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

by Andrews, Bryce

  Someone once told me that wolves travel in circles. In a book on the species, a map showed the movement of three packs as lines with directional arrows and dated waypoints. The packs overlapped their routes like the Venn diagrams that demonstrate a gray area.

  Each pack ran an enormous circuit over the course of a week or ten days. While they don’t end up in the same place each Wednesday or use a specific trail, wolves tend to visit and revisit the outer extremes of their territories. They follow the same general course through their landscape, diverging from it according to circumstance and season.

  We couldn’t say how our pack was moving, but we kept missing them and they kept killing. Every day or two for a week we gathered around another dead heifer, looked for sign, and went off with our guns in hand. We dispersed to search along the edges and inside the wildest nooks of the ranch. We patrolled our territory.

  Of the three of us, I was the least interested in shooting a wolf. For Jeremy, each new dead cow meant listening to another one of Orville Skogen’s tantrums. Every loss had to be reported over the phone and, though I never got to listen in, I doubted that the conversion of a cool thousand dollars into wolf shit did much to improve Orville’s thorny disposition. More and more it seemed like Jeremy’s reputation as a ranch foreman was on the line and each wolfless day tarnished it.

  James was a born hunter—better at stalking and killing things by the end of his teens than most people get to be in a lifetime. Hunting wolves was a rare opportunity for him, something not to be missed, but that wasn’t the whole of it. James was a cattleman through and through. He loved his herds unstintingly, and wholeheartedly devoted himself to their protection and care. James liked wildlife, too—enjoyed seeing, living among, and hunting it—but his first loyalty was always to the stock.

  I was less sure about the whole undertaking, stuck between a love of wild things and rage at the ruin of a summer’s work. I kept out of the hunt for a while, attending instead to the ranch’s day-to-day tasks. I carried a gun, sure, but doubted whether I could pull the trigger if a wolf walked through the sights. While James and Jeremy hunted, I hauled salt to the cattle, spliced wires, and cleaned stock tanks.

  One night, as July ground through its final week, something inside me gave way. I bedded down beside the cattle, arranged my gun and other things, and then stared straight up into a vaulted dome of stars for hours. Though I was exhausted, I could not sleep. Perhaps it was the result of the endless workdays, the terror I glimpsed in the eyes of certain cows, or the vivid carnage that the wolves left in their wake. I stayed awake with muscles tense and fists clenched tight, watching the progress of a thin crescent moon. When morning finally came, I was seething with anger. The wolves had gone too far. They had stolen too much from us.

  On the twenty-eighth, with a total of four heifers dead and the wolves still maddeningly elusive, Jeremy decided to make a big push through the timbered folds of Squaw Creek. I volunteered to come along. He just nodded and then, when James was out of earshot for a moment, asked:

  “If you see a wolf, do I have your word that you’ll shoot it?”

  I thought a moment, and then told him that I would. James returned and handed me a rifle, the old Winchester .30-.30 he’d bought at the age of twelve.

  “It’s a brush gun,” he said. “Perfect for that thick timber in Squaw Creek.”

  I looked over the gun carefully. It was a well-used lever action, bereft of ornamentation and engraving. The wooden stock was dinged in a few places, but freshly sealed with oil. I practiced throwing it to my shoulder and looking down the barrel, wondering when it had last been fired or sighted in. I loaded five shells into the tubular magazine. We rode out on four-wheelers before I could take a practice shot.

  We walked for hours in the roughest sort of country. I climbed through a hundred deadfall thickets and splashed across the North and Middle Forks of Squaw Creek. All the while I could not shake the feeling that the wolves were just ahead, hidden by thick timber and tricks of light and shadow. Though I carried no food and always seemed to pick difficult, steep, and circuitous routes, I did not tire. A strange force pulled me onward. It kept my eyes peeled and my feet moving fast. I drank from clean little springs, feeling always as though I was not alone.

