Badluck Way: A Year on the Ragged Edge of the West
Page 18
I crouched by the den’s mouth and listened for all I was worth. Here was the next generation of culprits. In a year they would be grown and hungry. They would maim and vanish, robbing someone like me of sleep, leisure, and sanity. I might have hated them for that. Some guys I know would have fetched diesel fuel, poured it down the hole, and struck a match. But there in the pines, all I felt was a deep sympathy and curiosity. I wondered how many pups were down below, what they looked like, whether their eyes had opened, and how their lives would go. I listened to their muffled noises for a while. When I stood to leave, the sound rose above the wind—fragile, but something like a howl.
Epilogue
I left the Sun Ranch in May 2007, but could not turn away from the vastness of southwest Montana. It was impossible to forget the wolf and shake my conviction that by killing him I had taken some consequential measure of wildness from the world. I moved to Missoula, slogged through graduate school, and wrote magazine articles to pay the rent.
James, having earned his degree in Range Science from Utah State, returned in June to manage the Sun. He faced a bloody summer with an inexperienced crew: in July, the wolves began to prey on Orville’s yearlings. James and his hired men struck back quickly, shooting a member of the pack, but the wolves would not be deterred. They harassed the cattle, killing what they could.
From a cramped Missoula garret, I imagined the sleeplessness, exhaustion, and mounting stress that must have prevailed on the ranch. I kept in touch with James enough to know that things went badly toward the end of July. A second wolf was killed in a manner grisly enough to make the local papers and smudge the Sun’s reputation as a conservation-minded operation. In the end, Montana Fish, Wildlife & Parks elected to take out the entire pack. By December 2007, the mountains immediately above the Sun were silent and ostensibly wolfless.
I returned to the Lee Metcalf Wilderness when I could as a hunter and backpacker. Early in the summer of 2008, I hiked in and set up camp on the public land behind the Squaw Creek hogback. The high, rough country looked just as it had when I worked on the Sun. Each morning, small bunches of elk crossed the hogback, circled wide around my tent, and disappeared in the direction of the mountains. From my high perch in the foothills, the ranch’s cattle could be seen grazing on the Flats below.
I walked all over, visiting Finger Lake and following the North Fork of Squaw Creek uphill until it dwindled to a trickle. A storm blew in one evening and soaked the landscape with a hard, brief shower. In the morning I packed my things and walked out, detouring on a trail that swung wide around the South Fork bog and dropped down toward Papoose Creek. In a low spot where the rain had pooled, I found a single wolf track, as big as my fist, pressed into the mud.
The Sun Ranch refused to slack its grip on my head and heart, so I kept track of it, returning in the fall of 2008 to find that the road up Squaw Creek had been improved. Though I feared I would one day find that remote drainage filled with freshly built mansions and luxury cars, development never came. The bottom dropped out of the real estate market, vaporizing the assets of would-be buyers. It hit Roger hard, too, and he sold the place in 2010 to a handful of executives from a multinational mining corporation. James lost his job when the sale went through, and moved on to run a ranch outside of Meeteetse, Wyoming. By the time Roger signed over the deed, 97 percent of the ranch’s acreage was protected from development by perpetual conservation easements.
After earning a master’s degree in Environmental Studies, I headed back to the mountains. I managed a different place from the Sun, the Dry Cottonwood Creek Ranch, near the has-been town of Galen in the Deer Lodge valley. There I tried to rehabilitate three thousand acres of land damaged by overgrazing and the toxic by-products of copper smelting. Though Dry Cottonwood is interesting in its own right, I am still haunted by the endless grassy sweep of the Madison Valley, the herds of elk that move like clouds across it, and the wolves running creek bottoms in the morning half light.
Acknowledgments
In writing, as in ranching, no significant work gets done alone. Making a book is not so different from pushing a dead truck up a long and steepening hill. At first, when the ground is favorable and the day is young, one straining person can keep the wheels turning. At such times, it is tempting for a writer to think of a book as something that belongs to him. But then the road begins to rise. The writer’s exertions fall short and progress grinds to a stop. Unless others come to join the struggle, all is lost.
Badluck Way exists because a handful of good and generous people have thrown their weight behind it and pushed hard. Kendra McKlosky was the first to do so, followed quickly by my parents, Colleen Chartier and Richard Andrews. Each supported the effort in his or her own way: Mom and Dad responded insightfully to drafts and photos, and were willing to talk endlessly about ethics, aesthetics, and ranching. Kendra lent her acute memory and creative spark to the cause. She gave me space enough to live inside my head, sometimes for days at a stretch, and then welcomed me home when the time was right.
Phil Condon improved an early draft of the book with thoughtful and open-ended critiques. Elizabeth Wales saw promise in the resulting manuscript and did an astonishingly good job of getting it into the hands of like-minded readers. I cannot imagine finding a better advocate for Badluck Way. Without Elizabeth’s help, I would not have found my way to my editor, Leslie Meredith. Over the past year, Leslie has worked diligently and insightfully to hone the edges of Badluck Way. Her comments and edits have yielded a better, sharper story than the one I brought her. Leslie and others at Atria have put their hearts into supporting this book, and I appreciate it immensely.
I am grateful to the people who worked with me on and around the Sun Ranch, especially those who do not appear by name in these pages. I never meant to leave them out, only to distill life’s chaos into a story that a stranger could read and understand. To Todd Graham, Vickie Backus, and others: the Sun belongs as much to you as it does to me or anyone else. The work you did there was essential and worthy. Thank you for all you taught me, and for your kindness.
The above people, and all the others unmentioned, have my deep and sincere gratitude. Without their gifts and efforts I would be laboring in vain, lonesome and haunted by certain indelible memories of the ranch, the cattle, and the wolves. I would have no book, half a book, or a book that falls short of its potential. These pages are not mine but ours.
BRYCE ANDREWS was born and raised in Seattle, Washington. He studied at Whitman College and the University of Montana, and has managed several cattle ranches in the West. He lives in Montana. This is his first book.
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Copyright © 2013 by Bryce Andrews
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Certain names and identifying characteristics have been changed, and certain events have been reordered and combined.
First Atria Books hardcover edition December 2013
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Designed by Paul Dippolito
Map by Kendra McKlosky
Photographs by Bryce Andrews
Jacket design by John Vairo Jr.
Jacket photograph of ranchland © Caravan Images / Getty Images
Author photograph by Bob Howell on B Bar Ranch
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Andrews, Bryce.
Badluck Way : a year on the ragged edge of the West / Bryce Andrews.—First Atria Books hardcover edition.
pages cm
1. Andrews, Bryce. 2. Wolves—Montana. 3. Human-wolf encounters—Montana. 4. Ranch life—Montana. 5. Ranchers—Montana—Biography. 6. Montana—Biography. 7. Montana—Description and travel. 8. Lee Metcalf Wilderness (Mont.)—Description and travel. 9. Madison River Valley (Wyo. and Mont.)—Description and travel. I. Title.
F735.2.A53A3 2013
978.6—dc23
2013011635
ISBN 978-1-4767-1083-9
ISBN 978-1-4767-1085-3 (ebook)