Badluck Way: A Year on the Ragged Edge of the West (27 page)

When Roger knocked on my door in mid-April, I thought he had come to wish me well. The thirtieth was my last workday on the ranch, and the Wolf Shack was in the state of thorough disarray that always precedes a move. But Roger didn’t mention the fact that I was leaving, or even seem to notice all the boxes and bags strewn around. He stepped into the living room and, breathless with excitement, told me that he had seen a light-gray wolf in the vicinity of an old den at Stock Creek.

“I want you to go up there,” he told me, “and see if it looks like they’re using it.”

I knew the spot well. In contrast to most of the places the wolves favored on the Sun Ranch, the Stock Creek den was easy to find and simple enough to monitor with a pair of binoculars from the shelter of the Mounds. It was an old hole—one that dated back to the days of the Taylor Peak Pack in the early 2000s, and had been used sporadically ever since. Because the den site was so exposed,
and Stock Creek had served as the backdrop for autumn’s last paroxysm of violence, I doubted that the Wedge Pack would choose to spend much time there.

Still, I told Roger that I’d take a look and found myself in the Mounds with binoculars, waiting for dawn’s first color to leak across the dogtooth peaks of the Madison Range. Though the temperature held below freezing, I could feel the season coming around. Light trickled back into the world, revealing the ground that two weeks of warm afternoons had gained against winter. Drifts of snow lingered on steep north slopes and behind all the bigger sagebrush, but most of the grasslands were melted bare.

As soon as I could see well enough, I trained my binoculars on the little grove of trees that held the den. Fresh, dark dirt spilled downhill from its mouth, but that proved nothing on its own. Coyotes, badgers, and skunks sometimes lay claim to old holes. Bears happen by and get curious. As I sat waiting for a wolf to emerge, I turned away from the den and began to study the land around it.

I stared south across a landscape I knew by heart. From the lofty perspective of the Mounds, I followed the familiar lines of pasture fences as they angled across the topography of the ranch. Looking west along Stock Creek, I recognized the spot where Jeremy had put down the last heifer. A few scattered bones still marked the flat where we had left her. Farther out, my gaze lingered on gates I had fixed and places where cattle moves had gone well or haywire. I looked one last time at the dark, gaping mouth of Bad Luck Canyon and recalled the hours I’d spent mucking out the spring box in its shadow.

Given time, some simple tools, and a reasonable supply of resolve, a ranch hand is capable of scrawling his name across the
land in a wide variety of ways. My own relics would long outlast my presence on the Sun. Twenty years from now a visitor, walking along any fence, but especially one running across a hilltop where elk like to hang, might find my particular brand of wire splice. Perhaps she would go walking with a ranch map and find a little spring or a hollow named for me, or something notable I did.

Man marks landscape. He does it quickly, ubiquitously, and to such an extent in some places that it becomes impossible to tell what was there before he started. But a place also marks a man. I was born a Seattle boy, a water child who looked at the clouds through holes in the trees and at the sun through holes in the clouds. Seattle has an easy climate, provided you can stand the rain. The land is fertile. When I spat apple seeds on the ground and walked away, I expected trees to grow.

Not so in the Madison Valley. Seattle tends toward soft, damp claustrophobia, but the Sun Ranch was characterized by exposure. A wide-skied place where everything but the hard essentials dried up and blew away, the valley and the ranch’s two predominant qualities were beauty and brutality.

That dual nature was in the weather: all summer I watched thunderstorms roil along the horizon, blackening the sky like bruises. One day a lightning bolt licked down and roasted a steer in his tracks. Duality was in the animals, too: there was nothing as eerily eloquent as the Wedge Pack’s howling and nothing messier than a kill.

Waiting in the Mounds for the emergence or arrival of wolves, I thought back to days and nights hunting them: the thrill of chasing big, dangerous creatures through close-set timber, the pinprick
stars that kept me company at night, and the guilt I lived with after finally pulling the trigger.

I shuddered to remember some of the work I did on the Sun. I had killed: an elk, a deer, a wolf-maimed heifer, and the wolf that probably tore her up. Through the long, dark months of winter those actions returned to keep me up at night. Often, I was tempted to construe ranching as nothing more than a protracted act of violence.

I thought hard about that until the sun rose high enough to light the faraway timber of the Gravelly Range. The temperature increased and a handful of deer popped in and out of sight as they negotiated the close-set hills of the Mounds. I took another look at the den’s mouth, but found no motion there.

Daylight began to warm the world, melting bits of snow on the sleeves of my coat. I watched jagged little crystals of ice subside into droplets, one after another, as the sun climbed my arm. As the drops soaked my jacket’s canvas shell, they seemed to argue that on a place like the Sun, things were always moving forward. Cattle got eaten. Wolves met bloody ends. Ranch hands arrived, sweated, and tried to stand against the wilderness long enough to make a living. Owners came and went, leaving their legacy in the form of strange structures and a mixed bag of place-names.

There was an element of tragedy in it, of course, but the main thing was that the land kept on. Day followed wild day, and over time amounted to a process of seasonal change. Immersion in that constant cycling was the ranch hand’s highest privilege. The thought of summer coming on, the whole drama starting over with green grass, spotted fawns, and high expectations, made it hard to think of leaving.

I waited in the Mounds for another hour. When the wolves didn’t show and the sun pulled away from the highest pinnacles, I gathered my things and walked to the base of the little pine grove that held the den. The wet dirt and old snow down there held a few tracks, but the process of freeze and thaw had reduced them all to ambiguous blotches.

I squatted in front of the den and peered inside. The dark oval of the mouth exhaled the thick smell of freshly turned earth. A few feet down the tunnel, pinched between the splintered fibers of a chewed-off root, a small tuft of pale fur caught my eye. I stuck my arm in after it. I couldn’t reach it, so I lay down on the ground and wriggled into the hole. The bulk of my shoulders blocked the light completely, so I had to feel blindly around in search of my prize.

