English Creek

by Ivan Doig

  Stanley considered some more. You would have thought he was doing it in Latin, the time it took him. But finally: “I don’t see offhand why that wouldn’t work. You know this piece of country pretty good. Take along the windchester,” meaning his rifle. “If any bear starts eating on me he’ll pretty soon give up on account of gristle.” Stanley pondered some more to see whether anything further was going to visit his mind, but nothing did. “So, yeah. We got it to do, might as well get at it. Which yayhoo do you want, Gufferson or Sanford Hebner?”

  I thought on that. Sanford was in his second or third summer in these mountains. Maybe he had entirely outgrown the high-country whimwhams of the sort Canada Dan was showing, and maybe he hadn’t. Andy Gustafson on the other hand was a long-timer in the Two country and probably had been given the range between Canada Dan and Sanford for the reason that he was savvy enough not to let the bands of sheep get mixed. I was more than ready to be around somebody with savvy, for a change.

  “I’ll take Andy.”

  “Okey-doke. I guess you know where he is, in west of here, about under the middle of Roman Reef. Let’s go see sheepherders.”

  Outside in the wet morning I discovered the possible drawback to my choice, which was that Andy Gustafson’s camp supplies were in the pack rig that went on Bubbles. That bothered me some, but when I pictured Stanley and his hamburgered hand trying to cope with Bubbles for a day, I figured it fell to me to handle the knothead anyway. At least in my father’s universe matters fell that way. So I worked the packs onto the black mare for Stanley—she was so tame she all but sang encouragement while the load was going on her—and then faced the spotty-nosed nemesis. But Bubbles seemed not particularly more snorty and treacherous than usual, and with Stanley taking a left-handed death grip on the halter again and addressing a steady stream of threats into the horse’s ear and with me staying well clear of hooves while getting the packsacks roped on, we had Bubbles loaded in surprisingly good time.

  “See you back here for beans,” Stanley said, and as he reined toward Sanford’s camp Pony and I headed west up the mountain, Bubbles grudgingly behind us.

  • • •

  I suppose now hardly anybody knows that horseback way of life on a trail. I have always thought that horseback is the ideal way to see country, if you just didn’t have to deal with the damn horse, and one thing to be said for Pony was that she was so gentle and steady you could almost forget she was down there. As for the trail itself; even in the situation I was in, this scene was one to store away. Pointed west as I was the horizon of the Rockies extended wider than any vision. To take in the total of peaks I had to move my head as far as I could to either side. It never could be said that this country of the Two didn’t offer enough elbow room. For that matter, shinbone and cranium and all other kind, too. Try as you might to be casual about a ride up from English Creek into these mountains, you were doing something sizable. Climbing from the front porch of the planet into its attic, so to speak.

  Before long I could look back out onto the plains and see the blue dab of Lake Frances, and the water tower of Valier on its east shore—what would that be, thirty miles away, thirty-five? About half as far off was the bulge of trees which marked where the town of Gros Ventre sat in the long procession of English Creek’s bankside cottonwoods and willows. Gros Ventre: pronounced Grove-on, in that front-end way that town names of French origin get handled in Montana, making Choteau Show-toh and Havre Hav-er and Wibaux Wee-boh. Nothing entertained residents of Gros Ventre more than hearing some tourist or other outlander pop out with Gross Ventree. My father, though, figured that the joke was also on the town: “Not a whole hell of a lot of them know that Gros Ventre’s the French for Big Belly.” Of course, where all this started is that Gros Ventre is the name of an Indian tribe, although not what might be called a local one. The Gros Ventres originally, before reservation days, were up in the Milk River country near the Canadian line. Why a place down here picked up that tribe’s name I didn’t really know. Toussaint Rennie was the one who knew A to Why about the Two country. Sometime I would have to ask him this name question.

