English Creek

by Ivan Doig

  We hooted over that. For the first time all day my father didn’t look as if he’d eaten nails for breakfast.

  “Anyway,” Dode assured us, “Alec’ll pretty soon figure out there are other people to work for in the world than Wendell goddamn Williamson. Life is wide, there’s room to take a new run at it.”

  My father wagged his head as if he hoped so but was dubious. “How about you, you see a nickel in sight anywhere this year?” So now it was Dode’s turn to report, and my father just as keenly welcomed in his information that down on the Musselshell a wool consignment of thirty thousand fleeces had gone for twenty-two cents a pound, highest in years, encouragement that could “goddamn near make a man think about staying in the sheep business,” and that Dode himself didn’t intend to shear until around the end of the month “unless the weather turns christly hot,” and that—

  I put myself against a tree and enjoyed the sight and sound of the two of them. All the English Creek sheepmen and my father generally got along like hand and glove, but Dode was special beyond that. I suppose it could be said that he and my father were out of the same bin. At least it doesn’t stretch my imagination much to think that if circumstances had changed sides when the pair of them were young, it now could have been Dode standing there in the employ of the U.S. Forest Service and my father in possession of a sheep ranch. Their friendship actually went back to before either of them had what could be called a career, to when they both were bronc punks, youngsters riding in the Egans’ big round corral at Noon Creek every summer Sunday. My father loved to tell how Dode, who could be a snazzy dresser whenever there was any occasion, would show up to do his bronc-riding in a fancy pair of corduroy pants with leather trim. “To look at him, it was hard to know how much was Dode and how much was dude. But he was the best damn rider you’d ever see, too.”

  By this time of afternoon a few clouds had concocted themselves above the crest of the mountains and were drifting one after another out over the foothills below us. Small fleecy puffs, the kind which during the dry years made people joke in a disgusted way, “Those are empties from Seattle going over.” This fine green year it did not matter that they weren’t rainbringers, and with the backdrop of my father and Dode’s conversation I lost myself in watching each cloud shadow cover a hill or a portion of a ridgeline and then flow down across the coulee toward the next, as if the shadow was a slow mock flood sent by the cloud.

  “I hear nature calling,” Dode now was excusing himself. He headed off not toward the timber, though, but to a rock outcropping about forty yards away, roughly as big and high as a one-story house. When Dode climbed up onto that I figured I had misunderstood his mission; he evidently was clambering up there to look along the mountain and check on Pat’s progress with the sheep.

  But no, he proceeded to do that and the other too, gazing off up the mountain slope as he unbuttoned and peed.

  Do you know, even as I say this I again see Dode in every particular. His left hand resting on his hip and the arm and elbow kinked out like the handle on a coffee cup. His hat tilted back at an inquiring angle. He looked composed as a statue up there, if you can imagine stone spraddled out in commemoration of that particular human function.

  My father and I grinned until our faces almost split. “There is only one Dode,” he said. Then he cupped his hands and called out in a concerned tone: “Dode, I hope you’ve got a good foothold up there. Because you sure don’t have all that much of a handhold.”

  • • •

  By the time Dode declared he had to head down the mountain toward home, pronto, or face consequences from Midge, I actually was almost in the mood that a counting trip deserved. For I knew that traveling to tomorrow’s sheep, those of Walter Kyle and Fritz Hahn, would take us up onto Roman Reef, always topnotch country, and after that would come the interesting prospect of the new Billy Peak lookout tower. It had not escaped me either that on our way to that pair of attractions we would spend tonight at a camping spot along the North Fork under Rooster Mountain, which my father and I—and, yes, Alec in years past—considered our favorite in the entire Two. Flume Gulch, the locale was called, because an odd high gully with steep sides veered in from the south and poured a trickle of water down the gorge wall into the North Fork. If you had to walk any of that Flume Gulch side of the creek, you would declare the terrain had tried to stand itself on end and prop itself up with thick timber and a crisscross of windfalls. But go on the opposite side of the creek and up onto the facing and equally steep slope of Rooster Mountain and you would turn around and say you’d never been in a grassier mountain meadow. That is the pattern the seasons make in this part of the Two, a north-facing slope bursting with trees and brush because snow stays longest there and provides moisture, while a south-facing slope is timberless but grassy because of all the sun it gets. Anyway, wild and tumbled country, Flume Gulch, but as pretty as you could ask for.

