English Creek Read online

  “No, I can do without that,” my father said. He turned to Alec again and studied him a bit. Then: “All right, Mister Smart Guy. How much is 365 times 12?”

  This too took Alec only an instant. “4,380,” he declared. “Why? What’s that?”

  “It’s about how many days a twelve-year-old like you has been on this earth,” my father said. “Which is to say it’s about how long it’s taken us to discover what it is you’ve got in that head of yours.”

  That, then, was what might be called the school year portion of Alec. An ability he couldn’t really account for—“I don’t know, Jicker, I just can,” was all the answer I could ever get when I pestered him about how he could handle figures in his head like that—and maybe didn’t absolutely want or at least welcome. The Alec of summer was another matter entirely. What he didn’t display the happy knack of, in terms of ranch or forest work that went on in the Two country at that season of year, hadn’t yet been invented. Fixing fences, figuring how to splice in barbwire and set new braceposts, Alec was a genius at; anytime an English Creek rancher got money enough ahead for fence work, here he came to ask Alec to ride his lines and fix where needed. When Alec, at age thirteen, came to his first haying season and was to drive the scatter rake for our uncle Pete Reese, after the first few days Pete put him onto regular windrow raking for a while instead. As a scatter raker Alec was working the job for more than it was worth, trotting his team of horses anywhere in the hayfield a stray scrap of hay might be found; the regularity of making windrows, Pete said, slowed him down to within reason. That same headlong skill popped out whenever Alec set foot into the mountains. On our counting trips before this year, he perpetually was the first to see deer or elk or a red-tailed hawk or whatever, before I did and often before our father did.

  The combination of all this in Alec, I am sure as anything, was what inspired my father and mother to champion college and engineering for him. They never put it in so bald a way, but Alec’s mathematical side and his knacky nature and his general go-to-it approach seemed to them fitted for an engineer. A builder, a doer. Maybe even an engineer for the Forest Service itself, for in those New Deal times there were projects under way everywhere a place could be found for them, it seemed like. The idea even rang right with Alec, at first. All through that winter of his last year in high school Alec kept saying he wished he could go right now, go to the college at Bozeman and get started. But then Leona happened, and the Double W summer job again, and the supper ruckus about marriage over college.

  Well, that was a year’s worth of Alec, so to speak. His partner in ruckus, my father up there on the horse in front of me, can’t be calendared in the strictly regular fashion either. Despite the order of months printed and hung on our wall at the English Creek ranger station, a Varick McCaskill year began with autumn. With Indian summer, actually, which in our part of Montana arrives after a customary stormy turn of weather around Labor Day. Of course every ranger is supposed to inspect the conditions of his forest there at the end of the grazing season. My father all but X-rayed his portion of the Two Medicine National Forest. South Fork and North Fork, up under the reefs, in beyond Heart Butte, day after day he delved the Two almost as if making sure to himself that he still had all of that zone of geography. And somehow when the bands of sheep trailed down and streamed toward the railroad chutes at Blackfoot or Pendroy, he was on hand there too to look them over, gossip with the herders, the ranchers, the lamb buyers, join in the jackpot bets about how much the lambs would weigh. It was the time of year when he could assess his job, see right there on the land and on the hoof the results of his rangering and give thought to how to adjust it. A necessary inventory season, autumn.

  He never wintered well. Came down with colds, sieges of hacking and sniffing, like someone you would think was a permanent pneumonia candidate. Strange, for a man of his lengthy strength and one otherwise so in tune with the Two country. “Are you sure you were born and raised up there on the North Fork?” my mother would ask, along with about the third mustard plaster she applied onto him every winter. “Maybe a traveling circus left you.”

  More than likely, all of my father’s winter ailments really were symptoms of just one, indoorness. For stepping out a door somehow seemed to extend him, actually tip his head higher and brace his shoulders straighter, and the farther he went from a house the more he looked like he knew what he was doing.

