by Ivan Doig
While the man Stanley Meixell rode away, I stood staring for a while at the mountains. National forest. They did not look like a national anything, they still looked just like mountains. A barbed wire fence around them. It did not seem real that a fence could be put around mountains. But I would not bet against this Meixell when he said he was going to do a thing. A fence around the mountains not to control them but us. Did we need that? Most, no. But some, yes. The Double W cattle that were more and more. It bothered me to think it in the same mental breath with Wampus Cat Williamson, but even Rob’s penchant for more sheep was a formula the land eventually would not be able to stand. And without the land healthy, what would those of us on it be? The man Meixell’s argument stood solid as those mountains. But whether he himself did . . . Not Proven.
I heard you come out of the shed with your bucket and start your next dutiful journey to the creek. When I glanced around at you, I found that you had taken a sudden new interest in your hat. You were wearing it low to your eyes as the forest ranger did. I registered then, Varick, that from the instant he reached down to shake your hand, you looked at Stanley Meixell as if the sun rose and set in him. And I already was telling myself that you had better be right about that.
• • •
“What in goddamn hell”—Rob, full steam up—“are we going to do about this national forest nonsense?”
“You’re of the opinion there’s something to be done, are you.”
“Man, you know as well as I do that’s been our summer grass up there ever since we set foot into this country. We can’t just let some geezer in a pinchy hat prance in here and tell us how many sheep we can put on this slope, how many on that one. What kind of a tightfart way is that to operate, now I ask you?”
“There’s maybe another piece to the picture, you know,” I had to say. “Those grazing allotments could mean Williamson can’t pour every cow on earth up there any more, too.”
“Williamson has never managed to crowd us off those mountains yet.”
“Yet.”
“Angus, are you standing there telling me you’re going to swallow the guff this man Meixell is trying to hand us? Just because he wears a goddamn tin badge of some kind?”
“I’d say it’s not the worst reason to pay the man some attention. And no, I’m not swallowing anything, just yet. I do think we all need to do some chewing on the matter, though.”
Rob shook his head slowly, deliberately, as if erasing Meixell and the heresy he called a national forest. “I’ll tell you this: I can’t stand still and accept that any sheep I own has to have a permit to eat grass that doesn’t belong to a goddamn soul.”
“Rob, there’s a fair number of sheep you own one side of and I own the other.”
That drew me a sharp look. I had not seen Rob so het up since our ancient debates over how many sheep we ought to take on. Yet why wouldn’t he be; this matter of the national forest grass was the same old dogfight, simply new dogs.
Rob must have realized we were fast getting in deep, for he now backed to: “All right, all right, I might’ve known you’re going to be as independent as a red mule. If it’ll keep peace in the family, you can go around daydreaming that we can run sheep with reins on every one of them.” He cocked his head and made his declaration then and there: “But if that forest ranger of yours thinks he’s going to boss me, and a lot of others around here, he has his work cut out for him.”
• • •
When I made a quick ride down to the Duffs’ after supper, Ninian was bleak, even for Ninian. “Ay, we can open the school-house next Saturday and give a listen to the man Meixell,” he granted. “But if what he has to say isn’t against our interests as sheepmen, I’ll be much and pleasantly surprised.”
• • •
That night at bedtime, I told Adair: “I think we’d better make a trip to town, after school Monday.”
She glanced over at me in surprise. Any town trip other than a periodic Saturday was rare for us, and during lambing time it was unheard of.
“Davie can handle the lambing shed until we get back,” I elaborated. “That way, we can take our time a bit, have supper with Lucas and Nancy.”
She still gazed at me. She knew as well as I did that my elaboration was mere fancywork, not revelation.
“Dair, I need to talk to Lucas about this national forest.”
“Rob has made his opinion clear.”
“Rob isn’t Lucas.”
At least that turned off her gaze. “No,” she said. “No one is anyone else.”