  By just before dusk my father and I were there, and Mouse and Pony and Homer were unsaddled and tethered on the good grass of the Rooster Mountain slope, and camp was established.

  “You know where supper is,” my father advised. By which he meant that it was in the creek, waiting to be caught.

  This far up the North Fork, English Creek didn’t amount to much. Most places you could cross it in a running jump. But the stream was headed down out of the mountains in a hurry and so had some pretty riffles and every now and again a pool like a big wide stairstep of glass. If fish weren’t in one of those waters, they were in the other.

  Each of us took his hat off and unwound the fishline and hook wrapped around the hatband. On our way up, we had cut a pair of willows of decent length and now notched the wood about an inch from the small end, tied each fishline snug into each notch so it couldn’t pull off, and were ready to talk business with those fish.

  “Hide behind a tree to bait your hook,” my father warned with an almost straight face, “or they’ll swarm right out of the water after you.”

  My father still had a reputation in the Forest Service from the time some Region One headquarters muckymuck who was quite a dry-fly fisherman asked him what these English Creek trout took best. Those guys of course have a whole catechism of hackles and muddlers and goofus bugs and stone flies and nymphs and midges. “Chicken guts,” my father informed him.

  We didn’t happen to have any of those along with us, but just before leaving home we’d gone to the old haystack bottom near the barn and dug ourselves each a tobacco can of angleworms. Why in holy hell anyone thinks a fish would prefer a dab of hair to something as plump as a stack-bottom worm I never have understood the reasoning of.

  The fish in fact began to prove that, right then. I do make the concession to sportsmanship that I’ll fish a riffle once in a while, even though it demands some attention to casting instead of just plunking into the stream, and so it pleased me a little that in the next half hour or so I pulled my ten fish out of bumpy water, while at the pool he’d chosen to work over my father still was short of his supper quota.

  “I can about taste that milkshake,” I warned him as I headed downstream a little to clean my catch. Theoretically there was a standing bet in our family, that anybody who fished and didn’t catch ten owed the others a milkshake. My father had thought this up some summers ago to interest Alec, who didn’t care anything for fishing but always was keen to compete. But after the tally mounted through the years to where Alec owed my father and me eight milkshakes each, during last year’s counting trip Alec declared himself out and left the fishing to us. And the two of us were currently even-stephen, each having failed to hook ten just once, all of last summer.

  “I’m just corraling them first,” my father explained as he dabbed a fresh worm to the pool. “What I intend is to get fish so thick in here they’ll run into each other and knock theirselves out.”

  The fish must have heard and taken pity, because by the time I’d gutted mine here he came with his on a willow stringer.

  “
What?” I inquired as innocently as I could manage. “Did you decide to forfeit?”

  “Like hell, mister. Ten brookies, right before your very eyes. Since you’re so advanced in all this, go dig out the frying pan.”

  Even yet I could live and thrive on that Flume Gulch meal procedure: fry up both catches of fish, eat as many for supper as we could hold, resume on the rest at breakfast. Those little brookies, Eastern brook trout about eight inches long, are among the best eating there can be. You begin to taste them as quick as they hit the frying pan and go into their curl. Brown them up and take them in your fingers and eat them like corn on the cob, and you wish you had the capacity for a hundred of them.

  When we’d devoured four or so brookies apiece we slowed down enough to share out a can of pork and beans and some buttered slices of my mother’s bread, then resumed on the last stint of our fish supper.

  “That hold you?” my father asked when we each had made seven or eight trout vanish.

