SEX, DEATH AND BEARS

Looking Glass Pass

In the days when snomobiles were new, everyone looked for places to go in the snow.  One of them was the closed pass called “Looking Glass” between Kiowa Kamp and East Glacier.  At the top was a bear den for hibernation so we went up to see.  There WAS nothing to see, since the den was covered by feet of snow, but there was a little air hole with a trickle of steam coming out, bear breath.  We each leaned over to sniff, sharing molecules with an animal usually unapproachable, in hibernation — not quite alive and not quite dead.

At the Scriver Taxidermy Studio we did a lot of bear-hugging, but they were all dead.  Since they weighed hundreds of pounds, we embraced them to move them across the room so we could skin them out.  It was not a bloody task because mammal body tissues are organized into sheaves, each enclosed with thin pearly tissue.  To cool the bear right after killing it, the viscera would have been removed along with most of the blood.  A mold for the papier maché form made directly from that individual bear was much better than buying a commercial standard form, which one can begin to recognize after a while.  Jonas Brothers’ rearing grizzly shows up everywhere zombie taxidermy gives the skill a bad name.

Emotion is what makes a mounted animal come alive, the same as any art.  Bob was emotionally entangled with bears early in life but the incident that seemed to be his indicator was about a human drunk who slammed his head with a gunstock when Bob (as a child) and his dog were out shooting gophers with a .22 -- considered a beginner’s long gun in the years before Red Ryder Daisy BB guns.   The boy lay unconscious with his dog guarding him until he was found.  On his left temple a mark remained lifelong.  

He identified with bears.  By the time he was late in his teens, he was stalking them.  He studied a bear skull carefully to see where the point of most vulnerability was and found it on the left temple.  Then he went out to kill a grizzly with his .22, a totally irresponsible thing to do from any point of view.  But he did it.  Bears in those days were predators, unprotected.  Maybe not even requiring a license to hunt.  

I only did one polar bear.  It was too big for the bear table.

Alonzo Skunk Cap, our neighbor and friend, was said to be the only Blackfeet brave enough to hunt bears.  In fact, he was breaking the taboo.  As the politics of going back to the past heated up, our bear rug edger and liner quit us, which is how I ended up doing it, sitting on the bear table where tanned hides dried flat, like a sweater stabilizing after washing, and using a big three-edged buckskin needle to put the felt ruffle around the edge.  The bear was in my lap, spread out over my legs.

When I first came (1961), there were three mounted bears in the Scriver Museum of Montana Wildlife:  the iconic grizzly; a very handsome standing black bear, glossy as a raven’s wing; and a sort of fuzzy young cinnamon bear that was out in the entrance where it was often dressed up in human clothes as a joke.  That’s what they thought.   "Smoky the Bear."

In a little more hidden way, it was reducing bears to toys, taking the fear out of them by claiming them as one of us.  As Bob began to be more upscale than a tourist attraction and his work progressed from trinkets to highbrow gallery art, he removed the little bear, along with the two-headed calf and the albino skunk.  Animals are cultural indicators even within white contexts.  Rich people can see them one way, while people scrambling to make a living see them in quite another.

By the time the art was carrying the studio, displacing the taxidermy, and then showing enough profit to buy the Flatiron Ranch (previously owned by the Doane family and across the road from Skunkcap’s) which was on a creek that came down out of the mountains, forming a roadway for bears, he was a little bit brain-damaged from strokes and heart attacks,  more recklessly defiant than he had ever been.  In spite of protests from the neighbors, he collected carcasses and dumped them on a ridge he could see with binoculars from the ranch house.  

Coyotes and cougars also found this little feeding ground, but the wardens were wary enough to just fly over low now and then, knowing Bob might shoot at an airplane but they could get out of range.  From the plane they could use their telemetry to see what bears were there.  I’d been gone for decades by then and was relieved that I didn’t have to confront the moral dilemmas of Bob's defiance, because my sympathies were always on every side, including that of the bear.  It is a painful quality but serves me well.

