I chased everything I could—coyotes, jackrabbits, and a badger who unexpectedly turned to fight. Once, in a moment of extremely poor judgment, I ran a black bear up Moose Creek and then looked over my shoulder all the way back down. There was never malice in it, only simple joy. I loved to feel the wind, lay claim to my landscape by crossing it, and watch the deer outpace me before disappearing in the rising night.
On a weekday afternoon I volunteered to go with Mike, the Fish, Wildlife & Parks biologist, to check his traps. We soon found a wolf lunging back and forth in a little gap in the sagebrush. From where we crouched at the crest of a small hill, we could not see the trap that held it, but knew it was there because of how the wolf rose, sprinted three steps, and then flipped grotesquely when the chain snapped tight.
Mike dropped onto all fours and crawled through the brush. He carried a jab stick at the ready, and small bottles of dope clinked in the pockets of his backpack. I followed, holding a noose pole in my left hand and smelling the familiar tang of crushed sage. Mike detoured around the bigger plants, breaking twigs and dirtying his crisp, tan uniform. We worked our way down the hill, kneeling at intervals to raise our heads like periscopes.
“Yearling,” Mike said. “Male.” He knew it from a glimpse and assessed the wolf confidently, the way I would pick a heifer from our herd of steers.
The wolf surged back and forth. Sometimes he rolled clear over the caught foreleg, thumping to the ground and staying out of sight for a handful of gut-wrenching seconds. Otherwise he stretched his limb out so that it pointed at where the brush hook tangled in the sage. He stood against the chain and yanked until it seemed his foot would tear away. The bush shook and recoiled, as if the wolf were strong enough to uproot it.
“What if he pulls loose?”
Mike answered in a low voice, from the side of his mouth: “He’ll just hook to the next one. Probably did a couple times already.”
The bush held. The wolf glared down his leg and the arc of the chain. He panted, then charged forward, leaped the anchor shrub, spun at the end of the chain, and dropped out of sight.
As we sneaked nearer, I forced myself to get lower. With my face six inches from the ground, I passed over elk shit, old bone shards, and jackrabbit runs, following Mike’s boot soles. Mike was not raising his head anymore, and I began to worry that we were covering ground too quickly and would soon round a bush and come face to jaws with the wolf. I took some comfort in the fact that Mike would have to greet him before I did.
When Mike did stop to take another look, we were twenty yards away from the yearling. He motioned me behind him and spoke across his shoulder:
“Let’s wait and see if he gets calm enough to noose.”
The wolf looked our way and made a noise that was not quite a howl or a growl, but held the most menacing features of both. Mike sat back on his heels. “Watch him.”
The wolf stared at Mike, bared his teeth, and rushed us. When the chain caught, it jerked the forepaw back below the wolf’s deep chest. The wolf did not yelp or move to slack the pressure of the chain, but faced us steadily on three legs, looking strangely like a pointer dog hot on a scent. After holding the pose for a moment, he broke and ran obliquely away from us until the chain downed him again.
“Aggressive—we’ll have to dart him,” he said. “The gun is in the truck.”
The wolf raised his muzzle and let go a deep, quavering moan. Mike slung his backpack around and pulled a camera from the main pocket.
“I’ll get it. Could you take some pictures?”
He held out the camera and I took it, hardly feeling the weight. Mike left, taking the noose and jab stick with him. The truck was a solid quarter mile away—a round-trip of ten minutes at the very least. I knelt in the sage and wondered what to do.
At first I tried to avert my gaze, aiming it at a chunk of ground a little ways to the left of the wolf, but my stare wouldn’t stay put. It wandered to the tine of the brush hook and up the nestled links of the chain to the spot where dark metal and silver fur met in a shining mess of blood.
The trap was a Newhouse, similar to the ones used during the extermination campaigns that had cleared this country of wolves in earlier times. There were, however, some notable differences: The trap was rigged with a transmitter that sent a specific signal when the jaws were sprung. This had let Mike arrive quickly on the scene, minimizing the amount of time that the wolf had to spend in agony. The trap was also toothless, its jaws made of smooth steel. The principle behind it was similar to that of fishing with a barbless hook. A smooth trap might lose a wolf more often, but it was easier on the bones and tissues of the foot, at least in theory.
