The Wild Marsh (56 page)

These dogs deserve all the birds the world can throw at them, I tell myself, particularly in light of the long and impending off-season. Given a choice of extra sleep or giving your dogs one more hunt, only a cretin would choose sleep.

"All I want," I explain to Elizabeth and the girls, aware of how much I sound like a child petitioning Santa Claus, "is the sight of one rooster against blue sky, with new snow behind him. I don't even need to hit it: I just want a good point, and the sight of a brilliant rooster against the snow, and then rising higher, into that blue sky."

Elizabeth and the girls have been out with me and know what I mean. They do not hold this image as intensely as I do (just as I in turn do not hold it as intensely as, say, the dogs), but they know what I mean. They've seen it, and though Elizabeth in particular shakes her head and says it's crazy to work so hard for such a brief image—one I've already seen, countless times, and will surely see again and again—she does not think it's so crazy as to try to argue me out of it, and instead only cautions me to drive carefully.

I get off to a slow start, creeping down the untracked roads, sipping coffee, the dogs warm and excited in the front seat, and the snow still falling so heavily, and in such large flakes, that peering through the windshield, it feels to me as if we are suspended in one of those little glass globes that you can shake up to agitate the artificial snow within, and I wonder idly if it's possible to construct one of those little globes so that bright roosters likewise flutter
through the snow, rising from thick cattails even as all the snow is descending.

Memories are strong, photographs are beautiful, but nothing will do for me but the real thing.

I have traveled less than a dozen miles in solitary wonder before encountering another pilgrim, a traveler less fortunate than I who has plowed headlong into a snowdrift sometime earlier—his truck is shrouded with a night's worth of snow—and as I pass, believing his vehicle's misfortune to be days old, I'm surprised to see him step from the truck, rumple-haired, flagging me down.

I'm the first person that's gone past, he says; he's been here five hours. For a couple of hours he tried digging out, clawing at the snow with his hands, lacking a shovel, but finally he became drenched and decided to quit and change into a dry set of clothes so that he didn't become hypothermic, and to wait for someone to pass by.

He's a Bible salesman from New Jersey, it turns out, wandering down from out of Canada on some convoluted and lonely-sounding sojourn. He's all out of Bibles but still has a few boxes of grapefruit and oranges, which he offers me as repayment for the bother of my time. I thank him but tell him that where I'm going, they'd freeze for sure.

I crawl under his truck, and then mine, fastening my old tow rope—he's all but clueless about such matters—but tugging his back end uphill, as the cant of his truck forces me to do (the front is swallowed almost entirely by the snowdrift), I'm unable to get enough bite and torque to free him, though I snatch and jerk again and again until we're both risking whiplash. I can almost get him out, but not quite.

Neither of us has a shovel—it's still too early in the year for us to be fully equipped; always, winter catches me by surprise, as if, by my not fully preparing, I can somehow stall its arrival—so we're clawing with sticks and empty coffee cans at the snow in front of his truck, with the resigned hopelessness of prisoners trying to dig an escape tunnel with nothing more than a soupspoon, when the headlights of another truck appear.

I've been fooling with the salesman's truck for about an hour by
this point—an hour I don't have to spare—so I'm extra chagrined when the truck passes by us without even stopping to inquire whether we need help or not. For some strange reason, however, I hold off from making a judgment—so unlike me—and my virtue is rewarded a few moments later when the truck, its occupants perhaps having reconsidered, turns around and comes driving back down the hill.

It's a truck full of lion hunters—they don't have time to spare, either—but they get out and visit for a while. They've got several hounds in the back of their truck, and it strikes me as an odd juxtaposition, the three groups of us moving around on the mountain beneath the cover of darkness and snowfall, as if in some netherworld, while the rest of the citizenry sleeps: a Bible salesman with his crates of grapefruit in Montana, and two trucks filled with hounds. As if only in the middle of the night, and in the midst of a blizzard, are such travelers willing to emerge from that lower, secret world and move about in the realms of the upper world...

