by Ivan Doig
But when Riley wasn’t armed with ink, he truly looked like a prime son-in-law. Oh sure, even in his nonwriting mode, any moment of the day or night he was capable of being a smart aleck. But better that than a dumb one, I always figured. No, exactly because Riley was the kind of sassypants he was toward life, his natural Rileyness, call it, I made my offer. An afternoon in April three years ago, in the middle of lambing time, this was. He and I were sharing coffee from my thermos outside along the sunny south wall of the lambing shed. Bold black and white of a magpie strutted the top of a panel gate, and Noon Creek rippled and lulled, but otherwise just we two. A few minutes earlier when I’d seen Mariah and Riley arrive in his old gunboat Buick I momentarily thought it interesting that after we waved hello mutually, he headed straight down here to the shed while she went into the house to Marcella. Nothing major suggested itself from that, however, and so far as I knew, father- and son-in-law were sipping beanjuice companionably amid the finest of scenery. Spring can be an awful flop in the Two Medicine country. Weeks of mud, every step outdoors taken in overshoes weighted with the stuff. Weather too warm for a winter coat but cool enough to chill you into a cold. Then out pops a day such as this to make up for it all. Just west of us, seemingly almost within touch, the midair skyline of the Rockies yet had white tips of winter, sun-caught snow on the peak of Phantom Woman Mountain and the long level rimrock of Jericho Reef, but spring green colored all the country between us and the foot of the mountains—the foothill ridges where my lamb bunches were scattered, the alfalfa meadows pocketed away in the willow bends of Noon Creek, the arcing slope of Breed Butte between our ranch and those of English Creek, green all.
I recall that Riley looked a little peaked, like he was in need of a fresh turn of season right that moment. But then the stuff he and Mariah dealt with in their news life would make anybody ready for some recuperation by week’s end, wouldn’t it: a schoolbus wreck, or a guy getting high on something and blowing his wife and kids away with a deer rifle—Christ only knew what messes he and she just averagely had to write about and take pictures of, any given week. So Riley’s expression of having been through the wringer bolstered my decision to speak my piece now. I mean, when better? Any number of times he had been heard to grouse about newspaper life and how he ought to just chuck it and go off and write the book he wanted to do about Montana, and equally often Mariah would wish out loud that she could do her own idea of photography instead of the Montanian’s, so I honestly and utterly believed that Marcella and I were handing them their chance.
The ranch was theirs to have, I told Riley on that pivotal day. Marce and I wanted the place to be his and Mariah’s as soon as they liked. Maybe not the biggest ranch there ever was, but every acre of it financially clear and aboveboard; perfectly decent grazing land, a couple of sections of it still the original native prairie grasses that were getting to be rare, plus the new summer range we’d just bought on the North Fork of English Creek; every bit of it strongly fenced, which was needed when you neighbored onto a grass-sneaking cow outfit such as the Double W; irrigation ditches already installed to coax maximum hay from those creekside meadows; haying equipment that maybe was a little old but at least was paid for; decent enough sheepshed and other outbuildings, brand new house. Here it all sat for the taking, and at their ideal age, old enough to mostly know what they were doing and young enough that they still had the elbowgrease to do it, Riley and Mariah could run this place with a dab of hired help and still find time to work on their own words and photos, couldn’t they? A golden chance for the two of them to try, at the very least.
But do you think goddamn Riley would see it that way?
“Jick, I can’t.”
“Aw, sure you can. I know this isn’t your country up here”—Riley was originally off a ranch down in the southern part of the state, on the Shields River near the Crazy Mountains; the father in the family died some years ago but the Wright cattle outfit still was in operation, run by Riley’s brother—“but the Two has got some things to recommend it, now doesn’t it?” I held my thermos cup out in a salute to the royal Rockies and the sheep-specked foothills and the fluid path of Noon Creek. I don’t care who you are, you cannot doubt the earth’s promise on such a spring day.
