Badluck Way: A Year on the Ragged Edge of the West (22 page)

I glanced up from the body to the stone and then into the darkness behind it. I used to like walking these foothills and exploring the wild country where Squaw Creek leaks out of the Madisons. Up here, only two months before, I had seen my first wolf, a far shadow trotting the edge of the forest, dipping in and out of the sunlight, moving so fast and beautifully that I forgot myself. I was supposed to have yelled, waved my arms, and
charged it, but I let the wolf pass. It was silent and silver-gray, like the body.

I slid from the truck and took a step forward. Against the boulder, in the high beams, the wolf glowed cold as the moon. His half-closed eyes were green. Besides the blood they were the only color.

When my hand broke the plane of the headlights, it turned yellow. I held it up and watched it burn against the wolf. Projected on the boulder’s face, my five-fingered shadow started out huge and diminished as I walked forward. Just before I knelt over the wolf and sank my fingers in his mane, I noticed that my hands were shaking.

I burrowed downward through the long, kinked guard hairs and the finer white ones underneath until my fingertips touched cold skin. I reached toward his shoulder and did it again. Again. What stopped me was a little whorl in his coarse rib fur. I knew it at a touch—beneath was a hole, ragged flesh, and shattered bone. It was too much. I stood up, stepped out of the headlights, and waited for the night breeze to lick my fingers dry.

“How do you get over a thing like that?” An old friend of mine asked the question over the phone, and I couldn’t answer him. I know what I did after killing the wolf, which was take two days off, drive down to Jackson Hole, speak to nobody, drink hard, and try to forget about it.

When I got back to the bunkhouse, it seemed that the ranch had managed to return to something like normality. In my absence
James had killed a wolf of his own, thereby filling our second “shoot on sight” permit. He’d made a clean job of it, Jeremy told me, using just a single bullet. The wolf never knew what hit it.

If Jeremy was less than pleased that James had used the permit on a subadult, he never said so to me. In fact, attacking the young of the year might have been what finally pushed the Wedge Pack over the edge. After the second killing, they made a beeline for the mountains. Jeremy went out with the radio receiver one evening and heard a few faint clicks from the direction of Finger Lake and Expedition Pass. After that, there was nothing.

How do you get over something like the wolf? You don’t, really. Working like a madman helps, so I immersed myself in ranching. I herded and settled cattle that the wolves had scattered. I watched diligently for signs of infection and disease. When I found anything suspicious, I helped James and Jeremy rope and doctor animals back to health. I slept out nights and listened for howling that never came. Having nearly exhausted the ranch’s supply of broken fences, I spent large chunks of time in the saddle and worked on my horsemanship and herding skills in earnest.

Jeremy took notice. He split up the cattle between James and me. From that point on, taking care of the steers was my primary responsibility. James, in turn, looked after the heifers. Around the same time, Jeremy let me start riding his horse, Billy.

What a thing it was to ride that big, quick-legged gelding out through dew-soaked grass in the early morning. Billy covered as much ground at a walk as most horses do trotting. He brought the horizon underfoot in a flash and never seemed to tire.

I rode. I herded. I set out salt and mineral, immersing myself in the lives and health of cattle until little time remained to think of anything else. Slowly, over weeks, the wolf began to fade. By mid-September, I could shut my eyes and go to sleep without seeing blood, fur, and bullets.

J
eremy once told me about a young man who rode for a grazing association in mountains southeast of the Sun. By all accounts the man was kind, quiet, and exceptionally skilled with a lasso. At the end of a long day he sat with the other hands by the fire, listening as they talked about cattle and women and watching sparks climb.

“I wish I were a better horseman,” he said, then stood and went out from the firelight into the mountain dark. When a single pistol shot rang out, the others knew the noise for what it was.

The dead man left relics: work clothes, a saddle, and horses. Once, on the way into town, Jeremy pointed out a truck that had belonged to the departed cowboy. I stared at that orphaned Chevy until we rounded the next bend.

Not long afterward, my mother visited the ranch and tagged along to watch me work. I walked a fence line, splicing wire and pounding staples while she waited. When I returned, she held out her hand to show me an elk vertebra as white as ivory. She said:

“There are so many bones here. You just don’t see them until you sit still.”

