The End

This is the hundredth blog entry, the last daily update, and the first entry I’ve written without Duke hanging out nearby.  Duke is now at the home of John Cosgriff.  He climbed into my lap as I drove over to John’s house, his muzzle resting on my left leg and his back legs lying on the console.  Duke will stay with John when I fly back to Georgia tomorrow for a two-week sabbatical.  He tried to follow me out the door of John’s house when I left.  I pointed back inside and made him stay, then I walked out into the dark.

Back at the cabin, as I usually do in the evenings, I paced around the living room trying to figure out what to write about.  This time I kept music playing.  I paced into the tiled kitchen area, then turned around and paced over the rug past the lamp and beside the bookshelf, then started to turn again and glimpsed Duke’s tennis balls resting on the shelf.  That’s when I started missing him.  Often while mulling over the evening’s writing, I’ve thrown tennis balls against the walls for Duke to chase or lobbed them into the air for him to catch.  Now the balls looked lonely.  If you believe in writing the truth – and I do – there was only one thing to write about.

I picked up a tennis ball and threw it against the far wall.  It bounced back to me halfheartedly, and I walked over to it and flung it again.  But throwing tennis balls, like one other activity I’ve been missing recently, just isn’t as much fun alone.  I placed the ball back on the bookshelf.  I walked over to my computer to shut off the music.  If I was going to write about aloneness, I had better let myself feel the silence first.  But I didn’t have the guts to turn the music off.  I have spent, in this single and wandering life, plenty of lonely time – I was not eager to go back to it.

I have said goodbye to more than one pretty girl to pursue this single and wandering life.  I received a Christmas card from one of them today, one to whom I said goodbye five and a half years ago when I graduated college.  I left her to wander around in my truck with a dog and no steady job.  Which has a familiar ring.  At the time that I left, I loved her.  Loved her wholeheartedly.  But the road called.  Now, she is engaged to be married and is gainfully employed in New York City.  Probably, I reflected, I made the right decision for the wrong reasons.  I sent her an email to emphasize the differences in our present situations.  If she’s keeping score, I thought, she’ll get a kick out of this.

It’s a tradeoff that I decided to make.  Probably a tradeoff that most of the fur trappers had to consider.  What is the price of freedom?  They left everything that they knew, spent several years wandering the Rockies, and then – at least most of them – returned to civilization.  Maybe what I’m doing is similar.

There was really no choice.

Hunting: What's Got Everyone So Worked Up?

If you want a hot argument, tell hunting stories in front of an anti-hunter.  You can probably elicit cursing with no work at all, and with a little effort, shoe-throwing isn’t impossible.  Few topics elicit unreasoned vitriol so reliably.  Unsupported generalizations are common:

• “The hunting community is mainly composed of grown men (and some women) with nothing more intelligent to do than kill little birds and animals because it provides fun and excitement for people who need to feel potent.”  (source)
  
• “Collectively, hunters resemble an army of under-trained, unsupervised amateur killers roaming around destroying 200 million animals a year, making it unsafe for hikers, campers and wildlife . . .  A hunter's lack of feelings - empathy and compassion - for animals and lack of respect for nature go hand in hand.”  (source)
  
• “killing for fun teaches callousness, disrespect for life and the notion that might makes right”  (source)
  
• “hunters are PATHETIC morons who have to kill things to feel like a man because they can\'t satisfy their wives”  (source)
  

That some people who oppose hunting express themselves in vehement and unreasonable ways is not surprising – irrational argument is common on all sides of nearly all hot-button issues in the United States today.  But what does surprise me is the extent to which anti-hunting fervor exceeds anti-meat-eating fervor.  As I mentioned in a post the other day, it’s hard to distinguish, from a moral perspective, shooting a deer that will be cut up and eaten from slaughtering a cow that will be cut up and eaten.  It is true that with hunting, there is a greater chance that the execution of the animal will be imprecise and the animal will suffer before it dies.  But hunting has the compensatory virtue of allowing the animal to live a natural, free-ranging life before it is killed – most commercial beef-producing operations, in contrast, confine the animals to be slaughtered in conditions that must be far less pleasant than the shaded woods or open prairie in which game animals live.  To me, these factors tip the moral balance in favor of hunting over commercial meat production, but reasonable opinions may differ.  Let us merely say for present purposes that, from a moral perspective, hunting and commercial meat production are in rough equipoise.  If you consider commercial meat production morally acceptable, you should hold the same view of hunting.

A Confined Animal Feeding Operation (CAFO) in the San Joaquin Valley.  This is actually a dairy farm, but beef cattle are kept under similar conditions.

That’s what I would think – but it ain’t so.  Polls show that about 22% of the US population would support a ban on all hunting (source), but only about 2.8% of the population follows a vegetarian or vegan diet (source).  That means that almost 20% of Americans – one in five – eat meat, but oppose hunting.

Why?

I think it’s about the public’s views of hunters, not hunting.  Re-read the bulleted quotations above.  Many people stereotype hunters as unappreciative morons who kill animals to feel powerful.  To be fair, I should note that most of the above quotations come from individuals who posted their opinions on the web; only the third quotation comes from a well-known organization (The Humane Society of the United States).  Most anti-hunting organizations, like People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA), refrain from overt stereotyping even if the information they disseminate appears misleading or inaccurate.  But I suspect the hunter-as-buffoon stenotype drives the passion of many individual activists. 

And that, I think, is the real danger of canned hunts.  When someone pays hundreds of dollars to shoot an animal that is confined in a small space, the act of killing the animal may be no worse that what occurs in a beef slaughterhouse, but it’s hard to argue that the shooter is motivated by an appreciation for nature or respect for the ancient workings of the food chain.  To the American public, the motive matters.  Stereotyping buyers of canned hunts is easy and effective, and asking the public to distinguish canned hunts from legitimate hunts is probably asking too much – like it or not, all hunters will be painted with the same brush.  For that reason, if for no other, hunters like me should oppose canned hunting.

Glaston Lake

If you stand on a frozen lake after a few days of warm weather when the sun has melted some water atop the ice, then you unzip your jacket and hold the sides out in the wind, you can sail across the lake.

Glaston Lake is about two and a quarter miles west of our property, over rutted prairie dotted with cows and sagebrush.  The prairie is flat enough that you can see where you’re going, and treeless enough that fifty percent of the visually observable world is sky, but it has enough topographical variation that you can find a hilltop to aim for if you’re in an ambling mood.  You amble across the prairie, reach the hilltop, gaze across the newly revealed landscape – look! more grass and sagebrush, and is that a cow in the distance? – and then you see another hilltop or a ridge that can serve as your next aiming point.  If you still want to amble, the stroll continues.  You weave your way among the sagebrush.  Happily, if you like prairie, this is a process that can be repeated indefinitely.

The prairie north of Big Timber, MT provides excellent ambling.  Since you’re not far from the Rockies, you can see the snowy Crazy Mountains in the west and the white-topped Beartooths in the south.  And if you amble east from my family’s property, and you have permission to cross the Lavarells’ land, you can go all the way to Glaston Lake.  Which is how Rebekah and I ended up there.

“Jeb, are you sure the ice is thick enough to walk on?”

Of course I wasn’t sure.  I’m from Georgia – what do I know about lake ice?  Nothing.  But I figured if I fell in I could probably get back out, and I wasn’t far from the warm cabin.  So, I calculated, the risk of frostbite or hypothermia was low.

