Badluck Way: A Year on the Ragged Edge of the West (19 page)

Everything is information. Pat Zentz said that to me years ago while we were driving around his ranch looking for a mule deer that he could shoot. He said it first in the cab when the wind came up and started flattening the grass so that it pointed northeast, then again when we saw a fork-horn struggling out of a coulee in an advanced state of exhaustion. Worn-out and banged up, that deer had just been beaten in one of the fights related to the fall rut. He walked right by the pickup, not fifty yards away. I kept expecting Pat to shoot, but he just watched through the window and said again that everything was information. Later, after we had driven to the far side of the coulee, stalked into the wind, and killed a four-point buck among his harem, I had to admit that Pat was right.

Some people are dumb enough to pronounce this high country empty. They pull off the highway at the Madison Bend, belly up to the bar at the Griz, watch the baseball game for a while, and then ask without the barest hint of irony: How can you live out here? Nothing happens and there isn’t anything to do.

Now I just shrug like I never thought about it before. They’re not ready to understand that the land is a palimpsest, overwritten countless times with jumbled but decipherable script. Tracks in the dust, broken barbwire, the shifting wind, and the swirl of magpies and other scavenger birds as they rise from the dark timber—all
these things carry meaning. With the right sort of attention, the land tells any story a person could want to hear.

But this knowing is dangerous, a kind of seduction. One time I did explain the whole shebang to a tourist, ending with the assertion that everything is information. When his eyes lit up as I explained how animals, storms, and seasons mark the land, I knew that he was thinking of buying his own place in the Madison. Like everybody else, he wanted a slice of paradise. Now I keep my mouth shut, because twenty years of visiting the Zentz Ranch taught me where talk like that can lead. The Billings exurbs have crossed the Yellowstone River and crept up Duck Creek like a flood tide. A spare, breathtaking landscape has become a vacuum into which has rushed every sort of debris: plastic bags blow across hayfields and snag on the right-of-way fences; headlights and gunshots carve up the night, leaving deer and cattle dead in the fields. The detritus of city life—junk mail, broken toys, aluminum cans, and soiled diapers—spill from the windows of passing cars and collect in the roadside ditches.

This was the future I feared most deeply for the Sun Ranch. Although the ranch had remained wild and largely untrammeled, the same could not be said for the rest of the valley floor. A small subdivision occupied half a section of land adjacent to the ranch’s northern boundary. It was just twenty or so houses spaced evenly across three hundred and twenty acres, but it bothered me.

An image of those houses popped into my head when, hauling salt to the heifers, I met a survey crew setting up their equipment in the middle of an old hayfield. When I asked the foreman what he was up there taking stock of, he responded enthusiastically.

“Oh, just about everything. We’re working up a bunch of overlays
for this place. Wildlife corridors, roads, utilities, viewsheds, streams and water rights, development potential—you name it, we’re mapping it.”

He asked me what I did for a living, and I told him.

“Agriculture,” he replied. “We’re doing a map for that, too. Maybe when we come back with a draft of this stuff you can give us some notes.”

The surveyor seemed like a decent and capable man, but the word
development
sat poorly with me. I didn’t stew about it for long, though. My fears about the future of the ranch were quickly eclipsed by the immediate tasks of tending herds, watching for wolves, and working all the daylight hours.

Around the middle of July we sorted off the bulls from Orville Skogen’s replacement heifers. Skogen’s bulls were almost identical—all ball sack, shit stains, and muscle—except for one. Among that homogenous crowd, one animal had worn the poll of his head bald from scrapping. The exposed skin was shockingly pale for a Black Angus, and from a distance the bare spot looked precisely like a tonsure. Once I noted the resemblance, it was hard to drive through the pastures without laughing at the sight of a black-robed monk enthusiastically screwing the heifers.

We sorted off the bulls and I trailed them along Badluck Way toward the pasture where they would graze for the rest of the summer. They started out rank. Fresh from breeding, they butted, scuffled, and raised dust from the gravel road. They took turns wheeling around to paw, bellow, and give me the eye. I was in charge of the bulls until shipping time and already it was going sour.

But then the bald bull moved out in front. He walked the roadside fence calmly and the other bulls followed. At the gate I stepped wide and he turned into the pasture without a backward glance. Because of his penchant for leading and the monastic hairdo, I decided to call him Moses.

Twice a week I took salt to the bulls and checked the water trough. I worked them a little bit from the four-wheeler, making each one take a few steps as I watched for signs of lameness. Each bull moved differently under pressure. Two usually trotted off, keeping a good distance away from me. Three others liked to turn to face the machine and make as if they would charge. The bald one always waited until I came within a few feet of him. When I was upwind he sniffed the air. I almost had to bump him to provoke a reluctant step back.

One day, mostly out of curiosity, I decided to shut off the engine, climb off the four-wheeler, and see how close I could get. The first step made me nervous, but then I noticed the softness in his eyes.

A ranch hand must be scarier afoot than on top of a clattering motor, at least to a bull. I could not walk within ten yards of him that first day or the next time I came with salt. But something kept me trying, and over the course of a few attempts, I shortened the distance between us. Soon we were separated by just a few feet.

