Ron's Barber Shop

Twenty-seven must be the perfect age.  You’re old enough to know what you like, but still young enough to do about anything.  For instance, my body was sturdy enough to carry me and a full pack over the Rockies, through the Black Rock Desert, and over the most rugged section of the Sierras.  I can still sprint at a good clip, I can throw Duke’s tennis ball with reasonable accuracy and velocity, and my eyes are sharp enough to aim a rifle with iron sights.  But I’ve been around long enough to know what I like.  I like hunting, hiking, and driving across the country.  As I have already noted in this weblog, I like burgers and beer, and anthropology and mint juleps.   And this morning, when I walked into Ron’s Barber Shop, saw a giant fish on the wall, and smelled pipe tobacco, I knew I had found a good spot.

I sat down in the only barber’s chair and Ron tied an apron around my neck.

“How do you want it cut?” he asked.

“Well,” I said.  In some places this is a difficult question to answer – I just want a regular haircut.  There aren’t too many options in the world of men’s barbering.  The way I see it, unless you want a spike or a mohawk or you wear your hair like Willie Nelson, you pretty much either buzz the hair or you give the same haircut that every guy has.  I am one of the regular-cut guys.  It isn’t complicated.  In some establishments – usually places to highfaluting to call themselves barber shops, where they stack shampoos with funny names behind the counter – I have had difficulty expressing this sentiment.  “Hairstylists” have quailed at my request for a regular haircut as though I were asking them to drive to Anchorage without a roadmap.  I find such caviling irritating.  How complex can cutting a man’s hair be?  Just give me the same haircut I’ve had since I was born.

“Nothing special,” I said to Ron.  “But make it pretty short.”  I paused.  “I can tell you what I don’t want – I’m losing my hair at the top, and I don’t want to have one of those haircuts where it looks like you’re trying to cover up the bald spot by combing over.  Just let it go, that’s my philosophy.”

He nodded as though that made perfect sense, which it does.

“So a regular haircut, and short?” he asked.

I knew I’d like this place.

Ron was an old guy with glasses and gray hair cut short around the sides of his head.  A buzz guy.  He also knew how to cuss, a trait I admire.  He didn’t mind an occasional four-letter word, at least when ladies were absent, and didn’t care very much if you disapproved.  But he didn’t swear exhibitionally, the way some folks do to make you think they’re jocular or tough.  He’d been born around Big Timber, and had lived here all of his life.  As a younger man, he’d had a ranch up on the Boulder River.  “But some guy from New York wanted it more than I did,” he said, “so I sold it.”

“Do you miss it?”

“Oh, yeah.  But at my age . . .”  He paused.  “You just can’t mess with it anymore.”  He walked to the other side of my head and did some snipping.  I rested an ankle across my knee.  We sat in silence for awhile.  “You can’t make any money at it,” he said.  “At ranching.  You can make a living, but it’s no way to make money.  I still say, the only time you make money ranching is when you sell the place.”

Another guy walked in.  Ron said hello to him, he said hello back, I said hello to the new guy, and he said hello to me.  He sat in the only waiting chair against the wall.

“So how has Big Timber changed since you grew up here?” I asked Ron.  The guy against the wall chuckled, then smiled when I looked at him to let me know he hadn’t meant to be derisive.

Ron chuckled too.  “Terms of size, it hasn’t changed much at all,” he said.

“The people,” said the guy who had just walked in.  His name, I would learn, was Arnie.  “The people have changed.  Used to be, you’d know everyone on the street.  Now, I walk down the street and eighty percent of the people I don’t know.”

“Too many Georgians coming in here?” I grinned.

“No, the Georgians are fine,” Arnie. said.  “It’s the Californians.  They’ve ruined their state, and now they want ours.  Want to run it too.  Want to come out here and tell us how to do things.”  He shook his head, and if we had been outside, I think he would have spat in the dirt.

“That’s the damned truth,” Ron said.

But neither of the men seemed angry.  Just wistful.  Arnie told about how it was getting hard to let the local folks hunt on his ranch anymore, since nowadays so many of them wanted to do it.  He used to let local folks hunt, as did most landowners, but now he had two problems.  First, people were coming in from out of town wanting to hunt, so there were more hunters.  And second, because out of town folks were buying up the land around Big Timber and not allowing hunters, there was less land.  “The people from out of town want to have their own private zoos or whatever,” he said.  “And they don’t realize how that affects the neighbors.  I’ve got a neighbor who’s got 130 head of elk on his place.  Won’t let anybody hunt.  Just got 130 elk out there.  These folks don’t know – he doesn’t realize – how much damage 130 elk can do to his neighbors.”

He meant, I think, competing with his cows for grazing.  For Arnie, cattle had priority over elk.  Most folks used to agree, but now it’s not so clear.  The world that he had described is ending.  Ron had it right: it’s hard to make money ranching in the old way.  It doesn’t pay because it’s inefficient – without subsidies, ranching would be finished already.  The subsidies will last only so long as ranchers maintain lobbying power, and that lobbying power will wane as ranchers’ contribution to the economy wanes.  Nowadays, the demand for this land is recreational.  People from out of state.  People like the New Yorker who bought Ron’s place.  Hikers, hunters, and sightseers.  They prioritize elk over cattle.

“I don’t know,” sighed Arnie, leaning back against the wall.  “Maybe I’ll sell.”

What a stylish haircut . . .

Mint Juleps and the Fates of Continents

“What is this, mint?” I asked as I picked a green sprig from the glass full of them sitting on the bar.

“Feel the stem,” Rebekah said, “if it’s square, you know it’s in the mint family.”

“That’s cool; I didn’t know that.”  I felt the stem – perfectly square.  “Yep, mint.   I wonder if they can make a mint julep.”

“That just means it’s in the mint family,” she reminded me.  “It could be mint, spearmint, any of those.”

“I see,” I said.  I caught the bartender’s eye.  “Can yall make a mint julep?” I asked her.

“Sure can,” she said.  “You want one?”

I told her I did, and Rebekah and I returned to talking about the book she was reading, 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus.  I’d read the first part of the book before I left it in a Waffle House one day, and I still remembered some of it.  As the title suggested, the book surveyed modern anthropological findings about pre-Columbian Native American culture.  It told of giant American cities: Tenochtitlan, it said, had running water and was larger than any contemporary European city; Machu Picchu was a thickly-populated and well-constructed city perched in a place that complex societal organization to build; Cahokia was the thriving hub of a continental trade network.

“If Columbus had never reached the Americas,” Rebekah asked, “do you think the Americas would have caught up?  Would they have become as developed as Europe?”

I told her I didn’t think so.  Technological development in the Americas faced some hurdles that development in Europe did not.  The availability of draft animals, for instance.  I paused to watch the bartender, who was pouring Jim Beam into a blender.  She reached for a handful of mint-family sprigs and dumped them in.  That wasn’t right – a blender can be involved in some phases of mint julep production, such as shredding the ice, but the whole concoction shouldn’t be just dumped in there.  The aesthetic signature of a mint julep is an intact sprig of mint, partially submerged but with some leaves waving languidly above the rim.  The glass wouldn’t fit in on the porch without them.

“That may be your drink right there,” Rebekah said.

And you don’t use just any bourbon for a mint julep.  Maker’s Mark is ideal, and although lesser bourbons are acceptable, Jim Beam was stretching it.  I’ve drunk mint julep at the Kentucky Derby, and my mother has made some mint juleps that could rival any mixed drink ever made, so I considered myself an authority on the subject.  At least compared to Montanans.  The bartender pressed a button and the blender started whining.

“Yeah, I think it might be,” I said.

At the time of the development of agriculture, there were only fourteen large mammals in the world suitable for domestication.  To be a candidate for domestication, a species had to satisfy each of several characteristics: the species had to be herd-oriented, non-aggressive, capable of reproducing in captivity, able to digest readily available foods, able to grow and reach maturity in a few years, and calm enough to live in an enclosure without panicking.  This idea came from Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs and Steel.  Eurasia was host to several of these large mammals, including the water buffalo, certain species of camel, cattle and horses.  The Americas had but two: the llama and the reindeer.  Neither could help the North American Indians, since the llama was native to South America and didn’t reach North America until modern times, and the reindeer was restricted to arctic regions.  The American bison wasn’t amenable to domestication, as evinced by the failure of ranchers – modern or prehistoric – to domesticate it in the way that cattle or horses have been domesticated.  Try to envision, for instance, someone riding a bison or hitching it to a plow.  Because to be domesticable, an animal had to meet all of the several criteria.  Diamond had used some fictional novel to illustrate that principle; I couldn’t remember which.  But it was something to the effect that every functional family is dully identical, while every dysfunctional family is dysfunctional in its own unique way.  All the large mammals of North America, Diamond analogized, were dysfunctional for domestication in their own ways.

“Anna Karenina,” Rebekah said.

“Yeah!” I said.  “How did you say that second word again?”

She said it, and sounded like a word that would be hard to say with a southern accent.  The waitress brought a white slushy concoction with green flakes and set it in front of me.  I decided not to try and repeat “Karenina,” so I put the glass to my mouth instead.

