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

  I sped through wheat fields and orchards, slept in a ratty Coeur d’Alene motel, and crossed into Montana by way of the Idaho Panhandle. By four in the afternoon I was at the foot of the Norris hill.

  If the Norris hill were someplace flatter than southwest Montana, it would be considered a mountain. Here, though, it’s unremarkable, and probably wouldn’t even merit a name if it weren’t for the fact that Highway 287 climbs it to a saddle from which the whole Madison Valley is visible.

  The view on the far side is distracting enough to cause a wreck. I pulled to the edge of the road to take it in. Two mountain ranges strike south from the hill, keeping roughly parallel to each other. In the foreground they are at least ten miles apart, but farther off the ranges bend inward, pinching off the valley like an hourglass waist. Though the valley is symmetrical in shape, the mountains that flank it could not be more different.

  On the east side, the Madisons leap suddenly toward the blue sky. Sharp, sheer, and rocky, at first glance they seem to cant forward and overhang the valley slightly. My map named some of the peaks: Fan, Helmet, Sphinx, and Wedge. From the top of the Norris hill they look like a solid wall with broken shards of glass along the top.

  The map also named a few of the Gravelly Range’s westward mountains, but I could not match them to the landscape. While the Madisons form a line of glinting canine teeth, the Gravellies are a many-shouldered swelling of the earth. The fallen-down range humps up from the floodplain grass, rising into a maze of timbered ridges, flecked from bottom to top with open meadows of various sizes.

  Rangeland begins where the foothills end, and the valley is wide enough to hold an ocean of grass. From atop the Norris hill, the landscape resolves into a series of descending benches, regular enough to look from a distance like a massive green-carpeted staircase connecting the mountains to the river.

  The most striking part of it all was the Madison River, which reflected the afternoon sun and drew a golden line through the heart of the valley. Curving smoothly across the floodplain like a snake navigating stony ground, the river issues from the south and is flanked on either side by dark thickets of willow.

  Traffic roared behind me, pulling my attention back to the early-season tourists and long-haul truckers topping the hill and accelerating down into the valley like roller-coaster cars. A little convoy of them dropped out of sight on a curve and reappeared on the far side of the town of Ennis. After Ennis, the highway crosses the Madison and veers south, running straight toward a little smudge in the grass called Cameron, population forty-nine.

  According to my map, Cameron was fifteen miles from Ennis, and the Sun Ranch fifteen miles farther up the road. I stared south, following the twists and turns of the Madison River upstream to where the mountains squeezed in tight around it, trying to imagine how the ranch lay upon the land.

  When I arrived on the Sun for the first time, Jeremy was standing in his front yard, waiting. For a long time I wondered how he had pulled that off, since I had given him the day, but not the time, of my arrival. No doubt he’d heard my truck clattering over the frontage road washboards or seen a dust trail rising. At any rate he was ready and I found him leaning against a low chain-link fence, looking like the boss in a broad straw hat and a sun-faded blue shirt.

  “Glad you found it,” he said, and shook my hand.

  I thanked him for taking a chance on hiring me, and he laughed like I had told a good joke. Up close, Jeremy looked younger, almost baby-faced except for a light goatee and a pair of round photosensitive glasses. Under the high April sun, those glasses turned dark enough to hide his eyes entirely.

  We talked in the yard, orbited by a pair of black border collies. Sometimes the dogs trotted up close to measure me with quick, inquisitive sniffs.

  Jeremy took me on a walking tour of a cluster of buildings adjacent to his house. We looped through a machine shop, corrals, and a handful of old livestock sheds in slump-roofed subsidence. Because of the eponymous stream that ran behind these structures, the little settlement was known as Wolf Creek. In addition to the compound we were walking through, there was another clump of buildings in the dead center of the ranch, which included the owner’s house, an old barn, the ranch office, and a sheet-metal building full of heavy equipment. Those constructions were scattered along a watercourse of their own, and were therefore called the Moose Creek buildings.

  As we passed the various ranch trucks, parked in a neat line, Jeremy pointed at a massive white one-ton flatbed Ford.

