Ethics, Values, & Sustainability
Environmental Strategy & Sustainability
Systems Thinking & Sustainable Businesses
Last Updated 01/14/2006
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
On a winter’s night in that first year he woke to hear wolves in the low hills to the west of the house and he knew that they would be coming out onto the plain in the new snow to run the antelope in the moonlight. He pulled his breeches off the footboard of the bed and got his shirt and his blanketlined duckingcoat and got his boots from under the bed and went out to the kitchen and dressed in the dark by the faint warmth of the stove and held the boots to the windowlight to pair them left and right and pulled them on and rose and went to the kitchen door and stepped out and closed the door behind him.
When he passed the barn the horses whimpered softly to him in the cold. The snow creaked under his boots and his breath smoked in the bluish light. An hour later he was crouched in the snow in the dry creekbed where he knew the wolves had been using by their tracks in the sand of the washed, by their tracks in the snow.
They were already out on the plain and when he crossed the gravel fan where the creek ran south into the valley he could see where they’d crossed before him. He went forward on knees and elbows with his hands pulled back into his sleeves to keep them out of the snow and when he reached the last of the small dark juniper trees where the broad valley ran under the Animas Peaks he crouched quietly to steady his breath and then raised himself slowly and looked out.
They were running on the plain harrying the antelope and the antelope moved like phantoms in the snow and circled and wheeled and the dry powder blew about them in the cold moonlight and their breath smoked palely in the cold as if they burned with some inner fire and the wolves twisted and turned and leapt in a silence such that they seemed of another world entire. They moved down the valley and turned and moved far out on the plain until they were the smallest of figures in that dim whiteness and then they disappeared.
He was very cold. He waited. It was very still. He could see by his breath how the wind lay and he watched his breath appear and vanish and appear and vanish constantly before him in the cold and he waited a long time. Then he saw them coming. Loping and twisting. Dancing. Tunneling their noses in the snow. Loping and running and rising by twos in a standing dance and running on again.
There were seven of them and they passed within twenty feet of where he lay. He could see their almond eyes in the moonlight. He could hear their breath. He could feel the presence of their knowing that was electric in the air. They bunched and nuzzled and licked one another. Then they stopped. They stood with their ears cocked. Some with one forefoot raised to their chest. They were looking at him. He did not breathe. They did not breathe. They stood. Then they turned and quietly trotted on. When he got back to the house Boyd was awake but he didn’t tell him where he’d been or what he’d seen. He never told anybody.
The winter that Boyd turned fourteen the trees inhabiting the dry river bed were bare from early on and the sky was gray day after day and the trees were pale against it. A cold wind had come down from the north with the earth running under bare poles toward a reckoning whose ledgers would be drawn up and dated only long after all due claims had passed, such is this history. Among the pale cottonwoods with their limbs like bones and their trunks sloughing off the pale or green or darker bark clustered in the outer bend of the river bed below the house stood trees so massive that in the stand across the river was a sawed stump upon which in winters past herders had pitched a four be six foot canvas supply tent for the wooden floor it gave. Riding out for wood he watched his shadow and the shadow of the horse and travois cross those palings tree by tree. Boyd rode in the travois holding the axe as if he’d kept guard over the wood they’d gathered and he watched to the west with squinted eyes where the sun simmered in a dry red lake under the barren mountains and the antelope stepped and nodded among the cattle in silhouette upon the foreland plain.
In 1948 my father was serving his second term as sheriff of Mercer County, Montana. We lived in Bentrock, the county seat and the only town of any size in the region. In 1948 its population was less than two thousand people.
Mercer County is in the far northeast corner of Montana, and Bentrock is barely inside the state’s borders. Canada is only twelve miles away (though the nearest border crossing is thirty miles to the west), and North Dakota ten miles. Then, as now, Mercer County was both farm and ranch country, but with only a few exceptions, neither farms nor ranches were large or prosperous. On the western edge of the county and extending into tow other counties was the Fort Warren Indian Reservation, the rockiest, sandiest, least arable parcel of land in the region. In 1948 its roads were unpaved, and many of its shacks looked as though they would barely hold back a breeze.
