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

by Andrews, Bryce

  “Predator alley,” he said. “It’ll make your hair stand on end.”

  The mouth of the canyon was thick with trees on its south slope and framed by two sharply angled hillsides, like a Newhouse trap with its jaws splayed out, waiting for a footfall on the pan. Although the hills didn’t look very steep from the spring box, they still had a menacing aspect. I strained my eyes to see past the spot where the walls came together in a massive V, but couldn’t penetrate the foliage and shadow.

  Such dark places were magnetic. I felt the same pull at the mouth of a cave, a mine shaft, a bog, or any obscure place that I had been warned about explicitly. On wild, moonless nights, the darkness called me away from the safe circle of firelight, challenging me to transgress, to step beyond my world into an ancient, unforgiving one.

  My curiosity about Bad Luck Canyon got the best of me one Saturday, when my only job that day was to make rounds of the generators and clean out the spring box. When finished, I left the four-wheeler and walked uphill along the creek. I didn’t own a pistol then, and hadn’t thought to bring a can of bear spray, so I went up Bad Luck Creek armed with a pair of fencing pliers. I held them with the staple hook pointing forward, an agricultural war club.

  The wind stopped when I passed into the mountains. It got dark, too, since the Madisons now blocked the sun. I stopped beneath a good-sized pine to catch my breath and let my eyes adjust. When they did, I looked down to find the first skeleton.

  The elk calf lay on the uphill side of the tree with its spine bent backward to match the curve of the trunk. Its ribs were gone, snapped off clean as wishbones. The long bones of the leg were cracked in half and the skull was missing. Rough incisions marred the unbroken bones. Not a shred of skin remained, but the ground was scattered with a halo of fur that I recognized as the wolf’s particular calling card.

  The creek was small, no wider than a long stride. Following it uphill, I stepped over a shocking multitude of bones. Spines lay like snakes in the grass, and disarticulated vertebrae dotted the ground like strange, low weeds. I stopped to study the fresher kills, the ones still held together by bits of dried black sinew, and found the brutal strength of wolves recorded in bone shear.

  A quarter mile back was a little shack as thoroughly disassembled as the skeletons. I tripped over a griddle and found a stovepipe, a wringer, and bedsprings scattered near the open door. Inside, a caved-in roof divided the cabin in half. One side was littered with gnawed bones.

  As I climbed, my worries multiplied. Game trails snaked along the bottom of the canyon. Spurs departed at intervals to climb awhile and peter out in scree. Looking back downhill, I found that I could no longer see the sunlit floor of the valley, or even the faraway green hump of the Gravelly Range. My world was ringed with dark, impenetrable timber, punctuated by the dull white of weathering bone, and bounded on two sides by slopes that had grown steeper until they looked impossible to ascend.

  I turned a corner and hopped once more across the canyon’s little cataract. As I landed on the other side, a tremendous racket issued from one of the nearer trees. It happened fast—a series of quick, dull explosions, like a string of fireworks held underwater. The noise was loud, close, and terrifying. I froze in my tracks, with my heart beating hard enough to hear. Even when a blue grouse emerged from the branches and coasted away down the canyon with its wings still making a bizarre flooded-engine sound, I couldn’t relax.

  Bad Luck had that effect on people—and livestock, too. In an old, unpublished history of the Madison Valley, I had read about the etymology of all the creeks around here. For most streams the naming process was mundane. Moose and Wolf Creeks were named for animals seen on their banks, apparently by men without a surfeit of creativity. Down the valley, Meadow Creek took its name from the wide expanse of grass through which it meandered. Of Squaw Creek, the author wrote only that the drainage contained the graves of horse thieves, killed by a posse of deputies from Gallatin City.

  But Bad Luck Creek was different. Bad Luck had a story. In the very early days, when homesteads were being proved up around Ennis and the first big ranches had yet to be pieced together in the upper valley, a man rode his horse up into the bowels of a little drainage near Moose Creek. Like me, the man crossed and recrossed the little brook in the center of the canyon, stepping over enough bone piles to put his mount on edge.

