Indian Creek Chronicles

by Pete Fromm

  14

  After carrying the lion to the road we stood and posed as a group, the lion at the center—the guest of honor. The river, as always, commanded the background. When we all had our pictures Brian decided to run back to Magruder Crossing with the others instead of returning to Paradise. They asked me to come with them for the celebration and then asked again. I didn’t feel a lot like celebrating this, but I climbed onto the back of the snow machine, part of the group.

  Cary’s friends were sitting up in the tent by the time we got there, the fire stoked, sipping beers and laughing. They came out in the snow and admired the lion and I watched Phil’s face redden, not with embarrassment, but with pride. Cary talked up the whole hunt, mentioning the spring out of the first tree, but skimming over what had caused it, the missed shot.

  He set to work skinning the cat, peeling the skin clear down to the toes, so the rug would have claws. He moved his knife so quickly and carelessly I was sure he’d slice huge holes in it, but he finished without a nick. He left the head on the hide, saying he’d let the taxidermist earn a little of his money. I laughed at that and looked around, but I was the only one out studying this. Dusk was closing in and the rest were in the tent already. They’d been talking about a feast since we’d pulled up.

  The naked lion carcass, hanging upside down from a hind leg looked smaller but even more powerful than it had with its blurring coat of fur. Each muscle group was distinct now, sheened by a silvering outer sheath of tissue. It did not however, look graceful, or like anything that had ever seemed so much alive. All that had been left on the mountain, and I did not pity it, or feel bad any longer. I was interested in how the skinning was done, how the skull would be removed, what would be done with the carcass. I tested Cary with a few questions and soon he was a fountain of information.

  When I asked about the meat he grinned and dove his knife into the body, behind the shoulder, along the spine. “Butterflies,” he said. “Big, beautiful, butterflies.”

  He sliced the loins away from each side of the spine and handed one to me. The meat was whitish pink, more like pork than anything else. We carried them into the tent and a whistle went up from the men in there. Cary sat down with a flourish and began to butterfly the loin chops. He cut a steak nearly an inch thick, but stopped before he’d cut all the way through. Moving his knife over an inch, he cut again, this time finishing the cut. He pulled the meat away from the rest of the loin and let the center cut fall open. The two wings of the butterfly spread and the chop doubled in size. I marveled at the simplicity of the trick, already planning to repeat it with my next moose steak.

  As they cooked a huge meal of fried potatoes and canned vegetables, dropping the chops into a sizzling grill at the very last, the tent filled with the mix of smells and the whiskey bottles got lower and lower. I remembered the times like this in the fall and I remembered why I craved those nights in strangers’ tents. But these men no longer seemed like strangers, and I laughed at their stories about long-running lions and mutton-headed dogs, laughed until I thought I might suffocate.

  The dinner was delicious, but nothing could have touched laughing like that. I hadn’t out-and-out howled with laughter since I’d been in here. I’d come to enjoy living here, but it was a peaceful thing, contented, rather than anything like a belly-buster. I wiped tears from my eyes, as did the others, and like the others I took more and more on my plate until the pans were empty, and refilled my glass when the bottle was passed.

  When the dinner was over and the party was done Brian stood up and said he had to get back to Paradise to take care of his dogs. I had to leave too, for Boone, locked all day in my truck. Cary’s friends would be leaving in the morning and I said my goodbyes. Then Brian and I moved out into the night on his snow machine.

  He had a flashlight taped to the cowling for a headlight but the night was crystal clear and before we’d gone a mile the moon broke over the ridges, round as an eyeball. Brian pointed it out, as if that were necessary, and I broke into a last tired giggle. He turned off the flashlight to save the batteries and we rode on, following the river, washed in moonlight, the snapping cold of the bright air stinging my face and any other trace of skin it could find. After months of walking it seemed nearly miraculous that it was possible to skim along so smoothly and so quickly. The whiskey was still running lightly through me and, racing through the clean, cold, silver world, I felt like tipping my head back in howling laughter at the moon.

