Badluck Way: A Year on the Ragged Edge of the West (16 page)

The other cow, exhausted, made it to the top of the hill and stopped in a small cluster of scattered pines. The trees were old giants, and their widespread branches had preserved a circle of bare, snowless ground around each massive trunk. The surviving elk stopped in one such circle, no more than two hundred yards from where the wolves were feasting, and she waited.

After perhaps fifteen minutes, a pair of wolves left the bloody mess of the kill to follow her tracks uphill. They trotted into the pine grove and stopped in front of her. The elk pressed her rump against the trunk of the tree and refused to move.

The standoff lasted for the better part of an hour. Frequently, one of the wolves edged in toward the big pine. When it crossed from snow onto bare ground, the elk charged forward. She held her nose in the air and struck at the wolf with both front hooves. As soon as the wolf turned tail, the cow walked back to her tree and stood against the trunk.

Just as they had worked together in the chase, the wolves took turns harassing the surviving cow elk. Members of the pack trickled steadily back and forth between the site of the kill and the spot where the elk had chosen to make her stand. Once in the pine grove, however, the wolves seemed less than serious. Some lay full-bellied in the snow and simply watched her with interest. A few tried halfheartedly to bait her away from the pine.

The elk stuck to her guns. When the wolves got too close she lashed out at them. Otherwise, she simply sidestepped around the tree. Always, she was careful to keep the nearest wolves in sight and her vulnerable hind end safely pressed against bark.

In the end, the wolves gave up and left her in the grove. They paused awhile by their kill to chase scavenger birds off the remnants
and eventually headed uphill and out of sight. The elk stayed put for a while, and then she walked away.

On the Sun Ranch, as in Yellowstone, a wolf kill was immediately, conclusively identifiable. If fresh, it retained the aspect of a violent feeding frenzy. I found the remnants of one dead elk that could not have been more than a few hours old. First I saw the blood, a thick trail daubed across the tops of sagebrush and bunchgrass, ending at a scene of messy dismemberment. Around the carcass, the grass was matted down and slicked with blood and half-digested grass from the rumen. Scattered tufts of hair formed a great, uneven halo. Inside that ring, a five-hundred-pound cow elk had been efficiently reduced to a pile of parts. The meat was about half gone and at its thickest had yet to completely cool. When I lifted up one of the shredded back legs, drops of blood ran down to the ground below. The other hindquarter was gone, snapped off red and clean at the femur. Most of the ribs had been cracked into fibrous, shattered messes. In the grass around the carcass were leftover bits from the organs and entrails, including a pink, frothy, fist-sized chunk of lung.

Perhaps the strangest, most disturbing part of the scene was that, in the midst of all that carnage and blood, I could not help thinking that the meat looked good enough to eat. Big chunks of it remained on the carcass, and it would have been no great trouble to pull out my pocketknife, trim away the tooth marks, and cut myself a thick steak.

But something stopped me from unfolding the blade. I grew uneasy and began to look hard at the land around me. It wasn’t that I expected the wolves to emerge, though I knew they weren’t finished with the carcass. It wasn’t that I doubted the quality or
cleanliness of the meat. In fact, I had long been waiting to try some elk. The ranch was dotted with headless, knife-gouged skeletons left over from past hunting seasons, and everyone I talked to seemed ready to corroborate the fact that elk agreed incredibly well with the human palate.

I wanted the meat but felt a deep, vague sense of revulsion. I was not, I thought, a predator—at least not like the wolves. Sure, I ate meat, but I did not tear life apart at the seams and swallow its guts before the heart stopped beating. I was different, I told myself—a gentler creature. I kept my knife in my pocket, left the kill to the wolves, and turned my attention back to the care and feeding of cattle.

Late one afternoon, a silver car drove up Badluck Way, a flashing speck that cruised out of the Moose Creek canyon and headed up the road toward the Big House. I leaned against a stock tank and watched it move across the land. I didn’t know anyone who owned a silver car, and James and Jeremy were in town.

No public road crossed the Sun Ranch. With the exception of Badluck Way, all the ranch roads that reached the highway were gated. In spite of the No Trespassing signs that hung from our perimeter fences, occasional strangers still wandered onto the ranch.

I was nervous the first time I stopped a car. Jeremy told stories about poachers and midnight chases across rough country. He kept a pistol in the glove compartment. All I had were fencing pliers and the distinct sense that something would go wrong. What do I say? I wondered. What if they tell me to go to hell?

The vast majority of people turned out to be lost tourists. The
ones who knew they were trespassing acted guilty and nervous, usually apologizing before I could say hello and heading straight off the place when I asked them to. I got comfortable with such dirt-road conversations, and even came to like them.

When the silver car appeared, chasing it down seemed like a welcome break from work. I put the four-wheeler in gear and gunned it down a two-track. At Badluck Way I spun my hat around so it faced backward and opened the throttle. Twenty, thirty, forty, fifty miles per hour. The engine roared.

I closed in on the car, letting off the gas when the dust started to make me cough. The driver must have seen me, but he didn’t pull over. He rolled down the road, passed the shop, and pulled into the driveway at the Big House. I stopped behind him.

The car was a big Audi sedan, an A8. It was brand-new and immaculate except for the dust from driving up the road. A Wyoming vanity plate hung on the bumper: SPUR.

A tall, gray-haired man climbed out and blinked in the sun. He said his name was George and stuck out his hand. He didn’t seem lost, guilty, or nervous.

