A River Runs Through It and Other Stories

by Norman Maclean

  He estimated that it would take us another week or more to get the station in shape at the end of the season, and to load the pack string, mostly with surplus tools from the big fire. The cook, he said, would ride to Hamilton. The rest of us would walk. No wonder the cook wore low canvas shoes in the woods.

  The first night in town we were to meet at the Oxford, a pool and card parlor that by report was Hamilton’s best. He was betting all his roll on the cook. As for the rest of us, we could get in on a sure thing if we liked and just as much as we wanted to contribute. That was up to me and to them—me to tell them and all of us to contribute. I was told again—several times—that I was to pick up the money in case trouble started, and I was told again that he would “cover me.”

  “Wear your own gun, too,” he said to me. “God,” I said, “Bill, I can’t do that. I’ve nothing but that .32-20 on a .45 frame. That’s as big as horse artillery. I’d be arrested before I got to the bar.” “Well,” he said, “expect trouble.” After a while I asked, “Bill, you don’t have any side arm, do you, but the big .45? Do you think you can get into a gambling joint wearing that?” He said, “I said I’ll cover you.”

  Early in the morning I had started putting pieces together by remembering the rumors that in Hamilton Bill was regarded as nature’s gift to the local gamblers. It was said that they even matched to see which one would pluck him when he came to town. So now we were going to have a big melodrama that might be called “The Ranger’s Revenge.” I was to go out and invite the crew to make the stake bigger so those Hamilton boys who had done Bill in would be done in bigger themselves. And a couple of weeks ago I had been sent into exile because I said I was going to take a punch at the cook. And when the time came the cook was going to ride into Hamilton, while we walked.

  “Well,” I said to myself, “it all fits.” But I bet twenty dollars on the son of a bitch myself, and normally I hoarded my money just like the rest of them.

  It took the crew some time to warm up to the idea of staking the cook. To start with, they didn’t like the cook much better than I did. Then, too, in the struggle between instincts, it’s hard to know whether miserliness or greed will have the edge. The crew still would rather darn their socks than lose a dime, but they couldn’t bear to miss a sure thing. Finally, I told them about finding the four aces in my shirt pocket. “That’s simple to explain but hard to do,” Mr. Smith said. Since he had spent most of his life around mining camps, he knew all about cards, but wasn’t much good with them himself and practically never played. “He palmed them,” he said. “What the hell is palming?” I asked. He got a card and showed us how you hold the edges of a card between your first finger and your little finger and then bend your fingers and reach with your thumb and push or pull the card from your palm to the back of your hand or vice versa, at the same time turning your wrist so the card can’t be seen by someone in front of you. “So what he did,” Mr. Smith said, “was to have the cards in the back of his hand and to show you the palm, and, as he went by your shirt pocket, he bent his fingers and put the cards in it.” He tried to show us but he was clumsy and we could always see the card, though we got the idea. We all tried to palm but we were clumsier than Mr. Smith. In fact, I tried for several years to get fairly good, but never did. Mr. Smith said to convince us, “You’ve seen this in vaudeville.” In those days the Pantages circuit made the rounds of Spokane, Butte, and Missoula, so we had all seen a magician hold out a card in his palm and then toss it in the air where it disappeared. “Do you mean,” Mr. McBride asked, “the cook is good enough to be in vaudeville?” “He might be,” said Mr. Smith. “Here we’re just trying to palm one card, but he may have palmed all those four aces at once.” Someone reverently said, “Jesus!” and they all bet.

  Besides, they too began to get the feeling that they were all to have parts in a sort of pulp-magazine plot, and they liked the feeling. If they seemed to feel a lot better than I did about having a part in a story, maybe that was because they liked their part better than I thought I was going to like mine. Anyway, when I collected the “hat pool,” it turned out the average bet was more than what I had bet—even a little more than half a month’s wages. Once their bets became official by my handing over their money to Bill, they gathered every night to see the cook shuffle, peering in a semicircle around the table like a bunch of rail birds at a race track watching their favorite horse work out. Now that they had bet on him, they even spoke of “having a piece of him.”

