Badluck Way: A Year on the Ragged Edge of the West (24 page)

Comparing the heifers, I could see only that one was missing her asshole altogether, while the other’s parts had just been sliced and torn to pieces. This, I knew, made all the difference between life and death. Holes could be stitched up. Big gashes could heal. The tail end of the digestive system, however, was irreplaceable.

For all their similarities, the heifers were marked for divergent paths. They plodded along, one potentially salvageable and the other doomed, and I followed on the four-wheeler. When the worse-off animal stopped, spread her hooves, and drizzled urine across her ruined flesh, I stepped off my machine, doubled over, and shook with dry heaves.

Both heifers moved under the weight of obvious and constant pain. When we reached the top of the bench, I did not want to push them on. It was only Jeremy’s arrival in his truck, and his insistence that the heifers wouldn’t be safe until we reached the small pasture adjacent to our barn and shop at Moose Creek, that kept me going.

We eased them onward, step by horrible step. Toward the end, when we were within a couple hundred yards of our destination, one of the heifers turned to fight. She ran at me, but I gunned the engine and scooted out of the way. After a few more charges, she tired and stood facing us. When Jeremy drove up close to move her on, she dropped her head and pushed in desperation against his front bumper. He honked, revved the engine, and shoved her out of the way, to no avail.

The heifer refused to walk. She stood unsteadily for a moment,
then crumpled in the grass and stayed there. Jeremy thought it over, then got out and grabbed a nylon tow strap from one of the toolboxes on the truck bed. He made a loop from one end, walked up to the heifer, and snugged it down around her front hooves. I hooked the free end to his trailer hitch, and he skidded her across Badluck Way. The other heifer followed us nervously through the gate, and we left them there together.

Later in the day, while Jeremy reported the depredations to Fish, Wildlife & Parks and called Orville for a tongue-lashing and some guidance on what to do with the injured stock, I hauled water and a little grain to the heifers. They remained as we had left them—one standing and one on the ground. Hoping for the best, I set the water and feed within reach of the prone one, who lay with her head up and eyes wide.

Wake, hunt, work, hunt, sleep in a truck bed with wind screaming all around and a dog for warmth: it amounted to a hard, unforgiving rhythm. I ate meals quickly, hardly tasting them, and grew intimately familiar with the look of sunrise spreading across the expanse of the Flats.

The wolves were always there. Our radio receiver picked them up frequently, and faraway howling often served as the sound track to dusk. The Wedge Pack had come home for winter, but for the first week we didn’t see them. I spent hours in likely places with binoculars and a scoped rifle, but the wolves always waited me out.

The only thing I killed during that time was the ruined heifer. I had been filling up her water bucket for several days when the
word came through from Orville. The morning before I put her down, I hunted all the way up the bottom of Wolf Creek for wolves, carcasses, or fresh sign, but found only a pair of moose that caught sight of me and shoved their way through narrow passages in the willows until they disappeared from view.

The shaggy memory of the moose later reassured me somehow or at least distracted me enough to still my nervous hands and draw a bead, as per Jeremy’s instructions, one inch behind the ear of the maimed heifer. When I pulled the trigger, a bloodred stream leaped out of the heifer’s skull. It formed a graceful arc—smooth, shining, and big around as my pinkie finger—on the way to the ground.

The heifer went stiff, tipped over, and flexed into a flat, recumbent semicircle—a shape that brand inspectors call a lazy C—and began to move her hooves in slow ovals. A breath rattled out, and then she was nothing but a cooling mass on the great, warped plain of the Madison—one more casualty in a landscape of bones.

Since the heifer’s carcass was so close to the barn, and we didn’t want bears prowling around, I dug a massive hole with the backhoe and used the bucket to set her down inside. The morning after that was done, a storm blew in.

I was out checking fence in my work truck when the clouds slid across the horizon and slapped a low lid on the valley. Rain followed them in short order, then intermittent sleet and snow. The roads got snotty in a hurry, and soon I found myself creeping along in four-wheel drive, hoping I wouldn’t have to get out and chain up. Peering across the North End, straining my eyes to see through the flurries, I caught sight of a bunch of heifers running at full tilt. From a distance they were a thin, black line crossing the
vastness of the Flats. Though I could see nothing chasing them, the situation looked disturbingly familiar. I radioed Jeremy, who told me to go home and grab a bite of lunch while he took a four-wheeler out to see what all the commotion was about.

Just after he left, the storm turned serious. The snow thickened into a whiteout, and a vicious wind blew out of the north. I heard nothing from Jeremy for an hour, and then the radio clicked to life.

“Drive my truck out here to Stock Creek,” he shouted over the wind. “Bring the rifle and a tarp.”

He said something else, but the weather garbled it beyond recognition. Shortly after that, his radio went dead.

As I headed out in the truck, the temperature kept dropping and snow fell thick enough to keep the windshield wipers straining. Winter had gone on the offensive and was taking no prisoners as it roared through the valley. When I turned from the gravel of Badluck Way, all four wheels started spinning and the truck nearly bogged down. I drove alongside the road after that, finding better traction in the high grass, bumping slowly toward the edge of the Stock Creek bench.

