Badluck Way: A Year on the Ragged Edge of the West (23 page)

I hit hard, facedown, with the four-wheeler rolling over me. The handlebars bent against my shoulders, and a crushing weight pressed into the small of my back. I could not draw a breath. The four-wheeler moved on, flipping end over end downhill. I lay with my head against a rock as James climbed toward me.

In the city you call an ambulance for something like that. You keep the victim still until the paramedics arrive with a backboard. On Wolf Creek, James waited until I could take a normal breath, and then we talked it over. I could feel and move my legs, so he flipped my four-wheeler right side up and I rode it back to the shop.

Later, in Ennis, the doctor checked me for internal bleeding.

“Bruised ribs,” he said. “You’re lucky.”

He told me a handful of stories about other people who hadn’t been.

James owned the cattle dog on paper, but it was his wife, Kendra, who had raised him from a pup. She had nursed Tick back to health after a horse stepped on him and broke all his ribs, so it was she who had to give the dog away. Kendra had loved Tick from the beginning, but when she and James decided to start breeding border collies, the heeler had to go. They offered him to me.

They couldn’t have failed to notice that I liked Tick. Often, after work, I would spring the dog from his kennel and take him jogging in the hills. They must also have guessed that winter on the Sun Ranch would be lonely, and figured that a dog would be better than nothing. After a couple of days’ deliberation, I accepted.

Tick was strange, even among the muttish race of cattle dogs. His coat wasn’t the usual merle or grizzled red, but deep brown with a light-gray frost—like a chocolate truffle rolled through ashes. He was taller, leggier, than most heelers, with a half mask and disproportionately large head. That head was always the first thing to catch a person’s attention—a blocky, equilateral triangle, made mostly of jaw and teeth. From certain angles, it looked almost crocodilian.

James and Kendra made me a present of the dog and then left the ranch in a rattling convoy, bouncing down the gravel road to Highway 287. In spite of the pain from my ribs, I waved at the vehicles until they disappeared and then watched the road dust settle.
Tick stood by my side and wagged his bobbed nub of a tail in the new and perfect silence.

A week or so later, James called me on the phone. He wanted to know if I was healing and how Tick was working out. I told him things were going well on both fronts. Tick had a new collar, a dog bed, and several other egregious luxuries. After a few initial moments of linoleum-induced panic, he had decided that he could get used to the indoor life. My ribs had improved to the point where I could make my rounds through the cattle, ride a horse, and breathe deep without much pain.

“That’s great,” said James, and then launched into a story about riding in his hometown rodeo. He was back behind the chutes, sorting out his rope and gear, getting ready for an event. A man rode up to him on horseback, with a pristine black Stetson and a brand-new pearl-snap shirt. James recognized the guy, though he couldn’t think of his name, as a salesman from the car dealership downtown. The man rode up, shot James a look of contempt, and said something to the effect of “Get out of here—you ain’t no cowboy.”

James’s laugh boomed through the phone. “Guess it was because he hadn’t seen me there before.”

James described the classes he was taking at Utah State and which bits of them applied to the Sun Ranch. In the midst of a case study in which cattle had been conditioned to seek out and consume invasive weeds, he stopped abruptly to ask:

“Have you seen the wolves around?”

I hadn’t seen or heard them. Our radio receiver, despite regular use, hadn’t picked up a signal from any of the Wedge Pack collars.

“Well, that’s good. How’s things otherwise?”

Listening to static on the line, I thought about how best to answer. For several evenings I had been walking up Moose Creek to listen in vain for the pack and mourn the wolf that I had taken-from the world. Each night, as the sun’s glow faded and no howling broke the silence, I headed home with grief and guilt sitting heavy as stones in my chest. Though I wanted to tell James all this, I supposed he’d understand none of it.

“Except for the dog,” I finally said, “it’s quiet.”

F
all swept into the Madison Valley in a hurry, as though anxious to be farther south. One morning I woke to find hoarfrost on my truck’s windshield. By the next afternoon the aspens were turning yellow-gold from the low country up, gorgeously dotting
and banding the landscape. For a week, maybe more, it lasted. The air was clear, crisp as the first bite of an apple. I relished it and rode when I could, trotting my horse along the old irrigation ditch to the North End Flats, where our heifer herd was finishing out the grazing season.

Tick trotted alongside, and when it came time to move cattle, he ran enthusiastic arcs behind them, harrying the stragglers and magnifying my impact on the stock. The dog stayed in constant motion, seeming never to tire. With Tick’s help, I gathered hundreds of heifers into tight bunches and moved them across the breadth of the Flats in search of good grass. Those were the best days.

Mostly, though, because James was gone and I had miles to cover, I had to take the four-wheeler and vibrate across the landscape in a haze of dust and noise. One morning in late September I gassed it up, loaded the front and rear racks with sacks of salt, and buzzed out to the Flats under an overcast sky. Going north, I had the wind in my face, colder than it had been since spring, with a new bite that licked through the weave of my Carhartt and raised goose bumps. It came in wild, urgent gusts, panting like a messenger with bad news.

