Ride With Me, Mariah Montana

by Ivan Doig

  Christamighty, I hadn’t known there was even going to be any doubt about it or I for sure would have watched this part of the procedure from inside the metal walls of the motorhome.

  There was a surprising amount of business to be done to the sedated bear. Weighing it in a tarp sling and scale that the state pair rigged from the stoutest branch overhead. Checking its breathing rate every few minutes. Fastening a radio collar—surveillance to see whether this was going to be a repeat offender—around its astonishing circumference of neck. Putting salve into its eyes to keep them from drying out during this immobilization period. And of course as the biologist said, “the really fun part,” loading the thing into the culvert cage. All of us got involved in that except Mariah. For once I was thankful for her camera-mania as she dipped and dove around, snapping away at the two state guys and Riley and me huffing and puffing to insert the three-hundred-pound heap of limp grizzly into the tank-like silver trap. Every instant of that, remembering the fury exploding up that tree of twenty-five years ago, claws slashing bark into ribbons and broken branches flying, I was devoutly hoping this bear was going to stay tranquil. Sure, you bet, no question but that it was snoozing as thoroughly as drug science could make it do. Yet this creature in our hands felt hotblooded and ungodly strong, and all this time its eyes never closed.

  Heaven’s front gate could never sound more welcome than that clang of the door of the trap dropping shut when we at last had the bear bedded inside. “Nothing much to this job, hmm?” the panting Riley remarked to the biologist.

  The state men then employed their crane to lift the cage onto the flatbed truck and soundly secured it with a trucker’s large tie-down strap.

  “Well, there,” I declared, glad to be done with this bear business.

  Almost as one, Mariah and Riley looked at me as if I was getting up from supper just as the meat and potatoes were put on the table.

  Good God, how literal could they get, even if they were newspaper people. I mean, the movers had the bear all but underway. Did we need to watch every revolution of the truck’s wheels, tag along like the Welcome Wagon to the grizzly’s new home, to be able to say we’d seen bear moving?

  By Mariah and Riley’s lights, indubitably. Out our caravan proceeded to Highway 89 and then south and west down thinner and thinner roads, to a distant edge of the Bob Marshall Wilderness. As we went and went, maybe the bear was keeping his bearings but I sure as hell couldn’t have automatically found my way back to the Pine Butte country.

  Exile is the loser’s land. Others set its borders, state its terms, enforce the diminishment as only the victors know how; the outcast sniffs the cell of wilderness.

  The motorhome had been growling in low gear for what seemed hours, up and up a mountain road which had never heard of a Bago before, until at last the truck ahead swung into a sizable clearing.

  “Here’s where we tell our passenger adios,” the biologist came over to us to confirm that this at last was the release site, sounding several hundred percent more cheerful than he had all day. The idea now, he told Riley and Mariah, was to simply let the bear out of the culvert, watch it a little while to be sure the tranquilizer was wearing off okay, and allow it to go its wildwood way, up here far from tempting morsels of calf etcetera.

  He could not have been any readier than I was to say goodbye to the grizzly. The back of my neck was prickling. And though I couldn’t see into the culvert trap, I somehow utterly knew, maybe the memory of the bear I had killed superimposing itself here, that the ruff of hair on the young grizzly’s hump was standing on end, too.

  “You folks stay in your vehicle,” the biologist added, somewhat needlessly I thought, before heading back to the truck. The state pair themselves were going to be within for this finale of bear moving, for they could operate the crane from inside the cab of the truck to lift the trap door. Except for rolling her window down farther than I liked, even Mariah showed no great desire to be out there to greet the bear and instead uncapped a long lens and fitted it onto her camera.

  The remote control debarkation of the bear began, the state guys peering back through the rear window of the truck cab to start the crane hoisting the culvert door so the bear could vamoose. We waited. And waited.

  It was Mariah, scoping over there with her lens, who said it aloud. “Something’s fouled up.”

  The truck doors opened and the two bear movers stepped out, the helper carefully carrying the shotgun. Reluctantly but I suppose necessarily, I rolled my window down and craned my head out, Riley practically breathing down the back of my neck.