• • •
Gros Ventre these days was a growing stripling of a town, all elbows and shanks. The main street was beginning to fill in; fresh buildings for the Gleaner newspaper, for a new saloon that called itself the Pastime, for the stagecoach office next to Dantley’s stable, for an eating place that had opened beside the Medicine Lodge—pure convenient, as Lucas put it, whenever the notion of a meal happens to strike one of my customers. But it still had plenty of room to go.
In every conceivable way, though, I was assured by Lucas in the next breath after I stepped into the Medicine Lodge, the town was advancing grandly. “We’re even about to get ourselves a bank, Angus. It’s bad business to let such places as Choteau and Conrad keep our money in their pockets.” All this he tendered to me as I was noticing that now that a bridge of bright new lumber hurdled the creek ford, by weathered comparison the Northern Hotel looked as if it had been in business since Lewis and Clark spent the night there. And Rob and I preceded the Northern, and Lucas preceded us . . .
I took a sip from the glass Lucas had furnished me, and speculated, “Then if we were to put the royal mint next to the bank, with a chute between for the money to flow through, and spigots on the front of the bank . . .”
Lucas had to laugh. But he came right out of it with: “Angus, you’ll see the day this town of ours is the county seat, and of our own county, too. Gros Ventre is a coming place.”
I could agree with that. It had been coming for nearly twenty years that I knew of personally. Before I could say anything to that effect, Lucas produced a glass for himself, between his stubs, then the whiskey bottle, freshening my drink after he had poured his own. “But enough progress for one day. Lad”—for a change that was not me but Varick, who had wanted to tag along with me rather than endure while his mother and Nancy were fixing supper—“what would you say to a fine big glass of buttermilk?”
“Uh, no thanks,” uttered Varick with that eloquent dismayed swallow only a boy can perform.
Lucas peered over the bar at him. “It’s a known fact that buttermilk will grow a mustache on you practically overnight. How do you think this father of yours got his? I’m telling you, this is your chance to get yourself a cookie duster.” Varick grinned up at him and gave out a skeptical “aw.”
Lucas shook his head as if dubious. “If you’re going to pass up perfectly good buttermilk, I’m afraid the only choice left is root beer.” That resolved, while Varick happily started into his rich brown glassful, Lucas remarked all too casually in my direction: “It’s not usual to see McCaskills in town on a school night.”
“I thought we ought to talk, Lucas. You just maybe can guess what about.”
“Angus, Angus.” Lucas’s great face behind the bar, his bald dome and his kingly beard, and those gray Barclay eyes regarding me; how many times had I known this moment? “Life was a lot simpler before this man Meixell, wasn’t it,” Lucas was saying.
“You’ve met up with him, I understand.”
“The day he hit town. I believe this was the exact next place he found after the Northern.”
“And?”
“And once I’d picked my jaw up off the floor after hearing the words national forest and what they meant, I stood him a few drinks while I tried to figure him out. That, I have to say, didn’t even come close to working.” It was an admission chipped in stone, the chilly way Lucas said that, then this: “Our Meixell definitely is a man with
a hollow leg, and by the time he strolled out of here I was the one wobbling.”
Lucas stopped and cocked a look Varick’s direction. Then, soul of discretion, said: “That was Meixell’s first half hour in town, Angus, and his second was a visit to Uncle Bob,” which was to say Wingo and his “nieces.” A fellow who attends to priorities promptly, this Meixell, ay, Lucas?
All of this Varick was taking in avidly. The first Montana McCaskill, trying to hear beyond his years. Even to myself I couldn’t have specified why, but I now wanted my son to know as many sides as there were to this thing called the Two Medicine National Forest, this matter of the land and us on it, and the sudden forest ranger on whom our future pivoted. I asked Lucas straight: “Other than Meixell’s social capacities, what’ve you concluded about him?”
To my surprise, Lucas Barclay hedged off to: “The talk I hear, this national forest notion is about as popular around here as a whore in church.”
“I’ve heard similar, just recently. But unless our conversation walked out the door while I wasn’t looking, Lucas, we’re talking now about Meixell himself and what we can expect from him.”
