“What are you thinking so hard about?” Beth said, her face bright with the cold wind that blew down the drainage.
“Those old-timers must have really believed in it. Can you imagine what it was like to pull the winter up here in the 1870s when they had to haul everything up the side of the mountain on mules? Before they could even go to work, they had to do something minor, like build those cabins. I bet they didn’t even think about it. They just did it. And I bet you couldn’t tear those logs apart with a prizing bar.”
She put her hands inside my arm and pressed against my coat.
“You’re a strange mixture of men,” she said.
“Well, none of that analysis crap. You see that house down there with the elk droppings by the door? Think of some veteran from Cold Harbor in there, drunk every night on whiskey just to stay warm until the next day, and not sure that an Indian wouldn’t set his place afire after he passed out. Those must have been pretty formidable people.”
She pulled the bill of my fur cap and laughed and squeezed herself against my arm.
“I thought you believed Montana people were barbarians,” she said.
“Only those who burn up trucks and guitars that belong to me.”
“I guess destroying half of a parking lot at the mill doesn’t count,” she said, and laughed again.
I built a fire in the snow and boiled a can of stew on a piece of tin from one of the cabins, and as the snow melted away in a widening circle from the heat, I looked over at her and wanted her again. We went into her car and made love on the backseat, with the doors open and the wind blowing snow in the sunlight and the distant sound of a gyppo logger’s truck grinding up the next hill.
We went grouse hunting up Rattlesnake Creek for blues and ruffs with an old dogleg twenty-gauge that I borrowed from Buddy’s little brother, and we knocked six down in a stand of pines on the lip of a huge canyon and cooked them at her house in wine sauce, onion, and wild mushrooms. The next day I bought a resident deer tag, and we drove into the Swan Valley, which was so white and blinding under the sun that you had to look at the green of the timberline to keep from losing the horizon. We crossed two hills of lodge pine in deep snow, pulling her boys’ sled in blue tracks behind us, our lungs aching in the thin air, her Enfield rifle slung by its leather strap on my shoulder.
We found a place on the edge of the trees that overlooked a long valley where they would probably cross at sunset. I took the folded tarpaulin off the sled, spread it in the snow between the pine trunks, and set down the big coffee thermos and ham-and-turkey sandwiches. The air was clean and sharp, with the sweet scent of the pines, and the far side of the valley seemed to grow and recede in the sunlight over the mountain. I unscrewed the thermos top, and the steam and the smell of the coffee blew around us in the wind.
I hadn’t hunted for deer, or any animal for that matter, since I was discharged from the army. At home after the war, I had shot ducks and certainly fished a lot, but I wouldn’t go out with my father anymore after coons or shoot deer with him in east Texas. Once, he asked me why I would take the lives of fish and knock birds out of the air with a double-barrel when I wouldn’t drop an animal running across the ground. I didn’t have an answer for him, because I had thought until his question that it was just a general reaction to killing things, and he said: “You don’t want to bust something living on the land because it’s just like you. You know it hurts him just like it does a man.”
Regardless of my father’s explanation about the lack of ethical difference in taking the lives of wild things, I wasn’t up to busting a deer or an elk that might work down through that snowfield in the sun’s last red rays over the mountains. Also, I had hunted enough deer at home to know that anything that came out of that distant stand of pine on the far side of the valley would be either a doe or an elk cow, because the males always kicked them out into the open before they would cross themselves.
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 countless 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 does 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.