English Creek

by Ivan Doig

  Canada Dan divvied the slices onto our plates and concluded: “A menu you don’t get just everywhere, ain’t it?”

  “Yeah,” Stanley said slower than ever, and swallowed experimentally.

  The report crossed my mind that I had just spent a couple of hours elbow deep in dead sheep and now I was being expected to eat some of one, but I tried to keep it traveling. Time, as it’s said, was the essence here. The only resource a person has against mutton is to eat it fast, before it has a chance for the tallow in it to congeal. So I poked mine into me pretty rapidly, and even so the last several bites were greasy going. Stanley by then wasn’t much more than getting started.

  While Canada Dan forked steadily through his meal and Stanley mussed around with his I finished off the hominy on the theory that anything you mixed into the digestive process with mutton was probably all to the good. Then I gazed out the dutch door of the sheepwagon while waiting on Stanley. The afternoon was going darker, a look of coming rain. My father more than likely was done by now with the counting of Walter Kyle’s and Fritz Hahn’s bands. He would be on his way up to the Billy Peak lookout, and the big warm dry camp tent there, and the company of somebody other than Canada Dan or Stanley Meixell, and probably another supper of brookies. I hoped devoutly the rain already had started directly onto whatever piece of trail my father might be riding just now.

  Canada Dan meanwhile had rolled himself a cigarette and was filling the wagon with blue smoke while Stanley worked himself toward the halfway point of his slab of mutton. “Staying the night, ain’t you?” the herder said more as observation than question. “You can set up the tepee, regular goddamn canvas hotel. It only leaks a little where it’s ripped in that one corner. Been meaning to sew the sumbitch up.”

  “Well, actually, no,” said Stanley.

  This perked me up more than anything had in hours. Maybe there existed some fingernail of hope for Stanley after all. “We got all that pack gear to keep dry, so we’ll just go on over to that line cabin down on the school section. Fact is”—Stanley here took the chance to shove away his still-mutton-laden plate and climb onto his feet as if night was stampeding toward him—“we better be getting ourselves over there if we’re gonna beat dark. You ready, Jick?”

  Was I.

  • • •

  The line cabin stood just outside the eastern boundary of the Two forest, partway back down the mountain. We rode more than an hour to get there, the weather steadily heavier and grimmer all around us, and Stanley fairly grim himself, I guess from the mix of alcohol and mutton sludging around beneath his belt. Once when I glanced back to be sure I still had him I happened to see him make an awkward lob into the trees, that exaggerated high-armed way when you throw with your wrong hand. So he had finally run out of bottle, and at least I could look forward to an unpickled companion from here on. I hoped he wasn’t the kind who came down with the DTs as he dried out.

  Our route angled us down in such a back and forth way that Roman Reef steadily stood above us now on one side, now on our other. A half-mile-high stockade of gray-brown stone, claiming all the sky to the west. Even with Stanley and thunderclouds on my mind I made room in there to appreciate the might of Roman Reef. Of the peaks and buttresses of the Two generally, for as far as I’m concerned, Montana without its mountain ranges would just be Nebraska stretched north.

  At last, ahead of us showed up an orphan outcropping, a formation like a crown of rock but about as big as a railroad roundhouse. Below it ran the boundary fence, and just outside the fence the line cabin. About time, too, because we were getting some first spits of rain, and thunder was telling of lightning not all that far off.

  The whole way from Canada Dan’s sheepwagon Stanley had said never a word nor even glanced ahead any farther than his horse’s ears. Didn’t even stir now as we reached the boundary fence of barbwire. In a hurry to get us into the cabin before the weather cut loose I hopped off Pony to open the gate.

  My hand was just almost to the top wire hoop when there came a terrific yell:

  “GODAMIGHTY, get AWAY from that!”

  I jumped back as if flung, looking crazily around to see what had roused Stanley like this.

  “Go find a club and knock the gatewire off with that,” he instructed. “You happen to be touching that wire and lightning hits that fence, I’ll have fried Jick for supper.”