  “You’ll share that one with James, when he gets here.”

  He left me at a low wooden bunkhouse, not far from the machine shop, with instructions to get settled in.

  “See you in the morning,” Jeremy said. “We leave at seven.”

  I had arrived.

  The wolf came up Beaver Creek, quiet as fog. The Lee Metcalf Wilderness was new country to him, steeper and emptier than the high plateaus of Northern Yellowstone. He walked at night through the leftovers of hunting camps—smelled the places where men cooked and shat and gutted their quarry. He killed deer in the little meadows below Blue Danube Lake and cracked their long bones for marrow. Other wolves had already staked their claims to the land—he heard them howling in the night and kept his distance. In late fall, when the first real snow fell and the elk herds made their harrowing climb across the ten-thousand-foot-high saddle of Expedition Pass, he followed.

  Coming down from Expedition through the pink granite cliffs that form a rampart between the Madison and Gallatin valleys, he was a long way from home. Below him, gathered in a rocky embrace, Finger Lake was rimed with a thin sheet of ice. He trotted around it, heading downhill through the thick timber along Moose Creek.

  Wolves inhabit a landscape humans can never know. Their forest is different from the one we walk through—more intelligible, bursting at the seams with information. Because of the ample signs to lead him on, the wolf never doubted his direction as he followed the twists and turns of Moose Creek: elk turds strewn around like dark hailstones, little trees rubbed bare by rutting bulls, and, amid an unbroken procession of scents, the occasional scatter of rib cage and leg bones.

  He trotted out of the trees, and onto the rocky spine of the Moose Creek hogback. From that perch he saw the Sun Ranch sprawling toward the Madison River. To the north, beyond the aspen groves of Wolf Creek, vast flats stretched off to the horizon. The nearest house was miles below him, dark and shuttered against the impending snap of winter. Just across the creek from the house, hundreds of steers flecked the flat grass expanse of the hay meadows.

  The wolf turned south, away from the low country and the livestock. Crossing the enormous, triangular face of a huge foothill called the Pyramid, he dropped into Squaw Creek’s labyrinth of fens and dark timber. He found it full of game and largely empty of wolves. He stayed.

  The Lie of the Land

  On my first morning in the bunkhouse, I woke up shivering and listened to the harsh squalling of magpies. Through a little window, past trim boards cracked and shrunken by age and exposure, a handful of stars still pocked the predawn sky. I lay motionless as they faded into the daylight. An insistent, hissing wind slipped through gaps in the window casing. The Madison wind is pitiless. It is a sandblasting, constant presence, meant for howling around the eaves of broken shacks and the scattered bones of winter-killed cattle. Passing cold and dry across my skin, it reminded me how far I was from Seattle.

  Jeremy and I went to fetch the horses. We piled into the ranch’s flatbed Ford and drove north on the highway toward a neighboring ranch where the herd had wintered. As we climbed the first grade, the truck growled and shuddered against the weight of the trailer, and Jeremy pointed out landmarks: the road that followed Wolf Creek toward the mountains; various locked gates that provided access from the highway; the principal peaks and drainages; the old, wind-shredded homestead buildings that dotted the flats; and finally, the ranch’s northern boundary.

  The Sun Ranch horses had wintered with
around fifty others, and the whole bunch was waiting in a dilapidated set of corrals. They milled together, blending into swirls of color and blowing steam into the morning cold.

  Jeremy grabbed a bundle of halters from the trailer’s tack compartment and handed all but one of them to me. Then the two of us walked into the corral. The horses pressed away, jostling each other to stay out of reach. As the herd reshuffled itself, Jeremy pointed out a horse that had stepped into view.

  “That sorrel gelding,” he said, “is Shooter.”

  The horse pricked up its ears as Jeremy took a step toward it. He moved another pace and the gelding shied away, melting back into the herd. Jeremy pressed on, moving slowly through the equine crowd, keeping his eyes on the sorrel and reacting to its movements with little corrections to his course. Quickly, almost magically, he sorted it off from its fellows. He reached out slowly to the horse’s nose, face, and neck, slipped on the halter, tied it, and led Shooter out of the pen.