  Distant yet familiar sites offering themselves above and below me, and a morning when I was on my own. Atop my own horse and leading a beast of burden, even if the one was short-legged and pudgy and the other one definitely justified the term of beast. Entrusted with a Winchester 30.30 carbine, not that I ever was one to look forward to shooting it out with a bear. A day to stand the others up against, this one. The twin feelings of aloneness and freedom seemed to lift and lift me, send me up over the landscape like a balloon. Of course I know it was the steady climb of the land itself that created that impression. But whatever was responsible, I was glad enough to accept such soaring.

  Quite possibly I ought to think about this as a way of life, I by now was telling myself. By which I didn’t mean chaperoning Stanley Meixell. One round of that likely was enough for a lifetime. But packing like this, running a packstring as Isidor Pronovost did for my father; that was worth spending some daydreams on. Yes, definitely a packer’s career held appeal. Be your own boss out on the trail. Fresh air, exercise, scenery. Adventure. One of the stories my father told oftenest was of being with Isidor on one of the really high trails farthest back in these mountains of the Two, where a misstep by one horse or mule might pull all the rest into a tumble a few thousand feet down the slope, when Isidor turned in his saddle and conversationally said: “Mac, if we was to roll this packstring right about here, the buggers’d bounce till they stunk.”

  Maybe a quieter mountain job than packing. Forest fire lookout, up there in one of Franklin Delano’s lighthouses. Serene as a hermit, a person could spend summers in a lookout cabin atop the Two. Peer around like a human hawk for smoke. Heroic work. Fresh air, scenery, some codger like Stanley to fetch your groceries up the mountainside to you. The new Billy Peak lookout might be the prime job. I’d be finding that out right now if my father hadn’t detoured me into companioning damn old Stanley. Well, next year, next counting trip . . .

  Up and up I and my horses and my dreams went, toward the angle of slope beneath the center of Roman Reef. Eventually a considerable sidehill of timber took the trail from sight, and before Pony and Bubbles and I entered the stand of trees, I whoaed us for a last gaze along all the mountains above and around. They were the sort of thing you would have if every cathedral in the world were lined up along the horizon.

  Not much ensued for the first minutes of the forested trail, just a sharpening climb and the route beginning to kink into a series of switchbacks. Sunbeams were threaded down through the pine branches and with that dappled light I didn’t even mind being in out of the view for the next little while.

  A forest’s look of being everlasting is an illusion. Trees too are mortal and they come down. I was about to face one such. In the middle of a straight tilt of trail between switchbacks, there lay a fresh downed lodgepole pine poking out over my route, just above the height of a horse.

  On one of my father’s doctrines of mountain travel I had a light little cruising ax along with me. But the steep hillside made an awkward place to try any chopping and what I didn’t have was a saw of any sort. Besides, I was in no real mood to do trail maintenance for my father and the United States Forest Service.

  I studied the toppled lodgepole. It barriered the trail to me in the saddle, but there was just room enough for a riderless horse to pass beneath. All I needed to do was get off and lead Pony and Bubbles through. But given the disposition of Bubbles, I knew I’d damn well better do it a horse at a time.

  I tied Bubbles’s lead rope to a middle-sized pine, doubling the square knot just to be sure, and led Pony up the trail beyond the windfall. “Be right back with that other crowbait,” I assured her as I looped her reins around the leftover limb of a stump.

  Bubbles was standing with his neck in the one position he seemed to know for it, stretched out like he was being towed, and I had to haul hard on his lead rope for enou
gh slack to untie my knots.

  “Come on, churnhead,” I said as civilly as I could—Bubbles was not too popular with me anyway, because if he originally hadn’t kicked Stanley I wouldn’t have been in the camptending mess—and with some tugging persuaded him into motion.

  Bubbles didn’t like the prospect of the downed tree when we got there. I could see his eyes fixed on the shaggy crown limbs overhead, and his ears lay back a little. But one thing about Bubbles, he didn’t lead much harder when he was being reluctant than when he wasn’t.

  I suppose it can be said that I flubbed the dub on all this. That the whole works came about as the result of my reluctance to clamber up that sidehill and do axwork. Yet answer me this, was I the first person not to do what I didn’t want to? Nor was goddamn Bubbles blameless, now was he? After all, I had him most of the way past the windfall before he somehow managed to swing his hindquarters too close in against the hillside, where he inevitably brushed against a broken branch dangling down from the tree trunk. Even that wouldn’t have set things off, except for the branch whisking in across the front of his left hip toward his crotch.

