Badluck Way: A Year on the Ragged Edge of the West Read Online Free PDF Page A

on either bank of the creek steepened to forty-five degrees. On the side where the road ran, a south-facing slope grew ryegrass and mullein. Across the creek, the north side bristled with an amphitheater of the oldest trees on the property. From the highway, the Moose Creek canyon’s notch looked like an enormous gun sight pointed at the Madison Range.
    Most of the canyon was too steep for cattle, and hunting had been prohibited there since Roger had driven up during hunting season, heard someone shooting at an elk, and decided he had almost taken a bullet. That happened years before I arrived on theranch, and the intervening time had turned the canyon into an overgrown, mostly untracked wilderness.
    The canyon worked as a funnel, gathering animals—elk, deer, antelope, and moose—from the higher benches of the ranch and channeling them downhill toward the Madison River. In winter, when higher trails drifted shut with snow, the population became especially dense. The wolves knew this, and could often be seen running the canyon during the dark and icy months.
    Jeremy showed me elk paths worn into the hills and pointed out places where they crossed the road. The truck labored up a steep grade, shook as it passed over the last washboards of the canyon, and then emerged into full sunlight. The view was staggering. Straight ahead of us, Moose Creek wound through a broad swath of willows, looped around the base of a hill, and then struck straight east toward where the Madison Range jutted into a light-blue sky. Jeremy pointed out the Pyramid, a grassy, vertiginous triangle on the scale of Giza that formed the divide between the drainages of Moose and Squaw Creeks. Topping out at nine thousand feet, the Pyramid fell to eight thousand and then blended seamlessly into the low, broad hump of the Squaw Creek hogback.
    Jeremy talked his way across the skyline from north to south, showing me the different gorges that gave birth to Wolf, Stock, Bad Luck, Moose, and Squaw Creeks. Flowing from the mountains toward the river, those five creeks bisected the ranch. If the Madison Range was the ranch’s prime meridian, the streams were its preeminent lines of latitude. After Jeremy had pointed out the many dirt tracks that departed at intervals from Badluck Way, we descended a little hill to a small cluster of buildings, where he brought the truck to a stop in front of a sheet-metal shop.
    Inside, the machines waited in good order. A fire truck occupied the only heated bay. Farther down, partially hidden in the windowless dark, were a road grader and a John Deere backhoe. Next to a collection of smaller machines, a plasticized map of the ranch hung on the wall. Jeremy unpinned it and handed it over. After showing me how to start one of the ATVs, a yellow Honda Foreman, he cut me loose to spend the rest of the day getting to know the Sun.

    I rode the ATV out into the morning, bracing myself against the stream of cold air. The Foreman was a strong machine, a 500. I revved through the gears, watching the speedometer climb through twenty, thirty, and forty as I followed Badluck Way downhill. I turned right onto a smaller gravel track that struck off to the north and ran across level ground for a while before arriving at the brink of a steep descent.
    I pulled out the map to get my bearings. Directly ahead, the road cruised across the Stock Creek plain, crossed a rickety bridge over Wolf Creek, and then struck out into a featureless zone of seven square miles called the North End Flats. Beyond that, the road met the ranch’s northern boundary fence, cut eastward through an area labeled with the single, cryptic word “Mounds,” and then looped back south along the base of the mountains, past Stock and Bad Luck Creeks.
    I folded the map and sped away. Melting snowdrifts crossed the road at intervals, and I cut the spring’s first tracks through them, scattering slush and mud as I roared onto the Flats. Theendless sky was blue, and everywhere