Nuzzled down into my collar, I turned north from Badluck Way, buzzed past a spot where the bulls stood bunched together, and dropped down to the North End Flats to find our heifer herd dotting the range like flies on a picnic table. At intervals there were other, lower specks in the grass, truck tires surrounded by ten-foot circles of bare dirt and cow shit. I stopped at the first one and shut off the engine, then sliced into two fifty-pound sacks—one straight salt and the other a rust-colored blend of minerals. I poured them side by side into the old tire, listening to the gentle
rain sound the grains made against the salt tub’s plywood bottom. I stirred the two colors together with my boot, muting each with the other. When I looked up, the heifers were ringed around me.

I moved across the Flats, salting the tires and then watching the heifers converge to orient themselves like filings around the pole of a magnet. I bent down to fill the last tub, and stood up in a blizzard.

Snow was nothing new. On the ranch it snowed every month of the year except August. There might have been a flurry that August, but I don’t remember it. At six thousand feet, a dusting, even at the height of summer, is unremarkable. But this was altogether different from a summer snowstorm. The wind pushed harder, flattening the bluebunch and forcing my eyes shut. Snow fell sideways, pricking my skin and melting in spots usually protected by my hat brim. Flakes sped toward the ground at acute angles, so close together that it seemed there was more substance than space in between.

Northward there was no horizon, just a blurred-out space where the grass and the sky dissolved into white unity. I cupped a gloved hand across my eyes and peered out through the fingers. I walked forward into the wind for a few steps, and then glanced down to find my chest, jacket, and pants coated with pure, unbroken white.

I turned south and found the tub, the heifers, and the front end of the four-wheeler covered. Against the storm they seemed tentative, like studies or recollections of the things they were. The heifers held their heads above the salt tub, staring at me as if awaiting instructions. None moved or lowed or, so far as I could see, breathed. We had been swallowed by the storm—whitewashed and frozen together.

For a moment I was sure, dead sure, that I wouldn’t escape. The white would draw tighter around us. It would fill the air until we choked on it, and then blanch our insides. The four-wheeler was nothing but an artifact, a line drawing. It would not start.

Then a heifer moved. Before the snowfall she would have been a Black Angus, slick-coated, wide-eyed, and fat. Now she dropped a ghost’s muzzle into the tire and kept it there. I waited nervously. Her movement was a hope.

Her head rose slowly. Ears, eyes, and the long bridge of nose emerged from the tire. And then there was a hole in the storm: wet and jet-black, her muzzle appeared. It was caked with grains of salt. She chewed and a trickle of mineral fell from her lips. Red on black—the colors were enough to break the spell. I slapped the snow from my jeans and jacket and headed for home.

As fall changed to winter, all manner of animals took notice. The cattle grazed more intensely, tearing off great mouthfuls of sun-dried grass to stoke their boilers against the rising cold. Elk began to trickle out of the mountains. As more of them quit the high country each day in search of relative warmth and easy pickings, they began massing into larger herds. Moving across the foothills like a tide, they trailed down to the open country at night and back to the safety of the peaks with daylight.

The wolves followed close on their heels. After weeks of silence, our telemetry unit clicked to life again. Jeremy and I listened as the pack found its way back over the mountains, across the face of the Pyramid, and into Squaw Creek.

We both anticipated trouble. Even before the wolves started moving north onto the Flats, Jeremy began to send me out among the herds more often. Carrying a rifle and the radio receiver, I spent most of my waking hours with the cattle.

In spite of our preparations, the bloody day came as a surprise. I rolled out early in the morning, zipped north to check the herd, and found fifty yearlings bunched up tight beside Wolf Creek. A few hundred yards beyond them, two ruined heifers tottered through the grass and sage.

The wounds were familiar—big gashes down the hindquarters, missing bags that yawned open and shut with every painful step, flayed tails, and a pulpy mess of blood and cow shit where the rectum was supposed to be. I raised Jeremy on the radio and started the wounded heifers back in the direction of the corrals at Moose Creek.

It was a long, awful march. I tried to stay calm and take things slowly, but the heifers would have none of it. After a night of terror, they wanted only to stay with the herd. We moved in fits and starts across the land. Every hundred yards or so the heifers would turn, drop their heads, and try to rush past me. I headed them off with the four-wheeler, sometimes getting sprayed with little drops of blood as they dodged away.

At the foot of the Stock Creek bench, things went from bad to worse. In a few spots, the grade increased until I had to walk alongside the four-wheeler. The heifers were exhausted, and at times I had to nudge them along with my front bumper. Up close, their wounds looked much more extensive. The holes and scrapes were nearly symmetrical, giving the scene in front of me the aspect
of a macabre optical illusion. Staring across the handlebars, I saw two identical ragged holes, each drizzling a slow stream of blood. Where flesh showed, it gleamed surreally red.