My Page: Bryce Andrews

blog: ON RIVERS AND RANCHING

Maybe it is a little thing, an insignificant one, to notice a man waving at the side of the road or miss him altogether. Maybe it was a fluke, or the drivers in their brand-new SUVs were just in a hurry. Still, I cannot shake the feeling that they inhabited a different world, a strange Montana bearing little resemblance to the place where I work and live.

Their Montana did not require attending closely to the hooves of cattle, or to clouds building above the Pintlers. It had not taught them to study the condition of grass plants, or learn the etiquette of gravel roads. [more]

blog: ON RIVERS AND RANCHING

At first, all I can see is the high, flickering light through the night sky, but I know the shape and clatter of what comes behind it. Two of these trains pass each day on the tracks. I watch them from the door of my rented house—an eastbound one at sunset and a westbound one after night falls.

The early train is loaded with toxic dirt from the now-dry reservoir of the Milltown Dam. Its suspension groans under the weight. But this train, the empty train, clatters as it passes. [more]

blog: ON RIVERS AND RANCHING

Four-thirty a.m. is dark, even in the middle of July, and so I drive the moonlit frontage road to Ted’s house where light spills out of the stable door and the horses stand with their heads low.

Ringo is a big paint whose only job for a while has been increasing his girth. His unshod hooves are rough-edged and massive. To get around his belly I have to let my latigo out as far as it will go and haul hard on the cinch to reach the first hole. [more]

blog: ON RIVERS AND RANCHING

When I reached the other side of the pasture I looped the wire though an insulator and pulled hard. The wire snapped straight between the posts, raising a fence where there was none. I looked down the line as it angled from post to post and finally was lost to distance. My eyes were drawn across the grass and the broad expanse of the Deer Lodge Valley to the far horizon. I stared up at the jagged gray line of the Pintler Mountains, and Mount Powell like an arrow pointing at the sky [more]

blog: ON RIVERS AND RANCHING

She stands up when I slip the chain and open the gate. Shaking with effort, she lifts her bad hind leg off the ground and sways on the other three. She is gaunt and sprinkled all over with fly powder that looks like talc. Pale and shrunken, she looks more like a cow’s ghost or a desert carcass than something alive.

I keep my eyes on her as I shut the gate. She lowers her head, stares at me and scrapes the ground with a front hoof. She drools. An abscess distorts the line of her jaw, making her look like a squirrel hoarding nuts. [more]

blog: ON RIVERS AND RANCHING

In the morning I drove down to the hay meadow, got out of the truck and pulled on my hip boots. I dosed my hands, face and neck with insecticide and then crossed the fence slowly, making sure each rubberized leg cleared the barbs by a good six inches. I’ve learned to protect these boots—even a small hole can soak you in a hurry.

The grass was up to the rivets on my jeans. As I took my first steps into it, I marveled at how quickly irrigated crops spring up in the long, hot days of early July. Still wet from last night’s shower, leaves and stalks flicked droplets of water on me. Each step sent two small clouds skyward, a whining gray one of mosquitoes and a yellowish one of pollen. The mosquitoes mobbed me looking for a sliver of non-toxic skin. The pollen curled lazily in my wake, tying knots in the air like smoke off a cigarette tip. [more]

blog: ON RIVERS AND RANCHING

A night storm: I am driving home from Butte on I-90. Speeding down the grade to Anaconda I watch lightning bolts striking to the northeast. Some of them are probably falling on the ranch. The wind is strong enough to jog the steering wheel in my hands and with the windows down and stereo off I can hear thunder.

I drove to Butte earlier this evening. The sun was just starting the think of setting and this storm was creeping into the valley. The scattered cumuli of day were overhead, but to the west above Mount Powell the sky darkened like a bruise. The dark clouds spread. [more]

blog: ON RIVERS AND RANCHING

I walk double time through a year’s worth of accumulated tumbleweeds. A bottle of propane—the squat, white kind you see next to barbeques—drags my left hand down. At the end of a rubber hose and three feet of steel, the torch is whooshing, kicking out a gas flame too pale to see in the afternoon light. Pointing it backwards with my right hand, I swivel the torch in time with my steps. I make sure to lick the flame beneath the dry grass that overhangs the ditch banks. I fire each side in turn, trying to be thorough.

Looking over my shoulder I can see flames boiling up where the torch has been. They catch fast and burn faster, exploding upward with a rush that hoists still-flaming stalks and embers towards the blue sky. The fires expand like gasoline dripped on water. [more]

blog: ON RIVERS AND RANCHING

The ranch is an odd piece of ground: Though pretty and secluded, it is bisected by a public road that accesses the Deer Lodge National Forest and therefore sees a lot of traffic. Hunters come in droves when the seasons are open. Locals drive up to cut posts and poles. Occasionally, a ragged hiker wanders out of the mountains. Some of these are traversing the spine of North America, walking from Canada to Mexico on the continental divide.

I’m walking too, following a barbed wire fence around the perimeter of section 27. The land is sharply creased, folded into a series of draws and ridges running north to south. From the Southeast corner of 27, I look west down the fence. On the farthest rises it looks perfect, like a pencil line drawn with a ruler. It slices across the contours of the land. [more]

blog: ON RIVERS AND RANCHING

The ranch is green and the roads are potholed from spring rain. Coming to work from the little house I rent outside of Deer Lodge, I drive a county road that looks down across the western end of the property—a floodplain ditched for haying and bisected by the linked bows of the Clark Fork River. Unplowed strips grow thick with willow and cottonwood. Whitetail deer graze on new shoots in the meadows. Their heads come up as I pass and drop again before I am out of sight. Hawks drift above it all, and though I know they are hunting I never see them dive. Our small bunch of heifers grazes together, strikingly red against the rest of spring.

Down by the river on a clear June morning, this place seems simple, pastoral and beautiful. Irrigation hides the land’s scars, making it easy to get the wrong impression of the ranch, or at least an incomplete one. [more]