by Judy Blunt
If I tell these stories now, I do so because so much of what I learned circles back and is lost in the way those lessons were taught, how I learned what I thought I knew until I had kids of my own. Shut up, pay attention, do what you're told. I was eighteen when I walked down the aisle on my father's arm. The groom was almost thirty, a man of simple tastes and few passions, staunch honor and little experience. I joined him at the altar, bristling with independence yet eager to please, desperate for attention yet filled with the fierce energy born of old anger—a riddle behind my homemade veil. From my parents to the unwitting hands of my husband I passed the terrible power of judgment and reward, the absolute authority I connected with love.
Salvage
The region we call the Hi-Line stretches the length of northern Montana from the foothills of the Rocky Mountains to the North Dakota border. Winter along the Hi-Line is all about wind, a cycle of wind. Cold wind brings the snow, whips it into place; warm chinook winds crust the snow, anchoring it until spring thaw. Between chinooks, wind levels the landscape, sweeping ridges bare, filling the low spots until creek beds and long, forked drainages seem to rise, exposed like a network of white veins against the wind-stripped hills. Ground blizzards shut down travel more often than fresh snow, dry winter storms, all variations on a theme: clear, cold nights with snow blowing knee-high, like a low fog streaming over the ground; cloudy days when the horizon disappears and wind pours sky and earth together into one seamless bowl; bright days you go blind trying to find the shadow-white of tire tracks under the continuous slither and glitter of moving white. In chinook country there is no snowpack. Instead, we talk about snow "on the level," a way of imagining a few inches spread out to an even depth. Only the drifts are measured in feet.
Winter mornings of my childhood take on a sameness in my memory, every day a repetition of chores done the day before. The livestock waited, as hungry on Christmas as they were on everyday mornings, and our lives revolved around the responsibility of them. Every evening we had bum calves to feed, water and bed, a milk cow to be tended and milked, water tanks wanting cleared of ice and hay bunks pitched full for the yearling heifers in the feedlot, and two or three dozen chickens to separate from their eggs. As we children were broken in to the evening chores, our supper table took on the farm kid's version of think of all the starving kids in China. Fried round steak and gravy, boiled potatoes and home-canned green beans piled on my plate, I would lift my fork and center the first mouthful.
"Did you take care of the chickens?" my mother would ask, pointed in her tone, for she would know whether I had trailed through the kitchen for the pail of warm water. Like all our outbuildings, our chicken house was neither heated nor insulated, and in winter only warm water would stay liquid long enough for each hen to drink. The few times I had to admit I hadn't done chores were enough to cure me. How could I fill my face while the chickens that depended on me went to roost empty, trapped inside, unable to fend for themselves? "No, finish your supper first," Mom would say as I clambered up from the table, and I would have to settle back and clean my plate, chewing every bite, finishing my milk, asking to be excused, her silence a reproach, an accusation. No excuse covered the sin, no apology wiped it away. It was a small, small person who bellied up to the table while his livestock stood hungry, and in that lesson we were offered the best of role models.
I suppose there were ranchers who slept in on Sunday mornings after a night in town, or took winter vacations and let their cattle make do for a few days, but my father wasn't one of them. Every morning after barn chores Dad drove to the hay yard adjoining the winter pasture and pulled the pitchfork from its seat deep in the side of a stack. First cutting, second cutting, in rare wet years a third crop of alfalfa grew in the meadows along the creek, each fragrant forkful cut, raked and stacked by his own hand. Standing knee-deep in a stack, he pitched the wooden hayrack full, stabbed the fork into the mound and jumped down to hitch the tongue of the rack to the pickup. Some of the cattle bedded down on the feed ground, and these rose and stretched as the pickup pulled toward them. Others broke into a lumbering trot, bawling in chorus as the honk of the pickup horn called them in from the shelter of coulees. A hundred-yard path cut across the prairie north to south, the snow trampled flat and hard, colored with the residue of yesterday's hay, and here Dad stopped, rolling down the window as the cows crowded around him.