  I bobbed that I guessed it would, and while he went to the creek to rinse off our tin plates and scour the frying pan with gravel, I set to work composing his day’s diary entry.

  That the U.S. Forest Service wanted to know, in writing, what he’d done with his day constituted my father’s single most chronic bother about being a ranger. Early on, someone told him the story of another rider-turned-ranger down on the Shoshone National Forest in Wyoming. “Trimmed my horse’s tail and the wind blew all day,” read the fellow’s first diary try. Then with further thought he managed to conclude: “From the northeast.” My father could swallow advice if he had to, and so he did what he could with the perpetual nag of having to jot his activities into the diary. When he did it was entirely another matter. Two or three weeks he would stay dutiful, then came a Saturday morning when he had seven little yellow blank pages to show for his week, and the filling in had to start:

  “Bet, what’d I do on Tuesday? That the day it rained and I worked on Mazoola paperwork?”

  “That was Wednesday. Tuesday you rode up to look over the range above Noon Creek.”

  “I thought that was Thursday.”

  “You can think so if you like, but you’d be wrong.” My mother was careful to seem half-exasperated about these scriving sessions, but I think she looked forward to the chance to set my father straight on history, even if it was only the past week’s. “Thursday I baked, and you took a rhubarb pie for the Bowens when you went to the Indian Head station. Not that Louise Bowen is capable of recognizing a pie.”

  “Well, then, when I rode to the Guthrie Peak lookout, that was—only yesterday? Friday?”

  “Today is Saturday, yesterday most likely was Friday,” my mother was glad to confirm for him.

  When I became old enough to go into the mountains with him on counting trips my father perceived relief for his diary situation. Previously he had tried Alec, but Alec had the same catch-up-on-it-later proclivity as his. I think we had not gone a mile along the trail that very first morning when he reined up, said as if it had just occurred to him out of nowhere, “Jick, whyn’t you kind of keep track of today for me?” and presented me a fresh-sharpened stub pencil and a pocket notebook.

  It did take a little doing to catch on to my father’s style. But after those first days of my reporting into my notebook in the manner of “We met up with Dill Egan on the south side of Noon Creek and talked with him about whether he can get a bigger permit to run ten more steers on” and my father squashing it down in his diary to “Saw D. Egan about steer proposition,” I adjusted.

  By now I was veteran enough that the day came readily to the tip of my pencil. “Patroled”—another principle some early ranger had imparted to my father was that if you so much as left the station to go to the outhouse, you had patroled—“Patroled the n. fork of English Creek. Counted D. Withrow’s sheep onto allotment. Commenced packing bolts and turnbuckles and cable to Billy Peak lookout site.”

  My father read it over and nodded. “Change that ‘bolts and turn-buckles and cable’ just to ‘gear.’ You don’t want to be any more definite than necessary in any love note to Uncle Sam. But otherwise it reads like the very Bible.”

  So the day was summed and we had dined on trout and the campfire was putting warmth and light between us and the night, and we had nothing that needed doing except to contemplate until sleep overcame us. My father was lying back against his saddle, hands behind his head and his hat tipped forward over his forehead. Ever since a porcupine attracted by the salt of horse sweat had chewed hell out of Alec’s saddle on the counting trip a couple or three years ago, we made it a policy to keep our saddles by us.

  He could make himself more comfortable beside a campfire than anybody else I ever knew, my father could. Right now he looked like he could spend till dawn talking over the Two country and everything in it, if Toussaint Rennie or Dode Withrow had been on hand to do it with.

  My thoughts, though, still circled around Alec—well, sure, somewhat onto Leona too—and what had erupted at supper last night. But again the reluctance lodged itself in me, against outright asking my father what he thought the prospect was where Alec was concerned. I suppose there are times a person doesn’t want to hear pure truth. Instead, I brought out something else that had been dogging my mind.

  “Dad? Do you ever wonder about being somebody else?”

  “Such as who? John D. Rockefeller?”

