Badluck Way: A Year on the Ragged Edge of the West (3 page)

On the east side, the Madisons leap suddenly toward the blue sky. Sharp, sheer, and rocky, at first glance they seem to cant forward and overhang the valley slightly. My map named some of the peaks: Fan, Helmet, Sphinx, and Wedge. From the top of the Norris hill they look like a solid wall with broken shards of glass along the top.

The map also named a few of the Gravelly Range’s westward mountains, but I could not match them to the landscape. While the Madisons form a line of glinting canine teeth, the Gravellies are a many-shouldered swelling of the earth. The fallen-down range humps up from the floodplain grass, rising into a maze of timbered ridges, flecked from bottom to top with open meadows of various sizes.

Rangeland begins where the foothills end, and the valley is wide enough to hold an ocean of grass. From atop the Norris hill, the landscape resolves into a series of descending benches, regular
enough to look from a distance like a massive green-carpeted staircase connecting the mountains to the river.

The most striking part of it all was the Madison River, which reflected the afternoon sun and drew a golden line through the heart of the valley. Curving smoothly across the floodplain like a snake navigating stony ground, the river issues from the south and is flanked on either side by dark thickets of willow.

Traffic roared behind me, pulling my attention back to the early-season tourists and long-haul truckers topping the hill and accelerating down into the valley like roller-coaster cars. A little convoy of them dropped out of sight on a curve and reappeared on the far side of the town of Ennis. After Ennis, the highway crosses the Madison and veers south, running straight toward a little smudge in the grass called Cameron, population forty-nine.

According to my map, Cameron was fifteen miles from Ennis, and the Sun Ranch fifteen miles farther up the road. I stared south, following the twists and turns of the Madison River upstream to where the mountains squeezed in tight around it, trying to imagine how the ranch lay upon the land.

When I arrived on the Sun for the first time, Jeremy was standing in his front yard, waiting. For a long time I wondered how he had pulled that off, since I had given him the day, but not the time, of my arrival. No doubt he’d heard my truck clattering over the frontage road washboards or seen a dust trail rising. At any rate he was ready and I found him leaning against a low chain-link fence, looking like the boss in a broad straw hat and a sun-faded blue shirt.

“Glad you found it,” he said, and shook my hand.

I thanked him for taking a chance on hiring me, and he laughed like I had told a good joke. Up close, Jeremy looked younger, almost baby-faced except for a light goatee and a pair of round photosensitive glasses. Under the high April sun, those glasses turned dark enough to hide his eyes entirely.

We talked in the yard, orbited by a pair of black border collies. Sometimes the dogs trotted up close to measure me with quick, inquisitive sniffs.

Jeremy took me on a walking tour of a cluster of buildings adjacent to his house. We looped through a machine shop, corrals, and a handful of old livestock sheds in slump-roofed subsidence. Because of the eponymous stream that ran behind these structures, the little settlement was known as Wolf Creek. In addition to the compound we were walking through, there was another clump of buildings in the dead center of the ranch, which included the owner’s house, an old barn, the ranch office, and a sheet-metal building full of heavy equipment. Those constructions were scattered along a watercourse of their own, and were therefore called the Moose Creek buildings.

As we passed the various ranch trucks, parked in a neat line, Jeremy pointed at a massive white one-ton flatbed Ford.

“You’ll share that one with James, when he gets here.”

He left me at a low wooden bunkhouse, not far from the machine shop, with instructions to get settled in.

“See you in the morning,” Jeremy said. “We leave at seven.”

I had arrived.

The wolf came up Beaver Creek, quiet as fog. The Lee Metcalf Wilderness was new country to him, steeper and emptier than the high plateaus of Northern Yellowstone. He walked at night through the leftovers of hunting camps—smelled the places where men cooked and shat and gutted their quarry. He killed deer in the little meadows below Blue Danube Lake and cracked their long bones for marrow. Other wolves had already staked their claims to the land—he heard them howling in the night and kept his distance. In late fall, when the first real snow fell and the elk herds made their harrowing climb across the ten-thousand-foot-high saddle of Expedition Pass, he followed.

Coming down from Expedition through the pink granite cliffs that form a rampart between the Madison and Gallatin valleys, he was a long way from home. Below him, gathered in a rocky embrace, Finger Lake was rimed with a thin sheet of ice. He trotted around it, heading downhill through the thick timber along Moose Creek.

Wolves inhabit a landscape humans can never know. Their forest is different from the one we walk through—more intelligible, bursting at the seams with information. Because of the ample signs to lead him on, the wolf never doubted his direction as he followed the twists and turns of Moose Creek: elk turds strewn around like dark hailstones, little trees rubbed bare by rutting bulls, and, amid an unbroken procession of scents, the occasional scatter of rib cage and leg bones.

He trotted out of the trees, and onto the rocky spine of the Moose Creek hogback. From that perch he saw the Sun Ranch sprawling toward the Madison River. To the north, beyond the aspen groves of Wolf Creek, vast flats stretched off to the horizon. The nearest house was miles below him, dark and shuttered against the impending snap of winter. Just across the creek from the house, hundreds of steers flecked the flat grass expanse of the hay meadows.