  Brian dropped me off at the channel and raced on alone. While I chopped at the new ice I thought of the miles of river he would see and I wished there was some way to keep skimming along like that. I shuffled through the snow to my meadow and threw open the truck door. Boone bounded out, leaping into me as she had after her night in the fifty-gallon drum, only able to see me as her rescuer, not her imprisoner.

  The tent would be stone cold after a day away and Boone was tugging at my heavy deer-hide mitten, her signal for play. I tossed her around and soon we were into a full-fledged rumble, tearing up the meadow, soaking ourselves as we rolled and twisted in the snow. Finally Boone lay victorious on my chest as I panted beneath her, snow shoved beneath my collars, the moon still bright above me, already on its way down to the other side of my narrow sky.

  I continued to see the lion hunters for the next week or so, even bumping into Brian once as he was pulling a bobcat out of the mountains near Paradise. He’d trailed it alone, with just his dogs and his smile nearly split his face. He’d shot it in the tree, he said, killing it, but it hadn’t fallen down. He told me about using nearly all his bullets to shoot the branch out from under the dead cat, and how it had simply fallen to the next branch and hung up there. Finally he’d had to climb the tree, and he had the scratches to prove it. The cat was a big one though, he told me, and would bring hundreds of dollars, enough to pay for all his expenses for the weeks of hunting. He never stopped smiling.

  But by the twenty-seventh of January the lion hunters all pulled out. They said they might or might not be back, they couldn’t be sure. The day before I’d walked down to Paradise to give the rangers a call, to see if they knew anything about when the wardens might be coming in. The ranger I talked to said, as far as he knew, that after blowing up their machine they weren’t due in until the middle of February. It seemed as if, for the first time in a long time, I would have some time to myself.

  And, though I wouldn’t have believed it in October or November, I was truly looking forward to that. I was tiring of the daily whine of snow machines, of the constant possibility of company. I realized I hadn’t really done any hiking, except behind dogs, since I looked for my dad and brother. I’d fallen into a trap of waiting around my tent, just in case somebody should come by, somebody who might invite me to some sort of social activity.

  I’d also been waiting for privacy for another reason. The temperatures had been nearly perfect lately, mid-twenties during the day, only dipping a few degrees below zero at night. But I hadn’t been able to put the fear of the first near thaw behind me. The more I thought about it the more I realized how hard it would be to accept the waste of all that moose meat.

  I did not mind killing, but not to waste. After trapping the raccoon I’d delved into my Foxfire books for a recipe and I’d roasted the coon whole. I’d even gone out on a limb and mentioned my fear of waste to the lion hunters before they left. On their last day in Cary brought down the remainder of Phil’s lion carcass, the meat untouched since the loins had been removed. I think he meant it as a bit of a joke, but I hung it up in plain sight, and cut steaks off it now and then.

  I wasn’t sure if all my secrecy about the moose was bordering on paranoia or not. The fine for poaching would probably equal a month or two’s wages, but that was the least of it. I couldn’t imagine what the wardens would think of one of their own employees breaking the laws. I didn’t know if they’d have special rules for that or not. And there was always the threat of Old Ironsides, the warden who’d bust
his mother. I wasn’t even sure if he was real. The only thing I did know was that I’d rather not find out, and in the back of my mind I wondered if I wasn’t simply making a game out of all my precautions. Something to do.

  As evening rolled around I left the quarters to thaw and took my pipe out for my usual stroll, staying out of the tent as long as possible before the long winter night forced me inside for another fourteen hours. I was nearly to Raven Creek, two miles up the Selway, when I stopped to listen to a plane. There were often jetliners slicing over above me, and occasionally something military would rip over, leaving heart-stopping sonic booms in its wake. But this sounded like a small plane, flying low, and I stopped, surprised by the sound.

  It was a moment more before I realized I was not listening to a plane, but to a snow machine, still a long way off, the sound rising and falling depending on the river’s twists. I wondered which hunter had forgotten something, marveling at the idea of their incredible mobility. Already I was nearly an hour from my tent. Who knows, they could have been all the way to Darby before they realized they had to turn around.

