Badluck Way: A Year on the Ragged Edge of the West (15 page)

I made huge circles across the ranch, and surprised a great variety of animals with my presence. On the North End, small bunches of antelope broke and ran across the empty expanse of the Flats, trailing wisps of dust until they disappeared into some gentle swale or across the horizon. Deer leaped from grassy hides and took off
running with the white flags of their tails held high. On more than a couple of tense occasions, I jumped moose in the willow thickets along the creeks. Their massive heads and dark, hulking shoulders were visible for a moment before receding into the brush. Hawks and eagles overflew my circumambulations. Jackrabbits tore pell-mell through the sage. Blue grouse burst from dark patches of timber, raising a racket loud enough to make my heart skip.

As I ranged higher and higher, I began to see more elk, both alive and dead. The vast herds of the early season had been scattered by the summer, strewn across the foothills below the Lee Metcalf Wilderness. A day rarely passed without my spooking a dozen or so of them from their day beds. They always headed for the high ground, and I watched group after group disappear into the mountains. I got the feeling that I was clearing the country of elk, displacing the natives to make room for our vast, bawling herds of steers and heifers.

From time to time I happened across a fresh elk kill or a wolf shit dead center in one of the wheel ruts. Though such things raised goose bumps, I tried not to dwell on them. I was, after all, the vanguard of a large and well-organized agricultural machine. We had fifteen hundred yearlings and a grazing plan to follow. I knew the pasture moves by heart: First, the heifers would graze the long, lush meadow just above the Big House. After a short week of that, we would move them uphill and over the Squaw Creek hogback, onto a grazing allotment we leased from the Forest Service.

No one doubted that the wolves were there and that they were hungry. As we forged ahead with our plans and expanded our range into the mountains, I grew increasingly aware that our margin
for error was growing slimmer. We were staking new claims in the high parks and timber around Squaw Creek. Each elk carcass I discovered, and each bunch of them I sent scurrying for the peaks, further clarified the fact that we were falling into competition with the wolves for space and sustenance.

Even so, I thought that things would work themselves out. Our cattle would displace the elk, and we, with cracker shells, telemetry, and good intentions, would displace the wolves. We would be diligent. We would keep tabs. We would push the wild things into the higher reaches of the mountains, just for a few months. This was, after all, conservation ranching. After grabbing a little grass for our stock, we would get out, giving everything back to wild nature on the first of October.

The wolves were no longer hypothetical. Soon after we’d moved into the foothills, they chased elk through our fence and made a kill not far beyond the edge of a pasture. There, they could not have failed to see and smell the steers. When Jeremy worried aloud that they might return for a beef buffet, I started sleeping out with the cattle. It was a perfect job for me, really. James had his family. Jeremy had a girlfriend. Instead of going home alone, I kept company with the black outlines of mountains and innumerable stars.

The first night sleeping out, I was roused by a bawl that seemed surprised and a little scared. I went in search of the source, blundering through the dark with flashlight and shotgun at the ready, eventually finding that all was well. Since then I had learned to tell desperate, endangered bawls from more mundane communication within the herd. The cattle made strange and varied night noises; they moaned, bleated, and squealed.

One night I hopped in the truck and bounced up to join our herd in a brushy spot between the drainages of Moose and Bad Luck Creeks. After parking, I sat against the rear wheel to watch the day burn out. A fence line dominated the foreground, and hundreds of steers grazed beyond it, flecking the grass and sage with brown, white, and black.

The cattle quieted as the last light faded away. I made my bed behind the truck, setting pad and sleeping bag on the ground beneath the overhang of the flatbed. As I arranged my headlamp, bear spray, shotgun, and water bottle, I looked often at the dark ridgeline of the Moose Creek hogback. It served as the rampart between the domestic world and the wilderness beyond. I imagined the wolves running along there, looking down from that height at my white truck and bovine charges with something like contempt.

Perhaps I was projecting. More often than not, I viewed our steers as dumb and shitty creatures. Their noises seemed witless compared with the spine-tingling richness of a howl or the birdlike chirping of elk. As I zipped into my bag, I could not help thinking that, though I was paid to watch and protect the cattle, I wanted little to do with them. The wolves were what I had come for—to see and hear them, and maybe even keep them from getting into trouble. They, and not the bawling yearlings, had brought me into the foothills at night.

That sort of thinking felt like treason, especially on the eve of our push into the mountains. I stayed uneasy until the dead weight of exhaustion took hold.

W
orking the Sun Ranch, I grew familiar with animal death in all its forms. Moving through the drainages of Bad Luck, Moose, and Squaw Creeks during the height of summer meant navigating a landscape of carcasses. In time, I learned to identify different carnivores from their handiwork and tried to reconstruct the particulars of hunts from the meager evidence of skeletons.

The grizzly, for instance, was a powerful glutton. Once, while tasked with looking for straggler cattle after a pasture move, James and I rode our horses along one of the faint paths that threaded through the timber in the
Moose Creek bottom. Down there I caught the unmistakable reek of death, mixed with some muskier, choking odor. For the better part of half an hour, we looked fruitlessly for a carcass. As we searched, James’s dogs grew nervous. They began to bark—not their usual yips, but low, fearful, rasping sounds. My horse began to snort and tighten underneath the saddle. When we found a steer’s skin behind a tree, shucked off whole and crumpled like a candy wrapper, the hair on the back of my neck stood up.

