Badluck Way: A Year on the Ragged Edge of the West

by Andrews, Bryce

  Elk are beautiful and strange. Larger and darker than deer, they smell like wilderness. Not long into my tenure on the ranch, I went out walking after the workday was over. Just south of Bad Luck Creek, I topped a little hill and saw a herd of five hundred spread across the grass and sage like a painter’s spill. The edge of the herd was close, no more than two hundred yards away. I quickly dropped on one knee behind a good-sized bush, but it was too late. The head of a near cow shot up. Her nose pointed skyward and her ears twisted dexterously. She gave a loud, guttural cough and the whole herd was off, moving like a stream of water across the pasture. They came to a fence, balled up for a moment, and then spilled across it. The wires groaned and snapped with their passing.

  A big herd of elk is a striking thing, enough to make a person stop and stare. It is also hell on fences. Because of this, the bulk of my first month on the Sun Ranch was spent fencing. I had a leavening of other jobs, but they were utterly eclipsed by an endless procession of posts and wire splices.

  The history of the Sun, like that of most other big spreads, is recorded in the type and position of its fences. The ranch was eighteen thousand deeded acres, plus a substantial Forest Service grazing allotment, and it contained every kind of cow barrier imaginable. There were barbwire fences and high-tensile ones, suspension fences and let-down fences, rail fences, jacklegs, old fences, and new ones.

  My days were tangled up in wire and dried elk shit, which rolled underneath my boots. In certain places, like the little grassy bowl we called Snowball, the elk crossed habitually. Up there the wires were shredded, more splice than space in between. I spent hours patching them back together—kneeling on the ground, twisting wire, grunting, sweating, and bleeding from forearm scratches. Months later, during hunting season, I remembered the precise routes that elk use to move across the ranch.

  After a few days of splicing barbwire, nothing sounds quite so good as working on a let-down fence. Most of ours were a three-wire electric design, with the wires attached to stout wooden posts by plastic pin-lock insulators. In the fall, after the cattle were shipped off, someone would walk the line and pull all the pins. The wires fell to the ground and lay there all winter, safe from snowdrifts and passing herds. In spring, getting the pasture ready for cattle was as simple as lifting the wires up and clipping them back to the posts.

  Once, I set out early to work my way around a let-down fence that started above the barn and headed west until it met a big ridge. Turning south from there, the fence climbed for miles toward the ridgeline. The whole pasture was tilted, and the top rose high enough to be visible from almost anywhere in the valley.

  I can’t remember why I started at the bottom of the hill. Maybe I thought I could use the exercise. More likely it was too early in the morning to do any thinking at all. Either way I left the four-wheeler at the gate, grabbed my fencing pliers, buckled on a tool belt full of extra insulators and staples, and headed for the first post.

  The routine was simple: walk to the post, reach out with the pliers, yank the pin from one of the insulators, stoop, lift the wire, slip it into the insulator, and slam the pin home. I repeated the process for each wire, and then moved on to the next post in the line. I got good at this, and quick enough so that from a distance it must have looked like I was paying my respects to a receiving line of posts—bowing three times and then moving on.

  Fixing fence would be a lot easier if it didn’t involve bending over all the time. Because I’m relatively tall, my back always wears out first. I tried to extend its useful life with little tricks like dropping onto one knee while I clipped the bottom wire or developing shortcuts that let me straighten up a fraction sooner on each post. Perfecting these strategies usually distracted me from the pain and repetition.

  Sometimes the pins were missing, so I replaced them with crimped, two-inch fencing staples. Every so often an insulator was torn away or chewed to a nub. I pulled a new one from a pocket on my tool belt and stapled it up, wondering what creature ate insulators and why.

  Slowly, over the course of a few hours, I climbed halfway up the hill. It was one of those clear, early season days that starts out cold enough to sting your lungs and then blossoms into something like summer. The sun had come up in a clear blue sky and the new, raw light of spring scorched the pasture. It flashed off the wires, making me squint and stumble. Conspiring with the pasture’s slope, the sun warmed me until I itched beneath my jacket and my face beaded with sweat.

