Claiming Ground

by Laura Bell

  “Tuesday we’ll have everybody up the mountain, and I’ll come start you up on Wednesday. Five days’ trail from out here, so eat your Wheaties.”

  I watch him fight my oat barrel up into the pickup bed. “Do you need some help?”

  “Hell no, not that it’d matter if I did, half-pint that you are. Get on out there. You’re on your own now till Wednesday, and I’ll be here at dark o’clock, so be ready. And don’t let them oilfield guys give you any grief. I seen their tracks all over.”

  I leave him to his black mutterings and climb up on Willy, heavy in my muddy boots. The dogs are at our heels, and I call them up to the sheep, “Way ’round, way ’round. Push ’em up, push ’em up!” They sweep the bedground, nosing up stragglers, and the old ewes come running back for the lambs. The damp air is full of sage and wet earth and the bird sounds of early morning.

  Miles drove over from Little Mountain in the Land Rover around noon, bringing Bennie Ruth and Freya along. They’re getting ready to open Natural Trap Cave for a season of archaeological work, with students coming in from around the country to work three-week shifts at the dig site. Freya is Canadian, living in Lovell, and will handle the cooking there. Miles and Bennie Ruth are from Missouri, both PhDs. He teaches paleontology at the university, and she, psychology at a private women’s college. They have what, in the seventies, was called an “open marriage,” opened in the past somewhat bumpily to include me.

  When they arrive, it’s like having a circus come to town. They have news of the world beyond the ranch, of politics and music and the crew gathering for the summer’s dig. They’re smart and funny and excited about their lives. I let my sheep scatter as we drink beer, eat cheesecake and watermelon under a sky that again has turned clear and blistering. Now my camp feels like the center of the universe, all that I need. They give me a whole box of cassettes, from Jerry Jeff Walker to Chopin, and wave and honk as they pull out. “See you on the mountain!”

  When they leave, everything feels barren and empty, no longer nearly enough. They consider me brave and said so, thinking that this is some hero’s world I’m living in, a child in nature and all that, but they don’t know the rough edges. They see only what I choose to show them.

  I open the leftover Sara Lee and pull a finger through the cherries and the sweet cream cheese, then saddle Willy and begin the long, slow circle around the sheep, bumping the strays back toward the center. Horseback again, my world begins to fall back into place around me—sheep, dogs, and a horizon that I know intimately. I’m relieved, once again, to have my bearings.

  Sheep gathered and bedded, I drink a last beer and dance with the dogs out under the stars to the Rockport Blues Festival and African drumming, my last night before we begin heading to the mountain.

  The days are long and the country desolate. We trail from before five in the morning until almost nine at night, with a few hours’ break midday when the sheep clump around the water hole and pant, too hot to move. Little Mountain looms larger with each mile, and looking through binoculars, I imagine that I can see the cabins above me. Sand Draw camp the first night and Little Sheep Mountain the next.

  From there, the sheep leave before dawn and hit the trail on their own. They know where they’re going and have an urgency about them, like when they’re thirsty and smell water. I leave camp and pick up stragglers, bumping them up to catch the lead. We make it to the highway by seven thirty and to the canal to water by ten. Since we’re so close to Lovell, Sterling lets me take the truck into town at noon, and he stays on the water with the sheep. I let myself in to Freya’s apartment to borrow her shower, my first in months, and use every sweet-smelling thing she has. I buy chocolate milkshakes at the drive-in, one for me and one for Sterling. Tomorrow we’ll cross the Yellowtail Reservoir on the causeway bridge and camp that night at the base of the mountain. Looking through my binoculars now, what I thought were cabins are only snowbanks.

  John Hopkin meets us coming into Roundup Springs that evening; he’s taking over tending my camp for the rest of the summer.

  “In the morning, you’ll need to bump up the tail end and get ’em moving pretty good with your dogs; then they’ll just have to drift up that slide-rock trail by theirselves.” He points to the bright scar of braided trails on the mountain face. I notice the fine red hair and freckles covering his forearms and the chunky gold ring on his right hand. “It’s too steep for you and your horse, so you’ll have to work your way up there a bit to the north. Pick your way careful and watch your horse. You’re better off leading him if you think you can hike it. Some of these old guys can’t, but hellsakes, what good’s youth and beauty if you can’t climb a little rock?”

