Free Spirits and Lost Souls
The antelope ran over the horizon into the smokey evening sun, and the little white setter dog followed after, leaving me to feel as powerless as the prairie is vast. My hunting guide’s stifled laughter confirmed this was indeed the exclamation point to a hunting trip gone bad. If only I had done something different… In futility, I reached back through time and memory as if there was something tangible I could grab ahold of to change this stark sobering moment.
In early September the prairie has an ornery look to it, the expression folks have when you pop in for a hello, but you catch them in the middle of an argument. It invites you in anyway, but unfinished business sets the tone of the visit, rolling hills hide relics and ruins from the past with no explanation of their history, abandoned cabins, abandoned towns, and little white crosses all watch as you drive through.
Before the fall rain starts, everything is covered in a greasy dust from summer wildfires and from farm machinery stirring up the landscape. Smoke stench and stained sky look as surly and as filthy as the roadside shrubs while the heat only contributes an impatience to everything. Fence lines rise and fall like the skeletal structure of a gigantic creature’s remains slowly being unearthed in some areas and covered back up in others. Long abandoned buildings lean into unending winds. Their paint peeling like the skin around a bad burn and bare wood bleaching in the sun, lending the landscape a post-apocalyptic feeling. For some of the residents, it is post-apocalyptic. This country is old and has many histories that go back further than the crumbling cabins and barns littering forgotten roads woven through the prairies like scar tissue.
I found myself here in the second week of a long-awaited, once-in-a-lifetime, big wing-shooting road trip. It’s the trip all bird hunters dream of, a chance to play out a personal version of Jim Fergus’s The Hunter’s Road. The trip was my chance to explore bird hunting destinations across the country. This trip had already been rough - with many challenges and few birds to show for them by the time I made it to Northern Montana, just south of the Canadian border. This land was called the medicine line before Montana was even a state in the Union, so named because US cavalry mysteriously couldn’t cross it in pursuit of the Indians they harried. Border control.
I was well past burnout. I felt lost and alone, wandering the world, rather than exploring it. I phoned a friend for advice and he suggested hunting the nearby reservation. I hesitated – can you do that? With the comfort of his assurance, I started the drive to the nearest Indian agency to buy a permit. The closer I got to the point on the map however, the stronger a foreboding feeling came over me. I wasn’t in familiar territory and the land didn’t feel welcoming. Although there was nothing to validate my feelings, I was reluctant to test them.
Before the turn off marked on my map, I pulled into a gas station to procrastinate and get something to eat. When I came back to my truck, I immediately noticed I left my window down and my companion, an English setter named Alder, was missing from his spot on the passenger seat. Dread rose from my gut into the back of my neck as my eyes scanned the highway for my dog.
“He is a free spirit,” a rough voice roused behind me.
I turned to see a man wearing a red and white gas station uniform stroking my dog in the shade of a relic telephone booth, with a six pack of beer sitting next to him.
His hair was cut high and tight, his skin mahogany tanned and I assumed him to be an Indian, being this close to the reservation, but he could have been from anywhere. His face was deeply creased, yet he smiled with a youthful glow missing teeth somehow magnified. I couldn’t tell if he was 30 or 50. My dog leaned into the man’s petting, which was vigorous despite the digits he was missing. I caught myself staring. He looked at his disfigured hand as if noticing it for the first time ever.
“Lost these logging and trying to catch up, you know how it is?” I sat down next to him. “My name is Samuel,” and he smiled a wide mischievous grin.
Samuel cracked a beer and took a long deep swig before passing the can to me. Covid had not yet been relegated to being a bad memory but for some reason I felt like turning down this magnanimous offering would not only be offensive to my new friend but further cement the feeling of isolation I had been battling. I took a long draught that fizzed at the back of my eyes and offered relief in the way only ice-cold beer could on a hot day.
“It’s five-o’clock somewhere. My name is Mick,” I laughed sheepishly.
“It’s always five-o’clock here Mick,” he said in a tone that didn’t encourage laughter. “But you aren’t from here, where are you going with this fine dog? Off after chickens I suppose?”
“Chickens” is how locals described any game bird besides the much sought-after pheasant. They always said chicken with a tone somewhere between puzzlement and indifference, as if they couldn’t understand why someone would spend so much time and money to pursue something so common, small, and drab. A waste of time when they could be working to make ends meet. I explained my plans, however removed from this neck of reality they may be. He offered to be my hunting guide for $100 and a case of beer. I obliged, grateful for some form of chaperone and local knowledge. He requested a ride to his home on the way to the Reservation to gather some things to outfit us. We polished off his beer, packed up the dog and left.
The drive was mostly silent on my part as Samuel told a story of each of neighbor we passed. The drive-by introductions focused on what the neighbor cooked best and to praise their generosity, two things that undoubtedly never went unnoticed through this land of scarcity.