  So I humored him, went off and found a sizable dead limb of jackpine and tapped the hoop up off the top of the gate stick with it and then used it to fling the gate to one side the way you might flip a big snake. The hell of it was, I knew Stanley was out-and-out right. A time, lightning hit Ed Van Bebber’s fence up the South Fork road from the English Creek ranger station and the whole top wire melted for about fifty yards in either direction, dropping off in little chunks as if it’d been minced up by fencing pliers. I knew as well as anything not to touch a wire fence in a storm. Why then had I damn near done it? All I can say in my own defense is that you just try going around with Stanley Meixell on your mind as much as he had been on mine since mid-morning and see if you don’t do one or another thing dumb.

  I was resigned by now to what was in store for me at the cabin, so started in on it right away, the unpacking of the mare and Bubbles. Already I had size, my father’s long bones the example to mine, and could do the respected packer’s trick of reaching all the way across the horse’s back to lift those off-side packs from where I was standing, instead of trotting back and forth around the horse all the time. I did the mare and then carefully began uncargoing Bubbles, Stanley hanging on to the halter and matter-of-factly promising Bubbles he would yank his goddamn spotty head off if the horse gave me any trouble. Then as I swung the last pack over and off, a hefty lift I managed to do without bumping the pack saddle and giving Bubbles an excuse for excitement, Stanley pronounced: “Oh, to be young and diddling twice a day again.”

  He took notice of the considerable impact of this on me. “ ’Scuse my French, Jick. It’s just a saying us old coots have.”

  Nonetheless it echoed around in me as I lugged the packs through the cabin door and stashed them in a corner.

  By now thunder was applauding lightning below us as well as above and the rain was arriving in earnest, my last couple of trips outside considerably damp. Stanley meanwhile was left-handedly trying to inspire a fire in the rickety stove.

  The accumulated chill in the cabin had us both shivering as we lit a kerosene lantern and waited for the stove to produce some result.

  “Feels in here like it’s gonna frost,” I muttered.

  “Yeah,” Stanley agreed. “About six inches deep.”

  That delivered me a thought I didn’t particularly want. “What, ah, what if this turns to snow?” I could see myself blizzarded in here for a week with this reprobate.

  “Aw, I don’t imagine it will. Lightning like this, it’s probably just a thunderstorm.” Stanley contemplated the rain spatting onto the cabin window and evidently was reminded that his pronouncement came close to being good news. “Still,” he amended, “you never know.”

  • • •

  The cabin was not much of a layout. Simply a roofed-over bin of lodgepole logs, maybe fifteen feet long and ten wide and with a single window beside the door at the south end. But at least it’d be drier than outside. Outside in fact was showing every sign of anticipating a nightlong bath. The face of the Rocky Mountains gets more weather than any other place I know of and a person just has to abide by that fact.

  I considered the small stash of wood behind the stove, mostly kindling, and headed back out for enough armfuls for the night and morning. Off along the tree line I found plenty of squaw wood, which already looked soused from the rain but luckily snapped okay when I tromped it in half over a log.

  With that provisioning done and a bucket of water lugged from a seep of spring about seventy yards out along the slope, I declared myself in for the evening and shed my wet slicker. Stanley through all this stayed half propped, h
alf sitting on an end of the little plank table. Casual as a man waiting for eternity.

  His stillness set me to wondering. Wondering just how much whiskey was in him. After all, he’d been like a mummy on the ride from Canada Dan’s camp, too.

  And so before too awful long I angled across the room, as if exercising the saddle hours out of my legs, for a closer peek at him.

  At first I wasn’t enlightened by what I saw. The crowfoot lines at the corners of Stanley’s eyes were showing deep and sharp, as if he was squinched up to study closely at something, and he seemed washed out, whitish, across that part of his face, too. Like any Montana kid I had seen my share of swacked-up people, yet Stanley didn’t really look liquored. No, he looked more like—

  “How’s that hand of yours?” I inquired, putting my suspicion as lightly as I knew how.

  Stanley roused. “Feels like it’s been places.” He moved his gaze past me and around the cabin interior. “Not so bad quarters. Not much worse than I remember this pack rat palace, anyway.”