But all of northeastern Montana is hard country – the land is dry and sparse and the wind never stops blowing. The heat and thunderstorms in summer can be brutal, and the winters are legendary for the fierceness of their blizzards and the depths to which temperatures drop. (In one year we reached 106 degrees in July and 40 below in January.) For those of you who automatically think of Montana and snow-capped mountains in the same synapse, let me disabuse you. Mercer County is plains, flat as a tabletop on its western edge and riven with gullies, ravines, and low rocky hills to the east because of the work the Knife River has done over the centuries. The only trees that grow in that part of the country, aside from a few cottonwoods along the riverbank, have been planted by farmers and town dwellers. And they haven’t planted many. It the land had its way, nothing would grow taller than sagebrush and buffalo grass.
The harshness of the land and the flattening effect of the wind and endless sky probably accounted for the relative tranquility of Mercer County. Life was simply too hard, and so much of your attention and energy went into keeping not only yourself, but also your family, your crops, and your cattle alive, that nothing was left over for raising hell or making trouble.
And 1948 still felt like a new, blessedly peaceful era. The exuberance of the war’s end had faded but the relief had not. The mundane, workaday world was a gift that had not outworn its shine. Many of the men in Mercer County had spent the preceding years in combat. (But not my father; he was 4-F. When he was sixteen a horse kicked him, breaking his leg so severely that he walked with a permanent limp, and eventually a cane, his right leg v-ed in, his right knew perpetually pointing to the left.) When these men came back from war they wanted nothing more than to work their farms and ranches and to live quietly with their families. The county even had fewer hunters after the war than before.
All of which made my father’s job a relatively easy one. Oh, he arrested the usual weekly drunks, mediated an occasional dispute about fence lines or stray cattle, calmed a few domestic disturbances, and warned the town’s teenagers about getting rowdy in Wood’s Café, but by and large being sheriff of Mercer County did not require great strength or courage. The ability to drive the county’s rural roads, often drifted over in the winter or washed out in the summer, was a much more necessary skill than being good with your fists or a gun. One of my father’s regular duties was chaperoning Saturday night dances in the county, but the fact that he often took along my mother (and sometimes me) shows how quiet those affairs – and his job – usually were.
And that disappointed me at the time. As long as my father was going to be sheriff, a position with so much potential for excitement, danger, and bravery, why couldn’t some of that promise be fulfilled? No matter how many wheat fields or cow pastures surrounded us, we were still Montanans, yet my father didn’t even look like a western sheriff. He wore a shirt and tie, as many of the men in town did, but at least they wore boots and Stetsons; my father wore brogans and a fedora. He had a gun but he never carried it, on duty or off. I knew because I checked, time and time again. When he left the house I ran to his dresser and the top drawer on the right side. And there it was, there it always was. Just as well. As far as I was concerned it was the wrong kind of gun for a sheriff. He should have had a nickel-plated Western Colt .45, something with some history and heft. Instead, my father had a small .32automatic, Italian-made and no bigger than your palm. My father didn’t buy such a sorry gun; he confiscated it from a drunken transient in one of his first arrests. My father kept the gun but in fair exchange bought the man a bus ticket to Billings, where he had family.
In 1948 my father was serving his second term as sheriff of Mercer County, Montana
The weather had changed in the night. The air was damp with a cold edge to it. Wood smoke and mist hung together in the valleys. In the garden the heavy heads of the last chrysanthemums drooped with moisture. The women had spent the last weeks preparing the winter clothes, and Kaede was grateful for the quilted garments she now wore under her robes. Sitting writing and reading made her hands and feet cold. Son she would have to arrange for braziers: She feared the onset of winter for which they were still so unprepared.
Ayame came bustling to the door and said in a voice tinged with alarm, “Lord Fujiwara is here, sir.”
Kaede said, “I will leave you,” placed the brush down, and stood.
“No, stay. It will amuse him to meet you. No doubt he’s come to hear whatever news you may have brought from the East.”
Her father went to the doorway and stepped out to welcome his guest. He turned and beckoned to Kaede and then dropped to his knees.