  “Equipment,” the biologist bitterly called over to us as if it was his personal malady. “Murphy’s Law seems to have caught up with the crane—probably some six-bit part gave out. This won’t be as pretty but we can do the release process manually.”

  The pair of men climbed onto the flatbed of the truck. The shotgun guard stationed himself back by the truck cab while the biologist carefully climbed atop the trap and began the gruntwork of lifting the aluminum door up out of the slotted sides.

  From the trap there was the sound of great weight shifting as the grizzly adjusted to the fact of freedom out there beyond the mouth of daylight. The big broad head poked into sight, then the shoulders with the furred hump atop them. I breathed with relief that we were about to be through with that haunting passenger.

  The bear gathered itself to jump down to the ground but at the same time aggressively bit at the edge of the trap door above it. By reflex the biologist’s hand holding that edge of the door jerked away.

  The grizzly was all but out of the trap when the heavy door slammed down on its tailbone.

  As instantly as the grizzly hit the ground it whirled against what it took to be attack, snarling, searching. The men on the truck froze, not to give the bear any motion to lunge at.

  With suddenness again, the bear reared up on its hind legs to sense the surroundings. It saw the man on top of the culvert trap.

  The grizzly dropped and charged, trying to climb the side of the truck to the men.

  “Don’t, bear!” the biologist cried out.

  BWOOMWOOM, the rapid-fire of the shotgun blasted, and within the ringing in my ears I could hear the deep peals of echo diminish out over the mountainside.

  Both shotgun slugs hit the grizzly in the chest. Stopping-power, the human tribe calls such large calibre ballistics, and it stopped the life of the bear the instant the twin bolts of lead tore into his heart and lungs. The bear slumped sideways, crumpled, and lay there in the clearing. Above the sudden carcass the two bear men stood rooted for a long moment. For one or maybe both of them, the shotgun had bought life instead of death by mauling.

  Of all of Mariah’s pictures of that day, here was the one that joined into Riley’s words.

  But as the shotgunner still held the gun pointing toward the grizzly, these survivors, too, seemed as lifeless as the furred victim.

  Normally I do not consider myself easy to spook. But that bear episode, close cousin to the outcome of my own grizzly encounter at Noon Creek, jittered me considerably. All this that was marching around in review in my head and then, kazingo, storming out in fresh form in the pieces Mariah and Riley found to do: I couldn’t keep the thought from regularly crossing my mind—was I somehow an accomplice to occurrences? What was it that had hold of me, to make memory as intense as the experiences themselves? Maybe I was given somebody else’s share of imagination on top of my own, yet tell me how to keep matters from entering my mind when they insist on coming in. Don’t think I didn’t try, day and night. But I could not get over wondering how contagious the past is.

  Nor was I the only one with a mind too busy. The first several nights after the grizzly episode, Riley was as restless in bed beside me as if he was on a rotisserie. I laid there next to him as he sloshed around, wondering why I was such a glutton for punishment, until I just could not take it any longer and would give him a poke and call him a choice name, which might settle
him down for maybe half a minute. Mariah was the opposite case on her couch at the other end of the Bago; too little movement could be heard from her, no regular breathing or other rhythms of sleep, and so I knew she was stark awake and seeing her photos of that Pine Butte day over and over. And if I was this well informed on the night patterns of those two I wasn’t exactly peacefully slumbering myself, was I.

  The day the Montanian duo decided to try their luck in the High Line country was one of those newmade ones after a night of rain. At the Hill 57 RV Park in Great Falls a lightning storm had crackled through about ten o’clock the night before, white sheets of light followed by a session of stiff windgusts that made me wonder why recreational vehicle parks are always in groves of big old brittle cottonwood trees, then the steady drum of rain on the motorhome roof which at last escorted me, and for all I knew Mariah and Riley as well, off to sleep. Out around us now as we drove north up Interstate 15 were wet grain-fields and nervous farmers. After deathly drought the previous year, they finally had a decent crop and now August was turning so rainy they couldn’t get machinery into those fields to do the round dance of harvest.

