by Jon Billman
A weak front passed and the evening cooled. Strain was used to the fall-like temperatures from summer night duty at altitude. He fished in his shirtsleeves.
Nothing worked the topwater. He covered the green-black area around him with the thoroughness of a room painter. The fluorescent chartreuse line cut through the dusk like a tracer round.
He felt the line go heavy on the back-cast and he missed the throw. Must have caught a limb, he thought. He retrieved the slack out of the line. A high screech, the pitch of a dog whistle filled the night behind him. Struggling on top of the eddy at the end of his leader, a bird of some kind. He carefully pulled the slack line and stepped into the water to retrieve what he could tell now was a Little Brown bat. With his left hand he cupped the wings, to keep the tiny mammal from hurting itself before he could cut the barb free. The bat was all of three inches long, rounded ears, face like a tiny bear cubs. He unclipped his Leatherman tool from his belt and unfolded the wire cutters against his pantleg. The number ten barb protruded through the bat’s lower mandible, below the tiny triangle of soft pink bat-mouth. “You like my renegade, eh,” Strain said in a calming voice. “Fish here don’t think much of em, but I fooled a pretty stealthy little exterminator anyway.”
He deftly clipped the barb and slipped the fly from the bat’s mouth, and in the same movement set the tool down and made a cave of both hands. “It’ll sting for a bit, but you’ll be back to eating your mosquitoes in no time.”
Gently, he blew warm breath on the wings and body, then placed the bat on the sand to finish drying. He stepped away backward, carefully, to let the bat dry in peace with a minimum of humiliation. The bat looked more human than birdlike, as if someday man would evolve winged hands and a tail rudder. What seemed odd were so many grasshoppers in November; it didn’t seem at all odd for the Incident Commander, no incident in sight, to be talking to a maimed Little Brown bat.
He switched to a hare’s ear nymph and made a few more consolation casts before wiping his line clean with a Smokey Bear 50th Anniversary bandanna and wading to the bank for the long walk back to the ranger station, where whiskey and a card game would await him. He tried not to let the politics of his job enter his mind. “Yeah,” Horton could be telling them on the phone right now, “he knows it was a computer mistake. He’s out fishing on the clock right now. Tomorrow morning we’re gonna cook a big turkey.” Fuck ’em. He had what was important. He hoped that by now the NIFC Data General computer had disemboweled itself.
The walk back to the ranger station cleared his mind. He smelled wood smoke. It was cold enough so he could see his breath. Horton was messy, having dipped into the Wild Turkey, drinking it neat. Strain fried some potatoes and a couple of the rib-eyes. They ate, leaving the dishes on the counter, and played cards to KVOO-AM out of Tulsa. Horton hummed to the old bluegrass song “Atomic Power”; then came Merle Haggard’s “Workin’ Man Blues.” “Aw, keep workin’,” Horton sang as he dealt. Festus nosed his leg.
Two hours later Horton was asleep on an army cot in his office. Strain turned the heater to low and read some of the back editions of the Rapid City Journal and Rocky Mountain News. A good deal had happened without his noticing. At least the comics weren’t dated.
Waking, he could hear the unsteady ticking of the electric heater. After a candy bar and instant coffee, he stepped toward the door to walk back to the river. “Take Festus with you, will ya,” Horton said.
“He does love to fish. I’ll be drunk as ten Indians time you get back.”
From his fly box Strain selected a two-and-a-half-inch black egg-sucking leach. He fished heavy, using a sinking-tip line and a 2x leader. He liked the heavier six-weight line, even on trout, because he could fire the bigger flies he favored through most any wind. Guys who fished midges tended to be anal-retentive flatlanders. Bigger bugs, bigger fish.
He reached into his pack, pulled out a small bulb of garlic, and broke off a clove. With his jackknife he cut off the stem and peeled it. Then he cut the meat of the garlic against his thumb, letting the thin discs of meat fall into his palm. He placed the garlic on an MRE cracker and started working on the PROCESSED CHEESE SPREAD—“KNEAD WELL BEFORE OPENING,” it said on the camo-green package. This was lunch; it would get him through to Thanksgiving dinner. With the garlic oil strong on his hands he balmed the maribou leach and first few feet of leader until it no longer smelled to a fish of epoxy and human glands.
