English Creek - Ivan Doig

by Ivan Doig

  "What’ve we got here," he wondered, "the latest kel1eygram?"

  His next utterance was: "Sonofabitch."

  He looked as if he had been hit with a two-by-four, stunned and angry. Then, as if the words would have to change themselves when read aloud, he recited from the letter:

  " ‘PIacement of manpower this fire season will be governed by localized fire danger measurements. An enforced lag of manning below current danger will eliminate over-manning designed to meet erratic peak loads and will achieve material decrease in FF costs over past years’ expenditures. Organization on east-side forests in particular is to be held to the lowest level consistent with carefully analyzed current needs.’ "

  My mother oh so slightly shook her head, as if this confirmed her suspicions of brainlessness in the upper ranks of the U.S. Forest Service. My father crumpled the letter and crossed the kitchen to the window looking out on Roman Reef and Rooster Mountain and Phantom Woman peak and other of the profiles of the Two.

  I asked, “What’s all that mean ?"

  "No fire guards on our side of the Divide until things start burning," said my father without turning from the window.

  * * *

  Right up until the time haying started, I had been rehearsing to myself how to talk my parents into letting me live in the bunkhouse at Pete’s with the rest of the hay crew. It was something I imagined I much wanted to do. Be in on the gab of Wisdom and Perry and Bud, hear all the tales of the Big Hole and First Avenue South and Texas and Anaconda and so on and so on. Gain one more rung towards being a grownup, I suppose was what was working on me. Yet when haying time arrived I did not even bring up the bunkhouse issue.

  For one thing, I could anticipate my mother’s enunciation about one shavetail McCaskill already living in a bunkhouse "and to judge by Alec’s recent behavior One Is More Than Enough." For another, with my father on the go as much as he was this summer it seemed plain that he would prefer for me to be on hand at English Creek whenever he couldn’t. But do you know, I actually made it unanimous against myself. What the matter came right down to was that I didn’t want to give up the porch bedroom at English Creek for the dubious gain of bunking with hay hands.

  Which is how I became a one-horsepower commuter. The one horse being Pony, whom I found I regarded with considerable more esteem ever since Mouse decided to hose down the rodeo grounds that time in front of Leona. Each morning now I got up at five, went out and caught and saddled Pony outside the barn—quite a lot of light in the sky that time of year—and the pair of us would head for the Reese ranch.

  Where morning is concerned, I am my father all over again. "The day goes downhill after daybreak" was his creed. I don’t suppose there are too many people now who have seen a majority of the dawns of their life, but my father did, and I have, And of my lifetime of early rising I have never known better dawns than those when I rode from English Creek to my haying job on Noon Creek.

  The ford north of the ranger station Pony and I would cross; if there was enough moon the wild roses along the creek could be seen, pale crowds of them; and in a few minutes of climbing we came atop the bench of land which divides the two creek drainages. Up there, at that brink of dawn hour, the world revealed all its edges. Dark lines of the tops of buttes and benches to the north, towards the Two Medicine River and the Blackfeet Reservation. The Sweetgrass Hills bumping up far on the eastern horizon like five dunes of black sand. The timbered crest of Breed Butte standing up against the stone mountain wall of the west. What trick of light it is I can’t really say, but everything looked as if drawn in heavy strokes, with the final shade of night penciled in wherever there was a gulch or coulee.

  The only breaks in the stillness were Pony’s hooves against the earth, and the west breeze which generally met us atop that broad benchland. I say breeze. In the Two country any wind that doesn’t lift you off your horse is only a breeze. My mountain coat was on me, my hat pulled low, my hands in leather work gloves, and I was just about comfortable.

  Since Pete’s haying season always lasted a month or a little more, I rode right through the phases of the moon. My favorite you can guess on first try. The fat full moon, resting there as if it was an agate marble which had rolled into the western corner of the sky. During the early half of my route the mountains still drew most of their light from the moon, and I watched the reefs and other rock faces change complexion, from light gray to ever so slightly pink, as the sunrise began to touch them. Closer to me, the prairie flowers now made themselves known amid the tan grass. Irises, paintbrushes, bluebells, shooting stars, sunflowers.