  Maybe the rain-induced sleep was a tonic, maybe the road hymn of the tires was comfortably taking me over, but I felt a little bolstered this morning. Interested in the freeway community of traffic as cars and trucks and other rigs walloped along past the Bago. A venerable Chrysler LeBaron slid by with pots of little cactus in the hothouse sunshine of its rear window. A pickup pulling a horse trailer whipped past, bumper sticker saying CALF ROPERS DO IT IN FRONT OF THEIR HORSES.

  Beyond the Valier turnoff the freeway traffic thinned away and I put our own pedal to the metal. I had the rig rolling right along at a generous sixty-five—which is the spot on the speedometer just beyond seventy—when I noticed a speck in the sideview mirror. Steadily and promptly it grew into a motorcycle, one of those sizable chromed-up ones with handlebars like longhorns. The rider rode leaning back, arms half-spread as if resting his elbows on the wind. That would be highly interesting, I thought, to cross the country that wide-open way, hurtling along directly on top of an engine, like saddling a peal of thunder and letting it whirl you over the land.

  This skein of thought took my eyes off the sideview mirror longer than I realized, because when I glanced there again the motorcycle was gone. Vanishimo. Which puzzled me because I couldn’t account for any exit where the thunder rider could have left the freeway.

  Then there was a knocking on the Bago’s door beside me.

  I about rocketed up through the roof. In that erect new posture, though, I could see that the motorcyclist was right there alongside the front wheel of the Bago, directly under the side mirror. Kind of a wind-mussed guy, as I suppose was to be expected, he had an unlit cigarette in his mouth. Taking one hand off the handlebars he indicated toward the cig with a pointing forefinger.

  Mariah had been catnapping in the passenger seat until the knock knock knock on my door brought her eyes open wide. Riley, dinking around on his laptop back at the nook table where he couldn’t see what was happening, assumed the noise was the doing of one of us and figured he was being funny by asking, “Who wants in?”

  “Guy on a motorcycle here,” I reported, oh so carefully keeping the Bago at a constant speed and not letting it wander sideways into the visiting cyclist. One nudge from the motorhome and he’d be greasing a mile of Interstate 15 with his brains. “I guess maybe he wants a light for his cigarette.”

  Mariah scrambled out of the passenger seat, camera already up and aimed down across me at the motorcyclist while Riley yelped out, “Holy Christ, Mariah, the photo chance of a lifetime! A guy lighting a match in a seventy-mile-an-hour wind! The BB’ll be so fucking proud of us he’ll put us up for a Pulitzer! Get ready to shoot when I hand this nut a matchbook, okay?!”

  “Riley, get stuffed,” Mariah told him but only in an automatic way. She took time out from her clicking—the motorcyclist with his cigarette cocked expectantly was frowning in at us like he wondered what was taking so long—to reach down to the dashboard and shove in the cigarette lighter. “But Jick,” Mariah went on as she clapped the camera back up to her eye, “you really ought to tell him it’s a bad habit.”

  Whether she meant the smoking or pulling up companionably alongside rapidly moving large vehicles I am still not clear. Anyway, I rolled down the window and when the lighter popped out ready, I gingerly reached across and then handed it down into the windstream in the direction of the motorcyclist. His fingers clasped it from mine, then in a moment returned it. Satisfactorily lit, he veered away from the side of the Bago, waved thanks, and drew rapidly away down the gray thread of the freeway. As we watched him zoom toward the horizon, Riley said: “Is this a great country, or what.”

  • • •

  Soon we were crossing the clear water of the Marias, literally Mariah’s river. Oh, the name Maria’s applied by Meriwether Lewis in 1805 to honor a lady of his acquaintance did not have the h on the end but it’s said the same, the lovely lilting rye rising there in the middle. Mid-bridge of this lanky river that gathered water from the snows of the Continental Divide and looped it across the plains into the Missouri, I sneaked a quick look to the passenger seat and the firehaired daughter there. Whatever Marcella and I expected, our Mariah definitely had a hue all her own.