He cast upstream and let the leach soak up the muddy water and sink slowly. The light current swept the rig downstream, past him, and into a hole along the cut bank. He stripped line out until the current took up the slack a hundred or so feet below him. He reeled in and cast upstream again, then again.
Fishing for catfish held the same import for him as casting for Wind River rainbows or blue marlin off Tampico. Technically, he was at work, getting paid. He could see the Custer National Forest to the northwest; his fire was cold. He felt the line slacken, then go taut. He set the hook hard, then dealt out slack line until he could play the fish with the drag on the reel. The pawl drag on the Ross reel buzzed like a chain saw. The catfish went as deep as she could, into the hole, trying desperately to find a sunken tree or barbed-wire fence. Strain could see the water muddy on top of the wallowing cat. Slowly he played the fish out, bringing it to the gravel at the edge of the sandbar. Four pounds, he guessed. He wet his hand and reached under her barbed whiskers, and with his hemostat, pulled the hook free and pushed her back into the current.
Though catching them now still held the same excitement as when he was a kid, Strain had never really liked eating catfish, especially since he knew what they ate, those old goats of the river, their fat full of DDT. Once he had suffered through a sermon by a Bible literalist on Old Testament foods—what was okay to eat, what wasn’t. Catfish, skin fish, weren’t okay, just like pork. Couldn’t eat oysters or shrimp. Ostrich. Crows. Was tuna in a can a skin fish? Bats, too. He remembered it wasn’t okay to eat bat, which had been just fine with him at the time. They went home after the sermon and his grandmother fixed a ham.
Anyway, today was Thanksgiving.
Now two or so miles north of town he heard the old civil defense siren. He looked back toward Crook and saw a thick column of black smoke. A trailer house, perhaps. But there weren’t many structures in the entire town. He cut the leach from the tippet and reeled in. It had started to snow lightly. “Let’s go, Festus.” He shouldered his pack and walked south, slowly, thinking about irony and responsibility. Strain knew the fire came from the ranger station.
A short in the ancient wiring. A cigarette on flannel. Or Horton might have kicked a section of newspaper into the heater. The paper would have caught another paper until the flames reached the bone-dry pine walls. One wall would catch, leading to the ceiling, then to the attic, where a hundred gallons or more of petroleum-based paints and outdated agricultural chemicals were stored. The Sioux Ranger District would be history in a matter of minutes.
George, the tavern owner and Camp Crook Volunteer Fire Department chief, radioed for help to Buffalo. “Complete conflagration” was the term he used. “That’s it for the old school,” he said. “Too late for the bucket brigade. Horton’s inside.”
A Powder River charter bus full of Type II firefighters from Pine Ridge Reservation idled in the street. It was one of the many crews ordered three days earlier to help put out the same Custer Complex that had gone out two years before.
Strain thought about his duties, then about Horton inside, where the old man burned like a Molotov cocktail. For the first time in his career, he balked at fire. There was a realism of consequences and an urgency to this fire he’d never experienced before. What would Horton Wynn do in my boots? He looked down at his boots, the steel showing through at the toes where the leather had been eaten by the lye made from ash and water. He thought of the Apache and Gila trout he’d caught during the past fire seasons that had melted together into one long sortie in his memory. He thought about ba
ts. Kurt Strain learns to fly: Go Fish. He reached for the pis aller, his fly rod, which leaned against the fender of the volunteer engine. Then he met the strike-team leader in the yard. “Have your men put a line around it before it gets into the grass. Mop up when it cools. Don’t forget to fill out your crew time reports. You’re on your own for chow. De-mob when you feel you’re finished here.” He called the dog, who was running frantic circles at the edge of the intense heat, and headed back toward the Little Missouri.
“Sir,” said the strike-team leader, “where are you going? I mean, is there anything else?”
The Indian stared at the burning house as Strain looked past him. The Lakota man knew he was witnessing the passing of more than one ghost. In Washington, D.C., this incident wouldn’t amount to a cigarette burn on the circus-tent-sized corporate canvas. Strain stopped and turned, meeting the man’s eyes. “I’m gonna fish through.”
At night, on fires, Strain had often thought about what burning to death would be like. Not as immediate as an unsuccessful cavalry firefight, not as peaceful as the latter stages of drowning. “Down here,” he mouthed to Mayday, who leveled the ship out at the Cottonwood tops and hovered over the river. Strain cupped the hard hat containing the sample of Horton’s ashes—mixed with ashes of newspaper, MREs, propaganda posters, lumber from the old school—and opened the door. “Care to offer an Indian prayer for the soul of this good man?” Strain asked the pilot.