  I would have taken off my coat and left it hanging on the fence, but the shape of the pasture and my plans for the day were such that I would pass each spot only once. Returning for the jacket would have meant walking far out of my way, so I kept it on and labored up the line, stewing.

  But as I sweated my way uphill, everything began to go haywire: a pin wouldn’t pop free of the insulator, and then it wouldn’t slide back in; a staple twisted as I pounded it with the fencing pliers, splitting the post; I picked up the middle wire when I wanted the top one and strung a dozen posts before I noticed the mistake; the wires twisted together so I had to walk up and down the hill to unwind them, yanking in different directions and pinching my fingers.

  At the midway point I was thoroughly browbeaten. I no longer looked uphill to see what was ahead of me, or down to check how far I had come. My attention shifted from the ground to the post and back again, that was all. It was a shame: less than a month on the ranch and already the work was breaking me.

  It took me a while to realize that I had reached the top. I might have crossed the crest without looking up, except I came to a braced corner, glanced past it, and found myself staring out across what seemed an endless void.

  I stood on the ridge’s end. Beyond me the ground dropped precipitously away toward where the Madison River ran north for miles in its willow cradle. The winding course of it was framed on either side by mountains and was darker blue than the sky. For a moment, in spite of the sweat in my eyes or because of it, I saw the land more clearly than I ever had, and it was beautiful.

  – II –

  THE WORK

  Bad Luck

  The stockman Orville Skogen arrived at the head of a convoy of cattle trucks, leaped down to the ground, and started barking greetings and orders in quick succession. He stuck out a stubby, powerful hand for Jeremy to shake and yelled at one of his drivers to back up to a portable loading chute. James and I were horseback, watching from a distance in the pasture as the first load of cattle poured off the truck. Steers banged down the metal ramp, took a flying leap onto the grass, and then trotted toward us. There seemed to be an impossible number of them in the trailer. Once a couple dozen got into the pasture, they began to mill and bunch against the fences. James and I rode back and forth to keep them together and calm. Orville and Jeremy stood on either side of the chute, counting animals with little flicking motions of their hands. Every so often Orville would shake his head at a thin steer or nod approvingly at a fat one. Both motions set his jowls trembling, like a bulldog worrying a bone.

  Orville’s cattle were a motley bunch. Some ranchers take pride in the genetics of their herd and breed carefully through the years toward a particular conformation or an ideal amount of marbling in the meat. The family line is an inheritance, passed through generations of cows and cowboys. If it earns a reputation, the calves will fetch a higher price.

  With the cattle he brought to the Sun, Orville preferred to make his money by the pound. He cruised stock sales every fall, buying calves by the lot. After a winter’s worth of growth, the calves matured into yearlings. Orville made sure all his steers were properly castrated, and he spayed most of his heifers, too, since sterile animals spend less time screwing and more time eating. In late spring, he brought his vast herds out to places like the Sun Ranch for the grazing season. When fall rolled around, he hauled them to feedlots in the Midwest or sold them for slaughter.

  On the ranch we charged fifty cents per head per day for all the grass a yearling could eat. In th
e right conditions, grass became flesh at a rate of two or three pounds per day. Since cattle sold at around a dollar per pound and there were more than one hundred days in the grazing season, Orville’s operation made a lot of economic sense.

  The trucks took turns at the loading chute, each disgorging all manner of steers: Charolais, Red and Black Angus, Simmental, Hereford, and every crossbreed in between. When the last steer stepped off the ramp, we let the herd spill past us. They trotted uphill and we followed, driving them toward tall grass, salt tubs, and water. The steers didn’t move easily. Nervous and squirrely from their long interstate haul, they shoved each other and looked for routes of escape. Conscious of the fact that Jeremy and Orville were standing by the trailer watching, James and I rode angles back and forth behind the stragglers, zigzagging our way up-country. When an animal broke off the left side of the herd, I chased it down, turned it, and hustled it back in the right direction. On his side, James did the same. One of James’s younger stock dogs trotted gamely along with us, nipping occasionally at the heels of lagging cattle.

