Bryce Andrews conjures the modern West with all its grit and conflict. At its core lies the old grudge between livestock protection and predator control. This fine memoir contains meticulous details of onerous ranch work—the unexpected violence of herding cows, the backbreak labor of building fence. Haunting and lyrical, this marvelous work belongs on everyone’s bookshelf alongside other Western Classics.”

  —Craig Lesley, author of Winterkill and The Sky Fisherman

  “One could find no better guide than Bryce Andrews for a journey along the shifting border between the wild and the tame; a daunting frontier filled with unsettling truths, blood, and beauty. His wonderfully crafted prose is lean, yet rich in the telling details of seasons spent on a Montana ranch overseeing a shaky coexistence between cattle and wolves. Andrews is a keen-eyed ecologist, a skilled ranch hand and, best of all, a self-examining student of life with a young man’s inclination to push past fear and caution toward an embrace of risky, life-altering experience. In Badluck Way, Andrews shuns both cowboy romanticism and environmentalist sermonizing and illuminates the inescapable conflict between human economic imperatives and the compulsions of animal instinct. His book is a gripping tale of the West, raw and real.”

  —David Horsey, columnist and cartoonist for the Los Angeles Times

  “Bryce Andrews’s Badluck Way is a powerful invocation of place and landscape narrated in a voice energetic, earnest, and wise. Year-round ranch work—tough, physical, and weathered—combined with a hard-earned regard and affection for animals—both livestock and wild creatures—thread together to renew our faith in the power of place, the value of work, and the ever-present need to interrogate our own lives and livelihoods.”

  —Phil Condon, author of Montana Surround and Nine Ten Again

  “Badluck Way addresses clearly, concisely, and eloquently a year when individual belief, faith, and philosophy are tested and tempered daily by the physical, communal, and political. On Montana’s Sun Ranch, . . . grass, granite, and ice, wolves, elk, livestock, and humans coalesce to shape in sharp relief the vital and contentious issues facing our region and society. Andrews offers a remarkably rounded, informed, and yes, wise, perspective. Badluck Way is a powerful testament from a new writer with much to share.”

  —Robert Stubblefield, the University of Montana

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  Contents

  Prologue

  PART I: ON THE SUN

  Eastbound to the West

  The Lie of the Land

  Rolling Rocks

  The Line

  PART II: THE WORK

  Bad Luck

  Calluses

  Under the Postcard Sky

  PART III: BONES

  Predators

  Leaving the Road Behind

  How It Started

  The Brush Gun

  The Silence That Followed

  PART IV: THE LONG MONTHS

  What Remains

  A Hard Wind

  Drifts

  Moving On

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  About Bryce Andrews

  Prologue

  When the sun dropped behind the highest ridge of the Gravelly Range, I sat on my front porch and watched daylight quit the Madison Valley. In April, at six thousand feet, night came quickly.

  Once the big orb winked out of sight, the day’s hard, pale light and meager heat poured across the western horizon in a torrent. Warm colors went first and fastest, balling up in an eddy of red, orange, and ocher before slipping from view. I imagined those hues flowing across the Gravellies to glint on the small-town storefronts of Twin Bridges and reflect in the slow oxbows of the Beaverhead River. I pictured them gaining speed as they fled westward through the Big Hole drainage and then skipping like stones across mountains, valley, mountains, and so on to the sea.

  The other, colder colors drained more slowly from the sky, moving across the valley in procession, each rising above the towering bench behind the house and tracking west by degrees. Green came first, then every hue of blue. The last color in the train was fathomless, abyssal. It lingered, a deep, pelagic shade that rolled slowly through the world, enveloping everything and leaving full darkness in its wake. The crescent moon followed some distance behind it, like a tagalong kid brother.