“Yeah, it’s been really cold,” I said.

“There’s standing water on the ice,” she pointed out.

“Right.  Well, there have been a couple warm days recently, but it was cold before that.”

I slid out on the ice.  You could push off and slide a short distance, sort of like ice skating in boots.  I listened for cracking and heard nothing.  Luckily the ice was thick enough.  Duke trotted out after me and even when he added his seventy pounds to my hundred and seventy, there was no cracking.  I threw a tennis ball for Duke, and Rebekah came out on the ice.  She spotted what looked like a fishing rod lying on the ice, and we walked toward it.  Duke brought his ball and I threw it again.  There was an auger hole in the ice and a short rod lying beside it – someone had been ice fishing.  Rebekah bent to examine the rod when her sunglasses fell onto the lake.  The lenses caught the wind and the glasses slid across the ice.  They moved rapidly – about the speed that I could sprint on solid ground.  Neither of us could catch them.

“Damn!” she said.  The glasses skittered away.  They were almost out of sight when they came to rest on a rough patch of ice, a black dot against the white lake.  “I guess they’re gone.”

 For no good reason I took that as a challenge.  I started across the lake after them, and experimented with several styles of walking on the way.  With long steps, you got too unstable on the slippery ice and I felt like I was about to fall.  Short sliding steps felt stable, but the going was slow.  You could stutter step then push off and slide for a foot or two, I found, but I figured that if I tried to ice skate for several hundred yards in my hiking boots busting my butt was the most likely result.  Which is how I came to be standing upright, unzipping my jacket, and holding out the sides to catch the wind.  I slid across the watery ice.  It was, I thought proudly, a mode of locomotion of which mountain men probably hadn’t conceived.

There’s some reward in novelty, even if divorced from practicality.  It would be harder coming back.  But who thinks of the future when the present is so much fun?

Google Earth image of Glaston Lake.  Crazy Mountains in the distance to the west; Big Timber and I-90 to the south.

 

Montana in winter is THIS awesome.

Shooting Fenced Animals

An eastern hunter with a shiny new rifle books a guided elk hunt in Idaho, sixty miles from Yellowstone National Park.  He pays his money and in return, the outfitter guarantees the hunter an opportunity to shoot a trophy elk.  No trophy, no payment – that’s the deal.  In fact, the hunter can receive a guaranteed opportunity to shoot a larger elk if he pays more, or a guarantee for a smaller elk if he pays less.  This is a “hunt” from which uncertainty has been removed to the maximum extent possible.  So when the hunter reaches the headquarters of Canyon Creek Outfitters near Teton, Idaho, he is confident that he can make a kill.  He is confident even if he has never fired his rifle; he is confident even if he is too out of shape to spend the predawn hours climbing ridges.  His confidence soars when, clad in camo and rifle in hand, he enters a fenced area from which the elk cannot escape.  The fence, the outfitter’s website carefully states, is "to maintain superior genetics.”

It’s called a canned hunt, and like most hunters, I hate that such hunts exist.  There is no “fair chase.”  The hunts turn my stomach.  I have never met a hunter who spoke well of them.  The public at large despises them, and anti-hunters use the events of canned hunts as fodder against all hunters.  It’s an effective tactic.  To most of us, there is something unsettling about an animal with no means of escape being approached by a human intending to kill it.



But of course that’s exactly what happens with every package of meat supermarket freezer.  To generalize: a cow is driven into a confined area.  A “captive bolt stunner” is pressed to its forehead and a bolt fires into the cow’s skull, stunning the cow and rendering it unconscious, but not shutting down its circulatory system.  The cow’s neck is then cut so that the cow bleeds out – i.e., is “exsanguinated” – which helps prevent meat spoilage.  At no point did the cow have a chance to escape, and at no point did the commercial slaughtering facility follow “fair chase” guidelines.

What’s the difference?  What is the moral distinction between a canned elk hunt and a slaughtered cow?

I’ll be honest; I can’t find one.  One person told me that because the hypothetical cows mentioned above had been born only to provide meat, they were not entitled to “fair chase” protections.  I think that argument misses the mark for two reasons.  First, if there is such a thing as an elk or cow’s right to a fair chase, that right belongs to the animal.  Since the right belongs to the animal, it cannot be waived by a human progenitor, even if the human who organized the breeding of the animal always intended for the animal to serve as food.  Phrased differently, it makes no difference to an elk or cow in danger of being killed whether humans always intended to kill it, or only had that idea after it was born.  Second, most of the animals offered to high-paying consumers of canned hunts were bred for the purpose.  It’s not as though the operators of the canned hunt went into the wild with a nets, captured elk, then brought them back to enclosed areas.  Instead, the prey animals come from game farms, where they were bred and raised for the same purpose for which most domestic cows were raised: to be killed and eaten.  The only difference is the manner of execution.

So in with both a canned elk hunt and a cattle slaughterhouse, animals born and raised for the purpose of being killed by humans are put to death, cut up, then eaten.  And yet Americans are morally outraged at canned hunts, but unfazed by slaughterhouses.  Why?

I don’t know, but this is what I suspect: it’s because we ignore the death that produced those meat-filled styrofoam trays at the supermarket, but focus on the death associated with a canned hunt.  When most people take home 1.14 pounds of ground round from Kroger, they don’t pause to think about the once-living cow that died to produce it.  They think of food, not death.  But when Americans consider canned hunts, they imagine the death of an animal.  They reflect on the termination of a life that, but for the hunter’s actions, might have continued.  They don’t consider the elk patties that sizzled on the grill afterwards.  They think of death, not food.  And death is unpleasant, so they resent canned hunts.

Don’t get me wrong; I still hate canned hunts viscerally.  I will never, ever, participate in one.  But when I go to the grocery store and toss a pack of flank steak into my cart, I ought – if I’m being objective – to recognize that it’s about the same thing.



The foregoing arguments apply to canned hunts carried out in accordance with governmental regulations designed to ensure humane hunts and prevent the spread of disease among farmed animals.  Many canned hunts, however, are not carried out in accordance with those regulations.  Recently, authorities prosecuted a provider of illegal canned hunts, and as a result of the prosecution, video footage of several hunts became a part of the public record.  Using that footage, the Indiana Wildlife Federation – a group that opposes canned hunts but supports legitimate hunting – made this excellent and apparently objective video.

Picturebook: A Trip to Yellowstone

I turned south off of Interstate 90 at Livingston, Montana, then drove south, traveling upstream along the Yellowstone River.

I visited the park principally to see the Lamar Valley, a place about which fur trapper Osborne Russell wrote extensively in his memoirs, Journal of a Trapper.

Soda Butte and my truck are in the bottom-right of the picture.

What a beautiful damned park.

Buffalo are built to excavate snow.  They use their massive heads to sweep the snow aside, and the bone structure of their humps functions as a place to attach the muscles and tendons that support the head.  (Additionally, according to the reports of the fur trappers, the "hump ribs" made damn good eating.)

From a signboard in the Park.

Because the Lamar Valley attracts buffalo, elk, and deer in winter, it also attracts predators.  Coyotes have long been common.  Wolves were common in the trappers' days, were shot out as white people moved west, and then were reintroduced in the Park in 1995.  They have since flourished.  I saw a wolf in the valley, but he was too far away for a picture.

However, I did get close to a coyote.  Real close.  Close enough to allow Duke to talk some trash from the cab of the truck, where I'd left the window down.