  John is all arms and legs and whistling energy, clad in mysteriously clean jeans and a polyester shirt with ironed-in creases. In charge of all the sheep and herders, he works like a fiend from sunup to sundown and yet here he is with his pickup washed and waxed and a cloud of aftershave in his wake. After a spring full of Sterling’s dour spirits, he’s a breath of fresh air, and it occurs to me there might be more on top of this mountain than just green grass.

  “I’m gonna pull your wagon on up around to the big mountain where you’ll have it for the summer, but you’ll have to stay in a junker for a couple weeks in the meantime. Anyways, pack up what you’ll need till you get up to the forest permit. And leave your fine china behind. This John Blue Canyon road’s a son-of-a-gun and it’ll bust cast iron to pieces. And where you’re goin’ you won’t be needin’ your damn prom dresses, either.” When he chuckles, he tilts his head back slightly and his face crinkles, all sunburn and freckles.

  It’s dusky evening and the sheep are still drifting up toward the vertical slide-rock trail that we’ll climb tomorrow morning. The mountain face looms over us, we’re so close, and its bare rock echoes back the chaos of sheep bleating for their lambs behind them and for the green grass above them. It makes me nervous, but John says they know where they’re going and some will begin pushing up in the night. He said, “Quit your worrying; you’re just about to start your summer vacation.”

  “Well, hell, looks like you made it.” John has been waiting on top of Little Mountain with a cold Coke for me and a barrel of spring water for my dogs and horse. “I tried to getcha a room at the Holiday Inn, but it was plumb full up,” he says with mock earnestness when he sees me wrinkling my nose at the old dark sheepwagon he’d hauled up for me. The sheep spread through the thick grass, eating their fill, beaching in clumps all around us with the sun hanging high at noon. “Rest a day now, and we’ll trail you one more jump on up Mexican Hill and over to your camp on the rim of Devil’s Canyon. It’ll be your last camp before we take you on past the Medicine Wheel and up to your forest permit at Burnt Mountain.”

  When he’s gone, I wander back over to the rim to look at where we’ve just been. The trail had been a bear, climbing between cliffs and around tilting slabs of slide rock—easy for sheep and rigorous, if not dangerous, for a hiker, but for a horse with slippery iron shoes, nearly impassable. We’d made it, though not without false starts and backtracks to find the single spot of grace that might let us through.

  From this elevation gain of nearly three thousand feet, I can see the shape of the Big Horn Basin and all the miles we’ve covered. Through binoculars, I scan the long, dark face of the Absarokas to the west and past them into the deep heart of the Yellowstone backcountry. I follow the Absaroka Range north to the Beartooths, where they disappear into Montana, and then east to where the northern Big Horns and Pryor Mountains reach toward them, nearly closing the circle. Out in the center of the basin, I pick out the knob of Heart Mountain and spine of McCullough Peaks, sixty miles to the west of where I stand. And to think that we’ve walked and ridden across the whole of it all.

  I call Lady and Louise over, and we fall down into the grass to nap with my jacket bunched up for a pillow and the sun warm on my face. We are tired, all of us. The grass around the wagon is sprinkled with spring beautie
s and shooting stars, lush enough to rise up around us like nests where we’re sprawled, dead to the world.

  BURNT MOUNTAIN

  In the summer of 1978, when my mother was grieving her sick and aging parents, my father bundled her into the car and drove her west across the Great Plains to a log cabin in the northern Big Horns, off the Sheep Mountain road, tucked in among lodgepole pine and Douglas fir.

  The cabin belonged to the Lewis Ranch and was where John stayed while tending the summer bands on the national forest permits. He met my parents there among the profusion of wildflowers the mountain gives up that time of year, loaded their bags into his four-wheel-drive pickup—its stock rack freshly painted red—and brought them as gently as possible over the rough miles to my high camp on the top of Burnt Mountain.