One day he could see the five horses lined up on a nearby hill top, gazing at something down in the willow brush along the creek.  It was May, the mating season.  Bears entangle violence and death with sex as much as humans do, so he decided not to walk up to see what was happening.  From the pickup he could see bear rumps, rhythmically pumping.  

John Clarke, grandson of Malcolm Clark whose murder triggered the Baker Massacre, was an aged deaf-and-mute famous woodcarver in East Glacier.  On the wall of his tumble-down studio, he had saved photos.  One was out of Life magazine, a rather famous photo of bears mating, the male behind in both senses.  In those days it was shocking.  These days it’s usual in R-movies.  John thought it was very funny.  Bob always examined it carefully.

One day in the Sixties when I walked into the shop suddenly Bob plopped a bear cub into my arms.  It was dead, about the size of a human baby just before it begins to walk.  It had somehow gotten into town, gone up a telephone pole and been shot down.  Naturally it was brought to Bob the same as every other problematic little curious or emotionally charged thing.  He was a maternal man, but often displaced it off onto me.  I’m am NOT a maternal woman, but anyone would have felt the surge of response to that little body.  I rocked it without knowing that I was.  I didn’t think of it as a teddy bear.  Bob smiled, but there were tears just behind.

This is why I’m telling these stories on Memorial Day, for the mixture of war and birth, the need to dominate mixed with the need to protect, and the simple fact that grief drives into our bodies far deeper than graves, because it is not in earth, but in time, reaching back to first awareness, reaching back to first human arts.

THE FLATIRON RANCH

Flatiron Ranch, west of Browning, MT

Anne Grant sends me this message:  "I was recently honored to be selected as the first Elouise Cobell Fellow for UM's College of Humanities and Sciences. My current position is to document the history of the Blackfeet Indian Land Trust, which Elouise founded and is the first of its kind in the country.

"As I am delving into various histories, I thought you would be the perfect source of information regarding the actual property prior to the FWS’s conservation easement and before it’s purchase by The Nature Conservancy."

Of course, I'm flattered and pleased, though I had almost nothing to do with this ranch.  This post is the first info I sent.
_______________

Gradients, contrasting qualities that make it inevitable that what’s on one side will go to the other side, are the dynamic energy that make lots of things happen, from the movement of air around the planet to the balance of molecules and elements like salt in a body.  Also, values that are high on one side and low on the other can cause commerce or migration like the circulation of bison around the grassy prairie.

As it was explained to me, for an ecologist the value of the Flatiron Ranch is that the snow water at the top of the Rockies goes downhill along the waterways but also in underground filtering that is not seen until it “daylights” in small lakes or wells.  In the case of this foothills location, at the highest elevation the water is near-ice, clear and pure.   But by the bottom nearest the highway, the underground filtering has changed by adding earth minerals until it is a rather more alkali water.  Most people wouldn’t notice, but the plants and animals, including birds but not larger mammals, sort themselves out according to their preferred alkali/acid balance.  Different plants collect around the high ponds than at the fish pond by the ranch house.  This makes the ranch ideal for studying ecology, the interrelationships among living things and the mineral earth.  Ecology is one of the most powerful ideas of our times.

Students of ecology at the ranch.

Any waterway is a path and a boundary so Flatiron Creek is a natural way up and down the mountains for game animals and their predators.  That means that grizzlies and mountain lions, coyotes and wolves, also went up and down that way.  There was a ridge maybe a half-mile from the ranch house where grizzlies came, visible from the house with binoculars.  Bob could not resist salting that ridge with the carcasses of animals, usually road kill from human doin’s.  Whole cows hit by cars.

