Heart Earth - Ivan Doig [11]
So they also knew about the isolation, more than twenty miles to town and most of that simply to reach a paved road, which they were going to have to put up with at Faulkner Creek. Polarly remote a couple of seasons of the year, it was the kind of ranch, in my mother and father's saying for it, where you had to be married to the place. Two other ranches lay hidden even farther down the gulches of Sixteen Creek and Battle Creek, but otherwise weather was the only neighbor. Clouds walking the ridgelines, hurried by chilly wind. Rain, rare as it was, slickening the road as quick as it lit. And if the winter was a tough one—they always were—my father fed hay on the road so that as the sheep ate, they packed down the snow and improved the chance of getting out to the hospital at Townsend when one of my mother's hardest asthma attacks hit.
I will always have to wonder whether some of the distances in myself come from starting life there beside Faulkner Creek. My parents had greatly hoped for twins, but instead got the mixture that was me. Maybe the medical stricture that one pregnancy was plenty for my mother to risk, that after I eventuated into the picture in the summer of 1939 there were going to be no sisters or brothers for me, made my parents allow me into the adult doings of the ranch. As far back as memory will take me, I liked that; honorary membership with the grown-ups, admittance to their talk. It does give you the habit from early on, though, of standing back and prowling with your ears.
Definitely I was doted on. My mother's photo album contains a flurry of my uncles holding me atop horses until, probably when I was between three and four years old, there I sit in the worldly saddle by myself and handle the reins as if I know what I'm doing. By then, too, World War Two and its songs on the radio had come, and I was the combination of kid who could listen to mairzy doats and dozy doats, and little lambsie divy, and staidly tell you, sure, everybody knows mares eat oats and a doe could too, and lambs would take to ivy; then go outside and disappear into fathoms of imagination the rest of the day. Touchy and thorough, doctrinaire and dreamy, healthy as a moose calf, I seem to have sailed through the Faulkner Creek years with my adults giving to me generously from their days. Words on a page became clear to me there, long before school; somebody in the revolving cast of busy parents and young Ringer uncles hired to do the ranch chores and a visiting grandmother checking up on us from Moss Agate, one or another of those had to have been steadily reading to me. My immersion into print, the time indoors with books and a voice willing to teach me all the words, surely I owe to that ranch's long winters.
Winter also brought out the trapper, to be watched from our kitchen window in the snow-roofed ranch house, tending the trapline on Faulkner Creek.
The bundled figure sieves in and out of the creek-side willows, a dead jackrabbit in hand for bait. Gray to catch white, for weasels in their snowy winter coats are the quarry, their pelts fetching a prime price from the fur buyer in Helena.
The weasels hunt along the creek in invisibility against the snow, terror to grouse and mice, or dart up to the ranch buildings, murder in the chickenhouse; their sylph bodies are such ferocious little combustion tubes that they have to eat with feverish frequency to live. Wherever the double dots of weasel tracks