Driving on the Rim (7 page)

I think some of my solitary ways derived from my early training under Dr. Olsson. He lived in rented rooms with Pie, drove an old car, and within two years of arriving in Montana knew the country better than the natives did. At sixty-five, he would not infrequently walk twenty miles in a day, wear me out when I was seventeen, and outshoot me. At times, I never raised my gun but only watched in awe as he squared up, focused, got his face down on the wood, and fired. When I visited him in his rooms and surveyed the sparse furniture, the half-filled closet, the worn shaving utensils carefully laid out by the sink, the wedding photograph of his parents, the small brown radio and single bed, I got an inchoate sense of why I would never outshoot him. In the single-car garage, he hung his birds next to his snow shovel and lawn mower. The garage contained a small workbench and vise as well as his reloading tools for the rows of shells lined up along the back.

We took Pie afield year-round, rain or shine, in or out of hunting season. In the off-season, we counted coveys and entered the information into Dr. Olsson’s partridge log, which he sent to the department of fish and game without acknowledgment. I was very anxious to do away with the hawks that decimated our partridges during the winter, especially the northern harriers who hugged the ground and left many a feather pile behind. But Dr. Olsson gave me my first inklings of a holistic view via the old phrase “the balance of nature.” He insisted that I learn to love the hawks. I didn’t find that easy. When he learned that I had shot one from a tree out at Gladys and Wiley’s, he stopped speaking to me for twenty-nine days, which I thought would kill me. I once poured my heart out about my love of hunting and nature to Wiley and my father, who squinted through their cigarette smoke as I talked. When I’d finished, Wiley asked my father if he thought I’d been drinking.

I think that Dr. Olsson was an atheist. When news of some fatality or another came to our attention, he always said the same thing: “Live it up.” Over time this seemingly casual remark acquired a kind of resonance, and the subtext for “Live it up” came to seem, “That’s all there is.” It might have explained his friendship with Wiley, who often quoted the old-time trail cowboys to the effect that if you waited for Jesus to feed you, you’d starve to death.

It was widely felt that I was Dr. Olsson’s surrogate child. When I overheard this, I was thrilled. This was the beginning of the hope of being a doctor myself, a wish so far-fetched that I shared it with no one and hardly took it seriously until Olsson urged me to think of making something of myself and medicine appeared as a duty that had befallen me. Running a modest practice with patients you knew inside and out, and from the downstairs of your home, was a model I must have gotten from Dr. Olsson. Olsson lived within his modest means, but surely something had propelled him from his place of origin.

Dr. Olsson had some money, or at least enough to do as he pleased. Now and then, he’d take a trip. He loved the Huntington Library in California, where Tessa had once worked. He went to Japan. Always it was something specific he wanted to see. He wanted to see Kyoto. He flew to Germany to have dinner with a Wehrmacht doctor under his charge in the war, a POW neurosurgeon. He flew to New York for the opera, the symphony, and the art museums. At such times, I took care of Pie and did a responsible job of it; I think he trusted me, though he called every day about her. One year he went back to Ohio to bury his sister; it was December. Partridge season was finished and he left me with Pie.

I decided to take her hunting.

I think too that Dr. Olsson helped me along on my somewhat indiscriminate love of nature. I became modestly knowledgeable about mountain wildflowers and birds, though my familiarity had to be renewed with regular resort to the guidebooks. After I was forbidden to shoot hawks, my predatory impulse was transmuted into a fascination with all hawks and especially falcons, including, on a medical junket in Texas, the exquisite aplomado coursing over the low salt marshes of the Aransas lagoons. I finally understood that my old enemy the northern harrier was a beautiful bird despite his stalking our partridges. I kept a great list of creatures I wished to see: the Stone sheep, Kemp’s ridley turtle, the bird of paradise. And so on. I was particularly anxious to see a wild condor. “Who else lives here?” was a question I entertained as adolescent endorphins supercharged my imagination.

