by Ron Carlson
Half of the kids would already be in their pajamas and robes, sitting legs up and arms folded in the canvas camp chairs, listening. They’d all heard of Hiram from last week or from last summer, and his legend was part of the Box Creek Ranch lore now. Mack would hold out his hand like a claw and say how Hiram only wanted human contact. “His loneliness was larger than Wyoming. He only wanted then to hear a beating heart. But he was misunderstood and called a cannibal, though there was never any proof of that.”
“I think he was a cannibal,” some boy would say. “He ate the campers and cooked them over the fire. They never came back.”
Mack would let this remark hang in the air. “He’s out there,” Mack would say, indicating the circle of darkness around them all. “And now we know for sure he’s misunderstood.”
If the children got too frightened, which was why they came every week, Mack would back up and tell about Hiram’s younger days working with wild geese and his travels in the cities which did not agree with him. Then as the hour turned, Mack would stand and stir the fire pit and as the cinders schooled up red, he would say, “Hiram listens for a beating heart. Can you hear your beating heart?” The night would glow with silence and the popping of the fire. “Now scoot. We’re going to ride horses tomorrow, and I don’t want you falling asleep.”
It was a favorite time for him, watching the young people scurry back to the cabins’ lit porches. They tried not to run, but they sometimes ran. It was his first love, the ranch, and he loved it night and day.
Then came his second.
The year he was seventeen, Mack took the weekly ridge ride with all the kids, nine riders winding up the line shack trail to the aspen draws that led to the mountaintop. He rode his horse Copper Bob, the captain. There were two old log cabins along the way, slumped and fallen in, new trees thrusting through the collapsed roof beams. They always stopped and took stagey pictures with the young people pretending to knock at the doorway or looking out the ancient window frames. Sometimes they dug around for old cans or bottles, and they made up stories about the lonely men who lived here, how they had a dog or played cards all winter. One of the young riders would always say, Maybe this is where Hiram lived, and Mack would explain that he never slept in the same place twice. He was always wandering and without a home.
The cabins always sobered Mack, because he knew how hard such lives would have been. Over the years he’d found and kept purple medicine bottles and boot buckles from the old places. Vonnie was a good rider and Rusty knew her, and they liked to lead the train through the gloomy treeshade. The horses stepped quietly up the grassy slopes, past the wildflowers, along the faint trail they’d walked a hundred times, their tails swishing silently timed to the gait. Mack watched the girl float in her saddle at the top of the easy parade. This was the golden center of Mack’s life, all these fine animals geared right and taking the bobbing children up every step farther from home than they had ever been.
Mack saw a shadow in the hillside and knew what it was in a second; he sat up and snugged his reins from where he rode behind the children. When the bear sat up in the tall June grass at the top of the draw, Mack thought he saw him rub his eyes like a man might in disbelief. It was a luxurious black bear and he didn’t stand or look alarmed. He sat and looked into the face of the first horse. Mack had known moments like this and usually something happened very fast as the surprises doubled. Rusty stopped short without rearing, but Vonnie went over the front of her saddle and fell. Mack felt something open in him. All the horses stopped, veterans. Mack knew that when Rusty turned riderless, all the horses would turn and start stepping down. He loved it that they knew not to run. They never ran even on the last flat stretch near the ranch yard, even when the tourists urged them with their heels or reins or any cowboy moves they had seen in films for years on end.
Mack was moving; he clucked and Copper Bob eyed the bear and still approached. Vonnie was down and Mack had to get down and lift her with an arm and lead the horse to turn away. The bear hadn’t moved, watching the performance. At twenty paces Mack boosted the girl up into his saddle and walked surely down behind the children’s cavalcade which was now headed inexorably toward the ranch, two miles below. Those who had been at the rear and hadn’t seen the bear would be astonished and envious as they heard the story, but by supper they would have their own tales of the close call and the huge beast. As they passed below the cabin shambles and onto the open hillside, Mack whistled and Rusty stopped and the line of riders stopped.