  After tying Shooter to the trailer, Jeremy came back, grabbed a halter, and caught another horse—a tall bay gelding with a roman nose—with the same calm efficiency.

  “This is Billy,” he said as he passed me on the way out. “Billy’s mine.”

  Jeremy caught two more horses. He walked right up to a dark-brown gelding named Skip. A fat mare named Tina took a couple of tries to corner, but followed willingly enough once the halter was on.

  I had two halters left in my hand, and Jeremy took one of them. He pointed to a small paint horse, more white than brown, in the corral’s far corner.

  “Catch that TJ horse,” Jeremy said. “He’ll be one of yours.”

  TJ watched suspiciously as I crossed the corral. I mimicked Jeremy, moving slowly and carefully through the rest of the herd, adjusting my path as TJ stepped one way or the other. TJ stayed calm, even when I tripped over a pile of horseshit and staggered to the side. I stretched out a hand, touched the cold velvet of his nose, and slipped the halter on him.

  “Nice,” Jeremy said. “Now here’s where it usually gets interesting.”

  The last horse on our list, Spook, was a paint like TJ, but the similarities ended there. TJ was calm, almost sleepy at the end of my halter rope. Spook, on the other hand, was the poster child for nervous energy. Standing a full head taller than the horses around him, Spook was covered in blotches of white and brown over a background of jet black. The overall effect was complex and foreboding, like thunderheads before a summer storm.

  Jeremy took a step toward Spook, who tracked him with both ears. When Jeremy made another move, Spook took a deep breath and blew it out. One more step was enough to trip the trigger, and Spook made a beeline for the far corner of the pen, scattering the rest of the horses as he went. As Spook bolted, his tail flared behind him, midnight black with a single white stripe along its length, as though marked by lightning.

  Spook took refuge in the far corner of the pen, and Jeremy followed him calmly. Each time Jeremy began to close in, the horse blew up, ran away, and hid in the herd. The practiced way that horse and man conducted the pursuit seemed familiar to both of them.

  It took the better part of half an hour to catch Spook, who panted hard as Jeremy finally got the halter on. We led him out of the corral and tied him to the trailer with the others.

  We wormed all six horses. I held their halters while Jeremy squirted a noxious cream down each of their throats in turn. None of them liked it. Spook reared and lifted me up off the ground. Tina tried to bite off Jeremy’s fingers. Afterward we loaded them in a trailer and headed back to the Sun.

  We didn’t stay long at Wolf Creek, because Jeremy wanted to “leg up” the horses by riding them to the barn and pastures where they would spend the rest of the summer. He pointed out a saddle that would fit me, handed over TJ’s lead rope, and turned his attention to getting Billy ready to ride.

  I saddled TJ carefully, working hard to bend the stiff, dry leather of cinch, latigo, and breast collar. After I’d mounted up and made a couple of laps around the shop, we headed out across the ranch. Jeremy rode first, with Shooter, Tina, and Spook in tow. I followed him, ponying Skip behind me. We crossed the highway, passed the ranch’s sprawling corrals, and angled uphill on a trail through the short green grass.

  As we rode, I wondered why Jeremy had chosen that day to catch the horses. We had no urgent need for them, since the summer cattle herd wouldn’t be arriving for another few weeks and we could have been doing a number of more pressing tasks on the ranch. Jeremy was quiet until we crested a hill and left the highway behind. Then he reined in Billy and let me draw even with him.

  As we rode together through what seemed like an endless sea of grass, Jeremy talked about the ranch and its history. He started with cows but gravitated to the subject of wolves, beginning with their reintroduction to Yellowstone National Park in 1995 and their subsequent colonization of adjacent valleys, like the Madison. Livestock depredations had followed in the tracks of the dispersing wolves, and the resulting debate had spread like wildfire through the discourse and politics of southwest Montana.

  Working on the Sun Ranch put us right in the eye of the storm. Our pack, the Wedge Pack, was composed of wolves that had come across the Madison Range from Yellowstone. According to a state biologist, it amounted to nine adults, plus an unknown number of pups.

