by Ivan Doig
• • •
I measure the next span of years by you, Varick. You who were born into one century, one era of Scotch Heaven and the Two Medicine country, and by the time you were approaching eight years of age, a different epoch and place had been brought around you. Or so it very much seemed to me, as sentinel called father.
You were not past your first birthday before your mother and I knew by doctor’s verdict that you were the only child there was going to be for us. You weren’t past your second before our hearts ticked on the fact that keeping you in life was never going to be simple. Every winter from then on you worried us, coming down with alarming coughs and fevers and bouts of grippe, as influenza was called then, for which spring seemed to be the only cure. Strange, the invalid ghost of yourself that you became as soon as cold weather cooped you in the house. As if your vitality dwindled when the length of daylight did. But in your hale seasons you more than made up for that; you sprouted long and knobbly, like me, and rapidly you were out and roaming into every corner of the homestead. The first major talking-to I ever had to give you was about wanderlust, the spring afternoon I found you in the barn: down under the workhorses at their oat trough, crooning happily amid those hooves that with a casual swipe could have smashed you as if you were a pullet egg. Had your mother seen you there innocent among the feet of death, she would have forfeited years of her life. My own heart pounded several months’ worth before I managed to sidle among the big horses and snatch you. Snatch only begins to say it, for I also gave three-year-old you a shake that rattled your eyeballs, and the appropriate gospel: “If I ever again catch you anywhere, ANYWHERE, around the hoof of a horse, I’ll lather you black and blue! DO YOU UNDERSTAND ME? Varick? DO YOU?” You looked downright shocked—at me rather than realization of your peril. But you piped apologetically, “I understand,” and lived up to it.
You went on, in the next year or so, to your lasso period of trying to rope the chopping block, the dog, the cat, the chickens, and fortunately got over that. But horses you did not ever get over. By the time you were five you could ride as well as I could, and by six you were twice the person I was on the back of a horse. The more horseman you became, the more worrisome it was for your mother; that hauntful day of our finding Davie Erskine bloody as a haunch of beef was ever there in her eyes when she watched you rollicking full-tilt across a meadow aboard Scorpion or some other mount. But she braced herself, as a person will when there seems nothing else to be done, and like a person who has simply decided to suffer—there is no less way to say it—she watched you out of sight the school morning when you proudly set off toward the South Fork on the back of your own pony Brownie now.
To say the truth, I had my own overwhelming fret about you. The dread deep as the bloodstream in me. What I feared for you, from the time you began to toddle, was what I had until then always prized. The water of the North Fork and its easy nearness to the house. I who would never swim was determined for you to become complete tadpole; water and the McCaskills were already several generations late in coming to terms with each other. And so the minute you were old enough I got Rob to teach you the water, your small strokes dutifully imitating his there in the North Fork’s beaver ponds beneath Breed Butte, until he was saying, and meant it: See now, McVarick, they couldn’t drown you in a gunnysack.
Did it lead on from there, the alliance between you and Rob? “Unk” as you called him from the time you were first persuaded to try your tongue on “uncle.” No, even without the swimming you and he would have doted on one another, I have to believe. The two of you made a kind of inevitable league against your girl cousins, Rob’s daughters Ellen and Dorothy and Margery and Mary, who for all that he treasured them like wealth were unmistakably four versions of Judith. Your tenet of those years, girls are bossy, fit snugly with his customary joke about unexpectedly running a convent on Breed Butte, and it was your Unk more often than not who enlisted you into riding the gutwagon with him during lambing time or a buckrake during haying, you little more than a tyke but the reins taut in your small hands as Rob taught you to tug the workhorses into their necessary routes.
You just don’t know how lucky you are, Angus, I heard from your Unk regularly in that time, having a Varick.
I maybe have some idea of it, Rob.