  My mother seemed a young girl when she arrived, as though she’d shed some thick skin of habit as she was brought across the country to a place she’d never been. When my parents emerged from John’s pickup, they were both bright eyed and silly with the extravagant remoteness of where they’d landed. “We’ve had such a trip!” she exclaimed, then told stories of cooking meals en route on the car’s manifold, an idea she’d read about in a magazine. My father laughed, relieved by my mother’s lightheartedness. As I welcomed them with hugs, their bodies felt thinner than I remembered, unprotected by the humid Kentucky air and the rituals of their lives. At ten thousand feet, the air was cool and startling in its brilliance, shimmering as a thing in itself that had shape and color. He pulled a sweater around her shoulders as she said, fiercely, “This is beautiful.”

  I tried to see anew what they were seeing for the first time. There was the sheepwagon, a gypsy camp on wheels, with its rounded metal roof and smoke coming out of its chimney. The lower body of the wagon was wood, rough and splintered, painted what was once a jaunty red. Across the back, above the window, HOME ON THE RANGE was lettered in crude brushstrokes. The wagon faced east for the morning sun, and from inside its split Dutch doors, there came the small rhythmic explosions of coffee perking on the woodstove. The rubber tires were snugged into holes in the ground to level the wagon and anchor it into the hillside for when the winds blew up hard.

  I remember wanting all this to be a charming picture for my parents to see but thinking how it might seem slim comfort against a yawning emptiness that stretched a hundred miles up into Montana. And how, when you’re used to sheltering hardwoods and rolling hills, the bare-bones immensity of Wyoming can make you feel like a sacrifice left on a slab for the gods to pick clean.

  John began unloading supplies and boxes of groceries from the back of the pickup, and we pitched in. A hundred-pound sack of oats for Willy. Dog food and a pair of rawhide hobbles that I’d asked for. The usual groceries that came every week, mostly in cans: soup, stewed tomatoes, tuna fish, beans and corn, and cling peaches in light syrup.

  Spotting the Spam and Vienna sausages hidden underneath, I fall into my weekly ritual. “John, you know I hate this stuff. I’m feeding it to the dogs as soon as you leave.”

  He smiles sweetly at my parents, unloading their bags, and tells me over his shoulder, “You’ll find your sorry ass planted in four feet of snow one morning and you’ll be damned glad to have this shit in your cupboards, pardon my French.” He resumes his whistling and empties the oats into the galvanized metal can by the wagon.

  My parents’ eyes are twinkling as they carry their things over, unused to this blasphemous variety of affection. I take their bags, marveling that they’ve packed so lightly, and lead them up into the tiny sheepwagon that will be their home for the next few days. My mother first, then my father, stepping up onto the block of pine and squeezing past the kitchen cupboard on the left and the woodstove on the right. The interior space is small, the floor only three feet by four and flanked on both sides by a bench with storage bins underneath. With three of us inside, there’s hardly room to turn around. My mother runs her hand over the quilt on the bed, a gift from a family friend, with diamond-shaped ripples of color; then she reaches up to finger the wildflowers that I’ve gathered into a mayonnaise jar on the bookshelf. “What are they?” she asks, and I name them, separating the tender blossoms of each as I do so. Silver lupine, sticky geranium, heartleaf arnica, yellow monkeyflower, shooting star, bistort, wild blue forget-me-nots. My father leans over my shoulder, watching, his breath warm at my ear. I speak the Latin names, too, because I know them and because my parents are still listening. Lupinus argenteus, Mimulus guttatus, Eritrichium …

  They have driven eighteen hundred miles to be in this place where I am. Now they’re here, and it is all so close—the scent of soap on my mother, the rare, bright fragrance of flowers, the roof of the sheepwagon curving over us, barely clearing the tops of our heads.

  She appears at the wagon door dressed in faded bib overalls that are rolled up at the ankles. Underneath, a waffle-weave thermal top and a denim workshirt, bleached out like the overalls to the softest shade of blue. On her feet, coarse work socks with brown reinforced heels that spill over the sides of her gardening tennis shoes. She shoves her hands deep in the pockets that hang low on her hips and smiles winningly at both Dad and me, knowing we must be shocked.