I stood in the pasture with my arm outstretched, clutching a handful of fresh-pulled grass. The gesture would have looked absurd if anyone had been around to see it: we were in the midst of a green sea, an endless expanse of growth. Despite the fact that I offered only what he slept, walked, and shat on, Moses stretched his neck out and worked his nose double-time. He drew back
whenever I reached forward, but as we repeated the motion, he retreated less and less. Soon the shoots were brushing across the wet tip of his nose, and then his tongue was snaking out, gathering the grass, and snatching it from my fingers.

I stopped awhile with Moses each time I went to check on the bulls and whenever I passed through his pasture on the way to somewhere else. I tore the grass from around my feet and held it out to him, and he took it.

Eventually I could scratch him on the neck and shoulders, and even lay my hand on the poll of his head—the spot he had scraped bald from fighting during breeding season—while he pressed gently back against it.

When my father came to visit I took him out to see Moses. In a photo he snapped I am bent over at the waist with my hands on the ground. My forehead is against that of a sleek black bull. It looks as though we are pushing against each other and I am winning. I showed the photo to Jeremy.

“That’s a pretty stupid thing to do,” he said. “That bull could sneeze and break your neck.”

He went on to give me a list of good reasons why people don’t give names to the livestock or play around with them, at least not on a spread this size. Most of them boiled down to this: singling something out with a name allows it to become unique. There is no room for this in the modern agricultural world, where efficiency has become the highest law and most calves never live to see their third birthday.

T
he sun edged above the Madison Range, warming the air. There was wind enough to rustle in the grass and keep the mosquitoes down. I was alone on horseback and had been riding toward what promised to be a perfect day when I found the heifer. She stood by herself in a meadow just below
the fence that separated the ranch’s deeded ground from the high pastures we leased from the Forest Service. Only a day had passed since we had gathered up all 790 of our heifers and pushed them southeast into the hills and convoluted valleys of Squaw Creek, so I wondered if she had jumped back or whether we might have left her behind when we moved the herd. I rode in close and began to walk her up a nearby fence.

But then I saw the bloody stripes just under and to the right of her tail. It took me a while to believe that they were there. Red is hard to see on black, and looking at her meant squinting toward the rising sun. It was only after I saw the rip in her bag, which closed and opened with each step, that I realized what had happened. I trailed her that way for a minute or so, thinking about my options. Some small part of me, knowing the chain of events that had been set in motion, was tempted to push the heifer into the forest and never say a word.

But the greater part burned with a rage that grew as I rode behind her. I watched the torn flesh above her udders yawn darkly open and drizzle blood in the dust. I noted the labored way she held her head and how she looked longingly over her shoulder at the lower pastures, where she had been safe.

It seemed that I had failed both wolf and cow by dint of my inability to prevent an attack. I pulled my radio from where it hung on my belt, put it to my lips, and said nothing. For a long moment I wondered what would be the right course of action. When nothing came of that, I settled for what was necessary: I pressed the talk button down.

“Jeremy,” I said, “do you copy?”

His usual measured reply came quickly: “Go ahead.”

We had to be cautious with the radio, since our repeater was capable of sending a signal nearly to Bozeman. Because I could never be sure who was listening, I chose my words with extreme care.

“We’ve got a situation up here. One heifer—torn up pretty bad. Over.”

I waited, but nothing issued from the speaker. Finally, my radio came alive with static. It hissed for a few long seconds, enough time for me to picture Jeremy standing outside the Moose Creek shop with the talk button pressed down, putting his answer together.

When Jeremy finally replied, he sounded tight and monotone, as though speaking through clenched teeth.

“What’s your twenty?” he asked.

“On the road, below the Squaw Creek fence.”

“Stay right with her,” he said. “I’ll be up in a minute with the trailer. Over.”

A minute, it turned out, wasn’t too far off. I turned back toward the heifer and tried to read the number on her ear tag. When I looked back down the road, I could see a dust plume rising high into the blue sky.

Jeremy skidded to a stop beside me and stepped down to take stock of things. The heifer watched nervously as he walked in a slow circle. When Jeremy got straight behind her, he stopped and let out a low whistle.

“The sons of bitches,” he said. “She’s done.”

We parked the trailer in the middle of a nearby gate and, after a few clumsy, bloody attempts, got her to step inside. Jeremy told
me to make a short loop through the pasture to look for other casualties, then head down to meet him at the Wolf Creek shop.

I rode slowly toward the Squaw Creek hogback. At a corner in the fence, I found a wire gate torn to shreds and thoroughly trampled. The damage looked too extensive to be the work of a single heifer—even one with a pack of wolves behind her—and so I rode through the gate to see what I could find.

The heifers hadn’t gone far. No more than a half mile from the gate they stood high on a hillside, bunched together in a tight group. Figuring they’d be wild and ready to bolt, I rode a wide circle before starting to ease them back uphill. None looked to be gravely injured. They had, however, been harassed in the night and it showed. Up close the heifers looked exhausted. They moved in jerky fits and starts, sticking together and balking when I pressed them uphill toward the broken gate and the mountains.

I rode back down, unsaddled my horse in the barn, and met up with James and Jeremy. Listening to them talk, I realized that the course of our summer had been irrevocably changed by the morning’s discovery.