From a distance, the grassy benches and foothills of this valley look austere and empty. Up close there are as many bones as bunchgrasses. It is a strange trick of decomposition: Soft tissue turns black and melts into the earth, leaving no record except a striking, oval-shaped green-up in the spring. Bones remain. They stay in place after the initial violence of stripping and disarticulation, accumulating over years.

Fallen-down homesteads, gray, slump-roofed, and chinked with scraps of newspaper from World War I, are bones. So are dry ditches going nowhere and slowly filling in, liquor bottles by the highway, boarded windows on the outskirts of town, and houses that can be sold only to strangers. We live with bones and keep making more.

In late summer, James and I were riding south through the foothills. More relaxed than we had been in a month, we traveled toward Squaw Creek with his dog Bee trotting behind. The Wedge Pack, so far as we could tell, had left the ranch and retreated into the farthest recesses of the Lee Metcalf Wilderness. Westward, we could
see our herd grazing in high grass. Beyond them were miles and miles of open air and then the dark-green humpback of the Gravelly Range. To the east the Madisons stuck up so close and stark and rugged they could have been the painted set from a cowboy movie. We tried for a shortcut through the creek bottom, where the pines were dense enough to get lost in. Our horses labored through, plunging over deadfall and snapping minor branches.

In the really thick stuff, we found where the wolves had killed a six-point bull elk. His skull lay fifty feet from his rib cage. Both were stark white against the moss. Looking at the bones, James said it must have happened during winter. I shuddered to imagine this place choked up with snow, with the bull spinning clumsy posthole turns to keep the pack at bay.

We climbed out of the creek bottom, our horses blowing, and as we gained the top of a long, open ridge, James saw a skunk in the grass ahead. He drew the little Walther .22 that he carried everywhere and handed it to me. It was a silly-looking gun—a green plastic semiautomatic, small enough to fit in the palm of my hand. “Shoot that thing before it sprays the dog,” he said.

The skunk waddled away from us, tail in the air. It was leaving, but not in a hurry. The last animals I had shot were the wolf and a maimed heifer. The heifer dropped like a stone and breathed out one long sigh that seemed almost relieved. The wolf had not quit darkening my dreams.

I handed the gun back to James and told him that if stinking had become a capital offense, he better save a bullet for each of us. He shrugged and muttered something, then goosed his horse forward and shot
pop-pop-pop-pop
until the skunk crumpled in a heap.

As the echoes faded, I saw movement out of the corner of my eye and turned to watch Bee disappear into the trees, headed back the way we came. She ran flat-out with her nub of a tail tucked. “Darn,” James said as he spurred his horse ahead. He had three dogs and all of them were gun-shy.

On his last workday, James and I took the four-wheelers up to the North End together. Our rigs were loaded down with sacks of salt, and we drove a big clockwise circle around the Flats. It was Friday, and on Sunday, James and his family were headed back to their house on the Utah-Idaho border for his final year of college.

I was staying. A week before, Roger had offered me a permanent job and I had taken it, agreeing to work through the winter and into next spring. I got a raise, from $1,650 to $1,800 a month, and health insurance. Jeremy said I could move out of the bunkhouse and into the little log house we called the Wolf Shack. Not bad for a ranch hand.

As we whizzed across the ranch, past cattle grazing in dark bunches and mountains scraping up against a clear blue sky, James must have been a little jealous. He was headed for the world of examinations and fluorescent light, while I got to stick around and have adventures.

We were gripped by separate euphorias. James was making the most of his last moment in the sun. He spun doughnuts through the grass and club moss and caught air across more than one ditch. I followed him, ecstatic in the knowledge that I did not have to leave and could work the ranch for years if I wanted. I pictured
myself toiling until my body wore out, then buying a cabin by the river.

We drove fast, scattering cattle. I raced south toward the bench above Wolf Creek, and then watched James bail off the edge.

I followed him. That, after all, had been my policy all summer, and it had worked well. The slope looked steeper than anything I had yet descended, but I reasoned that if James could do it, I could, too. I shifted my weight back, dropped the transmission into first gear, and headed straight down.

A lot can happen in the weightless moments between a mistake and its consequences. I looked down as the front left tire hit a basketball-sized rock. I felt the back wheels leave the ground.

The four-wheeler rolled forward into space, and the ground rushed toward me. There was time enough to glance downhill and see James watching with a look of horror, time to realize that people die this way and to think bitterly that the rear rack was empty, the front one was full, and all this was happening because I forgot to balance a load of cow salt.