Rebekah wasn’t too sure about my theory that pre-Columbian American cultures would not had developed in the way that European cultures did if left alone for a few centuries more.  She’s a graduate student at the University of Mary in Bismarck, North Dakota, and she teaches college classes on an Indian reservation around there.  Really likes her job, and really likes her students.  She feels like she’s made a connection to Native American culture since she started teaching there, and I guess she has.  Earlier she’d described, with some fascination, the ritual dances that some Native Americans still do.  She’d also said that many of her students lacked the advantages of typical college students – they were working their way through school, or had to take night classes, or struggled to find daycare for kids.  They didn't have, in other words, the advantages that I'd had.  And yet, Rebekah had told me, the tribe was pushing education, and enrollment was rising.  I remembered with a flash of pride that I was one-sixty-fourth Cherokee.  Or maybe it was one-one-hundred-and-twenty-eighth, I couldn’t remember.

There were some pretty good reasons to think I might be wrong about my theory that North American cultures, if left untouched, would not have advanced to European technological levels.  One of Europe’s developmental advantages was that domesticated species and technological advancements from Asia could travel to Europe relatively easily, since they could cross Eurasia at a constant latitude and thereby avoid major climatic stresses en route.  North America didn’t have that advantage: South American domesticates and technology had to pass through the Central American jungle – murderous mosquitoes, malaria, yellow fever, and all – before reaching North America.  In consequence, native North American cultures missed out on some pretty cool stuff.  The llama, for instance, never reached North America, and neither did the systems of writing developed by some South American cultures.  But what if Europeans had not ventured across the Atlantic in 1492, and had instead waited until 1992?  Surely llamas, writing, and other cultural innovations would have crossed between the Americas somehow, either overland or by sea.  That could have changed the game.

My mint slushy tasted good but, I reflected, that was more likely attributable to my notoriously easy-to-please palate than the quality of the beverage.  I slurped some of it.  You wouldn’t serve it at the Derby, but it still tasted like mint and whiskey – a good combination.  I was about to voice disagreement with Rebekah, just for the sake of argument, when she spoke up.

“Jeb,” she said, “you’ve got a mint leaf stuck to your lip.”

I wiped it with a forearm, grinned, and decided not to be so contrary.

Accuracy and Availability

I guess people have always confused the accuracy of an explanation with the availability of alternatives.

For Joseph Walker’s expedition to the Pacific, one primary source dominates the historian’s landscape.  Zenas Leonard, the young man hired to be the expedition’s clerk, kept a journal on the trip.  After the trip, when Leonard returned to Pennsylvania, Leonard’s story was published in a local newspaper in two installments.  Leonard’s account is thorough and, apart from the dates Leonard provides, is generally consistent with corroborating sources when such sources are available.  But for much of what happened, Leonard’s story, as published in the Pennsylvania newspaper, is the only source we have.

When no other source addresses a part of the Walker Expedition that Leonard describes, historians writing about the Walker Expedition have often treated Leonard’s account as though it presented unimpeachable fact.  For instance, while the expedition was leaving the Sierra Nevadas and heading toward the Pacific, Leonard recounts two occasions on which Captain Walker allayed the expedition members’ fears about natural phenomena.  First, Leonard reports that after making camp one night, “we were startled by a loud distant noise similar to that of thunder.”  Leonard says that some of the expedition’s members thought that it might be an earthquake and that “we would all be swallowed up into the bowels of the earth.”  According to Leonard, when Walker hypothesized that the sound came from the waves of the Pacific, all the expedition members were calmed.  (Walker’s explanation cannot have been correct; at the time, the expedition was two days’ walk from the ocean.)  Second, on November 13, 1833, there was a meteor shower.  Mountain men would refer to that meteor shower for years as “The Night it Rained Fire” or “The Night the Stars Fell.”  Leonard reports that a few words from his Captain was all that was needed to calm the expeditionary group: “after an explanation from Capt. Walker, [the expedition members] were satisfied that no danger need be apprehended from the falling of the stars, as they were termed.”

Bil Gilbert, author of an otherwise excellent biography of Walker, draws on these examples to conclude that “it is apparent that by that time the hard-bitten trappers had come to have an almost childlike faith in [Walker’s] wisdom and turned him into a soothing authority.”

To me, that sounds like a bit much.  Available texts allow a historian to conclude that Walker was well-regarded among mountain men as an explorer and as a leader, but concluding, on the basis of Leonard’s journal, that this group of weather-beaten mountain men had “an almost childlike faith in [Walker’s] wisdom” strikes me as a stretch.  I find it hard to believe that a few words from Walker, however well-regarded he was, could have allayed the fears of this large group of notoriously independent mountain men in the immediate and universal way that Leonard indicates.  A far more likely explanation, I think, is that Zenas Leonard was telling a story that would sound good in the Pennsylvania press, so he oversimplified events and lionized his expedition’s leader.  I don’t mean to imply that I think Leonard’s stories about the meteor shower and earthquake noise were entirely false – I suspect they were based on real events (the meteor shower, at least, is a recorded astronomical fact) – but I do not think an objective historian should swallow Leonard’s account whole.  Both of Leonard’s remembrances on which Gilbert based his “childlike faith” hypothesis reek of hero-worship.

It is true, of course, that we have no version of events to compete with Leonard’s.  But the absence of an alternative explanation does not convert a readily available explanation into unimpeachable fact.  It may once have been the case, for instance, that the best available explanation for a cloudburst was “we did a rain dance,” and it may once have been the case that the best explanation for Earth’s biodiversity was instantaneous creation of each species by a divine figure, but the unavailability of alternative explanations for rain or species diversity did not transform rain dancing or creationism into accurate explanations for the world around us.  Now we have meteorology and evolution, which appear to be more rational explanations.  It is of course true – in case you are a rain-dancer or creationist – that neither modern meteorology nor evolutionary theory is perfect.  Both theories are almost certainly imperfect, and should be improved in the years to come.  But the unavailability of a better theory cannot transform a readily available theory – be it rain dancing, creationism, or hard-bitten trappers turned to children sitting raptly by Joseph Walker’s knee – into a perfect explanation.

Leonard may be our only source for certain details, but that doesn’t mean everything he said was accurate.  It is conceivable, of course, that Leonard’s storytelling is perfectly accurate, as some historians seem to assume.  It is much more likely, however, that he succumbed to at least some of the temptations that beset all storytellers – to embellish some facts, omit others, and shuffle others around in order to impress an audience.  Leonard was only human, and historians who forget the limitations in human retellings turn a willfully blind eye to one of the most predictable patterns in human attempts to reconstruct the past.

One of Cosgriff's horses in the foreground; Crazy Mountains in the background.

Ol' Cropped Ears.  Half cutting horse and half grizzly bear, he's both fleet and ferocious, a freedom-craving cow's worst nightmare.

The Perils of Creedence Clearwater Revival

The radio was playing CCR, the sky was bright blue, the two-lane road was wide open; I was driving fast and drumming my hands on the wheel to the beat.  I was driving the Subaru that we leave out in Montanta, and compared to my truck, that car will fly.  The wind roared past the door seals.  Yellow dotted line smearing by, G-forces pressing me against my seat belt in the curves.  I’d never seen a cop on this part of US 191, and I figured it was unlikely that any cops would be working the beat on Thanksgiving morning, so I was cruising.  Radio playing as loud as Duke could stand.  You try driving a fast car on an open road in Montana when “Down on the Corner” is playing and obeying the speed limit – I challenge you.  It can’t be done.

A vehicle came over the hill ahead of me.  I peered at it as I got closer.  A blue pickup truck – no problem.  I resumed singing – “Rooster hits the washboard and people just gotta smile . . .” – and Duke stood in his seat, looking at me, wagging his tail, wondering what the hell I was saying and why.  The way fishermen wonder why fish jump.  I grinned and was reaching out to pat his head when a low-profile light on the roof of that pickup flashed blue, then red.

Damn.

I hit the brakes hard and Duke nearly fell off the seat.  I wondered how far over the limit I was – I didn’t know how fast I was going, but I was pretty sure it was north of ninety.  The truck started to pull off the pavement, so I slowed down and stopped.  In Georgia, I thought, you can lose your license for exceeding twenty-five over.  I didn’t know what the speed limit was on this road.  The truck turned around, lights flashing on the roof and in the grille now, and pulled behind me.  I swore.  How high would I need the speed limit to be for me not to have broken it by twenty-five?  Seventy?  In my rearview mirror I could see the cop step out of his truck.  I doubted the speed limit was seventy on a two-lane road.

I remembered someone telling me that cops like for you to have both hands on the wheel when they approach.  Apparently if you do that, the cop might figure you know what’s going on and think you’re involved in law enforcement.  I cut the car off and dropped the key in the cupholder and put my hands on the wheel.  Maybe he’d write me a ticket for slower than I was going.  I’d heard of that happening.  I would have to ask; this could end badly unless I caught a break.  The cop was growing larger in my rearview mirror.  A big cop, too; taller than six feet and broad at the shoulders.  I realized I’d forgotten to roll the window down.  I looked at the door – damn, power windows.  I put the key in the ignition and was fumbling around with the window switch when the cop bent down and placed his aviator-shielded face on the other side of the glass.

“Good morning,” he said when I finally got the window down.

“Happy Thanksgiving,” I said with more bitterness in my voice than I’d intended to allow.

“How are you today?” he asked.

“Well, I was doing alright.”

He chuckled slowly.  “You were doing –” he raised his left hand above the doorsill, held it palm-down and rocked it side to side the way people do when they’re describing something approximate – “about ninety-two.”  He paused.  “That’s a little fast for here.”

