The Lost Get-Back Boogie

“You’re probably late with your load, Carl,”

Mr. Riordan said.

“Don’t worry about that. I want to see you put them things in the creek. Do you have to club them in the head first and carry them down on the end of a shovel?” The driver giggled from the truck window with the cigar stub in the center of his teeth.

“You have a hot dinner waiting for you at home, Carl. Don’t make your wife throw it out in the backyard again.”

“You want me to help you with them things, in case they start biting your tires all to pieces?” the driver said.

“Tell him to get fucked,” I said.

Mr. Riordan looked at me with a sharp, brief expression, then picked up the two sawed-off broom handles that we used to put through the cages and carry them to the stream.

“Better put them in here, because the creek is dryer than a popcorn fart higher up,” the driver said. “In fact, I seen a couple of them rats walking up the road carrying a canteen.”

Mr. Riordan pushed the broom handles through the first cage, and we lifted it out of the pickup bed and carried it down the incline toward the beaver pond. The truck driver was still giggling behind us; then we heard him turn over his engine and shift into gear. We walked over the pine needles through the short trees, the nutrias tumbling over one another in the cage and gnawing with their buck teeth on the wood handles.

“Why do you take it off them?” I said.

“He’s a harmless man. He means nothing by it.”

“I don’t know how you define son of a bitch around here, but it seems to me that you have an awful lot of them.”

“They’re afraid.”

“Of what, for God’s sake?”

“The people who control their livelihood. All the eastern money that gives them a job and tells them at the same time that they’re working for themselves and some pioneer independent spirit. They tried to organize unions here during the depression, and they got locked out until they begged to work. So they think that any change is trouble, and they’ve told themselves that for so long now that they’ve come to believe it.”

“You have more tolerance than I do.”

“I imagine that you made the same type of realizations in growing up in the South, or you would have left it a long time ago,” he said.

He set his end of the cage down by the edge of the pond and began to roll a cigarette, his gray eyes focused intently on the quiet swell of water around the pile of dead and polished cottonwoods and pines that had been cut through at the base of the trunks by beavers until they toppled into the center of the creek. The wood had turned bone white from sun and rot, and tree worms had left their intricate designs in the smooth surface after the bark had cracked and shaled away in the current. On each side of the pile, two feet under the current, were burrowed openings where the beavers could enter and then surface into a dry, sheltered domed fortress. Behind the dam, where the gnawed stumps of the cottonwoods protruded from the water and formed a swift eddy against the surface, cutthroat trout, brookies, and Dolly Vardens balanced themselves against the pebble bottom, drifting sideways momentarily when food floated downstream toward them, their color a flash of ivory-tipped fins and gold and gills roaring with fire.

I unhooked the cage door and tilted the cage upward into the pond. At first the nutrias clung to the wire mesh with their strange, webbed feet; then they clattered over one another and splashed into the water, their pelts beaded with light. They turned in circles, their red eyes like hot bbs, then swam toward the log pile.

“I don’t think the beavers are going to like these guys,” I said.

“Then one of them will move,” Mr. Riordan said.

I looked at him to see if there was a second meaning there. If there was, it didn’t show in the rigid profile and the lead-gray eyes that were still focused intently on the pond.

“You see those grouse tracks on the other side?” he said. “There haven’t been grouse up this creek since I was a boy. Two years ago I turned some blues loose about fifty yards from here, and they still water at this hole.”

He dropped the cigarette stub from his fingers into the shallows, as though it were an afterthought, and we got back in the pickup and started down the grade in second gear. Through the pines bordering the road I could see the blue immensity of the valley and the metallic sheen of the Bitterroot River winding through the cottonwoods.

“I’ll buy you a steak at the Fort Owen Inn,” he said.

“You don’t owe me anything.”

“You better take advantage of it. I don’t do this often. Besides, I’ll show you the place where the Montana vigilantes hanged old Whiskey Bill Graves.”

“I’ll bet some of the locals put a monument up there.”

He cleared his throat and laughed. “How did you know?”

“I just guessed,” I said.