A River Runs Through It and Other Stories

by Norman Maclean

  Even before I got back to camp it had begun to melt. Hundreds of shrubs had been bent over like set snares, and now they sprang up in the air throwing small puffs of white as if hundreds of snowshoe rabbits were being caught at the same instant.

  While I was making breakfast, I heard the ticktock of a clock repeating, “It’s time to quit; it’s time to quit.” I heard it almost as soon as it began, and almost that soon I agreed. I said to myself, “You fought a big fire and packed a big gun,” and I said, “You slit waxy sticks of dynamite and stuck detonation caps in them and jumped back to watch them sizzle,” and then I said, “You helped Bill pack and you watched mountains by yourself. That’s a summer’s work. Get your time and quit.” I said these things several times to impress them on myself. I knew, in addition, that the fire season was over; in fact, the last thing the ranger had told me was to come in if it snowed. So I rang two longs for the ranger station; I rang two longs until I almost pulled the crank off the telephone, but in my heart I knew that the storm had probably blown twenty trees across the line between the peak and the station. Finally, I told myself to stay there until tomorrow when most of the snow would be gone and then to walk to the station and get my time and start over the hill to Hamilton.

  What I neglected to tell myself is that it is almost impossible to quit a ranger who is sore because you do not like his cook, or to quit a story once you have become a character in it. The rest of the day I straightened up the camp, finally mended the tent, and listened to the ticktock get louder. I put the boxes of tin cans in trees where the grizzly bear couldn’t get them. I had seen him split them open with one snap to a can.

  It was nearly ten o’clock the next morning before I started for the ranger station. There was no use starting until the sun had done some more melting. Besides, I had decided to take along the tree-climbing outfit with the faint hope that maybe the storm had blown only two or three trees across the telephone line, so in addition to my ax and my own little odds and ends, I was walking bow-legged with climbing spurs and climbing belt and was carrying insulators and number nine telephone wire. I doubt if I had dropped more than a thousand feet of altitude before I was out of the snow. Also, by then I had chopped two trees that had fallen across the line and had made one splice in the wire. I should have known from the count that I would never clean out twelve miles of telephone line in a day, but now that I was going to quit I developed a pious feeling, wishing to end in the act of conscientiously performing my duty, so I kept the climbing spurs on and followed the telephone right-of-way, watching the line dip from tree to tree. When you are following line this way you lose all sense of the earth, and all that exists is this extended pencil line in your eye. I wouldn’t have seen a rattlesnake unless he had wings and was flying south for the winter. As far as I was concerned, there were no rattlesnakes in Elk Summit district, and, if there were any, they would be holed up because it was late in the season and had just snowed. You could have examined my thoughts clear to the bottom of the heap and never found a snake track.

  I don’t need to tell you how a rattlesnake sounds—you can’t mistake one. Sometimes you can think that a big winged grasshopper is a rattlesnake, but you can never think that a rattlesnake is anything else. I stayed in the air long enough to observe him streaking for the brush, an ugly bastard, short, not like a plains rattler, and much thicker behind his head.

  I don’t know how far I jumped, but I was mad when I lit—mad at myself for jumping so high. I took off my climbing spurs, picked up my ax, and started into the brush after him. I remembered about the crazy sheepherder in the valley who had been bitten that summer by a rattler and, instead of taking it easy and caring for the bite, had chased the rattler until he killed him—and himself. I also remembered the crew talking about it and saying that, even for a sheepherder, he must have been crazy. I must have been crazier, because after remembering I went into the brush after him. I went in too fast and couldn’t find him.

  We talk nowadays about a “happening,” which is a good term to describe the next section of my life. In my mind it didn’t occur successively and can’t be separated: the snake was coiled about four feet in front of me I stuck the ax down between him and me he hit the ax handle the ax handle rang like a bell that had been struck and there was no punctuation between any of this. Then time started again because it was after this happening that I felt my hands sting from holding the ax handle the way your hands sting when you are a kid holding a baseball bat and not paying any attention and another kid with a bat comes sneaking up and hits your bat with his.