I nearly had my hand on it when I heard the first sound. From somewhere deeper in the hillside came a scratching noise, and then the dull thud of something readjusting its position. Though the noise didn’t seem aggressive, it was enough to make a strong impression on a man wedged face-first into a hole. With my heart beating in my throat, I scooted backward toward daylight and safety, pulled free of the den, and was about to flee when the second sound reached me. Though at first I couldn’t believe it, I heard the pups mewling from the underground dark.

I crouched by the den’s mouth and listened for all I was worth. Here was the next generation of culprits. In a year they would be grown and hungry. They would maim and vanish, robbing someone like me of sleep, leisure, and sanity. I might have hated them for that. Some guys I know would have fetched diesel fuel, poured it down the hole, and struck a match. But there in the pines, all I
felt was a deep sympathy and curiosity. I wondered how many pups were down below, what they looked like, whether their eyes had opened, and how their lives would go. I listened to their muffled noises for a while. When I stood to leave, the sound rose above the wind—fragile, but something like a howl.

I
left the Sun Ranch in May 2007, but could not turn away from the vastness of southwest Montana. It was impossible to forget the wolf and shake my conviction that by killing him I had taken some consequential measure of wildness from the world. I moved to Missoula, slogged through graduate school, and wrote magazine articles to pay the rent.

James, having earned his degree in Range Science from Utah State, returned in June to manage the Sun. He faced a bloody summer with an inexperienced crew: in July, the wolves began to prey on Orville’s yearlings. James and his hired men struck back quickly, shooting a member of the pack, but the wolves would not be deterred. They harassed the cattle, killing what they could.

From a cramped Missoula garret, I imagined the sleeplessness, exhaustion, and mounting stress that must have prevailed on the ranch. I kept in touch with James enough to know that things went badly toward the end of July. A second wolf was killed in a manner grisly enough to make the local papers and smudge the Sun’s reputation as a conservation-minded operation. In the end, Montana Fish, Wildlife & Parks elected to take out the entire pack. By December 2007, the mountains immediately above the Sun were silent and ostensibly wolfless.

I returned to the Lee Metcalf Wilderness when I could as a hunter and backpacker. Early in the summer of 2008, I hiked
in and set up camp on the public land behind the Squaw Creek hogback. The high, rough country looked just as it had when I worked on the Sun. Each morning, small bunches of elk crossed the hogback, circled wide around my tent, and disappeared in the direction of the mountains. From my high perch in the foothills, the ranch’s cattle could be seen grazing on the Flats below.

I walked all over, visiting Finger Lake and following the North Fork of Squaw Creek uphill until it dwindled to a trickle. A storm blew in one evening and soaked the landscape with a hard, brief shower. In the morning I packed my things and walked out, detouring on a trail that swung wide around the South Fork bog and dropped down toward Papoose Creek. In a low spot where the rain had pooled, I found a single wolf track, as big as my fist, pressed into the mud.

The Sun Ranch refused to slack its grip on my head and heart, so I kept track of it, returning in the fall of 2008 to find that the road up Squaw Creek had been improved. Though I feared I would one day find that remote drainage filled with freshly built mansions and luxury cars, development never came. The bottom dropped out of the real estate market, vaporizing the assets of would-be buyers. It hit Roger hard, too, and he sold the place in 2010 to a handful of executives from a multinational mining corporation. James lost his job when the sale went through, and moved on to run a ranch outside of Meeteetse, Wyoming. By the time Roger signed over the deed, 97 percent of the ranch’s acreage was protected from development by perpetual conservation easements.

After earning a master’s degree in Environmental Studies, I headed back to the mountains. I managed a different place from
the Sun, the Dry Cottonwood Creek Ranch, near the has-been town of Galen in the Deer Lodge valley. There I tried to rehabilitate three thousand acres of land damaged by overgrazing and the toxic by-products of copper smelting. Though Dry Cottonwood is interesting in its own right, I am still haunted by the endless grassy sweep of the Madison Valley, the herds of elk that move like clouds across it, and the wolves running creek bottoms in the morning half light.

I
n writing, as in ranching, no significant work gets done alone. Making a book is not so different from pushing a dead truck up a long and steepening hill. At first, when the ground is favorable and the day is young, one straining person can keep the wheels turning. At such times, it is tempting for a writer to think of a book as something that belongs to him. But then the road begins to rise. The writer’s exertions fall short and progress grinds to a stop. Unless others come to join the struggle, all is lost.

Badluck Way
exists because a handful of good and generous people have thrown their weight behind it and pushed hard. Kendra McKlosky was the first to do so, followed quickly by my parents, Colleen Chartier and Richard Andrews. Each supported the effort in his or her own way: Mom and Dad responded insightfully to drafts and photos, and were willing to talk endlessly about ethics, aesthetics, and ranching. Kendra lent her acute memory and creative spark to the cause. She gave me space enough to live inside my head, sometimes for days at a stretch, and then welcomed me home when the time was right.

Phil Condon improved an early draft of the book with thoughtful and open-ended critiques. Elizabeth Wales saw promise in the resulting manuscript and did an astonishingly good job of getting it into the hands of like-minded readers. I cannot imagine finding a better advocate for
Badluck Way.
Without Elizabeth’s help, I
would not have found my way to my editor, Leslie Meredith. Over the past year, Leslie has worked diligently and insightfully to hone the edges of
Badluck Way.
Her comments and edits have yielded a better, sharper story than the one I brought her. Leslie and others at Atria have put their hearts into supporting this book, and I appreciate it immensely.