  I wish it had been otherwise. I wish I could say that I hunted the wolves reluctantly. That pursuing them through the maze of Squaw Creek was a hard but necessary duty. That might sound right, but it would be a lie. The truth is that, once I lost sight of James and Jeremy, chasing wolves afoot gave me a feeling I’ve never had before or since. It sharpened my sight and brushed cobwebs from every corner of my mind. It focused me so intensely on the task of pursuit that everything else faded away. I did not notice the passing of the afternoon, or that I teetered on the threshold of exhaustion, until I met up with James and Jeremy on a ridge above the thick swath of forest where the South Fork of Squaw Creek seeped into the world.

  We stood there, ragged and empty-handed, and looked down at the timber. The copse wasn’t huge, measuring perhaps a half mile on its nearer side.

  “Let’s hunt through there,” Jeremy said, “then call it a day.”

  We split up again. James would circle around the top end of the trees. Jeremy would walk a lower route, then lie in ambush on the far side. My instructions were to wait fifteen minutes and then walk smack through the middle, hopefully flushing the pack into the open. On the far side of the trees we’d meet up on an old two-track, then walk back home together.

  I waited and then slid down a steep embankment into a nightmare of mud, old bones, and dripping water. The first step sank me past the knee. After that I walked on rotting trunks, exposed roots, and thick hummocks of moss. The bog was claustrophobic enough to set my hair on end. I ran the .30-.30’s lever action, set the hammer at half cock, and tried to keep from falling. After a little while I found the slumping traces of an overgrown logging road and followed it into the heart of the bog. I remember green profusion, fallen trees, and shadow. Through this, deft and massive, came the wolf.

  We saw each other simultaneously and then, though I can’t recall lifting the gun or thumbing back the hammer, I fired. The bullet knocked him over, and when he struggled up, I could see that his hind end was ruined. With his front paws, the wolf dragged toward the shelter of thick underbrush. I shot again and hit a tree. Again, and he tumbled out of view. I rushed downhill past bloodstains on a pine and came upon him breathing out his last in a clearing not ten feet across. He seemed to fill it.

  I racked in another cartridge and hesitated, wondering whether to give him a few more moments or shoot again to kill quickly. But by the time my thought had passed, he was gone and I was alone in the clearing with nothing but the shot ringing in my ears. The others started calling on the radio and crashing toward me through the muck and downed timber. Sick to my stomach, I sat at the clearing’s edge and stared at the body.

  The carcass had to be inspected by scientists from Fish, Wildlife & Parks. Doubting their ability to navigate through the depths of the South Fork, we decided to carry the wolf out to a little two-track road. Jeremy tied the paws together with baling twine—hind and front. James found a stout branch, broke the limbs off, and threaded it between the wolf’s legs. They leaned against trees and tried to cheer me up.

  “He’s a big one, a hundred pounds—maybe the alpha male,” said James. “People would pay money to hunt a wolf like that.”

  “Probably got a belly full of steak,” Jeremy added.

  He clapped me on the back. “You did good.”

  I nodded dumbly, said nothing. James and Jeremy discussed the next move and wondered aloud if this would be enough to drive the pack into the mountains. They smiled and talked as if we were not sharing the clearing with a dead body and the echoes of atrocity.

  They handed me their rifles, went to the wolf, and lifted the pole onto their shoulders. I walked ahead of them, searching in vain for an easy path out of the bog.

  After a fe
w minutes I switched places with Jeremy and brought up the rear of our procession. The pole was not much longer than the wolf, which meant I had to walk close to its voided asshole in a cloud of dog-shit stench. Once, when James stopped abruptly, I almost stepped face-first into it.

  It felt like a shortcut through hell. James and I moved clumsily, tripping over branches and sinking in the mud. The wolf became an awful pendulum, lurching back and forth between us. As we stumbled along, I couldn’t stop thinking about the fact that I had taken something that floated through the forest like a spirit, and reduced it to dead weight and a fecal smell. At last we reached the little dirt road that followed Squaw Creek down toward the highway and left the body there, beside a boulder. We would call Fish, Wildlife & Parks, so they could send someone up in the morning to collect the carcass for necropsy.

