Badluck Way: A Year on the Ragged Edge of the West (4 page)

I saddled TJ carefully, working hard to bend the stiff, dry
leather of cinch, latigo, and breast collar. After I’d mounted up and made a couple of laps around the shop, we headed out across the ranch. Jeremy rode first, with Shooter, Tina, and Spook in tow. I followed him, ponying Skip behind me. We crossed the highway, passed the ranch’s sprawling corrals, and angled uphill on a trail through the short green grass.

As we rode, I wondered why Jeremy had chosen that day to catch the horses. We had no urgent need for them, since the summer cattle herd wouldn’t be arriving for another few weeks and we could have been doing a number of more pressing tasks on the ranch. Jeremy was quiet until we crested a hill and left the highway behind. Then he reined in Billy and let me draw even with him.

As we rode together through what seemed like an endless sea of grass, Jeremy talked about the ranch and its history. He started with cows but gravitated to the subject of wolves, beginning with their reintroduction to Yellowstone National Park in 1995 and their subsequent colonization of adjacent valleys, like the Madison. Livestock depredations had followed in the tracks of the dispersing wolves, and the resulting debate had spread like wildfire through the discourse and politics of southwest Montana.

Working on the Sun Ranch put us right in the eye of the storm. Our pack, the Wedge Pack, was composed of wolves that had come across the Madison Range from Yellowstone. According to a state biologist, it amounted to nine adults, plus an unknown number of pups.

The Wedge Pack, like most others, was a family unit centered
on a single breeding pair. Aerial surveys had reported that two consecutive litters of pups had been successfully raised in the foothills and steep valleys behind the Sun. Beyond that, it was hard to say anything conclusive about the makeup of the pack, since the wolves were in a constant state of flux: Alpha males and females died or were deposed. Diseases like mange and distemper ripped through the population. With each new season, sons and daughters of the pack grew into themselves and departed for new territory.

Jeremy pointed uphill across the green expanse toward a deep, sheer cleft in the Madison Range.

“They’ve been staying up in Bad Luck Creek.”

The ranch had been lucky last year. The wolves had stuck to killing elk, and the cattle had come home fat at the end of the summer. This amounted to a very good thing, given the ranch’s emphasis on peaceful coexistence with wildlife. But Jeremy worried about the coming months. The pack had more mouths to feed this year, and over the winter they had become increasingly brazen and less terrified of human sight and scent. Jeremy had seen some wolf kills; the pack could tear apart an elk before it had a chance to die.

Jeremy got quiet then and rode in silence, taking my measure. From time to time he glanced sideways to look, I imagined, at the way I reined and spurred my horse. I sat up straight and did my best to ride well.

I kept glancing up at the place where the wolves were. Bad Luck Canyon stood out in the low gold light of afternoon, forming a dark V in the mountains. The canyon held its shadow while
the rest of the world caught fire. It looked as though a piece of the panorama had been sliced away, and nothing put in its place to hide the blackness underneath.

In the days that followed our first ride, I learned that Jeremy ran a tight ship. He made up systems for organizing the necessities of life and was unique in diligently and unfailingly following his own rules. He was a labeler of drawers, and if one said “drill bits,” you could bet there would be drill bits in it—all of them, and in good order.

He’d designed a bolt room on the ranch, a space the size of a walk-in closet lined on all sides with cubbyholes full of hardware. There were carriage bolts, lag bolts, lock washers, and nylon nuts. Most things were available in a staggering variety of sizes and at least two threads, and everything stayed in its proper place. When I came to the bolt room in desperate need of a specific piece of hardware, I usually found it advertised by a handwritten sign with particulars like: “
³
/
₈
carriage bolt—coarse.”

Soft-spoken and almost always calm, Jeremy assigned me hard, complicated jobs, and explained them patiently. He taught me to move cattle without speaking much, by working the angles and applying gentle pressure to stragglers. He showed me how to run a backhoe, demonstrating the way bucket and hoe could move like extensions of my arms.

Because of his expertise and meticulous preparation, most of what we did went like clockwork. On just a few occasions, when the gate blew shut, a fence gave, or somebody failed to turn the
herd, the harder side of Jeremy emerged: the features of his face clenched tight, and he cussed under his breath and charged top speed toward the problem, not stopping until he’d fixed it.

Jeremy moved fast. We had a Polaris Ranger on the ranch, a four-wheeler on steroids with a centrifugal clutch and two forward gears, low and high. The gears were marked “L” and “H” on the shifter, and I imagined that a third, secret gear above them, called “J,” was used only by Jeremy in response to the minor emergencies that occur on a ranch.

It happened regularly enough: pausing a moment from work, I would watch the Ranger rocket down the gravel road, a speck throwing a dust trail big enough to see from space. Jeremy would quit the road at some open gate and go clanking across a pasture, mowing down sagebrush and catching air off badger holes. As the noise got fainter I would wonder what had gone wrong.

In the evenings Jeremy played bluegrass and folk songs on the guitar. He read Wendell Berry’s essays, listened to
Democracy Now!
on satellite radio, and planned the following day’s work. I believed that, behind his lighted windows, he was constantly teaching himself to build, fix, and run things, a theory corroborated by our daily work.

