Badluck Way: A Year on the Ragged Edge of the West (20 page)

Jeremy had already reported the attack to Montana Fish, Wildlife & Parks. FWP, in turn, had contacted Wildlife Services, a division of the U.S. Department of Agriculture tasked with predator control. For their part, Wildlife Services pledged to send a government trapper to the ranch, to verify the attack and discuss potential courses of action. In the meantime, we were instructed to keep the heifer alive if possible.

James and Jeremy rode all afternoon, checking on the cattle. I watched as each of them lashed a rifle scabbard to his saddle. Jeremy
took the Tikka .243 he always kept in his work truck. James brought an old .30-.30 that he once told me was his first real gun. I strapped our radio receiver to the front rack of the four-wheeler, loaded up the back with wire and fencing tools, and then headed uphill to fix the ruined gate.

Up there I switched the receiver on and made a thorough sweep of the hills. I tried every frequency: Rotten Teeth, the newly collared yearling, and two more that belonged to a pack from the Gravelly side. When my efforts yielded nothing but the hiss and crackle of static, I started in on the gate.

Since most of the wooden stays were broken and all the wires were snapped, I decided to rebuild the thing from scratch. I worked with the volume on my ranch radio turned all the way up, so I could hear James and Jeremy talking as they checked the herd.

A wire gate is simple. In all it consists of five barbwires strung between two stout end stays, with a few lesser sticks in between to maintain the spacing of the strands. The gate hangs between two H-braces, secured to each of them by loops of wire. One end is rigged to open, with loops that can slip off the top and bottom of the end stay.

Stringing up a bunch of wires is easy. Building a good gate—one tight enough to stop stock, loose enough to be opened by most people, and sturdy enough to stay that way for years—is an art.

I began by fastening loops of smooth wire around the posts of the H-braces. I made four, one for the top and bottom of each side. As I twisted wire and drove staples, I tracked James’s and Jeremy’s progress through a landscape I knew by heart. I listened when Jeremy laid claim to riding the high loop—up over the hogback and along the big ridge that separated the forks of Squaw Creek. He
sent James on a lower trail—down through the timber along the North Fork of the creek.

The radios went silent for a while, and I immersed myself in the work of fencing. Choosing two straight poles for stays, I trimmed them to the right size with a chain saw and stuck them through the wire loops at either end of the gate’s opening. I pulled a heavy spool of barbwire from the four-wheeler, secured one end to a stay, and rolled more of it out across the ground. I snipped it off with my fencing pliers and used a wire stretcher—an ingenious metal ratchet that can put hundreds of pounds of pressure on a strand—to snug up the wire. With the stretcher’s help, I looped the tail of my wire twice around the end stay and then tied it off with four tight twists.

I strung the top wire, then the bottom one. After tightening each strand, I checked the tension of the gate by pressing my shoulder against the end stay and slipping off the wire loop. From time to time I heard James and Jeremy raise each other on the radio.

“James, what’s your twenty? Over.”

“I’m still working down the North Fork. Not seeing much for cattle. Over.”

“Plenty up here, but they’re all bunched up. Over and out.”

They fell silent for a while and I strung my last three wires. I added a few stays to the inner span of the gate, marking the wire spacing out on each. Just as I began to staple up the wires, James’s voice boomed out of my radio.

“Jeremy, you copy?”

“Go ahead.”

“You better get down here. It’s . . .”

The radio kept up a thin, crackling whisper.

“It’s a wreck.”

He was down at the water gap, a spot where the fence jogged back and forth across the creek so that animals on either side of it could drink from the same stream. Before James signed off, he asked if I could hear him.

“Go ahead,” I said.

“You’re gonna want to come down here, too. Bring the receiver.”

I drove along a bench that ran roughly parallel to the North Fork of Squaw Creek, figuring that when the going got tough I could walk the rest of the way down to the water gap. I parked the four-wheeler where the land dropped off, unstrapped the receiver, and started to hurry downhill. Fifty yards above the creek, I skidded to a stop on top of a little ridge with a big view.

From up there I could see it all. James, off his horse, stood beside Squaw Creek. Upstream of him, a black heifer lay sprawled, bloated, and partially consumed—half in and half out of the water. Not far above her on the hillside, jammed into a ninety-degree corner in the fence, a group of ten or so heifers stood paralyzed with fear.

We wrapped the heifer’s carcass in a plastic tarp and weighted the edges down with stones. The idea was to make it look unfamiliar enough to deter scavengers, and preserve the body until the government hunter could come and declare a cause of death. It worked that day and the carcass was undisturbed when we brought Chad out to see it in the morning.

Confident and square-jawed, Chad was a man who had found
the right line of work. He wore no recognizable uniform, just a snap shirt, faded Wranglers, and a pair of boots with slight military overtones. Chad loved to track, trap, hunt, and kill predators—wolves most of all. He had, in fact, been a hunting guide before he went to work for the USDA. To hear him tell it, after their reintroduction to Yellowstone, the wolves had gobbled up most of the trophy elk in the drainages where he used to take clients, eating him out of a job.