  High in the canyon, the man caught sight of a grouse sitting nearby in a tree. Grouse have two major challenges when it comes to their survival: First, they’re delicious, easily cooked on an open fire, and about the right size to make a hearty lunch. Second, they tend to overestimate their ability to blend in to their surroundings and will sit motionless on a tree branch until a person is nearly within arm’s reach.

  Seeing the grouse, the man dismounted. He picked up one of the blocky stones that litter the canyon floor and led his horse toward the bird. When he judged himself close enough, he chucked the stone with all his strength. It missed, but not by much, and the grouse leaped from the tree in a riot of motion and sound, flapping between man and animal, nearly brushing them with its wings.

  The noise, the bird, the smells of decay, and the carcass piles did not sit well with the horse, which reared back, broke free of the man, and ran downhill as fast as it could go. It did not stop to graze or drink, but kept going, out of the canyon, across Stock Creek and the vastness of the North End, and on down the valley to Ennis.

  The man, for his part, walked out. He wanted to call the drainage Grouse Creek, but his friends overruled him, calling it Bad Luck. Because of all the bones and how the place gets under a person’s skin, the name stuck.

  It isn’t wise to ruminate for too long in a place like that, but it’s tempting. I was totally and utterly alone. Standing in the high green grass along the creek and thinking about the man who named creek and canyon, I got lost in the strangeness of Bad Luck and its weird, dangerous vibe. After a few minutes, a little stone broke loose from some unseen talus patch, clattered down the hill, and splashed into the creek behind me. The noise startled me, but still I headed higher.

  After a mile, the stream forked. Neither tributary was much more than a trickle, and both spilled from steep, uphill gashes in the canyon walls. Although it was nearly noon, the canyon’s floor remained in shadow. It felt like a dead end—a place built perfectly for ambush—and reminded me of a painting that hung in Roger’s house. On the canvas a massive, exhausted bull elk struggles to keep three snarling wolves at bay. The bull stands in a dark little clearing with his back to a thick stand of timber, looking ready to collapse beneath the weight of his antlers. The wolves watch him intently, waiting for their cue to begin the final act.

  I listened to the faint tune of Bad Luck Creek and nudged at a heap of old rib bones with the toe of my boot. A breeze came out from the high country, cold enough to make me shiver, and I followed it downhill toward the light and safety of the valley floor.

  There was a place near the river and the highway, at the foot of a steep, barren hill, where elk always seemed to get into trouble. On an otherwise unremarkable little mound, the remnants of an old, salty spring rose to the surface. Nothing much grew where the little vein of minerals popped out into daylight, but it drew the elk and deer in all seasons, especially in the dead of winter, when exposure and the passage of time had leached most of the nutrition out of the bunchgrasses. During the months of January, February, and March the salt lick invariably held a crowd of deer and elk with their noses pressed against the chalky, pulverized dirt, ingesting the salt, potassium, magnesium, sulfur, and iron they needed to carry on.

  In ungulates, as in other mammals, salt engenders a powerful thirst. After grubbing their fill at the lick, elk and deer would lift their heads and hear the soft gurgle of water moving down the Madison River. Wide and relatively slow there, the river was irresistible. But even though the Madison was no more than two hundred yards from the lick, crossing the distance between the two was treacherous, and our boundary fence w
as a significant obstacle. Near the salt lick, that fence was a stout affair: four tight strands of smooth, high-tensile wire mounted on closely spaced wooden posts. The fence’s bottom wire was about a foot off the ground, and its top one pushed fifty inches. For elk, crossing it meant a high-stakes leap. Over the course of my time on the Sun, I would find several for whom it had ended badly.

  A small, calm bunch of elk generally had little trouble crossing fences. They took their time, scoped out the line, picked a good spot, and leaped cleanly over with a grace surprising for their size. Trouble cropped up when the herds were larger or began to hurry. In big bunches the elk jostled together, roughly pushing each other forward. As animals at the back of the herd pressed ahead, the ones up front had to leap the fence or be shoved through it.

