Ride With Me, Mariah Montana

by Ivan Doig

  “Hebner,” I prompted.

  “ ‘Mr. Hebner, I understand you once worked in a logging crew, quite a number of years ago in this Montana of ours. Would you please share with our viewing audience what you did in that job?’ That way, he won’t need to say—”

  “Pigfucker,” Good Help recited before the TVing was to commence again, “is what I ain’t supposed to say on the television but just tell what that job with the pig was?” He squinted anxiously up at Tonsil Vapor, wanting to make sure he had the new ground rules straight.

  “Perfect!” Tonsil Vapor pronounced. He turned to the cameraman one more time, got one more bored nod, aimed his chin into the lens and the bright lights came on again.

  The Here-with-us-now part and so on went along fine, and I had to admit, Good Help Hebner ensconced there with the carved dark oak of the Medicine Lodge’s ancient bar behind him looked amply historical. And I could tell by his squint of concentration that he had Tonsil Vapor’s cue about his logging job clamped in mind.

  “—share with our viewing audience that experience in the woods?” Tonsil Vapor got there as smooth as salve from a new tube and held the microphone in front of Good Help’s venerable lips.

  Good Help craned forward and carefully brayed:

  “What I done was, I fucked the pig! One whole summer! Best gosh-damn job—”

  • • •

  I left the TV perpetrator staring in despair at Good Help and took my restored good humor back into the cafe. Only to be met by Althea shooing the crowd into chairs. “Oh, Jick, you’re just in time, we’re about to have the committee meeting.”

  Riley already had gone over and propped himself along the wall where he could study sideways into either the audience or our committee, dutiful nuisance that he was. Mariah meanwhile was signifying by pointing urgently to my chair at the pushed-together cafe tables where the committee members were supposed to sit that she wanted me up there for a group picture. No rest for the civic.

  On my way to my seat, though, I paused at the end of the committee table to say brightly to Amber Finletter, who had been a wonderful neighbor to us when Marcella fell sick, “How you doing, Amber?” And wordlessly got back the merest little picklepuss acknowledgment.

  Oh, horse pucky. Amber had her nose out of joint, McCaskillwise, because she figured Mariah was making a play for Shaun during that picture-taking of him and me. Jealousy has more lives than Methuselah’s cat.

  Then no sooner was I sat than I was afflicted with Arlee Zane. Arlee and I have known each other our entire lives and disliked each other that same amount of time.

  Leaning over from his chair next to mine, Arlee now hung his fat face almost into mine and slanted his eyes in the direction of Althea at her speaking stand. Grinning like a jackass eating thistles he semiwhispered, “Jick, old son, are you getting any?”

  I cast a glance of my own across the room toward Arlee’s wife Phoebe and asked in turn, “Why? Have you noticed some missing?”

  That settled the Arlee situation for a while, and I was able to direct my attention to Howard Stonesifer seated on the other side of me. “Catch me up on what’s been happening here, Howard.”

  “Shaun Finletter and Mike Sisti rounded up a flagpole,” he reported. “They went all the way across the mountains to Coram for the tree, to get one big enough to take this flag. Other than that, everybody’s just sewing”—he cast a look at my chin shrubbery—“or growing.”

  With a soft raprap raprap raprap of her gavel—would you believe, even her hammering sounded like pats—Althea was commencing to officiate.

  “The meeting will please come to order, everybody, including you, Garland Hebner.” Good Help had spied Riley at his listening post there along the wall and doubtless was creaking his way over to deliver an hour or two of autobiographical afterthought, but Althea’s injunction halted the old boy as if he’d been caught slinking into the henhouse.

  “It’s so wonderful to see so many of you being so public spirited here tonight,” Althea proceeded on. “I won’t have to go door to door around town handing out pushbrooms after all.” She smiled sweetly in saying that, but testimony could have been elicited in that audience from any number of persons who were choosing to put up with an evening of committee crap rather than risk Althea putting them in the wake of our centennial parade’s horse version.

  Under Althea’s generalship we whipped right through Howard’s minutes of the last meeting and Amber’s treasurer’s report, and when we got to the first order of business, guess whose it was.

