Badluck Way: A Year on the Ragged Edge of the West (7 page)

I drove into Ennis on a Saturday night for dinner and ended up drinking at the Silver Dollar, a knock-around place with elk racks on the walls, video poker machines in the corner, and a handful of regulars getting serious at the bar. I ordered a Pendleton whiskey and sat close enough to listen.

At first, the conversation revolved around the arrival of the year’s first big batch of tourists. Spring was thawing into summer, and fly fishermen across the world knew it. Each morning brought a new wave of them through town, and their vehicles dotted the twists and turns of the Madison. From the hills above, those cars looked like beer cans strewn along the river.

From time to time I caught snatches of more interesting conversation. Down at the far end of the line of drinkers, a thick, spectacled man in a grubby black Stetson was holding forth to a handful of listeners. I strained to hear him over the low din of other talk. The man, I gathered, was a longtime resident of Virginia City, a defunct mining town just over the pass from Ennis, near the Ruby River.

“Guy named Bud Otis,” the man began, “his daddy built VC up in the thirties. I shot his dog. Woke up to the sound of sheep crashing into the walls of my house, grabbed my rifle, and wounded the goddamn thing. It went up to Bud’s and died.”

One of the man’s listeners mumbled something, but I couldn’t catch it.

“ ’Course I went to see him,” the Stetson guy replied. “I wasn’t no chickenshit. I went and he challenged me to a knife fight. Butcher knives, he said. Bud was in a wheelchair and I declined to fight him. Later, he was waiting for me outside the Bale of Hay with a pistol. Wanted to shoot me. I jumped behind an ore car and got to yelling: ‘Bud, you couldn’t hit shit, you son of a bitch!’ Best part of it is I was right in front of my mother-in-law’s place. She was some kind of witch—a real bitch, I mean. I kept hollering for Bud to shoot, hoping he’d break one of her windows and she’d be on him like stink on shit, but finally Jim came out and told Bud to put his gun away and go home.”

I sipped my drink, trying to decide how much of what I heard was bull, until one of the two guys nearest to me, a nail keg of a man, leaned in toward the other, dropped his voice, and asked:

“What did you see up Squaw Creek?”

The questioner’s close-cropped gray hair was tucked into a baseball cap with a flame paint job on the brim.

“Plenty of sign,” the second man said, his face all but hidden by a wide-brimmed felt hat and a thick brown beard. “There’s shit all over the place and a bunch of new kills. Couple bears, one sow griz with grown cubs, but mostly wolves. Lots of wolves.”

“Goddamn,” said the bearded man’s buddy. “Could be a hell of a summer.”

“Hard to say. We did all right with the first bunch for a couple years, even after the pack got big.”

“Sure,” said the man with the flaming hat. “But how did it end?”

He put on a canvas jacket, excused himself, and walked into the night. The bearded man went on drinking at the bar, and on an impulse I went over and sat down next to him. I explained that
I had just started working on the Sun and wanted to learn everything I could about the area, the animals, and the ranch.

The man, Steve, had worked in the backcountry of the Madison for years, doing wildlife surveys and packing into the Lee Metcalf as a Forest Service contractor. He knew the Sun Ranch well, and as I peppered him with questions, he patiently told me what he knew about its history.

The Sun Ranch hadn’t always been its present eighteen thousand acres. Beginning in the early twentieth century, it was stitched together from individual homesteads. By the 1930s, the ranch’s remoteness, elevation, and breathtaking panoramas had turned it from a patchwork of smallholdings into a rich man’s paradise. The Sun grew aggressively through the early twentieth century, gobbling up smaller spreads as it expanded. Before World War II, it was called the Rising Sun Ranch, a name that started to chafe after news of Pearl Harbor reached the valley and was abandoned before the war’s end. The Rising Sun lived on, however, in the Sun Ranch’s brand—a four-spoked half circle that looks like dawn in open country.

After the name changed, the boundaries began to shift as well. The ranch passed through the hands of a series of absentee landowners, expanding or shrinking a bit each time the deeds changed hands.

