by Pam Houston
I also understood I had been given a wake-up call to give the ranch more attention. I was never going to be able to live my life without ranchsitters, but I would screen them more carefully in advance. I would make it my goal to never leave the ranch for more than a month without dropping in. If I ever doubted how things were going, I would cut short whatever work trip I was on and come home and see for myself. Most significantly, I would drop from three-quarters time at UC Davis to half-time.
I got better at caring for the chickens and sheep. The owner of the Far Dog sent me his humblest apologies, assured me the employee who butchered Phoebe had been fired and invited me in for a meal on him. We had more lambs, two the next spring and two the next. I lost a ewe to pneumonia the winter after Monroe and Daphne’s departure, and a two-year-old ram who apparently got himself cast up (that’s rancher talk for stuck) against the barn wall and couldn’t move. He must have twisted his gut sometime in the night trying, because when we found him in the morning he was stiff as a board. Doc Howard said, by way of consolation, “You know, Pam, sheep are born looking around for a place to die.”
The year after we lost Phoebe and Sampson, Jordan gave birth to a ram we named Junior because he was the spitting image of Motown, his sire, black with white spots and a white face and tail, two white legs and two black ones. Rams tend to get more rammy with age, and at six, Motown was getting to be more than I could handle. I knew the rams would clash when Junior came of age, so I sold Motown to a breeder in New Mexico. Junior stayed sweet, and sired beautiful babies until the day his third set of lambs were born. The first thing he did was try to kill them. It’s not unusual for a ram to try to kill a male lamb—Motown had knocked Junior sideways the day Junior was born—but once it became clear both lambs were females, I feared Junior might have a screw loose.
We moved him out with the horses, where, in spite of the size differential, he found ways to terrorize them too, kicking his little hoof out—Van Morrison style—at sweet old Roany, and running him off pile after pile of hay. Junior wouldn’t quit no matter how many separate piles of hay I made. It didn’t seem to be about hunger or even ownership of each pile as much as the thrill of making an animal four times his size run. Deseo tried to stick up for Roany, cracking Junior in the head with a full-extension kick of both back hoofs on more than one occasion. It made a hell of a noise when his hooves hit those horns, but it seemed not to even faze Junior, as a ram’s head is designed to be slammed into over and over again.
Deseo is scared of the water trough even on a good day, so that’s what Junior chose to keep him away from. There is nothing in the universe más macho than an intact miniature donkey, so Junior left Isaac alone. But Isaac’s brother, Simon, is shy, and let Junior chase him out of the windbreak on the back side of the barn no matter how hard and fast the snow came.
Junior rammed me often, so hard it sent me sprawling in the sheep pen, so hard that when I got done with chores and went in to take a shower, I found the backs of my legs severely abraded and the inside of my pants covered in blood.
I built a whole new pen to isolate Junior further, but by that time he’d learned that if he applied continuous pressure to the metal stakes I’d sunk in the ground he could uproot them, and when I sunk them deeper he learned that he could hook his horns into the wire fencing and eventually tear a hole in it big enough to ram through. When I bought thicker gauge wire he learned to bash his way out by hitting the gate over and over again until the wooden parts of the frame splintered. I even tried rebuilding the walls of his enclosure so they curved in at the bottom, making it impossible for him to get his body into position for ramming. That’s when he started slamming himself into the outside wall of the hundred-year old barn.
You would think a fifty-four-year-old woman could outsmart a four-year-old ram, but I couldn’t. By that time the lambs were almost yearlings and I knew with their mother’s help they could all hold their own against him. I hoped putting Junior back in with the ewes would calm him down, and at first it did. But then Junior chose Natasha—a two-year-old ewe—as the victim of his bullying, spending so much time keeping her off her food he barely got to eat himself. Each morning, I let her out alone so she could eat her hay in the snowy yard.
It didn’t take two weeks for Junior to start bashing down doors again. The third morning in a row I woke to Jordan and all the other girls standing belly-deep in snow a hundred yards from the pen, just asking a coyote to come have a feast, I decided enough was enough. If I took no action, someone was going to get killed, and odds were it wouldn’t be Junior. On a ranch, I have learned, it is often the sweetest residents who die.
