Badluck Way: A Year on the Ragged Edge of the West (10 page)

“How do you figure,” she asked, “to keep them out of my cattle?”

I told her, as Jeremy had so often told me, that we were going to do everything in our power to keep the worst from happening. We would patrol the herd diligently, I said, and track the collared wolves in the pack with a telemetry system on loan from the University of Montana. When the two groups of animals got too close together, we would haze the wolves back into the wilderness and sleep out beside the cattle.

I went on, warming to my task: We had nonlethal shotgun loads—cracker shells and rubber bullets. We had an experimental contraption called fladry, a one-string fence of twine and plastic flagging that was thought to frighten wolves. When her cows and calves moved into the riskiest places, we would ring their pasture with fladry and monitor the results. The hope, I told her, was to keep the cattle safe and learn something new about coexisting with predators.

She took this in, listening with her mouth set in a grim line. When I finished talking, she let the silence hang long between us. Finally, she spoke:

“You’re going to put a string of flags around the cows?”

That was the plan, I said.

“How does that keep the wolves out?”

I confessed that I didn’t exactly know, but we had reports of it working well to protect sheep herds in Europe.

She let more silence pass, and then asked me if I owned a gun.

I mentioned my newly acquired pump shotgun and reminded her about the cracker shells and rubber slugs.

“No,” she said. “A real gun, a rifle. With bullets.”

When I told her I didn’t own a rifle, she stared at me as though I had revealed a deep-seated, appalling vice. Looking down from the saddle, she fixed me with a hard, appraising glare. It got to me. For a moment I was ashamed to be a man of twenty-three, presenting myself as a ranch hand, with just a shotgun to my name.

As she watched me think this through, her face softened just a fraction.

“Tell you what,” she said. “If you need a gun, you call me.”

“Thank you,” I replied. “I’ll keep it in mind.”

“Do that,” she said. “We’ll get you what you need for the wolves.”

She spun her horse and rode away, leaving me among her family’s cattle.

With our summer herds settled and grazing on the ranch, my own life fell into a reassuring, exhausting rhythm. Each morning, unless we were scheduled to move a herd from one pasture to another, I filled a couple of gas cans, strapped them to a four-wheeler, and buzzed uphill along the paired wheel ruts that followed Moose Creek toward the mountains. On the way up, I drove past each stock tank, checking to make sure the floats worked and the water was high. Mobs of steers scattered before me, and I scanned the herd for signs of lameness or trouble. When I saw a suspicious limp or swelling, I recorded it in a little red stock book that
Jeremy had given me. The books came free from a company that sold feed supplements. Mine was small enough to fit in a breast pocket and said “Vigortone” on the cover. It was wonderfully organized, with dated, boxed-out spaces for describing ailments, animals, and treatments. Jeremy probably filled them in correctly, but I just picked a random page, scrawled something like “Black Baldy with foot rot on left hind,” and finished with a barely legible notation of the tag number.

I puttered uphill, roughly following our water line until I reached the top of the pasture and a massive, circular cistern. Although it had been painted brown to match the grass, the tank looked rude and industrial against the foothills. Not far from its base, a generator and a wellhead sat inside a small fenced enclosure. I boosted one of the cans across the fence, leaped over, and began to tinker with the generator.

We had two of these setups, one on either side of Moose Creek. The wells were capable of bringing up nine or ten gallons per minute, the tanks held fifty-seven hundred gallons each, and pipes led downhill to more than a dozen stock tanks.

The average cow on good pasture drinks ten to twelve gallons each day, which meant our steers sucked around 8,160 gallons from the ground seven days a week. The heifer herd required even more, totaling approximately 9,480 daily gallons. Keeping pace with these demands meant running the generators for up to fourteen hours a day during the grazing season.