  James insisted on taking a picture of me with the wolf. I knelt behind it and he snapped two shots with a disposable camera.

  “You okay?” he asked.

  I nodded, and when he looked away, I reached down, used my knife to slice a few long hairs from the wolf’s tail, and tucked them in my pocket.

  The Silence That Followed

  Sleep was out of the question. After dinner I paced back and forth in the bunkhouse, growing more agitated every time I passed the front door. Without really knowing why, I laced up my boots, grabbed my shotgun and a flashlight, and headed out into the night.

  I drove fast down the highway and turned through the gate at Squaw Creek, the truck a speck of light moving across the new-moon blackness of the foothills, winding upward toward the Madison Range. Ahead the stretched oval of the headlights illuminated two dirt ruts and the rough bark of pines on either side. Beyond that the darkness was opaque, impenetrable.

  I got out to open a gate and a chill passed over me that felt out of place on a late-July night. I pulled the truck through and went to close the gate behind it. From the rear, the taillights seemed like the last things left over from another world. I couldn’t shake the feeling that they were about to wink out.

  I drove to where we had left the wolf earlier in the day, stretched out at the base of a pale boulder, just off the left-hand side of the road. He was straight-legged and silver in the headlight glare, and I watched closely from the cab as though he might move. A thin line of blood snaked between the wolf’s back teeth, crossed his dark-gray muzzle, and clumped in the dust. It curved like a creek leaving the mountains.

  I could not stop seeing the kill. The wolf emerged again and again from the trees. Each time, I shouldered the rifle and squeezed the trigger, living again the explosion, the impact, and the ringing silence that followed.

  I glanced up from the body to the stone and then into the darkness behind it. I used to like walking these foothills and exploring the wild country where Squaw Creek leaks out of the Madisons. Up here, only two months before, I had seen my first wolf, a far shadow trotting the edge of the forest, dipping in and out of the sunlight, moving so fast and beautifully that I forgot myself. I was supposed to have yelled, waved my arms, and charged it, but I let the wolf pass. It was silent and silver-gray, like the body.

  I slid from the truck and took a step forward. Against the boulder, in the high beams, the wolf glowed cold as the moon. His half-closed eyes were green. Besides the blood they were the only color.

  When my hand broke the plane of the headlights, it turned yellow. I held it up and watched it burn against the wolf. Projected on the boulder’s face, my five-fingered shadow started out huge and diminished as I walked forward. Just before I knelt over the wolf and sank my fingers in his mane, I noticed that my hands were shaking.

  I burrowed downward through the long, kinked guard hairs and the finer white ones underneath until my fingertips touched cold skin. I reached toward his shoulder and did it again. Again. What stopped me was a little whorl in his coarse rib fur. I knew it at a touch—beneath was a hole, ragged flesh, and shattered bone. It was too much. I stood up, stepped out of the headlights, and waited for the night breeze to lick my fingers dry.

  “How do you get over a thing like that?” An old friend of mine asked the question over the phone, and I couldn’t answer him. I know what I did after killing the wolf, which was take two days off, drive down to Jackson Hole, speak to nobody, drink hard, and try to forget about it.

  When I got back to the bunkhouse, it seemed that the ranch had managed to return to something like normality. In my absence James had killed a wolf of his own, thereby filling our second “shoot on sight” permit. He’d made a clean job of it, Jeremy told me, using just a single bullet. The wolf never knew what hit it.

  If Jeremy was less than pleased that James had used the permit on a subadult, he never said so to me. In fact, attacking the young of the year might have been what finally pushed the Wedge Pack over the edge. After the second killing, they made a beeline for the mountains. Jeremy went out with the radio receiver one evening and heard a few faint clicks from the direction of Finger Lake and Expedition Pass. After that, there was nothing.

  How do you get over something like the wolf? You don’t, really. Working like a madman helps, so I immersed myself in ranching. I herded and settled cattle that the wolves had scattered. I watched diligently for signs of infection and disease. When I found anything suspicious, I helped James and Jeremy rope and doctor animals back to health. I slept out nights and listened for howling that never came. Having nearly exhausted the ranch’s supply of broken fences, I spent large chunks of time in the saddle and worked on my horsemanship and herding skills in earnest.