  “We need to give some thought to our flag-raising ceremony,” Althea informed all and sundry. “It would be nicest, wouldn’t it, if we could re-enact that dawn just the way it happened a hundred years ago, when our Gros Ventre forebears flew Montana’s very first flag of statehood. But of course we don’t know what was said on that wonderful occasion.”

  The funny thing was, I did know. To the very word, I possessed the scene that ensued that exact morning of a century ago. I had heard it from Toussaint Rennie, who inevitably was on hand at the occasion. The gospel according to Toussaint was that Lila Sedgwick had officiated. Strange to think of her, a mind-clouded old woman wandering the streets of Gros Ventre conversing with the cottonwood trees when I was a youngster, as ever having been vital and civic. But there in her young years Lila and the handful of others this community was composed of in 1889 had mustered themselves and made what ceremony they could. “Way before dawn,” Toussaint’s purling voice began to recite in me again now, there, at that committee table. “Out to the flagpole, everybody. It was still dark as cats, but—”

  I had an awful moment before I could be sure Toussaint’s words weren’t streaming out through my mouth. Another spasm of the past, and this one as public as hell. It was one thing to have my memory broadcast out loud around Mariah and Riley and totally another to blab out here in front of everybody who knew me. I tried to fix an ever so interested stare on Althea as she continued to preside out loud and meanwhile clenched my own lips together so tightly I must have looked like a shut purse. But these cyclones out of yestertime into me: what was I going to do about them? I mean, when you come right down to it, just where is the dividing line between reciting what the past wants you to and speaking gibberish? Was I going to be traipsing around blabbering to the cottonwoods next?

  “A ceremony isn’t really a ceremony unless it has a speech, now is it?” Althea asked and answered simultaneously. “So, before our wonderful flag is hoisted Centennial morning, we really should have someone say a few words, don’t you all agree?”

  I wholly expected her to go into full spiel about what the speech ought to be about, and then somebody, quite possibly even me, could stick a hand up and suggest that she spout all of it again on Centennial morning and that would constitute the speech, but no, oh hell no. All Althea trilled forth next was:

  “I nominate Jick McCaskill as our speaker.”

  From the various compass points of the committee table, Howard’s hearty voice and Arlee’s malicious voice and Amber’s vindictive voice chorused: “I second the motion.”

  “Whoa, hold on a minute here,” I tried to get in, “I’m not your guy to—” but do you think Althea would hear of it?

  “Oh foo, Jick, you’re entirely too modest. If you’re stuck for what to say I’ll be more than glad to help out, you always know where to find me. Now then, all in favor of Jick McCaskill . . .”

  • • •

  “Tell me, Mariah Montana,” goddamn Riley started in, doing a syrup voice like that of TV Purvis, on our way home to the ranch. “When did you first realize your father is in the same oratorical league with Lincoln, Churchill, and Phil Donahue?”

  “Oh, I always knew he was destined for public speaking because of how he practiced on the sheep,” Mariah ever so merrily got into the spirit with a Baby Snooksy tone of her own. “He just has this wonderful talent for talking to sheep”—here she expertly made with her tongue the prrrrr prrrrr prrrrr ca
ll half-purr, half-coo, that I had taught her to coax sheep with almost as soon as she could toddle—“and so people are probably easy for him.”

  “Up yours, both of you,” I stated wearily.

  • • •

  Maybe it was the prospect of chronic aid from Althea, from then until I had to get up in front of everyone on Centennial dawn and insert my foot into my mouth. Maybe it was that I did not see my presence could cure the ranch situation any, just then; Kenny and Darleen and Helen were going to keep on being Kenny and Darleen and Helen, whether or not I hovered over them, and so I might as well wait until they had the hay up and the lambs fattened for shipping before I faced what to do with the place. Maybe it was hunch. Or its cousin curiosity, after Mariah and I emerged from the house the next morning and encountered Riley, daisyfresh from solitary sleep in the motor-home, who told her he’d already been to the cookhouse and made the phone call and it was all set, and she in turn gazed at him and then for some reason at me, before saying solemnly, “Heavy piece, Riley.”

