The Lost Get-Back Boogie

However, Beth had no such reservations. She was a real Montana girl. While I was holding an unlit cigarette and cup of coffee in my hands and thinking about striking a match (my dead army friend from Texas, Vern Benbow, used to say that a deer can see you fart from six miles), Beth slipped the sling of the Enfield up her left arm, eased the buckle tight, pushed a shell into the chamber, and lay on the tarp in a prone position. The sun had started to dip behind the line of trees on the next ridge, and the light fell out in long bands of scarlet on the valley floor.

“You know how to use iron sights at a distance like that?” I said.

“Be quiet. They’re coming down in a minute,” she said. The hood of her coat was back on her shoulders, and her black hair was covered with snow crystals.

“You’re frightening, woman.” But she wasn’t listening. She was aimed into the other side of the valley, her white hands numb with cold, those wonderful breasts as hard as ice against the ground.

I leaned back against a pine trunk and drank out of the coffee and ate a ham-and-turkey sandwich. Before the last Indian wars of the 1860s and 1870s, the Blackfoot and the Salish used to pass through this valley on their way to the Clark in their timeless migrations across their sacred earth. As I set my coffee down in the snow and felt the sandwich bread turn stiff in my jaw, I looked into that dying sunset on the snowfield and thought of how those coundess people who had been here for thousands of years were decimated and removed without trace in one generation. I wondered if in spring, when the snow melted and mountain flowers burst from the wet ground, there wouldn’t be some scratch of them there—a rose-quartz arrowhead, a woman’s broken grinding bowl, a child’s foolish carving on a stone.

My reverie was broken by the explosion of the Enfield. Two doe had started down out of the pines on the opposite side of the valley, their tracks sharp and deep behind them, and Beth had fired high and popped snow into the air off of a wind-polished drift. She ejected the brass casing, slammed another shell into the chamber, and fired again. I saw her cant the rifle before she squeezed off. The deer turned in a run and headed for the far end of the valley.

“You better hold it straight and lower your sights,” I said, quietly. “We’re higher than they are, and that bullet’s not dropping.”

She worked the bolt and pushed it home, pulled the rifle tight against its sling, and let off another one. The doe in the rear bucked forward on her knees as though she had been struck by an invisible hammer. She struggled in the snow, the hooves tearing long scratches and divots in the incline as she tried to get to her feet. Then she stumbled forward, with a single trail of bright red drops behind her.

“Damn, you gut-shot her,” I said. “Bust her again.”

Beth’s hands were shaking, and when she pulled the bolt, it hung halfway back, and the spent shell caught in the chamber. The doe was pumping hard for the cover of the trees, the blood flying in the wind between her flanks. I pulled the sling of the Enfield free from Beth’s arm, banged the heel of my hand against the magazine until the brass casing dislodged, shoved another shell into the chamber, and locked the bolt down. I didn’t have time to use the sling or get into a prone position. I steadied the Enfield against a pine trunk, aimed the iron sights just ahead of the deer, let my breath out slowly, and squeezed off. The bark shaled off the pine from the recoil, and my right ear was momentarily wooden from the explosion. I hit the doe right behind the neck, and I knew that with the downward angle the soft-nosed bullet must have torn through her heart and lungs like a lead tennis ball.

Beth sat up on the tarpaulin and shook the snow out of her hair with her hands. She tried to find a cigarette inside her coat,

but it was as though all of her pockets were sewn together. I set the rifle down and handed her my pack.

“That was a wonderful shot,” she said, but her voice was uneven with an unnatural pitch to it in the quietness.

“Where did you learn to hunt deer?” I said.

Her hands were still shaking when she lit the cigarette.

“Why?”

“Because you never take a shot from a distance like that without a telescope.”

“Should I apologize?”

“Don’t be defensive about it. Hell, you know you were wrong.”

She picked up my coffee cup from the snow and drank out of it, then took a deep drag on the cigarette.

“Buddy told me you could be righteous sometimes,” she said.

“Well, shit, you let off on something that you can only hit with luck, and she wanders around for two days before she dies.”

We didn’t speak for a moment, and I ejected the spent shell from the Enfield and slipped out the unused cartridges from the magazine. She looked out over the valley, where the last light was starting to glow in a rim of fire on the mountain’s edge.

“You didn’t want to shoot anything and you did,” she said. “You want me to walk home with my mad money?”

I pulled the hood of her coat up on her head and tied the strings under her chin. Her cheeks were red, and there was still a brush of snow in the black hair over her eyes. I pushed her hair back with my hand and stuck one stiff finger in her ribs.

“We’d better get her on the sled before they send the search-and-rescue in after us,” I said.

She looked away, still angry and unwilling to give up, then kicked me gently in the calf with her boot and turned her fine woman’s face into mine.

The snow was already starting to freeze as we pulled the sled across the valley floor. Our boots crunched through the surface, then sank in the soft snow underneath, so that by the time we reached the doe, we were sweating inside our clothes, and the moon had come up in a clear sky and turned the whole valley into a blue-white, tree-lined place on the top of the world that made you fear time and mortality. I gutted the deer and threw the steaming entrails on the ground, and we tied down the frozen carcass on the sled and worked our way back up toward the dark border of pines. The sleeves of my coat were splattered with blood, my head was dizzy from the thin air and the effort of pulling the sled up the hill behind me, but I felt a quiet exhilaration in the long day and its completion. We roped the doe on the fender of the car and drove back out of the moon-drenched mountains of the Swan Valley toward Missoula, and as I steered down that blacktop highway with those huge, dark shapes on each side of me, I understood why men like Jim Bridger, Jediah Johnson, and Jim Beckworth came here. There was simply no other place better, anywhere.

The next week Frank Riordan got his way with the state of Montana, the Anaconda Company, and in fact the whole lumber industry and anybody else who had anything to do with polluting the air. He and an environmental group got a temporary injunction from the court in Helena to shut down every pulp mill and tepee burner in western Montana. It was one of those things that nobody believed. A court decided on an abstraction that had nothing to do with economics, jobs, or clean air and water. It was just a matter of law. A judge’s signature went on the injunction, and suddenly the plume of smoke blowing down the Clark thinned and disappeared, and the tepee burners smoldering with sawdust crumpled slowly into ash and were covered by snow.

But other things happened, too. The workers at the plywood mill got a pink slip with their next check, the men who planed boards and pulled the green chain at the lumber companies were told to come around again in a month or so, the Anaconda Company was shut down at Bonner, and the gyppo loggers (the independents who owned their own tractors) had to either haul pine to a market in Idaho or Washington or go out of business.