Some contemporary Skunkcaps

On the botany walk around the ranch that was my first real introduction to it (after Bob’s death) the scientist guiding us said that one of the keys to grasslands was sporadic but thorough grazing.  This evolved to fit with the buffalo, who came in a big herd, mowed everything down to the bottom, left a lot of dung and then moved on, maybe not returning for a year or more.  The guide showed us that grass that hadn’t been grazed for a long time became entangled and too thick to grow.  Until then I had assumed that the biggest danger was overgrazing, but he taught us that it was “wrong grazing.”  The Savory system of moving cattle around the pastures was meant to imitate bison and resulted in good growth.  Savory grazing means using movable fence, maybe electrified to keep the cows moving, while bad management put up fences that kept the cattle in one place until they got tired of not enough grazing and broke down their own exits.

The pond by the ranch house was fenced with cyclone mesh to keep a pet deer or two inside.  Bob planted fish and his own grandchildren snuck in there to catch them.  Many Canada geese nested around the ranch and in the spring an observant person could locate the places.  Bob would sneak in cautiously and steal a live egg, which he would keep warm in his shirt until it hatched.  When it came out of the shell, it would imprint on Bob and faithfully follow him around all summer.  In the fall, after a little indecision, it would migrate with the others.

Bob Scriver and "Eegy."

He learned to do this when we had a pet eagle that we’d raised.  When she began to lay eggs, they were sterile because eagles mate on the glide very high in the sky.  So Bob had the bright idea of substituting a goose egg from the Hutterite colony.  The first time was a tragedy, because he hadn’t remembered that domestic chicks were from the kind of birds that -- as soon as they are dry -- get up and walk off.  Since the eagle’s nest, such as it was, which was more a collection of sticks than any sort of structure, was up high, that was the end of the gosling.  The next time Bob built a little fence on the nest ledge and a walkway down to the bottom.  

If he was too busy to find a nest of Canada geese, he would just go by the Hutterites and buy a domestic egg.  Once I stopped on a vacation trip and found him sitting at his work table with a white duck nicely settled on his foot.  The ducks and geese turned out to be pretty good mousers.

Bob's Badger Tipi has disappeared.

This photo was taken at the Flatiron Ranch.

One summer Bob got the notion that we should go fishing, even though he was allergic to fish and itched for days after he mounted one.  We went out to Skunkcaps, which was just across the highway, a continuation of the Flatiron waterway except spread out into marshy flood plain with many beaver mazes in it, shallow water winding through the willow brush that shaded it.  I had no experience at fishing at all, and Bob’s dated back to boyhood.  We cut sticks, tied on fishing line and a hook, and caught grasshoppers for bait, squeezing their heads to make them a bit logy but not kill them.  The idea was for them to kick on the surface of the water as though they'd just fallen off the overhanging grass.

A mighty Skunkcap.

We went right in the water, waist-deep, having a terrific time on a hot summer day and not catching a darn thing, partly because we kept talking.  Finally we caught one small fish and carried it up to the Skunkcap’s cabin.  This was the old-timers, Alonzo and his wife, old enough to have been blinded in the epidemic of trachoma that plagued the Blackfeet until Doug Gold brought out a doctor friend from Pennsylvania who treated a lot of people and taught the school superintendent and the agent how to use a wooden matchstick to roll back the eyelid so ointment could be put under it.  The germ was chlamidia, a variation on the sexual infection that likewise preferred tender places.  The blindness resulted when the eyelid swelled so that the eyelashes turned under and scraped the cornea, damaging it the way scratched glass would lose its clarity. 

Alonzo and his wife were both close to blind.  Bob announced with fake importance that we had brought meat to the table and put his little fish on it.  The old timers came to feel around for what might be there and began to laugh hard at our lack of fishing skill.  The little cabin was pretty empty and we felt sheepish for not thinking ahead to bring food for them.  We knew them pretty well, since they lived a couple of doors down from Scriver Studio in another log cabin.  Alonzo would bring wood from his allotment on his horse-drawn wagon, which had been stripped to running gear and wheels.  I’m not sure there was a seat.  Otherwise, he would hitch a ride into town and come to the studio when he was ready to go home, patiently sitting out front until it was closing time so we could run him home in the pickup.

