by Ivan Doig
Only when skewered on a buffalo horn if she happened to slip off that roof. I had my mouth open to roar her some approximate version of that when I became aware of two dull pebbly eyes regarding me out of a mound of dense crinkly hair, around the front end of the motorhome. I yanked my head inside at record speed, but the buffalo was nearsightedly concentrating on the vehicle anyway. Experimentally he shifted his full weight sideways against the grillwork below the hood and began to rub.
The motorhome began to shake rigorously.
“I figured this rig must be good for something,” Riley contributed as the buffalo settled into using the grill for a scratching post. Jesus, the power of that itch. The poor old Bago was rocking like an outhouse in an earthquake. Umhh . . . umhh, the three-quarter-ton beast grunted contentedly as he scraped and scraped. To look at up close, the hide on a buffalo is like a matted mud rug that hasn’t been shaken out for many seasons, so there was no telling how long this bison version of house-cleaning was going to go on. From my perch in the driver’s seat, every sway of the Bago brought into view those up-pointing horns, like bent spikes thick as tree limbs. Whingwhing whingwhingwhing from above told me Mariah still was merrily in action, but my jitters had had enough. Without thinking I asked over my shoulder to Riley: “If you know so goddamn much about buffalo, how do we get rid of an itchy one?”
“A little noise ought to make him back off,” Riley diagnosed with all the confidence of an expert on large mammals and reached past me and beeped the horn.
The honk did send the buffalo scrambling away, but only far enough to whirl around. Those dancy little legs incredibly maneuvered the top-heavy bulk of the creature, then propelled it head-on at us. Squarely as a pointblank cannon shot, the buffalo butted the grill of the Bago with a crunching Bam!
“Shit oh dear!” Riley expressed in something like awe.
“Hey, quit, you sonofabitch!” I shouted. Properly that utterance would have been in the plural, for I was including in it both the horn-throwing buffalo and goddamn hornblowing Riley.
Overhead there had been the sound of a bellyflop, a person hitting the deck. At least there hadn’t been a photographer’s body flying past.
“Mariah?!” I squalled next, mesmerically watching the buffalo back off with exact little steps, as if pacing off for another go at the grill. “Will you get yourself down here now, for Christ’s sake!?” Riley was poking the upper half of himself out the passenger-side window to try and locate her, for all the good that did.
“No way,” arrived the reply from the roof. “I know that buffalo can’t climb up here. But into the cab with you two lamebrains, I’m not so sure.”
“Then can you at least hang onto something while I back us out of here? I’ll take it as slow as I can, but . . .” Butt was still the topic on the buffalo bull’s mind too, from the look of him. As I eased the Bago into reverse and we crept backwards down the road with Mariah prone on the roof, he lumbered toward us at the same gait as ours, patient as doomsday. Not until the motorhome at last bumped across the hoof-catching metal rods of a buffaloguard and we were safely on the other side of that barrier and the massive fence, did our pursuer relent.
When we halted and Riley and I piled out, that daughter of mine relinquished her armhold around the rooftop air conditioning unit and climbed down perfectly unscathed. The Winnebago, though: its grill had a squashed-in dent as big around as a washtub. The abused vehicle looked as if a giant fist had punched it in the snoot.
Luckily the hood would still open, just, and as far as I could tell the radiator had survived. “How, I don’t know,” I stormily told the Montanian perpetrators and punctuated by slamming the hood back down.
“Honking the horn was a perfectly dumb-ass idea,” Mariah rendered.
“Riley’s who did it,” I self-defended.
“Then that explains it.”
“Don’t get your kilts flapping,” Riley told us soothingly. “A little flexible arithmetic is all we need.” He flipped open his notebook and jotted the reminder to himself. “I’ll just diddle the expense account for the cost of fixing the grill when we get a chance. The bean counters will never know they’ve been in the Winnebago repair business.”
“Speaking of,” I gritted out. “Now that the two of you are done with your goddamn buffalo business, let’s get the hell out of—”
Riley stirred in a suddenly squirmy way, like a kid who’s had an icicle dropped down the back of his neck.