We talked about the heat, the view—nothing. I waited for him to explain himself, to justify his presence here on the ranch, but he didn’t. When our conversation lagged, I asked him straight out:

“What brings you up to the ranch today?”

I was being nice. Usually I would have said, “Do you know you’re on private property?”

He gave me one of those you-don’t-know-who-you’re-dealing-with smiles and told me Roger had sent him up to have a look at the view from the Big House.

“You work for Roger, then?” I asked.

“Not exactly.” George chuckled. “I’m a consultant.”

We shot the breeze for a few more minutes. George talked a lot but didn’t say much about his purpose. When he headed back down the road and left me standing in the Big House driveway, I knew only that he had worked for thirty years in Jackson Hole, planning the layouts of resorts and high-end developments.

This worried me and brought to mind a conversation I’d had with Roger not long before on Badluck Way. I was headed home for the evening, and the sun had almost settled on the Gravelly Range when Roger flagged me down. After I rolled the big white work truck to a stop and he wiped the dust from his black cover-all sunglasses, Roger asked a few questions about the movements of the heifer herd, the last known location of the wolf pack, and other ranch minutiae. He seemed eager to talk, so I shut off the engine, stepped out of the cab, and stood in the road.

Roger, surprisingly, wanted to know about me. He asked about my background and my reason for coming to the Sun. I told him my story in a nutshell—that I had come to the ranch because I liked the work and loved the land. I enjoyed being alongside the wilderness and making my living from it.

He gave a slight nod in the affirmative.

“What are you going to do when the grazing season’s over?”

The question wasn’t new to me. In my rare quiet moments, after dinner in the bunkhouse, or in between daytime tasks, I often wondered where the coming winter would find me. There were plenty of options, ranging from embarking on a career as a lifelong cowboy to applying to the University of Montana to get a
master’s degree in something useful. Standing on Badluck Way, I tried to keep things simple.

“I want to stay out here,” I told Roger. “Do something that keeps this place wild, open, and undeveloped.”

I launched into a vicious little tirade about subdivisions, specifically the one that huddled against the foothills of the Madison Range just across the ranch’s north boundary. Ranchettes I said, were blights on the landscape, perversions of the Western dream.

“Sure,” Roger replied, “but you’ve got to be reasonable about it. Agriculture doesn’t pay the bills on a place like this. I don’t see how it could, which means the whole thing’s unsustainable on some level.”

He went on to say that the ranch was deep in debt and that the profits from our summer grazing barely balanced the cost of hiring help, servicing equipment, and keeping the buildings standing. It fell short of the land payment by a couple of important decimal places.

Roger explained that he believed a truly sustainable ranch could be built on a tricornered foundation. The first main enterprise was ranching—often of the seasonal type that we engaged in on the Sun. The second leg was a combination of tourism and recreation—hunting, fishing, and all the other earthly pleasures offered down at Papoose Creek. The last part of the equation was limited, responsible real estate development.

“Nobody likes it,” he said. “Least of all me. But look at the math. A place like this can’t survive by breaking even on cows. Elk hunters aren’t going to pay the mortgage, either, no matter how much we charge them.”

A homesite on the Sun would sell for a few million, easy, especially if it came with hunting rights, access to the rest of the property, and privileges at a lodge like Papoose Creek. Sell a handful of them, and the ranch would be out of the red in a hurry.

He stopped there and looked away to the west. The sun was gone, but the sky still burned orange above the Gravellies, and the scattered clouds were lit from beneath with a white light so intense it made me squint.

Roger pulled off and folded his sunglasses. When he looked back toward me, no trace remained of his customary smile. Without its usual shield, Roger’s face looked grim and exhausted.

“Hell of a place,” he said.

“That it is.”

He wished me a good evening and drove off toward the Big House. When his car had passed from sight, I climbed onto the truck’s flatbed and leaned against the headache rack to watch the day end. I had a hard time arguing with Roger’s logic. Ranching didn’t pay, and a couple more houses might not make much difference in the grand scheme.

Still, I hated picturing the office, somewhere in Ennis or Virginia City, where a filing cabinet held a map of lower Squaw Creek crisscrossed with property lines, utilities, and new roads. Building a house in the wilderness was easy. It took paperwork, lumber, and a few other details. On the outskirts of Twin Bridges, Whitehall, Sheridan, and a dozen other nearby towns, an army of contractors waited to be unleashed. One phone call and a little pile of money, and the deal would be done.

After the consultant left, I looked southeast and saw the moon rising, nearly full, above the Madison Range. Somewhere out there
the wolves were waking up, stretching out, and getting ready. The elk were moving, too, along with countless other creatures. As I pictured them all traveling by moonlight, unwatched and largely unbothered, a cold dread settled like anesthesia in my stomach.

We had an old radio receiver, a leftover from the summer when a pair of graduate students had stayed on the ranch to track the movements of elk and wolves. The receiver looked like a chubby version of the radios we carried to communicate with each other, except it had a cord at one end that connected to a collapsible metal antenna.

An hour before sunset I stood on a hill, switched on the unit, and held out the antenna like a dowsing rod. I faced the mountains and turned slowly through the points of the compass. With the receiver pressed against my ear I listened to the hiss of static. I turned the volume up and swept the horizon until a faint click came out of the speaker, indicating that one of the collared wolves was within a few miles.