I looked at the wheel.  “Yes it is,” I admitted.  I was about to launch into my best excuse, which I had planned to use for this occasion because it would also lead into my excuse for not having an insurance card, that I didn’t usually drive this car, I normally drove a heavy-duty pickup, and this durn car is so smooth that you can get to going so fast without realizing it, and . . . when he spoke.

“Try and slow it down a little,” he said.

I couldn’t believe it – was I going to get out of this?  “Uh – yes, sir, I’ll do that, I . . .” I stammered, still looking down.

“Just slow it down some,” he reiterated.  I noted a large fleshy protuberance in the left side of my vision and realized that it was the cop’s right hand, extended for a handshake.  I looked up into his glasses and shook his hand.  It was not the hand of a man with whom you’d want to get in a barfight.

“I sure will,” I said.

He chuckled and rose to his full height so that I was looking at his belt buckle.  “Have a good Thanksgiving,” he said as he walked away.

As a wise man once said, I’d rather be lucky than good any day.  All the same, I set the cruise control to sixty-five on the way home.  It helped that CCR was finished playing.

Thanksgiving with the Lavarells

It was that time after Thanksgiving dinner when digestion, normally a secondary task that can be accomplished while you attend to something else – working, walking, doing the dishes, etc. – requires your full attention.  The Cowboys were beating the Raiders on TV, and we sat in a semicircle watching them in various states of somnolence.  Those of us who occupied reclining seats with poke-out footrests stuck our feet out in front of us.  At least one set of eyes was closed.  But I have always been a quick digester, and soon I rose to stretch.

“Where are you going?” asked one of the blonde-haired kids that had been running around all day.  I had trouble keeping them straight, but I think his name was Dylan.  It had been a long time since I’d been around so many kids.

“I’m going to go let my dog out of the truck,” I said.  “You want to come meet my dog?”

“Okay,” he said.

As I walked toward the door I passed Rebekah, who was reclining in her chair. I tapped her stocking feet.  “Would you like to come meet my dog?”

She considered for a brief moment.  “Alright,” she said.

We walked out to my truck, which was parked behind a cluster of cars.  The Lavarells, who are the closest thing I’ve got to next-door neighbors, had a big crowd over for Thanksgiving.  There were aunts, uncles, grandparents and in-laws milling around.  They had set out quite a feast, and had been kind enough to invite me over.  Turkey, dressing, sweet potato casserole, cranberry gelatin, mashed potatoes, some kind of yellow dish with bread crumbs and carrots.  All excellent.  And, because Mrs. Lavarell’s family comes from Norwegian stock, they also served a delicious fried flatbread called “lefse,” which you eat by smearing butter on it, dumping sugar on the butter, then rolling it into a tube.  The other Norwegian dish they talked about but did not serve was “lutefisk” – cod soaked in ice water for ten days, treated with lye, and served in gelatinous form.  It is, by all accounts, rank.  But I was told that some Norwegians actually eat it.  I was glad the Lavarells had elected to serve lefse.

I don't care who eats it, I'm sticking with lefse.

Out at the truck, I unloaded Duke and grabbed his tennis ball from under my seat.

“Can I throw it?” asked the boy.

“Sure,” I said, “but first let me show you how.  There’s a procedure you should follow.”

I told Duke to heel, and once he was sitting by my right ankle, I threw the ball.  I waited until it had bounced a couple times, then said “Duke” – and off he went, pounding the dirt with his paws.

“That’s good.  But will he bring it back?” asked Rebekah.  Rebekah, I had learned, enjoyed testing me.  She taught at a tribal school near Bismarck, North Dakota and was working on a master’s thesis regarding the habitat of burrowing owls.  I liked her.  I hadn’t been able to sort out exactly what subjects she taught or what field she was studying, but she knew a lot about conservation, Indian tribes, and ecology, all interesting subjects to me.  I was happy that she was testing me on Duke’s training.  That’s a battle I can win.

“This dog?  Oh, you bet.  He’s a professional.”

Duke had the ball in his mouth before it stopped rolling and came jogging back to me.  At my command, he sat at my right ankle.  “Give,” I said, and he gave me the ball.  I smiled cockily at Rebekah.

“Can I try?” asked the kid.  I gave him the ball and he chucked it about forty yards.  Duke retrieved it and brought the ball to me.

“This time, let’s do it a different way,” I said to the kid.  I knelt and covered Duke’s eyes.  “We’ll do a blind retrieve, where you throw it and then I’ll have Duke follow my directions to the ball.  Throw it up that way –” I pointed in a direction where we hadn’t thrown yet – “and I’ll send him after it.”

The kid started to rear back.  “But don’t throw it too far,” I added.

“How far?” he asked.

“Oh, about middle range,” I said.

He looked uncertain.  “Throw it about twenty yards,” I said.  The kid still looked confused.

“He’s seven, Jeb,” Rebekah said.  She was right, I guess – seven-year-olds don’t compute yardage.  I’d forgotten.  There was a time when I was good with kids, but I was out of practice.

“Oh.  Well – just throw it regular.  Not quite as far as you did last time.”

He threw the ball fifteen yards or so and emphasized that he could have thrown it further.  Males are such showoffs.  I uncovered Duke’s eyes and sent him after it.  I looked at Rebekah.  She smirked.

Back inside, Rebekah and I sat on a bench that the Lavarells had brought inside to seat the family.  Dessert time.  Mrs. Lavarell brought me a plate with slices of pumpkin pie, cheesecake, some other brownish pie and a goodly dab of ice cream.  I liked it all.  I was beginning to wonder if my palate, which had returned a verdict of “excellent!” every time I’d put any of the Lavarells’ Thanksgiving food into my mouth, had been rendered unreliable by three months of my own cooking when another blonde-haired Norwegian boy ran up to Rebekah.

“Watch this!” he said.

“What?” she asked.

“Watch me hit the golf ball,” he said as he ran out the door.  We watched through the glass.  He set a golf ball on the grass then picked up a club that was almost as tall as he was.  He grasped the very end of the black handle and took the club back as far as he could, bending at the ankles, knees, hips, shoulders, elbows and wrists.  It looked as though he were participating in a golf club throwing contest.  Maximum power.

“I like this kid’s style,” I said.

“He’s a baseball player,” Rebekah said.

“What a way to live, though.  Full-bore.”

“Swinging for the fences,” she said.

The kid swung and made contact.  The ball zipped sixty yards, and he ran after it.  After collecting the ball, he ran inside.

“Hey, while you were out, the phone rang for you,” I told him.  “The PGA wants you on the Tour.”

He looked confused.  “The professional golfers,” Rebekah explained to him.  She cut her eyes at me.

“He’s nine, Jeb,” she said.

“Oh.”  I smiled.  I have liked living out of my truck, but there are some things I’ve missed out on.

Cooking Rabbit

I stoked the fire and put some salt water on to boil.  This would be my second time cooking rabbit.  The first time, I’d cut the rabbit into pieces, marinated it for a couple hours in red wine and brown sugar, then sautéed the meat in a skillet.  It was terrible.  The rabbit was edible in the same sense that a marinated boot sole would be edible.  I tried to serve some of the meat to friends so that I wouldn’t have to eat it all, but they refused.  I had to throw it out.  This time, I planned to cook the rabbit mountain-man style: either roasting or boiling it.  Not, I will note, because I thought it would taste better – but because I care that much about historical authenticity.  In fact, I was not looking forward to eating it.  The unpalatability of my prior culinary product, I suspected as I listened to the fire crackle and watched the salt water boil, was attributable only in part to my marginal abilities in food preparation.  In all likelihood, part of the problem was that rabbit just doesn’t taste very good.  I checked out a few rabbit recipes online, just out of curiosity, and found most of them suspiciously complex – one involving celery, carrots, onions, water chestnuts, mushrooms, chicken broth, salt, pepper, cornstarch, sherry, and not all that much rabbit  – which suggested that rabbit meat needed significant assistance to satisfy the modern palate.  Compare the foregoing ingredient list to the way most people cook a steak: marinate in Dale’s Steak Sauce, grill, eat.  Which meat sounds better: beef or rabbit?

But I am nothing if not persistent.  I cut up some chunks of the rabbit I’d shot and plunked them into the boiling salt water.  I cut a slice of rabbit, jammed it onto a coathanger, and hung it over the fire.  Then I sat back to await results.

A slice of rabbit hanging over the fire.

Rabbit – or to be precise, hare – was an important food source for mountain men.  According to archeologist Sam Drucker, most of the discarded bones around the Green River rendezvous sites came not from buffalo, elk, deer or antelope, but from rabbits.  Rabbits were probably particularly important to members of the Walker Expedition, who traveled through lots of game-poor country.  Buffalo, the mountain men’s staple food, weren’t available west of the Great Salt Lake.  In fact, there wasn’t much game at all along the Humboldt River, the watercourse that the Expedition followed across Nevada, and the Expedition’s members struggled to find game in the Sierra Nevada Mountains during their winter crossing.  When one of the expedition’s hunters killed a deer on the western edge of the Sierras in late October, Zenas Leonard remarked in his journal that it “was the first game larger than a rabbit we had killed since the 4th of August when we killed the last buffaloe near the Great Salt Lake.”  Between the Sierras and the Great Salt Lake, the Expedition survived on jerked buffalo meat and, in all likelihood, a good number of rabbits.