We turned off onto a long weed bordered driveway, swerving around potholes too deep to go through. An abundance of derelict cars cluttered the yard in front of Samuel’s trailer. They sat in various states of disrepair as if they had been butchered for their meat and organs, the skeletal remains left to the land. The trailer itself hung on to what constituted an inhabitable state. What was once a blue tarp, now bleached white by the sun and tattered by the wind, covered part of the roof. He opened the unlocked front door and invited me in. The living room was bare particle board floor, and besides two old recliners facing the hazed southern window, the place was void of furniture, giving a hollow alien quality to just about every sound we made. On the kitchen counter sat a hunk of roasted meat in a pan of congealed grease. Next to the pan, a carburetor.
With a knife found adjacent to the roast, Samuel cut a few chunks, rummaged around the cupboards and produced the last few slices of a loaf of bread to create a sandwich. He slopped the grease from the pan onto the bread like it was mayonnaise.
“This is from an old buck that lived where we are going. He must have been tough and hard to kill because his meat is tough and hard to chew,” he said as he presented my sandwich. His eyes landed on mine and held their position in anticipation of my first taste, as if I was being tested again. My eyes drifted down the tight hallway to an old Fraser print hanging askew on the wall. It depicted a wounded Native man slumped over on a horse, stoic against the sky. I took a bite of the sandwich and it tasted like cold grease and flavorless bread but my companion beamed at me in approval. His gaze then followed mine to the print.
“My Boss gave me that when I got home from injuring my hand. He said it was me. I don’t know why he may have thought that but I remember him every time I look at it.” In the shadows of the hallway, just past the print, an aged and curling newspaper clipping from the Havre Times was pinned to the wall. The headline read “Local Indian Saves Unit from Suicide Bomber, receives purple heart.” Below the headline, a picture of my guide albeit a bit younger, left arm bandaged, remaining thumb pointed up, in front of a big smile.
“We better hit the road if we want to get the jump on those chickens!” with surprising strength Samuel clapped his ruined hand on my shoulder and turned me toward the door. I took another bite of the dank sandwich.
Rolling drought-brown hills dominated our drive north toward the Canadian border. Cattle dotted the landscape in every direction grazing the native grass to worthless stubble.
He asked me where I was from.
“Seattle.”
“Seattle… eh? One of those places where all the WOKE Communist Pilgrims are coming from…setting up their Zoom towns to forever change the Montanan’s way of life?” He smiled and slapped me on the shoulder with his good hand. “I’m not sure whose way of life they are going to change? Not mine, eh?”
I felt myself blush, all too aware I was one of those pilgrims.
In classic Montana fashion, there was resistance to this wave of newcomers. Residents felt they were under attack, having others question why something has “always been that way.” Housing prices soared and many Montana residents sold out, going from “the way it’s always been” selling to “woke commies” from a higher tax bracket, also known as cash-buyers.
“What the hell does woke mean anyway?” Samuel slapped the dashboard with both hands good and bad. “The ranchers sure use that word a lot for being so upset about it. Seems like something they would have labeled the Indians back in the day when they were rounding them up,” he smiled his signature wily trouble maker’s grin. “Stop your complaining and don’t be so damn woke,” he puffed up his chest and did an enthusiastically animated mime of a Nazi salute.
“I think you are getting your Genocides mixed up?” I winced at my own wry gallows’ humor and how even history can seem inappropriate at times. In the last few years I learned it best not come anywhere near politics with folks, especially in hunting circles or rural areas. In an effort to just to fit in, I have taken a don’t ask don’t tell policy. Unless someone was wearing that red cap you could never tell exactly what a person ascribed to and things in that department usually were left better off unknown. Sometime between fake news and faux news, America changed faster than Americans could. I’m not even sure where my own politics lay anymore.
We passed hunters’ rigs at almost every turnout. Hunting rig after hunting rig - all them out of state. All obviously hunting chickens – their dog trailers and “upland” stickered windows giving them away.
“You would think it was pheasant season already from the turnout of hunters we are seeing this year,” Samuel clicked his tongue. “But nope they are all just after chickens like you… Some outdoor influencers must have said hunting sharptail on the prairie was the thing to do this year!” Samuel gave me a side-eye and smiled. I felt like I was being tested again.
“Plenty of residents are getting ticked off about all the competition from outsiders even though they could care less about chickens,” he continued. “They are trying to limit hunting access so folks from out of state can’t stay too long and take too much away from the residents.”
He tittered at the implied irony and was beginning to get on my nerves but I said nothing and kept driving. My non-statement seemed to irk him somewhat as he continued on, but no longer with the amusement of earlier.