For my first two weeks, I checked and fixed barbwire fence. Under Jeremy’s direction I pounded in staples and spliced wire where winter drifts, elk, or cattle had torn it apart. At the end of the day I went home exhausted, cooked a simple dinner, slept dreamless, and began again in the morning.

One Friday, I woke early and met Jeremy in the cold dawn. We
climbed into his truck and drove south on the highway for a mile or so. Near Moose Creek, we turned off the pavement through a post-and-lintel gateway with a picture of the ranch’s rising-sun brand and a sign bragging up the Sun’s participation in something called the Undaunted Stewardship program. The road was gravel, but well maintained, and the addresses on a small clump of mailboxes identified it as Badluck Way. Off to the south, two log houses sat at the base of an enormous hill. Jeremy pointed at the smaller of the two.

“That’s the Wolf Shack,” he said. “The other one’s called the Gatehouse.”

Badluck Way was the ranch’s major thoroughfare, since it began at the highway and ended at a cluster of buildings that included the owner’s house, ranch office, equipment shop, and barn. It was worth my while, Jeremy said, to learn it like the back of my hand and get comfortable with driving it in all kinds of weather.

Badluck Way was actually a new moniker for the road—the result of a recent push by the post office and police dispatcher to name every significant track in the valley. A letter had been sent to Roger, the ranch’s owner, asking whether he’d like to give the road a name, or simply stand aside and let the county assign it a number. To his credit, Roger decided to go the creative route.

“The road does come pretty close to Bad Luck Creek,” Jeremy said, “but mostly I think he chose Badluck Way because it sounded good.”

As we drove uphill along Moose Creek, I learned that the ranch occupied an irregular wedge of property between the sharp pinnacles of the mountains on one side and the parallel ribbons
of the Madison River and Highway 287 on the other. This uneven Nevada could be divided, geographically speaking, into two distinct and contrasting hemispheres. The north half of the Sun Ranch was flat, massive, and open—a nearly endless expanse of waving grass that extended right up to the base of the mountains. Fences on the North End followed the section lines of an old survey, which gave it a reassuring, rectilinear predictability.

Not so on the South End. There the ranch tapered to a point and the land heaved up like wastepaper crumpled by a giant hand. The South End was full of steep ridges and twisted valleys, a chaotic, disorienting place. Crossing through meant hard traveling in the best of conditions. A bad winter storm could leave it impenetrable.

For the most part the ranch got wilder with elevation, which increased as you headed east from the river toward the mountains. The Moose Creek canyon, which was relatively low and close to the western edge of the property, was an exception. It began just a half mile from Highway 287, where Moose Creek and Badluck Way bunched together to enter a deep crease in the land. The slopes on either bank of the creek steepened to forty-five degrees. On the side where the road ran, a south-facing slope grew ryegrass and mullein. Across the creek, the north side bristled with an amphitheater of the oldest trees on the property. From the highway, the Moose Creek canyon’s notch looked like an enormous gun sight pointed at the Madison Range.

Most of the canyon was too steep for cattle, and hunting had been prohibited there since Roger had driven up during hunting season, heard someone shooting at an elk, and decided he had almost taken a bullet. That happened years before I arrived on the
ranch, and the intervening time had turned the canyon into an overgrown, mostly untracked wilderness.

The canyon worked as a funnel, gathering animals—elk, deer, antelope, and moose—from the higher benches of the ranch and channeling them downhill toward the Madison River. In winter, when higher trails drifted shut with snow, the population became especially dense. The wolves knew this, and could often be seen running the canyon during the dark and icy months.

Jeremy showed me elk paths worn into the hills and pointed out places where they crossed the road. The truck labored up a steep grade, shook as it passed over the last washboards of the canyon, and then emerged into full sunlight. The view was staggering. Straight ahead of us, Moose Creek wound through a broad swath of willows, looped around the base of a hill, and then struck straight east toward where the Madison Range jutted into a light-blue sky. Jeremy pointed out the Pyramid, a grassy, vertiginous triangle on the scale of Giza that formed the divide between the drainages of Moose and Squaw Creeks. Topping out at nine thousand feet, the Pyramid fell to eight thousand and then blended seamlessly into the low, broad hump of the Squaw Creek hogback.

Jeremy talked his way across the skyline from north to south, showing me the different gorges that gave birth to Wolf, Stock, Bad Luck, Moose, and Squaw Creeks. Flowing from the mountains toward the river, those five creeks bisected the ranch. If the Madison Range was the ranch’s prime meridian, the streams were its preeminent lines of latitude. After Jeremy had pointed out the many dirt tracks that departed at intervals from Badluck Way, we descended a little hill to a small cluster of buildings, where he brought the truck to a stop in front of a sheet-metal shop.

Inside, the machines waited in good order. A fire truck occupied the only heated bay. Farther down, partially hidden in the windowless dark, were a road grader and a John Deere backhoe. Next to a collection of smaller machines, a plasticized map of the ranch hung on the wall. Jeremy unpinned it and handed it over. After showing me how to start one of the ATVs, a yellow Honda Foreman, he cut me loose to spend the rest of the day getting to know the Sun.