Some people hunt coyotes.  I've never done it, but I'd like to, so toward that end I invested $14.99 in a set of dying-rabbit coyote calls.  The idea is that you blow into the calls in such a way as to mimic a dying rodent, hoping to lure a coyote into rifle range.  I figured that Yellowstone would be a good place to test them, so I tucked the calls into my jacket pocket.



The decision to introduce wolves to Yellowstone in 1995 was controversial.  Environmentalists, of course, loved it.  But nearby ranchers protested, fearing that wolves would spread outside of the Park and kill their cattle.  Because sometimes, animals introduced the Park don't stay there.



As I described in yesterday's post, the drive home was not uneventful.  After sundown, I slipped off the road and crashed into some trees.

That's not where the truck should be.

 The damage by daylight.  Fortunately, the camper took most of the pounding.

Truck + Trees = Thunk

I crashed the truck last night.  I had been enjoying a nice relaxing drive – darkness had fallen in Yellowstone National Park and Duke and I were heading home.  Duke was resting his chin on the console and I was listening to an audiobook about the Donner Party as we drove through the woods on a narrow, snow-covered lane.  When a truck came from the opposite direction I moved to the right to give plenty of room to pass, and I accidentally edged a tire off the pavement.  Big mistake.  The tires that remained on the snow-covered pavement didn’t have enough traction to pull the off-pavement tire back over the lip of the asphalt, so I started sliding.  Slowly, slowly slipping further down the roadside embankment.  I cut the wheels left toward the road, but that didn’t help.  Normally, as any experienced red-clay driver knows, you turn into a slide to pull out of it, but that only works if you’ve got space to slide a little further before regaining traction.  Here the bank was steep and the shoulder nonexistent.  No space.  As the narrator on the audiobook was reading excerpts from the diary of James Reed, who was bringing provisions to the stranded pioneers, it occurred to me that I was going to slide down the bank and into the trees and there wasn’t anything I could do about it.

“Shit,” I said.

The truck slid slowly, two tires still on the pavement.  I could see an orange road marker ahead and knew I would run over it.  I gripped the wheel tightly and hoped the orange marker was made of plastic.  The grille guard slammed the marker to the snow and my truck slid over it.  It thunked on the undercarriage of my truck.  “Here I met Mrs. Reed and the two children still in the mountains,” said James Reed.

Maybe, I had time to think, I should step on the gas.  I had the truck in four-wheel-drive, so maybe the front tires would get enough traction to pull me back on the road.  But I doubted it.  Likely that would only accelerate my inevitable descent into the trees and make me smack into them harder.  I looked down the bank.  Ten or twelve feet of a seriously steep descent.

“Damnit,” I said.  My left tires followed the right ones off the road.

The back end swung downhill faster while the front tires, which were still angled toward the pavement, resisted the slide.  Now I was sliding sideways.  This wasn’t good.  I watched the trees approach.  I cut the wheel into the slide so the truck wouldn’t roll over.  Even if the truck rolled, I thought, I was moving slowly enough that I probably wouldn’t be hurt.  All the same, it would be more convenient to remain upright.  “I cannot describe the death look they all had,” said James Reed in a serious voice.  If I’d known I was about to crash I would have chosen a more encouraging soundtrack.

I looked at the trees that I was about to strike.  Some were small and would probably slide under the truck without doing too much damage, but a couple were pretty big.  Too big to give way.  They might leave some nice dents.  I wished I were heading for a forest of gentle saplings instead.  All in all, events at that time were not proceeding as I would have liked.

“Shit,” I said.

“ ‘Bread! Bread!  Bread! Bread!’ was the begging of every child and grown person except my wife,” commented James Reed.  With a crunch the back of the truck struck some small trees, and the nose continued to slide downhill.  I heard the whump of another tree sliding under the side of the truck and reflected that this was probably the slowest-moving car crash I’d ever witnessed.  The nose of the truck slid until it crashed into the outward branches of a big tree.  It slowed as the branches shattered progressively, then came to rest against the trunk.  Spruce branches lay across the windshield.  The truck was still.  The engine cut off because I hadn’t pressed in the clutch.  For a split-second there was silence, then James Reed interjected, “I give to all what I dared and left for the scene of desolation and now I am camped within 25 miles which I hope to make this night . . .”

I looked at Duke.  He was resting his chin on the console, which was now uphill of him but still appeared comfortable.  By mutual agreement we shut off James Reed and relaxed for a moment before getting out to assess the damage.  In the end it wasn’t too bad – some dents and tears, but mostly on the camper.  A tow truck hauled me back up the bank, then I drove the truck back home.  On the second leg of the journey we did not listen to Reed.

 

Chinook Wind

A mountain man choosing a wintering spot wanted to pick someplace that had mild winters, or at least periodic warm spells throughout the winter.  He’d want to make a good choice for two reasons: first, a warm winter would allow him to get out of his lodge occasionally, wander around outside, and maybe kill some fresh meat to replace the dried meat he’d been eating for weeks.  Second, if he picked a bad spot, his buddies might make fun of him for years.  Captain Benjamin Bonneville, for instance, picked a bad spot to build what he envisioned as a year-round fort.  He sited it just west of modern Pinedale, Wyoming, where the winters are bitterly cold, and the fort – which he immodestly named Fort Bonneville – was abandoned the first year.  For the duration of Captain Bonneville’s stay in the west, the trappers called his construction “Fort Nonsense.”

I think Big Timber, Montana, the town just south of the cabin where I’m spending the winter, would have made a good spot.  It’s along the Yellowstone River, so there was plenty of water.  Game was likely plentiful, and there were plenty of cottonwood trees to supply bark on which horses could feed after snow covered the grass.  Best of all, throughout the winter, periodic warm Chinook winds sweep in from the northwest to warm up the valley.  A few weeks ago in this blog, I wrote about the cold.  For three or four days I don’t believe the thermometer topped 0°F.  At one point it hit -15°.  But two days ago, amid a hard west wind, the temperature rose to 40°.  Yesterday and today, it topped 50°.  John Cosgriff, whose family has ranched around Big Timber for generations, says that’s what he likes about the winters west of the Crazy Mountains – it gets cold, but every once in awhile nature cuts you a break.

Chinook winds come about this way.  When a west-moving mass of air hits the western edge of the Rockies, the mountains force the air up.  As the air moves up, it cools because the decreased atmospheric pressure at higher altitudes allows the air molecules to spread out.  This cooling of air as it rises is called “adiabatic cooling,” and it happens all the time.  But all airmasses have a temperature below which the moisture that’s locked into the air will precipitate, or condense into droplets and fall as precipitation.  The point below which moisture will precipitate in a given airmass is the airmass’s “dewpoint.”  So if west-moving air cools enough as it rises along the Rockies’ western slopes – i.e., if the adiabatic cooling is sufficient – to drop the air temperature below the dewpoint, then rain, sleet, or snow will fall.  The airmass continues to move west, but now, having dumped its moisture, the air is drier.  After the air crosses the Rockies, it descends again.  And as it descends, the atmospheric pressure on the airmasses increases, shoving the molecules closer together.  The air heats up.  This is called adiabatic heating.  And here’s what causes the Chinook wind: the rate of adiabatic temperature change is different for moist and dry air.  Moist air being forced upward cools at a rate of approximately 3.5°F every 1000 feet.  But dry air being forced downward warms at a faster rate, about 5.5°F per 1000 feet.  So when the dried-out airmass descends to the base of the Rockies on the eastern side, it becomes warmer than it was when, moisture-laden, it first climbed the mountains’ western slopes.  The dried-out, warmed-up airmass continues moving east and when it arrives in a town east of the Rockies, such as Big Timber, the townspeople call it a Chinook wind.