It was getting close to the start of spring quarter at UC Davis, and I couldn’t leave a new ranchsitter with this problem, couldn’t take the risk Junior might ram her as hard as he rammed me. I put Junior up on Craigslist and tried to sell him, but at that time of year no one needs another mouth to feed. My friend Sam Arnold asked her hunter son if he could make use of the meat and the cape and he said he could. He came to the house on a brilliantly sunny afternoon and told me to lure Junior out of the pen. I went into the barn and got a can of grain and Junior followed me out into the yard. Then the young man told me to step away and I did. He raised his rifle to his eye from thirty yards away and shot Junior right between the eyes.
For four seasons in my twenties I worked as a Dall sheep-hunting guide in the Brooks and Alaska ranges. It was one hunter and one guide for ten days; that’s how long it took because the rams were smart and they could climb much faster than we could. Their sense of smell was about ten thousand times better than ours, so if we were upwind we had to stay put for hours. Their vision was unparalleled, and when they slept in groups in the afternoon they always left a sentry—one of the youngest rams—keeping watch. Even when we were downwind we had to find a way to approach the rams without crossing open terrain, which in the treeless high country of Alaska is nearly impossible. Even with ten days at our disposal, the hunters only killed about 35 percent of the time.
I guided sheep hunters in Alaska because I was in love with a guy who made his living that way and because I wanted, more than anything, to be out in the Alaskan bush for two months a year. I’ve never quite come to peace with myself for doing it, but those seasons taught me a lot about myself as a carnivore, about the relationship between meat eaters and game. Most of the hunters who killed on those hunts had great respect for the sheep and their environment, and the ones who didn’t generally went home empty-handed.
Killing Junior was the exact opposite of all that. And in spite of the close range and Sam’s son’s perfect marksmanship he died hard, bellowing and spinning and spewing blood across the snow for twenty feet in all directions while Sam and I and all the other animals looked on, amazed. In Alaska, we’d instructed the hunters to shoot the rams, not in the skull plate, as this young man had, but through the heart.
What had sickened me most when Monroe killed Phoebe was that he’d done it in front of the other animals. I’d imagined the horses, Deseo especially, smelling the beer and blood and thinking they might be next. And now here I was, creating the same trauma a few years later, minus the booze, minus the knife, plus one head-rattling explosion.
“He was either a good bad man, or a bad good man,” reads one of my favorite Toni Morrison lines, “it all depends on what you hold dear.” By which I think she means longevity has a way of turning heroes into villains and vice versa. With Junior, life had delivered me an opportunity to stop holding a grudge against Monroe. It handed me a particular set of circumstances, and the next thing I knew I had blood on my hands.
There is something deeply wrong, my years as a hunting guide taught me, with anyone who can take a life lightly. For the most part, neither the hunters I guided, nor the ranchers I know in this valley, ever do. When I had to kill the chicken that William eviscerated, when I lured Junior out to the yard with a can of grain, I understood that Monroe had not been lying when he said the sheep were
his friends. Sometimes, friends do terrible things to each other.
Ranch Almanac: Lambing
My shearer, Tom Barr, says Icelandics are the toughest sheep he shears, the strongest and the most unruly, but since they’re the only sheep I’ve had, I can’t compare. I find the ewes sweet and self-sufficient, if a little bossy, and I like sitting outside listening to their bleats and baas when they’re grazing around the house in the afternoon.
When the sheep are out, the wolfhounds are in, or we have a hell of a rodeo. Fenton got his ribs smashed hard a couple of times when he cornered Motown down by the creek one day, and Jordan lost a pretty big clump of wool from her butt to William who was very insistent she sit down right now. So far Livie has been smart enough to keep her distance, and there’s never been any blood drawn on either side.
