Johnny’s Wolf

By Lance Olsen, Unfiltered 7-25-07

As tall as I, or maybe a little taller, the front wheel of the old, grayed wagon was just a foot or so from my face. I was maybe seven, maybe eight years old.

The crusty rust on the wheel's steel rim was rough in my hands. Stepping onto one of the wheel's wooden spokes, using the spokes as a ladder, pulling myself up with my hands, I climbed that weathered old wagon wheel one sunny summer day in 1950 or ‘51.

Once atop the wheel, I stepped over the side of the wagon box and sat on the wooden seat. Mission accomplished.

From this same perch, my maternal grandfather, my grandpa Johnny, saw the last wolf that anyone would see on our little Montana ranch. I’d come to the wagon and climbed to its seat to be where he’d been when he saw the wolf.

Up to the time he died, my grandmother – I called her Nana -- called me "Johnny's little shadow" because I loved him and was always following him around. He died just a year or two before my ascent to his seat, so I could still remember him very well enough to almost feel him at my side.

Sometime during World War One, Johnny had hitched this very wagon to a team of mules for the fourteen-mile round trip to Belt, Montana and home again. He’d made the trip alone that day. Nana and their firstborn, a daughter, Hazel, who would grow up to be my mother, stayed behind. Johnny was on the return trip, less than half a mile from the house, when he saw the wolf.

The wolf didn’t move. It saw the mules, the wagon, and my grandfather moving toward it, but it just stood and watched.

When Johnny saw the wolf, the Highwood Mountains stood a dozen miles ahead of him, and a dozen miles behind the watchful wolf. The Little Belt Mountains were at Johnny’s back, about 30 miles away, and the Rockies maybe eighty miles from his left shoulder.

Sitting where Johnny had sat, knowing the field he was crossing at the time, and having heard my older relatives’ stories of the rough, jolting rides they’d had in horse- or mule-drawn wagons, I knew that Johnny would have been rocking back and forth on this wagon seat as his mules pulled him and the wagon toward home.

When Johnny saw the wolf from his rocking perch, his mules’ rear ends would have been just a few feet away from his boots; his hands would have been holding their reins. But the absence of mules at my feet and reins in my hands did nothing to inhibit my boyish imagination of sitting beside my grandpa Johnny, wolf-watching, that long-ago day.

I knew the story well enough to know that the wolf didn't move when it saw Johnny and the team of mules come over the rise. Auntie Bert had explained that Johnny knew at once how odd this was, because wolves in those days were trapped, poisoned at every opportunity, and shot on sight.

So, after becoming fugitives in their homeland, wolves would flee at first sight of a person. But this lone wolf was content to stand and watch, as if knowing that my grandfather wasn't carrying a gun that day.

It was the time of World War One, and swarms of warring soldiers were slaughtering one another in Europe when Johnny saw that wolf. He’d escaped war by staying down on the farm, which got him an exemption. But his brothers-in-law Carl Thorson and Ben Benson, married to two of Nana’s three sisters, were in France. According to the stories my relatives told me of that war, my great-uncle Carl partied in Paris most nights, after his daily duties as an Army mail clerk were done. But my great-uncle Ben was out in the mud, blood, mustard gas, and the endless waves of bullets flying over the trenches, only interrupted by one trip to Paris for a visit with Carl.

Johnny knew of war, Carl, and Ben as he rode this wagon’s seat that day, but he wasn't thinking about any of that from the moment he saw the wolf. The reins in his hands were forgotten. His own two feet on the footrest behind the two mules' butts were forgotten. His attention was focussed on the wolf.

Johnny glanced at the mules, to see if they saw what he saw. Their ears were aimed straight toward the wolf, but the mules showed no concern; their minds were fixed on the reward of oats my grandfather would give them once they all got home and he got them unhitched them from the wagon and out of their harness. Nearly fourteen miles behind them for that day, and only a quarter mile from the barn now, the mules were too near their reward of oats to let some mere wolf distract them.

As mules kept pulling man and wagon nearer, the wolf just kept watching. The road, actually just parallel tracks across the rolling hilltop, passed within forty or fifty feet of him, and still the bold wolf hadn’t run off. Still anticipating their oats, the mules pulled man and wagon past the watching wolf, then followed the primitive road off the edge of the hill, down into a brushy coulee, out of the winter wind, where house and barn and oats were waiting.

Only then, when man, mules and wagon had all gone over the edge of the hill, out of sight, the wolf moved on to whatever other Montana hilltop it sought next. And, at least for that wolf on that day, that was the end of the story.