  I was alone in the cold, crystalline night, thirty miles from a town of any consequence, staring out across the seldom-traveled gravel track that we on the Sun Ranch called Badluck Way. The failing light made it easy to remember the land as it had looked in summer. In my mind’s eye the hills glowed golden under a late-July sun. Tall, drying bunchgrass bent against the wind and fed the ranch’s vast herds of cattle. Antelope scudded across the horizon like clouds before a storm, and half a dozen gin-clear creeks tumbled downhill between stands of green, close-set willows. Above it all, in the high country, wolves and other wild creatures made endless, inscrutable loops across the ridges and valleys.

  The bustle and toil of life in August—long days on horseback and barbwire fence work—had raised a thick network of scabs and scars on my hands. Some of the scars remained, but they were the least of the high season’s bloody relics. Staring into the darkness beyond Badluck Way, I returned to the moments that had demanded violence of me. Alone in the dark I threw old punches again and set my finger against the rifle’s trigger once more.

  After one year on the Sun Ranch, a year of work, sweat, and hard choices, I was thinking about leaving. Dwindling snowdrifts dotted the landscape, some sculpted by the wind, others the consequence of my winter plowing. These latter piles stretched out along the road for half a mile and stopped at the intersection with Highway 287. I strained to see beyond the highway, to the dense willows that grow along the Madison, but the night was too complete.

  The high and faraway whine of a diesel engine spooling up from the south reached me, building in volume and complexity. In the perfect silence of the Madison, the sound of a tractor-trailer switching gears was audible from miles away.

  The truck appeared suddenly, when it rounded a bend where the highway swings wide around the river. Small amber lights outlined its cab and trailer. From a distance these resolved into simple geometric shapes—a long rectangle in hot pursuit of a straining right triangle. The truck roared past the turn for Badluck Way without slowing down, then picked up speed until it hit the big hill at Wolf Creek. It downshifted once, then again when the engine began to lag and groan.

  Though he could not see it, the trucker was rising up from the plain of the Madison, climbing the grade to the Cameron bench. Through his left window, across the river, were the sheer basalt cliffs of the Palisades. To his right was the ranch’s North End. Beyond the little world of his headlights were seven square miles of open grassland, fifteen hundred grazing elk, and the wolves that kept them moving through the night.

  When the truck topped the hill, I stood to go back into the house. From a great distance in that vast, black landscape, the rig looked as lonely as an ocean liner.

  My house on Badluck Way was a log prefab, designed in the shape of a wide H by an architect who never had intended to live in it. He’d drawn cramped rooms, sparse light fixtures, and a drafty brick fireplace that kept the place cold no m
atter how much wood was burning. The house must have come in two pieces, because the laundry room’s floor plan was a mirror image of the kitchen’s.

  Living there, I had come to hate the crevices between the wall logs. They gobbled incandescent light like candy and soaked up most of the glow from the cabin’s few small windows. A good log wall can be a masterpiece. Neatly joined and thoroughly chinked, it can stand against the elements for decades. A good wall is snug and monolithic, a bulwark against the wild. My walls were sieves, the logs sloppily joined and sealed piecemeal with brownish caulk. On clear days the rooms were flecked with glowing slivers of sunlight. During storms the wind hissed in. When summer gave way to the first real cold of fall, the logs disgorged an unsettling number and variety of spiders.

  Despite its careful orientation on the open, sunny north bank of Moose Creek, the house was always dark and a bit cold inside. Walking through its door felt like going underground into a cave or den. Because of this we called it the Wolf Shack.

  The front porch was a concrete slab between the wings of the house, kept sunless by an overhanging roof. An identical back porch was buried under a landslide of firewood, shed antlers, rusty leghold traps, and other detritus. In spring, when the world began to thaw and the weather allowed, I ate dinner out front. Deer, elk, or hamburger from town went onto the grill of my little Coleman barbecue. When the meat was ready, I ate leaning forward to catch the heat rising from the coals.

  Most of the time I stayed comfortable on the porch, even when the temperature dropped below freezing, because the house blocked everything except a straight north wind. I watched stars emerge to fill the void above the Wolf Shack and thought back to the beginning of my time on the ranch.

