When the work was done, James took his time heading back to the shop. If there were cattle around he would suggest we ride through, “to settle them.” Otherwise he devised some long way home that took us up into the foothills, past an old homestead or to some spot where he thought we might find elk antlers.
Once we were fixing a fence on the Forest Service allotment, a ragged one that snaked along a ridge and then shot straight up the face of a mountain. It ended where the slope got too steep for cattle. About halfway up the ridge, the fence met a public trail at right angles. When Jeremy had given us our marching orders, he’d mentioned that hikers and hunters often cut the wires, even though he had built a gate for them to use. Between that and the fact that a couple hundred head of elk had been crossing the ridge every dusk and dawn for six months, Jeremy figured that the fence would take us all day.
“After that,” he said, “you’re done.”
We flew up that fence like dogs on a scent. The prospect of an afternoon off was that rare in early summer. Despite the fact that the whole stretch was uphill and torn to shit, I trotted from one break to the next, driving each new staple into the weathered posts with four hard swings of my fencing pliers.
The idea was to finish, turn around, and go home to take it easy, but at the top we were both gripped by a strange euphoria. Neither of us had ever fixed a fence that just plain ended. All the others turned corner after corner and put you right back at the start.
This was different. We stood uphill of the drift fence’s end, feeling as though we had climbed beyond our ken. A sweeping view of the Madison River and the Gravelly Range unfolded to the west. Above it, the sky was pure blue. To the east was the steep-sided valley that held Squaw Creek, shaped by long-gone glacial ice into a broad-bottomed U. The slope around us was tattooed with the overlapping heart shapes of elk tracks and studded with dozens of roundish stones.
I slipped on a little boulder, knocking it loose. We watched the rock bound down the face of the mountain, leaping higher than a man’s head, until it disappeared with a satisfying crash in a thicket of aspen. James climbed over to a basketball-sized stone and rocked it forward with his foot until gravity took over. The stone raced downhill, leaping higher and higher as though it wanted to fly. When it hit an old, gray pine, the snag shattered into half a dozen pieces. The game had begun.
We rolled rocks for an hour, dislodging every available boulder, competing for distance and to see who could flatten the biggest tree. It took both of our efforts to move some of the real Goliaths, and those huge stones cut wide swaths through the forest.
The whole business was as destructive as it was unnecessary. We smashed a lot of tree trunks, and couldn’t have explained why we did it at the time. But now, at a little remove, I remember the thud and clatter of falling stone and the simple joy of watching trajectories unfold. As we chose our favorite rocks and sent them crashing through the woods, it seemed like our lives were consequential. For a few brief minutes, we were more than two specks on the steep shinbone of a mountain. We were shaping the wilderness, if only by punching holes. The land was stunning, enormous, and so empty that we didn’t have to yell warnings to people down below. And for a handful of ecstatic moments, it all felt like our dominion.
When the best stones were gone, we looked across the valley. The smell of sap drifted up from dozens of ruined trees. We sat on the ground among little craters and looked out across the ranch, naming its seeps, bumps, and saddles. As if reciting a prayer, James listed off the common and scientific names of the plants that grew around our boots: yarrow—Achillea millefolium; big sage—Artemisia tridentata; bluebunch wheatgrass—Agropyron spicatum; and lupine—Lupinus argenteus.
Staring out across the folds and timber of Squaw Creek, we let our thoughts drift to the wolves. Sign of them abounded, though neither of us had yet seen one in the flesh. Holding out a clenched, massive fist for scale, James described a set of tracks he had found on a muddy stream bank just a few hundred yards above our houses. The pugmarks had looked exceptionally fresh, and their location meant that the wolves were traveling the lower pastures of the ranch. Though I was excited about the possibility of seeing the pack, James didn’t like the situation. They were too close for comfort—his kids spent their days playing in the yard.
“I’ll tell you one thing for sure,” he said. “If that wolf comes around our place, he won’t last long.”