The first times I beat out my older brother as feed assistant, I was small enough to have to kneel on the seat to steer the pickup across the frozen ground, young enough to believe my father talked to his cows in their own language. Come boss, comeboss, c'mbaaws, his call melted into syllables bawled out the open window, and the cows answered in long, urgent drones, tipping up their chins and lofting streams of smoke into the bitter air. Planting the stick shift in compound gear, he would ease the clutch and push against their milling bodies to get the door open, jumping out as the pickup began to crawl forward.
Days we had school, the pickup made its own way across the feed ground, Dad keeping one eye on its direction as he pitched a trail of hay. The first forkfuls lit on the backs of the greediest cows, but as the feed stretched out along the path, the animals lined out alongside, and at the end it came out even—a thick line of green with red cattle, head-down on either side, a Christmas ribbon unfurled on a field of brilliant white. Swinging down from the rack, Dad trotted to catch the pickup, reaching out to grab the door handle and jump into the cab, settling behind the wheel in a gust of cold air, a flurry of fine chaff. He lingered after feeding, driving back slowly along the row of broad backs, stabbing the air with two fingers, lips moving silently as he counted the tally, squinting against the snow glare for signs of lameness, hocks cut on the sharp-crusted snow, a joint sprained in a slide on the ice. He judged health by their eagerness to shoulder and shove together, stopping to study any cow that held herself apart.
It's a luxury of the small rancher to look at a herd of uniform white-faced Herefords and see individuals, to know the old swing-bag cow from the Murphy heifer, or one 1,200-pound animal as the daughter of another, mother of a third. My father's cattle were not pets, but he knew them all, fifty big Hereford cows, the bulk of them descended from his father's herd. Each fall they lined up along the fence at the first sign of cold weather, bawling to be let into the winter pasture. "Spoiled old bitches," he'd grumble as we opened the gate and drove them in, all of them waddling fat, one calf weaned from their side that fall, another growing large in their bellies. It was good business to keep the cattle fed up, healthy, he would say, lest anyone accuse him of sentimentality. A person takes care of what's his. But his cows were far more than property, his connection to them more complex than the desire for heavy steer calves to sell and fine-quality heifers to keep. Their contentment was a measure of his own, their well-being a source of pride. Cattle that wore his brand spent their summers on good grass, their winters wallowing in hay, nursed their calves with sun rippling over sleek hides. They grazed fence lines along the county road, lifting their heads to gaze after passing cars, visible as any finely tended field.
The winter I was ten I would see my father as beaten as he ever got, though my recognition is one of hindsight. Children tend to observe catastrophe at their own level, maintaining a sort of cheerful indifference to those things outside their control. The blizzard of 1964 and its aftermath were adult problems, ones I assumed my parents were qualified to handle. For my part, the hard-packed drifts made great sledding. The snow could be chopped into blocks to make igloos, banks could be tunneled into or skated upon as the mood struck me. Plugged roads made school attendance an every-morning judgment call, and I went to bed each night in the thrill of uncertainty.
There was a lot of talk about death that winter, a lot of coming and going between neighbors as the community shoveled out and tried to piece together what was left. Though both were of vital interest to me, stories of birth and death had always differed in the telling. Birth happened, and whatever i
nitiated the event was never discussed. Death, on the other hand, was caused. When animals died out of turn, the stories focused on exploring the reasons for it and assigning blame, either human error or that of the victim. As a cause of death, stupidity beat out old age by a wide margin. That winter the stories had a new twist—death just happened. "Sonofabitch just tipped over and died," a note of wonder leveling the voice, leaving the rest hanging in midair. By the end of January, birth and death ran together in a new combination as sick cows aborted, emptying their wombs months early. Calves born dead. In the telling, these births took on a nasty sound, both in the words used and in the bitter tone that spoke of betrayal:
"That old red-necked cow sloughed her calf," they would say, or "She slunk a set of twins the size of jackrabbits."