Dr. Olsson asked me to bring him my report cards, which I did, as I was not ashamed of my schoolwork, and because I thought compliance would assure me of his favor. He took me to the library to get my first and explosively important library card, soon confiscated by my mother.
She said, “Don’t let me catch you there, you little nothing.” Dr. Olsson quietly got me another, and I soon began to lead a covert life in the library, establishing the excitement that would attend the sight of books for the rest of my life. Still, I remember the fear I felt whenever my mother caught me reading. “He’s got his nose in a book!” I would own thousands of books, but libraries were such a thrill that the hair on the back of my neck stood up upon entering one.

Given that Dr. Olsson’s approval of me was so urgent, I don’t know what impelled me to take Pie hunting out of season. I am tempted to pause over this conundrum, because episodes of the most incredibly opaque motivation have punctuated my life. There are viruses supposed to hibernate at the base of the spine—the various strains of the herpes virus, for example—which plague us and other mammals and which surge forth at arbitrary moments to assert their dominion over our health. This was the only phenomenon I could compare to the disruptive irregularities that cropped up in my life.

These were some of the things that inspired Farmer Lyles to forbid Pie and me from his acres on the grounds that I was “a disgrace” and moreover, “get out.” Only later did I remember Backseat Melissa Brown, by sour luck, his niece. This was a bad omen, compounded by my being no longer secure in Dr. Olsson’s converted hearse, for the driving of which I lacked permission; and my growing insecurity had made Pie restive, though she snuggled against my Winchester and her worries passed. It was necessary to find another place to hunt, and I was on a mission to prove to myself that all I had learned from Dr. Olsson about the hunting of partridges I was well able to perform without his oversight: the management of the hunting dog, the shooting, the preparation of the game (I already had a menu in mind), and a brief discourse on the rigors of the field.

I decided that I would not chance an encounter with another disagreeable farmer, and I crossed the Yellowstone River above Convict Grade, driving east until the country looked big and empty—then, as now, my favorite landscape. Pie could feel the rising excitement, and whirling in the backseat, she made little cries and licked the side window. “Cool it, Pie,” I said sharply. Pie gasped and pretended to die by sinking onto her stomach and hiding her head between her paws. I
had seen this before even under the firm hand of Dr. Olsson. I threw a piece of pig ear over my shoulder, but she ignored it. Soon, though, we found a small road headed north through hawthorn and chokecherry hills, about all that the hearse could handle, and when it ended after only a few hundred feet in a clearing under an old cottonwood, we stopped and I got out. On the ground before me was a small memorial, a slab of sandstone into which some bereft soul had scratched the word “Dad.”

I carefully opened the rear door just enough to get my shotgun and held it crossways as I picked a direction of travel and went through a few surmises about the weather, which contained a delicate northerly breeze. A hint of moisture would help Pie with her job. I had just a few hours before sundown, and the unlikelihood of meeting the game warden was a great comfort.

Pie jumped from the car and stopped. She moved only her head, assessing the air, her tail at an indifferent angle while she bethought herself. As Pie was the more experienced of us, I deferred to her and stood by as she considered her options. Once she came to a decision she was off like a shot, straight up the thread of water from a distant spring, winding through the chokecherry at such a clip that I was pressed to keep up.

I struggled through the brush and slipped a single waxy red shell into the chamber and closed it, sliding the safety into position. When I looked up I felt a flash of fear to find Pie no longer visible, but soon she popped up on a hillside looking back at me and then resumed her hunt. I wished it wasn’t so late in the day: I was climbing as fast as I could, Pie was casting back and forth but outpacing me by degrees, and the declining sun was on its own schedule. It was not easy to keep these three chronologies in the same plan, something I experienced as mild but creeping anxiety. I was pushing through a chokecherry thicket at the head of the spring, worrying that I had lost sight of Pie again, when five grouse erupted and flew like big brown bees straight back over my head and down the draw. In a few feet I found Pie on point, head cocked back to observe me. Undoubtedly, she wondered how I could have failed to get off a shot.

