English Creek - Ivan Doig Read online

  “It’s all right."

  I had the bright idea this conversation could benefit from my help, so I chimed in: "Counting starts tomorrow, Alec. Dode’s sheep, and then Walter Kyle’s, and then Fritz Hahn’s. Dad and I’ll be up there a couple, three days. Remember that time you and I were along with him and Fritz’s herder’s dog Moxie got after a skunk and we both—"

  Alec gave me a grin that was tighter than it ought to have been from a brother. "Don’t let all those sheep put you to sleep, sprout."

  Sprout? Evidently there was no telling what might issue from a person’s mouth when he had a blond girl to show off in front of, and the look I sent Alec told him so.

  “Speaking of counting," Alec came up with next, “you got your beavers counted yet?" Here he was giving my father a little static. Every so often the Forest Service regional headquarters in Missoula—"Mazoola," all of us pronounced it my father’s way, "emphasis on the zoo"—invented some new project for rangers to cope with, and the latest one we had been hearing about from my father was the inventory he was supposed to take of the beaver population on the national forest portion of English Creek. "Christamighty," he had grumped, "this creek is the beaver version of New York City."

  Now, though, with Leona on hand—this was the first time Alec had brought her out for a meal; the rest of us in the family recognized it as an early phase, a sort of curtain-raiser, in the Alec style of courting—my father just passed off the beaver census with: “No, I’m waiting for policy guidance from the Mazoola inmates. They might want me to count only the tails and then multiply by one, you never know."

  Alec didn’t let it go, though. “Maybe if they like your beaver arithmetic, next summer they’ll have you do fish."

  “Maybe." My father was giving Alec more prancing room than he deserved, but I guess Leona justified it.

  "Who’s this week’s cook at the Double W?" My mother, here. "Leona, take some more ham and pass it on to Jick. He goes through food like a one-man army these days." I might have protested that too if my plate hadn’t been nearly empty, particularly of fried ham.

  “A Mrs. Pennyman," Alec reported. "From over around Havre."

  "By now it’s Havre, is it. If Wendell Williamson keeps on, he’ll have hired and fired every cook between here and Chicago." My mother paused for Alec’s response to that, and got none. "So?" she prompted. “How does she feed ?"

  "It’s—filling." The question seemed to put Alec a little off balance, and I noticed Leona provide him a little extra wattage in her next gaze at him.

  “So is sawdust," said my mother, plainly awaiting considerably more report.

  "Yeah, well," Alec fumbled. I was beginning to wonder whether cowboying had dimmed his wits, maybe driven his backbone up through the judgment part of his brain. “You know. It’s usual ranch grub."

  He sought down into his plate for further description and finally proclaimed again: "Filling, is what I’d call it."

  "How’s the buttermilk business ?" my father asked Leona, I suppose to steer matters off Alec’s circular track. Her parents, the Tracys, ran the creamery in Gros Ventre.

  "Just fine," Leona responded along with her flash of smile. She seemed to be on the brink of saying a lot more, but then just passed that smile around to the rest of us, a full share to my father and another to my mother and then one to me that made my throat tighten a little, then letting it rest last and coziest on Alec. She had a natural ability at that, producing some pleasantry and then lighting up the room so you thought the remark amounted to a whole hell of a lot more than it did. I do envy that knack in a person, though likely wouldn’t have the patience to use it myself even if I had it.

  We still were getting used to the idea of Leona, the three of us in the family besides Alec. His girls before her were from the ranch families in here under the mountains or from the farm folks east of Gros Ventre. Nor was Leona in circulation at all for the past few years, going with Tollie Zane’s son Earl as she had been. But this past spring, Alec’s last in high school and Leona’s next-to-last, he somehow cut Earl Zane out of the picture. “Swap one cowboy for another, she might as well have stayed put," my mother said at the time, a bit perturbed with Alec anyway about his intention for the Double W summer job again.

  —"All right, I guess," Alec was answering profoundly to some question of my father’s about how successful the Double W’s calving season had turned out.