“If it’s the sheep that’re bothering you, that’s fixable,” I splurged on. “This place has put up with cattle before.” And for that matter horses, the original livestock my grandfather Isaac Reese brought onto this Noon Creek grass almost a hundred years before; and hoofless commodities such as hay, those beautiful irrigated meadows created by my uncle Pete Reese before he passed the ranch to me. I am on record as having declared that in order to keep the ranch going I would even resort to dude ranching, although as the joke has it I still don’t see why they’re worth fattening. In short, three generations of us had contrived, and every once in a while maybe even connived, to keep this Noon Creek ranch alive, and all the logic in me said Riley was the purely obvious next candidate.
“It’s not the sheep.”
“Well, okay, the money then,” I hurried to assure him. “That’s no big deal either. Marce and I have hashed it over a lot and we figure we can all but give you two the place. We’ll need to take out enough to buy some kind of house in town, but hell, the way things are in Gros Ventre these days, that can’t cost—”
“Money either,” Riley cut me off. He had a pale expression on him like he’d just learned he was a stepchild. Pushing away from the warm wall of the shed, he turned toward me as if the next had to be said directly. “You’re a contradiction in terms, Jick. A Scotchman too generous for his own good.”
“In this case, I got my reasons,” I said while trying mightily to think what was the unseen problem here. It’s not every day a guy turns down a functioning ranch.
Riley flung the cold remains of his coffee, almost the cupful, to the ground. “You really want to hear some advice about this place?”
“Yeah, sure, I guess.”
“Sell it to the Double Dub,” he stated.
I felt as if I’d been slugged behind the ear.
Offer after offer had been made to me by Wendell Williamson when he was alive and snapping up smaller ranches everywhere to the east of me into his Double W holdings; the Gobble Gobble You is the nickname that own-everything penchant so rightly earned for the Williamson outfit. The same appetite in my direction was being continued as WW, Incorporated, part of a big land conglomerate back east, now that the Double W and the rest of the lower Noon Creek valley with it was theirs, courtesy of a buyout of the Williamson heirs. Every one of those offers I had always told Williamson and the corporaiders to go stuff.
“Jesus, Riley! That’s what I’ve spent the majority of my life trying not to do!”
“Jick, get out while you can. Ranchers like you aren’t going to have a prayer. The pricks running this country are tossing you guys to the big boys like flakes of hay to the elephants.”
I still didn’t tumble. “I know I’m pretty close to being history, but that’s just exactly why the place ought to go to somebody younger like you,” I argued back to him. “You and Mariah could have quite a setup here, and the Double Dub and the rest of the world go chase their tails. Why the hell won’t you give it a try, at least?”
He and I stood staring at each other as if trying to get through to each other from different languages.
“Jick,” Riley blurted it, “Mariah and I are splitting up.”
Whatever is the biggest size of fool, that was me, there in the spring sunshine of the ranch I had just tried to give him, as Riley dropped the end of their marriage on me.
I turned away from him toward the mountains, my eyes stinging. By God, at least I would not bawl in front of this person.
• • •
Three years that had been now, since everything went crash. And the memory of it festered just as painfully even yet, here on Red Sleep Mountain.
“What, you want to give the BB the satisfaction of telling us
he knew all along we couldn’t manage to team up for this?” Mariah’s latest interrogation of her fellow employee pierced across the grass to me.
Riley delivered in turn, “If the choice is one honeybucket-load of ‘I told you so’ from the BB or four months of this kind of crap from you—”
Just then the federal guy beeped the horn of his van, signal for our ride back down the mountain with him. Off we trooped to the trailhead, each of those two in their separate mads and me perturbed at them both. Was this what they called getting the job done, throwing snits?
Back at the Winnebago, silence now as sourly thick as their argument had been, I decided to use the chance to fill the air with what was on my mind.
“Too bad you two weren’t hatched yet when there were people around who had really seen some buffalo.”
As fresh as ever to me were those tales from Toussaint Rennie when I was but a shavetail kid, fourteen or fifteen years old, of having viewed buffalo in their original thousands and thousands when he himself alit in Montana as a youngster. “Before Custer,” as Toussaint dated it, a chuckle chasing his words out his crinkled tan face. “Before those Indians gave Georgie his haircut, Jick. I was like you, young. My family came in from Dakota. We saw the end of it, do you know. Buffalo, then no buffalo.”
