The Deadly River (27 page)

At this, Mike suddenly stood. With one swift kick, he knocked Nate’s old rifle off the pier and into the deep muck under the outhouse. The sheriff stared at him in amazement. “What the hell are you doing, Mike?”

“Nate was a war hero. He’s going to be buried a war hero. Wards is a killer. He’s going to be buried as a killer. I’m going to make sure there’s some justice left in this world.”

The sheriff was still in shock. “But he shot at you. His rifle was right there until you kicked it.”

It was Lee’s turn. “I didn’t see Nate shoot anything, Sheriff. That was his old walking stick that Mike just stumbled over, wasn’t it, Mike?”

“Yeah. Just an old stick.”

Sheriff Rose was looking from one of the boys to the other, his surprise at this turn of events showing clearly on his face. “But, ...” His voice trailed off.

Lee took up the tale again. “Poor Nate. He must have seen us sampling the water here and got so excited that he had a heart attack. You gotta feel sorry for the old guy.”

Mike concurred. “Yeah, poor guy.” His eyes were still brimming with tears.

The sheriff finally pulled himself together. “Okay fellas. If that’s the way you want this to go down, I won’t argue with you. In fact, I think this is true justice. But this has to go to the grave as something none of us ever talk about. There can only be one story ever told about this situation. Do you both understand me?”

It was Mike that gave voice as both boys nodded. “We’re with you Sheriff.” He hesitated, then, “Shit! I can’t even remember Nate’s last name.” He started crying softly.

Sheriff Rose took charge. “It was Smith, Mike. Sergeant Nathan Smith, U.S. Army, Retired. That’s how he’ll be remembered.”

Then the sheriff stood, a sad smile on his face. “All right, fellas. Get out of here. Go back to your sampling job. I’m going to radio the hospital for an ambulance to pick Nate up. I’ll need to see you tomorrow to get a statement from each of you. Not to worry, just a formality. Come by the jail after work tomorrow evening.”

Sheriff Rose watched as Mike, then Lee, clambered down into the raft. As they pushed off, he raised his voice to let them know what he was thinking. “I’m going to make sure that Nate gets a hero’s funeral, complete with a 21-gun salute and the whole business. Wards is on death row in Deer Lodge. He’ll stay there. That’s justice. Thank you.”

Lee and Mike looked at the sheriff, then at one another. Both were lost in thought and both wore serious expressions on their faces. An occasional tear squeezed out of Mike’s lowered eyes.

Both of them felt that something special had been lost when old Nate died.

Lee reached over the side of the raft and half-heartedly filled a sample bottle. Life had to go on.

Neither of them noticed the two proud eagles watching silently from the branches of a nearby cottonwood tree.

THE END

AUTHOR’S NOTE

I
was raised on the banks of the Clark Fork River in the 1940s and 1950s. The descriptions of the river’s disgusting condition that appear in this book are factual. The town dump, human waste, mining sludge, and gray crust on the shores were all there when I was a boy. We accepted them as normal.

The people in this book are fictional, but the descriptions of the river and the worries about the sawmills are taken from my life experiences. They are true.

In my lifetime, many people have worked tirelessly to clean up the Clark Fork. The Milltown Dam was removed in 2008 and the river was rerouted so the mining waste behind the dam could be safely hauled off to a landfill. More than 330,000 cubic yards of mine waste (containing high levels of cadmium, copper, zinc, lead and arsenic) were removed from the old river bed. The Clark Fork cleanup is now considered a success and both locals and tourists are fly-fishing the river.

Similarly the cedar forest surrounding Little Joe Creek is still there and is still as beautiful as ever.

But the sawmill dilemma described in this book has continued, with politicians from both camps contributing to the problem. The environmentalists have successfully made the U. S. Forest Service (USFS) responsible for the nation’s wildlife as well as all aspects of our forests, from roads and trails to forest fires. At the same time the USFS is still responsible for managing timber harvests. In spite of these increased responsibilities, the USFS budget has been cut to bare bones. (In my home town in the 1950s, there was a large USFS Station which employed about a hundred people during peak months. It’s now closed. This is typical.)

In Montana today, the USFS is a mere shadow of what it was fifty years ago. Yet its responsibilities have expanded tenfold. The USFS is so overburdened, underfunded, and harassed by frivolous lawsuits that it hasn’t been able to provide the logs that are the lifeblood of the timber industry. There are only three or four sawmills operating in Montana
today. In the 1950s, there were hundreds. During the short time that I spent writing this book, another local Forest Service Station was closed because of budget constraints and one of the few remaining sawmills announced massive layoffs because they couldn’t get enough logs to stay in operation.

Today America imports most of its lumber, while our experienced lumberjacks and millworkers are unemployed. Montana’s population has hardly changed in fifty years, because the good-paying jobs are gone. Today, minimum-wage jobs are the only game in the state.

There’s room in Montana’s vast forests for both responsible environmental management and reasonable timber harvesting. But this won’t happen as long as politicians, on both sides of the aisle, continue to put their ideological biases ahead of common sense and reasonable business practices.

But good people did come together to fix the Clark Fork. It’s my fervent hope that this can happen again and reason can be injected into our politics and our forest management practices.

Very Sincerely,

Jeff Noonan

1
Who is the real Ray Moore? Who is Dawn’s husband if he’s not Ray Moore? For the answer, read
Rocky Mountain Justice (The Legend of Camel’s Hump)
, a book that tells how four Montana teens fight to the death against a degenerate sheriff.