I never doubted that James or Jeremy would shoot a wolf if the opportunity arose. We talked of the pack often, and of the risks we would run when it came time to drive our herds higher into the mountains. In short order I learned that, to my role models, the killing of a wolf was no occasion for soul-searching. Instead it was a job that, though difficult and dangerous, sometimes had to be done.
When a person works long enough on a ranch, he comes to suspect that most of the living things that walk or grow on the hills and pastures are either with or against him. Smart cow dogs, calm horses, fertile heifers, and thick stands of wheatgrass are on a rancher’s side. Noxious weeds and stock-killing predators stand decidedly against him.
James, in particular, had taken this lesson to heart. He told me once that he considered his animals to be part of his family, and felt an obligation to keep them from harm. That duty extended to the livestock, and as we worked together, I came to comprehend the depth of his loyalty to our herds.
James and Jeremy understood ranching as the art of protecting one’s chosen creatures in a brutal world. Though sometimes this meant spilling blood, more often it demanded perfect attention and a depth of care—as with new calves and tender, growing shoots—that seemed at odds with their callused hands.
I must have been counted among the good animals, because James and Jeremy were always generous with me. They lent me essential things, gave good advice, and helped me take root in the Sun Ranch’s hard soil.
Not long after James arrived on the ranch, I had finally gotten settled in the bunkhouse, a long, low, retrofitted shed that sat like an afterthought behind the other buildings at Wolf Creek. With its wonky floors and pair of rough barn doors that served as one wall of the kitchen, the bunkhouse leaked heat like a sieve. Through the crack between the doors, I could see the single-wide that James and his family called home.
One evening a ruckus started under the floor when I sat down to dinner. A series of thuds escalated into a screeching match and culminated in an unbearable smell that could mean only skunks. Gasping and coughing, I stumbled out of the kitchen and into the twilight, walked across to James’s trailer, and told him the story.
“Well,” said James, “I guess you better shoot it.”
He handed me an old twelve gauge and a couple of shells. I walked to the most likely corner of the bunkhouse and waited. Standing in the dying light, I looked carefully at the shotgun, a cheap single-shot covered with little rust pits. I snapped it open and clicked it shut as the night thickened around me. No skunks showed, but I kept the gun for a few days.
My coats were all made for Seattle, so I borrowed a frayed Carhartt from Jeremy. The canvas was almost worn out, and in some places had rubbed away to reveal insulation, but I wore it every morning until summer got going.
I had no rope, so James dug out an old lariat and showed me how to coil and throw it. Jeremy pulled a saddle from the dusty innards of the barn, bought a new cinch for it, and helped me adjust the stirrups to the length of my legs. I found a pair of chaps that almost fit me in a corner of the tack room and begged a crumpled straw hat off my dad when he stopped by to visit and fish the Madison. Even with a ream of paper stuffed in the brim, that hat refused to stay with me on a loping horse. When I looked in the mirror, the overall effect was less than impressive.
I made $1,650 a month at the Sun Ranch and spent most of it on food, drink, and gear. In short order I returned James’s old twelve gauge and bought myself a pump-action. I replaced the ill-fitting chaps with a pair of custom chinks from the leather shop on the edge of Ennis, switc
hed from Levi’s 501s to Wranglers, bought a palm-leaf hat with a leather band, and came home from a weekend trip to Sheridan, Wyoming, carrying a thirty-five-foot lariat with a left-handed twist. The transformation was slow and subtle enough to go unnoticed until one day I rode my horse past a window and saw a cowboy reflected.
I made a remark to that effect the next time I saw Jeremy, and he grimaced.
“I don’t like the word cowboy, except as a verb,” he said. I wished I hadn’t mentioned it.
I drove into Ennis on a Saturday night for dinner and ended up drinking at the Silver Dollar, a knock-around place with elk racks on the walls, video poker machines in the corner, and a handful of regulars getting serious at the bar. I ordered a Pendleton whiskey and sat close enough to listen.