Eloise Cobell, heroine

Alonzo was said to be one of the few old time Blackfeet who wasn’t afraid to hunt grizzlies.  Maybe they visited his ranch and he shot them there.  Bears were taboo but if they’re trying to come in one’s house, one’s priorities are adjusted.  Bob was a fur buyer and Alonzo’s sons brought in many beaver, otter and muskrat hides.  Now and then maybe a mountain goat, but no one asked any questions.  That was part of the social ecology, addressing a gradient for a family with no income through Bob, the middleman, to the elegant furrier clientele, maybe at Beckman’s in Great Falls.

EAST SIDE, WEST SIDE, ALL AROUND THE TOWN

Winter in East Glacier

This time of year in East Glacier things used to get a little, um, exciting.  I’m talking about the post WWII years.  You could read some of the stories in “Dream Chasers of the West” by B.L. Wettstein, (2006, Riverbend Publishing), although the author is writing about the WWI years.  It was so primitive in those days that Clara Augusta Miller Smiley, who had already homesteaded in Minnesota, was repeating the feat in a cabin that could only be reached by jumping off the train when it slowed down to go uphill around a curve.  Not from a boxcar, but from the coach, because there was no depot and no dependable road.  Even when Clara came home from the hospital with her new baby, the only way to get it home in winter with the road drifted shut was to throw the infant off the train into the arms of a dependable man.  The bright side was that if he missed, the snowdrifts would cushion the baby’s fall.  Today you can see that place from the Marias Pass Highway #2 just before you get to Summit. The buildings are gone, I guess.  In old age she moved into East Glacier and her buildings became the Brown House, a pottery shop and bed and breakfast.

http://www.tripadvisor.com/Hotel_Review-g45152-d615664-Reviews-The_Brown_House-East_Glacier_Park_Montana.html

East Glacier is not the same as West Glacier, but they are both born of the enterprises of James J. Hill, Jr, and therefore children of the railroad. The sibs are nothing alike.  East Glacier can be one helluva bleak place in winter, even now, though the Browning teachers often live up there these days.  I rented a house there in the spring of 1971, a two-story yellow house built in the Thirties that I dearly loved, not least because I had just survived a divorce and a winter in our little ranch house on Two Medicine River which I also dearly loved.  But then I’m a nester -- luckily, a serial nester.

The viaduct underpass

East Glacier is bisected by the railroad.  The train only stops there in the summer because it is the feeder for the Big Hotel which is only open in the summer.  There is only one way to cross from the mountain side of town to the highway side and in a really fierce winter (and the one in 1972-73 was worse than this one -- ask the weather stat people) the crossing viaduct under the train tracks can be problematic.  That year, the sewer, which runs under the road, froze, broke, and filled the road with steaming water that instantly froze onto the undercarriage of any vehicle that ventured across it.

Brownie's

In the Fifties when everyone was already dislocated and forced out of their familiar conventional patterns, one side of town would get into a sort of enmeshed quarrel with the other side.  They stole each other’s wives, ran up too-high bills, neglected their children, and -- well, drank too much.  That’s when the two sides are rumored to attempt to burn each other out, though it might be that things just got over-heated in several senses.  Thus there had to be two grocery stores:  “Brownies” in the bottom of an old log dormitory built to shelter the railroad construction workers and “Krska’s” or the “Glacier Park Trading Company.”   They survive today, though “Brownies” is now a youth hostel upstairs and a very rewarding bakery downstairs.  In the old days no Brownie’s customer would trade at Krska’s unless he gotten into a fight on the mountain side of the tracks, nor would any of Krska’s people trade at Brownies unless his wife had run off with someone on his own side.

Krska's

In the Seventies when I was divorced, there was financial trouble and population shrinkage all along the High Line.  Major changes were underway in Browning, the capital of the Blackfeet Reservation.  One was subsidized housing projects which caused the little old houses, like the ones I had lived in, to be demolished.  Moccasin Flats was partly demolished and partly sort of overbuilt so the little log cabins were crowded among newer buildings.  This meant that the white teachers had to find housing in East Glacier.  Until then, the Board would fire them unless they lived in town or on a family ranch.