  So, yes, the three of us applied ourselves to the road again. Mariah and I in the Bago trailed Riley and the rental Yugo to town to turn the thing in at Tilton’s garage, then I pointed the motorhome toward Choteau, as the Montanian pair had informed me that this next piece of work of theirs awaited there in the Teton River country.

  “Has this got to do with dinosaur eggs, I hope?” In that vicinity, out west of Choteau, lay Egg Mountain—no more than a bit of a bump in the prairie, really, but where whole nests laid by dinosaurs had been found, and while I can’t claim to know much more about paleontology than how to spell it, any scene where creatures of eighty million years ago hatched out their young like mammoth baby chicks sounded to me highly interesting.

  “Umm, not exactly. Here’s your turn coming up,” Mariah busily pointed out, “that sign, there where it says—”

  “Yeah, I can see that far,” I said and gave her a look. What, did she figure I’m getting so decrepit I couldn’t read the obvious roadside sign, which directed in perfectly clear lettering:

  PINE BUTTE SWAMP PRESERVE

  established 1978

  protected and maintained by

  The Nature Conservancy

  14mi. ???

  The Teton country is quite the geography. Gravelroading straight west as the Bago now was, we had in front of us the rough great wall of the Rockies where gatelike canyons on either side of Indian Head Rock let forth the twin forks of the Teton River. The floorlike plain that leads to the foot of the mountains is wet and spongy in some places, in others bone-dry, in still others common prairie. And even though I usually only remark it from a distance when I’m driving past on a Great Falls trip, Pine Butte itself seems like a neighbor to me. It and its kindred promontories make a line of landmarks between the mountains and the eastward horizon of plains—Heart Butte north near the Two Medicine River, Breed Butte of course between Noon Creek and English Creek, Pine Butte presiding here over the Teton country like a surprising pine-topped mesa, Haystack Butte south near Augusta. Somehow they remind me of lighthouses, spaced as they are along the edge of that tumult of rock that builds into the Continental Divide. Lone sentinel forms the eye seeks.

  We drove in sunny silence until I said something about how surprising it was to have a swamp out on a prairie, causing Riley to get learned and inform me that the Pine Butte swamp actually was underlain with so much bog it qualified as a fen.

  “That what you’re going to do here, some kind of an ecology piece?” I asked.

  “Sort of,” Mariah said.

  “Sounds real good to me,” I endorsed, gandering out at the companionable outline of Pine Butte drawing ever nearer and the boggy bottomland—in Montana you don’t see a fen just every day—and the summits of the Rockies gray as eternity meeting the blue August sky. This area a little bit reminded me of the Moiese buffalo range where we’d started out, nice natural country set aside, even though I knew the Pine Butte preserve wasn’t that elaborate kind of government refuge but simply a ranch before the land was passed on to the Conservancy outfit, which must have decided to be defender of the fen. I couldn’t help but be heartened, too, that the news duo at least had progressed from getting us butted by buffalo to moseying through a sweet forenoon such as this. “Great day for the race,” I chirped, even. Oh, I knew full well Mariah had heard that one a jillion times from me, but I figured maybe Riley would fall for it by asking “What race?” and then I’d get him by saying “The human race”—but huh uh, no such luck. Instead Riley busied up behind me and announced, “Okay, gang, we’ve got to start watching along the brush for the state outfit. Should be easy enough to see, there’s a crane on the truck they use to hoist the—”

  “I’ll watch out this side,” Mariah broke in on him and proceeded to peer out her window as if she’d just discovered glass is transparent.

  Dumb me. Even then I didn’t catch on until another mile or so down the road when I happened to think out loud that even though we were going to be with ecology guys we’d all need to watch a little bit out in country like this, because the Pine Butte area is the last prairie habitat of—

  The stiffening back of that daughter of mine abruptly told it.

  “Grizzlies?” I concluded in a bleat. “Has this got to do with grizzlies?”

  “Just one,” said Mariah, superearnestly gazing off across the countryside away from my stare.

  “That’s way too damn many! This isn’t going to be what I’m afraid it is, is it? Tell me it isn’t.”

  Of course neither of this pair of story-chasing maniacs would tell me any such thing and so the nasty hunch that had been crawling up the back of my neck pounced.