Mayday just stared at the few working gauges on the instrument panel. “He sure burned hot,” he said.
Strain hesitated. He should say something, but what? It was like having to pitch himself out the door. “Go with God,” he said and flipped Horton into the rotor blast. The flakes of carbon blew back through the door, floating around the cockpit like confetti, then settling in the cabin’s seams and cracks. “Goddammit,” Strain said. The two had ash on their faces, in their laps.
Chances were a few of the ashes had made it to the river, where they would join the Missouri in North Dakota, then drift south to the Mississippi and the Gulf of Mexico. But a month later most of what remained of the old man would ride with the rich skiers into the untouched backcountry powder of western Montana and northern Wyoming. Then, when the snow turned to fire, Horton would fly fire for as many seasons as the Jet Ranger kept from wearing out or burning up.
Which happened, a year and a half later, on the Fourth of July. The ship’s bucket cable caught a utility pole. The cable snapped and backlashed into the rotors, shattering the blades and fire-branding Mayday two hundred feet upside down into the south face of a mountain northwest of Buffalo. The explosion lit the night sky like a Roman candle, the humidity dropped, and the wind picked up. That evening Kurt Strain, saw boss on a fire north of Cora, Wyoming, landed two limits of brook trout and the second-or third-largest rainbow of his life. The next Monday the Data General report listed in boldface Horton and Mayday’s ten-thousand-acre, multimillion-dollar complex.
ubert de Sablettes hunted rabbits, on foot, with only a knife and a basset hound in tow. He was a runner. He ran every day—an addiction—even on the coldest winter mornings, twenty, thirty below zero, leaving at dawn his home on Klondike Street that was once the Methodist church, watch cap, a water bottle belted to his waist next to the knife, and a buffalo-horn cor to sound the trompe de chasse, calling Perch, the hound that ran behind, who could barely keep up. Hubert, gaunt and sinewy, ran up hills, over snowdrifts, into the sagebrush desert until he flushed a snowshoe hare. Then he would chase the white animal, sometimes for hours, until it became too exhausted to go on and just lay there waiting for the knife, or died of an exploding heart.
That was the hunt, the run, as described by the children who claimed they had seen it themselves. Everyone wanted to have seen it, but the hunts took place well away from town, on the vast wastelands good only for gas wells and sheep grazing. Hubert would sometimes run for five or six hours until his workout ended with the kill. Then he would dogtrot back to town, Klondike Street, carrying the limp hare by its hind legs, grimacing from the pain in his own bramble-scarred legs. Some days he would stop in the Hams Fork River and wade in the cold water until the swelling in his legs subsided. This even in winter.
Rumor around Hams Fork, Wyoming, is treated with the courtesy of truth, and rumor here had it that Hubert was a rich count and that he was holing up in town, hiding in the high desert, a refugee from France, where he had killed his wife by running her through with a well-honed bayonet after hunting her in a frantic chase in the forest. Around Hams Fork, Hubert was known as the Count. It had become a childhood act of bravery to creep down Klondike Street, into the churchyard at night, friends watching in the bushes across the street, and peer into the lighted stained-glass windows, pretending to be able to see more than vague shadows inside. The metallic kitchen sounds were real: knives on sharpening steels and stones, the basset howling, and the tinny buzz of late-night AM radio. And the smell was real, certainly, the smell of garlic and hot goose fat and wild game frying.
Lizabeth Tanner lived next door. Sometimes at night she could see the shadows of children chasing through the yard. The window-peeking was childish, but she too smelled the food and heard the hound and wondered what life in the church was like. Some days she would see the Count walking and would notice the color of his hair in the sunlight: grayish-white, like a summer coyote’s. Perch knew Lizabeth and liked her because she would sometimes lean over her fence and treat him to a raw hot dog.
She was a carpenter. Thirty-four and single, she had made her living following the ski-town booms. Now she was a contractor, mostly doing remodeling work on the older homes in town, though the mine had recently laid off a hundred or so and work was slow. She had time to remodel her own home, do some fishing, read some of the books she had always promised herself she would, and build a dogsled. The sled she donated to the charity auction that followed the Calcutta, the sled-dog-team auction where gamblers wagered on their choices for the upcoming race.