Across the river from the Sun Ranch’s western border, a sizable chunk of land came up for sale. The property, once known as the Granite Mountain Stock Ranch, stretched from the Madison River to the timbered slopes of the Gravelly Range. Like the Sun, it was empty and wild.

The new buyer looked east, saw the late-afternoon clouds catch fire above the scarps of the Madisons, and watched great herds of
cattle and elk move back and forth from the low pastures to the mountains. Recognizing that those things and the cowboy dream that underlay them could be sold, he renamed his spread the Sun West Ranch, drew up plats, and started advertising homesites. New facilities took shape quickly, including a massive horse barn, an indoor riding arena, and a private shooting range. A few dozen millionaires bought into the idea, foundations got poured, and the deal was sealed.

Though it, too, circulated through various echelons of the ultra rich, the Sun Ranch stayed empty and undeveloped, perhaps because it exerts an immediate, irresistible power over people who come to know it. The Sun Ranch is wild, pure, and untrammeled to a degree that is rare anywhere else. Carving it up would be like scribbling on the
Mona Lisa
.

“Nobody would develop it,” I said.

“I don’t know about that,” Steve replied. “The bottom part of Squaw Creek is platted out for a subdivision. All the paperwork is done, but I don’t think Roger would ever act on it.”

In any case, the Sun Ranch had managed to stay intact over the years. As time passed and other parts of the valley were gridded out into twenty-acre plots, its vastness and location became ever more important. For wild animals, the Sun provided a much-needed refuge from the constant noise and pressure of man. Pronghorn antelope migrated through by the hundreds, and elk lived and died by the winter forage they found on the ranch’s North End. Moose fared better on the Sun than anywhere else in the valley. At the top of the ecosystem, grizzlies and wolves grew fat, multiplied, and dispersed to new territories. In the parlance of biologists, the Sun Ranch was known as a “population source.”

“In other words,” he said, “it’s extremely goddamn important.”

By way of example, he told me how the first wolves to recolonize the Madison Valley after their 1995 reintroduction to Yellowstone had made a home on the Sun. They had come out of the park in search of a place with the right mix of prey, topography, and emptiness. Out of the immense landscape that surrounds the Madison River, they took up residence on the ranch, dug in, and began to multiply. The pack grew until it numbered somewhere around ten wolves. In time, a biologist from the department of Fish, Wildlife & Parks managed to dart and collar a member of the pack. From then on, something was known of the movements of the Taylor Peak Pack, which they named after a mountain not far to the north.

With telemetry units clicking, ranch hands and biologists could follow the wolves across the drainages of the ranch and record the number, timing, and position of elk kills. A few of the elk got collars, too, as part of a study designed to explore predator-prey interactions.

Things went well for a while. The radio collars recorded the Taylor Peak wolves’ perfect adaptation to a harsh environment. Researchers listened in as the pack followed elk into the uppermost reaches of the Lee Metcalf Wilderness. Occasionally a lucky intern or graduate student got to watch the ancient, evolutionary game of the hunt play out, the elk pounding across the open southern faces of the hills, the wolves in hot pursuit, straining their lungs and legs to keep up. Not far below, livestock continued to graze peacefully on the ranch.

Then came 2003: As spring gave way to summer, the elk headed for higher ground. Instead of tagging along, the wolves
stuck around and crossed the river to Sun West, where hundreds of sheep were being used to control noxious weeds. One bloody night left a handful of carcasses on the ground. The wolves found sheep killing so easy they could not give it up. By the end of summer, the Taylor Peak Pack’s alpha female had been gunned down from a USDA helicopter, and her offspring had been scattered throughout the valley.

The following summer was worse. Cows died. Wolves died. Attrition. In the end, the whole pack was wiped out with shotgun blasts from a helicopter door.

After the extermination of the Taylors, the south end of the Madison stayed quiet for a year. When wolves began turning up again, people assumed that they had come across from Yellowstone. The Wedge Pack, Steve concluded, was a wholly different group of animals, and he hoped that they would come to a different end.

“Enough about the wolves,” Steve said. “I’ll tell you about the movie star who owned that place before Roger.”