Mariah jumped him. “You haven’t got what you need for a story yet, have you.”
He grounded her with an appraising look and the rejoinder, “And you’ve just been burning film without getting the shot you want yet, haven’t you.”
Christamighty, all that uproar and neither one of them had anything printable to show for it? They called this newspapering? I suggested coldly to the pair of them, “How about reporting a buffalo attack on an innocent motorhome?”
“BUFFALO BONKS BAGO,” Riley considered. “Naw, the BB would only give that story two inches on the pet care page.”
Their stymied mood prevailed until Mariah proposed, “Let’s go up Red Sleep for a look around, how about.” Riley said with shortness, “Good as any.”
Red Sleep Mountain is not hospitable to long-chassised motor-homes, and so as far as I was concerned it was up to Riley and Mariah to hitchhike us a ride up the steep one-lane road with a bison ranger. Rather, it was mostly up to Mariah, because any ranger with blood in him would be readier to take along a red-haired woman of her calibre than mere Riley and me.
Shortly we were in a ranger’s van, rising and rising, the road up Red Sleep coiling back and forth and around, toward the eventual summit of the broad gentle slopes. Although no more buffalo, other game more than abounded. We drove past antelope curious about us and elk wary of us and every so often sage chickens would hurl up into a flock of flying panic at our coming. At least here on Red Sleep my eyes could enjoy what my mind couldn’t. I was thoroughly ticked off yet, of course, about the Bago’s bashed-in condition. But more was on me, too. The morning’s encounter out of nowhere with Shirley. The firefly thoughts of the mind. Why should memory forever own us the way it does? That main heavy mood I’d been in ever since Marcella’s death now had the Shirley layer of bad past added onto it. Was I radically imagining or did life seem to be jeering under its breath to me is that all you can do, lose wives?
I shook my head against that nagging theme and while Mariah and Riley carried on a conversation with the ranger I tried to make myself concentrate on the land spreading away below our climb of road. Montana west of the Continental Divide, the end toward Idaho, always feels to me as if the continent is already bunching up to meet the Pacific Ocean. But even though this was not my preferred part of the state I had to admit that the scene of the moment was A-number-1 country. North from the buffalo preserve the Flathead Valley stretched like a green tile floor, farms and ranches out across the level earth in highly orderly fashion, while to the west the silverblue Flathead River curved back and forth broad and casual, and to the east the Mission Mountains tepeed up prettily in single long slants of slope from the valley floor to peaks a mile and a half high. Extreme, all of it, to an east side of the Divide inhabitant like me accustomed to comfortable intermediate geography of foothills and buttes and coulees and creeks. But extremely beautiful too.
The federal guy dumped us out at the top of Red Sleep where there was a trail which he said led shortly to a real good viewpoint. While he drove off to check on the whereabouts of some mountain sheep, the three of us began hoofing.
Out in the tall tan grass all around, meadowlarks caroled back and forth. Here atop Red Sleep the afternoon sunshine felt toasty without being overwhelming. I’d begun to think life with Riley could even prove bearable, if it went on like this, but I had another think coming. We were in sight of the little rocky outcrop of viewpoint when he stopped in the middle of the trail, swung around to me and asked right out of nowhere:
“What do you say, rancher? Could you get grass to grow like this on that place of yours?”
Well, hell, sure. I thought so, anyway. What was this yoyo insinuating, that I hadn’t paid any attention to the earth under me all my life? Riley was truly well-named; he could rile me faster than anybody else ever could. I mean, I saw his point about the wonderful grass of this buffalo preserve. Knee-high, thick as a lawn, it was like having a soft thicket beneath your feet. Originally this must have been the way prairie America was, before farming and ranching spread over it.
“Yeah, my place could likely be brought back to something like this,” I responded to goddamn Riley. One thing for sure, that mustache wasn’t a latch on his mouth. The ranch. Why did the SOB have to keep bringing up that tender topic? On this grass matter though, I finished answering him with “All it’d take is fantastic dollars” and indicated around us to the tremendous miles of tight ten-foot-high fence, the elaborate system of pastures, the just-so balancing of how much grazing the buffalo were allowed to do before the federal guys moved them to fresh country. Sure, you bet, with an Uncle Sam–financed setup like this I or just about anybody else above moron could raise sheep or cattle or any other known creature and still have knee-deep grass and song-birds too, but—
The but was Riley’s department. “But in the good old U. States of A., we don’t believe in spending that kind of money on anything but the defense budget, do we. The death sciences. Those are what get the fantastic dollars, hmm, Jick old buddy?”