The courtyard was filled with men on horseback and other attendants. Lord Fujiwara was descending from a palanquin that had been set down beside the huge flat rock that had been transported to the garden expressly for that purpose; Kaede remembered the day from her childhood. She marveled briefly that anyone should so travel by choice, and hoped guiltily that the men had brought their own food with them. Then she dropped to her knees as one of the attendants loosened the nobleman’s sandals and he stepped out of them and into the house.
She managed to look at him before she cast her eyes downward. He was tall and slender, his face white and sculpted like a mask, the forehead abnormally high. His clothes were subdued in color, but elegant and made of exquisite fabric. He gave out a seductive fragrance that suggested boldness and originality. He returned her father’s bow graciously and responded to his greeting in courteous, flowery language.
Kaede remained motionless as he stepped past her into the room, the scent filling her nostrils.
“My eldest daughter,” her father said casually as he followed his guest inside. “Otori Kaede.”
“Lady Otori,” she heard him say, and then: “I would like to look at her.”
Come in, daughter,” her father said impatiently, and she went in on her knees.
“Lord Fujiwara,” she murmured.
“She is very beautiful,” the nobleman remarked. “Let me see her face.”
She raised her eyes and met his gaze.
“Exquisite.”
In his narrowed appraising eyes she saw admiration but no desire. It surprised her, and she smiled slightly but unguardedly. He seemed equally surprised, and the sternly held line of his lips softened.
“I am disturbing you,” he apologized, his glance taking in the writing instruments and the scrolls. Curiosity got the better of him. One eyebrow went up. “A lesson?”
“It’s nothing,” her father replied, embarrassed. “A girl’s foolishness. You will think me a very indulgent father.”
“On the contrary, I am fascinated.” He picked up the page she had been writing on. “May I?”
“Please, please,” her father said.
“Quite a fine hand. One would not believe it to be a girl’s.”
Kaede felt herself blush. She was reminded again of her boldness in daring to learn men’s affairs.
The weather had changed in the night
Here was this man Tom Guthrie in Holt standing at the back window in the kitchen of his house smoking cigarettes and looking out over the back lot where the sun was just coming up. When the sun reached the top of the windmill, for a while he watched what it was doing, that increased reddening of sunrise along the steel blades and the tail vane above the wooden platform. After a time he put out the cigarette and went upstairs and walked past the closed door behind which she lay in bed in the darkened guest room sleeping or not and went down the hall to the glassy room over the kitchen where the two boys were.
The room was an old sleeping porch with uncurtained windows on three sides, airy-looking and open, with a pinewood floor. Across the way they were still asleep, together in the same bed under the north windows, cuddled up, although it was still early fall and not yet cold. They had been sleeping in the same bed for the past month and now the older boy had one hand stretched above his brother’s head as if he hoped to shove something away and thereby save them both. They were nine and ten, with dark brown hair and unmarked faces, and cheeks that were still as pure and dear as a girl’s
Outside the house the wind came up suddenly out of the west and the tail vane turned with it and the blades of the windmill spun in a red whir, then the wind died down and the blades slowed and stopped.
You boys better come on, Guthrie said.
He watched their faces, standing at the foot of the bed in his bathrobe. A tall man with thinning black hair, wearing glasses. The older boy drew back his hand and they settled deeper under the cover. One of them sighed comfortably.
Ike.
What?
Come on now.
We are.
You too, Bobby.
He looked out the window. The sun was higher, the light beginning to slide down the ladder of the windmill, brightening it, making rungs of rose-gold.
When he turned again to the bed he saw by the change in their faces that they were awake now. He went out into the hall again past the closed door and on into the bathroom and shaved and rinsed his face and went back to the bedroom at the front of the house whose high windows overlooked Railroad Street and brought out shirt and pants from the closet and laid them out on the bed and took off his robe and got dressed. When he returned to the hallway he could hear them talking in their room, their voices thin and clear, already discussing something, first one then the other, intermittent, the early morning matter-of-fact voices of little boys out of the presence of adults. He went downstairs.
Ten minutes later when they entered the kitchen he was standing at the gas stove stirring eggs in a black cast-iron skillet. He turned to look at them. They sat down at the wood table by the window.
