by Pam Houston
The man in charge of the account was a friend of my father’s who signed all his letters to me “Uncle Jim.” The first time I called him after my father died it was to ask for a few thousand dollars because lightning had struck the ranch and fried the water pump in a month where money was tight already. But before I’d worked up the nerve to state the amount he said, “You know who went into the factories in World War II, Pam?” I said that I didn’t. “It was the women. Pam, the women,” and I said something like, “Yeah, I guess that’s true,” and hung up, and it was four more years before I gathered the courage to ask Uncle Jim for $10,000 to buy my friend Sarah’s Prius, so I could save gas on my ten-hour airport round trip during the nonblizzarding months. The Prius cost fifteen thousand, but I only took ten out of my father’s account, and made up the rest by taking on extra work over the summer, which sent Drew into raucous laughter. “Well,” he said, wiping his eyes, “it’s always nice to get your self-worth down to an exact figure.”
My best friend from college, Kelly—a clinical psychologist—once wrote out a script for me, actual words to say when I called the office, including comebacks when they pressured me into leaving the money alone, and my friend Practical Karen offered to call for me, to just say she was me and get the money moved into my Creede checking account. But I still couldn’t get it done. The only thing I had managed to do was switch it, against the broker’s recommendation, into a socially responsible portfolio.
Now my father’s been dead for more than a decade, and I’m older than he was when I was born. Jim has gone into some kind of semiretirement and even the woman who Jim passed me on to after that has moved on. Kurt, the new guy, sounds half my age, and still, I hesitate.
A few years ago, in the back of a car on the way to a reading, the poet Terrance Hayes and I were talking about fathers and when I told him about the money and how afraid I was to touch it he said, “I understand completely.”
“You do?” I said, since none of my friends nor my therapist seemed to.
“Sure,” Terrance said. “That money is the only thing your father is ever going to give you, whether he wanted to give it to you or not. The money is a kind of reparation. Once you spend it, both it and he will really be gone.”
“What do you think would happen,” I asked Tami on the phone, the night after RJ had given me the estimate, “if I used the rest of my father’s money to restore the cabin?”
“Your money,” Tami said, as she always did, when this subject came up.
“My money,” I said, emptily.
“I think it’s a terrific idea,” Tami said.
“And even if it turns out I don’t need all of it for the cabin, there’s no reason I shouldn’t move it all into my own account, right?” I said.
“Pam,” Tami said, “I know you don’t believe this, but that is your own account. There really isn’t anybody else there.”
In the end, I borrowed $20,000 from my dead father, and added nine back-to-back weeks of summer-conference teaching to make up the balance, which turned out to be another $20,000, because once RJ sent me photos and I saw how beautiful it was turning out to be, I told him not to skimp. I don’t see Drew too often anymore, so I haven’t gotten to tell him my self-worth has gone up in the last decade by exactly $10,000. It feels good to have busted my ass this summer toward a dedicated space for my writing. And to be perfectly honest, it feels a little strange—but not awful—to have finally let my father give me that gift.
West Willow, East Willow, Antelope Park
The last thing this book needs is another dead elk story. I know that. And yet a herd of two hundred elk live in the national forest immediately to the south of me. They come through my pasture to drink from the river in winter, en masse. Once the Soward Ranch closes up for the year, the elk are my closest neighbors, so I see a lot of them. Excluding the domesticated animals who live with me, I see more of them than I do anyone else.
More than ten years ago, on a pasture walk, the ground still muddy but not impassable, walking the fence line looking for breaks and fallen posts, I came upon an elk skeleton, caught up in the fence. Her bones had been picked clean by coyotes, but not clean enough to have disentangled her from the barbed wire that meant her end. In twenty-five years she had been the only elk who fell victim to my fences, until yesterday.