Two days ago, when the Chinook wind blew through.  The wind picks up around the microphone when I step from the lee side of the cabin.

I am a big fan of Chinook winds.  The warmer weather feels great; it makes me want to lace up my hiking boots and take to the hills.  Now I can go outside in just one jacket and can wear gloves instead of mittens.  If I were a cold-inured Montanan, I’d go outside in only a tee shirt.  But hey – I’m no mountain man.  I’m just writing about them.

Belly Crawling through Paradise

The night was fair and the mountain men had food.  They were happy.  Firelight flickered on the faces of an Englishman, an Irishman, and two Americans as they sat around their campfire in Hoodoo Basin in what is now Yellowstone National Park.  Hoodoo Basin was a part of the Lamar Valley, where the Lamar River trickled through the giant furrow that glaciers had plowed through the Absaroka Mountains.  The valley held elk, deer, and buffalo year-round, and the lush grass of the glacial bottom furnished good grazing for the horses.  The evergreens and aspens growing on the hillsides provided plenty of firewood.  To the north stood Hoodoo Peak at 10,500 feet, to the west Parker Peak at 10,200 feet, and to the south Polluck Peak at 11,000 feet.  Content in the lowlands, the trappers leaned back on their elbows and argued about whether England, Ireland, or the Rocky Mountains was prettiest.

“Talk of fine country,” said the Englishman.  “If you want to see a beautiful place, go to England and see the Duke of Rutland’s castle.”

“Aye,” said an Irishman, who sat across the fire from Osborne Russell, the diarist who would later publish Journal of a Trapper.  The Irishman held an elk rib in one hand, a knife in the other, and had dabs of grease at the corners of his mouth.  “If ye would see a pretty place, go to old Ireland and take a walk in Lord Farnham’s domain.”  With a greasy hand he smoothed his long hair.  “An’ if I were upon that ground this day I’d fill my body with good old whiskey.”

But the Americans would not allow it.  Russell loved the Lamar Valley, which he called “Secluded Valley.”  He returned to it time and again throughout his years in the mountains.  On this occasion, it was the other American who spoke, and, according to Russell, won the argument:

“You English and Irish are always talking about your fine countries,” he said, “but if they are so mighty fine, why do so many of you run off and leave them and come to America?”  He glared across the fire and, hearing no rejoinder, bit a mouthful of elk out of the chunk that he held.

Ninety miles north of Hoodoo Basin, I had not yet killed my supper.  Muzzleloader in hand, I climbed to the back of the mesa that overlooks Otter Creek.  Sixteen miles east of the Crazy Mountains and eleven miles north of Big Timber, Montana, this is the piece of land to which I return whenever I can.  The whitetails, I knew from experience, moved up and down Otter Creek throughout the morning.  I laid my rifle atop a short rock wall and scrambled to the top.  The top of this mesa isn’t perfectly flat.  It’s a low dome, and from where I climbed over the rock wall, the hummock of earth atop the mesa separated me from the edge overlooking the creek.  That was as I wanted it.  Any deer grazing in the creekbottoms wouldn’t be able to see me until I crept around to their side of the mesa, and at that point I’d be moving too slowly to attract their attention.  I picked up the rifle.  Before working over toward the creek, though, I’d check the hilltop.  Sometimes deer bedded down in the tall grass after feeding.

The wind blew hard across the high ground, and the tawny grasses bobbed furiously in the breeze.  I crept slowly up the side of the dome.  At each step a new sliver of land became visible over the hilltop, and after each step I paused to examine the new terrain.  I moved slowly.  This way only my eyes and the top of my head would be visible to any deer that I saw.  I wore a camouflage facemask to conceal my forehead, which has become taller and more reflective as I have gotten older.  But wisdom and hair vary inversely, I thought as I peered through the waving grass.  There was a dark blot near the edge of the mesa.  I squinted at it.  Probably a rock, but I wasn’t sure.  Lifted my binoculars.  Nope – two ears and a head.  It was a bedded doe, looking out over the flats of Otter Creek.  She hadn’t seen me.  I studied her.  Whitetail doe, good sized.  A target.  A hundred and fifty yards away.

I sank to my knees so that the hilltop screened me from the doe.  With this open-sighted muzzleloader and a deer-sized target, a hundred and fifty yards was way out of my range.  I could crawl to the top of the hill without her seeing me, I thought, but even then I’d be about a hundred yards distant.  I wanted to get within fifty yards, seventy at the most.  I envisioned the terrain between the doe and me.  After the hilltop, there was a low gully between us.  If I could reach that gully, then I could crawl up the opposite side and get a shot at her.  But reaching the gully would be a problem – once I topped the hill, I’d be in plain sight.  I could only crawl through the widely-clumped grass and hope she didn’t notice me.  No other way to do it.  The wind prevented approaching her from the opposite direction.  Maybe the grass would give enough cover.

I dropped my pack and, rifle in hand, moved toward the hilltop in a crouch.  Then I dropped to all fours until the doe came in sight again, then flattened against the earth and crawled on my stomach.  The wind was too noisy and she was too far away for her to hear me, so I crawled quickly.  I crawled ten yards or so then, when I lifted my head, saw the doe.  A hundred yards away.  She still hadn’t seen me.  I paused to look around.  There was no easy approach.  I rested my elbows in the dirt and pointed the rifle at the deer.  The front bead sight covered the whole forward half of her body.  Too far for a shot.  I’d have to crawl for the gully.

I cradled the rifle in the crook of my right arm and, swiveling at the waist, reached forward with my left elbow and right knee.  Doing so raised my butt and shoulders a little bit, but that couldn’t be helped.  I dragged the rest of my body forward by my elbow and knee, lay flat, then repeated the process by reaching forward with my opposite elbow and knee.  I found an awkward rhythm as I slid across the ground.  Butt and shoulders up, drag forward, lie flat.  Butt and shoulders up, drag forward, lie flat.  The doe was still looking out over the creek.  She hadn’t seen me yet.  Butt and shoulders up, drag forward, lie flat.  I felt a sharp pain in my knee as I crawled over a prickly pear.  But it didn’t hurt too bad, keep going.  Butt and shoulders up, drag forward, lie flat.  I could smell the dry, crumbly earth.  Vague scent of sagebrush, butt and shoulders up, drag forward, lie flat.  It really was pretty country.  Big, empty, optimistic sky above.  The snow-topped Crazy Mountains serrating the sky’s western edge, butt and shoulders up, drag forward, lie flat, and clumps of tawny grass covering the plains to the north as far as you could see.  To hell with Brits and Irishmen and their puny little islands.  Butt and shoulders up, drag forward, lie flat.  The American west, big and open, raw and untamed, unfettered by the ticky rules and norms that shrunk down a European life.  This was the place for a man to make his life.  Butt and shoulders up, drag forward, lie flat.  America, where the west was not merely a direction but an ideal that instructed us still.  Butt and shoulders up, drag forward, lie flat.  Long a magnet for wanderers, dreamers, explorers, warriors, debtors, criminals, and young guys trying to escape from office chairs.  Butt and shoulders up, drag forward, lie flat.  How had this doe not seen me yet?  I was way out in the open.  Butt and shoulders up, drag forward – and there she went.  I was still eighty-five yards away and the doe jumped up, bounded some distance, then stopped to look back.  How must I have appeared to her?  A dark shape, slithering toward her like a giant, chubby, arthritic snake with its middle section rising and falling against the ground.  No wonder she ran.  She stood broadside to me, offering the ideal angle for a shot.  I lifted my rifle and sighted at her.  With a modern scoped rifle, I could have shot her through the shoulders – a heart and lung shot – but with the muzzleloader the front bead covered most of her body.  Too far.  I lowered the rifle.  She stood looking at me for a minute or two until, tired of pondering the mysterious ground-humping snake, she walked over the edge of the mesa.  I rolled over to pluck cactus spines out of my knee.

