Badluck Way: A Year on the Ragged Edge of the West (5 page)

I rode the ATV out into the morning, bracing myself against the stream of cold air. The Foreman was a strong machine, a 500. I revved through the gears, watching the speedometer climb through twenty, thirty, and forty as I followed Badluck Way downhill. I turned right onto a smaller gravel track that struck off to the north and ran across level ground for a while before arriving at the brink of a steep descent.

I pulled out the map to get my bearings. Directly ahead, the road cruised across the Stock Creek plain, crossed a rickety bridge over Wolf Creek, and then struck out into a featureless zone of seven square miles called the North End Flats. Beyond that, the road met the ranch’s northern boundary fence, cut eastward through an area labeled with the single, cryptic word “Mounds,” and then looped back south along the base of the mountains, past Stock and Bad Luck Creeks.

I folded the map and sped away. Melting snowdrifts crossed the road at intervals, and I cut the spring’s first tracks through them, scattering slush and mud as I roared onto the Flats. The
endless sky was blue, and everywhere grass was rising from the dead. All of it augured a bright future.

The Foreman loved level ground and carried me across the Flats so fast I nearly missed seeing the ruins that sat perhaps a half mile from the road. Out there in the bunchgrass, a handful of slumping wooden shacks dotted the landscape. I shut off the engine and started toward them, but although I walked for a long time, the buildings never grew in size. The ATV, however, dwindled to a speck, nearly disappearing into the imperceptible topography of the Flats. Alarmed, I turned and hurried back to the Foreman, kicked it over, sped north, and didn’t stop until I hit the boundary fence.

Riding east, things got interesting in a hurry as I buzzed toward the base of the mountains and into the Mounds, a tight clump of hills left over from the last spasms of glaciation. After miles of unsettling, severe expanse, the Mounds came as a welcome relief. With the gentle, rolling aspect of a golf course, the Mounds were a world unto themselves. In a landscape of exposure, they held you close. They grew the best grass on the ranch and the animals knew it. I stopped and walked awhile in the Mounds—found a little antler there, mouse-chewed and grayed by years.

Beyond the Mounds, the going turned rough and the ruts got so deep that I couldn’t take my eyes off the ground. Because of this, Bad Luck Canyon sneaked up on me. One moment I was traveling alongside the reassuring face of a mountain and the next the canyon gaped open, a great, foreboding maw, close on my left-hand side.

Exploring that dark place had been my first thought when
Jeremy turned me loose for the day, and I had intended to hike at least a little ways up Bad Luck Creek. But there, at the mouth of the canyon, an old fear percolated up and tightened my throat. I let the Foreman idle and stared upstream to where the water disappeared between sharply angled walls of timber.

In the summer three years ago, before I knew about the Sun Ranch, I had filled a backpack and walked up a switchback trail into the Lee Metcalf Wilderness. I carried too much: a hatchet, sandals, four pairs of socks, a change of pants, a novel, a cell phone, a notebook, toiletries, a two-man tent, and a GPS unit with bewildering functions. I was fresh off the highway from Seattle and the thought of bears nearly paralyzed me.

As I climbed up the east side of the Madison Range, ascending along Beaver Creek until the trees thinned and the trail wandered across patches of loose talus, I marveled at the sheer-sided valleys, shouted nonsense into the clear air, and waited for echoes. I strained beneath the weight of my rookie’s pack and stopped often to pant and drink water.

After just a few uphill miles, I reached Blue Danube Lake. Because of my load and inexperience, I was exhausted. It seemed I had come to a place removed in not just space but time. Pink granite cliffs ringed the tarn on three sides. Mosquitoes rose in droves from the water and bunched thick around my face and hands. The only sign of human trespass was a handful of rusty tin cans marked with the names of companies long since foundered and dissolved.

I pitched my tent and sat beside it while the daylight waned,
feeling lucky to have found my way into another, older world. Thunderheads rose in dark masses and slid like a lid across the day. First there was wind, then rain, and then lightning from a pitch-black sky.

The alpine bowl collected more than water—it magnified the noise and light of the storm. I did not sleep but lay on my thin foam pad, eyes straight up, as bolts struck all around the semicircle of peaks, bright as camera flashes. They dislodged hunks of stone that thundered close about the tent and splashed into the lake. The storm went on through the night, ending just before dawn broke, around five in the morning.

A single thought possessed me as I struck camp: Get out. I had planned to stay another day or two in the high country, to visit other lakes, but the night and storm changed everything. I was afraid, not just of bears but the possibility that these wild mountains might swallow me. It was no secret that they could—bones were everywhere.