Samantha Dunn, who I teach with each summer at Esalen, was visiting. We didn’t know each other all that well, if we were measuring in quantifiable, real-world terms. But we knew each other’s books and could recognize each other’s scars. We both had limbs partially and permanently disfigured by horses, and we were pretty sure we’d had the same mother in two different models, the New Jersey and the New Mexico. Sam needed out of Orange County for a bit, so I invited her to come back to her beloved Southwest landscape, to relax for a few days surrounded by the big blue sky, spruce trees and gamma grass.
It was late March, and in the days before Sam arrived, my pasture freed itself from the last of the snow (or, the last of the snow until the great May blizzard of 2016 would “surprise” us, as it did every spring), so we took the year’s first pasture walk together. Out across the dead grass and over the still saturated ground to the first corner post of the pasture, where we saw the elk, caught in the fence, the barbed wire twisted around both her forelegs. We assumed she was dead, so there was first that sadness, but when the dogs went up to sniff her, she flailed her strangled and bleeding legs at them, which kicked the sadness up into a whole different category. I ran back to the house for the wire cutters; we cut her free, and she fell to the ground. Her eyes were opened too wide, and her stomach looked unnaturally bloated. Pregnant, we thought, because we needed one more thing that morning to tear at our hearts.
“Do you have a gun?” Sam asked, and I said I didn’t.
Sam was shocked by this, and I considered for the first time in twenty-two years that it might be irresponsible of me not to have a gun, when—my mind flashed back to Monroe and Daphne—I’d always thought about it the other way around. This morning was the first time I actually could have used one. Even when I had to kill the chicken whose guts William had spilled all over the yard, the axe had been more than enough.
“Well,” Sam said, “now that she’s free, I think she’ll die very quickly. It was probably just the pain and the adrenaline keeping her alive.”
“Let’s leave her then,” I said, “to die in peace.” We both told her we were sorry, called the dogs away from their sniffing and continued on the pasture walk.
When we returned from the walk, I put the dogs in the house and went to let the sheep out. I looked across the five hundred yards or so of pasture that separated the elk from me, and was pretty sure I saw her kicking. It seemed impossible she had not died during the duration of our walk. Maybe it was just a big bird of prey I had seen, rising off the carcass and it had only looked like her legs. I ran inside and grabbed the binoculars. She was definitely kicking, but in spite of her vigor, seemed unable to raise her neck and head.
Sam walked back out there to check on her. Her eyes looked better, Sam said, she was blinking, and licking the patch of snow under her head to get water and actually swallowing it down. She was breathing deeply but normally. But her forelegs were cut all the way to the tendons, and then there was the fact that she couldn’t seem to move her head separately from her neck, or her neck separately from her spine.
I went back out there with Sam and we put our hands on her neck and spoke to her softly, apologizing for my barbed-wire fences, that tamer and scourge of the American West. Then I returned to the house and called Doc Howard. “I don’t think there’s any way she could possibly make it,” I said. “But she’s very much alive and I don’t have a gun here.”
“Fish and Game doesn’t really like you to shoot anything anyway, Pam,” Doc said, and I felt relief flood through me. “Give Brent a call—I know it’s Sunday, but he’ll have his cell phone. If you can’t get a hold of him I can give you the numbers of h
alf a dozen people in town who’ll have a gun.”
“Do you think somebody would want to eat her?” I asked.
“I think she’s been stressed too long,” Doc said. “I don’t think it would be good for anybody to eat that meat.”
“Except for the coyotes,” I said.
“Yeah,” he said. “They’re not so fussy.”
I left a message for Brent. I went out with my binoculars again and now the elk seemed to be lying still.
I went back inside, where Sam had made us tea. “I know she’s suffering, but I don’t want some random man from town to bring his gun and all his macho energy out here to the ranch and shoot her,” I said and for the first time in that difficult day finally burst into tears.
Sam hugged me. “You want to save all the wild things from all the bad men,” she said, and in my kitchen at least, no truer words had ever been spoken.