By hooking their chain to the back of my truck, and then my yellow tow rope to the back of the salesman's truck after connecting it to a longer chain owned by the lion hunters, we're able to generate enough pulling power in tandem like that to ease him out of the drift, although in the process, my tow rope has gotten knotted and is cinched so tight from the force generated by our pulling that we have to cut the knot where it was fastened to the lion hunters' chain. This leaves a scrap of bright yellow embedded in their rusty chain, like a marker, a memento, of their good deed.

We part ways, then—the lion hunters heading north and west, and me and my bird dogs, south and east—and though I would rather have not had to stop, it's a code of the north, and, I suspect, a code of any place that still has any kind of identity at all, that when someone's in trouble, you stop and help.

 

It's slow going, even slower than I'd planned. I have to stop for gas in Libby—what a recent miracle the twenty-four-hour gas pumps are, the ones that accept credit cards, even at gas pumps far out in the hinterlands; in the old days, not so long ago, night travelers in the outback had to plan their gas stops around big cities—and
then, twenty miles farther, I have to stop again to let the dogs exercise and void, lest their rumbling, hissing flatulence asphyxiate me.

They take their sweet time wandering around in the hard-falling snow before finally settling into the obligatory hunker, like twin yard ornaments, and then we are on our way again, later than ever; and after only twenty more miles, my oil pressure drops—evidently some leaked through the valves the other evening while my truck was perched lightly on the side of the cliff—and twenty miles beyond that, I must stop yet again to retighten the lug nuts, which are nearly unspun, causing all four wheels to wobble lugubriously, and it is clear to me now that the party, the dawn party of bright roosters, moving at first light, will be starting without me—without us.

By midmorning we are nearing the Divide, traveling along the eastern boundary of Glacier National Park, and making pretty good time—the road is plowed and sanded—and as I pass through the town of West Glacier, I notice the Amtrak cars idling there, off-loading a few passengers and taking on a few new ones, and I have the wish, not for the first time, that Amtrak would travel directly to my hunting place, and that the dogs could travel on it with me, so that we could sleep, or so that I could ride in relaxation, reading a paperback, perhaps, and looking out the window at the beautiful winter scenery without having to worry about staying on the road.

For the next fifty miles or so, the train and I seem to engage in a push-and-pull game of tag—the train catching and passing me occasionally, tracking a straighter line along the other side of the Flathead River, though with me usually catching it and then passing it again, on the straightaways—and I cannot help but imagine that there is some passenger on the train who is noticing my truck, with the dogs in the back, thinking,
Aha, the lucky devil is going hunting this beautiful blue winter day,
just as I am thinking of the train's passengers,
Aha, how nice to be simply riding, without worrying about anything.

And although I recognize it as silly, even immature at best, after a while I discover that there's a part of me that wants to stay ahead of the train, even if only by a minute or two. I know, it's ridiculous! And I'm not going to compromise my safety—our safety (often while driving with the dogs I find myself aware of how they aren't
wearing seat belts)—but on the straightaways, well, I don't lollygag, but ease down on the accelerator; and if I'm a hundred or so yards ahead of the train, I soon realize that I'm trying to maintain or even increase that distance; and if I'm a hundred or so yards behind, I'm trying—within the limits of safety, certainly—to close that distance.

It's not anything as serious as a competition—I'm not
that
immature. Instead, it's more like a kind of an awareness, is all: something to rouse me from the postdawn torpor of all-night driving.

And on the train, is that hypothetical passenger, or passengers, likewise urging the train on?

Not far from the summit at Marias Pass, we hit another straightaway, the train and I, and I'm able to pull ahead again, and to improve the margin of my lead, so much so that the train isn't even in sight any longer, and I drive along feeling strangely better.

I don't want the season to ever end. I don't like the feeling of being left behind, and I don't like things ending.

I'm so far ahead of the train now—a mile? two miles?—that I can't even see it in my rearview mirror, and soon enough, it's all but forgotten, as if but a trifle. I'm bored again, trying to stay sharp and awake, and begin fiddling with my daughter's CD Walkman, trying to get it to play. (There aren't any radio stations up in the mountains—not even the narcoleptic stock and farm reports—and my truck's tape player hasn't worked for three years now.)

