Heart Earth - Ivan Doig [10]
Up only went so far, though. Montana's vast wheel of seasons always had a flat, skewed side—the biggest side—and that was winter. You could thud pretty hard in autumn, too, and before spring managed to definitely get on track. For year-round ranching, even a go-getter needed an extensive piece of inherited land or a hefty family wallet or a father-in-law with deep pockets. None of which Charlie Doig had been put on this earth with, and he well knew it. "As the fellow says," I hear his burr coming, "where's all the wherewithal?"
So, a summer on a mountain that shouted its name in grass, with a bride both new and long-awaited at his side, must have made a high season indeed for my father. No question about it for my mother, either. I know—have seen for myself in the years beyond hers—how the elevation there on Grassy opens up the view of the closed-away Sixteen country, diminishes the relentless sage and the raw shale cutbanks and the pinched gulches where failed homesteads are pocketed away, and takes the eye instead toward the neighboring and more generous Bridger Mountains; and just before the Bridgers, the one cocky tilt in the nondescript Big Belts, Wall Mountain. The imagination is easily led down past Wall Mountain's inclined rimrock to the canyon of Six-teenmile Creek, as ornery for its size as any chasm anywhere. The first railroad that was squeezed through there required fifty-eight bridges in eighteen miles. Enough floods and avalanches, plus an earthquake or two, and the Sixteen Canyon spat out both that first railroad and the subsequent Chicago, Milwaukee & St. Paul transcontinental line. Not a rail, not a tie, is left on the scar of roadbed, but the rattlesnakes that the railroad maintenance men hung on the right-of-way fence as sarcastic trophies are back in force. I always have a feeling, along those lines, about this original America of the Doigs, this Sixteen country and these Big Belt Mountains: one moment, the look of the land strongly stops you in your tracks, and the next, there is something ominous around your ankles. We were expected to grow used to it, I suppose, as Scotch endurers, as cockleburr American high-landers. But what am I to make of my mother's embrace of all this? Unlike me, unlike my father, she was not born into this chancy Sixteen country. She came as a convert. For, of course, that proudest photo of her, rhinestone cowgirl beneath the stone rainbow, that photo was taken at Wall Mountain, summit of the Sixteen country.
After their 1934 summer of herding, my parents went on into a skein of ranch jobs together, my mother cooking for whatever crew my father was running. But ranch wages were always thin coin. Settled down now, comparatively, into marriage, my father felt he had to turn his hand to operating a place "on shares," which was to say running somebody's ranch for them for a cut of each year's profit. The center years of my parents' story together come now at the hem of Grass Mountain, the first years of World War Two when the pair of them took the Faulkner Creek ranch on shares.
***
A scrape of road pierced through that sagebrush of the Sixteen country toward Wall Mountain until suddenly making a veer toward Grassy, and the Faulkner Creek drainage.
Not paying much attention to the rest of the world or each other, the ornery mountains of the Big Belts did hold pockets of ranchcraft for people as acquainted with work as my parents were. For better or worse, a place such as Faulkner Creek met them on its own clear terms. A tidy sum of rangeland without