“Are you okay?” Mack said.
“It was a bear,” Vonnie said. She was lit. They reached her horse and Mack helped her down.
“Let’s see.” She had skinned her wrist, and she pulled out her shirt and showed him where her waist was bruised, her belt full of dirt and grass.
“I’m okay. Can we go back and get a picture?” Everybody had a camera.
“Not today,” he said. “That bear doesn’t want his picture taken today.” He still had her arm and turned her in examination.
“Did he attack?” one of the kids said.
“No,” Mack said. “He was sleeping and we woke him up.”
“Hibernating,” one of the kids said.
“Not yet,” Mack said. “Let’s go down.” He held Rusty while Vonnie mounted. She was turned looking back up at the hill.
“That bear was hibernating. Bears hibernate,” the expert offered again.
“Go go,” Mack called and the line of horses and riders began the walk home.
It was the next morning that Mack had a problem. He woke to a face in his window: Copper Bob, and he pulled on his Levi’s and boots and stepped onto the porch to find the dozen ranch horses all standing in the bunkhouse dooryard. Above, he could see the corral gate open. With his boots unlaced and his shirt unbuttoned, he walked up there clucking for Copper Bob who led the others back into the enclosure. By the time he closed the rail gate, Mack knew that Rusty was gone. He saddled Copper Bob and rode over to the main house. Amarantha was in the kitchen and the whole place smelled like batter, her blueberry pancakes.
“Can you do the Dutch oven today?” he asked her. “I’ve got to go find a horse.”
“We can do that, Mack.” She had six cast-iron ovens and cooked with the young people a day or two every week over the fire pit behind the house.
“Save me some pancakes,” he said.
He knew what it was and trotted Copper Bob up the ranching road and into the trees, past the cabins. The dew was disturbed all the way, and he slowed in the aspen draw and saw where she had ridden up through and over the top. A bear chaser.
Above, he came out of the trees and ascended the ridgeline. There was a game trail that traced the spine of the broad hill and led to the mountains ahead. “Goddamnit,” he said and followed it up. He could see Rusty’s shoeprints in the clay trail periodically and horse manure as the trail dipped and rose again now into the pines. He was also looking for bear sign and there was none.
In the old days this was where the first ranchers had baited bear with horse carcasses, walking an old horse up to the top and then shooting it right at the wall of trees, someplace they could watch from across the canyon. Eighty years ago these pioneers had picnicked and waited with their rifles. There were still old constellations of horse skeletons drifting down a slope here and there. All the way to the horizon west and south was federal land and always had been, open to hunting in season. At the end of every summer Mack took four or five of the experienced riders out through the federal land and into the national forest, deadheading sometimes, learning the country. He liked being out beyond what he knew. Every year they came across butchered elk, chainsawed by poachers, the head and hindquarters taken months before the season. He hated these things, and he banked his hatred for such characters. He marked their trails when he could, but nothing came of his research.
One year his father had gone off two days with four rangers and the civil patrol raiding a poacher’s camp, and when his
father returned, he unloaded his horse from the trailer and put away the tack without speaking. Mack wanted to know what had happened, but his father’s face told him not to ask. He later found out one of the men, a teamster from Hammond, had tried for his rifle and been shot dead.