  Although, as Bill had suggested, I was working around the station and not with the trail crew, I knew that they weren’t getting much done either. For them as for me, quitting time had come and we were all through for the season. It wasn’t only because we felt carried away by being in our own story. Anyone who has done seasonal work knows that as regular as the seasons themselves is the return of this feeling at the end of each season, “It’s time to quit. It’s time to quit.” Even Mr. Smith seemed to have lost his passion for dynamite.

  We started trying to have some fun, more or less getting in practice for the first night in town. Now I know that it’s common to picture loggers and cowboys as always whooping it up, full of bad whiskey and great jokes on greenhorns. I don’t know much about cowboys—they come from my wife’s country—but before I was through I worked with a lot of crews in the woods, and day in and day out we weren’t jokey, and jokes on greenhorns were pretty standardized. For one thing, we worked too hard and too long to be left bubbling over with the comic spirit. For another thing, we worked too often alone or in small groups to think it worth the time to be funny. It’s no trouble at all to be tragic when you’re tired and alone, but to be funny you have to be fresh and you have to have time on your hands and you have to have an audience—and you have to be funny. And, however much you may love the woods, you can’t claim it is full of natural wits. Don’t get me wrong—we had what we called our fun, but only on what seemed like state occasions, and often then our jokes were pretty much the same old jokes and often the laugh was on us at the end. A state occasion was when a big crew got together, especially if it was quitting time and no one was working hard any more.

  Even so, we began very gently to throw off our workingman’s puritanism and prepare for sin. We began with a crew from the Engineers that had camped at the ranger station for a few days. They were mapping the back country where, they said, “the government hadn’t figured out yet what they had stolen from the Indians.” I went over to see them right away, because I liked maps and what they stood for, but the rest of our bunch were slower to take an interest in this mapping crew. For one thing, they waited every night until the cook had finished shuffling cards. And for another, they had the practical woodsman’s distrust of Forest Service maps. They were convinced that a lot of the back country was mapped in those early days by guys who sat in tents or in the Regional Office in Missoula in the winter and said, “No, it goes here.” In fact, in those early days we never believed that a mountain was really there unless it had been located by the United States Geological Survey. So our bunch immediately got in an argument with the mapping crew. We pretended to ourselves that we were the Regional Office in Missoula. “Hell,” we would say, “that creek doesn’t go there. It goes here.” Sometimes we were only trying to confuse them and sometimes we meant it.

  At that time, though, the mapping crew was more troubled about the name of a creek than where it went. They had been over on the north fork of the Clearwater and of course had run into Wet Ass Creek. They had accurately located it, too. They may have compass-and-chained it; at least they had compass-and-paced it. But they were divided as to whether they should put down its real name on the map they were going to submit to the drafting room of the regional office. Well, the regional office has never cared much for jokes or poetry, so we sided loudly with those who were for its right name and argued that too much of the West had been named after some guy’s home town in Minnesota or Massachusetts or even after the guy himself or after a bea
r or a deer. “There are only five thousand Deer Creeks in the country. Let’s keep America’s only Wet Ass Creek,” we argued. The other bunch, who also would soon be spending a summer of money on a night with the whores of Hamilton, argued that many who worked in the Forest Service’s drafting room in Missoula were women and would be offended by having to copy such language with their own pure hands.

  We put it to a vote, and our side won, or, for the time being, we thought we had. Anyway, they all agreed to submitting its right name to the drafting room and we looked forward to its becoming a National Park—Wet Ass National Park, where all pilgrims from Brooklyn can stop their cars in the middle of the road to let their children feed the grizzlies and vice versa.

  In the end, though, it turned out the joke was on us. On the next map of the Forest, it appeared all as one word and a final e had been added which henceforward was pronounced, and the a was made in Boston. Now, it doesn’t mean anything but be sure you pronounce it right:

  Creek, just as if its headwaters were on Beacon Hill.