Steel and flesh seldom play well together, however, and the wolf’s paw looked as though it had been beaten with a hammer. The jaws had clearly worked their way through the skin, and they pressed together so tightly that I had trouble believing that bones and ligamenture could remain whole between them. Below the trap his toes splayed out unnaturally, like a specimen readied for necropsy.
The wolf stood in a clearing of his own making, surrounded by broken chunks of sagebrush, a few daubed with red. He held his caught foot off the ground and panted as if his chest would burst. All this, I thought, to get a radio collar on him? All this gory business to point an antenna at the mountains and hear a click?
I looked higher, and then the full force of his stare caught me. His eyes were pale, though their precise color escapes me. They were green, yellow, and blue at once, rimmed around with delicate black lines striking off from the outer corners toward the ears. His eyes did not waver. He never averted them and I did not see him blink. There was something irresistible and sapping about the wolf’s stare, like water moving against a loose-soil bank. His eyes cut into my foundation. I was about to fall forward. I couldn’t move. I looked away.
When I dropped my gaze he sat up straight and howled until the mountain broke open in reply. At first the response was like an echo or the usual round whistle of the wind, but within moments, I knew his pack had answered. Their combined voice came tumbling from the high country, rolling like water down the draws. Distinct notes and the sounds of pups yipping in accompaniment blended into a strange, ululating mass of sound that filled the world. This chorus was wholly different from the noise they made before a night hunt. Hearing it made my hair stand and my heart sink. The wolves were keening, trying to call back one of their own that man and daylight had put beyond reach. I worried that the pack was watching, and that they would follow their voices down the mountain.
The wolf went quiet. He sat very straight and devoured the haunting sounds the way a death row inmate must eat his last meal. When the howling died away, he did not answer it or fight the chain.
The wolf kept still and watched me. Something had been decided and it had dimmed his gaze. Now I could look without completely losing my moorings. I remembered the camera, raised it up, and, feeling like a tourist at a messy highway wreck, snapped frames without focusing.
Mike returned, and we moved quickly. I walked around one side of the wolf, distracting him, while Mike thumped him in the flank with a tranquilizer dart full of ketamine and xylazine. We backed off and waited until the drugs took hold. The wolf began to weave unsteadily from side to side and then dropped suddenly, in a heap.
Mike approached him slowly, touched the wolf gently with the barrel of the tranquilizer gun, then knelt and slipped the trap from his leg. With the metal gone I could see that, though the pressure of the jaws had drawn blood and must have hurt unbearably, no permanent damage had been done. Aside from a sizable patch of bloodstained fur and a thin, straight line where the skin had been torn, the paw appeared to be whole.
“Take a look at this,” Mike said.
He reached up and opened the wolf’s mouth, pulling at the skin on its muzzle to expose rows of long, pure-white teeth. Mike poked at the wolf’s jaw, examining different teeth and checking all the gum tissue to make sure the wolf hadn’t hurt anything t
oo badly while biting at the trap. He turned to me.
“Go ahead and touch them. Just don’t stick your fingers too far inside.”
I leaned down and held an open hand in front of the wolf’s nose. His eyes weren’t fully closed, and I wondered if somehow, from deep within his opiate cage, the wolf could see my palm, the sagebrush, and beyond it, the upended sky. The wolf took shallow, irregular breaths that passed hotly across my skin. I reached in and ran my index finger down the long edge of a canine. It was smooth, dry, and surprisingly warm to the touch. I worked my way backward, carefully tracing the outline of each tooth. After following the ascending pyramids of the sectoral teeth, noting how they increased in size as one went farther back, I skipped across to the great flat knife of the carnassial. Of a wolf’s teeth, the carnassial is most fearsome by far. The canines are showy things, like paired stiletto knives, and they’re essential for bringing down prey of any size. But once the chase is over, the carnassial teeth are where most of the work gets done. They’re razor sharp, formed in the shape of a wide-based, double-peaked mountain. They look, in fact, quite like the rocky peak on the Paramount Pictures marquee. Carnassials are made for butchery. They slice through flesh and ligaments with ease. Along with their attendant molars, the carnassials can reduce an elk carcass to a pile of cracked, marrowless bones.