Didn’t you boys hear the train this morning?
Yes, Ike said.
You should have gotten up then.
Well, Bobby said. We were tired.
That’s because you don’t got to bed at night.
We go to bed.
But you don’t go to sleep. I can hear you back there talking and fooling around.
They watched their father out of identical blue eyes. Though there was a year between them they might have been twins. They’d put on blue jeans and flannel shirts and their dark hair was uncombed and fallen identically over their unmarked foreheads. They sat waiting for breakfast and appeared to be only half awake.
I remember the day the Aleut ship came to our island. At first it seemed like a small shell afloat on the sea. Then it grew larger and was a gull with folded wings. At last in the rising sun it became what it really way—a red ship with two red sails.
My brother and I had gone to the head of a canyon that winds down to a little harbor which is called Coral Cove. We had gone to gather roots that grow there in the spring.
My brother Ramo was only a little boy half my age, which was twelve. He was small for one who had lived so many suns and moons, but quick as a cricket. Also foolish as a cricket when he was excited. For this reason and because I wanted him to help me gather roots and not go running off, I said nothing about the shell I saw or the gull with folded wings.
I went on digging in the brush with my pointed stick as though nothing at all were happening on the sea. Even when I knew for sure that the gull was a ship with two red sails.
But Ramos’s eyes missed little in the world. They were black like a lizard’s and very large and, like the eyes of a lizard, could sometimes look sleepy. This was the time when they saw the most. This was the way they looked now. They were half-closed, like those of a lizard lying on a rock about to flick out its tongue to catch a fly.
“A canoe!” he cried. “A great big one, bigger than all of our canoes together. And red!”
A canoe or a ship, it did not matter to Ramo. In the very next breath, he tossed the root in the air and was gone, crashing through the brush, shouting as he went.
I kept on gathering roots, but my hands trembled as I dug in the earth, for I was more excited than my brother. I knew that it was a ship on the sea and not a big canoe, and that ship could mean many things. I wanted to drop the stick and run too, but I went on digging roots because they were needed in the village.
By the time I filled the basket, the Aleut ship had sailed around the wide kelp bed that encloses our island and between the two rocks that guard Coral Cove. Word of its coming had already reached the village of Ghalas-at. Carrying their weapons, our men sped along the trail that winds down to the shore. Our women were gathering at the edge of the mesa.
I made my way through the heavy brush and, moving swiftly, down the ravine until I came to the sea cliffs. There I crouched on my hands and knees. The tide was out and the sun shone on the white sand of the beach. Half the men from our village stood at the water’s edge. The rest were concealed among the rocks at the foot of the trail, ready to attack the intruders should they prove unfriendly.
A tall man with a yellow beard stood on the boat. I had never seen a Russian before, but my father had told me about them, and I wondered, seeing the way he stood with his feet set apart and his fists on his hips and looked at the little harbor as though it already belonged to him, if he were one of those men from the north whom our people feared. I was certain of it when the boat slid in to the shore and he jumped out, shouting as he did so.
“I have come in peace and wish to parley,” he said to the men on the shore.
None of them answered, but my father, who was of those hidden among the rocks, came forward down the sloping beach. He thrust his spear into the sand.
“I am the Chief of Ghalas-at,” he said. “My name is Chief Chowig.”
The Russian smiled and held up his hand, calling himself Captain Orlov. My father also held up his hand. I could not see his face, but I doubted that he smiled in return.
“I have come with forty of my men,” said the Russian. “We come to hunt sea otter. We wish to camp on your island while we are hunting.”
My father said nothing. He was a tall man, though not so tall as Captain Orlov, and he stood with his bare shoulders thrown back, thinking about what the Russian had said. He was in no hurry to reply because the Aleuts had come before to hunt otter. That was long in the past, but my father still remembered them.
“You remember another hunt,” Captain Orlov said when my father was silent. “I have heard of it, too. It was led by Captain Mitriff who was a fool and is now dead. The trouble arose because you and your tribe did all of the hunting.”
We hunted,” said my father, “but the one you call a fool wished us to hunt from one moon to the next, never ceasing.”