  – I –

  ON THE SUN

  Eastbound to the West

  One way to say how I ended up on the Sun is that my life in Walla Walla, Washington, where I’d stacked basalt, poured concrete foundations, and waited for a girl to finish her last year of college, ended. The door slammed shut and I just kept moving, out of desperation more than anything else. I went home to Seattle, slept on the floor in a friend’s house in Fremont, and knocked around miserably in bars. Then I joined up with another buddy, who lived on a sailboat that was thirty years old and twenty-eight feet long, and sailed that tub up to the San Juan Islands in a January storm. I was at the helm when the boom snapped in half and threw us broadside to the swells. As I fought the wheel and Bill cursed his rickety diesel inboard motor, I thought about how small the warmth of my body was and how endless the chill of water. I thought of how things thrown in the ocean sink down beyond the reach of the sun. Waves broke over the bow and it was raining so hard that I breathed through my nose to keep from choking. In spite of oilskins, rubber boots, a plastic hood, and neoprene gloves, I was soaked to the skin.

  When the motor finally kicked over, Bill folded the sail into a packet no bigger than a bedsheet, and we limped against the storm back toward Port Townsend. Veils of rain hid the Olympic Peninsula, so it seemed the world was made of only water. I tasted the ocean. It flooded my eyes. I watched it rise into jagged topographies that passed like mountain ranges on the move. When we docked, I had to pry my hands from around the wheel. I stepped onto dry land and thought: Enough.

  Getting lost was easy. One day I went down to the Amtrak station and slid out of Seattle on a pair of steel rails, traveling three unwashed days down the coast to San Diego, where I surfed poorly and did chores for my grandparents. My grandfather was on the mend from his first go-round with cancer. Though we couldn’t walk the beach together, he was optimistic when he left me at the station.

  I took trains that rattled across the Southwest: Phoenix, Tucson, San Antonio, and a hundred map dots in between. I got a hotel room in New Orleans for my twenty-third birthday, did what everyone does there, then ran north to get away. From D.C. and New York to Chicago, where clinker ice hissed against a concrete breakwater, I was quick and free. My feet had barely touched the ground since California. I bought a southbound ticket and one week later crossed into Juárez, Mexico, in the middle of the night.

  It makes a difference when your money runs out, especially in Mexico. I ate tacos of dubious provenance, scraped through the twisting innards of the Copper Canyon, and hitchhiked up Baja in a propane delivery truck with no starter and no brakes. After crossing back into the States at Tijuana, I spent three days retching in my grandparents’ bathroom, and went home to Seattle feeling as though I could handle just about anything. I looked for work, and the first good thing I found was a summer ranch job.

  That’s one way to explain how I got to the Sun.

  Another way to say it is that, ever since I can remember, I’ve been obsessed with the West. I grew up in Seattle, the son of a professional photographer and an art director. My father started running the University of Washington’s art museum when I was four and kept the job for twenty years. He must have had a touch of my own mania, because when I was seven he organized a show called The Myth of the West. While the curators installed it, I played with balls of wadded masking tape in front of Albert Bierstadt’s light-soaked picture of Yellowstone Falls and practiced my quick draw facing Andy Warhol’s duded-up Double Elvis.

  Dad brought home crowds of artists from work to eat at our long kitchen table. I was six when Pat Zentz came to dinner and kept everyone up with stories until night gave way to morning. In Seattle’s art scene, Pat was something different. He hailed from a ranch outside of Billings: a two-thousand-acre spread of dryland wheat, old homestead buildings, Black Angus cattle, grass, and sky where he built sculptures and worked like hell to keep from losing the land. One of these summers, Pat said, we should come out and see it.