  “Bear moving!” I slammed on the brakes and right there in the middle of the county road swung around in my seat, as mad as I was scared—which is saying a lot—to goggle first at Mariah who ought to have known better than this and then at Riley whose goddamn phone call this morning all too clearly led into this. “Jesus H. Christ, you two! Anybody with a lick of sense doesn’t want to be within fifty miles of moving a grizzly!”

  “I reckon that’s why the job falls to us,” Riley couldn’t resist rumbling in one of his mock hero voices. “What’s got you in an uproar, Jick? The good news is you don’t have to chauffeur the bear in the Bago. The state Fish and Game guys load him into a culvert trap.”

  I didn’t give a hoot if they had portable San Quentin to haul a grizzly in, I wanted no part of it and I then and there let Mariah and Riley know exactly that. Didn’t they even read their own newspaper, for Christ’s sake? Only days ago a hiking couple in Glacier Park had encountered a sow grizzly and her two cubs, and survived the mauling only because they had the extreme guts and good sense to drop to the ground and play dead. And not all that far from where we right now sat, several—several—grizzlies lately kept getting into the geese and ducks at the Rockport Hutterite Colony until the Hutterites managed to run them off with a big tractor. The Bago, I emphasized, was no tractor.

  Which did me about as much good with those two as if I’d said it all down a gopher hole.

  Riley was mostly the one who worked on me—Mariah knew good and well how ticked off I was at her for this—and of course argument might as well have been his middle name. “The bear is already caught in a steel cable snare, the state guys will conk him out with a tranquilizer gun, and then they’ll haul him in a chunk of culvert made of high tensile aluminum he’d have to go nuclear to get out of. Where’s the problem?” he concluded, seeming genuinely puzzled.

  The rancher portion of me almost said back to him, the problem is the grizzly, you Missoula ninny.

  Instead, in spite of myself, my eyes took over from my tongue. They scrutinized the brush-lined creek as if counting up its willows like a tally with wooden matchsticks, they probed each shadowed dip of the Pine Butte fen, they leapt to every ruffle of breeze in the grass. Seeking and seeking the great furry form.

  All the while, Riley’s bewilderment was
stacking up against the silent bounds of me and Mariah, who was keeping ostentatiously occupied with her camera gear. “Gang, I don’t know what the deal is here,” the scribbler owned, “but we can’t just sit in the middle of this road watching the seasons change.”

  “Are you two going to this bear whether or not I’m along?” I managed to ask.

  Say for Riley that he did have marginally enough sense to let Mariah do the answering on that one.

  “Yes,” she said, still without quite ever looking at me. “The Fish and Game guys are waiting for us.”

  I jammed the Bago into gear and we went on down the road for, oh, maybe as much as a quarter of a mile before Riley’s bursting curiosity propelled out the remark, “Well, just speaking for myself, this is going to be something to remember, getting a free look at a grizzly, hmm?”

  When neither of us in the cab of the motorhome responded, he resorted to: “You, ah, you ever seen one before, Jick?”

  “Yeah.”

  “But up close?”

  “Close enough.” I glanced over at Mariah. Her face carefully showed nothing, but I knew she was replaying the memory, seeing it all again. Who could not? “I killed one once.”

  “The hell!” from Riley in his patented well-then-tell-me-all-about-it tone. “There on Noon Creek, you mean?”

  “In the mountains back of the ranch, yeah.” As sudden as that, the site near Flume Gulch was in my mind, as if the earth had jumped a click in its rotation and flung the fire-scarred slope, the survivor pine tree with its claw-torn bark, in through my eyes.

  Greatly as I wished he would not, Riley naturally persisted with the topic. “You run across him by accident or track him down?”

  “Neither.”

  “Then how’d you get together with Brother Griz?”

  “I baited him.”

  Strong silence from behind me.

  At last Riley said: “Did you. My dad did some of that, too, whenever he’d lose a calf. But black bear, those were. We didn’t have grizzlies in the Crazy Mountains any more.” Those last two words of his said the whole issue. Originally the West had been absolutely loaded with grizzly bears, but by now they were on the endangered species list.