  Does that sound harsh? It’s not meant to. All I am trying to work into words here is that my father was a man born to the land, in a job that sometimes harnessed him to a desk, an Oliver typewriter, a book of regulations. A man caught between, in a number of ways. I have since come to see that he was of a generation that this particularly happens to. The ones who are firstborn in a new land. My belief is that it will be the same when there are births out on the moon or the other planets. Those firstborn always, always will live in a straddle between the ancestral path of life and the route of the new land. In my father’s case the old country of the McCaskills, Scotland, was as distant and blank as the North Pole, and the fresh one, America, still was making itself. Especially a rough-edged part of America such as the Montana he was born into and grew up in. All my father’s sessions with old Toussaint Rennie, hearing whatever he could about the past days of the Two Medicine country, I think were due to this; to a need for some footing, some groundwork of the time and place he found himself in.

  The Forest Service itself was an in-between thing, for that matter. Keeper of the national forests, their timber, grass, water, yet merchant of those resources, too. Anybody local like my father who “turned green” by joining the USFS now sided against the thinking of a lot of people he had known all his life, people who considered that the country should be wide open, or at least wider open than it was, for using.

  And even within all this, ranger Varick McCaskill was of a betwixt variety. A good many of the guys more veteran than my father dated back to the early time of the Forest Service, maybe even to when it originated in 1905; they tended to be reformed cowboys or loggers or some such, old hands who had been wrestling the West since before my father was born. Meanwhile the men younger than my father were showing up with college degrees in forestry and the New Deal alphabet on their tongues.

  So there my father was, between and between and between. My notion in all this is that winter, that season of house time and waiting, simply was one more between than he could stand.

  When spring let him out and around, my father seemed to green up with the country. In the Two, even spring travels in on the wind; chinooks which can cause you to lean into them like a drunk against a lamppost while they melt away the snowbanks of winter. The first roar of a chinook beginning to sweep down off the top of the Rockies signaled newness, promise, to my father. “The wind from Eden,” he called the chinook, for he must have read that somewhere. Paperwork chores he had put off and off now got tackled and disposed of. He and his assistant ranger gave the gear of the English Creek ranger district a going-over; saddles, bridles, pack saddles, fire equipment, lookout phone lines, all of it. With his dispatcher he planned the work of trail crews, and the projects the Civilian Conservation Corps boys would be put to, and the deployment of fire guards and smokechasers when the fire season heated up.

  And from the first moment that charitably might be classified as spring, my father read the mountains. Watched the snow hem along the peaks, judging how fast the drifts were melting. Cast a glance to English Creek various times of each day, to see how high it was running. Kept mental tally of the wildlife; when the deer started back up into the mountains, when the fur of the weasel turned from white to brown, how soon the first pile of coal-black droppings in the middle of a trail showed that bears were out of hibernation. To my father, and through him to the rest of us in the family, the mountains now were their own calendar, you might say.

  And finally, spring’s offspring. Summer. The high season, the one the rest of my father’s ranger year led up to. Summer w
as going to tell itself, for my father and I were embarking into it now with this counting trip.

  • • •

  “—a gander. Don’t you think?”

  My father had halted Mouse and was swiveled around looking at me in curiosity. Sometimes I think if I endure in life long enough to get senile nobody will be able to tell the difference, given how my mind has always drifted anyway.

  “Uh, come again?” I mustered. “I didn’t quite catch that.”

  “Anybody home there, under your hat? I was saying, it’s about time you checked on your packslinging. Better hop off and take a gander.”

  Back there on the subject of our horses I should have told too that we were leading one pack horse with us. Tomorrow, after we finished the counting of the Kyle and Hahn bands of sheep, we were going on up to Billygoat Peak where Paul Eliason, the junior forester who was my father’s assistant ranger, and a couple of trail men were building a fire lookout. They had gone in the previous week with the pre-cut framework and by now likely had the lookout erected and shingled, but the guywire had been late in coming from Missoula. That was our packload now, the roll of half-inch galvanized cable and some eyebolts and turnbuckles to tie down the new lookout tower. You may think the wind blows in the lower areas of the Two, but up there on top it really huffs.

  This third horse, bearer of the load whose lash rope and diamond hitch knot I now was testing for tautness, was an elderly solemn sorrel whom my father addressed as Brownie but the rest of us called by the name he’d been given before the Forest Service deposited him at the English Creek station: Homer. Having Brownie né Homer along was cause for mixed emotions. One more horse is always a nuisance to contend with, yet the presence of a pack animal also made a journey seem more substantial; testified that you weren’t just jaunting off to somewhere, you were transporting.