Mike muzzled the wolf, in case the drugs began wearing off before we finished collaring and collecting information. Handing me a clipboard with a data sheet, he began to call out things like the wolf’s heart rate, temperature, age, and condition. I wrote hurriedly and helped Mike when I could, handing him vials for blood samples and assisting as he weighed the wolf with a sling and portable scale. Hanging suspended, the wolf seemed like a whole lot of predator for eighty-five pounds.
I prepped the collar, adjusting its size and sorting out the washers and nylon locknuts that held the device in place. When Mike wasn’t looking, I scribbled down the radio frequency number from the back of the transmitter. I wrote it high on the inside of my arm, and then, supposing that sweat might render it illegible, I copied it into the little red book I carried to keep track of mineral sites and cattle ailments.
Mike probably would have given me the number if I had asked for it. We were, after all, the most conservation-minded ranch in the valley. Still, I worried that he might have balked because of some agency policy and I wasn’t about to miss the chance to keep tabs on a new wolf. So I kept the number hidden.
Mike fit the collar, making it snug but not too tight, and I held it in place while he threaded a pair of small bolts through prepunched holes and screwed the locknuts down tight against thick leather. When we finished, Mike injected a reversing agent into the wolf’s rump and we retreated a hundred yards to watch it take effect.
Ten minutes passed and I worried that the wolf would not wake. When he finally, blearily raised his head, I drew my first calm breath. He struggled to stand, tipped over once, and then stumbled like a drunk toward the mountains. As the wolf climbed uphill, he regained control of his legs. By the time he disappeared across the crest of the first foothill, he was trotting. Somewhere up there, his pack was waiting. They would welcome the yearling home, unaware that the strange, new device around his neck would broadcast their whereabouts.
Everything is information. Pat Zentz said that to me years ago while we were driving around his ranch looking for a mule deer that he could shoot. He said it first in the cab when the wind came up and started flattening the grass so that it pointed northeast, then again when we saw a fork-horn struggling out of a coulee in an advanced state of exhaustion. Worn-out and banged up, that deer had just been beaten in one of the fights related to the fall rut. He walked right by the pickup, not fifty yards away. I kept expecting Pat to shoot, but he just watched through the window and said again that everything was information. Later, after we had driven to the far side of the coulee, stalked into the wind, and killed a four-point buck among his harem, I had to admit that Pat was right.
Some people are dumb enough to pronounce this high country empty. They pull off the highway at the Madison Bend, belly up to the bar at the Griz, watch the baseball game for a while, and then ask without the barest hint of irony: How can you live out here? Nothing happens and there isn’t anything to do.
Now I just shrug like I never thought about it before. They’re not ready to understand that the land is a palimpsest, overwritten countless times with jumbled but decipherable script. Tracks in the dust, broken barbwire, the shifting wind, and the swirl of magpies and other scavenger birds as they rise from the dark timber—all these things carry meaning. With the right sort of attention, the land tells any story a person could want to hear.
But this knowing is dangerous, a kind of seduction. One time I did explain the whole shebang to a tourist, ending with the assertion that everything is information. When his eyes lit up as I explained how animals, storms, and seasons mark the land, I knew that he was thinking of buying his own place in the Madison. Like everybody else, he wanted a slice of paradise. Now I keep my mouth shut, because twenty years of visiting the Zentz Ranch taught me where talk like that can lead. The Billings exurbs have crossed the Yellowstone River and crept up Duck Creek like a flood tide. A spare, breathtaking landscape has become a vacuum into which has rushed every sort of debris: plastic bags blow across hayfields and snag on the right-of-way fences; headlights and gunshots carve up the night, leaving deer and cattle dead in the fields. The detritus of city life—junk mail, broken toys, aluminum cans, and soiled diapers—spill from the windows of passing cars and collect in the roadside ditches.