The route had seemed clear enough on my map: circle around Blue Danube, clamber up to a saddle between two cliffs, bushwhack a mile to a small, unnamed lake, take a Forest Service trail four miles down Squaw Creek, and then follow a public easement across the Sun Ranch to the Madison River and Highway 287.

I might have made it, if not for the mosquitoes and biting flies. They came on with dawn and gave me no rest for hours. In combination with the leftovers of midnight terror, they drove me on when I should have stopped to read map, country, and compass. I did not eat. I hardly drank. Soon I was lost without a trail, plunging downhill along a spring, pushing through high willow thickets with both hands.

Hours and miles passed. Grunts and crashing noises issued from the willows, and at one panicked moment I uncapped my bear spray and pointed it futilely at a wall of close-set sticks. But nothing emerged and it was late afternoon when I struck the highway at Quake Lake, ten miles and ninety degrees of the compass away from the spot I was aiming for. I stood at the edge of the road, looked up at the mountains, and shivered. I told myself that I would not go back.

Standing next to the shadows of Bad Luck Canyon, the familiar fear rushed into me, the terror of feeling like prey in the mountains. I fled from it again, bouncing the Foreman south through Moose Creek and along the base of the Pyramid. Ahead of me, to the south, the ranch’s property lines pinched down between the sheer cliffs of Hilgard Peak and the curling line of the river. The map showed a tangle of ridges, timber, and contorted streams, labeled with the words “Squaw Creek.”

Snow lay deep in the road and kept me from venturing far into the South End that day. I dreaded getting my machine stuck. Instead, I shut off the engine, climbed to the top of a ridge, and looked out across the land.

Just as Jeremy had told me, the north and south halves of the Sun Ranch bore little resemblance to each other. North of Moose Creek, the land was defined by scale, order, and exposure. Views were sweeping up there, the fences followed survey lines, and crossing the landscape was mostly straightforward. In places, the North End Flats seemed limited only by the curvature of the
earth. From the Flats, the Madison Range, though always visible, looked far away.

But to the south, beyond the open meadows that flanked Moose Creek, the topography bent into a great, chaotic knot. Ridges swept down from the mountains at strange angles, and the three forks of Squaw Creek veered crazily back and forth to negotiate them. The low places were choked with thick, dark timber. Even from a distance it looked like an easy place to get lost.

The wolf was not the first of his kind to stake a claim in Squaw Creek, below the sheer rocks of Hilgard Peak. Others, not long gone, had left their mark on the landscape. As he blundered into the places where they had killed elk and prowled through the mossy wreckage of skeletons, he discovered the best trails from one ridge to another and paused at scent trees that still held the last whiffs of stale urine. In time he found and cautiously entered the old dens. Nothing waited for him inside.

He tried to make sense of it, picking at the smells and leftover sign the way all canids do. A good cattle dog also knows the difference between fresh and stale wolf piss. He’ll hackle up when faced with the new stuff, sometimes even growl or tuck his tail and press against the side of your leg. But old sign gives him pause. He knows it’s not a threat, but pays attention anyhow. He sniffs it carefully, takes his time walking around, and eventually marks a tree or gatepost in a manner that somehow seems both assertive and deferential. From the way he acts, it is no great stretch to suppose that he’s thinking hard about what came before him.

The wolf trotted along the steep ridge between the Middle and North Forks of Squaw Creek, with the high, hard peaks of the Lee Metcalf Wilderness spreading out south and east. In October, aspen trees would have been burning sunlight yellow in all the places where live water flows or springs rise close to the surface. The wolf would have been fat, full to bursting with offal and meat from some hapless mule deer. He would have followed the only
good trail, the one that snakes between boulders, dipping often into the timber on the north side. The trail is the best route for everything that moves through Squaw Creek. Elk use it to gain elevation before they hit the rocky shins of Hilgard Peak. Grizzlies come in the early summer to flip boulders and swill down the grubs underneath. Because it is the easiest way through a tough piece of country, with a sweeping view of the open, grassy parks between the forks of the creek, ranch hands use it to check cattle.

The wolf trotted up that well-worn trail. He visited and refreshed the trees he used for marking territory. He watched, as everyone does from up there, the progress of cloud shadows across the sage and grass in the valley below. He stopped at a spot where something had scratched up a pile of fresh dirt. One whiff, and he knew he was no longer alone.