The campfire-roasting method of preparation was probably most common for small groups of trappers.  It’s the way Jeremiah Johnson cooked the rabbit he killed in his eponymous movie.  The method is pretty simple: build fire, hold rabbit over it.  Well-equipped trappers might have had salt and pepper to flavor the meat.  Because the Walker Expedition was both well-equipped and had passed by the Salt River and the Great Salt Lake, they would almost certainly have had salt, and might have had pepper.  When I pulled my hunk-o-rabbit off the fire, I intended to use both.

The boiling method would have been possible only for larger expeditions that carried kettles.  There’s no record of whether the Walker Expedition carried kettles, but roughly contemporaneous, similarly-sized trapping expeditions did.  Many Indians often boiled meat, especially for ceremonial occasions.  The trappers would likely have parboiled the rabbit – which I recently learned means to boil with salt – in order to improve the taste.  In modern parlance, parboiling is supposed to draw the wild, gamey taste out of the rabbit.  When preparing my parboiling pot, I had opened the spout on a can of Morton’s and dumped liberally.

After 45 minutes, I got up to check the salty-water pot.  Reluctantly, I fished out the chunks of meat.  I set them in a bowl and stared at them.  They didn’t look bad, really.  Just like regular morsels of cooked meat.  I was still suspicious.  The rabbit I’d sautéed the time before hadn’t looked bad either, and it had still lost me friends.  Grimly, I picked a chunk up between my fingers.  I put it in my mouth.

A few chunks of parboiled rabbit.

And you know what?  It was good.  Maybe it was just the upcoming holiday, but it tasted like dark turkey meat.  The only problem was that I had used too much salt.  But not bad.  I walked to the fireplace and inspected the slice of meat hanging from the coathanger.  My hopes for this piece were dim – it even looked bad.  Burned on the bottom, fleshy on the top.  Nevertheless, I pulled it down and sliced it off the hanger.  The meat was done.  I tore a piece off the top, started to sniff it but stopped myself, then popped it in my mouth.  And damn if it wasn’t good too.  Even without salt or pepper.  Tasted like grilled dove.

These mountain men didn’t have it so rough after all.

Jeb Butler, Wrangler

I pulled harder until the lead rope slipped between my hands.  I picked it up, wrapped it around my knuckles three times, and pulled again.  “Come on, damn you!” I said.

But he wouldn’t move.  I spat in the dirt and glared at the horse.  He looked placidly back at me, chewing.  Maddening.

It was one of John Cosgriff’s horses.  They’re grazing on our place for the winter, but they’re not supposed to come in the yard.  Otherwise they’d tear up the grass and leave turd piles for us to remember them by.  There’s a three-rung wooden fence that surrounds most of the yard except where it abuts Otter Creek, and John had run a single white strand of electric fence along the creekside.  Between the three-rung fence and the single-strand electric fence, the yard was fully enclosed.  But this horse had gotten into the yard enclosure somehow.  I needed to get him out.

He was grazing down by Otter Creek, at the far side of the enclosure from the gate.  The reason he was at that end of the yard was that the rest of the herd, which was still outside the enclosure, was grazing on the opposite side of the creek.  This horse, like all horses, wanted to stay as close to the others as possible.  They’re herd animals.  I grew up around horses, and I knew that one of the toughest things to make a horse do is leave the herd.  It’s as difficult as driving a cat, or making a cat come to you, or teaching a cat to retrieve, or making a cat do anything useful for that matter.

Well, maybe not that hard, but it is difficult.  Most of John’s horses are fairly skittish, so I figured I’d try to drive the horse over to the gate.  Although it’s not easy for a single person to drive a reluctant animal, I figured I could use the fenceline to my advantage the way an open-field tackler uses the sideline – to limit his options.  I’d just drive him along the fence until we reached the gate.  So I walked toward the horse.

And he came to me as I approached.  He stopped a couple feet away and reached his nose toward me like he was going to bite a button off my jacket.  Clearly, I thought, you can’t drive a horse that won’t run from you.  So I spoke softly to him and lifted my hand.  He sniffed my glove then resumed sniffing my chest.  Slowly I lifted my hand to his neck and petted it.  I can get a lead rope on this horse, I thought.  I’ll just lead him out.  That’ll be easier than trying to drive him.

So I retrieved Duke’s leash from the truck, tied a piece of nylon rope to the end of the leash to lengthen it, and walked back to the horse.  I approached slowly.  Again he reached out as though he wanted to make a snack of my buttons.  Again I let him sniff my hand, and again I reached up to his neck.  I slipped the leash over his neck and tied it in a knot that wouldn’t slip and strangle the horse under tension, then I tugged on it.  The horse started after me, and I congratulated myself on knowing my way around horses.  Once you know one horse, I thought, you know a good bit about the rest of them.  Then the horse got more reluctant, and I had to pull to keep him going.  He slowed further, and I was leaning against the rope as I pulled.  Then he stopped altogether.

“Come on, now,” I said.  I pulled.  The rope slipped through my hands.

I wrapped the rope around my knuckles and pulled.  “Come on, damn you!”  But still, nothing.  I pulled again, this time with sustained effort.  The horse held his head high and leaned back ever so slightly, bracing against his front hooves, and the only thing that changed was that my knuckles hurt.  I might as well have been pulling at a barn.

“Damn your time,” I muttered.  I walked around behind the horse, still holding the rope, and slapped him across the rump.  No reaction.  I hit him again, harder, then ran back in front of the horse to pull.  He stood still.  I looked him in the eye for a considered moment, then walked around to the horse’s side and pulled his head alongside his flank.  When you do that, a horse has got no alternative but to turn – it’s the way they’re built.  The horse turned, following his head, and I led him in a quick circle then straightened out and headed briskly for the gate.  He stopped in his tracks and, because I wouldn’t let go of the rope, so did I.

I turned back to him.  “Are you a horse or a damned mule?” I demanded.  I’d never been around a horse that absolutely refused to be led.  I jerked on the rope three times in succession.  Nothing.  I let the rope go slack and considered the situation.  Surely I could outsmart a horse.  The horse relaxed, blew through his nose, and reached his nose toward my jacket as if still hoping to pluck a button.  “Up yours,” I said.  I pulled again on the rope, this time turning away from the horse and laying the rope against my shoulder.  Again the horse braced lightly on his front hooves and did not move.  I must have resembled a Yorkshire terrier pulling against its leash: straining, ineffectual, and running my mouth in an incomprehensible but annoying fashion.  At length I desisted.

Time to change tactics.  “Alright, I’ll fix you,” I told the horse.  I let his lead rope dangle and went to the garage, where I found about thirty feet of burlap rope and our ATV.  I grabbed the rope, got on the ATV, and drove across the yard to the horse.  I got off, walked up to the horse, and pulled on the lead rope one more time.  He didn’t move.

“That was your last chance,” I told him.  "Now we’ll do it the hard way.”  I tied one end of the burlap rope to the lead rope, played out about ten feet of burlap, then tied it to the ATV.  I got on the ATV and started idling toward the gate.  Its engine had more than one horsepower, I noted with satisfaction.  Slowly I pulled the slack out of the rope.  It pulled tight.  The horse jerked his head up in alarm.  I idled forward.  The horse tossed his head backward.  The burlap rope snapped.  The horse paused, realized it was free, and went back to grazing.  I swore.  The leash, nylon rope, and a few inches of burlap rope trailed from the horse’s neck.

“Damn you,” I whispered.

I walked over to the electric fence control box and switched the power off.  I walked along the single strand of electric fence and pulled three of the stakes out of the ground.  The single white strand lay harmlessly on the ground on the bank of the creek between the herd and the Rebel Grazer.  I grabbed the rope that dangled from the horse’s neck and pulled him toward the fence I’d taken down.  He came willingly enough now that I was leading him back toward the herd.  I wondered why I hadn’t thought of this sooner.  I was almost to the creek when he stopped.  He was looking at the white strand laying on the ground a foot in front of him.

“Come on,” I said.  “It’s off.  Just step over it.”

But he refused.  I pulled.  He stayed.  I pulled again.  He stayed again.  I whacked ol’ Button Biter across the rump with a stick.  He stayed put.  It was a familiar sequence, and after an unreasonably lengthy period, I gave up.

I hated to call John.  I’d have to admit that I had been unable to get a single horse from the yard to the pasture.  He’d think: “has this guy ever handled a horse before?” and he’d say: “oh, that’s okay this is a difficult horse” and then he’d use some old-rancher method and would, in about two minutes, whisk the horse back into the pasture.  It would be some simple method that looked obvious in retrospect, and I’d feel the way you do when you look all around the house for your favorite hat and finally realize, after an hour’s search, that all you had to do was reach on top of your head.