  As the machines grew louder I had a slight queasy feeling about the moose legs in my tent, but the hunters never went in there and I started to smile before the machines were quite around the corner.

  Then suddenly before me were two Idaho Fish and Game snow machines. They roared up and shut off their engines and as they took off their helmets I recognized the biologist, but not the warden. The biologist introduced me and I heard the name of the one warden I’d been warned about—Old Ironsides. He was real. I pictured the huge white and red quarters propped against my table, unavoidable, undeniable evidence of the crime of feeding myself, and my bowels grew loose and my throat went so dry I picked up some snow to suck on.

  The warden started asking questions immediately. When I’d called to Paradise the day before, the forest ranger had asked about the lion hunters and I told him they’d all be heading out today. This warden had screamed over from Idaho to catch them before they got out of the mountains. He’d caught them at the top of the pass. I imagined Cary and Brian being as shocked as I was. I wondered if they’d done anything wrong—if they felt as hopelessly caught as I did right now.

  Along with his bobcat, Brian had shot a lion a few days before and the warden wanted to know who had really killed them, which client had filled out the guide’s tags. I told him I’d seen him come out alone with the cat, and I was sure the lion was his too.

  He asked about Phil next. Cary didn’t have an outfitting permit, he said, and he was sure as sure that Phil was a client. I was pretty sure about that myself, but I told him Phil was a friend of Cary’s from Hamilton, that he was unemployed, so how could he possible afford to pay for a lion hunt? That’s what Cary had told me once, and at the time I thought it had been an odd thing to say. I’d wondered why he bothered telling me anything about it. Now I wondered if I’d been included as much as I thought I’d been, or had I been a wonderful opportunity for alibis?

  The warden eyed me suspiciously, not at all pleased with my answers, but I figured he had me red-handed and I might as well go down in flames all by myself. I wondered if he’d make me ride all the way out of here wearing handcuffs. They’d said he’d tack my hide to a tree.

  The biologist broke up the interrogation, stepping around the warden to pet Boone. He said it was getting nearly dark and if I’d hop on the back of his machine they’d give me a lift back to Indian Creek. They were going to spend the night at Magruder, he said.

  My mind raced, stumbling onto a thin possibility. “You guys don’t need to give me a ride. I don’t mind walking.” I gave them a great smile and added that I did a lot of walking.

  But they insisted and my hopes sank until I thought about Boone. “What about Boone?” I said. “She can’t ride.”

  “We aren’t that far,” the warden said. “It can chase along behind.”

  Now I thought I might have a real chance. “With all the hunters snowmobiling by, Boone’s started chasing the machines like crazy,” I said. “I’ve been beating on her, trying to get her to quit. I can’t let her chase us now.”

  The warden nodded, seeing the sense of that, and the biologist dug under the cowling of his machine. He brought out my mail, including a round metal candy tin painted with holly and other Christmas stuff. He grinned, shaking his head. “This was with me when my machine blew up,” he said.

  Half the paint was scorched away. “It was wrapped, but all that kind of burned up.”

  Giddy over what appeared to be an unbelievable escape, I was glad to have an excuse to laugh. I opened the tin and held it out to the men from Idaho so they could see the solid block of chocolate filling one side of the tin, bits of the crinkly red paper that had once surrounded the individual candies poking through here and there. We all laughed out loud and the warden said, “Meltdown!” and we laughed harder. He wasn’t such a bad guy.

  The biologist also handed over a huge T-bone he’d bought with his own money, and I almost felt bad taking it from him. He said he wasn’t a giant meat eater, but that he thought he’d get to miss it after a while. At my tent I had half a moose, a quarter of a deer, and most of a lion, but I made a big show of my appreciation, and when he finally handed over a bag full of oranges I really was bowled over. I’d missed nothing as much as fresh stuff, fruit in particular.