  When we got back to the trucks and the ramp, Orville stopped complaining about beef prices, his bottom line, and the goddamn wolves long enough to shake my hand.

  After the cows arrived, our days started at 6:30, or earlier if we had to move a herd. I rolled from bed, fumbled through a shower, and ate whatever was close to hand in the kitchen. At the window I looked out to read the thermometer. Most early-June mornings the temperature hovered between twenty and thirty degrees Fahrenheit.

  We spread the cattle across the ranch according to our grazing plan. There were two large herds: one of 680 steers and the other of 790 heifers. Both belonged to Orville Skogen. In addition to the yearlings, we pastured 200 cow-calf pairs from a family ranch down by Ennis.

  Once, I talked with the matriarch of that family—a silver-haired, no-bullshit woman—when she came to drop off her cattle. She was on horseback and I was afoot, and somehow we got started on the subject of wolves. She had heard rumblings about the new incarnation of the Taylor Peak Pack, now called the Wedge Pack, which sounded like trouble.

  “How do you figure,” she asked, “to keep them out of my cattle?”

  I told her, as Jeremy had so often told me, that we were going to do everything in our power to keep the worst from happening. We would patrol the herd diligently, I said, and track the collared wolves in the pack with a telemetry system on loan from the University of Montana. When the two groups of animals got too close together, we would haze the wolves back into the wilderness and sleep out beside the cattle.

  I went on, warming to my task: We had nonlethal shotgun loads—cracker shells and rubber bullets. We had an experimental contraption called fladry, a one-string fence of twine and plastic flagging that was thought to frighten wolves. When her cows and calves moved into the riskiest places, we would ring their pasture with fladry and monitor the results. The hope, I told her, was to keep the cattle safe and learn something new about coexisting with predators.

  She took this in, listening with her mouth set in a grim line. When I finished talking, she let the silence hang long between us. Finally, she spoke:

  “You’re going to put a string of flags around the cows?”

  That was the plan, I said.

  “How does that keep the wolves out?”

  I confessed that I didn’t exactly know, but we had reports of it working well to protect sheep herds in Europe.

  She let more silence pass, and then asked me if I owned a gun.

  I mentioned my newly acquired pump shotgun and reminded her about the cracker shells and rubber slugs.

  “No,” she said. “A real gun, a rifle. With bullets.”

  When I told her I didn’t own a rifle, she stared at me as though I had revealed a deep-seated, appalling vice. Looking down from the saddle, she fixed me with a hard, appraising glare. It got to me. For a moment I was ashamed to be a man of twenty-three, presenting myself as a ranch hand, with just a shotgun to my name.

  As she watched me think this through, her face softened just a fraction.

  “Tell you what,” she said. “If you need a gun, you call me.”

  “Thank you,” I replied. “I’ll keep it in mind.”

  “Do that,” she said. “We’ll get you what you need for the wolves.”

  She spun her horse and rode away, leaving me among her family’s cattle.

  With our summer herds settled and grazing on the ranch, my own life fell into a reassuring, exhausting rhythm. Each morning, unless we were scheduled to move a herd from one pasture to another, I filled a couple of gas cans, strapped them to a four-wheeler, and buzzed uphill along the paired wheel ruts that followed Moose Creek toward the mountains. On the way up, I drove past each stock tank, checking to make sure the floats worked and the water was high. Mobs of steers scattered before me, and I scanned the herd for signs of lameness or trouble. When I saw a suspicious limp or swelling, I recorded it in a little red stock book that Jeremy had given me. The books came free from a company that sold feed supplements. Mine was small enough to fit in a breast pocket and said “Vigortone” on the cover. It was wonderfully organized, with dated, boxed-out spaces for describing ailments, animals, and treatments. Jeremy probably filled them in correctly, but I just picked a random page, scrawled something like “Black Baldy with foot rot on left hind,” and finished with a barely legible notation of the tag number.