“Angus, Robbie is not wrong about what this national forest can do to us and the way we’re used to going about things. I know as well as you do that Robbie can be the quickest in the world to get a wild hair up his”—Lucas’s eye caught the attentive face of Varick below—“nose. But this notion of divvying the grass as if it was the oatmeal and we were the orphans. By Jesus, I don’t know why that should have to be, Angus, I just don’t. What I do know is that we’ve always run whatever sheep we could manage to, up on that grass, and we’ve built ourselves and Scotch Heaven and Gros Ventre and the entire Two country by doing it, ay?”
“That’s been the case, yes,” I had to agree. “But how long can any piece of ground, even one the size of those mountains, keep taking whatever sheep get poured onto it?” I studied Lucas to see how he would ingest this next: “Or cattle either, for that matter.”
Lucas rubbed a stub across his beard as if reminded of an untidiness there. “You mean Williamson. Our dear friend Wampus Cat. I don’t have the answer there either, Angus, any more than I do this geezer Meixell. I’m as fuddled about this as the old lady when she was told that astronomers had found planets named Mars and such up there among the stars. ‘I’ve nae doubt they can see those things with their long glasses and all,’ she said, ‘but how did they find out their names?’ ”
And that proved to be Lucas’s say on planetary matters this night. Even after the lilt of that joke, though, I was certain of this much: certain that I saw come back into Lucas the same bleakness I had found in Ninian Duff two evenings ago. Ay, the one of them beginning dourly about Meixell, and the other concluding dourly, ay? Not pleasant to be squeezed between, Ninian and Lucas. If these two old stags of the country set their minds and horns against Meixell; if they led the many others who would listen to them into rank behind Rob’s anger . . . A fence could be built around a forest, but a fence could be cut, too. Grass could be allotted, but sheep could forever stray onto the unallotted, too. A forest ranger could be sent to us, but that forest ranger could rate early replacement if everything he touched turned to turmoil.
I looked down at my son and had the sudden wish for him to be twice or three times his not-quite-eight years, to be old enough, grown enough, to help me think through what I ought to do. To bring his native attunement to the land into my schoolmasterly mind.
Lucas, too, now put his attention on the inquisitively watching boy. Leaning across the bar, he announced:
“Varick, I happen to know for a fact that Nancy has ginger cookies in oversupply at the house. Go tell her I said to give you the biggest one, ay?”
Varick couldn’t help blurting his astonishment at such unheard-of fortune: “This close to supper?”
“I know just who you mean by that, lad,” sympathized Lucas. “But tell that mother of yours that I’ve known her since she was just an idle notion up my brother’s leg”—I’d wanted Varick to have full education tonight, had I—“and I don’t want to hear any whippersnap arguments out of her about when a cookie can be eaten. Tell her that for me if she needs it, ay?”
Varick scooted out of the saloon for the house and I sat wondering if the Barclays maybe constituted an entire separate human race. It would explain a lot. Lucas now turned his magnanimity my way and proclaimed: “We’ve just time to top off these drinks before supper.” He poured and toasted, “Rest our dust.”
As we put our glasses down, Lucas asked: “And how is life treating its schoolkeepers?”
Schoolkeepers. That s whispering more than just yourself and you know who I mean by more, Angus.
I studied my glass while all the other whispers of Anna whizzed in me, years of accumulated echoes of not having her, a chorus of whispers adding and adding to themselves until they were like the roar of a chinook wind. Angus, I’ve told Isaac yes . . . Angus, Angus, take it slow now, both on this whiskey and yourself. . . . Angus, man, this is the best news in the world! . . . Angus, I’ll try with whatever’s in me to be a good wife. . . . Annguz, ve got a stork on de ving. And ever around to first words again: I am called Anna Ramsay. And it is Miss Ramsay.
The swarm of it all was too much. If I ever once began letting it free . . . Even here now to Lucas, I could stand only to say the utter minimum of my Anna situation:
“We get by, Lucas. That seems to be the story of schoolkeepers.”
“And that’s enough, is it?”
“I try to make it be.”