So much for a knife in one hand, venison rib in the other.  If I were a mountain man, I’d have gone hungry.  I cleaned out the cactus spines, then stood and stretched.  I thought about breakfast.  Praise be to the modern pantry.

The view from the mesa when I went back later with Duke.  Crazy Mountains in back left; Otter Creek behind Duke's head.

[note: the events described above occurred several weeks ago]

An Unlettered People and the Pulitzer Prize

The Native Americans, in an indirect way, rewrote history.

Europe has left its marks all over the world.  The reach of European languages illustrates the influence of European cultures.  In Australia, for instance, which lies 8,500 miles away from England, the predominant language is English.  In Brazil, which lies 3,500 miles away from Portugal, the predominant language is Portuguese.  Inhabitants of Quebec speak French, even though France is 3,500 miles away, and Mexicans speak Spanish, notwithstanding the 4,750 miles that separate Mexico and Spain.  South Africans speak English, despite 5,500 intervening miles, and of course I speak English, although 4,000 miles lie between England and Georgia.  Beyond doubt, Europe has had a disproportionate impact on the world.

A natural question is: why?

For a long time, a common answer was that Europeans, who tended to be fair-skinned, had biological advantages that others did not.  Some believed that European whites were smarter than anyone else, others believed that whites had more drive, and others believed that white people were more virtuous and had thus been granted global domination by a deity who sought to reward their good conduct.  Some, like 19th century historian Francis Parkman, would conflate the theories and simply describe races in terms of their “merits”: in the American west of the 1800s, Parkman wrote, “[t]he human race . . . is separated into three divisions, arranged in the order of their merits: white men, Indians, and Mexicans.”

But an anthropological revolution was coming.  In the early 1900s, well after Parkman ranked the races, Franz Boaz was teaching anthropology in New York City.  His first great innovation was to stress fieldwork.  Instead of hypothesizing about foreign cultures from armchairs, or relying on secondhand reports of cultures by other people whose business brought them into incidental contact with foreign peoples (e.g., fur trappers), Boaz believed that an anthropologist should interact directly with the culture about which he wrote.  This was a new idea and, as it turned out, an influential one.  But it was easier for Boaz to encourage his students to do fieldwork than it had been for European anthropologists – for Boaz and his students, relatively intact Native American cultures were only a train ride away.  Without this access to Native Americans, the “fieldwork revolution” might not have occurred when it did.

Franz Boaz.  If consulted, he probably would not have chosen this picture.

The fieldwork revolution spawned another new and widely influential theory: cultural relativism.  Boaz concluded that human beings were basically the same in terms of their biological merits.  White people were not inherently smarter than Mexicans, and no more inherently virtuous than Indians.  He explained differences in the conduct of different races as results of cultural differences, not as reflections of the races’ underlying biological capabilities.  Boaz further emphasized that all cultures had value, and that none was inherently superior to another.

This new theory of cultural relativism undermined the theoretical basis for the United States’s westward expansion.  Previously, for Americans who sought an intellectual rationale for having taken the Indians’ land (and personally, I suspect such people were a minority), the doctrine of Manifest Destiny provided a justification.  Because the United States had been a more enlightened, advanced, and righteous society than the societies of the Indians, the theory went, it had been the duty of the United States to displace the natives.  But the ideas of manifest destiny and cultural relativism ran smack into each other.  How could we justify having displaced North America’s indigenous people if we weren’t any better than them?  And how to justify the suppression of their cultures if we were to believe that all cultures have value?  These were difficult questions to answer.

The theory of cultural relativism also left us with a conspicuous void in our understanding of history.  If Europeans weren’t biologically superior to other people, why had they dominated the globe?  If Europeans didn’t have inherent advantages, why did Australians speak English, Brazilians speak Portuguese, and Quebecers speak French?  Why didn’t, for instance, the Apaches build boats and take over Paris?  It was another difficult question.  Anthropologists are still fighting over the answer, but we’ve come a long way.  In 1997, Jared Diamond answered the question, at least to my satisfaction, in Guns, Germs and Steel.  The fullness of his answer is way beyond the scope of this weblog, but in sum, Diamond explained European global dominance by pointing to unique geographical advantages that Europe enjoyed over any other continent in terms of domesticable plants, domesticable animals, and readily available trade routes.  Diamond’s efforts went a long way toward filling the void of understanding surrounding European global dominance, and they won him the Pulitzer Prize.

more about the book 

buy Guns, Germs and Steel

Diamond couldn’t have won that Pulitzer if his work hadn’t filled a historical void.  That historical void wouldn’t have existed if cultural relativism hadn’t undermined manifest destiny as an explanation for European dominance.  Cultural relativism wouldn’t have undermined manifest destiny if Franz Boaz hadn’t made his anthropology students do fieldwork, and Franz Boaz couldn’t have made his students do fieldwork if intact Native American cultures hadn’t existed nearby.  In sum, I hope Jared Diamond put in a good word for the Indians in his acceptance speech.

Duke: Frontier Dog

Long before Duke hiked a leg beside his first Douglas fir, dogs had left their mark on the annals of western settlement.  Native Americans’ dogs hunted, guarded camps, and, if they misbehaved too often, provided meat for the cookpot.  Further, when the Indians moved camp, the squaws would hitch long poles to either side of a dog, then stretch a skin across the poles, creating a platform called a “travois” on which the Indians placed gear for the dog to drag.  White men also brought dogs into the Rockies.  Meriwether Lewis (he of “and Clark” fame) brought a Newfoundland named “Seaman” along on the expedition, who assisted in hunting and retrieving.  Various subsequent mountain men also kept dogs that hunted, retrieved, guarded, and provided warmth on cold nights.

Duke is not the first dog to assist in western exploration, but he is the best.  By far.  Duke is better, in fact, than all previous mountain dogs combined.  To prove this point, I will present a purely objective point-by-point comparison of Duke to a composite of all other dogs of which we have a historical record.

The competition thus begins: Duke vs. Other Dogs.

Guarding
Warren Ferris, a trapper of the 1830s, recorded an occasion on which the barking of a mountain man’s dog alerted him to the proximity of hostile Indians, allowing him to escape.  Now, Duke hardly ever barks.  The only occasion in Duke’s life when I’ve ever heard him bark was when I left him in a kennel after we’d spent a few months traveling together.  (It quickly became apparent why he barks so rarely – Duke’s bark is high-pitched and not very manly.)  But he can guard.  While Duke and I were camping in the Rockies and again in the Black Rock Desert, Duke alerted me to the presence of suspicious critters by growling into the darkness.