  Since the lookout gear and our food only amounted to a load for one horse it hadn’t been necessary to call on my father’s packer, Isidor Pronovost, and his eight-mule packstring for this counting trip of ours. But even absent he had his influence that morning as I arranged the packs on Brownie/Homer under my father’s scrutiny, both of us total converts to Isidor’s perpetual preachment that in packing a horse or a mule, balance is everything. One of the best things that was ever said to me was Isidor’s opinion that I was getting to be a “pretty daggone good cargodier” in learning how to fit cargo onto a pack animal. These particular Billy Peak packs took some extra contriving, to make a roll of heavy guywire on one side of the pack saddle equivalent to some canned goods on the other side of it and then some light awkward stuff such as our cooking utensils in a top pack, but finally my father had proclaimed: “There, looks to me like you got it Isidored.”

  Evidently I had indeed, for I didn’t find that the packs or ropes had shifted appreciably on our ride thus far. But I went ahead and reefed down on the lash rope anyway, snugging my diamond hitch even further to justify the report to my father: “All tight as a fiddle string.”

  While I was cross-examining the lash rope my father had been looking out over the country all around. Roman Reef predominated above us, of course. But just across the gorge of the North Fork from it another landmark, Rooster Mountain, was starting to stand over us, too. Its broad open face of slope was topped with an abrupt upshoot of rock like a rooster’s comb, which gave it the name.

  “Since we’re this far along,” my father decided, “maybe we might as well eat some lunch.”

  The view rather than his stomach guided him in that choice, I believe.

  By now, late morning, we were so well started into the mountains above the English Creek–Noon Creek divide that we could see down onto both drainages and their various ranches, and on out to where the farm patterns began, east of the town of Gros Ventre. To be precise, on a map our lunch spot was about where the east-pointing panhandle of the Two Medicine National Forest joins onto the pan—the pan being the seventy-five-mile extent of the forest along the front of the Rockies, from East Glacier at the north to Sun River at the south. Somehow when the forest boundary was drawn the English Creek corridor, the panhandle route we had just ridden, got included, and that is why our English Creek ranger station was situated out there with ranches on three sides of it. That location like a nest at the end of a limb bothered some of the map gazers at Region One headquarters over in Missoula. They’d have denied it, but they seemed to hold the theory that the deeper a ranger station was buried into preposterous terrain, the better. Another strike was that English Creek sat nearly at the southern end of my father’s district, nothing central or tidy about the location either. But the Mazoola inmates had never figured out anything to do about English Creek, and while the valley-bottom site added some riding miles to my father’s job, the convenience of being amid the English Creek ranch families—his constituents, so to speak—was more than worth it.

  My mother had put up sandwiches for us; slices of fried ham between slabs of homemade bread daubed with fresh yellow butter. You can’t beat that combination. Eating those sandwiches and gazing out over the Two country mended our dispositions a lot.

  If a person can take time to reflect on such a reach of land other matters will dim out. An area the size of the Two is like a small nation. Big enough to have several geographies and an assortment of climates and an appreciable population, yet compact enough that people know each other from one end of the Two to the other.

  A hawk went by below us, sailing on an air current. A mark of progress into the mountains I always watched for, hawks and even eagles now on routes lower than our own.

  Mostly, however, as my father and I worked our way through sandwiches and a shared can of plums, I simply tried to store away the look of the land this lush June. Who knew if it would ever be this green again? The experience of recent years sure as hell didn’t suggest so. For right out there in that green of farmland and prairie where my father and I were gazing, a part of the history of the Depression began to brew on a day of early May in 1934. Nobody here in the Two could have identified it as more than an ordinary wind. Stiff, but that is never news in the Two country. As that wind continued east, however, it met a weather front angling down out of Canada, and the combined velocity set to work on the plowed fields along the High Line. An open winter and a spring of almost no rain had left those fields dry; brown talcum waiting to be puffed. And so a cloud of wind and topsoil was born and grew. By the time the dirt storm reached Plentywood in the northeastern corner of the state the grit of it was scouring paint off farmhouses. All across the Dakotas further dry fields were waiting to become dust. The brown storm rolled into the Twin Cities, and on to Chicago, where it shut down plane flights and caused streetlights to be turned on in the middle of the day. I don’t understand the science of it, but that storm continued to grow and widen and darken the more it traveled, Montana dirt and Dakota dirt and Minnesota dirt in the skies and eyes of Illinois, Indiana, Ohio. And on and on the storm swept, into New York City and Washington, D.C., the dust of the West fogging out the pinnacle of the Empire State building and powdering the shiny tabletops within the White House. At last the dirt cloud expended itself into the Atlantic. Of course thereafter came years of dust, particularly in the Great Plains and the Southwest. But that Montana-born blow was the Depression’s great nightmare storm; the one that told the nation that matters were worse than anyone knew, the soil itself was fraying loose and flying away.