  Jeremy took notice. He split up the cattle between James and me. From that point on, taking care of the steers was my primary responsibility. James, in turn, looked after the heifers. Around the same time, Jeremy let me start riding his horse, Billy.

  What a thing it was to ride that big, quick-legged gelding out through dew-soaked grass in the early morning. Billy covered as much ground at a walk as most horses do trotting. He brought the horizon underfoot in a flash and never seemed to tire.

  I rode. I herded. I set out salt and mineral, immersing myself in the lives and health of cattle until little time remained to think of anything else. Slowly, over weeks, the wolf began to fade. By mid-September, I could shut my eyes and go to sleep without seeing blood, fur, and bullets.

  – IV –

  THE LONG MONTHS

  What Remains

  Jeremy once told me about a young man who rode for a grazing association in mountains southeast of the Sun. By all accounts the man was kind, quiet, and exceptionally skilled with a lasso. At the end of a long day he sat with the other hands by the fire, listening as they talked about cattle and women and watching sparks climb.

  “I wish I were a better horseman,” he said, then stood and went out from the firelight into the mountain dark. When a single pistol shot rang out, the others knew the noise for what it was.

  The dead man left relics: work clothes, a saddle, and horses. Once, on the way into town, Jeremy pointed out a truck that had belonged to the departed cowboy. I stared at that orphaned Chevy until we rounded the next bend.

  Not long afterward, my mother visited the ranch and tagged along to watch me work. I walked a fence line, splicing wire and pounding staples while she waited. When I returned, she held out her hand to show me an elk vertebra as white as ivory. She said:

  “There are so many bones here. You just don’t see them until you sit still.”

  From a distance, the grassy benches and foothills of this valley look austere and empty. Up close there are as many bones as bunchgrasses. It is a strange trick of decomposition: Soft tissue turns black and melts into the earth, leaving no record except a striking, oval-shaped green-up in the spring. Bones remain. They stay in place after the initial violence of stripping and disarticulation, accumulating over years.

  Fallen-down homesteads, gray, slump-roofed, and chinked with scraps of newspaper from World War I, are bones. So are dry ditches going nowhere and slow
ly filling in, liquor bottles by the highway, boarded windows on the outskirts of town, and houses that can be sold only to strangers. We live with bones and keep making more.

  In late summer, James and I were riding south through the foothills. More relaxed than we had been in a month, we traveled toward Squaw Creek with his dog Bee trotting behind. The Wedge Pack, so far as we could tell, had left the ranch and retreated into the farthest recesses of the Lee Metcalf Wilderness. Westward, we could see our herd grazing in high grass. Beyond them were miles and miles of open air and then the dark-green humpback of the Gravelly Range. To the east the Madisons stuck up so close and stark and rugged they could have been the painted set from a cowboy movie. We tried for a shortcut through the creek bottom, where the pines were dense enough to get lost in. Our horses labored through, plunging over deadfall and snapping minor branches.

  In the really thick stuff, we found where the wolves had killed a six-point bull elk. His skull lay fifty feet from his rib cage. Both were stark white against the moss. Looking at the bones, James said it must have happened during winter. I shuddered to imagine this place choked up with snow, with the bull spinning clumsy posthole turns to keep the pack at bay.

  We climbed out of the creek bottom, our horses blowing, and as we gained the top of a long, open ridge, James saw a skunk in the grass ahead. He drew the little Walther .22 that he carried everywhere and handed it to me. It was a silly-looking gun—a green plastic semiautomatic, small enough to fit in the palm of my hand. “Shoot that thing before it sprays the dog,” he said.

  The skunk waddled away from us, tail in the air. It was leaving, but not in a hurry. The last animals I had shot were the wolf and a maimed heifer. The heifer dropped like a stone and breathed out one long sigh that seemed almost relieved. The wolf had not quit darkening my dreams.