  Bubbles went straight sideways off the mountain.

  He of course took the lead rope with him, and me at the end of it like a kite on a string.

  I can’t say how far downslope I flew, but I was in the air long enough to get good and worried. Plummeting sideways as well as down is unnerving, your body trying to figure out how to travel in those two directions at once. And a surprising number of thoughts fan out in your mind, such as whether you are most likely to come down on top of or under the horse below you and which part of you you can best afford to have broken and how long before a search party and why you ever in the first place—

  I landed more or less upright, though. Upright and being towed down the slope of the mountain in giant galloping strides, sinking about shin-deep every time, the dirt so softened by all the rain.

  After maybe a dozen of those plowing footfalls, my journey ended. Horse nostrils could be heard working overtime nearby me, and I discovered the lead rope still was taut in my hands, as if the plunge off the trail had frozen it straight out like a long icicle. What I saw first, though, was not Bubbles but Pony. A horse’s eyes are big anyway, but I swear Pony’s were the size of Terraplane headlights as she peered down over the rim of the trail at Bubbles and me all the way below.

  “Easy, girl!” I called up to her. All I needed next was for Pony to get excited, jerk her reins loose from that stump and quit the country, leaving me down here with this tangled-up pack horse. “Easy, Pony! Easy, there. Everything’s gonna be—just goddamn dandy.”

  Sure it was. On my first individual outing I had rolled the packstring, even if it was only one inveterate jughead of a horse named Bubbles. Great wonderful work, campjack McCaskill. Keep on in this brilliant fashion and you maybe someday can hope to work your way up to moron.

  Now I had to try to sort out the situation.

  A little below me on the sidehill Bubbles was floundering around a little and snorting a series of alarms. The favorable part of that was that he was up on his feet. Not only up but showing a greater total of vigor than he had during the whole pack trip so far. So Bubbles was in one piece, I seemed to be intact, and the main damage I could see on the packs was a short gash in the canvas of the top pack where something snagged it on our way down. Sugar or salt was trickling from there, but it looked as if I could move a crossrope over enough to pinch the hole shut.

  I delivered Bubbles a sound general cussing, meanwhile working along the lead rope until I could grab his halter and then reach his neck. From there I began to pat my way back, being sure to make my cussing sound a little more soothing, to get to the ruptured spot on the pack.

  When I put my hand onto the crossrope of the diamond hitch to tug it across the gash, that top pack seemed to move a bit.

  I tugged again in a testing way, and the summit of the load on Bubbles’s back definitely moved, more than a bit.

  “Son of a goddamn sonofabitch,” I remember was all I managed to come out with to commemorate this discovery. That wasn’t too bad under the circumstance, for the situation called for either hard language or hot tears, and maybe it could be pinpointed that right there I grew out of the bawling age into the cussing one.

  Bubbles’s downhill excursion had broken the last cinch, the one the lash rope ties into to hold the top pack into place on a horse’s back. So I had a pack horse whole and healthy—and my emotions about Bubbles having survived in good fettle were now getting radically mixed—but no way to secure his load onto him. I was going to have to ride somewhere for a new cinch, or at the very least to get this one repaired.

  Choices about like Canada Dan’s menu of mutton or sheep meat, those. Stanley by now was miles away at Sanford Hebner’s camp. Besides, with his hand and his thirst both the way they were, I wasn’t sure how much of a repairer he would prove to be anyway. Or I could climb on Pony, head back down the trail all the way to the English Creek station, and tell that father of mine to come mend the fix he’d pitched me into.

  This second notion held appeal of numerous kinds. I would be rid of Stanley and responsibility for him. I’d done all I could; in no way was it my fault that Bubbles had schottisched off a mountaintop. Most of all, delivering my predicament home to English Creek would serve my father right. He was the instigator of all this; who better to haul himself up here and contend with the mess?