It would have been simpler to water our herds from the creek. We could have fenced our pastures so the creek ran right through the middle of them, dumped in a load of cattle, and called it good. That’s the easy way, and the old way. The stock gets its own water,
and nobody has to set tanks or run pipe or bounce across a washboard road to stoke a generator. But cattle are hell on creeks and the ground around them. They loiter by the banks and foul the water. If left to their own devices and not rotated through pastures quickly enough, they chew the riparian grass to nothing. Naked banks slump into the water, and soon the creek is destroyed, gone, replaced by a barren, deeply incised gully. We fought against this process all over the ranch, adding off-stream water sources to the most heavily used fields. In other, more remote pastures, we used a combination of temporary electric fence and vigorous herding to keep the cattle on the move and away from the most fragile areas.

Our system of tanks, pipe, and pumps was built to take the pressure off natural water sources and it worked pretty well. The only real problem was the amount of gasoline and maintenance required to keep it going. Fourteen hours a day is a lot to ask of an old motor, especially when it’s kept outside and chilled below freezing every night.

I fussed with the generator, adding oil and picking grass seeds from the air filter. After filling the empty gas tank to the brim and adjusting the choke to its sweet spot, I reached down and pulled on the starter cord for all I was worth. The generator rattled, coughed, and died. I yanked the cord frantically, until the skin of my palm started to burn. When the generator kicked over, I stood beside it panting. I ran a hand across my forehead to clear off the day’s first sweat.

I almost always started mornings like that: up along the cold, roiling creek, then north across a bumpy stretch of sagebrush to the mouth of Bad Luck Canyon. We had a spring box there, built to siphon water out of Bad Luck Creek and send it downhill to a
line of tanks that dotted an otherwise dry section of the ranch. Although it was sunk in one of the stream’s slower, deeper holes and ringed around with a couple different sizes of wire mesh, the box trapped silt, old leaves, and debris. I shoveled it out almost every day, and then reamed the box’s intake holes with a stick. By the time I had the water running strong, my hands would be frozen stiff. I’d lean against the four-wheeler and try to slap some life back into them.

The spring box sat high on the ranch, near the foot of the Madisons, so that gravity could do the work of moving water. Building it there was a utilitarian decision; the spot’s sweeping view was incidental. Still, it stopped me in my tracks every day. Downhill, toward the west and the river, the valley spread out for miles. In the foreground, the new green grass looked soft as a carpet. It shimmered with each gust of wind. The two movie-set cabins punctuated the middle distance, lonely, gray, and weathered. Anyone who didn’t know the story behind them would have thought they had stood there for a century or more.

I usually began to take in the landscape by looking west, the friendlier panorama, across the valley toward the faraway Gravelly Range, letting the rising sun warm my back. But I always turned east and stared up the course of the creek to where it spilled out of the mountains at Bad Luck Canyon. Jeremy said the canyon belonged to the wolves. It was narrow and full of bones, the sides so steep a man couldn’t climb them without using his hands.

“Predator alley,” he said. “It’ll make your hair stand on end.”

The mouth of the canyon was thick with trees on its south slope and framed by two sharply angled hillsides, like a Newhouse trap with its jaws splayed out, waiting for a footfall on the pan. Although
the hills didn’t look very steep from the spring box, they still had a menacing aspect. I strained my eyes to see past the spot where the walls came together in a massive V, but couldn’t penetrate the foliage and shadow.

Such dark places were magnetic. I felt the same pull at the mouth of a cave, a mine shaft, a bog, or any obscure place that I had been warned about explicitly. On wild, moonless nights, the darkness called me away from the safe circle of firelight, challenging me to transgress, to step beyond my world into an ancient, unforgiving one.

My curiosity about Bad Luck Canyon got the best of me one Saturday, when my only job that day was to make rounds of the generators and clean out the spring box. When finished, I left the four-wheeler and walked uphill along the creek. I didn’t own a pistol then, and hadn’t thought to bring a can of bear spray, so I went up Bad Luck Creek armed with a pair of fencing pliers. I held them with the staple hook pointing forward, an agricultural war club.