Jeremy led Chad down to the body, and I joined them there after making a short lap through the herd. Chad pulled out a small pocketknife and began to skin the heifer, looking for bite marks and bruising beneath the hide. Since the hair and thick skin of cattle tend to hide damage, peeling the body was often the best way to determine how an animal had died. The presence or absence of hemorrhaging also indicated whether the heifer had been alive or dead when the wounds were inflicted.

He started skinning at the base of the skull and worked his way down from there. I marveled at the effortless way he stripped hide from flesh and how little mess it made. Chad went looking for damage and found it in spades. Beneath the heifer’s black shroud of hide, she was stippled with a hundred canine-tooth punctures. Some of the holes in her neck and high on her flanks were ringed with bright blood, confirming that she still had a heartbeat when they were made.

“Definitely wolves,” Chad muttered. “Not that you guys were wondering.”

Chad walked over to a five-gallon bucket and began pulling out leghold traps. Thinking he was going to be at it for a few minutes, I sat down on the trunk of a fallen tree. He must have seen the movement, because Chad wheeled around.

“Don’t sit!” he snapped.

I jumped up as though bitten.

“Every spot we touch—they smell it. Set your ass on something and they’ll know from a mile away.”

He went back to fiddling with the traps. After a while, he turned to Jeremy and said pointedly:

“I’m going to be at this for a while.”

Taking the hint, we left him to his work. As we walked out, Jeremy filled me in on a couple of things. First, he said that we had been authorized by the state to shoot two wolves on sight. Second, he told me that when Chad volunteered to fill our permits from a government helicopter, Roger had told him no.

Killing would be done, Jeremy said, and unless Chad’s traps caught something in the next couple of days, the ranch crew would do it. The hope was that, by chasing the wolves on the ground or trapping them off a carcass, our retribution against the pack would be less capricious. We might be able to kill strategically and drive the pack far back into the mountains in the process.

From then on, time picked up speed until events and actions ran together like watercolor. There seemed never to be enough time between sunrise and sunset. I did chores with my eyes on the foothills and slept in the back of my truck beside the cattle.

Not long after the first attack, James and his family started staying nights in a little cabin up Squaw Creek. The shack was without electricity and running water, and getting to it meant a long, jostling trip along grown-in two-track roads. If he or his family ever missed the comforts of home, I never heard them complain. Over a campfire dinner up there, James told me that he would do all he could to keep the heifers safe, and the wolves on the run.
He was as good as his word, and wore out horses in the course of keeping tabs on the herd.

When I think of these things, or anything else from the end of July, it is impossible to escape two images from a dream I had at the time. The first is a pile of dead heifers that grows each time I look at it. All are in states of decay and consumption. Some are bloated and some are bones. The second image is a low, gray wolf-shadow, moving constantly through the corner of the frame.

A little before dusk, the wolf crossed through Squaw Creek’s dense timber, stepping lightly over toppled logs and detouring to avoid the soft, treacherous ground near seeps and water holes. He moved cautiously, eschewing well-worn trails for more tangled routes. From time to time he stopped to watch his pack mates find their own ways through the brush.

Change had come swiftly: one morning, the wolves returned from a fruitless night hunt and bedded down at the confluence of the North and Middle Fork. Within hours, cattle began arriving by the hundreds. Bunched up in tight, bawling scrums, heifers walked out of the low country and into the foothills. Riders and dogs followed the herds, pressing them toward the scattered timber and lush grass of the mountains.

Cattle spread across the landscape like a hardy, alien weed, trampling grass and leaving massive shit piles at the creek crossings where they came to water. At first, unnerved by all the dust, bustle, and noise, the pack steered clear, retreating toward the South Fork of Squaw Creek, the most remote and impenetrable corner of their domain.

The sun was gone and the twilight fading by the time the wolf crossed the long, stony ridge that stands like a battlement between the South Fork and the rest of the valley. He chose to follow a familiar trail, sniffing at important trees and pissing often to mark his passage. Behind him, the other wolves staked their claims in similar fashion. Down where the trail crossed an old logging road, he picked up a fresh scent and decided to follow it.

It was full dark by the time the wolf found a small bunch of heifers grazing in a meadow above the North Fork. A dozen bovine heads jerked to attention when he stepped from the timber. For a moment, nothing moved. The cattle did not spring away and vanish like deer, or gather up and run together like elk. The wolf took a single step forward. One heifer pawed the ground and shook her head from side to side. Another let out a low, guttural noise like a cough, spun on her hind hooves, and disappeared into the forest.

Her panic was contagious, and it scattered the rest of the herd. Heifers ran pell-mell in all directions, snapping branches in their hurried flight. In an instant the wolf was running, closing the gap between himself and the nearest yearling. The pack was at his heels, and they pulled her swiftly to earth.

The wolves ate well that night, and they learned something. From then on they looked differently at the strange creatures that had come into their mountains.