Lambs are born, like clockwork, on the twenty-fifth of March every year. They come alone or in pairs, black and white, or orange and white with big white stars on their faces, and sometimes a color I’d call pure golden blond. From the minute they are born until they are three weeks old, they have the softest, tightest, most beautiful curls you’ve ever seen.
During lambing season mamas and babies stay in the big pen 24/7. I’m grateful when the new lambs turn out to be female, because I’m not a good enough farmer to raise multiple rams, who do as their name suggests. I raise all the lambs to respond to basic voice commands and to enjoy a scratch behind the ears, but uncastrated, all my rams eventually become unruly, and nobody has much use for an aging, castrated ram.
I’ve learned a lot over the years about lambing: how to recognize when a ewe is in trouble, when to step in and when to leave well enough alone. But at the first birth I attended, a year after we got the sheep, my then ranchsitter, Mary Kate, and I stood outside the pen wringing our hands and saying encouraging words to Jordan the ewe who was down on her knees panting and looking more than a little uncomfortable.
Motown the ram stood over her, calm by his standards and, we thought, protective. We’d read lots of conflicting advice on the internet and had decided to go with the “most Icelandics know exactly how to do this themselves” school of sheep ranching. Mary Kate is an RN and kept repeating the first rule of nursing, “If it is not broken, don’t fix it,” until one black and white little lamb popped out, leapt immediately to his feet and started to nurse. We had about thirty seconds of cooing and grinning before Motown took a few steps back, got a running start, and tossed the two-minute-old baby into the air using his giant full curl of horns. Mary Kate ran to the baby while I threw my body on top of Motown, got him in a chokehold, and pulled and pushed him out the gate. Nowhere on the internet had it said, “Get the ram out of the pen before the ewe gives birth,” though we felt like idiots for not even speculating.
The baby seemed unhurt—if a little dazed—and in less than a minute had resumed nursing. We guessed it was a little ram, more because of Motown’s reaction than because of any body part we could discern, and when his horns started to come in a few days later, it turned out we were right.
The baby was nursing happily, and Jordan seemed in no distress. We decided we might leave them alone to let them bond when we noticed something else seemed to be emerging from Jordan’s nether regions. “Don’t worry,” Mary Kate said, with some authority, “It’s probably just the afterbirth.” We settled back against the wall of the pen to watch. “Does an afterbirth have hooves?” I said, and sure enough, less than a minute later, a second little black and white ram was born.
PART THREE
Diary of a Fire
Diary of a Fire
Many folks visiting the Rio Grande National Forest are noticing a big change in the high elevation forests as literally millions of trees are succumbing to the spruce bark beetle. More than 600,000 acres of spruce-fir forest have been infested by spruce beetle since 2002 and the beetles are continuing to spread. The native spruce beetle primarily attacks mature Engelmann spruce, although it sometimes infests blue spruce too. The tiny beetle is killing trees down to 5 inches in diameter. Luckily, smaller spruce and all sizes of subalpine fir will continue to survive and they will provide the base for creating the next forest.
—From the USDA Forest Service website
On June 5, 2013, lightning strikes a dead Engelmann spruce in the San Juan National Forest near Wolf Creek Pass in a direct line south from the ranch, up and over the Continental Divide. The smoke plume the resulting fire ignites is too thin and distant for me to see from my kitchen window—probably fifteen miles as the crow flies, so I don’t know about it yet. The spring of 2013 has been the driest in more than a decade. The region has had very little precipitation in April and none whatsoever in May. While the rest of the country has exploded into summer activity, we’ve hunkered down at home, rationed our water, watched the horizon. We’ve had ten red flag days since May 20 and I can feel the whole valley holding its breath.
Red Flag Warning: A designation put in place by the National Weather Service to alert land management agencies about the onset of critical weather and fuel moisture conditions that could lead to rapid or dramatic increases in wildfire activity (USDA Forest Service Fire Terminology).
On June 7, the West Fork Fire makes its first appearance on the internet when it is only a quarter acre in size. The Archuleta Emergency Management Website, receiving its information from the Durango Interagency Fire Dispatch, reports that the West Fork Fire, started by lightning on Monday, June 5, is burning in a rugged and remote area of heavy “down-dead and standing bug-kill timber” at 10,850 feet in elevation.