This may seem to give the advantage to Other Dogs, since a bark is louder than a growl.  But not so fast: Ferris also recorded an occasion on which some trappers were hiding from hostile Indians, who were prowling about the forest looking for them, when the trappers’ dog’s barking betrayed their position.  The trappers were nearly killed.  So Duke’s growl is ideal – it’s loud enough for me to hear, but not so loud as to give away our location to enemies.

Advantage: Duke

Hunting
Indians used their dogs for catching various game – squirrels, rabbits, lynx and even sometimes deer.  Meriwether Lewis’s journal reflects that Seaman supplied the party with fresh squirrels by catching and killing them.

On this point, Duke can’t compare.  Maybe because he has not missed a meal since – well, he may never have missed a meal – Duke shows little concern for chasing animals more than a few yards.  Which is just as well, because while Duke’s short legs aid him in slipping under barbed-wire fences, they do not make him fleet.  So when it comes to capturing game independently, the scorecard reads . . .

Advantage: Other Dogs

Transport
Some tribes, particularly the Shoshone, used their dogs to transport gear over the Rockies.  The dogs had to pull travois, which must have been difficult.  But Duke has also hauled gear through the mountains.  Although the modernity of Duke’s pack made things easier on him, he has one-upped the Other Dogs by hauling gear over not only one, but two mountain ranges – the Rockies and Sierras – in addition to the Black Rock Desert.

Advantage: tie

Warmth
When the nights got bitter cold and there wasn’t much fuel for the fire, the mountain men slept close to their dogs for warmth.  In the coldest camping that I’ve done – camping in the Sierras in early November – I had plenty of clothes and a goose down sleeping bag, so I didn’t need to sleep too close to Duke.  That would seem to give an advantage to Other Dogs.  But when I slept outside the tent, as in the Black Rock Desert, Duke showed himself to be a first-rate cuddler.  He will lie wherever you place him, doesn’t move much, and as long as you don’t make him sleep on his back, he does not snore.  He also does not stink.

Advantage:  tie

Retrieving
Seaman did some retrieving for the Lewis and Clark expedition.  He retrieved beaver for the hunters and, on one occasion, retrieved a wounded deer that had bounded into a river.

Duke is not strong enough to pull a deer out of a river.  But retrieving is Duke’s art.  He can retrieve objects he detects by smell, like a grouse lying camouflaged in the brush, or objects that he sees, like a duck lying dead on the water.  If there are several objects that he might retrieve, you can specify which one you want him to bring to you.  If you want him to run in a certain direction before looking for something to retrieve, he can do that.  Few dogs of any era can match him.  Seaman may have been stronger than Duke, but when it comes to precision, Duke blows Seaman out of the water.  And how often do you really need to fish a wounded deer out of a river?  C’mon.

Advantage: Duke

Food
The Indians sometimes ate their dogs, and considered the meat a delicacy.  When trappers visited native tribes and their hosts threw feasts in their honor, dog was often on the menu.  Generally, the trappers found the meat pleasant.

I’m not going to eat Duke.  This is a stupid question.  Who comes up with these categories?

Advantage: not applicable

Companionship
Many of the Indians’ dogs were mean, at least to the white trappers who visited their camps.  Both Warren Ferris and Francis Parkman noted that when visiting native camps, they had to beat back the mongrels who snarled and snapped at them.  This may have been only because the dogs weren’t used to white men, but who said it’s okay for dogs to be racists?

We have no good record of Seaman’s disposition, but we do have some drawings of his likeness.  And Seaman was just not as good-looking as Duke.  Look at the picture below.  Note the nondescript hair, featureless sides, and stubby nose – he looks like Grendel’s cousin.  On the other hand, look at Duke.  Finely-shaped head, gleaming coat, friendly expression, intelligent eyes.  No contest.

Duke is not a racist, unlike the Native Americans’ dogs, and he’s much better looking than Seaman.  Therefore . . .

Advantage: Duke

Embassary of Peace
Most frontier dogs have been aggressive, barking as newcomers approached and snarling at them after they arrived.  But Duke is a peacemaker.  I remember when Duke and I were hitchhiking along Gray’s River, where Wyoming law makes hitchhiking illegal and National Forest rules forbid Forest employees from giving rides.  But a Forest biologist stopped for Duke and me.  Or more precisely, she stopped for Duke.  “I wouldn’t have picked you up if it weren’t for your dog,” she said.

Advantage: Duke.

Attracting Women
Not even close.  Duke wins.

Advantage: Duke


So, Duke dominates.  By a score of 5-1, Duke is the greatest frontier dog of all time.

Duke beside a statue of his now-vanquished and much larger opponent, Seaman.  Bismarck ND.

Benefits of a Y Chromosome

It was a good time to be a guy.  In most Plains Indian tribes, a warrior had to be a good enough shot with a bow or musket to bring down a deer, and a good enough horseman to ride his horse among a herd of stampeding buffalo.  A guy also needed to be brave and tough, so that he could fight with the enemy and endure the pain of wounds if necessary.  This was because the principal duties of a warrior were hunting and fighting.  Neither was an incredibly taxing pursuit: the Indians generally enjoyed hunting, and they had the good sense not to engage in the brutal, combat-to-the-death battles for which European armies are famed.  When not hunting or warring, a warrior was free to sit around with his buddies, gambling, swapping lies, and smoking the pipe.  In such pursuits did a warrior spend much of his time.  The squaws’ work, on the other hand, was tiresome, drudging, and seemingly neverending.  When a warrior killed a buffalo, most of the work in cleaning the carcass and preparing the hide fell to the women.  So too with cooking and caring for the young.  So too with making clothing, keeping the lodge clean, and jerking meat.  The squaws were also tasked with taking down the lodges when the Indians moved camps, transporting much of the gear, and re-erecting the lodge when the tribe reached the next place that the men had selected.  When visitors arrived at camp, the warriors’ duties including smoking the pipe with the newcomers and making long speeches that recounted old battles and told how brave the speaker had been.  The squaws, on the other hand, had to fix food for the visitors and prepare a place of lodging.  Moreover, if you were a guy, things only got better as you got older.  As a warrior aged, he was relieved hunting and fighting, and had only to sit around camp and offer his opinion on such subjects as caught his interest -- a task at which old men have always excelled.  But when a squaw got old, her husband was likely to take a younger wife, the new wife was likely to become the warrior’s favorite, and the older squaw was likely to have to perform the harder household work that the younger squaw got away with shirking.  More than one white visitor to Indian tribes recorded the ferocity with which old squaws could nag their husbands.  The warriors often paid them no mind.  It was a good time to have a Y chromosome.




A buddy of mine emailed this joke to me recently:

Indian Chief Two Eagles was asked by a white government official, "You have observed the white man for 90 years. You've seen his wars and his technological advances. You've seen his progress, and the damage he's done."

 The Chief nodded in agreement.

The official continued, "Considering all these events, in your opinion, where did the white man go wrong?"

The Chief stared at the government official for over a minute and then calmly replied. "When white man find land, Indians running it, no taxes, no debt, plenty buffalo, plenty beaver, clean water. Women did all the work, Medicine man free. Indian man spend all day hunting and fishing; all night having sex."Then the chief leaned back and smiled.  "Only white man dumb enough to think he could improve system like that."

Pretty Mandan maiden.