The disc—Gillian Welch's sleepy, wonderful
Time (The Revelator)
—is skipping on the bumpy road, and I glance down for a second to make sure I haven't bumped the Pause button. When I look up again the view through the windshield is of nothing but a wall of snow spraying up over the windshield—immediately, all around me, there's a muffled silence that tells me that although I'm still moving, I'm not on the road anymore. And then we are sinking, descending, and there is blue winter light all around us, and we come to a stop—the dogs, jolted by the impact, rouse themselves from their naps and look at me as if wondering whether it's time to go hunting, finally—and when the snow spray finally clears, I'm surprised at how far off the road I am.

I shift down into four-wheel low and attempt to back out, but
it's pointless, I'm buried up to the headlights, and resting atop another four feet of snow, below the wheels—and so I burrow into the snow beneath the truck and begin attaching the tattered yellow tow rope to the frame, so that it will be ready to fasten to the chain of the first Samaritan who happens along.

It's not too long of a wait. The train passes first—though I can see no passengers through the small window portals, I wave anyway—and not long after that, a truck driven by two men working for the railroad passes by, and stops.

One man is my age, the other, much younger, and they're dressed in heavy coveralls and are sipping steaming coffee from insulated cups. Their truck—the Burlington Northern's truck—is a big, new, fancy one, and they've got a super-long new tow rope, which they loop on to mine.

I buckle up, start my truck, put it in reverse, and then experience the strange and resurrection-like feeling of being uprooted from all that snow, tugged free with immense power; and just like that, I'm out, my extraction nearly as smooth and effortless as my entrance.

Once again, my tow rope is knotted inextricably around theirs, and so I saw the rope off again, leaving another little butterfly tuft of gilding on their rope, a remnant marker—like some strange kind of Montana-winter chain letter, I think, on either side of the Divide, so that soon enough, at this rate, many Samaritans will be wearing fragments of this yellow rope on their own tow chains, and their own tow ropes, both the pullers and the pullees—and I thank and shake hands with the two railroad employees and then continue on my way, hoping to make it to the plains now by noon in order that the dogs and I might at least have half a day of hunting before turning right around and heading back.

 

Eventually, I'm over the pass and sailing down the back side of the Divide, to the Atlantic. The plains are gold below me, bathed in sun, beneath pale blue windy-winter's skies, and the roads are scoured free of snow so that I'm able to make better time, quicker time—stopping only once, to give those cliff-tipped valves another transfusion of thirty-weight—and before I know it, the Sweetgrass
Hills are in view on my left, sugar-topped above the gold stubble that surrounds them, and on my right, the incomparable Front Range, perhaps the grandest view in North America. Bravo to Senator Max Baucus for his attempt to protect it from being developed into yet another oil and gas field; bravo to ex-Lewis and Clark National Forest supervisor Gloria Flora for withdrawing these public lands from oil and gas leasing. How a damaged world needs heroes.

We drive right up to our honey hole of yore, visit with the rancher, Tom, his foreman, Steve, for a while, and their words are like a sweet and rare kind of music—yes, there are plenty of birds this year, but no, there haven't been many hunters, because the hunting was so poor early on that people just stopped trying.

Always, I have to run little Point first. He simply won't tolerate letting Superman hunt first; if I don't take him first, he howls, whirls in circles on the front seat, scent-marks the steering wheel, tears at the upholstery with his claws, then begins biting and tearing the door apart in an attempt to tunnel out to freedom and glory.

This year, the birds aren't there: no scat, no tracks, no scent, though it doesn't even really matter; it's great just to be striding the snowy fields, and for Point to be charging through them, scampering, casting left and right; and with such a modest goal as wanting to see only one bird, one rooster, sky borne, there's always the possibility that we can accomplish that goal at any moment. Just one bird, and no matter whether a cagey old veteran that holds tight, knowing the hunters and dogs sometimes pass on by, or a foolish young bird, believing that because he is hidden, he is safe.