It takes the better part of a week for the West Fork Fire to grow from a quarter acre to 25 acres. We still haven’t seen any smoke on our side of the Divide, but I keep my eyes trained on the mountains to the south, which are covered with tens of thousands of beetle-killed spruce trees, standing like matchsticks on the hillsides, taunting the clouds full of dry lightning.
I’ve probably been hiking a hundred times up on the Divide behind the ranch just north of where the fire is burning. I turn left out my driveway, away from town, and follow Middle Creek Road all the way to its end. There I follow any one of a number of elk trails through the forest until I get to the tree line, where there’s a marmot trail that wraps around the backside of Copper Ridge, facing Red Mountain. From there it’s a steep but short grunt up to 12,800-foot Copper Mountain, which towers over the headwaters of Red Mountain Creek.
It is glorious country, flat mesa top fringed with giant slabs of volcanic rock, tundra meadows full of purple bluebells and miniature stalks of Indian paintbrush which glow a vibrant purple-red up that high in a really wet year, and cover the tundra in a palette that includes oranges, yellows and sometimes even whites.
From the top of Copper Mountain it’s a 360-degree view most people can’t imagine. To the south, the tundra-covered dips and swirls of the mountains surrounding Wolf Creek Pass: Piedra Peak, Palomino Mountain, and on the other side of Porphyry Basin, the Window and Sugarloaf. To the southeast, South River Peak and Fisher Mountain stand rock-strewn and mostly bald above the relatively lush Ivy and Lime Creek drainages. To the northeast, the ranch and the rest of Antelope Park point the way to the town of Creede, San Luis Peak and the nearly always snow-dusted La Garita Range. Due north is Bristol Head, and above it, Table Mountain and Snow Mesa, a pancake-flat highland lost in the clouds. To the northwest, the headwaters of the Rio Grande and Jarosa Mesa. And to the west, perhaps grandest of all, the high San Juans: the Pyramid, Handies Peak, Sunshine Peak, the melting ice cream cone of Uncompahgre and the Wetterhorn, the last four standing above 14,000 feet, under a Colorado bluebird sky.
It’s a place that literally and figuratively takes your breath away, a place where you might find yourself believing there is too much wild country ever to be destroyed. You might think climate change can’t touch this, nor fracking, nor the Koch brothers, nor Trump and his cabinet of oil barons. But all you have to do is look closely at the mountainsides to know not only that
those things can touch us, they already have.
After the pine beetle spent the 1990s decimating forests in northern Colorado, its cousin, the spruce bark beetle showed up in our part of the state in the early 2000s. Foresters blame the devastation the spruce beetle has caused on drought conditions in the southwest and consistently warmer temperatures due to long-term changes in sea surface temperature—all climate-change-related trends that are expected to continue and worsen for decades. In 2012, 183,000 new acres of spruce-beetle-infested trees were discovered in Colorado, bringing the state’s total to a million acres. Many of those new acres are in the San Juan and Rio Grande national forests—which is really all one forest, separated in name only by the Continental Divide. It is the Rio Grande National Forest that comes all the way down to my fences, that surrounds the ranch on three sides. By 2013, the only live trees left on many of the hillsides are the youngest spruce trees, which have too little diameter to make it worth the beetle’s while, a few subalpine firs, and the giant stands of aspens, lime green in their early summer finery, that braid themselves through the larger groves of spruce.
The spruce/fir forest doesn’t burn very often, but when it does, it burns big. Add a century of fire suppression, climate-driven high winds and low humidity, and an average temperature increase of 2 degrees, thanks to all the carbon dioxide we’ve pumped into the air. I’m no scientist, but my intuitive understanding goes something like this: Maybe the forest looked around at its cluttered, overheated, airless self and said, “What if I invent a beetle that will leave a million trees standing dead and crisp on top of a mountain that gets hundreds of lightning strikes each summer. Let’s see you try to stop me burning then.”