  Then this. The first week or so of those daybreak rides, the sun was north enough that it came up between the Sweetgrass Hills. They stand sixty or seventy miles across the prairie from where I was riding, way over towards Havre, so there was a sense that I was seeing a sunrise happening in a far land. The gap between the mounded sets of hills first filled with a kind of orange film; a haze of coming light, it might be called. Then the sun would slowly present itself, like a big glowing coal burning its way up through the horizon.

  Those dawns taught me that beauty makes the eyes greedy. For even after all this, mountains and moon and earth edges and the coming of the sun, I considered that what was most worth watching for was the first shadow of the day. When the sun worked its way about half above the horizon, that shadow emerged to stretch itself off from Pony and me—horse and youngster melded, into an apparition of leftover dark a couple of hundred feet in length. Drawn out on the prairie grass in that far-reaching first shadow, Pony and I loomed like some new creature put together from the main parts of a camel and a giraffe. Is it any wonder each of these haying-time dawns made me feel

  remade?

  * * *

  Meanwhile it continued to be the damnedest summer of weather anybody could remember. All that rain of June, and now July making a habit of ninety degrees. The poor damn farmers out east of Gros Ventre and north along the High Line were fighting a grasshopper invasion again, the hot days hatching out the ’hoppers faster than the farmers could spread poison against them. And for about five days in the middle of July an epidemic of lightning storms broke out in all the national forests of Region One. A lookout reported a plume of smoke up the South Fork of English Creek, on a heavily forested north slope of Grizzly Reef. This of course caused some excitement in the ranger station, and my father hustled his assistant ranger Paul Eliason and some trail men and a nearby CCC brush crew up there. "Paul’s used to those big trees out on the coast," my father remarked to my mother. "It won’t hurt him to find out that the ones here are big enough to burn." That Grizzly Reef smoke, though, turned out to be a rotten log and some other debris smoldering in a rocky area, and Paul and his crew handled it without much sweat.

  That mid-July dose of lightning and his dearth of fire guards to be smokechasers put my father in what my mother called "his prowly mood." But then on the morning of the twenty—first of July we woke up to snow in the mountains. Fire was on the loose elsewhere in Montana—spot fires across the Continental Divide in the Flathead country and others up in Glacier Park, and a big blaze down in Yellowstone Park that hundreds of men were on—while my father’s forest lay snoozing under a cool sheet of white.

  “How did you arrange that?" my mother mock-questioned him at breakfast. “Clean living and healthy thoughts "

  "The powerrr of Scotch prrayerrr," he rumbled back at her in his preacher voice. Then with his biggest grin in weeks: "Also known as the law of averages. Tough it out long enough in this country and a snowstorm will eventually happen when you actually want it to."

  * * *

  As I say, putting up Pete’s hay always took about a month, given some days of being rained out or broke down. This proved to be a summer when we were reasonably lucky about both moisture and breakage. So steadily that none of us on the crew said anything about it for fear of changing our luck, day on day along Noon Creek our new stacks appeared, like fresh green loaves.

/>   My scatter-raking became automatic with me. Of course, whenever my mind doesn’t have to be on what I am doing, it damn well for sure is going to be on some other matter. Actually, though, for once in my life I did a respectable job of combining my task at hand and my wayfaring thoughts. For if I had a single favorite daydream of those hayfield hours, it was to wonder why a person couldn’t be a roving scatter-raker in the way that sheep shearers and harvest hands moved with their seasons. I mean, why not? The principle seems to me the same: a nomad profession. I could see myself traveling through Montana from hay country to hay country—although preferably with better steppers than Blanche and Fisheye if there was much distance involved—and hiring on, team and rake and all, at the best-looking ranch of each locale. Maybe spend a week, ten days, at the peak of haying at each. Less if the grub was mediocre, longer if a real pie maker was in the kitchen. Dwell in the bunkhouse so as to get to know everybody on a crew, for somehow every crew, every hay hand, was discernibly a little different from any other. Then once I had learned enough about that particular country and earned from the boss the invite "Be with us again next year, won’t you ?" on I would go, rolling on, the iron wheels and line of tines of my scatter rake like some odd over-wide chariot rumbling down the road.