I drove in a cocoon. Everything looked soft and faded in the blizzard’s low light. Familiar objects—braces and stock tanks—seemed strange. I rolled to a stop and got out to open a metal gate. When I touched its familiar welded tubes, the caked-on snow and deep cold in the steel seemed irreconcilable with all I’d learned in summer.

I drove on across a pasture, following a little two-track road. I was nearly to the far fence when I saw the wolf emerge at a lope from the ravine that drops to Stock Creek. He sprinted away from
me on a beeline toward the mountains. Against the blowing snow he was a depthless, slate-gray shade. I spun the truck to face him, skidded to a stop, and threw open the door. The wolf never turned to look at me. As I stepped into the maelstrom and reached back into the cab for my rifle, he dissolved into the storm.

At the foot of the Stock Creek bench, I found Jeremy standing near a ruined but still breathing heifer and told him about the wolf. We decided, based on the location of my sighting and the freshness of the carnage, that the wolf had been watching from the bench as Jeremy stood with the heifer. At a distance of a couple hundred yards the wolf had waited patiently while Jeremy called me on the radio, shivered against the snow, and stooped to warm his hands against the four-wheeler’s engine block. The wolf sat there biding his time and thinking lupine thoughts until I rousted him out with the truck.

Jeremy put the heifer down and we wrapped the tarp around her quickly, finishing our work before her muscles stopped twitching. When the storm lifted for a bit, he pulled a pair of binoculars from the cab of the truck and glassed the foothills above us. Nothing caught his eye.

“You can bring Chad up here in the morning,” he said. “It’s his deal from now on.”

From the way he said it, I knew that Jeremy wasn’t just talking about this particular heifer or the lone wolf I’d seen on the drive out.

We swapped vehicles, since I was better dressed for the snow. Jeremy climbed into the truck, started it up, and rolled down the window. I sat on the four-wheeler, waiting for him to speak.
He glanced at the lumpy silver shape of the tarped heifer, which looked like something dropped from space, and then stared out across the wild panorama of the mountains.

“This would all be kind of funny,” he said, “if it wasn’t so fucking sad.”

He put the truck in gear and I followed him. In convoy, we worked our way up to the top of the bench and headed south for home.

Jeremy and I rode through the cattle milling in the shipping pens. They slid away from us, graceful as a shoal of fish. Dust rose thick enough to blur their moving bodies into a mass of color as we knifed through the herd, splitting off groups of twenty or a dozen according to the preferences of the truck drivers. We would have had to shout against a tide of outraged bawling to hear each other, so we mostly worked in silence.

As we moved and loaded cattle, my mind kept wandering back to the wolves. After we had put down the last heifer, Jeremy and Roger agreed out of desperation and exhaustion that the best thing we could do was turn the situation over to the professionals at Wildlife Services. We couldn’t seem to catch up with the Wedge Pack. Despite our best efforts, they maimed and killed the stock with impunity, then disappeared into the hills before daylight. If summer was a war of attrition, the wolves had won it. By late September we were wrung out, shorthanded, and ill prepared for the grazing season’s final push of work: gathering the herds, moving them down to pastures along Highway 287, and readying the
ranch for the relentless onslaught of winter. In the midst of that last marathon, we would have no time or energy to spend on fruitless chases across the North End.

The call was made and Chad showed up promptly with permits to kill three wolves. He set traps around the heifer’s carcass and caught a young female. After attaching a radio collar, he set her free.

He made a traitor of her. With the trap off her leg and the collar broadcasting loud and clear, the female ran back into the hills and took shelter in the bosom of the pack. Chad gave us her radio frequency and Jeremy named her Judas.

Chad would have gone after the pack immediately if a big storm hadn’t blown in. Low visibility and vicious winds kept the Wildlife Services helicopter grounded, giving the wolves a final, brief respite. As the snow piled up, I went out often with the receiver and listened to the Judas wolf. Judging by the signals I was able to pick up, she traveled back and forth between the Mounds and Bad Luck Canyon.

Against my wishes, I developed a deep sympathy for her. The collar marked her and others in the pack for a grisly end, and every time the receiver clicked to life, the leaden weight of remorse settled on my shoulders. The storm would break, and when it did, Chad and his pilot would be ready. As I watched the clouds pass, I hoped like hell that her transmitter would get wet, short out, and go silent.

I was moving cattle when the day came. My herd was down by the river, far from the North End. At times, over the din of squalling steers, I thought I could hear a straining engine and the thud of rotor blades. I never saw the helicopter, but as I rode I imagined
the way it must have dropped out of the sky, guided unerringly by the signal from the Judas wolf’s collar, and set the pack running across the barren expanse of the Flats. I pictured Chad leaning out the window, taking careful aim, and dropping the wolves one by one with double-aught buckshot.

Later in the day I asked Jeremy for details, but he didn’t have much to say. Chad filled all three permits. The bodies of the Judas wolf and two others were collected and flown to Bozeman. The rest of the pack vanished, so far as anyone could tell, into the wild folds of the Lee Metcalf Wilderness. That was the end of it.