Some of the mountain men faced even steeper learning curves than me.  Before I started studying the subject, I recognized that most of the trappers had to learn mountain skills from scratch: how to find mountain passes, how to travel through deep snow, what kind of animals were dangerous, how to communicate with Indians.  I had to learn some of the same things myself.  But I didn’t realize how much some of the trappers-to-be had to learn.  Osborne Russell, for instance, signed up with a fur company in St. Louis in 1834 and traveled west.  He remarked early in his narrative, Journal of a Trapper, that many of the recruits were new to wilderness travel, but I didn’t realize how new they were until I read the part where Russell was assigned to garrison Fort Hall.  Fort Hall is near Pocatello, Idaho, and it took Russell’s party almost four months to get there.  After Russell had joined the garrison, and after the main party had left, some members of the garrison went out hunting for the food they’d need to survive the winter.  Russell wrote, “I now prepared myself for the first time in my life to kill meat for my supper with a Rifle.”  He had never hunted before?  The man was in the middle of Idaho – parts of it are barely civilized now; the area was certainly wild then – and he had never killed game with a rifle!  It seemed like he’d waited a little late for his first experiment.  But Russell goes on blithely to recount the experience of shooting twenty-five times at a buffalo without killing it, and of chasing a wounded grizzly into the brush and nearly getting mauled as a result.  Back at the fort, Russell boasted of his grizzly encounter.  “[B]ut I secretly determined in my own mind,” he wrote, “never to molest another wounded Grizzly Bear in a marsh or thicket.”  Good call, Osborne.

The horse was nonchalantly grazing in my lawn.  Time to call John.  I started to turn back toward the cabin and the phone, but then I hesitated.  I’d give it one more shot -- I’d try driving him once more.  Again I walked up to the Captain Recalcitrance, and again he turned toward me.

“No,” I said, “get out of here.”  I waved my arms and stepped toward him.  I pushed against his neck.  “Get on.”

The horse stepped away from me.  “Go on, now,” I said, and I slapped his side.  He started walking.  I drove him toward the single-stranded electric fence, then alongside it, then alongside the three-runged wooden fence and all the way to the gate.  It took about two minutes.  I drove him into the pasture.  He whinnied as he trotted through the gate.  Then he curved around the enclosure and broke into a canter.  I leaned on the fence to watch him.  He slowed down as he crossed Otter Creek, then cantered, almost galloped, across the tawny pasture toward the herd.  Head held high, dark mane and tail streaming behind him.  A gorgeous animal.  Osborne Russell ended up trapping the Rockies for eight years, operating much of the time as a free trapper who called his own shots.  Maybe I’d make it yet.

A couple of Cosgriff's horses on the proper side of the fence.

Helpful Hints for Cartographers

Otter Creek was frozen over in most places and fringed with ice everywhere else.  I stepped over the ice that lined the bank and onto the shoals.  The water rushed against my calf-high boots.  I eyed the rocky streambed uneasily.  I was wearing my heavy wool jacket and a bulky synthetic skull cap – it was way too cold outside to be falling into creeks.  I imagined the scream that would likely escape my lips if I toppled into the water.  Shrill enough to shatter the glass on the cabin and loud enough to be heard for two miles, it would besmirch my family name for years to come.  Determined to avoid such infamy, I set my feet carefully on the mossy rocks, arms extended on either direction like a tightrope walker in Inuit garb, and picked my way across Otter Creek.  I clamored onto the opposite bank with relief, then turned to look for Duke.

A coot in Otter Creek.  (Picture taken a couple days ago, before the creek froze.)

He was sitting on the opposite bank looking at me with his ears perked.  Probably being well-mannered, I thought – when we forded streams while hiking, I’d make him wait on the bank while I crossed so that he wouldn’t bump into me mid-stream and knock me over.  I guess he remembered the procedure.  What a well-behaved dog.

“Okay,” I called.  “Come on.”

Duke started toward the water, put a foot on the icy edge of the stream, withdrew it and looked at me again.  He perked his ears.  I stared back at him.

“Duke, you lazy ass!  Get into the water!”

He sprinted up the bank in one direction, looking for a way across.  Then he ran down the bank in the opposite direction.  He found a spot and picked his way down the bank, stepped on the ice, then retreated again and ran the other way.

“Duke,” I said, “it’s a stream.  You can’t run around it.  We crossed this two days ago – it’s Otter Creek!”

I ought to call it Lazy Lab Creek, I thought.  It would be a better name than Otter Creek.  When it comes to naming topographic features in the American west, two themes dominate to the exclusion of just about everything else: using a local animal, and using someone’s last name.  Otter Creek, Bear Lake, Sheep Creek.  Bridger Mountains, Owens Valley, Humboldt River.  Frankly, I think these themes are overused, and I’d like to see some variation.

A muskrat in Otter Creek.  I have never seen an otter in it.

In fact, more inventive names have been actively suppressed.  For instance, a trapper named John Colter encountered a stream in what is now Wyoming that ran through tar pits.  The river stunk, so Colter called it the Stinking River.  It was a good name, and it stuck.  It was easy to remember, especially if you were downwind.  In his memoirs, the trapper Osborne Russell referred to the watercourse as “Stinking River.”  But years later, the Wyoming state legislature would decide that “Stinking River” was not complimentary enough.  In an attempt to make the river’s name inoffensive, boring, and bland for the ostensible benefit of future pantywaists, the legislature renamed it the “Shoshone.”  Bad call.  Norman McLean, in the short story USFS 1919: The Ranger, the Cook, and a Hole in the Sky, tells the tale of the stream that his Trail Crew called “Wet Ass Creek.”  It was a delightful name: did it mean that the creek was, for some reason, unusually damp?  Did it mean that the creek’s discoverer, when crossing, fell backward on his butt?  Or did it mean the discoverer had a nasty case of swamp ass?  A map reader could only grin and guess.  But instead of savoring the ambiguity, the Forest Service’s Survey Crew decided that the name was too indelicate.  At least the Survey Crew bypassed such obvious alternatives as Deer Creek or Jones Fork: they called it “Wetase Creek” and passed it off as an Indian name.

The American west is in need of better names.  There’s no use faking humility; I think cartographers should begin by consulting me.  “Lazy Lab Creek” would be a good start, and then they could add “Stinking Pants Spring” for the pit of bovine excrement that I fell into a couple months back.  And “Rocky Mountains?”  Talk about an uninspired name for America’s most inspiring topographical feature.  As Del Que shouted in the movie Jeremiah Johnson, “the Rocky Mountains is the marrow of the world,” and we have named them after the generalized substance that exists in every mountain range everywhere: rock.  Dull.  That has to change.  I propose calling them the “Marrow Mountains,” in honor of Del Que, and then changing “South Pass” to “The Narrow in the Marrow.”  And while I’m at it, I’ll reach back to my home state – Atlanta should start calling itself Tohellwithsherman, Georgia.  This would require Yankees to say the words whenever they bought plane tickets into our state.  And if they refused, what would be the loss?

I would allow some relatively dull names to remain, but only if the name had an interesting story behind it.  For instance, Wyoming’s “Sweetwater River” has three nominal stories.  One historian says that an early trapper gave the river its name because the water tasted sweet.  Warren Ferris, the trapper who wrote Life in the Rocky Mountains, says that the river got its name while a mule laden with sugar slipped in the river and drowned.  Still another historian records that a bunch of traders in a “drunken carousel” accidentally dumped a bag of sugar into the water.  If we combine all of these stories to ascertain the truth, we learn that the river’s discoverer was drinking downstream of some drunk traders who, in the course of “carousing” with their mule, knocked a bag of sugar off the animal’s back in mid-stream.  I’d rather have called the watercourse “Fond-of-Mule River,” but the story is good enough that I’ll settle for “Sweetwater.”

Duke ran down the opposite bank of Lazy Lab Creek and stopped where he’d started.  He sniffed the ice at the creek’s edge, then stepped onto it.  He waded into the water.  Duke’s legs are unusually short for a lab, and although that’s an advantage for slipping under barbed wire fences, he paid the price now.  The water splashed against his stomach.  I realized with a vicarious wince that other sensitive parts of his anatomy hung at the same elevation.  He stepped over an ice floe in midstream and the ice rubbed against his underside.  He commenced to running, and bounded the last few steps out of Otter Creek.

He ran to me and I knelt to pet him.  He was wet but wagging his tail.  Maybe “Lazy Lab Creek” isn’t right.  Henceforth, in Duke’s honor, I’ll call it “Retract Creek” instead.

The Other Side of the Glass

A blue flatbed truck was parked at the northwest corner of the property, and someone was out in the grass digging.  I put on my mackinaw jacket, tucked my insulated gloves in the pocket and walked across the pasture toward the truck.  The temperature was hovering around freezing and the wind was ripping, twenty knots or so.  Gusting harder than that.  Duke, who loves the cold, ran ahead of me.  I turned up my collar.
   
Probably John Cosgriff repairing the fence, I thought.  John’s family has been ranching around Otter Creek for generations, and I’ve come to know him since we bought property out here.  John cuts hay on our place in late summer and pastures his horses on our land in winter, and in return he lets my father, my uncle and me hunt on his property.  As I got closer I could see a tan cap with earflaps, floppy with age and darkened with dirt.  Frayed strings hanging down from the earflaps.  John Cosgriff.  The wind was blowing from him to me, and Duke, smelling who it was, ran to greet him.  John had just dug a hole for a new fencepost and was trying to hold the post upright in the hole and simultaneously shovel the loose dirt around its base.

“If you wait long enough, someone’ll come along and hold that post up,” I called.

John looked up and grinned.  “Hey,” he said.

“Let me grab that post.”

John shoveled dirt around the fencepost and packed it down with a steel pole.  John’s horses were grazing at the other end of the pasture, so we didn’t have to worry about them running through the fence while we worked.

“How do you like this Montana weather now?” he asked.  It was cold, but I knew the bottom hadn’t dropped out of the thermometer yet.  Last week we had warmer air blowing down the valley, what John calls a Chinook wind.  We were still feeling some of the warmth.