• • •
George and Abraham traded their eternal stoic stares along the schoolroom wall, and the bunch ranged below seemed to have caught their mood. If faces could somehow be said to be sitting there with crossed arms, these of Scotch Heaven’s sheepmen on Saturday morning were.
Stanley Meixell half-perched half-leaned on the corner of my big desk in front of us. By years, he was the youngest person in this gathering. But with his hat off, the start of a widow’s peak suggested itself there in his crow-black hair, and the lines webbed in at the corner of his eyes by wind and sun and maybe personal weather as well made his face seem twice as old as the rest of him.
Having just given us the full particulars of the land he was boundarying to create this Two Medicine National Forest of his, Stanley paused to let it all sink in, and it definitely sank.
“Why don’t you just arrange your goddamn boundaries to the North Pole and the Atlantic Ocean while you’re at it?” spoken lividly by Rob.
To say the truth, the empire of geography the forest ranger had delineated to us was stunning. Grizzly Reef. Roman Reef. Rooster Mountain. Phantom Woman Mountain. Guthrie Peak. Jericho Reef. Anywhere in the high stone skyline to our west, name a rimrock bow of mountain or a sharp flange of peak, and it sat now within the Two Medicine National Forest. And its foothills below it, and its neighbor crags behind it, all the way up to the Continental Divide. All the way up to the moon, may as well say. And Stanley hadn’t only tugged his indelible boundary west to the Divide and north to the Two Medicine River. To the startlement of us all, he already had put a Forest Service crew to building his ranger station here on the east edge of Scotch Heaven, at the juncture where the North Fork and the South Fork met to form the main creek. The narrow panhandle of national forest boundary he had drawn from the mountains down here to the station site took in only hogback ridges of rocks and stunted pine that could never be of use to anyone, but still. Everyone of Scotch Heaven and the South Fork both would need to pass by the ranger station and the bold flag atop its pole, whenever they traveled to or from town. Like having an unexpected lodger living on the front porch of our valleys, although I knew from Stanley’s own lips why he had done it: You’re asking me if I absolutely have to bring the national forest all the way down to the forks of the creek, Angus, and yeah, I figure I do. If I hide the ranger station way to hell and gone out of sight somewheres, that’s not gonna do either side of the
situation any good. This station and the forest have got to be facts of life around here from now on. People might as well get used to them as quick as they can. My answer, Some aren’t going to like your station out there so prominent. I didn’t much myself. Me and the forest got plenty of time, said Stanley, for them to change their minds.
Changing of minds wasn’t the fad yet, if this schoolroom audience was any evidence. In the seat next to me Rob was tight-jawed, fired up as a January stove. On the other side of him, Lucas was the definition of skeptical. Around us, a maximum Ninian frown and variations of it on Donald Erskine, Archie Findlater, the two Frews . . . the only unperturbed one in the room was Stanley.
He wasn’t going to stay that way if Rob had anything to do with it. “Christ on a raft, man! You’re taking every goddamn bit of the country we use for summer range!”
“I ain’t taking it anywhere,” Stanley responded quietly. “It’s still gonna be there.”
“What makes you think,” Rob spoke up again, “you can parade in here from nowhere and get us to swallow this idea of a national forest and like it?”
“I wouldn’t necessarily say you got to like it, Bob,” answered Stanley. “If you just got used to it, that’d be plenty to suit me.”
“But man, what you’re asking of us”—pure passionate Rob, this—“is to get used to limiting our sheep on all that mountain grass. That’s the same as limiting our livelihoods. Our lives, too, may as well say.”
“I’m not here to fool you any,” Stanley responded. “You’re probably not gonna be able to put any more sheep into those mountains than you’ve already had up there, and maybe some fewer.” Glower from Rob, on that. His look changed to bafflement as he realized the ranger didn’t intend to expand that response. Rob burst out:
“You mean you’re flat-out telling us there isn’t anything we can do about you and your goddamn grazing allotments?”
“Me personally,” Stanley said to Rob, “I guess you could get rid of someway. Or at least you could try.” The schoolhouse filled with consideration of that. “But about the grazing allotment system, no, I don’t really see nothing for you to do.”