At first, the conversation revolved around the arrival of the year’s first big batch of tourists. Spring was thawing into summer, and fly fishermen across the world knew it. Each morning brought a new wave of them through town, and their vehicles dotted the twists and turns of the Madison. From the hills above, those cars looked like beer cans strewn along the river.
From time to time I caught snatches of more interesting conversation. Down at the far end of the line of drinkers, a thick, spectacled man in a grubby black Stetson was holding forth to a handful of listeners. I strained to hear him over the low din of other talk. The man, I gathered, was a longtime resident of Virginia City, a defunct mining town just over the pass from Ennis, near the Ruby River.
“Guy named Bud Otis,” the man began, “his daddy built VC up in the thirties. I shot his dog. Woke up to the sound of sheep crashing into the walls of my house, grabbed my rifle, and wounded the goddamn thing. It went up to Bud’s and died.”
One of the man’s listeners mumbled something, but I couldn’t catch it.
“ ’Course I went to see him,” the Stetson guy replied. “I wasn’t no chickenshit. I went and he challenged me to a knife fight. Butcher knives, he said. Bud was in a wheelchair and I declined to fight him. Later, he was waiting for me outside the Bale of Hay with a pistol. Wanted to shoot me. I jumped behind an ore car and got to yelling: ‘Bud, you couldn’t hit shit, you son of a bitch!’ Best part of it is I was right in front of my mother-in-law’s place. She was some kind of witch—a real bitch, I mean. I kept hollering for Bud to shoot, hoping he’d break one of her windows and she’d be on him like stink on shit, but finally Jim came out and told Bud to put his gun away and go home.”
I sipped my drink, trying to decide how much of what I heard was bull, until one of the two guys nearest to me, a nail keg of a man, leaned in toward the other, dropped his voice, and asked:
“What did you see up Squaw Creek?”
The questioner’s close-cropped gray hair was tucked into a baseball cap with a flame paint job on the brim.
“Plenty of sign,” the second man said, his face all but hidden by a wide-brimmed felt hat and a thick brown beard. “There’s shit all over the place and a bunch of new kills. Couple bears, one sow griz with grown cubs, but mostly wolves. Lots of wolves.”
“Goddamn,” said the bearded man’s buddy. “Could be a hell of a summer.”
“Hard to say. We did all right with the first bunch for a couple years, even after the pack got big.”
“Sure,” said the man with the flaming hat. “But how did it end?”
He put on a canvas jacket, excused himself, and walked into the night. The bearded man went on drinking at the bar, and on an impulse I went over and sat down next to him. I explained that I had just started working on the Sun and wanted to learn everything I could about the area, the animals, and the ranch.
The man, Steve, had worked in the backcountry of the Madison for years, doing wildlife surveys and packing into the Lee Metcalf as a Forest Service contractor. He knew the Sun Ranch well, and as I peppered him with questions, he patiently told me what he knew about its history.
The Sun Ranch hadn’t always been its present eighteen thousand acres. Beginning in the early twentieth century, it was stitched together from individual homesteads. By the 1930s, the ranch’s remoteness, elevation, and breathtaking panoramas had turned it from a patchwork of smallholdings into a rich man’s paradise. The Sun grew aggressively through the early twentieth century, gobbling up smaller spreads as it expanded. Before World War II, it was called the Rising Sun Ranch, a name that started to chafe after news of Pearl Harbor reached the valley and was abandoned before the war’s end. The Rising Sun lived on, however, in the Sun Ranch’s brand—a four-spoked half circle that looks like dawn in open country.
After the name changed, the boundaries began to shift as well. The ranch passed through the hands of a series of absentee landowners, expanding or shrinking a bit each time the deeds changed hands.
Across the river from the Sun Ranch’s western border, a sizable chunk of land came up for sale. The property, once known as the Granite Mountain Stock Ranch, stretched from the Madison River to the timbered slopes of the Gravelly Range. Like the Sun, it was empty and wild.