  I thanked them both profusely and as they were strapping on their helmets the biologist said that he thought he had his wife nearly talked into coming in to trade with me for a weekend. He said he thought he’d be back with my boss in a couple of days and he’d let me know for sure then. I told them to come on down in the morning for coffee, but they said no, with everyone gone there really wasn’t anything for them to do and that they’d be out first thing.

  They turned their machines around then and drove off upstream, toward Magruder, away from everything incriminating I’d left in my tent, and I stood still until I couldn’t hear them any longer.

  Then I turned back toward my tent and though it was nearly dark I walked slowly, unable to believe how close a walk I’d taken with disaster. When I reached my tent I pulled the quarters out to my food cache and I buried them in there for the night, just in case the warden would roar back with some piece of conveniently forgotten mail.

  I spent that night in my usual rush through the mail and then I sat back in the candlelight and opened the fire-blackened tin of candies and stared at the solid mass of chocolate, the red, crinkly papers frozen into the block. I picked at the chocolate with my knife and popped a piece in my mouth. My grandmother had sent it in and she would have died if she’d seen what had happened to it. But I hadn’t had a sweet in months and though I was constantly picking little bits of soggy paper from the tip of my tongue and the chocolate tasted a little like smoke, it seemed pretty deluxe. I tipped back in my chair and laughed, imagining my grandma being able to picture any of this.

  I waited until after noon the next day, but I never saw that warden again. I retrieved the quarters and spent the rest of the day hacking them into forearm-sized chunks and rolling them around in the salt. I was supposed to hang them after that, someplace dry, and I still hadn’t figured where I would do that. Late that night however, lying in bed, I thought of the horse tack building down at Paradise. There wouldn’t be a horse in here until June. I smiled, thinking about curing my contraband right in a Forest Service building.

  By the next morning the meat was soggy, the salt drawing water out of it as if from a sponge. I wanted to leave it hanging until it was dry, but I’d finally learned that people had a bad habit of popping up at the worst times and I dumped the meat in a garbage bag and loaded my pack to the brim. I had to sit down beside it, using my legs to lift, and when I had it up on my shoulders I wondered that my legs didn’t simply bow until they snapped.

  The pack weighed over a hundred pounds and I thought about splitting the meat into two trips, but I was started now, and I wanted to get this stu
ff out of my tent.

  I tottered the first few steps of the six miles to Paradise, then plunged through the well-packed snow machine trail. The extra weight was too much. I was caught off guard and I went all the way down, the pack impossible to control once off balance. I managed to fall backward though, and lying on the snow, looking at my leg still stuck in the trail, I knew that if I’d gone forward or to the side I would have blown my knee to shreds. I slipped out of the pack straps and went to the tent for my snowshoes. This was going to be a long day, but it was early still, and as I staggered up under the pack again, I thought of the Scott party in Antarctica. This was nothing compared to that.

  I was nearly to Paradise and nearly exhausted when I heard the whine of a snow machine coming up behind me. I glanced quickly around, but there wasn’t even a tree to hide behind. I let myself fall against the bank, swearing, knowing this meat was going to be my undoing, but too tired to care. In a minute the Paradise outfitter pulled up beside me.

  We talked for a minute. He was just coming in to make sure his camp was closed up tight. There was a chance he’d be back in a few weeks with one more hunter, but he wasn’t positive. I stood up as we talked and he kept looking behind me, finally asking what I was doing. I told him I was just moving some stuff down to the ranger station at Paradise.

  “What stuff?”

  “Odds and ends, you know.”

  He nodded and said, “Looks heavy.”

  I said it was but declined his offer for a ride. I was almost there, I told him.

  After he drove off I stepped back down onto the snow machine trail, only then noticing the reddish brown stain in the snow where I’d rested. I reached back and felt my pack. The bottom was soaked, my hand coming away slick with the meat juice the salt was drawing out. There were already a few red drops in the trail beneath me. I pictured the red drops leading all the way back to my tent, like Hansel and Gretel’s crumbs.