“Brent’s not that way,” I said. “He’s super calm and decent. He’s had this job for twenty-one years. He loves the elk more than anybody in the world.”
“Then we wait for Brent,” Sam said.
“But what if he doesn’t call back and it gets dark and she gets eaten alive by coyotes?”
“Then she will be like many other elk who lived here long before you did,” Sam said.
That was the right answer. But still, without my fences, this particular elk would not have had to die.
“There’s always my kitchen cleaver,” I said, “but we might get that all wrong too.”
Brent called back within a half hour and thirty minutes after that he stood on my porch. He took one look at our faces, and rattled off a series of stories of elk who had pulled through, one that had had three legs cut all the way around by wire.
“When I started this job I used to put them down if they had a runny nose,” he said, “but in twenty-one years I’ve learned a lot about how tough these critters are, and I’ve also seen lots of three-leggeds, the same animals, winter after winter. Especially the females. They’re tougher than you think.”
It was sweet of him to try to cheer us up, but we were all but certain that once he got out there and saw her, there was only going to be one answer.
“Should we go with him?” I asked Sam, something in me afraid I was shirking my duties if I did not. What I wanted to be least of all was one of those people who dropped the earth, or a dog, or an elk, off at the door of the vet.
“I think we already said goodbye,” Sam said. “I think the fewer the people, the better for her.”
From the kitchen window we watched Brent walk across the pasture, then we watched him look her over, and then take out his pistol, and then we heard the muffled report of the shot.
I had told him on the phone I was worried about how close she was to the house, worried about the coyotes and the dogs getting into the carcass. He had said he would try to take the carcass away in his truck if he could drive out there, but it was four o’clock in the afternoon, and 41 degrees, and I knew the pasture would be soup all the way. We watched him drag her carcass a few feet away from the fence. And then we watched him drag her a little farther, and then it occurred to me he was going to try to drag that elk all the way to the back of my property himself.
Sam and I threw on our boots and crossed the space between us and the elk for the fourth time that day. Brent told us the elk was last year’s calf, and as soon as he said it I realized she was, in fact, quite small, and that’s why she hadn’t made it over my fence. This was a bad news/good news scenario—while she had only lived a year herself, she did not, at least, have a nearly viable calf in her belly.
“Sometimes when they hang up like that they destroy a vertebra,” he said, which I took as his explanation for why she couldn’t lift her head, why he knew so immediately she was a lost cause.
She was gone now, a pile of meat that bore little resemblance to the sweet soul who blinked her eyes at us, who tried to lick water from the top of the melting snow. We each picked up a leg and started pulling. It was, in fact, easier to have her dead than to have her in pain and living with no hope of recovery. We pulled her across the pasture and around to the back of the hill where the homesteaders are buried. This might keep her scent off the wind that blew toward the house, and keep the coyotes farther away from the sheep when they came, as they would, probably as soon as nightfall, to begin the process of breaking down the carcass.
Standing above her one minute more, I had the terrible thought that maybe this was Willa, who, if she lived, would now be a yearling. Maybe she had remembered the barn and gotten left behind somehow and was coming back to see us—but this was, I decided, a thought that might be too self-torturing even for me. There were at least two hundred head of elk who used my ranch in winter, and probably seventy-five calves born each year. If Willa had made it through those first weeks of her life, with or without a mother, likely she was somewhere up on the mountain right now, eating the brand-new shoots of grass that were, just in these last few days, starting to poke through in sheltered microclimates.
One day, if I could put away enough money maybe I could change my fences from barbed wire to wood. I had no idea how much that would cost for 120 acres, maybe ten thousand dollars, maybe a hundred thousand. I could be like Dona and Robert Blair and buy myself a half mile every Christmas. It would make me the laughingstock of the county, but I didn’t care about that. Be the change, I thought, as I did twenty or thirty times every day during the moments I was so obviously not.