  The snake lay there as if he had never left his coil. He whirred and watched. He just barely left the next move up to me, and I made it fast. I almost set a record for a standing backward jump. It was getting so that I was doing most of my thinking in the air. I decided if I got to the ground again that I would try to take some of the sting out of my hands by chopping a few more fallen trees but instead when I lit I stood frozen trying to picture the snake as he struck because part of the picture was missing. All I could recall was about a foot and a half of his tail end lying on the ground. His head and all his upper part weren’t in the picture. Where they should have been was just a vertical glaze. As I backed off farther, I came to the conclusion that about a foot and a half of him stayed on the ground as a platform to strike from and what struck was too fast to see. The bastard still whirred, so I backed off even farther before I strapped on my climbing spurs. This time when I started to follow the line, I kept one eye and a good part of another on where I was putting my feet.

  If you have ever strung much wire, you know there is an important difference between the climbers used on telephone poles and on trees. Tree spurs are about two inches longer, because when you are climbing trees your spurs first have to penetrate the bark before they can start getting any hold in the wood, which is all fine and dandy as long as the trees have bark. But pretty soon the line crossed an old fire burn, maybe one of those 1910 burns, and the only trees standing were long dead and had no bark on them—and were as hard as ebony. I could get only about half an inch of spur in them and so I rocked around on the tips of my spurs and prayed the half inch would hold. The higher I climbed these petrified trees, the more I prayed. Before long, the line crossed a gulch 250 yards or more wide, and it was natural but tough luck that the line on one side of the gulch was down. A span of 250 yards of number nine line is a hell of a lot of weight for a dead tree to hold up in a storm, and one of the trees, rotted at the roots, had come down. I chopped out the line that had got wound around the tree when it fell and I spliced the line and added a few feet to it and picked a new tree to hang it on. Then I almost left the line lying there and started for the ranger station, because I didn’t want to climb a dead tree while carrying that weight of line, but whenever I started to duck out like that the ranger was sure to be watching. So I put the wire over my climbing belt and the belt around the tree, and started up with my rear end sticking straight out to punch as much spur into that calcified tree as possible. You’ve seen linemen at work and know it’s a job for rear ends that stick out and you should know why, even if you’ve never had climbers on. And when you’re hanging line on trees instead of poles, you have an extra hazard to overcome—you have to lean even farther back on your rear end and swing a little ax to chop off the limbs as you go up, because your belt is around that tree and it has to go up if you are. Also going up with you are at least 250 yards of number nine wire, getting heavier and tauter every time you stick half an inch of spur into this totem pole of Carborundum. Below on the tree are the sharp stubs of branches you have chopped.

  Less than half way up, the line had become so taut it would have pulled me out of the tree if I hadn’t been strapped to it by the belt. The half inch of spur became less and less. Then I heard the splinter. Maybe I would have felt better if I had had no belt and the wire had just flipped me over the cliff into the gulch. Anyway, with my spurs torn out of the totem pole I came down about ten
or twelve feet, and then my belt caught on something, and I dangled there and smelled smoke from the front of my shirt, my belly having passed over ten feet of the snag ends of chopped branches. I worked the belt loose and fell ten or twelve feet more, and so on. I never could push far enough away from the tree to jab my spurs into it again, and when I finally reached the ground I felt as if an Indian had started a fire by rubbing two sticks together, using me for one of the sticks.

  I was afraid to look at my lower quarters to see what was still with me. Instead, I studied the snags of those branches to see which of my private parts were to hang there forever and slowly turn to stone. Finally, I could tell by the total distribution of pain that all of me was still on the same nervous system.

  I was suddenly destitute of piety, and knew that I had done all the telephone repair work that I was going to do that day. I tried to tie my outfit into one pack, but all I was thinking about was how thick that mountain rattler was behind his head. And how warm I was in front.