“Well, I figure it’ll get colder, so I’m trying not to wimp out yet.”

“Yeah,” he chuckled.  “Wait ‘till it gets to zero or a little below zero and the wind blowing like this.  That’s cold.”

“Right.  I’ll let myself bitch about the weather when it gets that cold.”

“Yeah,” he said.  He finished packing dirt around the post.  “Although, you know, working out of the pickup these days, it’s never that bad.  You’ve got the heater a few feet away.”  I looked at John’s truck.  Grille broken out, exhaust pipe broken, muffler hanging from a strand of bailing wire.  But apparently the heater still worked.  John talked about how they used to work out of some other piece of equipment, the name of which I didn’t catch.  Sometimes I don’t understand everything John says.  He talks as though I have also been ranching in Montana for decades.  “Open cab and stuff.  You’d get so cold you had to get off and warm your hands around the exhaust manifold.”

I nodded.  “What happened to the old fenceposts?” I asked.

He pointed to the roadside ditch where he had laid the posts.  “That one had rotted out,” he said.  “And the others were about to go, so I figured I’d go ahead and replace them all.”  I looked at the posts – rotted for sure.  I’d driven past this corner ten or twelve times and hadn’t noticed.

John had already put in two new posts before I got there.  Now we had to install braces.  When you run a barbed wire fence, you generally use three heavy wooden posts in each corner of the pasture – one post in the true corner of the pasture, and then two adjacent wooden posts along the fenceline so that if you looked at the three posts from above, they’d form an isosceles right triangle.  All three posts are sunk fairly deeply, and the two non-corner posts are braced to the one in the corner.  You fasten the barbed wire to the heavy triad of posts in one corner of the pasture and then use a come-along – basically a hand-operated winch – to stretch the wire tight from one corner of the pasture to the triad of posts in the next corner.  After the wire is stretched tight, you clip the taunt wire to metal fenceposts that you drive into the ground along the wire’s route, one about every thirty feet.  The metal fenceposts will hold the wire in place as time passes and the wire loosens, but it’s the heavy wooden posts that get it taunt in the first place.

John pulled a chainsaw off the flatbed to notch the wooden posts so that we could install a brace.  He made two horizontal cuts, each about an inch deep, in the side of the post where the brace would attach.  One cut about eight inches above the other.  Then with an axe he chipped out the wood between the cuts.  That made one notch.  He repeated the process on the opposite post, and sawed a wooden pole fit between them.  We lifted the pole and set it in the notches John had cut.  It fit snugly.  He nailed the pole in place, and the brace was complete.  Then he sawed two cuts in the other side of the corner post so that we could install the second brace, and I picked up the axe to chip away the wood between the cuts he'd made.  It was close work so I swung with my hands apart on the axe handle.  I got it done, but it took me about three times as long as it had taken John and the result was not nearly so neat.

I leaned on the axe handle when I had finished.  There were stray marks all over the post from where I’d swung the axe and missed my mark.  “I need to work on my accuracy,” I said.

“Oh, it looks pretty good,” John said.

“You do the next one.  I need to watch again.  I didn’t pay close enough attention the last time.”

As John efficiently chipped out a notch on the third post, a Mercury SUV drove up on the gravel road.  Two young guys inside.  They slowed and rolled down the window.  John looked up.

“How’re you guys doing?” one of them asked.

“Good,” I said.  I figured they were friends of John’s – most folks know each other around here – so I waited for John to say something.  But he didn’t.  I guess he figured that since we were on my family’s land it was my job to do the talking.  I took a couple steps toward the car and said, “how’re yall?”

“We’re okay,” one of them replied.  I waited a second for him to introduce himself or say what he was doing but he just looked at his buddy nervously and then they drove off.  John picked up the axe again.

“Who were they?” I asked.

“Oh, I don’t know,” he said.

I watched them drive away.  “Colorado plates,” I said.

Not from around here.  I thought about the way we must’ve looked to them – a couple guys out in the cold beside a worn-down flatbed, fixing a fence.  Tools lying around, old fenceposts in the ditch, a dog sitting in the grass.  They were probably concerned about the impression they were making on the locals.  Probably thought I was a rancher.  I grinned at Duke and spat in the dirt.  I picked up a hammer and some fence staples and walked back to the posts.  It was nice to be on this side of car window for a change.

Overlooking Otter Creek; Crazy Mountains in background.  The view from a hilltop on our place looking west. 

Overlooking Otter Creek; Beartooth Mountains in background.  The view from a hilltop on our place looking south.  

Nature on an Empty Stomach

Almost a mile up the valley, on the other side of the cabin from which I had come, a herd of deer moved across a field.  I could just make out their bodies in the fading light of evening.  Dark brown bodies on a golden-brown field, now bare of the snow that still clung to the hillsides and lurked in shady patches under the cottonwoods of Otter Creek.  Otter Creek was the winding centerline of this valley, its course traced by cottonwoods that now stood dark and leafless.  I trained my binoculars on the deer.  Whitetails.  I’d be hunting them in a few days.  I counted twelve of them – a big herd, even for this area.  They were moving from Otter Creek, a thickly-populated corridor for cervine travel, west toward the Crazy Mountains.  I dropped my binoculars.  The snow-capped Crazies bounded the valley to the west, their peaks pushing into the clouds.  To the east, the flatlands surrounding Otter Creek ascended into sage-covered hills breached by coolies and interspersed with rock cliffs.  Beyond those hills, flatlands.  The western edge of the Great Plains.  It was a remarkable place to sit and survey the country.

I have wondered if this appreciation for natural grandeur is a modern development.  Did man have to know cities, buildings and roads before he could appreciate landscapes, mountains and rivers?  Did man first have to be certain that he could wrest sufficient food from the earth before he could appreciate its beauty?  Aldo Leopold – a nature writer who stands shoulder-to-shoulder in prominence with John Muir and Henry Thoreau – thought so.  In his Forward to Sand County Almanac, he wrote, “[t]hese wild things, I admit, had little human value until mechanization assured of a good breakfast.”

But I’m not so sure.  The fur trappers, for whom the availability of breakfast was frequently in doubt, appreciated the natural splendor of their surroundings.  Osborne Russell, a trapper in the 1830s who penned his memoirs in Journal of a Trapper, waxed eloquent about various natural scenes.  He was particularly enamored with, and was most moved to gush about, the Lamar Valley in what is now Yellowstone National Park.  “For my part,” Russell wrote upon one of his visits to the valley, “I almost wished I could spend the remainder of my days in a place like this.”  Zenas Leonard, clerk of the Walker Expedition and author of Narrative of the Adventures of Zenas Leonard, wrote about the natural beauty of various scenes, particularly the San Joaquin Valley.  Warren Ferris, a fur trapper who wrote his memoirs in Life in the Rocky Mountains, described the beauty of the Rockies.  Despite living outdoors almost all the time, and despite frequently foregoing a good breakfast, these trappers found aesthetic value in the wild things around them.  Leonard did note that, on occasion, the trappers were too concerned about survival to ponder pretty landscapes: when on the brink of starvation in Yosemite country, he wrote that “we spent no time in idleness – scarcely stopping in our journey to view an occasional specimen of the wonders of nature’s handy-work.”  But even then, when recounting the Sierra crossing that the Walker Expedition almost did not survive, Leonard recognized the beauty of his surroundings – even if his thoughts quickly returned to his empty belly.

Of course, Russell, Ferris, and Leonard were all Americans in the political, rather than native, sense – they came from the east where they had known cities, buildings and roads.  So if the question is whether an appreciation of natural beauty is inherent, or must be learned by exposure to landscapes altered by man, these three trappers – although they lived day-to-day in wilderness, and although the sources of their next meals were frequently in doubt – do not provide perfect answers.  A better test would be to asses the degree to which Native Americans appreciated natural beauty.  That’s a question I can’t answer, because the Indians didn’t leave much behind in the way of written records.  But we can make this observation: the historical record is replete with explorers, trappers, pioneers and settlers leaving the eastern settlements and heading west for wilder country.  But I can think of no example of a Native American leaving the wild country and seeking to live in a town.

The sun had long since slid behind the Crazy Mountains, and soon it would be dark.  I had no headlamp and a good distance to walk before I got back to the cabin.  Reluctantly, under a darkening sky tinged with orange, I rose to go.

A bison in Yellowstone National Park.

Picture taken in late September.

A Bit of Sense

I remember cowering in the ash, crumpled into a fetal-position ball by the debilitating chill, too cold even to piss.  We had started too early, worn too few clothes, and now we were waiting for dawn so that we could clamor onto the summit of LeMagaruit, a low volcano in Tanzania that you didn’t want to summit in the dark because you might step into a lava flow.  Clumped just below the caldera rim, huddled together in an eroded field of gray ash, we stared at the eastern horizon for signs of the sun.  I was on a NOLS trip with several other American students, and this was supposed to be a warmup for Kilimanjaro.  As I held back my urine, unwilling to subject either my ungloved hands or my unguarded penis to the gnashing cold, I decided that mountain climbing didn’t make a damn bit of sense.