  Our first visit to the Zentz Ranch, when I was seven years old, lasted only a couple of days. We pulled spotted knapweed with Pat, his wife, Suzie, and their three boys and helped move a few cows on horseback. My mother photographed every skeletal cottonwood and disintegrating outbuilding she could find. On the last evening, we drove out to a high bluff that Pat called Martini Ridge and watched the sky grow dark above the Crazy Mountains. Emergent stars seemed closer than the horizon. When we left I pressed my face to a dusty backseat window and cried.

  I came back the next summer—stayed longer, worked a little bit harder, got paid two bucks an hour. I learned to roll up rusty, ground-bound strands of barbwire. In the summers that followed, I built fence, fixed fence, moved cows, and learned how to catch and tack a horse. I drove a 1978 GMC High Sierra on tracks so rough my forehead smacked the steering wheel. When the work was done I lay faceup on the truck’s roof looking into the deep blue bowl of the sky. Thunderstorms rose in the southwest, raged a short while, and then blew east to die in the Badlands. The smell of wet dirt followed.

  Every summer until I turned eighteen, I returned to the Zentz Ranch to work for nothing, or next to nothing, finding recompense in the little calluses on my palms. Whenever I went home to the damp claustrophobia of Seattle, I would dream about big, dry, lonely country. I pictured it each time I bought a ticket to anywhere or filled up the gas tank on my truck.

  After returning from Mexico, when I sat down in front of my parents’ computer to look for a job, I could not put the idea of ranching from my mind. I found a job announcement on the Montana State University website. The first paragraph read:

  The Sun Ranch is located on the edge of the Lee Metcalf Wilderness, in the upper Madison River Valley of southwestern Montana, about 30 miles south of Ennis. It encompasses approximately 25,000 acres of deeded land and grazing leases. The Ranch is committed to conservation and improving the health of the land for wildlife and livestock through progressive management.

  The position was seasonal, a six-month gig beginning on the first of May. The job title was Assistant Grazing Technician/Livestock Manager. Of the nine traits listed as the “Successful Applicant’s Qualities,” six were unremarkable, couched in the narcotic jargon of human resources, but the last three were different. I
read them slowly and more than once: “Common Sense, Adaptability, Gumption.”

  I did a little research and found that the Sun Ranch straddles one of the most important wildlife corridors in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem, providing habitat for grizzly bears, wolves, lynx, and wolverines. Elk herds numbering in the thousands move across it. The ranch was at the vanguard of a movement to rethink the way agriculture is practiced in the West. Large herds of yearling cattle grazed the ranch each summer. The movement of these heifers and steers across the landscape was carefully choreographed to complement, rather than hinder, the systems of the wild. Simply put, the idea was to integrate ranching into a functional, natural ecosystem.

  The Madison Valley, and especially the south end of the Madison Valley, was my father’s fishing heaven. He’d taken me to the river as a teenager, and we’d leapfrogged up the pocket water near Three Dollar Bridge. From my time on the Zentz place I knew a bit about the work described, the fencing and herding, anyway. I had gumption, or thought I did, so I called about the job and was hired.

  On my last morning in Seattle, I packed the back of my truck with jeans and work shirts, a few cooking utensils, sheets, and food that would keep. I scuffed my cowboy boots against a curb so they wouldn’t look brand-new and drove out of the city on wet streets, weaving through the morning rush.

  Interstate 90 led toward the west slope of the Cascades. Ahead the clouds snugged down around Snoqualmie Pass and its attendant peaks like a gray skullcap. The forest pressed in from either side of the freeway—firs, cedars, and elephantine blackberry tangles. I charged up and over the pass. The walls of greenery blurred and then, somewhere after Cle Elum, disappeared.

  I had practiced this departure many times, and as the irrigated fields and scrubland of eastern Washington unfurled in all directions, everything felt right. I was headed away from my youth and home, a place where the clouds spat water through a lush, evergreen canopy. Ahead, the horizon was wide and empty, and the sky a clear blue. I was eastbound toward the West, to become a ranch hand in the high country of Montana. I never even glanced at the rearview mirror.