  I puttered uphill, roughly following our water line until I reached the top of the pasture and a massive, circular cistern. Although it had been painted brown to match the grass, the tank looked rude and industrial against the foothills. Not far from its base, a generator and a wellhead sat inside a small fenced enclosure. I boosted one of the cans across the fence, leaped over, and began to tinker with the generator.

  We had two of these setups, one on either side of Moose Creek. The wells were capable of bringing up nine or ten gallons per minute, the tanks held fifty-seven hundred gallons each, and pipes led downhill to more than a dozen stock tanks.

  The average cow on good pasture drinks ten to twelve gallons each day, which meant our steers sucked around 8,160 gallons from the ground seven days a week. The heifer herd required even more, totaling approximately 9,480 daily gallons. Keeping pace with these demands meant running the generators for up to fourteen hours a day during the grazing season.

  It would have been simpler to water our herds from the creek. We could have fenced our pastures so the creek ran right through the middle of them, dumped in a load of cattle, and called it good. That’s the easy way, and the old way. The stock gets its own water, and nobody has to set tanks or run pipe or bounce across a washboard road to stoke a generator. But cattle are hell on creeks and the ground around them. They loiter by the banks and foul the water. If left to their own devices and not rotated through pastures quickly enough, they chew the riparian grass to nothing. Naked banks slump into the water, and soon the creek is destroyed, gone, replaced by a barren, deeply incised gully. We fought against this process all over the ranch, adding off-stream water sources to the most heavily used fields. In other, more remote pastures, we used a combination of temporary electric fence and vigorous herding to keep the cattle on the move and away from the most fragile areas.

  Our system of tanks, pipe, and pumps was built to take the pressure off natural water sources and it worked pretty well. The only real problem was the amount of gasoline and maintenance required to keep it going. Fourteen hours a day is a lot to ask of an old motor, especially when it’s kept outside and chilled below freezing every night.

  I fussed with the generator, adding oil and picking grass seeds from the air filter. After filling the empty gas tank to the brim and adjusting the choke to its sweet spot, I reached down and pulled on the starter cord for all I was worth. The generator rattled, coughed, and died. I yanked the cord frantically, until the skin of my palm started to burn. When the generator kicked over, I stood beside it panting. I ran a hand acro
ss my forehead to clear off the day’s first sweat.

  I almost always started mornings like that: up along the cold, roiling creek, then north across a bumpy stretch of sagebrush to the mouth of Bad Luck Canyon. We had a spring box there, built to siphon water out of Bad Luck Creek and send it downhill to a line of tanks that dotted an otherwise dry section of the ranch. Although it was sunk in one of the stream’s slower, deeper holes and ringed around with a couple different sizes of wire mesh, the box trapped silt, old leaves, and debris. I shoveled it out almost every day, and then reamed the box’s intake holes with a stick. By the time I had the water running strong, my hands would be frozen stiff. I’d lean against the four-wheeler and try to slap some life back into them.

  The spring box sat high on the ranch, near the foot of the Madisons, so that gravity could do the work of moving water. Building it there was a utilitarian decision; the spot’s sweeping view was incidental. Still, it stopped me in my tracks every day. Downhill, toward the west and the river, the valley spread out for miles. In the foreground, the new green grass looked soft as a carpet. It shimmered with each gust of wind. The two movie-set cabins punctuated the middle distance, lonely, gray, and weathered. Anyone who didn’t know the story behind them would have thought they had stood there for a century or more.

  I usually began to take in the landscape by looking west, the friendlier panorama, across the valley toward the faraway Gravelly Range, letting the rising sun warm my back. But I always turned east and stared up the course of the creek to where it spilled out of the mountains at Bad Luck Canyon. Jeremy said the canyon belonged to the wolves. It was narrow and full of bones, the sides so steep a man couldn’t climb them without using his hands.