Like the gypsy circus in the days when Hams Fork had been merely an ashen coal camp, the dog race came to town each February. The day before the Hams Fork leg of the race, pickup trucks with mobile kennels containing the yelping spitz dogs paraded into town, sleds on top, straw and muzzles poking out of the whiffled boxes. The Calcutta had become Hams Fork’s winter version of the Kentucky Derby. Residents would eat from a prime-rib buffet, then bid on their favorite sled teams. Some of the lesser-known teams would go for a mere hundred apiece. Winners would receive a 30 percent cut of the money raised. The bulk of the money went to pay immunization costs for poor children. Chances of winning weren’t great, but in a state with fewer than half a million residents and no lottery, the Calcutta was still the social event of the winter. Following the auction was the dance.
Except to run, the Count rarely went out in public, but now he leaned nervously against the paneled wall of the Eagles Club and sipped his blush Chablis from a plastic cup as townspeople tried not to stare, and the auctioneer, an overweight man with a brushy mustache and 20x silverbelly Stetson, rattled off bids. Hunerd dolla, hunerd dolla, I’ve a hunerd, do I hear two, two hunerd, hunerd dolla, I need two … Box wine and Budweiser, the Calcutta was not fancy, but the building was warm and folks could catch up on gossip with friends from the other end of the county, people they saw maybe once or twice a year.
The Count, awkward yet privileged in carriage, wore his hair oiled down, navy blazer, white oxford shirt, Levi’s, and handmade Luchese boots. The lobes of his ears and the very tip of his nose were purplish from multiple frostbite. His face was weathered, but he was extraordinarily fit. His leg muscles pressed like a horse’s through his pantlegs. His supposed age around town sometimes varied by thirty years. The Count cupped his wine close to his chest and made his bids in regal gestures with his right forefinger, enduring the hearty bids of several Reno-wise ranchers and miners who had pooled their money in order to afford the big names in the sport.
The race dire
ctor, a tan former musher out of Jackson Hole named Hunter, stood in the back wearing a long red drivers parka with coyote-fur trim and dogfood company logos emblazoned on the back. His job was to raise the anemic bids, show enthusiasm in hopes that the bidders would think he knew something they didn’t. At times he would interrupt the auctioneer by walking down the aisle between the bingo tables in his arctic ringleader’s coat and take the microphone. “Now, Dale’s team has been training at altitude all winter long!” he might say with steely enthusiasm, or “Terry is especially hungry this race. He led through Dubois last year and he’s not coming to town with the idea of losing again.” Hunter’s tactics worked for the most part, though he was forced to sit on several teams running a gangline of roadkill-fed curs. Hunter wanted to recoup his losses with the favorite, Guy de Calvaire, a French-Canadian musher training on the provincial tundra out of St. Louis, Saskatchewan. Fifteen, fifteen, yow, sixteen-hunerd, yow, seventeen, seventeen …
The Count kept Hunter and the ranchers at bay and took the rights of the favorite. De Calvaire’s team went for $3,500, the highest bid in the brief history of the Calcutta. Sold. To the man in the navy-blue blazer and the big checkbook. Hope you’ve got you a rabbit’s foot.
“Les chiens,” the Count said softly. “Thank you. Marche.” When the crowd had topped off their drinks, the charity auction began.
“This sled is race-ready,” said the race director, looking straight at Lizabeth, “and I admire the construction. Solid ash driving handle, crosspieces, brush bow, rear stanchions. Teflon runners. Everything welded together with rawhide joints. Some of our mushers are gonna wish they were driving this baby come a week from now.”
The sled was beautiful, in the same linear way that antique gun stocks, oak letter desks, old saddles, bamboo fly rods, handmade cowboy boots, beavertail snowshoes, and wooden skis are beautiful. Were gonna start the bidding on this fine piece of craftsmanship at three hundred dollars. Now who’ll open the bidding at three hundred dollars? Hunter’s hand went up like the tail of the lead dog in the gangline as the crowd counts down the beginning of the race. Three, now four, four hunerd, four hunerd, yow! Hubert’s hand went up at four. Four, now five, five hunerd, need five, five! A glass of cheap wine later, the Count owned an expensive handmade dogsled. Lizabeth watched Hubert run his hands along the lines of the sled.