Now Mack was in the pines, the trail narrow at points and moist, and still he saw where Rusty had tracked. He spent an hour like that in and out of the trees, breaking into the sage day, the hundred-mile vistas and then again into the green dark. “Goddamn girl,” he said. At the saddle near the summit, he stopped and whistled three times, the way he could, the sharpest loudest noise a human can make. Nothing. A little ahead he saw where Rusty had left the trail and begun to descend the far slope. Oh shit shit shit. It was noon, the day was gone. He should have brought the walkie-talkies, his rifle, a lunch. “Girl,” he called. “Rusty,” he called. She was off the trail now, sidehilling the sage to who knew where. The way was steep and there were shale outcroppings. At least it was clear and sunny, but the day was gone. They’d never lost a girl before. They’d had blisters and splinters and hangovers and one broken arm when a boy fell off the corral fence, but no one had been lost. No one had perished. On the shady side of the mountain fourteen bighorn sheep ascended in bursts up the sandy mountainside, tame as barngoats, and obliterated the girl’s trail. He rode out looking for the tracks and could not find them. She either went up or down and now it was three o’clock. To hell with you. Mack knew that Rusty would know when the sun hit four to head for home. If she was still aboard. To hell with you and your camera, lady. This far from the ranch there were three or four ways back, and Mack climbed up and over the summit and then just guessed the stream trail and struck for that, a mile and a half east. It was warm in the sun and fresh in the shadows, climbing down. He was deadheading it, but he had been gifted with directional skill that even his father remarked on. He hit the Box Creek and watered Copper Bob and then led him by the reins up to the log bridge he had built with his father ten years before, when he was seven. His father taught him the chainsaw and let him run it, bucking the thin logs into five-foot lengths for the flooring. All that green wood was now dried slate gray and appeared an artifact of the frontier.
Before he saw the bridge, he heard Copper Bob snuffle and there was Rusty tied to a tree. The girl was lying on the bridge, her arms out as if she had fallen from a great height. She was bare-legged and her new brown corduroy jeans lay jumbled by her head. Mack and Copper Bob walked up.
“You asleep?”
She looked at him without moving her head, her face upside down to him. “I’m okay.” She pulled her shirttail down over her underwear. “I guess I’m lost,” she said.
He stood silent; the two horses nosed each other. Mack held the horse. He could see the angry red chafe on her thighs.
“What’s your name again?” she said.
“I guess your bear got away.” He stepped up and checked Rusty’s saddle which was secure and the bridle. “You did a good job with this gear.”
“I can’t ride anymore,” she said. “I can’t touch my legs.”
“We just need to get back and then you can soak,” he told her. “We have to go though.”
She sat up and looked at her inflamed legs. She stood and pulled her pants on, tenderly. “Oh god, I can’t even walk.”
“You’re about skinned,” he said, “but I’ve seen worse. Move through it,” he said. “We’ll get you to the ranch road and I can bring the truck.”
“How far is that?”
“Up over there and down: two miles, a little more.”
She stepped stiffly to the horse and Mack helped her up. She moaned and said, “Where’s that bear?”
“Montana,” he told her. “You scared that bear a good one jumping on him that way.”
She laughed and cried out softly as Rusty followed Copper Bob across the old wooden bridge and into the glade. “What’s your name,” she had said.
In the glowing mountain dark Mack walked across the dirt path of the trailhead to the old Forest Service sign hanging now by one rusty bolt. The post was still grounded firmly. He went back to his toolbox in the truck and retrieved the two six-inch steel bolts and the nuts and wide lock washers as well as his closed wrench and hacksaw. The old bolt fell away with five strokes of the saw and the sign dropped. Mack held it in both hands. The paint in the routed letters was all gone, and he had actually thought of bringing paint, but it would have been overdoing it and bright lettering always invited vandalism. He fitted it up and placed it square and took pleasure in cinching the nuts on tight as they bit into the old stained pine. Cold Creek Trailhead. The first time he’d come here, his father had sent him across to the sign and there was a small plastic envelope wedged behind, between the sign and the post. He withdrew it and found a dollar bill and a Royal Coachman fly and a small card that said, “Let’s fish, Mack. Love, Dad.” He still had the scrap in his wallet. Now he folded the baggie he’d brought and hid it in the back, against the old splintered post, securing it with a silver pushpin. If she comes, she’ll surely check the mail.