Mentally challenged but self-confident warrior prepares to slay enemies with boat paddle.

The Modernity of Cruelty

Around Thanksgiving, someone asked me what Cormac McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men was about. I should have just answered that it was about a guy who stumbles onto the scene of a drug deal gone bad, wanders among the wreckage and dead bodies, finds a bag of money, then spends the remainder of the novel eluding a hit-man sent to kill him while a good-hearted old Texas sheriff tries to save him. That would have been interesting. But, possibly because my present project requires me to think of myself as a writer, I felt compelled to expound upon the theme. “It’s about . . . well, let’s see. It’s about the way that the extreme ferocity of modern crime and the viciousness of some people nowadays is without precedent. How it didn’t used to be that way. And how an old sheriff in Texas just has to throw up his hands, because the crimes happening in America today aren’t like the crimes that he used to work on as a young man. Modern crime has passed him by so . . . so, it’s like this isn’t a country for old men anymore.” That’s what I said. Most likely, my attempt to sound smart was driven not only by a desire to sound writerly, but by the proximity of a pretty girl. Which is understandable. But whether I was motivated by my self-image or the impulse to show off, I said that the modern world was meaner than it used to be.


But history doesn’t support that statement. Cruelty is confined neither to modern times nor to American culture. For historical examples of cruelty , we need look no further than the young girls burned at the stake as witches in the 16- and 1700s. For cruelty outside of American culture, we can look to the many Native American tribes in the 1800s that tortured their captives, white and Indian alike, in various horrible ways. Burning at the stake was one of them.

Modern American culture can be, at times, a culture of self-flagellation. That’s especially true where Native Americans are concerned. And certainly, America has much to be sorry for in its treatment of Indians – lying to the Indians, cheating them, nearly exterminating their food sources, and in places slaughtering their women and children. None of that is excusable. For many years, some Americans justified these actions by dehumanizing the Indians. That shows a serious lack of judgment. Objectivity required that America recognize that its treatment of Native Americans was wrong. But in some ways, we have lately overreacted in the opposite direction. Now there are some who will excoriate Americans, but admit no imperfection in Native American cultures. That viewpoint also lacks objectivity. The best way to remember the past is the way that it actually occurred: many Indians tortured their captives in horrendous ways. That does not excuse America’s conduct toward Native Americans, but nor does it permit the conclusion that horrible cruelty is a modern American invention.

Some Plausible Excuse

All people may feel it, but none more strongly than Americans.  It colors the fiber of our beings, ineradicable and indispensable, like the blue in a pair of jeans.  We inherited it from our cultural ancestors, who crossed the Atlantic to a land they knew little about, and it found expression in the westward push of the culture that those emigrants forged.  To the Appalachians, then over them; to the Mississippi, then the Rocky Mountains; to the Sierra Nevadas, then the Pacific.  Always onward.  In this country, “west” is not only a direction but a dream.  The urge to roam.  It is impossible, I think, for any red-blooded American to not at some point look across the hills to a broad unexplored horizon and think “damn, I’d like to go.”

 Western North Dakota.

I stood in western North Dakota, looking south over the gullied, snow-spotted prairie and watching the sun set when the impulse struck me, as it often does, to go.  I’ve been lucky to do more than my share of wandering, but still the urge doesn’t let me alone.  To drive off in a well-provisioned truck with no itinerary, as did John Steinbeck, or to “throw some tea and bread into an old sack and jump the back fence,” as did John Muir.  That’s the stuff of daydreams.  Or to catch your horse and ride into the snow-capped backbone of the continent.  That was the stuff of the Rocky Mountain trappers.

The trappers’ reasons weren’t unusual, fancy, or foreign to you and me.  They wanted to roam.  Would-be travelers from around the world poured into St. Louis in the 1830s, waiting for a westbound expedition that they could join.  Some were poor, others rich; some unlettered, some with college degrees; some experienced outdoorsmen, some who had never fired a rifle at game.  But all shared a common dream of covering wild country.  Which trapping company did they prefer?  It didn’t matter.  What part of the Rockies did they hope to visit?  Not important.  When would they return?  A detail to be worked out later.  Wanderlust is not a need that can wait for the morrow.

And so I am going to get back in the truck and drive.




Westward! Ho! It is the sixteenth of the second month A. D. 1830. and I have joined a trapping, trading, hunting expedition to the Rocky Mountains. Why, I scarcely know, for the motives that induced me to this step were of a mixed complexion, - something like the pepper and salt population of this city of St. Louis. Curiosity, a love of wild adventure, and perhaps also a hope of profit, - for times are hard, and my best coat has a sort of sheepish hang-dog hesitation to encounter fashionable folk - combined to make me look upon the project with an eye of favour. The party consists of some thirty men, mostly Canadians; but a few there are, like myself, from various parts of the Union. Each has some plausible excuse for joining, and the aggregate of disinterestedness would delight the most ghostly saint in the Roman calendar. Engage for money! no, not they; health, and the strong desire of seeing strange lands, of beholding nature in the savage grandeur of her primeval state, - these are the only arguments that could have persuaded such independent and high-minded young fellows to adventure with the American Fur Company in a trip to the mountain wilds of the great west. But they are active, vigorous, resolute, daring, and such are the kind of men the service requires. The Company have no reason to be dissatisfied, nor have they. Everything promises well. No doubt there will be two fortunes apiece for us. Westward! Ho!

                                                                      -Warren Ferris, St. Louis, 1830

A Touch of Modernity

Modernity can set you back.

Awhile back, my uncle sent me a replica muzzleloading rifle that he built from a kit some years ago.  It’s a Hawken plains rifle, and in 1833, it would have been the finest gun a mountain man could have hoped to carry.  It is still an aesthetically pleasing rifle.  It is short but well-balanced, so that it seems to rise naturally to your shoulder and remain steady when aimed.  It has a blued octagon barrel, graciously-shaped hammer, filigreed lock, a dark wooden stock and brass trimmings.  Small wonder that the Hawken plains rifle (like the Model 1894 Winchester that I wrote about last month) has become an American classic.  It is often said to be the most copied weapon in the history of firearms.

The lock on the Hawken.

But if a gun won’t shoot it’s nothing but a bulky paperweight, so the first thing I did was load up the gun and start blasting lead into the trees in the yard.  And the Hawken can do that effectively.  It is fun to shoot.  With blackpowder, there’s a gratifying ka-pow sound, unlike the sharper crack of a modern rifle, and a big plume of smoke and the smell of rotten eggs.  When you shoot a blackpowder rifle, you feel like you’ve done something.  But with repetitive firing, the drawbacks of a muzzleloading gun were quickly evident.  It was taking me several minutes after firing the gun until I was ready to shoot again.

Loading and firing the Hawken.

Shooting the Hawken at night.

Part of the problem, of course, is inherent in a muzzleloader.  It takes time to measure powder, pour it down the barrel, set a patch and ball on top of the muzzle, ram them down the bore, cock the hammer, and replace the percussion cap.  An experienced rifleman in the 1800s, using pre-measured powder, could fire 2-3 shots per minute.  But I wasn’t even coming close to that.