  It was downhill to the ranger station, and I arrived there late in the afternoon, still not altogether cooled off. As I expected, Bill was in the warehouse, and he didn’t look up when I came in. He said, “Why did you leave the peak?” He knew damn well why I came in—he had told me to come in if it snowed. I said, “There are rattlers up there.” He grinned and seemed pleased with himself and the snake. I didn’t mention anything about tree climbing, although the front of my shirt was torn.

  He wasn’t building packs—he was just pulling things together at the end of the season. We didn’t say much of anything to each other because I was sore about the snake and he was enjoying himself, but after a while we both got our minds on what we were doing and we both were enjoying ourselves. Maybe one of the chief reasons you become a packer is that you like to handle groceries—and tools. By this time in the season most of the slabs of bacon are moldy and a lot of the tools have broken handles or need their points or edges sharpened, but that’s all right. It’s a good feeling to pick up an honest mattock that’s lost its edge from chopping roots and rocks while making a fire trench, and moldy bacon gives a feeling of having been more than ready to be of service. Finally Bill said, “Why do you go back with the trail crew? They’ve been doing without you, and I need somebody around camp to help me straighten out the stuff now that the season is over.” Then he said, as if he had put the two things together in his mind, “How about a game of cribbage at the station tonight?” I said I would if he needed me and to myself I said I’d put off for a day or two telling him that I was going to quit. More and more, I sensed I was slipping out of life and being drawn into a story. I couldn’t quit even when it was time to quit.

  The cribbage I especially wasn’t crazy about. Here he was, a big black hat and a blue shirt and a cold Bull Durham cigarette hanging on his lip and in his logging boots a double tongue with a fancy fringe cut in it; in addition to all this splendor, he was the best packer going and we thought the best ranger, and he could handle big crews of fire fighters as if he personally owned them and the Bitterroot Mountains, and maybe he had killed a sheepherder, and yet he couldn’t play cribbage. And, if the rumors from Hamilton were true about his poker, he couldn’t play cards and he couldn’t keep away from them. But my immediate burden was this two-handed face-to-face cribbage, and I couldn’t get anybody in the outfit to join and make a third so we could play something else. I’ve already told you about the cook turning me down, and you can bet I tried the crew before I tried him.

  The crew was like nearly every other crew I ever worked with in the woods. They were misers on the job. They wouldn’t buy shoelaces as long as they could tie more knots in the old ones; they wouldn’t bet a nickel on a card game; they learned to sew great ugly patches on their shirts; they spent all Sunday darning their socks and patching the patches on their shirts; they hoarded and Christianized—all so they would have a bigger roll to lose the first night they hit town. The closer we got to quitting time, of course, the more they hoarded and Christianized. When I went to the crew’s tent to find my bedroll and air it before night, I ran into the whole bunch, and it was good to see them, especially Mr. Smith, who gave me a thump on the back, but I didn’t try to tempt them into any forms of sin like a dime-limit poker game. I knew I was stuck with cribbage, and I could hear Bill counting an eight and a pair of sevens: “fifteen-two, fifteen-four, fifteen-six, and a pair make eight.”

  That evening I learned never to quit hating a guy just because I hadn’t seen him for a while. Bill and I were a little guarded with each other, but my two weeks in exile had cleaned away some of our bad feelings. Sending me to Siberia, though, hadn’t given Bill any greater insight into cards, and I knew that unless we changed the game we would soon be in trouble again. I am sure that feeling was right; where I was wrong was in forgetting to keep on hating the cook. He was almost through wiping the dishes, the food had tasted pretty good, especially after two weeks of my own cooking, and three men seemed as if they should be friendly when we had just been through an August snowstorm.

  As one of those people who often are among the first to hear what they are saying, I heard myself say, overloaded with friendship, “Here, give me a towel and let’s finish the dishes. Then, how about joining us in a game of something? The season is almost over and the three of us have never sat down to a game.”