  I’ve never seen my mother in blue jeans before, much less baggy overalls. She steps down onto the woodblock step, and I come up close to look at her. “I’ve been going through Daddy’s things,” she says, “and I just wanted to bring these along.” She is a handsome woman, square jawed and bright eyed, slender and strong. Now she looks like some fierce Huck Finn, her face wavering between joy and despair, full of her daring. She shakes her hips, making fun of herself, but it is her father’s life that she wears.

  I reach up to touch the fabric at her waist. It smells of fresh laundering, but underneath, inside the weave, there’s the smell of hard well water and blackberry-bramble sweat and the dark, sweet lingering of Burley tobacco leaves curing in the fall air. My mother had grown up working alongside her father in his tobacco fields, trying to match his stride and energy and dawn-to-dark ambition. She had hoed her rows the fastest, milked her morning cows first, and graduated valedictorian of her class for the chance to have the bright light of his approval shine on her. Now he sits in a wheelchair, in a nursing home in the small Kentucky town where he used to buy his tractor parts, clouded in the confusion of Alzheimer’s. For my mother, there have been years of caring for him, of trips to the farm and a live-in companion, but finally there is nothing that’s enough and no place where he feels at home. She stands on the wood block telling some story about her father over my head, to Dad, to the sheep creeping over the rise of the hill. Looking up into her animated face, I can see that she doesn’t know how to mourn his loss. I have no words to comfort her; instead, I lift a hand and help her down.

  The top of Burnt Mountain is above timberline. To the south, the bald ridge runs fat and smooth like the back of an elephant out to where it rounds into a grassy knob. From there, you can see where Half-Ounce Creek springs up and quickly drains into the headwaters of the Little Big Horn River. To the north, the ridge climbs and narrows into a spine of fractured shale where the sheep are now gathering, dropping to their knees, panting with the great weight of their fleeces, to bed down for the night. Their bleating quiets as lambs suckle and butt at their mothers’ bags.

  My parents have unpacked their things into the sheepwagon cupboards, and I’ve pitched a small canvas pup tent for myself off to the side. We have eaten mutton stew around the small table in the wagon, and now the sweet and vast spaces of evening have drawn us back out.

  It is the last magic hour of light. A red-tailed hawk screeches. The dogs lie out among the clumps of Idaho fescue, heads stretched down onto their paws, done for the day. Below camp, the Burnt Mountain spring falls through a tangle of wild sweet arnica into a catch-pond, the mud around its edges stamped by sharp hooves, its glassy surface filled with a day going to dusk.

  I lift my binoculars and follow the slope of grass, gone velvet
and rich in the last light, down to where it tilts into timber half a mile below our camp. I look for straggling sheep, for coyotes with their coats backlit like halos, for elk nosing out to feed, then scan the skewed horizon to the north where the Leakey and Dry Fork ridges reach out toward the Little Big Horn canyon, one from each side, like arms grasping for what has already disappeared. I watch for movement and pass the binoculars on to my parents.

  When I begin to pull fat chunks of split pine from the woodpile, my father steps over to help. He has buttoned his heavy wool shirt against the chill and looks more rugged than the man I grew up with.

  Every Sunday until I was eighteen, I sat in our family’s pew while he conducted the service in his black robes and spoke the words of Christ and the teachings of the great theologians. His voice was deep, his diction perfect. From a distance, I watched him speak and move through a world that was polished silver chalice, crimson velvet stole. His words were of love and truth, carefully chosen, and he spoke bravely, a habit that could make the righteous uncomfortable, and on occasion, there were threatening phone calls in the night. I heard members of the congregation say they couldn’t have made it through the hard times—unplanned births, sudden deaths, rebellious teens, alcoholic spouses, the grittiness of life that tests people’s faith—without my father. I heard them say, “You must feel so lucky to have him as your father.” Now here he is beside me, gathering up an armload of wood with his fine hands like an artist’s, one knee bent into the soft dirt. Chips of bark sift down into the creases of his jeans. His breath is raspy, labored with the altitude. Up close, he seems like a man I do not know.

  We carry the wood back to the fire ring and arrange it loosely in the bottom. “No kindling?” he asks. I shake my head and reach for the can of diesel fuel by the wagon steps. “John calls this my fifty-cent fire,” I say, pouring it over the pile and striking a match, the flames leaping up in a whoosh of sparks.