He started in, suggesting that I take what I heard with a grain of salt, since most of the stories had been passed around the bars and kitchen tables of Ennis a few times. It was hard to say what had really gone on out there, since few people had access to the ranch until Roger bought it. Still, in a valley like the Madison, stories got around.

The previous owner had made his fortune as the leading man in a series of early-nineties shoot-’em-up movies. The way Steve heard it, this action hero liked to fly his buddies in and turn them loose on the ranch. One of the regulars was especially fond of hot-rodding across the Sun in a lifted, tinted black Suburban—a
monster truck. The guy rumbled across the North End, bouncing in and out of the old ditches and over the cairns built by Depression-era shepherds. He packed a handgun big enough to match the truck and blazed away at whatever caught his eye.

The legal targets would have been bunchgrass, cow pies, cans rusted and new, occasional shed antlers, rabbits, old homesteads, and coyotes. He preferred coyotes. With the radio blasting, the window wide open, and the AC blowing, he spent the long evenings of summer chasing them across the Flats. His favorite method of dispatch was to pull up alongside and shoot from the driver’s seat.

At least once he missed his mark and found the pistol empty. The exhausted coyote edged ahead. The driver looked across the heaving line of his quarry’s backbone and mashed the gas pedal until the V-8 screamed.

Steve stopped there, paused, and then shrugged.

“Could be a bunch of bullshit, but that’s what I heard.”

He paid his tab and shook my hand. Pulling on a dirty oilcloth coat, Steve nodded to the other guys drinking at the bar and took his leave.

As I waited to settle up with the bartender, I listened to more talk from the regulars. Down at the far end of the bar, the man in the black Stetson was still going strong about his days as a deputy sheriff. When I stood to go he was midway through a story about some notorious Virginia City woman who ended up handcuffed to the side-view mirror of his cruiser.

“I put it in gear and drove right down the street,” he said. “She jumped on the hood and broke off both windshield wipers.

“Goddamn.” He chuckled. “She had a sense of humor.”

Walking down Main Street in the dark, I thought about two notable artifacts on the ranch left over from the action hero’s tenure: a pair of log cabins from a movie shoot below the beginning of Bad Luck Canyon and a stone hot tub in the absolute middle of nowhere.

Made of stacked logs and set on stone foundations, the cabins are meant to look scenic and old, and they do. By now they have outlasted any interest in the film for which they were built.

I spent one night in the bigger of the two cabins when we had a herd of cow-calf pairs bedded down nearby and the wolves were prowling through. Mice kept me awake, but other than that, the cabins were unused. They’d sat through storms and turned gray, settling on their foundations until no trace of Hollywood remained. Given a few more decades of freeze, thaw, and wind, they would be indistinguishable from half a dozen other homestead shacks on the place.

The action hero’s other legacy was a bit more useful. Before selling the ranch, he’d engaged the services of a renowned mason from Ennis. The contractor had hauled load after load of cobbles from a nearby creek and cemented them into a massive tub. Pink, green, and black, the stones were smooth to the touch and as big around as beach balls. The tub was a low cylinder, fourteen feet across and four deep—beautiful craftsmanship.

The water came out of the ground fifty feet away and collected in a crystal-clear scalding pool, the kind for which Yellowstone Park is famous. Strange, thick algae grew in the pond, and a steel pipe ran downhill from it to curl over the tub’s east wall like a kitchen faucet. The pipe gushed hot water day and night.

At night, the stars above the tub were so beautiful that I wore
out my neck looking up. I spent hours soaking, swimming circles, and listening to the faraway drone of airliners. I traced dark skylines with my eyes: first the slump-shouldered hills of the Gravelly Range, then the toothy peaks of the Madisons. A tiny pinprick glow from a talc mine fifteen miles away was the only man-made light.

When I used the tub I thought of its builder rolling and hefting the stones, and then concentrating on the meticulous task of cementing them together. He must have worked for weeks, maybe months, to set the boulders as precisely as jewels. I compared those labors to my own job of fencing, herding, doctoring cows, and setting out salt, and came away impressed.