The new buyer looked east, saw the late-afternoon clouds catch fire above the scarps of the Madisons, and watched great herds of cattle and elk move back and forth from the low pastures to the mountains. Recognizing that those things and the cowboy dream that underlay them could be sold, he renamed his spread the Sun West Ranch, drew up plats, and started advertising homesites. New facilities took shape quickly, including a massive horse barn, an indoor riding arena, and a private shooting range. A few dozen millionaires bought into the idea, foundations got poured, and the deal was sealed.
Though it, too, circulated through various echelons of the ultra rich, the Sun Ranch stayed empty and undeveloped, perhaps because it exerts an immediate, irresistible power over people who come to know it. The Sun Ranch is wild, pure, and untrammeled to a degree that is rare anywhere else. Carving it up would be like scribbling on the Mona Lisa.
“Nobody would develop it,” I said.
“I don’t know about that,” Steve replied. “The bottom part of Squaw Creek is platted out for a subdivision. All the paperwork is done, but I don’t think Roger would ever act on it.”
In any case, the Sun Ranch had managed to stay intact over the years. As time passed and other parts of the valley were gridded out into twenty-acre plots, its vastness and location became ever more important. For wild animals, the Sun provided a much-needed refuge from the constant noise and pressure of man. Pronghorn antelope migrated through by the hundreds, and elk lived and died by the winter forage they found on the ranch’s North End. Moose fared better on the Sun than anywhere else in the valley. At the top of the ecosystem, grizzlies and wolves grew fat, multiplied, and dispersed to new territories. In the parlance of biologists, the Sun Ranch was known as a “population source.”
“In other words,” he said, “it’s extremely goddamn important.”
By way of example, he told me how the first wolves to recolonize the Madison Valley after their 1995 reintroduction to Yellowstone had made a home on the Sun. They had come out of the park in search of a place with the right mix of prey, topography, and emptiness. Out of the immense landscape that surrounds the Madison River, they took up residence on the ranch, dug in, and began to multiply. The pack grew until it numbered somewhere around ten wolves. In time, a biologist from the department of Fish, Wildlife & Parks managed to dart and collar a member of the pack. From then on, something was known of the movements of the Taylor Peak Pack, which they named after a mountain not far to the north.
With telemetry units clicking, ranch hands and biologists could follow the wolves across the drainages of the ranch and record the number, timing, and position of elk kills. A few of the elk got collars, too, as part of a study designed to explore predator-prey interactions.
Things went well for a while. The radio collars recorded the Taylor Peak wolves’ perfect adaptation to a harsh environment. Researchers listened in as the pack followed elk into the uppermost reaches of the Lee Metcalf Wilderness. O
ccasionally a lucky intern or graduate student got to watch the ancient, evolutionary game of the hunt play out, the elk pounding across the open southern faces of the hills, the wolves in hot pursuit, straining their lungs and legs to keep up. Not far below, livestock continued to graze peacefully on the ranch.
Then came 2003: As spring gave way to summer, the elk headed for higher ground. Instead of tagging along, the wolves stuck around and crossed the river to Sun West, where hundreds of sheep were being used to control noxious weeds. One bloody night left a handful of carcasses on the ground. The wolves found sheep killing so easy they could not give it up. By the end of summer, the Taylor Peak Pack’s alpha female had been gunned down from a USDA helicopter, and her offspring had been scattered throughout the valley.
The following summer was worse. Cows died. Wolves died. Attrition. In the end, the whole pack was wiped out with shotgun blasts from a helicopter door.
After the extermination of the Taylors, the south end of the Madison stayed quiet for a year. When wolves began turning up again, people assumed that they had come across from Yellowstone. The Wedge Pack, Steve concluded, was a wholly different group of animals, and he hoped that they would come to a different end.
“Enough about the wolves,” Steve said. “I’ll tell you about the movie star who owned that place before Roger.”
He started in, suggesting that I take what I heard with a grain of salt, since most of the stories had been passed around the bars and kitchen tables of Ennis a few times. It was hard to say what had really gone on out there, since few people had access to the ranch until Roger bought it. Still, in a valley like the Madison, stories got around.
Badluck Way: A Year on the Ragged Edge of the West Page 4