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

by Andrews, Bryce

  In Thailand young men who train to be kickboxers beat their legs against trees for hours on end. Their shins fill up with ugly welts, and bones break if they push too far beyond the limits of physiology. After a while, they can hardly feel the impact. They fight serenely on, comfortable in the knowledge that most of their relevant nerves have already been beaten to death, and the ones left over are too worn-out to protest much. Their notion of pain, once sharp as a blade, has been worn down by long effort, until it is as smooth as a river stone. Ranching is similar.

  The real work of ranching isn’t riding horses, moving cattle, shoveling shit, fixing fence, digging holes, or any other specific task. It is instead the process of toughening the body into something worn, weathered, scarred, and strong enough to do everything asked of it, and honing the mind until it knows precisely what it can and should ask of the body.

  I got in the truck, drove down the line, and built another brace while all the shadows lengthened. I built a third in the failing glow of dusk. Not far from the last brace, I found a dried-out pile of wolf shit in the sage. I chopped it apart with the rock bar, and a little cloud of undigested elk hair rose into the evening breeze.

  I turned the truck for home, picking my way along the rough track, paying close attention to the shapes that passed through the edges of the headlights. I hoped for elk, deer, or a fleeting glimpse of some loping predator, but nothing appeared except scrub brush and the rolling land. Looking closely at an old, sagging fence that crossed the road, I could not help thinking that the forces of time and weather were already at work on the braces I had built.

  Though the posts were set well and the wires tightly strained, the long process of their decay had begun. A decade would find them gray and rusting. In a century they would be all but gone—toppled in the grass and picked apart by endless freeze and thaw. Elk would step carefully across the ruins of my best efforts. Sagebrush would rise to hide the braces, as they did the myriad piles of old bones that dotted the ranch’s pastures. In time, the last traces of my labor would dissolve into the dirt, leaving only wild animals, hardy plants, and the wide blue sky.

  The following Sunday morning, just a few days after I finished shredding my palms in the course of building fence braces, I checked the stock tanks and the salt tubs, and then went walking. I parked the four-wheeler at the upper fence of one of the ranch’s highest pastures and hiked up the road that curled like a cow’s tongue around the low end of the Squaw Creek hogback. June was in its final days, and in places the grass had grown tall enough to brush against my outstretched, swinging fingertips.

  Earlier in the week James, Jeremy, and I had piled into the truck cab together and driven up Badluck Way. Distracted, I’d stared into the rearview mirror and watched Jeremy’s dogs run back and forth on the flatbed. Just after we emerged from the Moose Creek canyon, Jeremy pointed out toward an ocean of grass and sage and said: “Wolf!”

  A moment later James saw it, too. I stared for all I was worth, but I couldn’t see anything but grass and brush. They pointed it out and gave me landmarks, but still I peered intently and saw—nothing. Soon they let me know it had dropped from sight. It would be just my luck, I thought, to work a summer here and never see a wolf.

  But sign was everywhere. I couldn’t walk through an open gate or turn the corner of a fence line without running into evidence of wolves. Paw prints snaked across muddy spots in the road, each one the size of a man’s fist. Most of the gateposts were spattered with piss. Black, hair-rich piles of scat dotted all the well-worn trails.

  Talk of wolves abounded, too. Neighboring ranchers, hunting guides, and people from town reminded me often of the grisly possibilities that waited in the months ahead. I heard about calves gone missing, horses that came home wild-eyed and bloody, and all those goats a few years ago, turned out to graze noxious weeds in the foothills and never seen again.

  Once, on a four-wheeler, I nearly ran over the carcass of an elk calf. Its chest and stomach were torn wide open, the ribs inside broken off cleanly. Blood was everywhere, matting the grass and coagulated in dark, gelatinous pools. The rumen and intestines lay nearby in the sage. Organs were missing. I toed the body and found that it was not yet stiff. I put my hand against the neck and it was warm.

  I didn’t see the wolves, but they must have been watching. When I came back in the evening, nothing remained of the calf except the usual scattered hair and bones.