  A quick handful of miles beyond the Marias put us at our noontime destination. To me the town of Shelby is the start of the High Line country, the land by now leveling eastward after all its geographical stairsteps down from the Divide seventy miles to the west. To look at, Shelby isn’t particularly surprising, yet I always think of it as a place with more ambition than its situation warrants. Even now the town is best known for having put up a fat guarantee to lure the heavyweight championship fight between Jack Dempsey and Tommy Gibbons in 1923. Shelby took a bath in red ink but the fight gave it something to talk about ever since. Indeed, when Mariah and Riley and I stashed the Bago and went in the Sweetgrass Cafe for lunch, a lifesize blowup of Dempsey with his mitts up, maybe demanding his money, challenged us from the wall.

  “There you go,” I found myself saying as we awaited our grilled cheese sandwiches. “How about a piece on that fight?”

  “Mmm,” was all that drew from Mariah.

  “Naw,” came the instant verdict from Riley, although he did turn and contemplate the businesslike scowl of the pugilist. “The Manassas Mauler or the Molasses Wallower or whatever he was, Dempsey’s been written about by the ton.”

  Mariah and I had the thought at the same instant. Riley must have wondered what sudden phase of the moon had the two of us grinning sappily at each other.

  Heritage demanded that the family bywords be said in a woman’s voice, and so Mariah tossed the hair out of her eyes and cocked her head around to deliver to Riley: “What about The Other Man.”

  “The other man?” Riley blinked back and forth between Mariah and me. “Who, Gibbons?” He quit blinking as the idea began to sink in. “Gibbons. What about him?”

  Over lunch Mariah told him the tale just as I had told it to her, just as I had heard it from my mother.

  When she’d finished, Riley expelled:

  “Jesus H. Christ, that’s a better idea for a piece than we’ve been able to think up all week! Maybe we ought to buy a Ouija board and let your grandmother do this whole series.”

  He glanced from one to the other of us as though deciding whether to say something more. And at last said it, quite quietly. “I wish Granda would have ever let me interview her.”

  Surprising to hear him speak her nickname within our family, as if he and Mariah still were married. As if Beth McCaskill still were alive.

  Then the two of them headed off to the Marias Museum to get going on Gibbons.

  The morning of the day he had spent his life fighting to get to, Tommy Gibbons disappeared.

  He slipped out of the hotel at dawn while his wife and children still slept and walked up onto the treeless bench-land a
bove Shelby. The town was encased by its land, the rimming benchlands as straight and parallel as the railroad steel below. But here above the boomtown splatter of hasty buildings and tents and Pullman cars, another view awaited: the Sweetgrass Hills, five magical dunes of earth swooping up out of that ledger-straight northern horizon.

  Equally unlikely, the forty-thousand-seat arena of fresh lumber sprawled below Gibbons as he roamed the ridgeline, trudging and pausing, trudging and pausing. Shelby was losing its shirt on promotion of the fight, yet its dreamday of making this oil-sopped little town known to the world was about to actually happen. A matter of hours from now Jack Dempsey would arrive on his royal train from Great Falls. Dempsey had taken the heavyweight championship of the world four years ago to the day, on another July Fourth, by pounding Willard senseless in three rounds. Two Julys ago, Dempsey the champion had demolished Carpentier in four rounds the way a butcher uses a cleaver on a side of beef.

  Tommy Gibbons was a thirty-two-year-old journeyman boxer. It had taken him eighty-eight fights to reach today. His distinction was that he had never been knocked out, never even knocked down. This afternoon he faced fifteen rounds in that prairie arena against the hugely favored Dempsey.

  Gibbons went back down the slope into Shelby. He said something to his alarmed family and entourage about not being able to sleep and having just wanted a walk. Then he sat down to breakfast.

  She’d have eaten willows, my mother, in preference to being interviewed by Riley Wright. I’d had to talk like a good fellow even to get her to let the young new Gros Ventre Gleaner editor do his piece on her eighty-fourth birthday—the last of her life, it proved to be—about the fact that she was born, with utmost inappropriateness, on April Fool’s Day of 1900. No sooner had the Gleaner man gone out the door than she let me know she was chalking him onto the roster of the world’s fools. She said severely, “I wonder why that young man didn’t ask me about The Shelby Fight.”