John Krakauer wrote about his Mt. Everest expedition in Into Thin Air, which is about as fine a book as I’ve read in the past five years.  To summarize, it was really cold and there wasn’t much oxygen and a storm came up and several people died and several others, Krakauer included, were saddled with a lifetime of guilt for not being able to save them.  They knew the risks and climbed anyway – and for what?  To say they stood in a particularly high place?  When my group set our boots to climbing Kilimanjaro, reached 19,000 feet then had to turn around because a member of the group developed high-altitude cerebral edema – the swelling of the brain caused by high altitude, accompanied by hallucinations, a loss of rational thought, and a loss of motor skills – once we got her down safely, I didn’t give a tinker’s damn about the summit.  Some other folks wanted to take another shot at the top, and if conditions had permitted the climb, I’d have gone with them just for the hell of it.  But as for summiting, I didn’t much care.  Seven years later, I still don’t.

These reflections, as I drove through the night listening to the Into Thin Air audiobook and reacquainting myself with Krakauer’s writing style, made me feel mature.  Here was a story of a bunch of sure-enough grownups, with wives, husbands, and children, taking absurd risks to achieve an objective with which I was unimpressed.  I smiled to myself and remembered Harvey Manning’s line from Walking the Beach to Bellingham: “To be sure, long lines of tourists plodding their way up the path to the top of Everest interest me.  So do ants.”   I stood with Harvey.

But as so often happens with self-righteousness, the next thought was a deflater.  It wasn’t the risks that bothered me.  It’s just that I didn’t much care about their objective.

True, mountain climbing doesn’t make a damn bit of sense.  But then, I have long enjoyed duck hunting.  I remember getting up before dawn on frigid January mornings with my buddy Ben where we shivered, dressed hurriedly, then looked at the waders.  One pair leaked and the other didn’t and we didn’t know which was which so we’d each grab a pair and wade into the beaver pond with our fingers crossed.  And I remember standing stock-still, shotgun in hand, as icy water poured down my leg and pooled around my foot thinking, this doesn’t make a damn bit of sense.  But we went duck hunting again and again and I loved it.  I remember mounting a bicycle at one end of a sandy strip of beach, a foam-covered eight-foot-long PVC pipe in my hand, and staring at a buddy a hundred yards distant with his own bicycle and his own foam-covered pipe.  Then we’d pedal toward each other as fast as we could go, stabbing at one another with our lances then colliding with thumps, groans, banging metal and spraying sand.  I remember examining the bruises on my chest and thinking, this doesn’t make a damn bit of sense.  But I jousted again, and I loved it.

I tried to get a college buddy of mine to go camping once.  “Jeb,” he said, “I could leave behind my warm bed, my TV in the morning, the snacks in the cabinet, and the beer in the refrigerator.  I could leave all of civilization behind and go walk around in the woods.  I could handle it.  But why would I do that?”  His point, I think, was this: it didn’t make sense.

Often, the best parts of living just don’t make sense.  Joy and sensibility are frequently at odds.  Something’s gone wrong: insomuch as enjoying one’s life is a sensible goal, one of these concepts must have gotten off track.  Joy or sensibility.  One of them is amiss.  It’s an easy choice.  Having determined that “sense” is defective, I have resolved to jettison it at every opportunity.  :)

The aftermath of a joust.

Liars, Allegedly

“I am well aware that a Crow Indian can express great sorrow for me,” wrote Osborne Russell, a native of Maine who was trapping beaver in the Rockies in 1837, “and at the same time be laying a plan to rob me or secretly take my life.”  I sighed, put down my book, and made a note in my legal pad: “O.R. perceives Crow as duplicitous.” In the left margin, where I write one-word labels so I can scan my notes later, I wrote “RACISM.”  It’s a label that appears throughout my notes on fur trappers’ journals.
  
Condemning such generalizations as racist is a reflexive reaction of my generation, I think.  That may be a good thing.  It’s better than immediately concluding that an actor’s race determines his conduct.  But my generation also strives recognize cultural differences.  In Japan, for instance, it’s alright to slurp your noodles.  In the United States, it’s not.  Either system of manners is fine, we believe, and neither set of table norms is superior to the other.  Recognizing that cultural difference, however, is another way of adopting a generalization: Japanese slurp their noodles in public, but Americans don’t.  That, I think, is an unobjectionable generalization.

So it’s okay to generalize about cultures and their views on noodle-slurping.  But if I were to claim that “black people act like criminals,” that would be an objectionable generalization properly condemned as racist.  So, some generalizations are permissible and others aren’t.  The dividing line may lie here: generalizing about norms in different cultures is permissible, so long as it is accurate, while generalizing about alleged propensities of different races, as distinct from cultures, is not.  In other words, it’s okay to note cultural differences, but not okay to imply that race determines character.  For instance, I had a long conversation with a black guy I met in bar in Berkeley who had been born in Sudan but raised in the United States.  We talked about how neither of us gave a damn about soccer, which is what the bar had inexplicably decided to show on TV.  For me to apply generalizations to this guy would have made no sense because he and I were, broadly speaking, culturally identical.  Although he’d grown up in New York and I in Georgia, we were both culturally American and our differences were negligible when compared to –  for instance – the differences between Osborne Russell and a Crow Indian in 1837.  We were racially different but culturally similar, so generalizations were inappropriate.

Osborne clearly generalized about the Crow.  Was my all-caps label of “RACISM” correct?  It is indisputably true that the agriculture-based culture into which Osborne Russell was born differed markedly from the hunting-and-gathering culture of the Crow.  Their cultures diverged about as much as it is possible for cultures to diverge, in fact.  And for all I know, it may have been true that folks from Maine in the 1830s placed a higher value on interpersonal sincerity than the Crow.  Maybe what Russell viewed as “duplicitous” the Crow would have viewed as “sound strategy” – a sort of caveat emptor approach to negotiation.  A little like modern TV ads in which insurance companies present themselves as allies of their claimants.  So when Russell wrote that “I am well aware that a Crow Indian can express great sorrow for me and at the same time be laying a plan to rob me or secretly take my life,” was he being racist?  Was his claim more like generalizing about cultural predispositions to noodle-slurp, or more like generalizing as to the allegedly inherent criminality of a different race?

It’s hard to say.  To begin, we don’t have the Crows’ side of the story – they left no written record of their views of the trappers’ sincerity.  And in part because we don’t have access to the Crows’ perspective, it’s hard to gauge the cultural sincerity of the trappers.  Although by 1837 the federal government and the governments of some states – e.g., Georgia – had been swindling eastern tribes like the Cherokee for years, there wasn’t yet enough of a governmental presence in the west to make governmental swindling a possibility.  That would come years later, when the United States started packing Native Americans onto reservations.  At the time, the trappers were the western representatives of the United States.  One hundred and eighty years after the height of the fur trade, it’s difficult to generalize about the fur trappers’ cultural tendencies.  Were they more sincere, or less sincere, than the culturally distinct Crow?  And if there was a difference in the cultures’ relative sincerity, would it have been racist to acknowledge it?

Forget Forever

There will come a day when we’re all gone, but nothing much will change.

Humans have always been self-absorbed, and it shows in the way we describe the world around us.  Creation myths usually depict the culture in which the myth circulates as preeminent or “chosen” – in Deuteronomy 7:6, for instance, the Jews’ god announces that Jews are his chosen people.  Until astronomical data proved otherwise, humans imagined that the Earth was the middle of the universe, and when that model proved empirically untenable, insisted that the sun was the universe’s center – the geocentric and heliocentric theories of astronomy, respectively.  The mythology of the Blackfoot Indians provided that the creator had made birds and animals so that man could eat of their flesh.  In the movie Jeremiah Johnson, a Rocky Mountain fur trader named Del Que rides into the foothills shouting, “I ain’t never seen them, but my common sense tells me that the Alps are foothills, and the Andes are for children to climb. Yes sir, these here Rocky Mountains are the marrow of the world!”  When man describes the drama of the universe, he accords himself the central role.

But the geological record does not.  According to present theory, Earth formed 4.5 billion years ago.  Life appeared around 3.7 billion years ago.  Multicellular organisms evolved around 1.8 billion years ago.  Life crawled out of the seas and onto land for the first time about 500 million years ago, and dinosaurs waddled forth 230 million years before the present time.  Anatomically modern humans emerged 400,000 years ago.

Some comparisons in raw numbers: crocodiles have been around for 200 million years.  Trilobites, a group of three-lobed mud crawlers that looked like beetles but are now extinct, pulled off a phenomenal feat by lasting 340 million years.  Blue-green algae has been around for a whopping 2.8 billion years.  At 400,000 years, man has been around for 0.2% of the crocodile’s time, 0.11% of the trilobites’ time, and .01% of the algae’s time.  To put it figuratively, using an analogy from Dave Brower as presented in John McPhee’s Encounters with the Archdruid: if one analogizes man’s evolution to the six days of Genesis, for all of Monday and Tuesday morning, Earth was lifeless.  Life began on Tuesday at noon.  At midnight on Wednesday, blue-green algae got started.  At 4 PM on Saturday, dinosaurs and trilobites entered the scene, and five hours later, both were extinct.  Three seconds before midnight – only three seconds before midnight – humankind emerged.  We have not been here long enough to win the leading role in the Earthly drama.

And we will not be here much longer.  Just as organisms die, species go extinct.  Giant meteors like Chicxulub pound the earth; supervolcanoes like the Yellowstone hotspot explode; unknown conditions alter the atmosphere as with the rusting of the Earth in the late Archean; the climate changes drastically as with the Pleistocene ice ages.  The more complex species, the faster it goes extinct.  Mammals go extinct especially quickly.  We’re the most complex mammal we know of.  Our time on Earth is finite.