The other dynamic that stretched along Highway #2 to the east was businesses that had been founded in the boom after WWII when veterans returned to start small businesses and marry Indian ranch women who were enrolled and nicely situated.  These were big handsome white guys with real world experience.  Their mixed-blood children have become major leaders in the half-century since then.  But in the Seventies the parent generation was aging, wanting to retire, selling out, or -- the saddest aspect -- running their businesses to failure because no one would buy them.  That is, they stopped maintaining buildings and inventories, let their tax bills run up, discovered that their children would not stay, and -- well, began drinking too much.  When I came to Browning to teach in 1961, Joe Lewis’ cafe was one of the nicest in town.  Now it is Ick’s, a source of abusable substances and street quarrels.  The image of Napi that Al Racine painted on the wall of the building is still there, but he ain’t eatin‘ no short stack no more. 

Great Northern Railroad, paralleling Highway #2

Things are a little better in Valier, so some rez folks are moving here.  It’s just off the rez so teachers can live here and still teach in Heart Butte.  There is no equivalent to Ick’s, at least where anyone can detect it.  In fact, this time the running to failure is more like consolidating the wealth.  The prosperous ranchers don’t live in town, but own town businesses, often collecting the better ones into the strongest families.  The rich get richer and the poor just hang on.  The churches can’t support a local minister, but protect their buildings.  Ministers and priests travel among three or four congregations, which is what I did in the Eighties.  The bars ran to failure.  Gone.  A few other businesses begin to struggle.

Bob divorced me in the fall of 1970 but I just ignored him for a while.  I was too confused to make decisions, though I’d asked him to get the divorce because he was terrified that I would divorce him and be able to take all his money.  He had bought a little ranch on Two Medicine, a couple of miles from the highway, so I went out there for the winter to let my head clear.  It was a thistle-and-gravel ranch since the flood of 1964 removed all the topsoil, but our horses were fine with that.  Their biggest problem was boredom  -- excluding hay, of course -- which they resolved by watching me move around in the house.  When I went from kitchen to front room, there were thundering hooves outside while they raced around to the window on that side.  Reality TV.   In spring I went back to teaching and moved to East Glacier.

Three developments happened without me really noticing.  One was that the alcoholic woman who took a run at Bob after his second divorce but didn't get anywhere, did better this time.  He was aging.  She moved right in with him and ended up being the fourth wife by common law, the widow.  The second was that the big rodeo series, which I had helped develop and cast, sold as a complete series to the Calgary Stampede or its collateral investors.  It was a LOT of money, enough to buy the Flatiron Ranch.  The third was that the divorce law changed in Montana and was far more generous to wives as well as including common-law wives.  But I just ignored all that.  I wanted a graduate degree and went back to Portland.  People around here were baffled -- one’s CHILDREN went to college and what the hell was a grad school anyway?  Was it worth money?

Flatiron Ranch

Since then Browning has gained a tribal community college.  Valier has a booming library, looking at expansion.  More and more people not only own computers but can operate them, which means that a lot of what happens is invisible, underground, unmonitored except by the internet megamedia.  The sheriff has proceeded upwards to being a county commissioner, our best deputy has left his job, and I don’t know about the other law officers (border patrol, homeland security) who live in town.  We’re not as secure as we were for a while.  The expected boom in housing that was supposed to follow frakking has gone out with the tide, the wind farm somehow doesn’t seem to be connected to us, and the water rights that sustain wheat farming are threatened by the activation of sovereign rights the rez had all along, but never developed.

People are scared.  They act badly.  They fort up and cocoon.  East Glacier still does that, too, but -- maybe because of the tourist summers -- they tend to lean to the left instead of the right and that’s all the difference.  What both communities have in common is that they know sex is fun but money means a lot more.  In the half-century since I came, that has seemed to be about right.  Not so many drink too much, but some have turned to drugs of one kind or another.  Or are hooked on bodice-ripper romance.