Badluck Way: A Year on the Ragged Edge of the West (25 page)

Every so often, as I worked Billy back and forth among the cattle, I glimpsed a familiar face in the steady flow of stock. I remembered strange markings, ear tag numbers, cows that were difficult and others that were docile. Some of them I had doctored, and I recalled the thrill of roping and the rattling breaths they took before falling. In the pens, over and over, it happened this way: the animal resolved from a bovine throng, I saw it for a moment, and then it crowded through the gate and disappeared. Heifer 512, the cow we had treated so roughly in the early summer, passed me in the crush, healthy, if a bit more nervous than the rest of the stock.

It was hard to keep from feeling that a summer’s work had come to nothing. After five months of careful management, countless nights of standing guard, and long days of riding and doctoring, the herd was leaving. That they left much heavier than they arrived was little consolation to me, because I knew where they were headed.

I cut bunch after bunch of cattle and stuffed them into the alley,
where Skogen’s men whooped, hollered, and pounded them toward the chute. The cattle thudded up the ramp and into a waiting semi. Working steadily, I loaded a year’s growth of grass and five months of my life into the bellies of stock trucks. Airbrakes hissing, they pulled away from the loading ramp and headed up the hill across from the Palisades to disappear, bound for the land of corn finishing.

By late afternoon the heifers and steers were gone. Only a handful of bulls, including Moses, remained in one of the side pens. While the last truck and trailer backed in, Moses stood calmly and watched the cowboys work.

One of Skogen’s boys opened the gate and stepped in with the bulls. Moses ambled past him into the alley and turned toward the chute. He must not have moved quickly enough, because somebody hit him with a hotshot cattle prod. Kicking out, he broke into a trot that took him up the ramp and out of sight. The other bulls followed. A heavy, metal door clanged shut and the truck pulled away.

After we closed down the whole works, I found Orville Skogen in the scale house, totting up weights. He was fighting mad and ready to hold forth to anyone who would listen about the damage the wolves had done to his business over the summer.

“I lost my ass on this deal, you know that?” He gave me a hard look before continuing. “It’s bad enough they kill a few, but that ain’t even the worst part. Look at this shit!”

Orville held up a printed spreadsheet covered with scribbled numbers and notations. He explained that the heifers had come out ninety pounds light, on average.

“Ninety times seven hundred ninety! You know what that works out to?”

He didn’t wait long for me to answer.

“A shitload! Seventy thousand pounds light. The sons of bitches ran seventy thousand goddamn dollars off my bottom line.”

Not knowing what else to say, I told Orville I was sorry it had worked out that way. He made a little grunting noise and turned back to his figures. Remembering why I’d come, I asked him where the bulls were headed. “Some feedlot,” he said. “Can’t remember which one.”

I told him that one of his bulls, tag R-125, was an exceptional creature. I sang Moses’s praises as a gentle animal and a prolific breeder. Skogen nodded and shot me a curious, sidelong look.

“He’s the kind of bull you want to keep,” I said, and left him to his figures. It was the best I could do.

We finished shipping on the nineteenth of October. Four days later, madness descended on the lower reaches of the valley. The elk came first, spilling down from the Madisons as if a floodgate had broken open. On the ranch they congregated in the thousands, darkening hillsides and annihilating fence lines. At night they moved fearlessly around my log house, talking in strange, whistling squeals. Hunting season had begun.

Mostly I kept people off the place, but one Saturday a week or so into the season, I rose early, dressed in layer upon layer of wool without showering, and walked out to start the pickup warming. The eastern sky glowed green, and for so long as I could stand the cold, I watched it, savoring the early calm. This morning was different: I was going on a guided hunt.

I was neither the official guide nor the hunter. The clients, almost
all of them from out of state, had paid handsomely to hunt bull elk on the Sun Ranch and expected their money’s worth in horns. I met up with Curtis, the guide, on the main road, and he introduced me to the hunter, a young, pudgy man out from Atlanta with his father. I piled into the backseat of Curtis’s truck, and as we drove up Badluck Way toward higher country, the hunter turned to me: “I want to apologize in advance—my hips are no good.”

We growled uphill with the headlights off. At the road’s end we slipped from the truck and gently shut the doors. The hunter loaded his rifle clumsily, and the three of us hiked uphill and climbed into the defunct ditch that used to gather water from Wolf, Stock, and Bad Luck Creeks. The ditch was about six feet deep in most places and contoured across the north half of the ranch, marking the boundary between the Flats and the crenulated foothills. The elk crossed it each morning on the way back to the mountains after their lowland night grazing.

Curtis and I crept along, peeking up occasionally to glass in the half light. We saw a handful of cows and spike bulls, but nothing worthy and nothing close. The hunter lagged behind, puffing, staggering, and tripping often over the cantaloupe cobbles in the bottom of the ditch. More than once he fell and whacked his rifle on the stones. His exertions were the loudest thing in the clear silence of the morning. The light grew and color filtered back into the world as we labored along the ditch.