I did not take the school that first South Fork year of yours, on the doctrine that you ought to be spared the awkward load of having your own parent everlastingly up there at the teacher’s desk. But when that first year produced as little in you as it did, I tossed away doctrine and became schoolmaster as quick as the annual offer came again from Ninian. And found out for myself that as a pupil, you were reminiscent of the fellow who declared that his education simply hadn’t happened to include reading, writing and ‘rithmetic. Oh, you could do well enough to scrape by in the schoolroom, and did, with prods from me. But the main parts of you were always outside the walls rather than in. Riding beside you to and from the schoolhouse, I saw day by day what made you absentminded above a book. Absent to the mountain canyons like crevices in the wall of the world, absent to the warm velvet back of Brownie, absent to the riffles and trout holes of the North Fork—you already were a fishing fiend—absent to anywhere your volition could be your own, rather than an arithmetic book’s or a teacher father’s. Those were points at which, as maybe all parents ever have, your mother and I wondered where we got you. Except in the lines of your body, there was much about you that did not necessarily seem to be my son. Except in your annual war with winter and a certain habit of drifting quietly into yourself, there was considerable about you that did not seem to be your mother’s son. You seemed to be the Two Medicine country’s son. Your chosen curriculum, even then, was with Rob and me in the year’s rhythm with our band of sheep, lambing-shearing-summering-shipping-wintering. With us as either Rob or I rode up atop Roman Reef once each summer week to tend the camp of our sheepherder, Davie Erskine, whom I had hired as soon as he grew from twisted boy into twisted man. With us as we more and more discussed—cussed and discussed, as Rob put it—the jumping total of Double W cattle on the mountains’ summer grass after the Blackfeet reservation finally was fenced against the Williamsons of the world. With us, jackknife in your earnest small hand, skinning the pelts off our bad loss in the winter of 1906, when almost a quarter of our sheep piled up and smothered during a three-day blizzard. With us to every extent a boy could be in his greenling years.
A last thing that needs saying of those earliest years of yours, Varick. In all that was to come, I hope it was not lost to you that some supreme truces were made of those years. Your mother’s with the homestead. Mine with the everpresence of the shadow between your mother and me, the shadow named Anna; Anna now with children of her own, Lisabeth born half a year after you and Peter a few years after that, children who might have been mine, instead of you. Truce, yes: your mother’s and mine with each other, for I believe—I hope with all that is in me—that you grew through these years without yet having to know that a truce is not a full peace.
• • •
In the spring of the year that Toussaint Rennie ever after spoke of as that 19-and-7, you at rambunctious seven-going-on-eight. A Saturday morning amid lambing time you were helping me at the sheep shed, watering the jugged ewes with as much as you could carry in a bucket while I suckled a freshborn lamb onto its reluctant mother. As you were making one of your lopsided trips from the creek, outside the shed door I heard a voice with Missouri in it say to you:
“Hullo, mister. Funny how water turns heavy when you put a bucket around it, ain’t it.”
“Uh, yeah, sure is, I guess.” I could hear, too, the startlement in your question back to the Missouri voice: “Who is it you’re looking for, my dad?”
“If he’s the sheep boss of your outfit here, yeah, I’d kind of like to talk to him about something.”
You plunged into the shed as nearly running as a person can with a bucket of water tilting him sideways. “Daddy!” you
called out, your face still lit from having been mistered for the first time in your life, “Daddy, there’s some man—”
“I hear, son. As soon as little Fiddlesticks here gets his breakfast, I’ll be there. Tell our visitor so, will you please?”
But you lurched on toward me with your water bucket until near enough to whisper in scared thrill, “Daddy, he’s wearing a badge!”
An added fact such as that does take the slack out of a person’s behavior. I finished with the lamb quicker than I’d have thought possible and stepped out of the shed, you close as a shadow to my heels, Varick.
And both of us very nearly tromped on the nose of a chestnut-colored saddle horse with so much white on his head he was the sort called an apron face, chewing the tall new grass beside the shed.