The story lasted a little longer for my grandfather. When he got to the house, Nana would tell me years later, Johnny was eager to get his hands on his guns. He took two, went looking for the hired man, and the two of them went after the wolf. But Johnny never saw that wolf again.

It's been more than fifty years since I climbed aboard the old wagon. The time I spent on its seat couldn’t have been more than five minutes. But there I was, my butt firmly planted on history as I sat, thinking of Johnny, the wolf, and the days when horses and mules still hauled wagons hither and yon on this ranch and many others all around it, for as far as Montana sprawled.

There was no great drama in the story of that wolf, nothing on an epic scale, but there was enough spark in this tidbit of my family’s history to have pulled me up onto the seat of the old wagon for an appointment with a world beyond my time. For all the adult talk of a child's mind being all taken up with the passing moment, my mind was drawn entire into my grandpa Johnny’s day.

Anyone watching me from the surrounding hills would have seen only a boy sitting still on an old wagon’s seat. The stillness within me would have been a good match for what that observer would have seen of me.

Sitting there, I lifted my gaze to the hills above the flock of chickens who were hunting dandelion greens and grasshoppers near the wagon. Then my gaze turned south, to the hills above the big, red barn and the pole corrals around it.

Wolves had run these hills. And my own grandfather had seen the last of them. In that moment, wolves were as distant and as near as my Grandpa Johnny.

I was occupied territory when I climbed down off that wagon seat – a boy inhabited by wolves. On the ground again, I walked all around the wagon, touching it, looking at the tailgate, studying all four wheels, memorizing the weathered structure of the sun-bleached, rain-washed, snow-scoured wood.

And then I was off to whatever other adventures awaited me that fine summer day, forgetting the moment as the next delivered something new. That old wagon’s seat would never again feel the weight of my butt. But wolves wouldn’t let me go that readily or that soon.

After my brief reverie upon a weathered wagon's seat, I'd frequently walk past the haystack above the house. It wasn’t something I did every day, but it happened many times in the years that followed. The first few times it happened, maybe only two or three of them, I carried a thread of hope that another wolf might be waiting there.

In time I finally came to accept I’d lost all hope of seeing a wolf there even before I was asked my opinion about it. But wolves would not let me go. Because of an old print hanging on one of the ranch house walls, one of them looked down on me everyday. That print -- The Lone Wolf – was a favorite in its time, and is a collectible today, but it has always been something much more personal to me.

In it, day in and day out, year after year, a wolf out hunting on a wintry evening is looking down from a hilltop at some farm or ranch buildings below. The wolf's breath is a frozen puff before its nose. All the surrounding landscape is covered by snow. The windows of the buildings below are yellowed with the light of candles or lanterns inside them, where the people are enjoying the warmth of fire, family, and shelter from the cold. The only thing missing is a hilltop haystack, a man, his wagon, and his mules.

The old print would sometimes catch my eye, and hold it for just the few seconds needed to pull me into a palpable history again. Caught there, staring, I would wonder what wolves thought of us, and whether Johnny's wolf had given my family any thought at all. Thus are souls stretched out of themselves, even for little kids, if only for a few seconds at a time.

Home from the war, Johnny and Nana’s brother-in-law Ben Benson got a job with one of the mining companies in Butte. But Butte was in those days far too intense and rowdy a place for this man who’d seen so much gore and horror. There were people of great heart there, but there was wickedness too, and violence, including tensions between miner and boss, and between miner and miner as fully grown men spent their wages on drinks and their energy on fights.

Already sickened with war, Ben hated it, and my then-young great-aunt Bert hated it too. The Bensons were looking for some place else, some life other.

Nana and Johnny were looking too. Nana wanted out of the ranch after losing a toddler son there, and perhaps Johnny tired of living as my great-grandfather’s hired man, having too little say in how the ranch was run. Bert and Ben moved onto the ranch when Nana and Johnny left it, and it was my patient Auntie Bert who first told me the story of Johnny’s wolf, and who’d hung the Lone Wolf print on the ranch house wall.

The ranch would never be Johnny’s or Nana’s. But Johnny had kept a diary of his last days there. I found it in a box of papers after my mother’s death in 1996. On its first page, he wrote only this: Diary of a Knucklehead. In his day, Norwegians were called squareheads, or blockheads, or knuckleheads, and I think that maybe he enjoyed the monicker rather than being insulted by it.