“Yeah,” I kept on remorselessly as I drove toward the original dozen dark grazers we’d encountered, who by now had drifted around a corner putting the high fence between us and any more possible butting of the Bago, “Toussaint said the Two Medicine country was absolutely buffalo heaven at first.” I guess I was pouring it on a little, dwelling on Toussaint and what a sight the buffalo were to his fresh eyes, but damn it all, I did feel justifiably ticked off about having been enlisted into this big centennial journey that had petered out here in its first day.
Mariah eyed me severely from the passenger seat as if about to say something, thought better of it, then resumed a fixed gaze out the window. Behind her on the sidecouch where he was staring into his notebook as if it was in Persian, Riley stirred a little. “Geography time, class,” he announced in a singsong schoolma’am voice. Then in his ordinary annoying one: “If this peerless pioneer of yours came from Dakota Territory, how come he was called Tucson?”
“That was the way it was pronounced, but spelled T-O-U-S-S-A-I-N-T,” I took pleasure in setting him straight. “Nobody could ever get it out of him just what he was, but maybe French Cree. He’s buried under a Cree cross up home, anyway.”
“Métis,” said Riley.
I glanced at him from the corner of my eye. The sonofagun did know some things. The Métis were Canadian French Crees who came to grief in 1885 when the Riel rebellion in Manitoba and Saskatchewan was put down and their leader, Louis Riel, was hung. Out of that episode, several Métis families fled south across the border into our Two Medicine country. But as I started to point out to Riley in case he thought he knew more than he did, “Yeah, but you see, by Riel’s time Toussaint already had been in the Two—”
“Your guy Toussaint,” Riley butted in on me. “How did he talk?”
“What the hell do you mean, how did he talk? Like any of the rest of us.”
“Jick, I bet if you think about it, he didn’t.” Quick as this, Riley was in his persuading mode. “Do something for me a minute. Pretend you’re him, tell me what Toussaint told you about the buffalo in just the words he said.”
I gave the scribbler an X-raying look now. Which did everloving Riley want, a driver or somebody to play Let’s Pretend?
“Stop! Right here!”
Mariah’s urgent shout made me slam on the brakes, at the same time wildly goggling around and trying to brace myself for whatever national disaster this was.
After the scrushing noise of tires stopping too fast on gravel, in drifted the fluting notes of a meadowlark, answered at once by Mariah’s quick click.
Daughter of my own loins notwithstanding, I could have throttled her. Here I figured the Winnebago was on fire or some such and she’d only wanted a picture stop.
I blew out the breath I’d been holding and with the last patience in me sat and waited for Hurricane Mariah to climb out and trigger off a bunch more shots at whatever she’d spied, but no. Our dust hadn’t even caught up with us before she announced, “Okay,” meaning drive on.
Meanwhile Riley wasn’t paying her and our emergency landing any attention at all, but was back at me about how Toussaint talked. “Just in the way he said it, try to tell that story of him seeing those buffalo, hmm? No, wait.” He scrabbled around, swapping his notebook and pen for his laptop computer. “From your lips to those of the Montanian’s readers, Jick. Ready?”
My God, life with these people was herky-jerky.
It is true that I have always been able to remember. I could all but see Toussaint Rennie of fifty years before, potbellied and old as eternity, by profession the ditch rider of the Blackfeet Reservation’s Two Medicine irrigation project and by avid avocation the most reliable conductor in the Two country’s moccasin telegraph of lore and tale. Could all but hear as real as the meadowlark’s notes the Toussaint chuckle at life.
“ ‘I was young then, I wanted to see,’ ” I began, to the pucka pucka accompaniment of Riley typing or whatever it’s called these days. Mariah for a change quit fiddling with her camera and just listened. The sentences surprised me with their readiness, as if I was being told word by word right then instead of all those decades ago when Toussaint was yet alive. As if the telling was not at my own instigation. “ ‘When it came the season to hunt, I rode to the Sweetgrass Hills. From up there, the prairie looked burnt. Dark with buffalo, here,
there, everywhere. It was the last time. Nobody knew so, but it was. The buffalo were so many, the tribes left each other alone. No fighting. Each stayed in place, around the buffalo. Gros Ventres and Assiniboines at the northeast. Piegans at the west. Crees at the north. Flatheads at the south. For seven days, there was hunting. The herd broke apart in the hunting. I rode west, home, with the Piegans. They drove buffalo over the cliffs, there at the Two Medicine River. That, now. That was something to see.”