The wolf turned south, away from the low country and the livestock. Crossing the enormous, triangular face of a huge foothill called the Pyramid, he dropped into Squaw Creek’s labyrinth of fens and dark timber. He found it full of game and largely empty of wolves. He stayed.

O
n my first morning in the bunkhouse, I woke up shivering and listened to the harsh squalling of magpies. Through a little window, past trim boards cracked and shrunken by age and exposure, a handful of stars still pocked the predawn sky. I lay motionless as they faded into the daylight. An insistent, hissing wind slipped through gaps in the window casing. The Madison wind is
pitiless. It is a sandblasting, constant presence, meant for howling around the eaves of broken shacks and the scattered bones of winter-killed cattle. Passing cold and dry across my skin, it reminded me how far I was from Seattle.

Jeremy and I went to fetch the horses. We piled into the ranch’s flatbed Ford and drove north on the highway toward a neighboring ranch where the herd had wintered. As we climbed the first grade, the truck growled and shuddered against the weight of the trailer, and Jeremy pointed out landmarks: the road that followed Wolf Creek toward the mountains; various locked gates that provided access from the highway; the principal peaks and drainages; the old, wind-shredded homestead buildings that dotted the flats; and finally, the ranch’s northern boundary.

The Sun Ranch horses had wintered with around fifty others, and the whole bunch was waiting in a dilapidated set of corrals. They milled together, blending into swirls of color and blowing steam into the morning cold.

Jeremy grabbed a bundle of halters from the trailer’s tack compartment and handed all but one of them to me. Then the two of us walked into the corral. The horses pressed away, jostling each other to stay out of reach. As the herd reshuffled itself, Jeremy pointed out a horse that had stepped into view.

“That sorrel gelding,” he said, “is Shooter.”

The horse pricked up its ears as Jeremy took a step toward it. He moved another pace and the gelding shied away, melting back into the herd. Jeremy pressed on, moving slowly through the equine crowd, keeping his eyes on the sorrel and reacting to its movements with little corrections to his course. Quickly, almost
magically, he sorted it off from its fellows. He reached out slowly to the horse’s nose, face, and neck, slipped on the halter, tied it, and led Shooter out of the pen.

After tying Shooter to the trailer, Jeremy came back, grabbed a halter, and caught another horse—a tall bay gelding with a roman nose—with the same calm efficiency.

“This is Billy,” he said as he passed me on the way out. “Billy’s mine.”

Jeremy caught two more horses. He walked right up to a dark-brown gelding named Skip. A fat mare named Tina took a couple of tries to corner, but followed willingly enough once the halter was on.

I had two halters left in my hand, and Jeremy took one of them. He pointed to a small paint horse, more white than brown, in the corral’s far corner.

“Catch that TJ horse,” Jeremy said. “He’ll be one of yours.”

TJ watched suspiciously as I crossed the corral. I mimicked Jeremy, moving slowly and carefully through the rest of the herd, adjusting my path as TJ stepped one way or the other. TJ stayed calm, even when I tripped over a pile of horseshit and staggered to the side. I stretched out a hand, touched the cold velvet of his nose, and slipped the halter on him.

“Nice,” Jeremy said. “Now here’s where it usually gets interesting.”

The last horse on our list, Spook, was a paint like TJ, but the similarities ended there. TJ was calm, almost sleepy at the end of my halter rope. Spook, on the other hand, was the poster child for nervous energy. Standing a full head taller than the horses around him, Spook was covered in blotches of white and brown over a
background of jet black. The overall effect was complex and foreboding, like thunderheads before a summer storm.

Jeremy took a step toward Spook, who tracked him with both ears. When Jeremy made another move, Spook took a deep breath and blew it out. One more step was enough to trip the trigger, and Spook made a beeline for the far corner of the pen, scattering the rest of the horses as he went. As Spook bolted, his tail flared behind him, midnight black with a single white stripe along its length, as though marked by lightning.

Spook took refuge in the far corner of the pen, and Jeremy followed him calmly. Each time Jeremy began to close in, the horse blew up, ran away, and hid in the herd. The practiced way that horse and man conducted the pursuit seemed familiar to both of them.

It took the better part of half an hour to catch Spook, who panted hard as Jeremy finally got the halter on. We led him out of the corral and tied him to the trailer with the others.

We wormed all six horses. I held their halters while Jeremy squirted a noxious cream down each of their throats in turn. None of them liked it. Spook reared and lifted me up off the ground. Tina tried to bite off Jeremy’s fingers. Afterward we loaded them in a trailer and headed back to the Sun.

We didn’t stay long at Wolf Creek, because Jeremy wanted to “leg up” the horses by riding them to the barn and pastures where they would spend the rest of the summer. He pointed out a saddle that would fit me, handed over TJ’s lead rope, and turned his attention to getting Billy ready to ride.