On the 22nd of September, 1918, my knucklehead grandfather wrote, "Went fishing and got 11 trout. Cut and branded the calves at noon. "

On the 25th, he and a neighbor named Browning laid out fence on the mutual boundary of their land. Then: "Browning and I got stewed got home at 10:30 in the dark."

The next day, September 26th, 1918, he wrote only this: "Too sick to work so we fished all day."

October 12, 1918: "Set post and stretched wire at Browning."

October 13, 1918: "Some sick last night got 14 trout and some suckers."

October 14, 1918: "Hauled two loads of wheat. Took home two loads of coal."

October 17, 1918: "did work rained all day went fishing got sack full."

November 7, 1918: "cleaned the barns and coop Also went hunting for 1 hr. with Joe Dzivi got a cottontail and weasel."

Johnny’s drinking, hunting, and fishing do nothing to subtract from the beloved American myth of the hardworking rancher, but Johnny did love to party and play. In this, he and Nana were a good match; they invited rural neighbors and relatives from town to barn dances when they were on the ranch. When I read that Johnny and his neighbor Browning got "stewed," I knew exactly what he meant by the term, because many years after his death Nana and others of her generation still used that old-timers' slang for getting drunk.

Johnny died without telling me why they left the ranch, or what he thought about it. I didn't think to ask Nana about their leaving until years later, when I was in college: "How come you and Johnny left the ranch?"

"Oh," she sighed. "That."

She told me that life on the ranch was in some ways very good. Chokecherries were abundant enough to make jars and jars of thickly luxurious syrup and jelly. She and Johnny had a big garden and, once the barn was built, a good root cellar. Chickens, turkeys, ducks, geese, sheep, a couple pigs, and maybe a couple dozen cattle gave them all the meat they could eat.

They had milk cows enough to give them plenty of war-years luxuries like butter and cream, and chickens enough to give them eggs even when a lot of the people in town couldn't afford them. Nana’s dad, Swan Thorson, was a prosperous businessman in Great Falls, and he made very sure that his grandkids always had good clothes and shoes.

But Johnny and Nana had no spare money, nothing for the little extras that can bring joy to the life of a family. Necessity and practicality took their toll on cash. If Nana made any money selling eggs, it went to buying more fencing nails. When Johnny loaded the wagon with wheat for sale in town, he’d come back home with a load of coal for the kitchen stove. Nana said one of the things that made her want to leave the ranch was coming home from Belt, a return trip of seven miles in an uncovered wagon, behind a team of horses or mules, with kids sniffling tearfully every step of the way because there hadn't been even a few pennies to buy them some candy.

"I couldn't stand it," Nana said, quietly, but emphatically, and with a remembrance of bitter pain in her voice.

This wasn’t a happy story, but my mind closed ‘round it quickly because I was glad to knew this other chapter of my family’s life on that ranch. And then Nana remembered something else, another story I'd never heard before.

Once, after having passed the haystack where a wolf once stood, pulling the same wagon but now with both my grandparents and their then-two kids in it, the mules suddenly decided to plunge off the little road leading from the hilltop down to house and barn. The mules plunged straight downhill to the bottom, where they, the wagon, Nana, Johnny, my mother and her younger brother Harvey all crashed in one great tangled pile by the little creek that gurgled past the house.

Nana told me it happened so fast that she didn't have time to toss the kids free of the wagon, and was anyway afraid that she might just end up tossing one under the wagon's wheels. As it turned out, there was a broken part or two on the wagon, but neither mules nor people were hurt.

Standing in her kitchen, in Great Falls, several decades later, Nana told me, with the same quiet emphasis, "I just didn't want to live like that anymore."

There was something more. Bert had already told me that it was Russell and his apple who ran Nana’s heart off the ranch.

Russell, Johnny and Nana’s toddler son, younger than my mother and Harvey, had fallen suddenly ill one day when Johnny was far from the ranch house. Whatever had struck Russell that day, Nana had seen nothing like it before, and it looked very bad.

Belt, the nearest town, was seven miles away, and the nearest hospital was 30 miles away, in Great Falls. Electricity and the telephone wouldn’t reach that part of rural Montana until some forty years later, so there was no way to get help via a phone call. Complicating things even more, Nana was among the many young adult women of the early 1900s who hadn’t learned to drive a car.

With her toddler son too sick for carrying across the hills in search of Johnny, Nana paced the kitchen floor with Russell in her arms, trying to will him well, until Johnny showed up for lunch. They got Russell to the hospital in Great Falls, but their little boy died there.