  The Wedge Pack, like most others, was a family unit centered on a single breeding pair. Aerial surveys had reported that two consecutive litters of pups had been successfully raised in the foothills and steep valleys behind the Sun. Beyond that, it was hard to say anything conclusive about the makeup of the pack, since the wolves were in a constant state of flux: Alpha males and females died or were deposed. Diseases like mange and distemper ripped through the population. With each new season, sons and daughters of the pack grew into themselves and departed for new territory.

  Jeremy pointed uphill across the green expanse toward a deep, sheer cleft in the Madison Range.

  “They’ve been staying up in Bad Luck Creek.”

  The ranch had been lucky last year. The wolves had stuck to killing elk, and the cattle had come home fat at the end of the summer. This amounted to a very good thing, given the ranch’s emphasis on peaceful coexistence with wildlife. But Jeremy worried about the coming months. The pack had more mouths to feed this year, and over the winter they had become increasingly brazen and less terrified of human sight and scent. Jeremy had seen some wolf kills; the pack could tear apart an elk before it had a chance to die.

  Jeremy got quiet then and rode in silence, taking my measure. From time to time he glanced sideways to look, I imagined, at the way I reined and spurred my horse. I sat up straight and did my best to ride well.

  I kept glancing up at the place where the wolves were. Bad Luck Canyon stood out in the low gold light of afternoon, forming a dark V in the mountains. The canyon held its shadow while the rest of the world caught fire. It looked as though a piece of the panorama had been sliced away, and nothing put in its place to hide the blackness underneath.

  In the days that followed our first ride, I learned that Jeremy ran a tight ship. He made up systems for organizing the necessities of life and was unique in diligently and unfailingly following his own rules. He was a labeler of drawers, and if one said “drill bits,” you could bet there would be drill bits in it—all of them, and in good order.

  He’d designed a bolt room on the ranch, a space the size of a walk-in closet lined on all sides with cubbyholes full of hardware. There were carriage bolts, lag bolts, lock washers, and nylon nuts. Most things were available in a staggering variety of sizes and at least two threads, and everything stayed in its proper place. When I came to the bolt room in desperate need of a specific piece of hardware, I usually found it advertised by a handwritten sign with particulars like: “3/8 carriage bolt—coarse.”

  Soft-spoken and almost always calm, Jeremy assigned me hard, complicated jobs, and explained them patiently. He taught me to move cattle without speak
ing much, by working the angles and applying gentle pressure to stragglers. He showed me how to run a backhoe, demonstrating the way bucket and hoe could move like extensions of my arms.

  Because of his expertise and meticulous preparation, most of what we did went like clockwork. On just a few occasions, when the gate blew shut, a fence gave, or somebody failed to turn the herd, the harder side of Jeremy emerged: the features of his face clenched tight, and he cussed under his breath and charged top speed toward the problem, not stopping until he’d fixed it.

  Jeremy moved fast. We had a Polaris Ranger on the ranch, a four-wheeler on steroids with a centrifugal clutch and two forward gears, low and high. The gears were marked “L” and “H” on the shifter, and I imagined that a third, secret gear above them, called “J,” was used only by Jeremy in response to the minor emergencies that occur on a ranch.

  It happened regularly enough: pausing a moment from work, I would watch the Ranger rocket down the gravel road, a speck throwing a dust trail big enough to see from space. Jeremy would quit the road at some open gate and go clanking across a pasture, mowing down sagebrush and catching air off badger holes. As the noise got fainter I would wonder what had gone wrong.

  In the evenings Jeremy played bluegrass and folk songs on the guitar. He read Wendell Berry’s essays, listened to Democracy Now! on satellite radio, and planned the following day’s work. I believed that, behind his lighted windows, he was constantly teaching himself to build, fix, and run things, a theory corroborated by our daily work.

  For my first two weeks, I checked and fixed barbwire fence. Under Jeremy’s direction I pounded in staples and spliced wire where winter drifts, elk, or cattle had torn it apart. At the end of the day I went home exhausted, cooked a simple dinner, slept dreamless, and began again in the morning.