  An abrupt case of Wanderlust, this may sound like, but then it took very little to infect me at that age. Can this be believed? Except for once when all of us at the South Fork school were taken to Helena to visit the capitol, a once-in-a-while trip with my father when he had to go to forest headquarters in Great Falls was the farthest I had ever been out of the Two country. Ninety miles; not much of a grand tour. There were places of Montana I could barely even imagine. Butte. All I knew definitely of Butte was that when you met anyone from there, even somebody as mild as Ray Heaney’s father Ed, he would announce "I’m from Butte" and his chin would shoot out a couple of inches on that up-sound of yewt. In the midst of all this wide Montana landscape a city where shifts of men tunneled like gophers. Butte, the copper kingdom. Butte, the dark mineral pocket. Or the other thing that was always said: “Butte’s a hole in the ground and so’s a grave." That, I heard any number of times in the Two country. I think the truth may have been that parts of Montana like ours were apprehensive, actually a little scared, of Butte. There seemed to be something spooky about a place that lived by eating its own guts, which is the way mining sounded to us. Butte I would surely have to see someday. And the Big Hole Basin. As Wisdom Johnson told it, as haying season approached in the Big Hole the hay hands-they called them hay-diggers down there, which I also liked—began to gather about a week ahead of time. They sifted in, "jungled up" in the creekside willows at the edge of town, and visited and gossiped and just lay around until haying started. I savored the notion of that, the gathering, the waiting. Definitely the Big Hole would be on my hay rake route. And the dry Ingomar country down there in the southeastern part of the state, where Walter Kyle had done his hotel style of sheep ranching. The town water supply was a tank car, left off on the railroad siding each week. Walter told of coming back to town from sheep camp one late fall day and seeing flags of celebration flying. His immediate thought was that somebody had struck water, "but it turned out to be just the armistice ending the war." Havre and the High Line country. Fork Peck dam. Miles City. Billings. Lewistown. White Sulphur Springs. Red Lodge. Bozeman and the green Gallatin Valley. For that matter, Missoula. Montana seemed to be out there waiting for me, if I only could become old enough to get there.

  But. There’s always a "but" when you think about going everywhere and doing everything. But how old was that, when I would be advanced enough to sample Montana to the full?

  North of the ears strange things will happen. Do you know who kept coming to mind, as I thought my way hither and thither from those Noon Creek hay meadows? Stanley Meixell. Stanley who had gone cowboying in Kansas when he was a hell of a lot younger than I was. Stanley who there in the cabin during our camptending journey told me of his wanders, down to Colorado and Wyoming and over into the Dakotas, in and out of jobs. Stanley who evidently so much preferred the wandering life that he gave up being a forest ranger, to pursue it. Stanley who could plop himself on a bar stool on the Fourth of July and be found by Velma Simms. But Stanley who also looked worn down, played out and overboozed, by the footloose way of life. The example of Stanley bothered me no little bit. If the wanderer’s way was as alluring as it seemed from my seat on the scatter rake, how then did I account for the eroded look around Stanley Meixell’s eyes?

  * * *

  Almost before I knew it the first few weeks of haying were behind us and we were moving the equipment onto the benchland for the ten days or so of putting up the big meadow of dry-land alfalfa there.

  "The alfaloofee field," as Perry Fox called it. This was another turn of the summer I looked forward to with interest, for this alfalfa haying was far enough from the Reese ranch house that we no longer went in at noon for dinner. Now began field lunches.