This was the future I feared most deeply for the Sun Ranch. Although the ranch had remained wild and largely untrammeled, the same could not be said for the rest of the valley floor. A small subdivision occupied half a section of land adjacent to the ranch’s northern boundary. It was just twenty or so houses spaced evenly across three hundred and twenty acres, but it bothered me.
An image of those houses popped into my head when, hauling salt to the heifers, I met a survey crew setting up their equipment in the middle of an old hayfield. When I asked the foreman what he was up there taking stock of, he responded enthusiastically.
“Oh, just about everything. We’re working up a bunch of overlays for this place. Wildlife corridors, roads, utilities, viewsheds, streams and water rights, development potential—you name it, we’re mapping it.”
He asked me what I did for a living, and I told him.
“Agriculture,” he replied. “We’re doing a map for that, too. Maybe when we come back with a draft of this stuff you can give us some notes.”
The surveyor seemed like a decent and capable man, but the word development sat poorly with me. I didn’t stew about it for long, though. My fears about the future of the ranch were quickly eclipsed by the immediate tasks of tending herds, watching for wolves, and working all the daylight hours.
Around the middle of July we sorted off the bulls from Orville Skogen’s replacement heifers. Skogen’s bulls were almost identical—all ball sack, shit stains, and muscle—except for one. Among that homogenous crowd, one animal had worn the poll of his head bald from scrapping. The exposed skin was shockingly pale for a Black Angus, and from a distance the bare spot looked precisely like a tonsure. Once I noted the resemblance, it was hard to drive through the pastures without laughing at the sight of a black-robed monk enthusiastically screwing the heifers.
We sorted off the bulls and I trailed them along Badluck Way toward the pasture where they would graze for the rest of the summer. They started out rank. Fresh from breeding, they butted, scuffled, and raised dust from the gravel road. They took turns wheeling around to paw, bellow, and give me the eye. I was in charge of the bulls until shipping time and already it was going sour.
But then the bald bull moved out in front. He walked the roadside fence calmly and the other bulls followed. At the gate I stepped wide and he turned into the pasture without a backward glance. Because
of his penchant for leading and the monastic hairdo, I decided to call him Moses.
Twice a week I took salt to the bulls and checked the water trough. I worked them a little bit from the four-wheeler, making each one take a few steps as I watched for signs of lameness. Each bull moved differently under pressure. Two usually trotted off, keeping a good distance away from me. Three others liked to turn to face the machine and make as if they would charge. The bald one always waited until I came within a few feet of him. When I was upwind he sniffed the air. I almost had to bump him to provoke a reluctant step back.
One day, mostly out of curiosity, I decided to shut off the engine, climb off the four-wheeler, and see how close I could get. The first step made me nervous, but then I noticed the softness in his eyes.
A ranch hand must be scarier afoot than on top of a clattering motor, at least to a bull. I could not walk within ten yards of him that first day or the next time I came with salt. But something kept me trying, and over the course of a few attempts, I shortened the distance between us. Soon we were separated by just a few feet.
I stood in the pasture with my arm outstretched, clutching a handful of fresh-pulled grass. The gesture would have looked absurd if anyone had been around to see it: we were in the midst of a green sea, an endless expanse of growth. Despite the fact that I offered only what he slept, walked, and shat on, Moses stretched his neck out and worked his nose double-time. He drew back whenever I reached forward, but as we repeated the motion, he retreated less and less. Soon the shoots were brushing across the wet tip of his nose, and then his tongue was snaking out, gathering the grass, and snatching it from my fingers.
I stopped awhile with Moses each time I went to check on the bulls and whenever I passed through his pasture on the way to somewhere else. I tore the grass from around my feet and held it out to him, and he took it.
Badluck Way: A Year on the Ragged Edge of the West Page 12