  When the herd got spooked, the danger was compounded. With a wolf or a hunter behind them, the elk ran pell-mell through anything in their path. In such moments of panic, the herd tried to steamroller over the boundary fence with disastrous results. Most of the animals made the leap cleanly or flicked their hooves across the top wire. Others fell short, bouncing off the fence or wedging themselves through the spaces in between strands. These were the fortunate ones. A luckless few jumped, ended up with a leg or two stuck between the wires, and, carried ahead by their own momentum, pitched over the top of the fence. As an elk twisted the fence out of shape, the wires bound against each other and tightened like a vise.

  From there on out, it got ugly. The elk struggled violently to get loose, and sometimes made a frenzied, bloody escape. But when the wires were twisted, steel tightened above their hooves as surely as a leghold trap. As they kicked, it sliced through hide, muscle, and ligament, right down to the bone.

  Once, while out working, I spooked a little bunch of elk and watched all but one of them make it across a pasture fence. The last cow got a hind leg tangled badly and began to fight against the wire. I ran to the fence, got as close as I dared, and cut her free. She limped away, bleeding just a little.

  Such happy endings weren’t normal. Mostly, the carnage went on without a witness. Once caught and irreparably damaged by fighting against tempered metal, the elk waited awkwardly to die. Some bled out; others were claimed by exposure. Wolves and bears found a few and tore them limb from ruined limb. More than once, while repairing remote barbwire fences in the springtime, I found the hooves and shanks of ungulates still twisted in the wires.

  We worked hard to keep the animals from such grisly ends. Before I arrived, the ranch had already replaced miles of high, hazardous barbwire fence with more wildlife-friendly designs. When we built new fences, they were generally low and electrified, standing no more than forty inches off the ground. Since they carried current enough to keep our stock in check, the new fences could be strung relatively loosely, on flexible fiberglass posts. Deer and elk could cross them easily, fluidly—almost without breaking stride.

  The boundary fence by the lick was a necessary exception. Highway 287 dropped off a steep grade there, and then swung through a blind corner. When the temperature dropped below freezing, steam rose off the river and glazed the road with a slick of ice. We lived in fear of livestock getting loose, ending up on the highway, and causing a massive wreck, so we kept the boundary fence high, tight, and impeccably maintained.

  One day, while checking that fence where it cut through a little grove of willows, I found a casualty in the wires. In spite of time, rot, and partial disarticulation, the elk’s body had remained tangled. Most of her flesh was gone, torn away by scavengers, leaving the ribs out and gray as old snowdrifts. The remaining skin and hair were falling away in loose, disintegrating sheets. Her body sagged down from the fence at a gut-wrenching angle, with its skull cocked grotesquely to the side.

  The elk had been badly, hopelessly stuck, with her hind legs pinched between the second and third wires. To complicate matters, she had somehow managed to flip several times over the fence, snugging the wires down farther with every rotation. The result was a disconcertingly neat, perfectly symmetrical bow-tie shape with two elk legs at dead center.

  I pulled a bow saw from the fencing bucket I carried and began to work. The cutting went quicker than I thought it would—three hacks across a joint split the first leg. The other yielded similarly, and the wires twanged back into position, spinning the two grisly shanks high into the air. I stepped back, breathing through my mouth to avoid the smell of death. The wires of the fence were perfectly straight and totally unmarred. When I returned later in the season on another errand, the elk’s remains were gone and no sign of the violence remained.

  Calluses

  After a hurried lunch, I had loaded all sorts of fencing tools into my work truck and headed out to fix a handful of broken H-braces on a fence at the ranch’s South End. An H-brace, as the name suggests, consists of two upright posts, usually eight feet apart, with a stout rail spanning the distance between them. Such braces are the capstone of every good barbwire fence. They stand at corners, on hilltops, and in swales, holding fast against the tension of the wires. An H-brace is pinned together by a pair of heavy spikes, which are driven through the posts and into each end of the rail. This, however, is not what gives the contraption its strength.

  An H-brace is a masterpiece of applied physics. Properly built, it stands as strong as rock and stays that way for decades. The secret is in the wire: Picture the low H of the brace’s wooden frame. Upon it, superimpose an equally wide X formed of two loops of wire. One loop connects the lower left and upper right corners of the brace. The other angles from lower right to upper left. At either end, the loops are secured to the posts with fencing staples.