  At the time, we liked our joke, and, on the temporary strength of it, tried others, but we were end-of-the-summer tired—for that matter, still tired from the big fire—and our jokes were tired, too. We even tried to take the Canadian on a snipe hunt and get him to hold the gunnysack open while we herded the snipe into it, but the Canadian hadn’t been gassed in France just to get caught holding a gunnysack in Idaho. Besides, we were starting to get in practice for Hamilton, and we weren’t thinking of making jokes when we got there. Instead, the crew had a still back in the woods and were making moonshine out of dried apricots, peaches, and prunes they stole from the warehouse. Old Mr. Smith had got hold of some Sterno and they would boil the pink stuff off the top and drink the rest and it would go right through them, sometimes before they could get to the toilet or to the brush. They were practicing up for Hamilton, and had a couple of days more to go. I’d decided I was going to leave next morning, and walk to Hamilton in one day and more or less set a record. So I wasn’t drinking any of their stuff, not even their dried apricot brandy distilled in a lard pail. When I told them I was going to leave tomorrow, they said, “What the hell kind of a guy are you anyway? Aren’t you going to stay with the crew and help us clean out the town? What about the cook winning all that money for us from those Hamilton tin-horn gamblers? What kind of a crew are we anyway if we don’t clean out the town?”

  All these were important matters, and you can be sure I’d thought about them. You just weren’t a crew if you didn’t “clean out the town” as your final act of the season. I don’t know why, but it always happens if you’re any good—and even if you’re not much good—that when you work outside a town for a couple of months you get feeling a lot better than the town and very hostile toward it. The town doesn’t even know about you, but you think and talk a lot about it. Old Mr. Smith would take another drink of that alcohol and other debris from the canned heat, and say, “We’ll take that God damn town apart.” Then with his dignity lost he would have to run for the toilet, yelling as he ran that we had to show them there were no guys as tough as those who worked for the USFS.

  Besides, there was this big killing the cook was going to make for us. We spent part of every evening arguing about how much we’d win. The amounts varied depending upon whether we argued before or after we saw the cook deal, but we usually settled for a figure around what for each of us was a summer’s wages. Secretly, we hoped for more.

  But I was out to set a record. Ever since the ranger had realized that the cook was fancy with the cards and so had taken my place as his favorite, I’d felt a growing need to set a record. I wished that it could be in packing and that I could become known overnight as one of the Decker brothers, who had designed the latest packsaddle, but I couldn’t live long in that pipe dream, and powder work made me sick, so it had to be walking. I knew I could outwalk anyone in our district, and at the moment I needed a little local fame, and I needed it bad.

  Twenty-eight miles from Elk Summit to the mouth of Blodgett Canyon plus a few more miles to Hamilton is not outstanding distance, just as distance, but still it is a damn tough walk. For one thing, those were Forest Service miles, and, in case you aren’t familiar with a “Forest Service mile,” I’ll give you a modern well-marked example. Our family cabin is near the Mission Glaciers and naturally one of the many nearby lakes is named Glacier Lake, which is at the end of the Kraft Creek Road, except that the final pitch is so steep you have to make it on foot. Where the trail starts there is a Forest Service sign reading: “Glacier Lake—1 Mi.” Then you climb quite a way on the trail toward Glacier Lake and you come to another Forest Service sign reading: “Glacier Lake—1.2 Mi.” So a good working definition of a “Forest Service mile” is quite a way plus a mile and two-tenths, and I was going to walk over thirty Forest Service miles to Hamilton, about half of them up until I was above mountain goats and the other half down and down until my legs would beg to start climbing again and I wouldn’t be able to comply. The trail was full of granite boulders, and I would manage somehow so that Bill would hear that I had walked it in a day.

  I said to Bill while he was counting his cribbage hand with his lips, “When are you going to take the pack string and the men into town?”