The wind stopped when I passed into the mountains. It got dark, too, since the Madisons now blocked the sun. I stopped beneath a good-sized pine to catch my breath and let my eyes adjust. When they did, I looked down to find the first skeleton.

The elk calf lay on the uphill side of the tree with its spine bent backward to match the curve of the trunk. Its ribs were gone, snapped off clean as wishbones. The long bones of the leg were cracked in half and the skull was missing. Rough incisions marred the unbroken bones. Not a shred of skin remained, but the ground was scattered with a halo of fur that I recognized as the wolf’s particular calling card.

The creek was small, no wider than a long stride. Following it uphill, I stepped over a shocking multitude of bones. Spines lay like snakes in the grass, and disarticulated vertebrae dotted the ground like strange, low weeds. I stopped to study the fresher kills, the ones still held together by bits of dried black sinew, and found the brutal strength of wolves recorded in bone shear.

A quarter mile back was a little shack as thoroughly disassembled as the skeletons. I tripped over a griddle and found a stovepipe, a wringer, and bedsprings scattered near the open door. Inside, a caved-in roof divided the cabin in half. One side was littered with gnawed bones.

As I climbed, my worries multiplied. Game trails snaked along the bottom of the canyon. Spurs departed at intervals to climb awhile and peter out in scree. Looking back downhill, I found that I could no longer see the sunlit floor of the valley, or even the faraway green hump of the Gravelly Range. My world was ringed with dark, impenetrable timber, punctuated by the dull white of weathering bone, and bounded on two sides by slopes that had grown steeper until they looked impossible to ascend.

I turned a corner and hopped once more across the canyon’s little cataract. As I landed on the other side, a tremendous racket issued from one of the nearer trees. It happened fast—a series of quick, dull explosions, like a string of fireworks held underwater. The noise was loud, close, and terrifying. I froze in my tracks, with my heart beating hard enough to hear. Even when a blue grouse emerged from the branches and coasted away down the canyon with its wings still making a bizarre flooded-engine sound, I couldn’t relax.

Bad Luck had that effect on people—and livestock, too. In an
old, unpublished history of the Madison Valley, I had read about the etymology of all the creeks around here. For most streams the naming process was mundane. Moose and Wolf Creeks were named for animals seen on their banks, apparently by men without a surfeit of creativity. Down the valley, Meadow Creek took its name from the wide expanse of grass through which it meandered. Of Squaw Creek, the author wrote only that the drainage contained the graves of horse thieves, killed by a posse of deputies from Gallatin City.

But Bad Luck Creek was different. Bad Luck had a story. In the very early days, when homesteads were being proved up around Ennis and the first big ranches had yet to be pieced together in the upper valley, a man rode his horse up into the bowels of a little drainage near Moose Creek. Like me, the man crossed and recrossed the little brook in the center of the canyon, stepping over enough bone piles to put his mount on edge.

High in the canyon, the man caught sight of a grouse sitting nearby in a tree. Grouse have two major challenges when it comes to their survival: First, they’re delicious, easily cooked on an open fire, and about the right size to make a hearty lunch. Second, they tend to overestimate their ability to blend in to their surroundings and will sit motionless on a tree branch until a person is nearly within arm’s reach.

Seeing the grouse, the man dismounted. He picked up one of the blocky stones that litter the canyon floor and led his horse toward the bird. When he judged himself close enough, he chucked the stone with all his strength. It missed, but not by much, and the grouse leaped from the tree in a riot of motion and sound, flapping between man and animal, nearly brushing them with its wings.

The noise, the bird, the smells of decay, and the carcass piles did not sit well with the horse, which reared back, broke free of the man, and ran downhill as fast as it could go. It did not stop to graze or drink, but kept going, out of the canyon, across Stock Creek and the vastness of the North End, and on down the valley to Ennis.