  “Maybe we ought to have a look,” I persisted. “That wrapping’s seen better times.” Before he could waltz off onto some other topic I stepped over to him and began to untie the rust-colored wrapping.

  When I unwound that fabric, the story was gore. The back of Stanley’s hand between the first and last knuckles was skinned raw where the sharp calk of Bubbles’ horseshoe had scraped off skin: raw and seepy and butchered-looking.

  “Jesus H. Christ,” I breathed.

  “Aw, could be worse.” Even as he said so, though, Stanley seemed more pale and eroded around the eyes. “I’ll get it looked at when I get to town. There’s some bag balm in my saddlebag there. Get the lid off that for me, would you, and I’ll dab some on.”

  Stanley slathered the balm thick across the back of his hand and I stepped over again and began to rewrap it for him. He noticed that the wrapping was not the blood-stained handkerchief. “Where’d you come up with that?”

  “The tail off my shirt.”

  “Your ma’s gonna like to find that.”

  I shrugged. Trouble was lined up deep enough here in company with Stanley that my mother’s turn at it seemed a long way off.

  “Feels like new,” Stanley tried to assure me, moving his bandaged hand with a flinch he didn’t want to show and I didn’t really want to see. What if he passed out on me? What if—I tried to think of anything I had ever heard about blood poisoning and gangrene. Supposedly those took a while to develop. But then, this stint of mine with Stanley was beginning to seem like a while.

  I figured it was time to try to get Stanley’s mind, not to say my own, off his wound, and to bring up what I considered was a natural topic. So I queried:

  “What are we going to do about supper?”

  Stanley peered at me a considerable time. Then said: “I seem to distinctly remember Canada Dan feeding us.”

  “That was a while back,” I defended. “Sort of a second lunch.”

  Stanley shook his head a bit and voted himself out. “I don’t just feel like anything, right now. You go ahead.”

  So now things had reached the point where I had lost out even on my father’s scattershot version of cooking, and was going to have to invent my own. I held another considerable mental conversation with U.S. forest ranger Varick McCaskill about that, meanwhile fighting the stove to get any real heat from it. At last I managed to warm a can of provisions I dug out of one of the packs of groceries for the herders, and exploring further I came up with bread and some promising sandwich material.

  An imminent meal is my notion of a snug fortune. I was even humming the Pancho and Sancho and Suzy tune when, ready to dine, I sat myself down across the table from Stanley.

  He looked a little quizzical, then drew in a deep sniff. Then queried:

  “Is that menu of yours what I think it is?”

  “Huh? Just pork and beans, and an onion sandwich. Why?”

  “Never mind.”

  Canada Dan’s cooking must have stuck with me more than I was aware, though, as I didn’t even think to open any canned fruit for dessert.

  Meanwhile the weather was growing steadily more rambunctious. Along those mountainsides thunder can roll and roll, and constant claps were arriving to us now like beer barrels tumbling down stairs.

  Now, an electrical storm is not something I am fond of. And here along the east face of the Rockies, any of these big rock thrusts, such as that crown outcropping up the slope from the cabin, notoriously can draw down lightning bolts. In fact, the more I pondered that outcropping, the less comfortable I became with the fact that it neighbored us.

  In my head I always counted the miles to how far away the lightning had hit—something I still find myself doing—so when the next bolt winked, somewhere out the south window, I began the formula:

  One, a-mile-from-here-to-there.

  Two, a-mile-from-here-to-there.

  Three . . . The boom reached us then; the bolt had struck just more than two miles off. That could be worse, and likely would be. Meanwhile rain was raking the cabin. We could hear it drum against the west wall as well as on the board roof.

  “Sounds like we got a dewy night ahead of us,” Stanley offered. He looked a little perkier now, for whatever reason. Myself, I was beginning to droop, the day catching up with me. I did some more thunder-counting whenever I happened to glimpse a crackle of light out the window, but came up with pretty much the same mileage each time and so began to lose attention toward that. Putting this day out of its misery seemed a better and better idea.