  How’s this, how’s that, fine, all right, you bet. If this was the level of sociability that was going to go on, I intended to damn promptly excuse myself to get back to working on my saddle, the scenic attractions of Leona notwithstanding. But then just as I was trying to estimate ahead to whether an early piece of butterscotch meringue pie could be coaxed from my mother or I’d do better to wait until later, Alec all at once put down his fork and came right out with: "We got something to tell you. We’re going to get married."

  This kicked the conversation in the head entirely.

  My father seemed to have forgotten about the mouthful of coffee he’d just drunk, while my mother looked as if Alec had announced he intended to take a pee in the middle of the table. Alec was trying to watch both of them at once, and Leona was favoring us all with one of her searchlight smiles.

  "How come?"

  Even yet I don’t know why I said that. I mean, I was plenty old enough to know why people got married. There were times recently, seeing Alec and Leona mooning around together, when I seemed to savvy more than I actually had facts about, if that’s possible.

  Focused as he was on how our parents were going to respond, the philosophy question from my side of the table jangled Alec. "Because, because we’re—we love each other, why the hell do you think?"

  “Kind of soon in life to be so certain on that, isn’t it?" suggested my father.

  "We’re old enough," Alec shot back. And meanwhile gave me a snake-killing look as if I was going to ask old enough for what, but I honestly didn’t intend to.

  "When’s all this taking place ?" my father got out next.

  "This fall." Alec looked ready to say more, then held on to it, finally just delivered it in one dump: "Wendell Williamson’ll let us have the house on the Nansen place to live in."

  It was up to my mother to cleave matters entirely open. "You’re saying you’ll stay on at the Double W this fall?"

  "Yeah," Alec said as if taking a vow. "It’s what I want to do."

  The unsaid part of this was huge, huger than anything I had ever felt come into our kitchen before. The financing to send Alec to Bozeman my parents had been gathering like quilt pieces whatever savings the household managed to pinch aside, plus a loan from my mother’s brother Pete Reese, plus a part-time job which my father had set up for Alec with a range-management professor at the college who knew us from having spent time up here studying the Two, plus of course Alec’s own wages from this summer, which was another reason why his choice of the Double W riding job at thirty dollars a month again was less than popular—Christamighty, since my own haying wages later this summer would go into the general household kitty, even I felt I had a stake in the Bozeman plan. And now here was Alec choosing against college. Against all the expectation riding on him. Against—

  "Alec, you will End Up as Nothing More Than a Gimped-Up Saddle Stiff, and I for one Will Not—"

  More out of samaritan instinct than good sense my father headed my mother off with a next query to Alec: "How you going to support yourselves on a cow chouser’s wages?"

  “You two did, at first."

  "We starved out at it, too."

  "We ain’t going to starve out." Alec’s grammar seemed to be cowboyifying, too. “Wendell’ll let me draw ahead on my wages for a few heifers this fall, and winter them with the rest of the outfit’s. It’ll give us our start."

  My father finally thought to set down his coffee cup. “Alec, let’s keep our shirts on here"—language can be odd; I had the vision just then of us all sitting around the table with our shir
ts off, Leona across from me in full double-barreled display—“and try see what’s what."

  "I don’t see there’s any what’s what about it," Alec declared. "People get married every day."

  "So does the sun rise," my mother told him, “without particular participation by you."

  “Mom, now damn it, listen—"

  "We all better listen," my father tried again. "Leona, we got nothing against you. You know that." Which was a bit short of true in both its parts, and Leona responded with a lower beam of smile. "It’s just that, Godamighty, Alec, cattle have gone bust time after time these last years. That way of life just has changed. Even the Double W would be on hard times if Wendell Williamson’s daddy hadn’t left him such deep pockets. Whether anybody’ll ever be able to start off from scratch in the cow business and make a go of it, I don’t see how."

  Alec was like any of us, he resisted having an idea pulled from under him. “Rather have me running sheep up on one of your allotments, is that it? There’d be something substantial to look forward to, I suppose you think, sheepherding."