“Montana is and always will be a land of conflicts and extremes, that is its way. Warring tribes. Warring cultures. Conflicts of interest. Conflicts of politics. Forest fires and flooding. Extreme summers and extreme winters. Catch and release. Using and Sobriety. Cops and criminals. Indians and cowboys. Public and private. The filthy rich and the dirt poor,” he stated without emotion.
“But the rest of the country has all of that too.” I said plaintively.
“But it’s the rest of the world that comes here to get away from their own problems. They follow promises made by Hollywood and social media. They can pretend to be Brad Pitt standing in a river catching and releasing trout like play things. Or else it’s those folks who want to play pretend at ranching like Kevin Costner on Yellowstone. They buy up all the property for their second summer homes and throw up no trespassing signs and then fly away like some fragile bird for the winter.”
“It’s some kind of never ending cycle, except the people who are getting their way of life changed permanently are now called ‘Residents’ instead of ‘Natives.’ This place has always been a tourist trap. Some tourists stay longer than others but they all get to leave the Big Sky when their fun is over. Meanwhile we are left with the problems they made, along with our own.” Samuel looked out the passenger window.
“But It’s a nice place to visit, I hear,” he said flatly.
“Yeah!” I shouted over emphatically. It was all I could say and he laughed and the tension broke. But he was right. The world flocked here for the promise of a sparsely populated paradise welcoming them with open arms. I know that is why I was here. That’s what movie studios and outdoor social media sold, driving people to Montana, only to leave it overpopulated with other pilgrims.
Samuel told me to pull over into a nondescript patch of grass along the road we had been following. He scanned the horizon dramatically.
“Yes, yes. looks like this spot hasn’t been hunted much. The antelope don’t look bothered,” he pointed toward three pronghorn antelope couple hundred yards out in the grass, their white markings made them stick out more than blend in.
I took out my dog’s GPS collar and paired it with the handheld unit which required calibrating before we started. Calibrating a dog collar GPS involves comical feats of coordination - turning the handheld unit one way, flipping it the other. I often wouldn’t get it right the first time and have to start over. My guide watched the process terribly bemused.
“Orange box prays to stars to keep dog safe?” Samuel said in his best impression of a Hollywood Indian. He slowly moved his arm toward the sky.
I laughed despite myself and the awkwardness of it all.
“Pretty much” I replied not wanting to step out on the thin ice set before me. He slapped me on the shoulder and we both laughed.
Once the ritual of calibrating the compass was over, I put the collar on the dog and he promptly made a dead run after the pronghorn. I grabbed the GPS handheld to give him a training correction, but the handheld hadn’t successfully linked to the collar and just like that he was gone.
“Is he supposed to do that? I thought we were after chickens?” Samuel clicked his tongue.
“I didn’t calibrate the handheld right! It must not be communicating with his collar!” I stammered in disbelief. “Alder!” I shouted as my dog and the antelope got smaller and smaller. I started to run but my guide grabbed my shoulder to stop me.
“You aren’t going to catch him. I know a thing or two about being lost. Best thing to do if you don’t know where someone is going and you don’t know how to find them is to stay put,” Samuel offered.
Considering the circumstances, staying put was much easier said than done, but I followed my guide’s advice. Every few minutes I whistled or shot a round into the sky hoping Alder would hear me and come back. Every whistle, shout, and gun blast echoed across the coulees and hills making it sound as if a hundred of us, in all different directions, were trying to get his attention.
The sun crept down below the horizon along with my hope of seeing a small white dog come loping in from miles away.
“I suppose as your guide I am obligated to see this predicament through, but I sure wish I had that case of beer now” Samuel laughed nervously as I fussed with my GPS hoping that it would suddenly find the signal.
Between dog calling sessions we talked, mostly about how much we had in common and what we didn’t have. I talked about my passion for bird dogs and he talked about his love of restoring old classic cars. He never brought up his time in the military and I didn’t ask. It felt best to leave that memory in the shadowed hallway of his trailer peering around that horrible Fraser painting.
Hours crept by painfully slowly and all there was to do was stare at the night sky and hope that damn dog figured out his way back. A shooting star appeared, so close I could see it shudder and oscillate as it burnt through the atmosphere, streaking Southwest over the bearpaw mountains.
“Maybe that was the satellite that was supposed to be keeping track of your dog?” Samuel laughed. “Maybe it still can save him, make a wish!” I glared at him in the dark.
“Maybe it is answering some rancher’s wish and heading straight to California? KABOOM!” he was cracking himself up. Suddenly, behind his laughter, I heard panting. The white blur of my dog came through in the darkness as he sat down next to us as if satisfied all was right with the prairie. Samuel reached over to scratch Alder’s ears with his bad hand.
“He is a free spirit.”