  In a way, wherever I scrutinized from the lunch perch of that day I was peering down into some local neighborhood of the Depression. As if, say, a spyglass such as Walter Kyle’s could be adapted to pick out items through time instead of distance. The farmers of all those fields hemming the eastern horizon. They were veterans of years of scrabbling. Before WPA relief jobs and other New Deal help began to take hold, many a farm family got by only on egg money or cream checks. Or any damn thing they could come up with. Time upon time we were called on at the ranger station by one overalled farmer or another from near Gro
s Ventre or Valier or even Conrad, traveling from house to house offering a dressed hog he had in the trunk of his jalopy for three cents a pound. Believe it or not, though, those farmers of the Two country were better off than the ones who neighbored them on the east. That great dust storm followed a path across northern Montana already blazed by drought, grasshoppers, army worms, you name it. Around the time the CCC, the Civilian Conservation Corps, was being set up, my father and other rangers and county agents and maybe government men of other kinds were called to a session over at Plentywood. It was the idea of some government thinker—the hunch was that it came down all the way from Tugwell or one of those—that everybody working along any lines of conservation ought to see Montana’s worst-hit area of drought. My father grumbled about it costing him three or four days of work from the Two, but he had no choice but to go. I especially remember this because when he got back he said scarcely anything for about a day and a half, and that was not at all like him. Then at supper the second night he suddenly looked across at my mother and burst out, “Bet, there’re people over there who’re trying to live on just potatoes. They feed Russian thistles to their stock. Call it Hoover hay. It—I just never saw such things. Never even dreamed of them. Fencelines pulled loose by the wind piling tumbleweeds against them. When a guy goes to drive a fencepost, he first has to punch holes in the ground with a crowbar and pour in water to soften the soil. And out in the fields, what the dust doesn’t cover, the goddamn grasshoppers get. I tell you, Bet, it’s a crime against life, what’s happening.”

  So that was the past that came to mind from the horizon of green farms. And closer below us, along the willowed path of Noon Creek, the Depression history of the cattlemen was no happier memory. Noon Creek is the next drainage north of English Creek, swale country without as much cottonwood and aspen along its stream banks. Original cattle country, the best cow-grazing land anywhere in the Two. But what had been a series of about ten good ranches spaced along Noon Creek was dwindled to three. Farthest west, nearest our lunch perch, the Reese family place now run by my mother’s brother Pete, who long ago converted to sheep. Just east from there Dill Egan’s cow outfit with its historic round corral. And everywhere east of Dill the miles of Double W swales and benchland and the eventual cluster of buildings that was the Double W home ranch. Dill Egan was one of those leery types who steered clear of banks, and so had managed to hold his land. The Williamsons of the Double W owned a bank and property in San Francisco or Los Angeles, one of those places, and as my father put it, “When the end of the world comes, the last sound will be a nickel falling from someplace a Williamson had it hid.” Every Noon Creek cowman between the extremes of Dill Egan and Wendell Williamson, though, got wiped out when the nation’s plunge flattened the cattle market. Places were foreclosed on, families shattered. The worst happened at a piece of Noon Creek I could not help but look down onto from our lunch site; the double bend of the stream, an S of water and willows like a giant brand onto the Noon Creek valley. The place there had belonged to a rancher who, on the day before foreclosure, told his wife he had some things to do, he’d be a while in the barn. Where he tacked up in plain sight on one of the stalls an envelope on which he had written I CANT TAKE ANY MORE. I WONT HAVE MY EARS KNOCKED DOWN BY LIFE ANY MORE. And then hung himself with a halter rope.