  My father seemed to consider. "No, most probably not, in your case. It takes a trace of common sense to herd sheep." He said it lightly enough that Alec would have to take it as a joke, but there was a poking edge to the lightness. "Alec, I just think that whatever the hell you do, you need to bring an education to it these days. That old stuff of banging a living out of this country by sheer force of behavior doesn’t work. Hasn’t for almost twenty years. This country can outbang any man. Look at them along the creek here, even these sheepmen. Hahn, Ed Van Bebber, Pres Rozier, the Busbys, Dode Withrow, Finletter, Hill. They’ve all just managed to hang on, and they’re as good a set of stockmen as you’ll find in the whole goddamn state of Montana. You think any of them could have got under way, in years like there’ve been?"

  “Last year was better than the one before," Alec defended with that litany of the local optimists. "This one looks better yet."

  I saw my father glance at my mother, to see if she wanted to swat down this part of Alec’s argument or whether he should go ahead. Even I could tell from the held-in look of her that once she got started there’d be no stopping, so he soldiered on. "And if about five more come good back to back, everybody’ll be almost to where they were fifteen or twenty years ago. Alec, trying to build a living on a few head of stock is a dead end these days."

  "Dad—Dad, listen. We ain’t starting from fifteen or twenty years ago. We’re starting from now, and we got to go by that, not whatever the hell happened to—to anybody else."

  "You’ll be starting in a hole," my father warned. "And an everlasting climb out."

  I say warned. What rang through to me was an alarm different from the one in my father’s words; an iron tone of anger such as I had never heard out of him before.

  "That’s as maybe." Alec’s timbre was an echo of the anger, the iron. “But we got to start." Now Alec was looking at Leona as if he was storing up for the next thousand years. "And we’re going to do it married. Not going to wait our life away."

  * * *

  If I ever get old enough to have brains, I will work on the question of man and woman.

  All those years ago, the topic rode with me into the next morning as my father and I set off from the ranger station toward the mountains. Cool but cloudless, the day was a decent enough one, except for wind. I ought to have been in a topnotch mood, elevated by the anticipation that always began with my father’s annual words, “Put on your mountain clothes in the morning."

  Going along on one of these start-of-June rides with my father as he took a count of the sheep summering on the various ranchers’ range allotments in the national forest was one of the awaited episodes of life. Better country to look ahead to could not be asked for. Kootenai, Lolo, Flathead, Absaroka, Bitterroot, Beaverhead, Deerlodge, Gallatin, Cabinet, Helena, Lewis and Clark, Custer, Two Medicine-those were the national forests of Montana, totaling dozens of ranger districts, but to our estimation the Two Medicine was head and shoulders above the other forests, and my father’s English Creek district the topknot of the Two. Anybody with eyes could see this at once, for our ride this morning led up the North Fork of English Creek, which actually angles mostly west and northwest to thread between Roman Reef and Rooster Mountain to its source, and where the coulee of the North Fork opened ahead of us, there the first summits of the Rockies sat on the horizon like stupendous sharp boulders. Only when our first hour or so of riding carried us above that west edge of the coulee would we see the mountains in total, their broad bases of timber and rockfall gripping into the foothills. And the reefs. Roman Reef ahead of us, a rimrock half a mile high and more than three long. Grizzly Reef even bigger to the south of it, smaller Jericho Reef to the north. I don’t know, are mountain reefs general knowledge in the world? I suppose they get their name because they stand as outcroppings do at the edge of an ocean, steady level ridges of stone, as if to give a calm example to the waves beyond them. Except that in this case the blue-gray billow up there is not waves but the Continental Divide against the sky. The name aside, though, sections of a fortress wall were what the three reefs reminded me of, spaced as they were with canyons between them and the higher jagged crags penned up behind. As if the whole horizon of the west had once been barricaded with slabs of rock and these were the mighty traces still standing. I must not have been the only onlooker this occurred to, as an even longer barrier of cliff farther south in the national forest was named the Chinese Wall.