When Johnny and Nana went back to the ranch, Nana found an apple lying on the ranch house floor, where Russell had dropped it. Somehow, in her hours of pacing, she hadn’t noticed it. But now she saw that little Russell taken a bite of it, his last bite of anything in this world. Her heart fell when she saw it.

Auntie Bert had already told me that story when I asked Nana why she and Johnny left the ranch. When Nana didn’t tell me about Russell and his apple, I felt I understood.

Once off the ranch, Johnny worked as a blacksmith for the mighty Anaconda Copper Mining Company's operations in Great Falls. His lungs were going bad because of it. On weekends, he still loved fishing for trout, and hunting for sharptailed grouse and Chinese pheasants. Evenings, he read the novels of Sinclair Lewis.

I remember sitting on the front porch with Johnny on a stormy Great Falls evening when rain came down in floods and thunder rocked the skies above us. Amidst the fireworks and thunderclaps all around, he told me that he loved thunderstorms because they have even more drama than Shakespeare could inspire. This was the first I’d heard of Shakespeare but, immediately, I loved thunderstorms for their drama because my grandfather did. A couple dozen or more noisy storms can come and go without one of them reminding me of Johnny but, every now and then, when I'm least expecting it, a resounding storm will bring me back beside my grandfather.

Johnny’s lungs got worse. He got too weak to work. ACM at first insisted that he only had tuberculosis, and certainly not the silicosis that other men got from working in the risky conditions of those times. He kept getting sicker, and then sicker, until he was too far gone to work for ACM, and had to face his illness and his family with no money.

Friends gave him work in one of the small, independent blacksmith shops that have long since fallen to make way for today's downtown Great Falls. I have a vague memory of visiting him there one day, a five-year old walking into the surprising darkness of an unlighted blacksmith shop on a sunny day. And I can clearly remember one evening when several of his blacksmith friends came in the door with Johnny after work, smiling, cracking jokes, and ready for a party.

But as the days went by, Johnny only got sicker, and the parties at home got fewer. Then he went away, to the state hospital at Galen, Montana. At last, ACM acknowledged that Johnny and others were actually suffering from silicosis, and started issuing monthly checks to Johnny and the other men, but I would never see him again.

Gone were Johnny's days of a diary on the ranch, when he would write of trout and hangovers, calves and neighbors with names like Browning and Dzivi. Gone too were his days of fishing for trout, of hunting for sharptail grouse and Chinese pheasants. In Galen State Hospital, where he would die, Johnny's last written words were on a torn piece of paper with --- ah, the irony of it -- a beautiful Chinese pheasant rooster on the left edge. He wrote this:

Dear:
Dr Terrill: I menet no harm in what I said The innocent of what I had said I came he to get twell twell.

On the back of the pheasant-graced scrap of paper, in Nana's hand, this : Daddy wrote this the night before he died.

Even then, the world wasn’t quite done with Johnny. The hearse carrying his body back to Great Falls slid off an icy road, and ended up in the ditch, where it sat until a tow truck came to the rescue. While Nana waited, an executive from ACM called her to say how sorry the company was to hear of Johnny’s death and, oh, yes, by the way, he also wanted to make very sure to remind her that, because Johnny had died, there’d be no more checks.

Years later, when Nana was already pretty old, about the time I asked her why she and Johnny left the ranch, Mom noticed a little blurb in the newspaper. Finally, ACM acknowledged that many men like Johnny had died of work-related silicosis, and that it had set up a fund for the widows. Mom told that she and Nana spent months before Nana could prove she was Johnny’s widow. Nana’s checks amounted to $75 a month, until the day she too died.

I can imagine Johnny and Nana now, having a good long laugh as they sip their whiskey and water, throwing a party – probably with Sinclair Lewis on their guest list -- to celebrate the dark comedy of all the years of bad lungs, hearses in ditches, and company checks. I can hear the ice cubes tinkling in their glasses as they chuckle.

If it were possible to be with them, I'd propose we drink a toast to wolves, who have lately been making a bit of a comeback in western Montana, although I don't expect that wolves will ever be permitted a grand enough return to let any of their kind’s eyes see that ranch again. But then I never really believed that the ranch would go out of the family, until it did.

Those hills, already older than we, can look forward to the unfolding views of millions of days and nights crossing their horizons. Wolves may not be foreseeable by the ephemeral likes of me, but the world has ways and means of its own.

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