  As I climbed up the Squaw Creek hogback, I briefly pictured the calf’s gaping abdomen. Then I put it from my mind because the weather was so good, and I was determined to enjoy a rare moment of recreation.

  What we called a hogback was really the last ridge of the mountains—a moraine left over from glacial times. It sprawled out from the base of the Madisons and struck south for about half a mile. Its west side, which faced the lower pastures of the ranch, was steep and rocky. I expected the east side to look similar.

  It didn’t. Hidden behind the hogback was a vast, gently sloping bowl of grass. It was dotted with small, regularly shaped swellings in the ground, scaled like the ones on golf courses. On its far side, the bowl ended at a wall of close-set trees that marked the beginning of the Lee Metcalf Wilderness’s 250,000 acres of stone peaks, alpine lakes, and seldom-traveled trails.

  I hiked uphill toward the gorgeous, rock-sided slit in the mountains that gave birth to Squaw Creek. Low clouds blew in from the southwest, and the canyon gobbled them up.

  I am tempted to say that the wolf caught the corner of my eye. It would be simplest if I had noticed something, and then turned my head to see. That makes sense, but it isn’t the truth. Telling it that way gets the order wrong. What really happened was this: I felt movement. Something rose up from the back of my skull, climbed my brainstem quick as lightning, and spun my head around.

  Wolf. I knew before my eyes found it near the tree line. It was tall, slim-legged, and gray, with a tail like a sickle. I did not think, Coyote, for a second. It wasn’t maybe. There was no shred of doubt.

  I knew my job. Not long ago I’d stood with James and Jeremy and listened to a couple of Fish, Wildlife & Parks employees hash out the basics of wolf deterrence. Mike, the valley’s wolf biologist, explained the finer points of the law: since the wolves had been intentionally reintroduced to the Yellowstone by the United States Fish and Wildlife Service, they were treated slightly differently than most animals protected by the Endangered Species Act. The main rule, known as 10(j) in legal documents, allowed us to non-lethally harass the wolves whenever they came near our livestock. Once they started to chase cattle, sheep, horses, or any other domesticated species, we could shoot for real.

  Mike brought out a shotgun with the butt wrapped in red tape and showed us how to fire noisemaker shells. After loading the gun with rubber slugs, he let us take shots at a wolf-sized piece of half-inch plywood. James went first and missed. My slug knocked a quarter-sized hole in the wood.

  “The box says ‘less than lethal’ instead of ‘nonlethal’ for a reason,” Mike said. “These aren’t for shooting each other in the ass with.”

  He talked about our resident wolves, the Wedge Pack. They numbered nine this year, not including the pups born early in spring. Mike had two radios in the pack, but hoped to trap and collar more animals during the summer. Once the wolves had gotten established, the current incarnation of the Wedge Pack had grown quickly. In addition to raising at least two healthy litters of pups, Mike suspected that it had absorbed a few “dispersers,” wolves that had wandered in solo, found a place within the pack, and decided to stay. That was the great and damning thing about wolf biology—given an ample prey base and enough room to roam, they spread easily across the landscape. With an average litter size between four and seven pups, two wolves became a dozen in very short order. This didn’t bode well in a valley like the Madison, with thousands of cattle wandering the foothills.

  To stay alive and fit, a good-sized wolf pack needs to kill an elk or something like it every few days.
The birth of each new, hungry pup increases the pressure to kill large animals, a task that grows harder as the snowpack melts and elk move into the highest reaches of the mountains. By early summer, the south end of the Madison was already buzzing with rumors of depredation. In the mountains above Sun West, cowboys had found a Black Angus calf dead in a ring of blood and scattered hair, its bones cracked for marrow and scattered. Wolves had been seen chasing livestock on another neighboring ranch, so they were the prime suspects. Mike ran some numbers in his head and he didn’t like the results.

  “With that many wolves on the ranch,” he said, “you’re probably going to have a problem.”

  At the end Mike paused for questions.

  “What if I see a wolf and don’t have a gun?” I asked him.

  “Yell and chase it as far as you can.”

