One Nation, Under God
One Nation, Under God
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I have a picture on my phone of Ace and a sharptail grouse I shot early this season. It was, I feared, the old dog’s last hunt. A couple of months shy of his 13th birthday, Ace is about done. Or so I thought. But I just took another photo of him with a bird last week, and I suspect it won’t be the last either. Like Joe Biden, Ace doesn’t know when to quit. He can’t hear. He stumbles. It’s often hard to tell if he’s dead or simply asleep. Barb and I have even been talking about getting a p...
What a difference a year makes. By this time last November the ground was covered with snow. It didn’t bare off for more than five months. Today it’s sunny and 50 degrees with more of the same in the extended forecast. Sunny and warm is hard to complain about, but sunny and warm in Montana this time of year never bodes well. We live with the ever-looming specter of drought. Last year’s bountiful snowpack and spring rains hardly got us through July before it all dried up once again. The stock...
No longer gainfully employed, I nonetheless try to accomplish something every day. It’s usually a task assigned to me by my wife, added to a list she continuously updates. Typically it’s a chore on the home front, such as laundry, dishes or making the beds in the guest room. Occasionally it involves fixing something, a never-ending task that comes with living in a 108-year-old house. I like checking things off the list. More precisely I like checking one thing at a time off the list. For yea...
Bird hunting at its most basic level is a relatively simple endeavor. Dog flushes bird. Hunter shoots bird. Dog retrieves bird. When it all comes together it’s a beautiful thing to experience, a well-orchestrated bit of teamwork between man and animal. Seldom, however, does it all come off so simply. More often it’s a different scenario ending with dog flushes bird out of range. Or hunter misses easy shot. Or dog can’t believe hunter actually hit something and has no interest in finding dead...
Montana’s general big game hunting season opened last weekend and I didn’t go. I rarely hunt deer and elk anymore, preferring to chase the dogs all fall in pursuit of grouse, pheasants and ducks. They’re easier to pack out. I certainly filled my share of tags. While I can’t recall how many deer or antelope I killed over the years, I kept track of the elk – 10 bulls and 10 cows. Where and when I killed each cow is a bit foggy, but the bulls, because of their headgear, are easier to remember....
Almost lost my dog. Happened just the other day. As I was crawling under a fence she took the opportunity to run away. I don’t know why. She didn‘t say. Worried me something awful, enough to make me pray. Was she hurt? Was she dead? Was it something I said? I hit the button on her electronic leash, hoping she would hear the beep, but if she did there was no response, all was quiet, still no Dot. I headed uphill for a better look where the trees played out and the grass was short. I called her...
Folks up here in Phillips County are complaining about a lack of places to hunt. Rich people are buying up all the land. Locals have no place to go. I heard the same refrain when I first moved here nearly 20 years ago. All the good places had sold to out-of-staters or at least out-of-county folk. There were few places left to hunt. I could only shake my head at my new neighbors’ plight, and offer my sympathy. Then I went hunting. I’ve been hunting ever since. Poor-mouthing Phillips County as...
My mother, a former high school English teacher, said cussing indicated a limited vocabulary. I never heard her swear. Dad, on the other hand, did swear on occasion, although not in mixed company, and there were certain words and phrases he never used or tolerated from me. I remember being knocked on my butt once after using the Lord’s name in vain. Profanity, however, has prospered since their passing. To a lot of folks, there’s rarely any polite company these days around which it’s impro...
The first month of the season has nearly run its course. What little green was left on the prairie vanished weeks ago, hiding out of sight over the creek banks. The rest of the country is the color of straw. The recent rains won’t make much difference except to turn dust to mud. Stock ponds that were brim-full in mid-summer shrunk to half their size by the first of September as hot winds blew and the ground cracked. Where there was good soil the grass grew waist high, but on the hard pan, o...
Like me, my house has fallen into disrepair. My eyesight is failing. My teeth are falling out of my head. I can’t hear a thing. I have to plead with my knees every morning simply to get them working. My 108-year-old stone house has similar problems. It still looks good from a distance, but upon closer inspection, there’s a bit of rot to be found, a couple of doors need to be replaced, and the oven in the kitchen is kaput. That’s a big deal. Barb is no longer able to bake, her favorite escap...
I awoke Sept. 1 way too early. It was the first day of hunting season and I didn’t want to be late. After a quick breakfast I loaded the dogs into the truck, double-checked my gear, and grabbed a mug of coffee. On the drive down I worried that someone would be in my spot, but when I got there of course no one was. Opening day of upland bird season never draws a crowd despite my fears. It was dark yet, and I sat in the truck listening to Ace whine in his box. When it was light enough I f...
When filling up your car at the pump costs more than it used to, and the price of a gallon of milk soars, it’s nice to have someone to blame. Whoever is in office at the time typically catches the heat. But it’s not just D.C. politicians who bear the brunt of the criticism. It trickles down. Way down. John Demarais is the mayor of Malta, a town of about 1,800 people on Montana’s Hi-line. A genuinely good guy who sincerely cares about his neighbors, Demarais catches a lot of flack for thing...