  My stomach aside, why did I look forward to this little season of field lunches? I think the answer must be that the field lunches on the bench constituted a kind of ritual that appealed to me. Not that I would want to eat every meal of my life in the stubble of a hayfield. But for ten days or so it was like camping out or being on an expedition; possibly even a little like "jungling up" the way the Big Hole hay hands started off. Whatever, the alfaloofee field lunch routine went like this. A few minutes before noon, here came Marie in the pickup. She had with her the chuckbox, the old Reese family wooden one with cattle brands burned everywhere on its sides, and when a couple of us slid it back to the tailgate and lifted it down and opened it, in there waited two or three kinds of sandwiches wrapped in dish towels, and a bowl of potato or macaroni salad, and a gallon jar of cold tea or lemonade, and bread and butter and jam, and pickles, and radishes and new garden carrots, and a pie or cake. Each of us chose a dab of shade around the power buckrake or the pickup; my preference was to sit on the running board of the pickup, somehow it seemed more like a real meal when I sat up to eat; and then we ploughed into the lunch. Afterward, which is to say the rest of the noon hour, Pete was a napper, with his hat down over his eyes. I never was; I was afraid I might miss something. Clayton too was open-eyed, in that silent sentry way all the Hebner kids had. Perry and Bud smoked, each rolling himself a handmade. This was the cue for Wisdom to pull out his own sack of Bull Durham, pat his shirt pocket, then say to Perry or Bud, "You got a Bible on you?" One or the other would loan him the packet of cigarette papers and he’d roll himself one. Strange how he could always have tobacco but perpetually be out of papers, which were the half of smoking that cost almost nothing. But that was Wisdom for you.

  The womanly presence of Marie, slim and dark, sitting in the shade of the pickup beside the chuckbox and the dozing Pete, posed the need for another ritual. As tea and lemonade caught up with kidneys, we males one after another would rise, carefully casual, and saunter around to the far side of the haystack and do our deed. Then saunter back, trying to look like we’d never been away and Marie showing no least sign that we had.

  Eventually Pete would rouse himself. He not only could nap at the drop of an eyelid, he woke up just as readily. “I don’t suppose you characters finished this field while I was resting my eyes, did you?"

  Then he was on his feet, saying the rest of the back-to-work message: "Until they invent hay that puts itself up, I guess we got to."

  * * *

  Our last day of haying the benchland alfalfa brought two occurrences out of the ordinary.

  The first came at once, when I headed Blanche and Fisheye to the southwest corner of the field to start the morning by raking there awhile. Maybe a quarter of a mile farther from where I was lay a nice grassy coulee, at the base of that slope of Breed Butte. The ground there was part of Walter Kyle’s place, and with Walter summering in the mountains with his sheep, Dode Withrow always put up the hay of this coulee for him on shares. The Withrow stack
ing crew had pulled in and set up the afternoon before; I could pick out Dode over there, still with a cast on his leg, and I could all but hear him on the topic of trying to run a haying crew with his leg set in cement. If I hadn’t been so content with haying for Pete, Dode would have been my choice of somebody to work for.

  Maybe scatter rakers are all born with similar patterns of behavior in them, but in any case, at this same time I was working the corner of our field the Withrow rake driver was doing the nearest corner of theirs. Naturally I studied how he was going about matters, and a minute or so of that showed me that he wasn’t a he, but Marcella Withrow. I had no idea what the odds must be against a coincidence like that: Marcella and me having been the only ones in our class those eight years of grade school at South Fork, and now the only English Creek ones in our particular high school class in Gros Ventre, and this moment both doing the same job, in the same hay neighborhood. It made me grin. It also caused me to peek around with care, to make sure that I wouldn’t be liable for any later razzing from our crew, and when the coast looked clear I waved to Marcella. She did the same, maybe even to checking over her shoulder against the razzing possibility, and we rattled past one another and raked our separate meadows. Some news to tell Ray Heaney the next time I got to town, anyway.