  To get to the broken braces, I had to cover just over three miles as the crow flies. In the truck, however, the trip was circuitous and excruciatingly slow. I bounced over glacial boulders that studded all the ranch’s high pastures and sloshed through little springs that turned the dirt into a soupy mess. With the truck groaning in four-wheel drive, I skidded uphill to a windswept ridge with a sweeping vista of Squaw Creek’s timbered crenulations.

  The braces were in a particularly inconvenient spot, where the land dropped off steeply and the fence turned often to stay on level ground. By the time I pulled up at the first one and looked at the dashboard clock, the trip had taken nearly an hour.

  For the most part, I could tell very quickly how long digging postholes would take and how difficult it would be. If the shovel, when stabbed down, slid into the ground a few inches with a satisfying crunch, the dirt was cooperative. If, on the other hand, it clanged like an off-pitch bell and bounced back through my hands, hard hours were in the offing.

  At the first brace, I stomped on the shovel, giving it all I had to little avail. A spasm of all-out work yielded just a six-inch crater around the old post. I looked down the line at the rotten, shattered braces that needed to be dismantled, dug out, and replaced. I was in for a long afternoon.

  Setting aside my shovel, I pulled a rock bar from the back of the truck. A simple, brutish tool made for unforgiving soil, the bar we had on the Sun Ranch was a heavy steel rod, six feet long and tipped at one end with a flat, tempered blade that looked like an oversized flathead screwdriver. The blade was used for shattering rock and dry, compacted earth into pieces that could be shoveled out. The bar’s other end terminated in a thick, three-inch disk of steel for tamping earth back in around a newly set post.

  The rock bar was never fun to use. It weighed twenty pounds and tended to peel the skin from my palms with shocking efficiency. But the bar was often the only way to get the job done.

  I beat steel against embedded stones until they broke or loosened, mining downward. Every few minutes, I scooped out loose material with the shovel and piled it at the edge of my excavation.

  The first hole took half an hour. When the old post finally broke loose, I tossed it away and sat panting like an overheated dog. Sweat rolled down my face, cutting lines through the accumulated dust and dirt. I set a new post,
checked its position with a level, and tamped the dirt back in around it.

  I repeated that process on the brace’s other end—toiled down, set the post, filled the hole—and then bent myself to the work of rebuilding the brace. After nailing up a rail between the posts, I strung loops of wire and then tightened them by sticking a short piece of wood, perhaps two feet long, through the center of the X they made. As I twisted the wood in circles, the wires began to wrap around each other. They grew taut as guitar strings and the wood groaned under the strain.

  That’s where I stopped. Pushed too far, this massive tension will snap wire, break rails, and unseat the bases of the posts from the ground. I set the twister against the rail and pinned it there with a framing nail. I kicked the brace as hard as I could, and it didn’t budge. Satisfied, I spliced the barbwire of the fence together and stapled it to each new post.

  I looked down the line at the work yet to be done. The sun was falling toward the western edge of the sky, the afternoon passing quickly. I gathered my tools and went back to the truck, shook off my work gloves, and reached into the cab for my water bottle. After drinking deeply from it, I noticed my hands were stained an unnatural yellow. Sweat had mobilized whatever noxious chemical was used to tan my gloves and it had stained my skin a dead, unsettling hue. It worried me, so I flipped my hands over to have a look at the palms. They looked even worse. In addition to being yellow, my palms were torn to pieces. A number of calluses, softened by sweat or the tanning agent, had torn loose. The raw, new skin beneath them oozed clear liquid with a slight red tint. I peeled off the biggest sloughed pieces and threw them in the grass at my feet.

  As I looked down at the jaundiced wreckage of my palms, I felt a strange surge of pride. These weren’t city boy hands. They weren’t delicate by a long shot. From the elbows down, the skin of my arms was covered with a chiaroscuro of barbwire scratches. The older ones had healed, peeled, and turned a dark, bluish color from the sun. More recent marks were zippered shut with lines of cracking scab. A few spots, either sliced today or bumped hard enough to reopen, were smeared with small patches of freshly dried blood.