Shortly after arriving in Montana as a homeless 18-year-old I remedied that situation by getting a job that provided room and board. After all, I had a skill. I could cook. I spent much of that first summer in the backcountry working for an outfitter who took clients on pack trips into the Beartooth Mountains and Yellowstone Park. The wages were minimal, but enough that I could pay my own way. That’s how I had been raised. Handouts and charity were for the less fortunate, not for me. But that w...
Nearly seven months after the end of last year’s hunting season -- cut short by an old-man ailment -- I’m ready to go again. At least I think I am. Almost every morning for the last couple of months the dogs and I have walked a brisk mile. At least Ace and I cover a mile while Dot does at least three times that racing through the sagebrush. Fortunately, I don’t have to keep up with her. An electronic collar keeps Dot in check. Ace, on the other hand, is kept in check by his advancing age. Stone...
I saw the two sides of Montana last week, one still green and lush, bustling with commerce and traffic, the other already dry, the landscape turning to khaki, with sparse traffic and few people. The influx of folks moving to Montana is hardly noticeable where I live in Malta, a small town with a declining population. But what Malta has to offer isn’t what newcomers to the state are looking for. There are no trout streams up here, and no snow-capped peaks. The muddy, slow-moving Milk River skirts...
While running the boat down the lake last week I spotted what looked like a bird of some sort on the water. Expecting it to fly as we passed, I was surprised when it didn’t. I slowed the boat, and turned around to investigate. As we got closer I could see it was a young gull. Grabbing the landing net I scooped up what turned out to be two birds hooked together on a fishing lure. Each gull was impaled on a treble hook through the beak. They were barely moving, but when I twisted the hook out o...
I always seem to be a step behind. Call me Johnny-come-lately. When everyone else was wearing Gore-Tex, I was still in leather and wool. When all my friends were listening to cassettes, I was rockin’ out to eight-tracks. While planning a trip last week to North Dakota to get a boat repaired, I sought directions online to the location of Swenson Marine in Bismarck. As I was reaching for a pen and notebook to copy the information from my laptop, a brilliant thought struck me; take a picture w...
I saw a picture online last week of a friend posing with a handsome brown trout he’d caught. “It’s hopper season!” read the caption. I hadn’t thought about “that” hopper season in years. Instead, the hopper season I’ve become familiar with has biblical plague connotations. The grasshoppers were so thick in north central Montana last summer that swarms of them in flight were picked up on radar. While that’s yet to happen this summer, there’s certainly no shortage. Hoppers at our cabin on Fort P...
I recently read a story about two young men who paddled their canoe from Butte to the Pacific Ocean, completing the 1,300-mile journey in 52 days. I read the initial story when they began the trip on Silver Bow Creek. I never expected to read a story about the conclusion. During my time working for both the Livingston Enterprise and the Bozeman Chronicle I wrote and edited a number of stories about such trips. Plenty of would-be adventurers have grand visions of starting a float trip near the...
The railroad bridge collapse last month that spilled tanker cars full of liquid asphalt and molten sulfur into the Yellowstone River was hardly the first indignity the river has suffered. A broken oil pipeline under the river near Billings a few years ago comes to mind. So does a broken sewer line over the river at Gardiner, to name a few. The longest free-flowing river in the lower 48 has taken some abuse. Before the rail line between Livingston and Gardiner was discontinued, trains used to del...
I quit gardening this year. For the second time. No more tilling, planting, weeding, watering, or harvesting for me. My family always grew a large vegetable garden, and I was required to work in it. Once I left home, I vowed to never garden again, a vow I kept until I began growing gardens of my own. I had a small garden in Livingston, and a bit larger one in Bozeman, but it was in Malta where I really cut loose. My first garden here was a 15 x 40-foot plot soon followed by another of the same...
On Father’s Day, I went fishing and thought about Dad. I don’t think about him every day. I’m not one to celebrate heavenly birthdays or lament his passing at the age of 90 nearly two decades ago. But I always think about him when I fish. He and I fished together often. We didn’t agree on a lot — religion and politics come to mind. Get us on the water, however, our differences vanished and we were best buds. Dad taught me to fly fish. It wasn’t something many folks did in southern Indiana, an...
Barb and I spent the morning at the lake catching up on chores. It was too windy to fish. By early afternoon, however, the wind began to lay. “Let’s go fishing,” Barb said. I was in the boat at the dock rigging a couple of rods watching her walk down the hill with an insulated bag of food and drinks when I noticed an ominous bank of clouds approaching. “Let’s wait this out,” I suggested, and we headed up the hill back to the house. By the time we got there big drops of rain had begun to fa...
They say money doesn’t buy happiness. Apparently it doesn’t buy fish either. I own a fishing boat with all the bells and whistles. It has three motors, sonar, and GPS. There are a dozen rods in the on-board locker, drawers filled with every lure on the market, and a live-well big enough to hold me. There’s even a retractable yard stick to measure all those fish I don’t catch. Before I could afford such a craft, however, I fished out of more modest boats and caught more fish. My most successful t...
It’s nearly June and I haven’t been in the water yet. There was a time I never would have let that happen. On the news yesterday I saw it was supposed to be 95 degrees in Paducah, Ky. I used to work at a marina near there, and when it was that hot I would start my day in the water, cooling off with a dip before opening the bait shop at first light. By now I would have been swimming for a month already. My friends and I also made it a point to start skiing in April, the water still cold eno...