  “What I mean, I got to thinking from watching you and Dode together there at the counting vee. Just, you know, whether you’d ever thought about how he could be in your place and you in his.”

  “Which would give me three daughters instead of you and Alec, do you mean? Maybe I’ll saddle up Mouse and go trade him right now.”

  “No, not that. I mean life generally. Him being the ranger and you being the sheepman is what I had in mind. If things had gone a little different back when you guys were, uh, younger.” Were my age, was of course what was hiding behind that.

  “Dode jaw to jaw with the Major? Now I know I’m going to head down the mountain and swap straight across, for the sake of seeing that.” In that time the regional forester, the boss of everybody in the national forests of Montana and northern Idaho, was Evan Kelley. Major Kelley, for he was like a lot of guys who got a big army rank during the war, hung on to the title ever afterward as if it was sainthood. The Major’s style of leadership was basic. When he said frog, everybody better jump. I wish I had a nickel for every time my father opened his USFS mail and muttered: “Oh, Jesus, another kelleygram. When does he ever sleep?” Everybody did admit, the Major at least made clear the gospel in his messages to his Forest Service men. What he prescribed from his rangers was no big forest fires and no guff. So far, my father’s slate was clean of both. In those years I didn’t give the matter particular thought, but my father’s long stint in charge of the English Creek district of the Two Medicine National Forest could only have happened with the blessing of the Major himself. The Pope in Missoula, so to speak. Nobody lower could have shielded ranger Varick McCaskill from the transfers that ordinarily happened every few years or so in the Forest Service. No, the Major wanted that tricky northmost portion of the Two, surrounded as so much of it was by other government domains, to be rangered in a way that wouldn’t draw the Forest Service any bow-wow from the neighboring Glacier Park staff or the Blackfeet Reservation people; and in a way that would keep the sheepmen content and the revenue they paid for summer grazing permits flowing in; and in a way that would not repeat the awful fires of 1910 or the later Phantom Woman Mountain burn, right in here above the North Fork. And that was how my father was rangering it. So far.

  “I guess I know what you’re driving at, though.” My father sat up enough to put his boot against a pine piece of squaw wood and shove it farther into the fire, then lay back against his saddle again. “How come we do what we do in life, instead of something else. But I don’t know. I do not know. All I’ve ever been able to figure out, Jick, is that no job fits as well as a p
erson would like it to, but some of us fit the job better than others do. That sorts matters out a little.”

  “Yeah, well, I guess. But how do you get in the job in the first place to find out whether you’re going to fit it?”

  “You watch for a chance to try it, is all. Sometimes the chance comes looking for you. Sometimes you got to look for it. Myself, I had my taste of the army because of the war. And it took goddamn little of army life to tell me huh uh, not for me. Then when I landed back here I got to be association rider for Noon Creek by setting out to get it, I guess you’d say. What I did, I went around to Dill Egan and old Thad Wainwright and your granddad Isaac and the other Noon Creekers and asked if they’d keep me in mind when it came time to summer their cows up here. Of course, it maybe didn’t particularly hurt that I mentioned how happy I’d be to keep Double W cows from slopping over onto the Noon Creek guys’ allotments, as had been going on. Anyway, the job got to be mine.”

  “What, the Double W was running cattle up here then?”

  “Were they ever. They held a permit, in the early days. A hellish big one. Back then the Williamsons didn’t have hold of all that Noon Creek country to graze. So, yeah, they had forest range, and sneaked cows onto anybody else’s whenever they could. The number one belief of old Warren Williamson, you know, was that other people’s grass might just as well be his.” I didn’t know. Warren Williamson, father of the present Double W honcho, was before my time; or at least died in California before I was old enough for it to mean anything to me.

  “I’ll say this one thing for Wendell,” my father went on, “he at least buys or rents the country. Old Warren figured he could just take it.” He gave the pine piece another shove with his boot. “The everlasting damn Double W. The Gobble Gobble You, as the gent who was ranger when I was association rider used to call it.”