  Yet when I came right down to it I was bothered by the principle of anyone venturing to my rescue. I could offer all the alibis this side of Halifax, but the truth of it still stood. Somebody besides myself would be fishing me out of trouble. Here was yet another consequence of my damned in-between age. I totally did not want to be in the hell of a fix I was. Yet somehow I just as much did not relish resorting to anybody else to pluck me out of it. Have you ever been dead-centered that way? Hung between two schools of thought, neither one of which you wanted to give in to? Why the human mind doesn’t positively split in half in such a situation I don’t know.

  As I was pondering back and forth that way I happened to rub my forehead with the back of my free hand. It left moisture above my brow. Damn. One more sign of my predicament: real trouble always makes the backs of my hands sweat. I suppose nerves cause it. Whatever does, it spooks a person to have his hands sweating their own worry like that.

  “That’s just about enough of all this,” I said out loud, apparently to Pony and Bubbles and maybe to my sweating hands and the mountainside and I suppose out across the air toward Stanley Meixell and Varick McCaskill as well. And to myself, too. For some part of my mind had spurned the back-and-forth debate of whether to go fetch Stanley or dump the situation in my father’s lap, and instead got to wondering. There ought to be some way in this world to contrive that damn cinch back together. “If you’re going to get by in the Forest Service you better be able to fix anything but the break of day,” my father said every spring when he set in to refurbish the English Creek equipment. Not that I was keen on taking him as an example just then.

  No hope came out of my search of Bubbles and the packs. Any kind of thong or spare leather was absent. The saddlestrings on my saddle up there where Pony was I did think of, but couldn’t figure how to let go of the horse at hand while I went to get them. Bubbles having taken up mountaineering so passionately, there was no telling where he would crash off to if I wasn’t here to hang on to him.

  I started looking myself over for possibilities.

  Hat, coat, shirt: no help.

  Belt: though I hated to think of it, I maybe could cut that up into leather strips. Yet would they be long enough if I did.

  No, better, down there: my forester boots, a bootlace; a bootlace just by God might do the trick.

  By taking a wrap of Bubbles’s lead rope around the palm of my left hand I was more or less able to use the thumb and fingers to grasp the lash cinch while I punched holes in it with my jackknife. All the while, of co
urse, talking sweetly to Bubbles. When I had a set of holes accomplished on either side of the break, I threaded the bootlace back and forth, back and forth, and at last tied it to make a splice. Then, Bubbles’s recent standard of behavior uppermost in my mind, I made one more set of holes farther along each part of the cinch and wove in the remainder of the bootlace as a second splice for insurance. In a situation like this, you had better do things the way you’re supposed to do them.

  I now had a boot gaping open like an unbuckled overshoe, but the lash cinch looked as if it ought to lift a boxcar. I did some more brow-wiping, and lectured Bubbles on the necessity of standing still so that I could retie his packs into place. I might as well have saved my breath. Even on level ground, contriving a forty-foot lash rope into a diamond hitch means going endlessly back and forth around the pack horse to do the loops and lashes and knots, and on a mountainside with Bubbles fidgeting and twitching every which way, the job was like trying to weave eels.

  At last I got that done. Now there remained only the matter of negotiating Bubbles back up to where he had launched from. Talk about an uphill job. But as goddamn Stanley would’ve observed to me, I had it to do.

  Probably the ensuing ruckus amounted to only about twenty minutes of fight and drag, though it seemed hours. Right then you could not have sold me all the pack horses on the planet for a nickel. Bubbles would take a step and balk. Balk and take a step. Fright or exasperation or obstinacy or whatever other mood can produce it had him dry-farting like the taster in a popcorn factory. Try to yank me back down the slope. Balk again, and let himself slide back down the slope a little. Sneeze, then fart another series. Shake the packs in hope the splice would let go. Start over on the balking.

  I at last somehow worked his head up level with the trail and then simply leaned back on the lead rope until Bubbles exhausted his various acts and had to glance around at where he was. When the sight of the trail registered in his tiny mind, he pranced on up as if it was his own idea all along.