Another part of the problem was that blackpowder, in addition to sounding really cool when it explodes, making awesome clouds of smoke, and looking totally sweet when you shoot it at night, creates lots of barrel fouling.  Instruction manuals on shooting muzzleloaders note the problem.  After firing, the powder sticks in the bore – that is, the inside of the barrel – and it’s hard to ram the next patch and ball down the barrel because the stuck powder effectively diminishes the diameter of the bore.  In most rifles, that meant that after every 3 or so shots, the shooter had to use the ramrod and a piece of cloth to wipe the bore clean.  With a particularly tight-fitting patch and ball combination, the shooter might have to wipe the powder residue out of the bore more often.  I had to clean the bore every other shot, and even then getting the second ball seated atop the powder charge was difficult.  I ended up swabbing the bore every time I pulled the trigger.

Blackpowder, I had read, was also highly corrosive.  After every shooting session, you had to clean the bore completely.  That meant disassembling the rifle, submerging the barrel in soap and hot water, pumping a cloth up and down inside the barrel to clean it, then rinsing the barrel out and, after it dried, running a solvent-covered patch down the bore.  That process, I found out after sinking lead balls into the trunks of the nearest trees, took a long time.  Twenty minutes or so.  And that set me to thinking: I don’t believe the mountain men did this.  They kept their rifles loaded almost all the time.  Many of them slept with their rifles.  They were not near bathtubs with hot water taps, so I know they weren’t unloading the guns for cleaning every night.  But I’d never heard of a mountain man’s barrel rusting out.  Moreover, when hunting buffalo or fighting with Indians, the mountain men often fired several rounds in succession.  I had never heard of them pausing to swab their bores while galloping in the middle of a buffalo herd or hunkered behind a fallen log with arrows flying overhead.  It didn’t add up.

So it was an ah-hah moment when I read about non-petroleum-based solvents.  Apparently what really causes the extreme fouling that I had experienced in the Hawken was not simply blackpowder, but the way that blackpowder interacts with petroleum.  Blackpowder only fouls the rifle so badly as to require swabbing between shots if your bore is coated with petroleum, and only becomes so corrosive as to require daily cleaning if it interacts with a petroleum-based lubricant.  With non-petroleum-based lubricants and solvents you don’t have to follow such an aggressive maintenance schedule.  The mountain men didn’t have petroleum-based products because the purportedly superior oils hadn’t been invented yet.  I ordered some non-petroleum-based material from Thompson-Center, the manufacturer of the rifle.  In keeping with the unacknowledged sexual innuendo that pervades the argot of blackpowder shooting – “before you cock the gun, put the ball just inside the hole and push really hard with the ramrod” – the substance was called, apparently without a sense of irony, “Natural Lube 1000 Plus.”  Most muzzleloader shooters, I guess, are above making sophomoric jokes about the language of their sport.  But in any case, the modern stuff was disadvantageous and the old-fashioned lubricant works better.   It makes it easier to slide the ramrod all the way in.

Walking the Creek on a Charmed Winter Day

I stepped onto Otter Creek, my bootheel slipped, and I almost landed on my butt.  After a moment of waving my arms as though I were designing an aircraft that would use dual propellers, I caught my balance.  Where the snow hadn’t accumulated, I noted sagaciously, the ice was slick.  Ideal traveling footwear might have been golf shoes, or at least boots with crampons, but my rubber-bottomed Muck Boots weren’t meant for this.  I took a deep breath and gathered myself.  This icy patch was big – about twenty feet long.  An idea.  I pushed off and crouched over my boots to see how far I could slide.  Four or five feet.  Pretty cool.  I attempted a moonwalk as Duke watched with perked ears from the bank.  If Duke had known anything about dancing he would have been embarrassed, but that’s why people keep dogs.  They keep their criticism to themselves.

It was a glorious winter day.  The temperature had risen to a balmy 10°, so Duke and I were out for a walk.  He wasn’t sure about the ice.  I crossed to the far side of the creek and called him.  Duke ran along the bank, looking for a way to reach me without stepping on the ice, but of course there was no way to cross the creek without crossing it.  But dogs are empirical learners, and even tautologies do not impress them, so Duke had to find out for himself.  At length satisfied that the creek was indeed a lengthy obstacle that would require direct confrontation, he stepped gingerly to the ice’s edge and sniffed it.  He put his front paws on the creek and paused.

“Don’t be such a wuss,” I called.  “Come on.”

Reluctantly he stepped onto the ice.  His paws spread wide and his claws pressed against the slick surface.  Eyes on the ice, paws clicking, he scuttled toward me.  He scuttled right past and did not turn around until he’d reached the bank behind me.  I congratulated him on his bravery, he congratulated me on not busting my ass, and we proceeded downstream.



Otter Creek is a highway for animals moving through the area.  It runs the entire length of the parcel, and deer moving between fields commonly stay in the creekbed where they’re hard to spot unless, like I do when I’m hunting, you sit atop a nearby hill and peer down with binoculars.  In places you can see their trail along the bank.  After I moved a few yards downstream a thin layer of snow covered the creek and the footing was more secure.  I met with a set of coyote tracks – the only other animal besides me to walk over the ice since the snow, apparently.  The coyote had stayed on the ice, veering at times toward one bank or the other.  Probably to sniff for moles or muskrats.  Around a bend the regular spacing of the canine prints stopped and beside a cluster of paw prints was a pile of scat.  Duke, who had at length decided that travel on the snowed-over sections of ice was safe, sniffed the excrement and freshened it with a few drops of his own scent before trotting ahead.

In winter, the mountain men might also have used a thoroughfare like this.  When forced to find a way through unfamiliar terrain without the benefit of a trail, the mountain men struggled nearly as much as I had when hiking off-trail in the Rockies and Sierras.  In his narrative of his years as a fur trapper, Warren Ferris left no doubt that he preferred following trails.  When there was no established route, he wrote about following alongside serpentine streambeds, getting hemmed in by rocky bluffs, being slowed down by interlocking fallen trees, skirting hair-raising precipices, skittering across recently-avalanched rocks that tumbled downhill when dislodged.  Retracing steps was common.  “Had I followed a guide,” he once wrote, “no doubt much fatigue, danger and distance, would have been avoided, but ignorant as I was of the proper route, I was compelled to follow the tortuous course of the river; often to retrace my steps, and seek a more practicable passage, from some abrupt precipice, or perpendicular descent . . .”  On one occasion Ferris followed up a day of easy traveling on which he’d made 28 miles with a day when he had to find his own trail and made only 6 miles.  No doubt a wide, flat route like Otter Creek would have satisfied Ferris immensely.  I recalled spots in the Salt River Range and the Wasatch Front where I’d followed the courses of not-yet-frozen streams and wished I could just walk through the water.  An iced-over stream like this made for ideal traveling.

It really was a charmed day.  Along the bank Duke and I flushed two sharptailed grouse, who burst into the air with the sounds of small helicopters taking off, and in an opening in the ice I saw several four- or five-inch trout working to stay in place in the fast-moving water.  They darted under the ice at my approach and I knelt beside the opening to see if they would reappear.  The trout could travel in the streams the whole year, I thought with envy.  As I waited on the trout I looked at the sky to judge the time before sunset.  A flock of Canada geese was passing above, a massive line of black dots sweeping above the earth, the shape of their formation ever-changing but always maintaining one or two points, the birds arrayed at a forty-five degree angle behind the lead bird, some geese flying behind the line then catching up to take their places, others dropping back to take up a position elsewhere.  In minutes they covered distances that would take me hours to traverse.  I felt an envy that is probably as old as imagination.

“But they can’t moonwalk,” I said to Duke.

You can’t either, he thought but did not say.