That spring as the weather faired, Gail, Gary and I played around a deep trench gouged into the prairie a quarter mile from the house. We made games around the bloating carcasses it held, daring each other to cut pieces away with our jackknives, holding our breath against the sweetish stench as we jumped from one set of ribs to another, playing hopscotch on the bodies of half my father's cattle. We shivered with naughtiness, dancing on the dead. Some we recognized. The new Angus bull, Bellboy, was in there, and Inky, our milk cow The rest were anonymous—at one end a dozen feeder calves dead of coccidiosis, the bloody scours, their eyes sunk deep in their skulls from the fever and dehydration, at the other, a layer of range cows, bigger animals that seemed sealed in death, eyes and mouths clamped tight.
Their loss was of passing interest to me, an event too large to grasp, perhaps, or simply dismissed because cows were not my job. My memories would have faded with spring thaw but for the community who got past the winter and kept the stories alive until children grew into them. They come down to me whole, stories of a blizzard that took the measure of any man, that became the measure of all storms to come.
December 14, 1964. Jackrabbits gather nervously at the edge of the feed ground, the first line moving in low to the ground, those behind rocking up on their hindquarters, ears flipping to the bedded cows and away, registering the stillness. A bad night for rabbits, twenty below zero under a sharp moon, every movement a shadow, every noise brittle, explosive. A good night for owls. But it's the flash of a spotlight the rabbits fear more than the shadow of silent flight. Their bodies are worth a quarter, and the men come hunting most every night. Every rancher has his pile of jackrabbits, his mountain of mad money, stashed in an outbuilding, frozen whole. Every couple of weeks, buyers arrive in Malta, collect the stiff corpses by the semi truckload, and sell them to mink farms.
Fifty Hereford cows and two bulls doze in the waste of morning feed, and the rabbits work around them, pulling alfalfa stems from the packed snow with nervous jerks, noses working the sharp air as they chew. The atmospheric pressure has fallen rapidly since dark. Strung tight, they scour the trampled ground, erupting in exaggerated leaps at the chalky crunch of snow under a cow's hoof. They've come on trails, hundreds of rabbits single file, and they leave the same way, following the paths beaten by cows coming to water, by pickups checking on cows. Off the trails, they leave body prints in the loose powder, no crust to support their weight. Scattering out of sight of the buildings, they settle in the shelter of cut-banks, under willows along the creek, in snow domes roofed by the spread of tall sagebrush, digging into the drifts and turning to face south. It's twenty-five below zero now and quiet, but something is coming. They can smell it.
Midnight turns with a sigh. A faint breeze eddies along the ruts of the county road, softening the channels cut by four-wheel-drives. More than a foot has fallen since Thanksgiving, and it lies in loose gathers across the fields, restless where the breeze touches it. Slack drifts taper across the grade, deepest where the road crosses a coulee. Where the lane is plugged, drifted straight across, it's been cleared by hand, a mother or a father with scoop shovel and a pickup load of kids heading for school. The snow shovels like sand or wheat, spilling off the sides of the scoop as it's tossed toward the ditch. The county plows come by every few days, kicking through drifts, shoving it all to one side, to the south or east, so the track will fill more slowly. Fifty miles west, a chinook has cleared the prairie at the base of the Little Rocky Mountains, but here the forecast remains cold, the warm spell overdue, and the ranchers grumble and shovel.
Past midnight, lights wink out to the northwest and the line spreads toward the moon, half the sky gone smooth as wet slate, half still rough with the jitter of starlight. The wind picks up, strong enough to scalp drifts and chase snow across the flats. Where the land pitches rough, snow streams flat off the ridge tops like foam spraying from whitecaps. On the lee side of the cutbanks, jackrabbits flatten their ears as snow fans over their bodies. The claws on their front feet are sharp enough to dig roots from dry sod. Those with full bellies may survive. But the prairie birds, the ring-necked pheasants and sage hens, dug their graves at dusk, burrowing under blankets of snow, insulated and invisible as the wind rises around them.