  The skyline of the Two. Even here at the outset the hover of it all always caused my father to turn and appreciatively call over his shoulder to Alec and me something like "Nothing the matter with that." And always Alec and I would chorus "Not one thing" both because we were expected to and because we too savored those waiting mountains.

  Always was not in operation this year, however. My father did not pause to pronounce on the scenery, I had no chance to echo him, and Alec—Alec this year was on our minds instead of riding between us.

  So our first stint on the road up the North Fork was broken only by the sound of our horses’ hooves or one or the other of us muttering a horse name and urging a little more step-along in the pace. Even those blurts of sound were pretty pallid, because where horse nomenclature was concerned my father’s imagination took a vacation. A black horse he invariably named Coaly, a white one always Snowball. Currently he was riding a big mouse-colored gelding who, depend on it, bore the title of Mouse. I was on a short-legged mare called Pony. Frankly, high among my hopes about the business of growing up was that I would get a considerably more substantial horse out of it. If and when I did, I vowed to give the creature as much name as it could carry, such as Rimfire or Chief Joseph or Calabash.

  Whether I was sorting through my horse hopes or the outset of this counting trip without Alec weighed more heavily on me than I realized, I don’t know. But in either case I was so deep into myself that I was surprised to glance ahead and learn that Mouse and my father were halted, and my father was gandering back to see what had become of me.

  I rode on up and found that we had arrived to where a set of rutted tracks—in flattery, it could have been called almost a road—left the North Fork roadbed and crossed the coulee and creek and traced on up the side of Breed Butte to where a few log buildings could be seen. Normally I would have been met with some joke from my father about sunburning my eyeballs if I went around asleep with my eyes open like that. But this day he was looking businesslike, which was the way he looked only when he couldn’t find any better mood. "How about you taking a squint at Walter’s place," he proposed. "You can cut around the butte and meet me at the road into the Hebner tribe."

  “All right," I of course agreed and turned Pony to follow the ruts down and across the North Fork swale. Walter Kyle always summered in the mountains as herder of his own sheep, and so my father whenever he rode past veered in to see that everything was okay at the empty ranch. This was the first time he had
delegated me, which verified just how much his mind was burdened—also with that question of man and woman? at least as it pertained to Alec McCaskill and Leona Tracy? —and that he wanted to saunter alone awhile as he sorted through it all.

  As soon as my father had gone his way and I was starting up Breed Butte, I turned myself west in my saddle to face Roman Reef, tapped the brim of my hat in greeting, and spoke in the slow and distinct way you talk to a deaf person: " ’Lo, Walter. How’s everything up on the reef ?"

  What was involved here was that from Walter Kyle’s summer range up there in the mountains, on top of Roman Reef a good five miles from where I was, his actual house and outbuildings here on Breed Butte could be seen through Walter’s spyglass. Tiny, but seen. Walter had shown Alec and me this stunt of vision when we took some mail up to him during last year’s counting trip. "There ye go," he congratulated as each of us in turn managed to extend the telescope tube just so and sight the building specks. “Ye can see for as long as your eye holds out, in this country." Walter’s enthusiasm for the Two was that of a person newly smitten, for although he was the most elderly of all the English Creek ranchers—at the time he seemed to me downright ancient, I suppose partly because he was one of those dried-up littleguys who look eternal—he also was much the most recent to the area.

  Only three or four years ago Walter had moved here from down in the Ingomar country in the southeastern part of the state, where he ran several bands of sheep. I have never heard of a setup like it before or since, but Walter and a number of other Scotch sheepmen, dedicated bachelors all, lived there in the hotel in Ingomar and operated their sheep outfits out of their back pocket and hat, you might say. Not one of them possessed a real ranch, just grazing land they’d finagled one way or another, plus wagons for their herders, and of course sheep and more sheep. Away each of those old Scotchies would go once a week, out from that hotel with boxes of groceries in the back of a Model T to tend camp. For whatever reason, Walter pulled out of hotel sheep tycooning—my father speculated that one morning he turned to the Scotchman beside him at the table and burred, "Jock, for thirrty yearrs ye’ve been eating yourrr oatmeal aye too loud," got