Bears aren’t picky, and since they don’t turn their noses up at a rotting carcass, we couldn’t be sure about the steer’s cause of death. Bears are, however, extremely possessive of the kills to which they lay claim. As James kept a close watch on the timber around us, I slid off my horse and cut the tag from the steer’s ear. We beat a hasty retreat out of the trees.

Up in the meadow we made it to the top of a little hill in time to see a sow griz and her two cubs charge out of the creek bottom and make a run for the peaks. They moved at a shambling lope that made surprisingly short work of big country. From a distance, they looked strangely human as they climbed across a barbwire fence. We hadn’t caught them in the act of killing cattle, so we let them go.

A mountain lion is the bear’s antipode. A grizzly survives by brute force. In contrast, a cat gets by on stealth. During one week in July, I found several lion kills in the Moose Creek canyon. Each deer had been dragged to a suitably private spot, partially eaten, and then covered up with dirt. The violence seemed to go on mostly at night. Though I watched carefully as I drove the road at dusk and dawn, I did not catch sight of the creature responsible.

I saw a lion just once during my time on the Sun. It was early
morning, before sunrise, and I had trekked through the darkness to stake out a wolf den, hoping to catch a glimpse of newborn pups. As I hid in the grass with a pair of binoculars, waiting for the wolves to emerge, a group of elk crossed the steep face of a foothill far above the den. Without them, I never would have seen the cat.

A cow elk looked uphill toward some timber, and then stiffened as if a jolt of current had run her through. I followed her stare to the tree line and watched the lion emerge. Through my binoculars, he was huge, tawny, and unbelievably muscular. His forearms were massive, bigger in proportion to the rest of him than the limbs of wolves, bears, or anything else I knew of on the ranch. Though he loomed large in my binoculars, the lion virtually disappeared against a backdrop of dry grass and sage. A thick, bushy tail arced out behind him, occasionally switching languidly from side to side. He seemed to be in total control, and in no particular hurry.

The lion moved carefully. He did not trot, or even really walk. He lifted one foot at a time, swung it forward, and set it gently in the grass. After every movement, he stopped and waited. Even from a distance I could tell that he was trying to be quiet as he advanced slowly toward an outcropping of rock above the elk.

I don’t think the elk could see him, because the slope of the hillside leveled off above the herd, hiding the cat from view. Still, the cow had sensed that he was there. Perhaps the swirling wind betrayed him or some twigs snapped underfoot. Whatever it was, the herd became agitated, bunched together, and swung around toward the hidden tom, like weather vanes in a hard breeze.

A strange thing happened then: instead of breaking and running downhill, the lead cow charged, pounding uphill toward the lion. A few of her herd mates followed. With her nose in the air and cows at her back, she closed the distance until she stood thirty paces from the big cat.

A tense standoff ensued. Well and truly busted, the lion stood up tall and looked straight at the elk. For an agonizing moment, the lead cow seemed unsure about what to do next. Then she took a defiant step forward. The lion stepped back. Another, and he spun on his heels, took two bounds, and melted into the trees. The elk watched and waited for a while, then turned and headed slowly south.

Bears have strength. Cats have patience. A wolf has endurance and a family. On paper, in comparison with a goliath like the grizzly or a specialist like the cougar, a wolf seems small, ill equipped, and inconsequential. They have teeth, sure, but no real claws to speak of. To see one standing knee-high to an elk is to wonder how they ever manage to get the job done.

In practice, however, wolves did most of the killing on the ranch. They were successful on the North End Flats, in the confines of Bad Luck Canyon, and in the strange, dark bogs along Squaw Creek. Wherever they found prey, the wolves figured out a way to take it down.

Wolves make their living by traveling far and working together. During winter, on the north end of Yellowstone Park, in the frozen expanse of the Lamar Valley, I watched a group of wolves hunt elk.
It was a large pack, twelve or thirteen adults, and they managed to split two cows off from the rest of the herd. Seeing them run prey to exhaustion was thrilling and terrifying. The wolves were relentless, churning through six inches of fresh powder and taking turns pushing the pace. The chase ranged across a few good-sized hills and went so far that I had to drive down the road to keep up with it. The way they hazed and tired the cows reminded me of how James, Jeremy, and I worked together to rope and doctor cattle.

Toward the end, the elk were knackered. One cow fell behind the other as they started up a final hill, and the pack took notice. A wolf took a leap at her flank and missed. Another took a crack at it, and briefly got its teeth into meat.

The first moments of that kill were almost playful and looked similar to the way cattle dogs hustle along a lazy steer. The wolves nipped at the elk’s heels, and she responded by putting on one last burst of speed. After that, things turned serious. A wolf bit the cow high on her hindquarter and hung on for a few steps. The elk stumbled as she shook him off, missing a beat in the high-stakes dance of running.

Her momentary lapse gave the wolves an advantage and they pressed it. Another member of the pack sank his teeth in and held on. A third edged up alongside, reached high, and bit her hard near the base of the neck. The cow crumpled under the weight, pitching forward in the snow. Her hooves came thrashing up for a second, and then the pack was on her. They crowded in, wagging tails and shoving each other around. Though I couldn’t see everything, it was clear that her legs were still kicking weakly when they started to part her out.