Having delivered that, wherever it flew into the pigeonhole of his brain from, Riley spun around again and went stalking off down the trail. He all but marched over the top of Mariah where she knelt to try a shot of how a stand of foxtail was catching the sunlight—sprays of purplish green, like unearthly flame, reflecting out of the whisks of grass.
Riley, typical of him, had freshened another bruise inside of me with his skyblue mention of my ranch. What in the name of hell was I going to do with the place? I trudged along now trying to order myself, Don’t think about the ranch. Like that game that kids play on each other: don’t think about a hippopotamus, anything but a hippopotamus is okay to think about, but if you think about a hippopotamus you get a pinch, are you by any chance thinking about a hippopotamus?
I am not as zippy on a trail as I once was, but before too long I caught up with Mariah and Riley at the rock finger of viewpoint. Below, Red Sleep Mountain divided itself judiciously into two halves of a V, letting a small stream and its attending trees find their way down between. Then beyond, through the split of the V the neatly tended fields of the miniature Jocko River valley could be seen, and immediately over the Jocko, mountains and timber accumulated into long, long rising lines of horizon. By all evidence, the three of us were the only onlookers in this whole encompassing reach of planet.
Picturing that moment in the mind, it would seem a scene of thoroughest silence. But no. Warbles and trills and solo after solo of sweet sweet and wheeep wheeep and deedeedee: the air was magically busy.
None of us spoke while the songs of the birds poured undiluted. I suppose we were afraid the spate of loveliest sound would vanish if we broke it with so much as a whisper. But after a bit came the realization that the music of birds formed a natural part of this place, constant as the glorious grass that made feathered life thrive.
I take pride that while we three filled our ears, I was the one who detected the promising scatter of dark specks on the big slope to the west; at least my eyes aren’t lame. After I wordlessly pointed them out to the newspaper whizzes, those dots grew and grew to become a herd of a couple hundred buffalo. Bulls, cows, calves, by the tens and dozens, spread out in a nice graze with one of the stout pasture fences blessedly between us and them so Mariah couldn’t caper out there and invite a stampede onto herself. Of course, even this pepper pattern of a herd across an entire mountainslope amounted only to a fingernailful compared to the buffalo millions back in the last century. But I thought them quite the sight.
Mariah broke the spell. “Time for a reality check,” she levied on Riley. “So what are you going to do in your Great Buffalo Piece?”
Riley’s pen stopped tapping his notebook. “I won’t know that until I sit down and do the writing, will I.”
“Come off it, Tolstoy,” Mariah said as if telling him the time of day. “Since when don’t you have an angle to pull out of storage? Here’s-my-ever-so-clever-idea-about-buffalo, and then plug in the details.”
“Oh, it’s that christly easy, is it,” he retorted, starting to sound steamed.
Mariah sailed right on. “So, what can I best shoot to fit with your part of the piece? Buffalo, or country, or grass, or what?”
He gave her a malicious grin. “The birdsong. Get me that, that’ll do.”
For half an instant, that put me on his side. I wished they’d both can the argument or discussion or whatever kind of newspaperperson conversation this was, and let the air music stream on and on.
But Mariah had on her instructive voice now, not a good sign. “Don’t freak, Riley. All I’m asking is for some idea of what you’re going to write.”
“Buy a Sunday paper and find out.”
“How crappy are you going to be about this? Let’s just get down to work, okay?”
“I am working! At least when you’re not yapping at me.”
“Then let’s hear some of those fabulous words. What’s your buffalo angle going to be?”
“I’m telling you, I don’t know yet!”
“Tsk,” she tsked briskly. “A tiny wee bit rusty out here in the real world after all that sitting around the office dreaming up columns, are you?”
