Badluck Way: A Year on the Ragged Edge of the West (6 page)

W
hen James’s white crew-cab, long-box Chevy pulled into Wolf Creek, I thought that I had never seen a truck so thoroughly full. The cab was packed to the dome light and the box was piled high with tack, tools, plastic toys, and a bewildering array of camouflage camping gear. Behind the truck, a rusty bumper-pull trailer rattled and clanked
with the noise of the impatient horses inside. The whole outfit rolled to a dusty stop outside Jeremy’s house, and a big, redheaded guy in a flat-brimmed cowboy hat climbed down from the driver’s seat.

I had come to the Sun Ranch in a little Toyota Tacoma with a small stock of gear. James had brought everything he could lift. After we shook hands, I helped him unearth an entire household from the truck bed and carry the bigger stuff inside the single-wide trailer that sat at the base of a hill across from my bunkhouse. Over the next half hour, we moved furniture, appliances, food, saddles, musical instruments, a good-sized TV, framed photos, and a queen-sized headboard, plus a half dozen pistols and at least that many rifles. James unloaded three horses from the trailer and turned them out to graze in the little pasture behind my house. Our last task was to unpack a doghouse and four panels of chain-link fence. We set the doghouse down near the corner of the trailer house and stood the panels up around it. As we worked, James told me that his herding dogs were en route, driving with his wife and kids from their home in Preston, Idaho.

James’s world revolved around ranch work; his wife, Kendra; and his two young children, Christian and Emma. Beyond that, his favorite things were guns, hunting, old-time cowpoke yodeling, and trashy pop music. He had an open, easygoing charm and was a devout enough Mormon to abstain from beer, coffee, and swearing, three vices that he replaced with hard work and an endless stream of sugar. At home he was never without a big cup of Gatorade, and at the height of summer he went through
an Otter Pops craze so intense it made my teeth hurt just to watch him. James gave me a copy of
The Book
. I might have read it if I weren’t so stubborn, because I quickly grew to look up to him like an older brother.

Although we were both summer hands on the Sun and got paid about the same amount of money, James had far more experience. Almost through the Range Science program down at Utah State, with more than a few summers of ranch work under his belt, James was better than I was at every aspect of our work, and faster, too. When fixing fence together, we started at a gate and worked in opposite directions. I always tried to beat him to the halfway point, but never did. Panting, bleeding from a half dozen cuts, and stretching wire like a maniac, I would look up to see James’s battered cowboy hat, red goatee, and broad shoulders pop over a ridge. Once in sight, he fairly whizzed down the line, stopping hardly long enough to see the breaks, let alone fix anything. His forearms stayed unscathed, as if the barbs were scared of them.

When the work was done, James took his time heading back to the shop. If there were cattle around he would suggest we ride through, “to settle them.” Otherwise he devised some long way home that took us up into the foothills, past an old homestead or to some spot where he thought we might find elk antlers.

Once we were fixing a fence on the Forest Service allotment, a ragged one that snaked along a ridge and then shot straight up the face of a mountain. It ended where the slope got too steep for cattle. About halfway up the ridge, the fence met a public trail at right angles. When Jeremy had given us our marching orders, he’d mentioned that hikers and hunters often cut the wires, even
though he had built a gate for them to use. Between that and the fact that a couple hundred head of elk had been crossing the ridge every dusk and dawn for six months, Jeremy figured that the fence would take us all day.

“After that,” he said, “you’re done.”

We flew up that fence like dogs on a scent. The prospect of an afternoon off was that rare in early summer. Despite the fact that the whole stretch was uphill and torn to shit, I trotted from one break to the next, driving each new staple into the weathered posts with four hard swings of my fencing pliers.

The idea was to finish, turn around, and go home to take it easy, but at the top we were both gripped by a strange euphoria. Neither of us had ever fixed a fence that just plain ended. All the others turned corner after corner and put you right back at the start.

This was different. We stood uphill of the drift fence’s end, feeling as though we had climbed beyond our ken. A sweeping view of the Madison River and the Gravelly Range unfolded to the west. Above it, the sky was pure blue. To the east was the steep-sided valley that held Squaw Creek, shaped by long-gone glacial ice into a broad-bottomed U. The slope around us was tattooed with the overlapping heart shapes of elk tracks and studded with dozens of roundish stones.

I slipped on a little boulder, knocking it loose. We watched the rock bound down the face of the mountain, leaping higher than a man’s head, until it disappeared with a satisfying crash in a thicket of aspen. James climbed over to a basketball-sized stone and rocked it forward with his foot until gravity took over. The stone
raced downhill, leaping higher and higher as though it wanted to fly. When it hit an old, gray pine, the snag shattered into half a dozen pieces. The game had begun.

We rolled rocks for an hour, dislodging every available boulder, competing for distance and to see who could flatten the biggest tree. It took both of our efforts to move some of the real Goliaths, and those huge stones cut wide swaths through the forest.