We got him an elk. Well after dawn and far from the truck, Curtis spotted a legal set of antlers. We waited prone and hidden at the crest of a rise until the hunter wheezed up and cooled down enough to be steady. At two hundred yards, under close supervision, he shot and killed an unremarkable bull. The elk shuddered
as the bullet hit, loped a few steps, and keeled over. We walked to where he lay. I snapped the obligatory man-with-trophy photo, and then Curtis and I gutted out while the hunter watched. He never bloodied his hands. I wondered about the story he’d tell back home.

When it was my turn to hunt elk, I left the big herd on the Flats alone and chose instead to prowl the complex terrain of the South End. There was a little, run-down cabin up there, tucked in at the base of a mountain between the forks of Squaw Creek. That cabin was miles away from anything else, and I used it as a base of operations. I hiked in, set up camp, and then woke each morning before five to walk along the tributaries of Squaw and Moose Creeks. It was early in the season, before the snow piled up in earnest. I glimpsed bunches of elk through my binoculars, but they were always high on steep faces, and climbing higher. Three days passed and I never took a shot.

On the fourth day, I ranged higher and farther than before. A black bear spooked in front of me and ran like gangbusters through the trees, leaving a trail of funny, padded tracks in the mud and wet snow, which I followed for a while. After noon a group of bulls loped through my crosshairs, but I didn’t like the shot. The sun was licking the horizon when I made it back to the cabin. By the time I decided to walk out to Highway 287, get my truck, and hunt farther north, it was altogether gone from the sky.

Three miles of ridges, creeks, and forest separated the cabin from the trailhead where my truck waited. The shortest route meant bushwhacking across a steep, forested drainage until I hit the overgrown road that cut through the boggy morass of the
South Fork. After that I had to skirt the edge of a huge, timbered hill and follow a faint, broken trail for half a mile. It was a piecemeal route, a path that made sense only if you knew the country.

I ate jerky and peanuts and left the cabin in an advanced state of exhaustion with only my rifle and a flashlight—anything else would have been too heavy. As soon as the cabin dropped from sight, I felt the same old fear building and blooming like a weird, pestilent flower. I was a warm, bright speck in the face of endless cold. The wild could swallow me and scatter my remains.

In this state of mind, I found myself at the end of the open sagebrush country, staring at the spot where the road cut into the trees of Squaw Creek. The close-set pines arched together above the ruts, so that the hole in the forest was as circular as a den mouth. A quarter moon dived in and out of clouds, dousing the sage with white light.

The moon winked out when I stepped between the first trees, leaving the night as black as pitch. I followed the ruts by feel more than anything, and the forest seemed to reach out at me from either side. It was like dying from the outside in: my hands and feet went cold, the blood in them stilled, and numbness crept up my arms like anesthesia.

I should have known that some things once done must be revisited and that, in spite of my direction and intentions, enough walking would bring me back to that ovoid granite stone, that tree, and that remembered pool of shadow where we had left the big wolf. I blundered around the corner and found the white boulder sitting there with the pine’s branches spread above it, unchanged.

My feet quit moving. I glanced at the stone and then twisted around to stare into the dark behind me. My senses were dull as
a rusted shovel and my limbs would not answer. The rifle was dead weight on my shoulder, good for nothing. Weak-kneed and sweating in the dark, I stood paralyzed, thinking that this must be how an elk feels when the running is done, when her last reserves are gone, the blood is clumping in the dirt, and the pack is all around.

I stepped off the road, stooped into the shadow, and pressed my palm against the rough surface of the stone.

Something roared to life at that touch, like a derelict engine kicking over or embers doused with gasoline. It was as though a call came out of the dark and some part of me managed to answer.

Afterward, I went back to the road and stood for a while, listening to my heartbeat. I started walking again slowly, stopping often for small night noises and to savor the feeling of blood returning to my fingers. A half mile brought me to the edge of the forest, and I lingered in the shadows of the last trees.

At the edge of a grassy park, I looked downhill at the draw that would take me to the highway. I was loath to leave, even though I was exhausted and alone, so I loitered, prowling along the edge of the forest, toying with the idea of trying to shoot an elk at night. I sat on a little knoll and waited for something to happen. When nothing did, I walked out in the moonlight, drawn forward by hunger and possessed of strength I did not understand.

L
ike Dante’s Inferno, winter on the edge of Yellowstone has levels. After hunting season ended and November fizzled out, the longest season began. Winter came as a series of shocks, each colder than the last. The weather followed a disconcerting pattern: Every few days, a storm blew in and the temperature
dropped farther than I’d ever known it to do. I struggled to come to grips with each new nadir, learning the feel of ten, five, and zero Fahrenheit against the bare skin of my cheeks. After each storm, I expected some sort of break from the weather, but none came. The mercury kept falling as though it had found a new equilibrium below zero. As soon as I’d decided that I could endure a new low and got used to a set of adverse conditions, the bottom dropped out again: the thermometer fell another few degrees or the wind picked up by ten miles per hour. Overall, December felt like descending a long staircase into a deep freeze. Daylight faded further, the cold got stronger. By the middle of January, I wondered how anything left outdoors could hope to make it through to spring.