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North Fork of the Sun River

Bob Marshall Wilderness, Montana

May 2004

The storm seems, for a bit, to settle, a monotony of squalls, the rain no longer quite streaming down as if the sky itself were nothing but water. I dip low, peering out the cabin window, studying the overcast, the thermometer’s red column straining toward forty, the gusts cutting across the meadow grass in waves. The lulls leave almost silence, just the occasional pop of fir in the stove. Then the rising beat of wind batters the cabin logs, and the drum of rain skitters across the cedar shingles. Already after nine, and weather regardless, still the ten-mile loop to check the grayling eggs’ progress, my daily chore. I shrug into the tired rain gear, top and bottom both, adjust the jacket’s hip zippers to leave the bear spray free, the handgun.

Out in the wind, the spray lashes in under the eaves, stinging my cheeks, trickling into the start of my beard as I walk around the cabin, raising each of the bear-proof shutters, battening the hatches. All the routine. Then up the muddy track, over the hump and into the trees, toward the opening of the burn, the turn down toward the North Fork. Plodding, working up some heat, I watch the water bead off the oil I’d worked into my boots last night, watch my walking stick pock the mud, the cowbell I’d tied to its top all but silent with the easy rhythm. It’s hood-up, head-down weather, little more than just the trail before my feet, until I start following bear tracks, last night’s traffic, a reminder to keep my eyes up, to tuck the deafening hood behind my ears, to start making some noise. I sing, the only way I’ve thought of to constantly announce my presence, belting out “The noble Duke of York, he had ten thousand men…” as I enter the darker woods.

The rain, it turns out, instead of easing off, had only been warming up, and as I cross the pack bridge over the roiling brown North Fork, it comes down sideways, stupendously, stupidly hard, lashing the surface of the river to a froth. I lunge up the ridge toward the Spruce Creek eggs, laughing at just the wildness of it. Already soaked through, toes turned out in the mud as if herringboning up a ski trail, I make the ridge and cross the mile of recent burn, forgetting to sing to the bears, the blackened spear points of the trees easy enough to see through.

Until I reach the Hansel and Gretel stretch. Here the trail cuts into an older burn, dog-haired with fifteen-year-old lodgepole pine. Twelve feet tall and only inches apart, they’re furred so tight to both sides of the trail—their needled branches threaded together, crowding in from both sides, whispering and shushing in the wind—it’s more a green-walled tunnel than path. Even so, unable to see more than a few feet, unable to hear anything over the sighing and moaning of the trees, I don’t muster up much more than a murmur myself, the pissing-down rain just too much, too loud. Who on earth would be out in this mess?

The sodden, impenetrable wall of pines an arm’s reach to each side, I thump my walking stick against the occasional rock, rattling the cowbell, keeping time with Burl Ives, the Big Rock Candy Mountains, mumbling out “Oh, the buzzing of the bees in the cigarette trees, the soda water fountain.…” Working my way, again, through my old bedtime repertoire for the boys, the lyrics hammered into me through endless repetition.

I swing through the corkscrew bend near the drop down to the river, “where the lemonade springs and the bluebird sings,” and there, two steps in front of me, lies a half-eaten elk calf. Half-eaten.

I stumble over myself, yanking off my hood. The calf lies spread-eagled on its back, gutted, a portion of the hams torn off from the inside, strings of meat limp against the ivory line of bone. Staggering back, I pull out my bear spray, push away the safety catch. With my other hand I unsnap my revolver’s holster, wrap my fingers around its grip.

Another step back, another, rain running down my neck. No day-old calf can be more than a snack for a grizzly. Not something they’d eat part of and come back to. And even if it were, there’s nothing scraped up over the kill, nothing hiding it as if the bear means to return.

I’ve chased it off. With the Big Rock Candy Mountains. Still stepping backward, I scan the trees, their dank, blank walls, seeing no more than four or five feet.

Rounding backward through the bend, bear spray out front, the calf disappearing behind the trees, I turn and walk, fast, back the way I’d come. I pound my stick, try shouting, “Coming through, make a hole, make a hole,” what my dad said they were always shouting in the navy, barreling along the ship’s tight corridors. At first my voice is hardly more than a squeak. I try again.

The Spruce Creek eggs are on their own today. And tomorrow.

I break out of the trees, glance down for tracks, finding only my own. Moving fast, able to see again, I look everywhere: across the short grass, the blackened rocks, up into the sooty burned snags, across the river’s steep cut, up onto the burned clear face of the other side’s cliff. I all but ski down the mud to the pack bridge and run up the opposite side, slowing for the dark timber of that bear highway. Shouting, “Kiss me goodnight and say my prayers!”—one song I never sang to the boys—I step carefully over the same tracks I’d walked over this morning, the rain drumming.

Rounding the cabin, I open the shutters, letting the gray murk leak in through the windows. Under the porch roof, the nesting robin blasts off by my face, and I let out a quick “Jaysis!” as if I’d been charged by a winged grizzly. Catching my breath, I unzip my rain gear, shake off what mud I can. Then I unlock the door and step inside as if my return had always been in doubt, lean back against it and take a long, deep breath. “Boys!” I call to the single, empty room. “I’m home!”

The bear had done me a favor, no doubt about it, slipping back into the pines, watching maybe, instead of challenging me for its kill. Or adding me to it. All its choice. I shake my head, the heat from the stove’s banked fire taking away the chill, but not the shiver that runs through me.

I pick a log out of the wood box, open the stove, work it in over the coals. Then another. Latching the door, I stand back and pick a clean white splinter off the face of my wool shirt.

A month ago I’d been fighting to bring the boys in here with me. A monthlong campout. A wilderness experience they’d have for the rest of their lives.

Nolan, nine; Aidan, six. My sons. Neither one of them much bigger than that calf.

Nine and six. I realize with something approaching surprise that I’d only been a father for nine years. But what was I before? A kid myself for what? Seventeen years? And then off to college, the wilds of Montana, and then?

Plenty followed, I know, decades’ worth, but all of it, everything I’ve ever done, or at least the reasons for it, when there were any, seem to have simply vanished. Before being a parent? There were just those first thirty-six years. And then Nolan. And Aidan.

Before—after.

But only nine years in, I’ve nearly fed them to the grizzlies. And, even so, I can hardly wish them here more.

Copyright © 2016 by Pete Fromm

Copyright © 1991 Sony/ATV Music Publishing Limited UK