  I stood on the hogback, remembering his advice. Cattle were already grazing on the lower pastures of the ranch, and the Wedge Pack had a rap sheet of suspected depredations. Making them fear the sound, sight, and smell of man was our best hope for a peaceful summer.

  In spite of all that, I did nothing. I stood frozen until the wolf moved. It stepped forward, broke into a loose-limbed trot, and followed the edge of the forest. The world was quiet. The weather was calm. The wolf traveled smooth as a ghost for a few seconds, then turned left and disappeared in the trees.

  My hands shook a little. The air seemed colder. I suspected that there might be consequences.

  One night in midwinter, a waxing moon shone across the North End, glowing bone white on the grass and throwing long shadows behind the ruins of old homestead buildings. The air was clear, with a crystalline, breathless quality that comes only when the temperature falls well below zero. A southeast wind had been at work, shoveling snow across the Flats and stashing it in the lee of anything that stood off the ground.

  The elk were restless and swirled like a shoal of fish. Wheeling into the wind, they headed for shelter in the aspen groves near Wolf Creek. Earlier in the night, just after twilight gave out and the moon reared up in the east, they heard the wolves howling back in the Madisons. Later, over the hissing snow and grass, they heard them again from somewhere closer. Moving across the plain, the elk stretched out into a ragged column. A handful of the older cows went first, picking their way through the scattered glacial cobble. Then came the hoi polloi, the vast, dark majority of the herd. Innumerable cows, calves, and young spike bulls bunched together against the cold and the night. The big bulls stayed mostly toward the rear, following the herd and nodding their weighty racks at the stars.

  The elk were still on the move when the wolves came loping out of the Mounds. Since its origins in the union of a single breeding pair, the Wedge Pack had come into its prime: a half dozen mature wolves raced down from the hills, trailed at a little distance by a handful of yearling pups. They pressed forward, scattering elk like leaves before a hard wind.

  Most of the herd turned back the way they had come. They balled up in a huge, tight scrum and beat a path back to the safety of the open, windswept North End. The wolves let them go.

  A smaller bunch ran south. They raced down through the creek, breaking ice, stumbling across slick, round stones, and fighting through close-grown stands of willow. The wolves were on their heels as they pounded up a little hill and across the plain. There, on flat and frozen ground, the wolves struggled to keep from falling behind. The elk stretched out and ran for all they were worth, leaping sage and blowing through the little piles of snow that form behind each tuft of bunchgrass. They found a frantic rhythm in their flight, and it carried them forward. The lead cows knew the country well. They stared ahead at the long, steep slope of the Stock Creek bench, knowing that if they made the top, the wolves could not keep pace with them forever.

  In a burst of strength, the elk began to climb. They labored up through snow that deepened until it overtopped the grass and sage. They blew clouds of steam in the moonlight. The wolves followed in their tracks.

  The Stock Creek bench is a hard climb in any season—it is steep, scattered with loose rocks, and long enough to make you wish for a break before the halfway point. In the winter, with a storm blowing out of the south, it often became impassable. The wind tore across flat and mostly featureless expanse, gathering snow. A real gale could sweep that snow across the ground for miles, looking for a place to put it. Ditches and the borrow pits along roadsides were filled quickly and then burnished to an icy shine. Snowflakes changed as they tumbled across the land. They got pulverized, refined into uniform, minuscule crystals that rolled easily and packed densely together into something more like sand than snow.

  The wind built strange things all over the ranch, but its masterwork was the enormous cornice at the top of the Stock Creek bench. In the dead of winter, with the right conditions, the cornice could take form overnight and stretch out for miles. It was massive, and arced so far out into space that it seemed to defy gravity. Chunks calved off and fell in piles on the slope below. Deep, dense snowdrifts grew at the foot of it. Such drifts lasted all through the winter and well into spring.

  There must have come a moment, when the snow reached belly level and their legs began to bind, that the elk despaired of reaching the top. The wolves were just behind them, and the cornice towered overhead. The elk churned forward, postholing the deep, packed snow until they were high-centered and thoroughly mired. The wolves closed in behind them, walking lightly across the crust.