Once we emerged from the narrow draw, I was relieved to find us in
ample grassland rising toward the Crazy Mountains to the northeast. I wished Pie would hunt closer so that I could see her always, but she reappeared often and I could keep track of her enough to allay my ascending fear, which was now based mostly on the decreasing angle of the sun and the spread of cold. To the west there was not a genuine horizon because the sun would fall behind the Bridger Range; as it declined toward the ice clouds above those hills its light seemed grayer. I hurried to keep up with Pie, who seemed in charge of things, and while I would have preferred a modest circle ending at Dr. Olsson’s car, Pie wanted only to hunt straight into the wind with its scenting advantages, taking us away from what I viewed as safety and what little light we still had.

Again I found Pie on point and I was relieved, not because she had found game but because it gave me the opportunity to overtake her. I held the shotgun across my chest, thumb ready to slide the safety, and advanced. Several huge birds lumbered into the air: I fired and missed. These were sage hens and since they were scarce, Dr. Olsson had forbidden me to shoot them. Well, I hadn’t shot one, though I had shot at one, and Dr. Olsson, had he been here, would have given me the cross look for which I had great respect and some fear. Perhaps I was trigger-happy. I’d have to be careful. Such thoughts were a kind of inattention and when I focused once more Pie was no longer in sight. I looked toward the sunset, then hurried in the direction I thought she had gone.

I never found her. I crossed the top of two broad coulees toward the Crazy Mountains, my last bearing before darkness fell. I’d thought there was time, but the sunset just snuffed out behind the Bridgers and I failed to resolve whether I was searching for Pie or trying to get myself to safety. I frantically reviewed the landmarks I had seen driving into the old road, but they were no longer of any use. I was lost.

Perhaps I’d never been lost before. I was startled by my state of accelerating dismay followed by panic. The broad field of references that I’d had in mind—that ridge of moraine, that tall spruce with the wind-slewed eastward branches, that rivulet, the two-track with its deceptively gradual change of direction, the yard light at the Swede’s farm, the old windmill—were all arrayed as special markers reassuringly redundant, even cross-referenced. Yet something as slight as the bulb going out in the yard light, the perspective of the spruce that concealed the stunted
limbs, the rising shadows which appeared to have the same mass as the landmarks before vanishing in twilight—all conspired to arouse the feeling that I no longer knew where I was, beset by the most ancient of enemies, darkness and cold. It was like the threat of being buried alive. I struck out in any direction, hoping that clarity would soon be at hand. It was not. I struck off elsewhere and felt a sort of eclipse. As each foray seemed to sag into confusion, the forays grew shorter and more rapid. Soon they were in circles, and I lost the capacity for traveling in a straight line. I felt confined and claustrophobic. I could not get out of this small and lightless room. Announcing itself, the darkness was cold, tangible as a black bird descending at stall speed.

A vertical slab of wet stone struck my face and I screamed, less from pain than from a rush of helplessness. I bumped into other things I couldn’t identify. The river of stars overhead flared in a direction I could no longer grasp. My insignificance was so overwhelming that these impediments surrounded me with austere malevolence. My only hope was that by submitting myself to their awful power, I would be released. That was it! I would flatter the unknown and it would feel sorry for me! At last I caught on, saw the first fissure, and lay down in the densest brush I could find with my hands; I trained my humility on the hope of sunrise.

During the night and in those moments when I escaped my misery enough to think of how I had lost Pie, I was not entirely certain I wanted to survive. I imagined Dr. Olsson’s spare room without her and my heart sank in agony. Even that agony was insufficient to preparing me for what I would feel when I finally was face-to-face with Dr. Olsson.

Sunrise revealed my hollow in the brush. When I stood up, it was easy to see the long slope of grassland to the south and, against its far edge, the winding county road I had driven. The light, the renewed orientation were insufficient consolation for the absence of Pie. By afternoon, I stood before Dr. Olsson. I had never seen him so sad. “You’ve let me down,” he said. “I’m all through with you.”

It was a long walk to my house, and the weather had turned worse. I had to navigate in the lee of the house and still I was soaked on arrival; I hardly noticed. The very abrupt loss of the approval of the only person who had ever believed in me was a blow of such magnitude as I had
never experienced, to my stomach and mind at once. And apart from that, I feared that Pie was being eaten by coyotes or shot by a rancher finding her among his livestock.