  He jerked away the towel I was reaching for. In his canvas shoes, he rose on his toes, sank back on his heels, and rose again. Until this time I hadn’t been old enough to realize that you can’t hate a guy without expecting him to return the compliment. Up to now, I thought you could hate somebody as if it were your own business. “How many times do I have to tell you—I don’t play cards against guys I work with.” The cards lay rejected in my hand. He rolled the towel in a wad and threw it on the dishrack. “Here, give me those cards,” he said, and grabbed them out of my hand and sat down at the table and began to shuffle. The cards seemed to burst into flames. He said, “Sit down,” and I obeyed, with my hand still open where the cards had been.

  Then he did two things.

  First, he flashed through the cards and picked out the four aces. Then he stuck them in the pack. Then he asked me to cut the deck. Then he dealt out hands to Bill, me, and himself. “Turn them over,” he said to me. Mine was just a hand. So was Bill’s. In his hand were all four aces.

  He started out the same way the next time—he picked out the four aces, stuck them into the deck, shuffled, had me cut, and then dealt out hands to the three of us. “Turn them over,” he said, and there wasn’t a single ace in any hand. He slapped the deck of cards in front of me. “Here,” he said, “find the four aces.” And he went back to finish the dishes.

  It wasn’t like me to be obedient, but I was. I fumbled through the deck and never found an ace. Then I tried to conduct a more thorough search and then I gave up. As he spread his dish towel to dry, he said over his shoulder, “Look in your shirt pocket.” They were there, all four of them. I spread them out to count them. I was to have plenty of reason to remember this trick.

  “He’s a cardshark,” Bill said, with a smile on his face, something like the smile that was there when I had told him the rattler had almost bitten me.

  After a while, Bill added, “He’s an artist.” Well, I was a little dazed, I admit, and there was no denying he was a cardshark, and in the center circle of male magic sits the cardshark, but Bill’s calling him an artist was something I wouldn’t accept. I said to myself—fortunately not out loud this time—”Still, there’s something wrong with this guy. I still think he’s a forty-cent piece.”

  He came over and sat down next to me at the table again and began to shuffle and deal. Now, he was only practicing by himself. Usually he dealt one round and said one sentence. If he wanted more emphasis, he would shuffle, cut, and deal four hands and then say one sentence. Something like this. “I’ll tell you once and for all about my card playing…” (one round). “I play cards for a living…” (one rou
nd). “I have to get out in the summer for my health…” (one round). “I can’t do hard work because I have to keep my hands soft…” (one round). “So I cook and wash dishes…” (one round). “I practice every night before I go to bed.” Then he played a whole poker game again before he finished, “I never play cards against men I work with.”

  With one movement he picked up the four hands, and we all started for bed.

  “By the way,” Bill said as I went out the door, “I have a scheme—I’ll tell you about it tomorrow.” Before I went to sleep I had the scheme fairly well figured out. Just fairly well.

  The truth is that I don’t think he had it figured out too well himself at the time—maybe never. It became obvious as we talked in the warehouse the next morning that he was talking to shape things in his own mind. From the beginning I was the one to pick up the money, and he would “cover me,” whatever that meant. At the beginning, too, he thought he would need only two others, and he made what to me was a strange pick—Mr. Smith and a Canadian soldier who had been gassed and had been sent out to recover in the high mountains. Although he wore the first pair of hornrim glasses I ever saw, and with a braided cord attached, he turned out to be almost as gifted in communing with livestock as Bill himself. He could talk to all horses and mules and heal them, no matter what their trouble was. He must have had something for Bill to pick him for the rough work ahead, even though sometimes he coughed so bad that we would take the whiskey away from him and drink it ourselves on the theory that there was no use wasting fairly good moonshine on a dying man. Bill’s picking him had to be a case of one horseman believing in another. At first, then, Bill was going to count on the three of us and himself, but before the morning was over he had decided on the whole crew. “It’s a pretty good crew,” he said. “We can’t leave any of them out.” As for the cook, I was warned again never to put a hand on him.