“Mariah, ring off. Shoot whatever the fuck you want and they’ll slap it on the page next to whatever the fuck I write and that’ll be that. Simplissimo.”
“Two half-assed pieces of work don’t equal one good one,” she said, all reasonableness.
“We are not going to be Siamese twins for the next four months!” he informed her. “You do your job your way and I’ll do mine mine!”
With equal beat she responded, “No! The series won’t be worth blowing your nose in if we do it that way!”
It must have been some marriage, theirs. By now I’d gone off a ways to try and not hear anything but the birds and the breeze in the grass, but I’d have had to go into the next county to tune those two out. Quite a day for the Montanian task force, so far. Newspapering is nothing I have ever done, but I have been around enough work to know when it is not going right. Here at the very start of their centennial series, Mariah and Riley both were spinning their wheels trying to get off high center.
Does time make fancy knots to entertain itself this way, as sailors did when ships were vessels of wind and rope? Cause to wonder, for a centennial started all of this of Mariah and Riley. Not this one of Montana’s statehood, of course, but a number of years ago when the town of Gros Ventre celebrated a hundred years of existence. That day Mariah was on hand in both her capacities, so to speak; as somebody who was born and raised locally, and for the Gros Ventre Weekly Gleaner as its photographer, there at the start of her career of clicking. Thus she was in natural orbit on the jampacked main street of Gros Ventre that centennial day, and it was Riley who ricocheted in—I would like to say by blind accident but there was more to it than that, as I suppose there ever is. Riley’s mother’s side of the family was from Gros Ventre originally and so it could be said he was only being a dutiful son by coming with her to the reunion. My suspicion, though, is that he was mainly fishing for something to write in his column. When was he ever not?
In any case, I was witness to the exact regrettable minute when Riley Wright hooked up with Mariah. Late in the afternoon, after the parade and the creek picnic, with everybody feeling gala and while the street was clogged with people catching up on years of news from each other, extra commotion broke out at the Medicine Lodge saloon. Young Tim Kerz, who never could handle his booze, had passed out drunk and his bot
tle buddies decided a ceremony was called for to commemorate the first casualty of the day. Scrounging up a sheet of thick plywood, they laid out Tim on it as if ready for the grave—his beer bier, Riley called it in the column he wrote—to the point, even, of folding his hands on his chest with a purple gladiolus clutched in them. Then about a dozen of the unsoberest ones began tippily pallbearing Tim out of the Medicine Lodge over their heads, the recumbent body on high like a croaked potentate. Somehow Mariah seems to sense stuff like this before it can quite happen. She had raced up into a third-story window of the old Sedgwick House hotel with a panoramic view down onto the scene by the time the plywood processional erupted out of the Medicine Lodge, singing and cussing.
And then and there I noticed the tall shouldery man with the notebook and pen, one intent eye gray and the other blue, lifting his gaze over the tableau of Tim and the tenderly held gladiolus to Mariah above there as she worked her camera.
I had skyhigh hopes for Riley Wright originally. What daddy-in-law wouldn’t? Oh, true, matters between him and Mariah had taken a couple of aggravatingly slow years to progress toward marriage. First the interval until a photographer’s job at the Montanian came open for her. Then after she moved to Missoula for that, a span when carefully nothing was said by either us or them but Marcella and I knew that Mariah and Riley were living together. On their wedding day in 1983 we were glad to have that loose situation ended. So then here Riley was, in the family. An honorary McCaskill, so to speak. In his own right a semi-famous person because of his newspaper column, although some of that fame was a grudging kind from people who yearned to give him a knuckle sandwich for what he wrote. Just for instance, a few years ago when agriculture was at its rockbottom worst and corporations got busy taking each other over and hemorrhaging jobs every time they did, Riley simply ran a list of the counties in Montana that had voted for Reagan and put at the end, How do you like him now? Or the time he wrote about a big farming operator who was plowing up thousands of acres of virgin grassland in a time of roaring crop surpluses—farming the farm program, it’s called—and then letting that broken earth sit fallow and victim to the wind, When he becomes dust himself, the earth will spit him back out.