“Hullo,” the figure atop the big horse greeted. “Sorry to pull you off of your work this way.” The man wore a campaign hat and a soft brown leather vest, and was lazing on the horse with one knee hooked over the saddle horn in an easy way I knew I would never learn. His face had good clean lines but only a minimum of them: a sparse, almost pared look to this rider. And while the badge on his vest seemed to say he was a lawman, he was more casual about it than any I’d ever seen. He was asking me now, “You the gent of this enterprise?”
“I am.”
“Myself, I carry the name Meixell. Stanley Meixell.” He put down a hand and I responded with mine and my own name. The restlessness behind me was close enough to feel, and I added: “This bundle of fidgets is my son Varick.”
“Him and me has met just now, though we didn’t get quite as far as names. Pleased to know you, Varick,” and the rider put down his hand again. While your small one was going into his large work-brown one I snatched the chance to look hard at the man Meixell’s badge. Not a law star; not anything I had ever seen: a shield with a pine tree embossed in its middle.
Stanley Meixell moved his head to take in the ridgeline above the creek valley, the summit of Breed Butte above that. “This’s a pretty valley in here. Kind of up toward the roof of the world, though. Get some snow in the winter, do you?”
“A bit,” I submitted. “Then a few feet more for sauce on that.”
“Winter,” he repeated, as if it were an affliction of the race. Meanwhile the chestnut saddle horse chewed on at the high grass, the only one of us getting anything accomplished. Whatever this Meixell’s business was he seemed to have forever to do it in, but I had a maternity ward of sheep waiting.
“Your badge isn’t one I’m familiar with. What, have the trees elected you sheriff?”
“Not exactly the trees. A character named Theodore Roosevelt. I’m what’s called a forest ranger.” He went on in his same slow voice, “The country up west of you here is gonna be made a national forest.” Meixell shrugged in what seemed a mildly regretful way. “They sent me to make it.”
“Mr. Meixell, I have to ask you to trot that past me again. A which forest?”
“A national one.” He began giving me an explanation of the new United States Forest Service, and then I remembered that what were called forest reserves existed a number of places, mostly west of the Divide where trees grew big enough to be made into lumber.
“Mr. Meixell, I’m afraid you’ve got your work cut out for you if you’re looking for timber to reserve anywhere around here. It reserves itself on this dry side of the mountains. No self-respecting logger would bother with these little pines of ours for anything but kindling, now would he?”
Meixell’s gaze had been all around our valley and up the pinnacle of Breed Butte and back and forth across the mountains we were talking of, and now it casually found me, and stayed.
“No, I don’t guess he would, Angus—if I can go ahead and call you that?”
I had to nod; civility said so.
“But actually it ain’t just the trees I’m supposed to be the nursemaid of,” Meixell went on, “it’s the whole forest. The soil and water, too, a person’d have to say.”
He contemplated me and added in a slower voice yet:
“Yeah, and the grass.”
I felt as if a tight rope suddenly was around my insides. It was then I blurted to you, Varick, “Son, you’d better get on with your watering, before those ewes come looking for you.”
“Aw.” But you went as promptly as a reluctant boy ever can. And I have regretted since that I sent you, for if you had stayed and heard, the time ahead might have come clearer to you. You who were born in the Two Medicine country with its rhythms and seasons in you had a right I did not manage to see just then, there in the welter of apprehensions instantaneously brought on me by Stanley Meixell’s words, a right to witness what was beginning here. We both knew it was not the worst you could ever hold against me, but if I had that exact moment back . . . Instead, as soon as you were out of earshot, I spun around to the man Meixell. “But we summer our sheep up there. Everybody here, on both forks of the creek. That’s free range and always has been.”
“Always is something I don’t know that much about, Angus. But I just imagine maybe the Blackfeet who used to have free run of this country had their own notion of always, don’t you suppose? And if there was anybody here before them, they probably knew how to say always, too.” Meixell shook his head as if sorry to be the herald of inescapable news. “As I get it—and I’m the first to admit that the Yew Ess Forest Service ain’t the easiest thing in the world to savvy—the notion is we can’t go on eating up the land forever. As the lady said to the midget, there’s a limit to everything.”