  He finished counting before he said, “You will wait till we get there.” I didn’t know whether he had asked or told me something.

  I picked up his hand and counted it over again. “I need the whole crew,” he said. I said, “Yes.” “If you’ll stay tomorrow,” he said, “and help put the packs together, I’ll try to get away by noon the next day and camp on the divide that night. You can start the same morning ahead of us.”

  It was Wednesday, and by his scheme we would work Thursday and I would start Friday morning and he and the men Friday noon.

  “I’ll meet you in town on Saturday,” I said.

  “Saturday night in Hamilton,” he said, which was to become one of my walking tunes.

  Long before daylight I was using my feet like beetle feelers to find my way across Horse Heaven Meadow. Don’t look at me, look at the map, because I don’t have the kind of a mind that could make up a name like that. Even if you want to drop the Horse Heaven business, you still have a high mountain meadow just before daybreak, full of snorts and spooks. There are lots of horses out there but also a lot of other big animals. Elk and deer for sure. Maybe bear. They wake in darkness and come down from the hills to drink, and then slowly feed toward higher ground until it gets hot and is time for them to lie down again. A clank in the darkness is the scariest of all sounds, but you know a second afterwards it has to be a hobbled horse. If you are listening for dainty sounds to signify deer, there is nothing daintier than a snort—but there are deer there. They snort, and then bound. Elk snort, and then crash. Bear bolt straight uphill in a landslide—no animal has such pistons for hindquarters.

  I still walked in wonderland after daylight. Far ahead on gray cliffs I could see the white specks that were not spots in my eyes. The trail was already getting steep and I knew before noon I would be higher than the mountain goats and from experience I knew that there is nothing much higher on earth.

  The first summer I worked in the Forest Service we had come out of Idaho over the Bitterroots by way of Lake Como, and the hunting season on mountain goats was open in Idaho but not in Montana, and also in those days we could buy a resident’s license in Idaho if we worked for the Forest Service. So we all did, and camped for a few days near the divide to hunt. Bill said to me, “All you have to do is get above mountain goats. They never think anything is above them.” So all I had to do was get above mountain goats, which is beyond where most men have been. But finally there was a goat standing below me near the edge of a cliff two hundred and fifty or so yards away. I knew that when you shoot downhill at such an angle, you have to shoot way under your target, but it was almost straight down and I didn’t hold under him nearly enough. My bullet didn’t even hit the cliff. It wa
s just a loud sound bound for eternity. The goat only hightailed it behind a rock, and hid. Now nobody could see him from below but he was still in plain sight to me. So Bill had been right, and I thought afterwards it must be great to live believing that there is no danger from above. None of those goats could have been Presbyterians, or ever heard my father preach. This time, though, I held so far under him I was afraid I’d shoot my feet off and I still shot over him, but I did hit the rock, and I’ve often wondered where the bullet went from there. Likewise the goat, which may never again have been seen by man. I didn’t get any more shots that season—man is evidently not entitled to miss a goat more than twice in the same year.

  I walked head down because I wasn’t getting anywhere when I watched, so I was aware of him first as a snort and then a stamp. He was in the trail in front of me and he was a big bull moose and he looked as if he had decided not to go any place. When you saw bull moose in Montana in those days you were probably near the Bitterroot Divide and close to one of those snowbank lakes left in the burrows of old glaciers.

  This bull lowered his horns and then, possibly just for exercise, raised them. Some half-chewed marsh grass stuck out of his mouth. Finally, he reversed the order and stamped and then snorted. Reluctantly he turned and started down the trail, slowly at first but faster as he went along, as if the idea of retreating came very gradually to him. I watched those legs swinging those big feet that looked as if they had been shod, and I am almost sure he was a four-gaited animal, if you’ll admit that for a short stretch I saw him single-foot. In wonderland, why shouldn’t a moose single-foot as well as walk, trot, and pace?