The sun was falling toward Handies Peak, washing the pasture golden as Brent, Sam and I made our way back to the house. We talked about the bighorn sheep that live up in Seepage Creek, and an extra-large coyote I had seen up there the last time I was snowshoeing. I told Brent I used to be a Dall-sheep-hunting guide in Alaska, and I knew he could not quite reconcile that information with the fifty-four-year-old grief-stricken-over-an-elk-yearling woman before him. Or perhaps he could, perhaps in his own way he was as sad about the young elk cow as I was, and perhaps that’s why, the year before with Willa, when he had said, “Pam, I’m going to need you to trust me a little bit,” I had.
“I had an insatiable appetite for being in the wilderness,” I said. “I never killed anything myself, but on those ten-day, one-hunter-one-guide sheep hunts, I learned a lot about how to conduct myself.” Some hunters were assholes. Just like some of everything are assholes. But in the years I spent guiding hunters, I met many men who had deep respect for wildlife and wilderness, and Brent reminded me of the best of them.
I gave him a mircobrewed root beer for the road along with my endless gratitude.
“This is just what I do,” he said, for the third time since he arrived, though whether he was convincing me or himself I couldn’t be sure.
Later that night, after I’d made Sam and me a good, comforting dinner that included my famous mashed potatoes, and we were still sad anyway, I said, “Well, here is the one thing. The one silver lining. Now you and I have been through something together. In the actual world. It’s not just a hunch anymore. Now she’ll always be right there between us.”
Two weeks later a package came to the ranch, the return address belonging to Daniel Leslie, a jeweler in Oregon. Inside were two tiny elk prints, one for each ear, and a gift card that said, “Us orphans, it matters that we stick together.”
Miners Creek, Ivy Creek, Ute Creek, Rat Creek
In the years since the sheep slaughter, I have upped my ranch time by at least 30 percent. I’ve missed out on a couple of big paychecks and great destinations, but it’s felt good to be home enough to feel the rhythms of all the seasons, to keep a close eye on Roany as he ages, to watch each year’s lambs turn into sheep.
I replaced the forty-year-old woodstove with one that doesn’t leak, so now my clothes smell better. I replaced the furnace so it doesn’t sound like it’s walking from one side of the basement to the other during the coldest January nights. My friend Sarna bought me a gift certificate to Home Depot and I
bought some tools I’m learning to use.
Every time Jeff Larson—Creede mayor, hot dog stand owner and my go-to odd-job guy—comes out to replace the furnace fan belt, or the water filter housing, or a breaker box fuse out at one of the frost-free pumps, he insists I pay very close attention.
“A woman living out here all by herself has got to know how to fix things!” he always says to me as I crane over whatever pile of parts he is craned over, trying to guess which tool he is going to ask for next and fearing I won’t know it by name.
Jeff is whatever kind of genius it is that allows him to know the make and model of every propane furnace fan made since 1936 (just as one example), so I listen and watch, and try to learn. I’m more game now to take a stab at a repair job myself, even when it takes me three tries and that many trips to the hardware store. Although I still tend to use butter knives as screwdrivers, and the heel of my cowboy boot as a hammer, progress is progress. In fact, I’ve come to appreciate duct tape and baling wire so much I have to force myself not to sneak a little of each into my suitcase whenever I go traveling. Add a can of WD-40, a universal socket set and my Leatherman, and I can put most disasters on temporary hold until Jeff can get out here and bail me out.
I mounted a gear hammock in the mudroom to collect the hats and gloves and neck gaiters that accumulate on the countertops in winter. I fixed an ice dam in my freezer after watching a YouTube video. I reinforced the whole sheep pen with an extra layer of chicken fencing to protect them better against varmints. I solved a recently developing problem of William jumping over the four-foot fence to chase the donkeys by stringing a single white cord six inches above the fence for a half a mile to make a visual barrier. I understand none of these things is particularly impressive, but they make me feel good about how I’m living my life.