  Under the Postcard Sky

  Mosquito season was in full swing by the beginning of July. Ahead of me on the trail, James’s shirt was covered in gray bodies. The bugs moved across it slowly, stopping sometimes to probe through the cotton weave. I reached back and ran my hand along my horse’s flank. Two passes covered my fingers in blood.

  James, Jeremy, and I worked our way around a particularly remote portion of the ranch’s southern boundary fence. We rode where we could, walked where we had to, and sometimes left the horses tied to stout trees while we fixed extremely bad sections. The valley was socked in with steely, bulge-bottomed clouds. It had drizzled all morning and started pouring at noon.

  Rain was never warm on the Sun Ranch, but this shower felt particularly icy. A soaking rain, it set teeth chattering and numbed fingers into a state of complete uselessness. To walk in rain like that is bad. To ride through it is worse. I sat my horse and felt the warmth ebb from my feet and hands. When we hit breaks in the fence, I dismounted and tried to bend rusty wire to my will.

  We sighted the fence’s end as the first peals of thunder split the air and finished the final splices as bolts of lightning began crackling out of the southwest. They pounded the foothills on the far side of the Madison River for a while and then crossed it, sending us scuttling for shelter. We rode along an old logging road for a while, and then took cover in a grove of big Douglas firs beside Squaw Creek. We tied our horses, and James and I hunted for shreds of dry tinder while Jeremy worked with knife and lighter to make a fire in the wet dirt. He built a little smoldering pile and the three of us took turns blowing on it. I shivered until the fire caught, and then I steamed.

  The smoke boiled up and knocked back the bugs. We stood by our blaze, in the midst of wild mountains and a godforsaken storm, and shared what little food we had, joking about neighboring ranches and discussing the progress of the grass. We talked the talk of hired men, about work that needed doing, the eccentricities of the owner, and short routes from one place to another. We told the secrets of the country, as if we could earn some title to the land by knowing it.

  We let the fire die when the storm broke, and rode together toward the higher pastures and the barn. Every tree was dripping and the creeks had swollen. It occurred to me that I had achieved a rare thing: I was living at the center of my heart’s geography. And I knew it.

  In July we moved cattle almost every day. More than any other chore on a ranch, herding is an art. When approached correctly, and if the animals are willing, a cattle driv
e becomes a complex, intriguing dance. I’ve always believed that cattle understand the steps a lot better than all but the most practiced and attentive humans. I won’t claim to grasp the rules perfectly, but I’ve been around stock enough to know that their lives and movement are ruled by two interrelated principles: flight zone and herd instinct.

  To understand the flight zone, imagine a rough circle around each cow in the herd. Certain animals—mostly other, familiar ruminants—are allowed inside the circle. The rest of the world’s creatures, including cowboys, are personae non gratae.

  Walk toward a bunch of contented, grazing cattle. At first they’ll watch your progress with dull interest, as if you’re in a sitcom they’ve seen before. Draw near the edge of the flight zone, however, and you’ll quickly have their full attention. Heads jerk up into the air. Ears snap to attention. Worried glances fly back and forth within the herd.

  Press the issue by taking another step or two forward, and the animal nearest you will react, generally by moving away. Working cattle in the open, grassy pastures above the Madison River, I learned to picture the flight zone as an elastic sphere, somewhat like a rubber kickball. When the sphere was pressed into from behind, the animal sprang away, forward. Direction mattered: pressure from the left rear would cause cattle to bend their course obliquely to the right, and pressure from the right would send them yawing to the left.

  The process is not as simple as it sounds. The circle can vary infinitely in size based on the mood of the animal and the condition in which it finds itself. On the open range, when a herd is under constant harassment by predators or overzealous herders, the flight zone can expand all the way out to the horizon. In corrals, with the right sort of handling, it can diminish to a few feet. The animal’s reaction once you’re in the flight zone can vary, too: Yearlings often skip all the steps between curiosity and full-on panic. Older, more dominant cows will force you to prove that you’re serious. They’ll sometimes stand their ground until you’re close, toss their heads, and paw the dirt to test your nerve. Make one wrong move with a cow like that, or hesitate for an extra, nervous beat, and she’ll charge right over the top of you.