Within hours an inner alarm clock will rouse the birds, and they will shift and push against the solid roof overhead. Some will peck ineffectually at the snow until they tire, until they sleep from suffocation or starvation. Months later they surface untouched, head still tucked under a wing. The strongest die quickly, at daybreak. These manage to crack their sealed coffin like an eggshell and burst upward into the jaws of the storm. They drop within seconds, gaping, the air too thick to pull through the slim nares at the top of their beaks, too cold to breathe directly into the lungs for very long. These will be found first, in the top layers of the drifts, necks outstretched, wings spread as if for balance, or flight.
The big animals have nowhere to hide. The largest population of mule deer winter in the Missouri River Breaks, browsing where scrub pine and juniper mute the worst of the wind, but the pronghorn antelope live by their eyes. Winter and summer, they stick to the bench land where they can see what's coming, sheltered by distance rather than trees. This night, they gather in groups of twenty or thirty, pressing into draws and coulees. They are toughened to the cold, plush with winter hair, and still they stamp and shift against the bite. Well before dawn, the snow billows far over their heads, clogging the air, chilling their blood. They begin to move with the wind, walking to stay warm. The late fawns, a few wet does drawn thin from a summer of nursing, grow stiff and stop before morning, but the rest keep going, blinded by snow, pushed by the wind. They walk like machines, heads lowered to breathe in the shelter of their own bodies, slow and steady, a night and a day, another night. There's nothing to eat. Wind-packed drifts pave the prairie, sealing the grass like concrete. Where ramps of snow bridge the fences, they step over the wire, walking south. Hundreds cross the Missouri River on the ice forty or fifty miles from where they started, arriving at the edge of the storm front gaunt and hollow-eyed.
By two in the morning, the stars are gone, whether blotted by clouds or blowing snow there's no telling. On the feed ground, cows begin to rise, silent and miserable. They are range animals, bred for stamina, reared on the unsheltered prairie, and they weather storms on herd instinct. Guarded by layers of fat, thick hide, a dense coat of winter hair, they close ranks, shoulder to shoulder and turn tail to the wind. Those in the center of the herd stand quietly, heads lowered, surrounded by heat. Snow softens and refreezes in layers on their exposed backs, but inside where the bodies touch, they are warm. The outside ring is less content. Snow lodges under hair, sticks to the skin and builds outward. They clamp their tails and hump their backs against the sting of it until something gives, and they can push toward the shelter inside, stirring the group like a slow spoon. Warm flanks shoved to the outside turn white; cold ones entering the circle of condensed breath collect irost like magnets in a pile of metal shavings.
As the weather worsens, the cattle endure it as best they can, butts to the wind, aiming south like the arrow on a weather vane. With every change of the rear guard, the group shi
fts a few feet forward, away from the minimal windbreak of the stackyard, toward the open prairie. Icicles dangle from the guard hairs on their chins and bellies, from eyelash and ear fringe. A mile to the east antelope drift by on a twenty-mile wind, coated white, invisible but for the dark slits of their eyes. The air chill is some seventy degrees below zero, already cold enough to focus every creature, domestic or wild, on survival. At three, the blizzard hits like a freight train.
Thirty years after the storm I quiz my father about the wind, what does he guess? Forty, fifty miles an hour? Sixty, seventy? "Sixty," he says, "seventy." Shrugging. No one knows how hard the wind blew. Temperatures were a fact, measurable, recordable, though they varied a few degrees from ranch to ranch. Some reported twenty-seven below zero that first morning, others insist it was colder, thirty or thirty-five below. But the wind was a guess. They could only compare it to other winds, gales that hit with summer storms, times someone lost the roof off a shed or watched windrows of green hay roll like cigars across the meadow. All my father knows for sure is he never saw anything like it in winter.
I study the almanac open between us on the kitchen table.
"Wind chill charts stop at forty-five miles per hour. Says here anything stronger than that doesn't change the temperature much."
That draws a snort. He tips his head sideways, stubborn, thinking on it. "Matters if you're in it," he says finally. But I'm already testing my meager math skills, looking for a conservative estimate—let's say, thirty below zero with a forty-five-mile-per-hour wind. "That makes it one hundred sixteen degrees below zero," I say quietly, mentally refiguring the numbers: minus 116?