  The cabin didn’t have any beds as such, just a cobbled-together double bunk arrangement with planks where you’d like a mattress to be. But anyplace to be prostrate looked welcome, and I got up from the table to untie my bedroll from behind my saddle and spread it onto the upper planks.

  The sky split white outside the cabin. That crack of thunder I honestly felt as much as heard. A jolt through the air, as if a quake had leapt upward out of the earth.

  I believe my hair was swept straight on end, from that blast of noise and light. I know I had trouble getting air into my body, past the blockade where my heart was trying to climb out my throat.

  Stanley, though, didn’t show any particular ruffle at all. “The quick hand of God, my ma used to say.”

  “Yeah, well,” I informed him when I found the breath for it, “I’d just as soon it grabbed around someplace else.”

  I stood waiting for the next cataclysm, although what really was on my mind was the saying that you’ll never hear the lightning bolt that hits you. The rain rattled constantly loud now.

  At last there came a big crackling sound quite a way off, and while I knew nature is not that regular I told myself the lightning portion of the storm had moved beyond us—or if it hadn’t, I might as well be dead in bed as anywhere else—and I announced to Stanley, “I’m turning in.”

  “What, already?”

  “Yeah, already,” a word which for some reason annoyed me as much as anything had all day.

  Leaning over to unlace my forester boots, a high-topped old pair of my father’s I had grown into, I fully felt how much the day had fagged me. The laces were a downright chore. But once my boots and socks were off I indulged in a promising yawn, pulled out what was left of my shirttail, and swung myself into the upper bunk.

  “Guess I’m more foresighted than I knew,” I heard Stanley go on, “to bring Doctor Hall along for company.”

  “Who?” I asked, my eyes open again at this. Gros Ventre’s physician was Doc Spence, and I knew he was nowhere near our vicinity.

  Stanley lanked himself up and casually went over to the packs. “Doctor Hall,” he repeated as he brought out his good hand from a pack, a brown bottle of whiskey in it. “Doctor Al K. Hall.”

  • • •

  The weather of the night I suppose continued in commotion. But at that age I could have slept through a piano tuners’ convention. Came morning, I was up and around while Stanley sti
ll lay flopped in the lower bunk.

  First thing, I made a beeline to the window. No snow. Not only was I saved from being wintered in with Stanley, but Roman Reef and all the peaks south beyond it stood in sun, as if the little square of window had been made into a summer picture of the Alps. It still floors me, how the mountains are not the same any two days in a row. As if hundreds of copies of those mountains exist and each dawn brings in a fresh one, of new color, new prominence of some feature over the others, a different wrapping of cloud or rinse of sun for this day’s version.

  I lit a fire and went out to check on the horses and brought in a pail of fresh water, and even then Stanley hadn’t budged, just was breathing like he’d decided on hibernation. The bottle which had nursed him into that condition, I noticed, was down by about a third.

  Telling myself Stanley could starve to death in bed for all I cared, I fashioned breakfast for myself, heating up a can of peas and more or less toasting some slices of bread by holding them over the open stove on a fork.

  Eventually Stanley did join the day. As he worked at getting his boots on I gave him some secret scrutiny. I couldn’t see, though, that he assayed much better or worse than the night before. Maybe he just looked that way, sort of absent-mindedly pained, all the time. I offered to heat up some breakfast peas for him but he said no, thanks anyway.

  At last Stanley seemed ready for camptending again, and I figured it was time to broach what was heaviest on my mind. The calendar of our continued companionship.

  “How long’s this going to take, do you think?”

  “Well, you seen what we got into yesterday with Canada Dan. Herders have always got their own quantities of trouble.” Stanley could be seen to be calculating, either the trouble capacities of our next two sheepherders or the extent of my impatience. “I suppose we better figure it’ll take most of a day apiece for this pair, too.”

  Two more days of messing with herders, then the big part of another day to ride back to English Creek. It loomed before me like a career.

  “What about if we split up?” I suggested as if I was naturally businesslike. “Each tend one herder’s camp today?”