It was not seen again, by Toussaint’s young eyes or any others. Killed for their hides or killed off by disease caught from cattle, the buffalo in their millions fell and fell as the cutting edges of the American frontier swathed westward into them. That last herd, in the last west called Montana, was followed by summers of scant and scattered buffalo, like crumbs after a banquet. Then came the Starvation Winter of 1883, hundreds of the Piegan Blackfeet dying of deprivation and smallpox in their creekside camps. A hunting society vanished there in the continent-wide shadow of a juggernaut society.
Say the slaughter of the buffalo, then, for what it was: they were land whales, and when they were gone our sea of life was less rich. The herds that took their place were manmade—ranch aggregates of cattle, sheep, horses—and to this day they do not fit the earth called Montana the way the buffalo did. In the words of the old man the color of leather:
“Those Indians, they said the buffalo best. They said, when the buffalo were all here the country looked like one robe.”
This buffalo stuff of Riley’s when it showed up in the Montanian, I read with definite mixed emotions.
I was pretty sure Toussaint would have gotten a chuckle out of seeing his words in the world, outliving him. That about the manmade herds, though. What, did goddamn Riley think I ought to have been in the buffalo business instead of the sheep business all these years? And Pete Reese before me? And my McCaskill grandfather, who withdrew us from Scotland and deposited us in Montana, before Pete? I mean, you come into life and livelihood with some terms set, don’t you? The Two Medicine country already was swept clear of buffalo and thick with sheep and other livestock by the time I came along. So why did I feel the prod of Riley’s story?
And, yes, of Mariah’s photo along with. That one she’d shot, sudden as a fingersnap, out the window of the motorhome in our slam-on stop while Riley w
as trying to persuade me to Toussaintize. A high thick fencepost of the buffalo range enclosure, a meadowlark atop. The beautiful black V dickey against his yellow chest, his beak open to the maximum, singing for all he was worth. Singing out of the page to the onlooker. And under and behind the songbird, within the fence enclosing that wonderful restored grass, dark hazes of form which the eye took the merest moment to recognize as buffalo, dim but powerful, indistinct but unmistakable.
• • •
The next day after Moiese the famous newspaper pair had me buzz us back down the highway to Missoula and keep right on going—when I asked if they wanted to stop at the Montanian for anything, Mariah and Riley both looked at me as if I’d proposed Russian roulette—south through the Bitterroot Valley. Well, okay, fine; as we drove along beside its lofty namesake mountains and their attendant canyons, even I could see that here was a piece of country well worth shooting and writing about, fertile valley with ranches and residential areas nervously crowding each other for possession of it, and any number of times in our Bitterroot route I figured my passengers would want to pull over and start picture-taking and scribbling in earnest.
Wrong a hundred percent. “Old news,” Mariah and Riley chorused when at last I politely inquired whether they were ever going to get their butts into gear at chronicling the Bitterroot country’s highly interesting rancho de la suburbia aspect. Old news? If I was translating right, the Bitterroot and the way it was populating was just too easy a story for these two. I couldn’t help but think to myself, what kind of line of work was this story stuff, that it was hard to get anything done because it was too easy to bother with?
The next thing I knew, the Bago and we in it were across Chief Joseph Pass and over into the Big Hole. Well, okay, etcetera again. Now here was a part of Montana I had always hungered to see. The Big Hole, which is actually a high basin so closely ringed with mountains that it seems like a sudden grassy crater, has a reputation as a hay heaven and in fact the ranch crews were putting up that commodity fast and furious as we drove past hayfield after hayfield where beaverslide stackers, big wooden ramplike apparatuses which elevated the loads and dropped them like green avalanches onto the tops of haystacks, were studiously in action. Blindfolded, I could have told you what was going on just from the everywhere smell of new hay. You don’t ordinarily see haymaking of that old sort any more, and I’d like to have pulled the motorhome over onto the side of the road and watched the scene of the Big Hole for a week steady—the new haystacks like hundreds of giant fresh loaves of bread, the jackstay fences marching their long XXXXXX lines of crossed posts between the fields, the timbered mountains like a decorated bowl rim around it all.