He went back across and put his tools away and opened the hood and checked the oil. It was dark there, and he used his flashlight. Small actions kept the worry off. If he hadn’t just done it, he would have tucked his shirt in again. He washed his hands. Oh September, you beauty. Show me something.
That winter after he’d shown her the bears, she wrote him one letter from Brown that told him her family was coming the second week in August. They had wanted to go to Martha’s Vineyard, but she had held out. She told them she had an appointment with a bear and signed it: Vonnie, Music Major, Bearhunter.
He spent July scouting the western hills and found them one at a time: six black bears, two cubs, one still cinnamon. The next month when her family arrived, he stayed busy, and the two young people ignored each other. There was a lot to do. The third day at dawn, the day Amarantha was going to get out the Dutch ovens and make biscuits and omelettes with the kids, he came to the porch rail of the bunkhouse and he could see the girl on the porch of her little cottage. She stood and followed him to the corral. They rode two hours out the trail he had marked until they were in a hollow above the valley of the bears. They hadn’t spoken.
“How are your legs?”
“Good,” she said. “You’ve seen worse.”
“You bring your camera?” he asked her.
“I’ve got it.”
“Do you want to see these bears?”
“Yes, I do. I came to see a bear, one will do.”
“I’m not sure I should let you at them,” he said.
“And why is that?”
“Because once you get your bear, you’ll be done with me.”
She turned in her saddle, one hand on the back of it, and said, “I haven’t even started with you.”
“You don’t know my name.”
“I know your name.”
“Don’t say it.”
“Don’t you say my name.”
Mack said: “Do you keep your word?”
“Yes, mister, I do.”
“Come along then.” He led her up through the trees to the overlook. Below, the vale was meadow and aspen that gave way to the pines. They wended down a rocky trail, staying above the open area. They sat and the horses knew to be still.
This was his life, riding out two hours from a ranch that itself was an hour from town and still knowing there were unknown hours ahead. The ridges of the next valley were distinct and thrilling in the clear summer air. He’d been there once or twice maybe; he remembered a swale with two reedy moose pots against a granite hill, but it was trackless and like so much up here, it was still waiting. Someone had told him that there were only a few places left in the country where a person could get five miles from the road, and it remained the worst news he’d ever heard. He wasn’t himself in town, and though he liked school, the energy, and could bear a semester, he didn’t really trust that world, or himself in it, and a
t the end of every term his car was packed before the last exam and then he fled home, fled to the hills. Two hawks swung out into the blue-sky sunshine and traded treetops in the valley below them.
“Music?” he said.
“There’s no money in it, but I’m a music major.”
“You play the piano?”
“That and the clarinet.” She scanned the treetops and the meadow greenery below and said, “They’re close, aren’t they?”
“They are,” he said. “It’s about bear time.” Then he added, “I can’t even play a guitar.”
“That’s good. You’d be the whole package as a cowboy who played guitar.”
A black bear on all fours walked out into the sunlight.
“Is it the same bear?” she whispered. A smaller bear appeared at the edge of the trees.
“They’re all the same bear.”
She lifted her lensed Nikon out of its case and began to take pictures. As the camera sneezed, the bears lifted their heads to look up. “Yes, it’s him, my same bear.” She turned and took Mack’s picture. When she had packed her camera away and lifted it behind her back, she said to him, “Thanks for this.” He reined Copper Bob around on the narrow trail and started back.
His father came out to the tack room that afternoon and stood in the sunlit doorway. “You’re doing something?”
“Yes, sir, I am. Not much, but I am.”
“Do you know what you’re doing?”
“No, sir, I don’t.”
“Are you going by your gut?”
“By something.”
“Do you think you can get a girl by showing her a bear?”
“No idea,” Mack said.
His father folded his arms and leaned on the doorframe. “Me neither. How many were there?”
“Seven or eight. Three cubs.”
“There’s good news.”
Mack waited. He knew his father had something else. “I showed your mother two hundred elk in an aspen grove high above the reservoir at Cody.”