The whole business was as destructive as it was unnecessary. We smashed a lot of tree trunks, and couldn’t have explained why we did it at the time. But now, at a little remove, I remember the thud and clatter of falling stone and the simple joy of watching trajectories unfold. As we chose our favorite rocks and sent them crashing through the woods, it seemed like our lives were consequential. For a few brief minutes, we were more than two specks on the steep shinbone of a mountain. We were shaping the wilderness, if only by punching holes. The land was stunning, enormous, and so empty that we didn’t have to yell warnings to people down below. And for a handful of ecstatic moments, it all felt like our dominion.

When the best stones were gone, we looked across the valley. The smell of sap drifted up from dozens of ruined trees. We sat on the ground among little craters and looked out across the ranch, naming its seeps, bumps, and saddles. As if reciting a prayer, James listed off the common and scientific names of the plants that grew around our boots: yarrow—
Achillea millefolium;
big sage—
Artemisia tridentata;
bluebunch wheatgrass
—Agropyron spicatum;
and lupine—
Lupinus argenteus.

Staring out across the folds and timber of Squaw Creek, we let
our thoughts drift to the wolves. Sign of them abounded, though neither of us had yet seen one in the flesh. Holding out a clenched, massive fist for scale, James described a set of tracks he had found on a muddy stream bank just a few hundred yards above our houses. The pugmarks had looked exceptionally fresh, and their location meant that the wolves were traveling the lower pastures of the ranch. Though I was excited about the possibility of seeing the pack, James didn’t like the situation. They were too close for comfort—his kids spent their days playing in the yard.

“I’ll tell you one thing for sure,” he said. “If that wolf comes around our place, he won’t last long.”

I never doubted that James or Jeremy would shoot a wolf if the opportunity arose. We talked of the pack often, and of the risks we would run when it came time to drive our herds higher into the mountains. In short order I learned that, to my role models, the killing of a wolf was no occasion for soul-searching. Instead it was a job that, though difficult and dangerous, sometimes had to be done.

When a person works long enough on a ranch, he comes to suspect that most of the living things that walk or grow on the hills and pastures are either with or against him. Smart cow dogs, calm horses, fertile heifers, and thick stands of wheatgrass are on a rancher’s side. Noxious weeds and stock-killing predators stand decidedly against him.

James, in particular, had taken this lesson to heart. He told me once that he considered his animals to be part of his family, and
felt an obligation to keep them from harm. That duty extended to the livestock, and as we worked together, I came to comprehend the depth of his loyalty to our herds.

James and Jeremy understood ranching as the art of protecting one’s chosen creatures in a brutal world. Though sometimes this meant spilling blood, more often it demanded perfect attention and a depth of care—as with new calves and tender, growing shoots—that seemed at odds with their callused hands.

I must have been counted among the good animals, because James and Jeremy were always generous with me. They lent me essential things, gave good advice, and helped me take root in the Sun Ranch’s hard soil.

Not long after James arrived on the ranch, I had finally gotten settled in the bunkhouse, a long, low, retrofitted shed that sat like an afterthought behind the other buildings at Wolf Creek. With its wonky floors and pair of rough barn doors that served as one wall of the kitchen, the bunkhouse leaked heat like a sieve. Through the crack between the doors, I could see the single-wide that James and his family called home.

One evening a ruckus started under the floor when I sat down to dinner. A series of thuds escalated into a screeching match and culminated in an unbearable smell that could mean only skunks. Gasping and coughing, I stumbled out of the kitchen and into the twilight, walked across to James’s trailer, and told him the story.

“Well,” said James, “I guess you better shoot it.”

He handed me an old twelve gauge and a couple of shells. I walked to the most likely corner of the bunkhouse and waited. Standing in the dying light, I looked carefully at the shotgun, a
cheap single-shot covered with little rust pits. I snapped it open and clicked it shut as the night thickened around me. No skunks showed, but I kept the gun for a few days.

My coats were all made for Seattle, so I borrowed a frayed Carhartt from Jeremy. The canvas was almost worn out, and in some places had rubbed away to reveal insulation, but I wore it every morning until summer got going.

I had no rope, so James dug out an old lariat and showed me how to coil and throw it. Jeremy pulled a saddle from the dusty innards of the barn, bought a new cinch for it, and helped me adjust the stirrups to the length of my legs. I found a pair of chaps that almost fit me in a corner of the tack room and begged a crumpled straw hat off my dad when he stopped by to visit and fish the Madison. Even with a ream of paper stuffed in the brim, that hat refused to stay with me on a loping horse. When I looked in the mirror, the overall effect was less than impressive.

I made $1,650 a month at the Sun Ranch and spent most of it on food, drink, and gear. In short order I returned James’s old twelve gauge and bought myself a pump-action. I replaced the ill-fitting chaps with a pair of custom chinks from the leather shop on the edge of Ennis, switched from Levi’s 501s to Wranglers, bought a palm-leaf hat with a leather band, and came home from a weekend trip to Sheridan, Wyoming, carrying a thirty-five-foot lariat with a left-handed twist. The transformation was slow and subtle enough to go unnoticed until one day I rode my horse past a window and saw a cowboy reflected.

I made a remark to that effect the next time I saw Jeremy, and he grimaced.

“I don’t like the word
cowboy,
except as a verb,” he said. I wished I hadn’t mentioned it.