One slightly hung over morning when the coffee was late to arrive, I made this argument to my good friend Matt Stoddard.  In a self-important moment, of which I have a regrettable plentitude, I said that no reasonable argument could be made to the contrary.  He disagreed: humans would migrate from Earth when they needed to, he said.  They would keep planet hopping and never go extinct.  But the planethopping theory has a problem: for any given stretch of time, there is some probability that humankind will die out.  To be charitable, let’s give humans a 0.1% chance of dying out in any given millennium.  If we’re talking about whether man will ever go extinct – that is, planet-hopping indefinitely – then we’re talking about infinite time.  Infinite time contains infinite millennia.  So the chance that, in one millennium or another, man will eventually go extinct is infinity times 0.1%.  Any number times infinity is infinity.  The math: extinction is a certainty.

What will happen when humans no longer exist?  Not much, probably.  The crocodiles will keep swishing through warm salty water and cockroaches will crawl through our pantries.  Or maybe the mode of our extinction will be dramatic enough to drag crocodiles and cockroaches down with us.  In that case, the more primitive, sturdy forms of life may be all that remain: blue-green algae (aka cyanobacteria) might continue to add to the 2.8 billion years it has spent on Earth; the chemosynthetic microorganisms that live beside hydrothermal vents at the bottoms of the oceans might survive; so might the extremophilic microbes that live inside today’s nuclear reactors.  In any case, the passing of Homo sapiens will be the norm rather than the exception – another mammal bites the dust.

And what if we managed to drag all life out of existence?  The nonexistence of life wouldn’t be new.  Earth existed for 800 million years without life, and the universe existed for about 9 billion years without Earth.  Life is not indispensible to the operation of the cosmos.  “Life” is, after all, only a label humans have given to a particular set of chemical patterns and reactions that we have observed on the surface of our own planet.  The preoccupation with these particular patterns and reactions is, so far as we know, only a human fixation.

I pulled my jacket off the rack and walked outside with Duke.  I could hear Otter Creek rippling in the darkness, could see the stars like so much silver confetti tossed across the sky.  The cold night air slipped under my fleece and crept inside my pullover, cold against my lower back.  Whatever the significance of the chemical patterns that make up my brain and body, and however long my species and I will continue to exist, it was a beautiful night.  Duke sat beside me and looked up, waiting to be petted.  What a blessing it is to have been included in the pageant of existence.

Cabin by night.

Hare Hunting

The sunlight bounced off the snow and shone through the living room windows, lighting the table where I sat at my computer.  I looked through the window at the hills across Otter Creek, coated in about four inches of snow and nuzzling a light blue sky.  Tawny grass poked through the snow in steep places and deer tracks crisscrossed the yard.  A magpie sat on the fence twitching its tail.  I pulled my gaze from the window, waited a few moments for my eyes to readjust, then went back to work.

Thirty minutes later I put on my jacket, buckled on my gaiters and followed Duke out the door.  He bounded in the snow like a puppy.  Deer tracks were everywhere.  Piles of scat in the front yard.  Partridge tracks across the driveway.  I walked across the footbridge over Otter Creek and saw that deer had been using the bridge too.  The snow was old enough to crunch underfoot and the wind was blowing just hard enough to roar across your ears when you turned into it, but not hard enough to be uncomfortable.  A gorgeous day.

I angled toward a copse of trees with some deadfalls lying at their bases, intending to walk past them and roam around in the hills.  Duke ran ahead.  He was sniffing around the bases of the trees when a snowshoe hare lept from the cover of the trees and ran forty yards across the open snow, then stopped and stood on its hind legs to watch me.  He would have been in easy range if I’d brought a shotgun.  The mountain men ate lots of hares and rabbits.  Sam Drucker, the archeologist in Pinedale, had told me that most of the discarded bones at the mountain men’s rendezvous site did not come from deer or buffalo, but from hares and rabbits.  The members of the Walker Expedition probably ate more rodent than they would have liked – when one of the expedition’s hunters killed a deer on the western edge of the Sierra Nevadas in late October, Leonard remarked in his journal that it “was the first game larger than a rabbit we had killed since the 4th of August when we killed the last buffaloe near the Great Salt Lake.”  I whistled for Duke, who smelled the hare but had not seen him yet.  He came to me and we walked back to the cabin for a gun.

Dad had taken our shotguns back to Georgia, but I picked up the old .30-30 and jacked a round into the chamber.  Zenas Leonard wouldn’t have had anything like this rifle, but this gun had its own place in American lore.  A lever-action gun with a short barrel, open sights and a hardwood stock, the Model 1894 Winchester was ideal for carrying in a scabbard strapped to your saddle.  The necked-down cartridge was the flat-shooting wonder of the late 1800s – though powerful enough to take down an elk or moose with a well-placed shot, the bullet was light and fast, relative to its contemporaries, which made it excellent for killing at several hundred yards.  And it was beautifully balanced.  The rifle’s balance makes it attractive even today – throw a Model 1894 to you shoulder and it holds naturally steady.  Swing it as though shooting at a moving target and the barrel slides across the horizontal like an expensive Italian shotgun.  Carry it by your side with a hand across the action and the rifle hangs, muzzle slightly down, just like God intended.  It was designed by John Browning, a gun designer of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, many of whose designs – the Model 1894 rifle, the 1911 style pistol, the Browning Automatic Rifle, the Auto-5 shotgun – remained the templates with which subsequent designers began their work until the very late twentieth century.  But of all his designs, and perhaps more than any other rifle, the Model 1894 is the American classic.  It is the best-selling centerfire sporting rifle of all time.  John Wayne used a Model 1894.  If that won’t sell rifles, nothing will.

Our Model 1894.

Duke saw the rifle when I came back out of the cabin and bounced on his front feet in excitement, anticipating that he might have something to retrieve besides a tennis ball.  “Hold on, buddy,” I told him, “we have to find him first.”  I walked toward the copse of trees where we’d started the hare and looked to the spot where he’d run.  He was no longer there.  “Stay,” I whispered to Duke and walked to where I’d last seen him.

The hare was probably close – most rabbits, when started, run in a large circle.  I looked around as I walked but didn’t see him.  The snow where the hare had stood was pockmarked with deer tracks, but before long I found the hare’s prints.  Two long prints shaped like snowshoes, then two nearly circular prints from the front feet.  His tracks were visibly fresher than the surrounding prints.  I followed them for a few yards.  They led back toward the copse of woods from which the hare had first emerged.  I looked into the trees, stumps, and downed logs that formed the copse.  If I followed the tracks into the trees, the trees would limit my field of vision and I probably wouldn’t see the hare until I got close, at which point he’d run.  He’d be hard to shoot on the move.  But if I circled the trees, the hare might stay put, hoping that I would pass by without seeing him.  And if, peering into the woods, I could see the hare before he ran, I’d have an easy rifle shot.

Hunting often troubles the modern conscience.  Nothing gets anti-hunters worked up more than hunters defending their passion by explaining that they enjoy being out in nature.  “If your aim is to commune with nature,” anti-hunters exclaim, “why are you killing the animals?  Go hiking and leave the gun at home!”  It’s easy to understand their response.  But the experiences are different – so very different.  Hiking is a wonderful way to observe nature.  There is much to be said for tramping though beautiful country, admiring the views, and watching animals in their natural habitats.  But a hiker is only a tourist.  A hunter is something else – when you creep through the woods, your footfalls quiet, face in the wind, eyes roving the forest, seeking out game because you intend to kill it, peel back its skin, and digest it so that its flesh contributes to your own, you are no longer a tourist.  You are a living, breathing, scheming participant in the food chain.  There is nothing else like it.

I circled the copse of woods.  The sun was almost directly overhead and the foliage was long gone from the trees, so I could see into the woods.  A large trunk, three feet in diameter, lay parallel to my course.  I looked along it, focusing at one end of the log, then the next section, then the next.   Human eyes often overlook stationary objects when they scan an area, but if you examine the area piece by piece, pausing to refocus your eyes each time, you’ll notice more.  Tufts of grass, broken branches, a drift of snow.  No hare.  I continued the circle.  I heard the tinkle of Duke’s collar and I held out my palm to remind him that he was under “stay” orders.  Even when footfalls and the sight of a human form won’t spook game, the sound of a human voice may stir them to flight.  The wind picked up and the trees swayed, creaking.  A magpie fluttered from one limb to another.  I stopped to look.  There, beside the big log, sat the hare.  I should have seen him earlier.  His fur was white and grayish-brown, perfect camouflage for his surroundings.  He had spotted me but wasn’t sure if I’d seem him.  He sat on his haunches.  I raised the rifle, cocked the hammer and centered the front sight on his chest.  He didn’t move.  I squeezed the trigger.

When my eyes refocused from the recoil the hare lay dead, sprawled backward in the snow.  The bullet had entered his chest, passed through his chest cavity and upper abdomen, and exploded out his lower back.  Lots of damage.  Not surprising when you shoot a rabbit with a deer rifle, but at least he hadn’t suffered.  Although there wouldn’t be much left of the backstraps, his haunches would make good eating.  I backed away and called Duke, who retrieved the hare, then watched eagerly as I cut the meat out with my knife.  Duke’s eyes, normally trained on my face when we’re doing something together, never left the hare.  I grinned.  A part of the food chain.

Duke retreiving the hare.