I could feel the homestead, seventeen years of labor, hours incalculable spent on the sheep, all slip beneath my feet as if I were on a 160-acre pond of ice. With surprising quickness now, the forest ranger spoke to my wordless dismay:
“Don’t take on too hard about the national forest, though. More’n likely you’re still gonna be able to summer your sheep up there. There’s gonna be grazing allotments and permits I’ll be doling out, and prior use is something I’m supposed to take into account.” Up there on his chestnut horse he began outlining to me how the permit system was to work, every inch of it sounding reasonable in his laconic tone, but I was still unready to let myself skid back to hope. I broke in on him:
“But then, if we can still use the range, why bother to—Mr. Meixell, just what in holy hell is it you and President Teddy have in mind for us?”
“The idea ain’t to keep the range from being used,” Meixell said as if it was a catechism. “It’s to keep it from being used to death.”
Now the summer mountains filled my mind, the rising tide of Double W cattle we sheep graziers were encountering in each grass season up there, Wampus Cat Williamson’s chronic imperial complaint, You people would sheep this country to death. The awful echo of that in what this—what was the word for him, ranger?—had just said. Prior use. But whose prior use of that mountain range? Suddenly cold with suspicion, I studied the hardworn lean face above the badge, beneath the campaign hat: had he come as agent of the Wampus Cat Williamsons of the world, those who had the banks and mills and fortunes in their white hands? Ruin’s wheel drove over us/in gold-spoked quietness. I had thought it wouldn’t be like that in America. I clipped my next words with icy care:
“I hope while you’re so concerned against grass being sheeped out, you’ll manage to have an eye for any that’s being cattled out, too.”
From his saddle perch Meixell gave me a look so straight it all but twanged in the air. “Yeah,” he spoke slowly, “I figure on doing that.”
Maybe so, maybe no. I kept my gaze locked with his, as if we were memorizing each other. Say for this Meixell, he did not look like anyone’s person but his own. Yet even if he was coming here neutral, that eternal seep of Double W cattle to wherever Williamson’s eye alit . . . “You may as well know now as later,” I heard myself informing the man in the saddle, “there’ll be some who have their own ideas about your government grass.”
“Oh, they won’t have no real tr
ouble telling the difference between the forest grass and their own,” Meixell offered absently. “There’s gonna be a bobwire fence for the boundary. And I’ll pretty much be on hand myself, if the fence ain’t enough.” Still absently, he tacked on: “And if I ain’t enough, then Assistant Ranger Windchester likely’ll be.” The butt of his Winchester rifle stuck out of its scabbard as casually ready as this forest ranger himself.
“Fellow there in the saloon in town,” Meixell resumed as I was striving to blink all that in, “he told me you’re the straw boss of the school up here. I wonder if I could maybe borrow your schoolhouse for a meeting, just in case anybody’s got any questions left over about the national forest.” Meixell paused and scanned the long stone colonnade of Roman Reef atop the western horizon. “The Yew Ess Forest Service is great on explaining. Anyway, next Saturday wouldn’t be any too soon for me about your schoolhouse, if it wouldn’t for you.”
I answered, “I’ll need to talk to our school board,” which meant Ninian. “But I can tell you the likelihood is, people here are going to have questions for you, yes.”
Meixell nodded as if that was the fairest proposition he’d heard in years. “Well,” he concluded, “I better get to getting. Figured I might as well start here at the top of the valley with my good news and work on down. Noticed a place on that butte.” He inclined his head an inch toward the summit of Breed Butte. “I suppose you maybe know the fellow’s name up there?”
Only as well as I knew my own. And although this forest ranger was a stranger to me, and maybe a dire one, I felt impelled to tell him at least the basic of Rob Barclay. “He has a mind of his own, especially where his sheep are concerned.”
Meixell cast me another look from under his hat, a glance that might have had a tint of thanks in it. “There’s some others of us that way. Be seeing you, Angus.” Before he swung the chestnut saddle horse away, he called into the shed to you: “Been my day’s pleasure to meet you, Varick.”