One Nation, Under God
One Nation, Under God
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It’s been a while since I saw a bear in my neighborhood. We had them in our yard once in Bozeman as evidenced by the scat they left. I have a wonderful photo of a black bear running full tilt through the cemetery behind my daughter’s house in Livingston. I used to have to shoo them off the porch of my cabin in Cooke City. But once Barb and I moved to Malta I pretty much gave up hope of seeing any more bears near where I live. After all, we’re miles from the mountains on the tree-less prair...
I worry about my dogs. More than I should. It might be all those photos of lost and missing dogs I see every day on the Internet. I haven’t lost a dog in some time so there’s little cause for alarm. I keep them in a fenced yard. The young, fast one wears an electronic collar when we hunt. The older one seldom leaves my side. But I worry nonetheless. Each time I open my laptop I see all those missing dogs. If mine aren’t in the room I go looking for them. I’ve never lost a dog for long. My dear...
As we drove north the temperature headed south. We’d spent a few days visiting friends and family in Livingston, shopped a bit in Bozeman, and were on our way home to Malta. It’s always fun to see the economic vitality and growth in that part of the state, but it’s become another one of those places that are nice to visit but I sure wouldn’t want to live there. Instead, I live in a place few folks visit, and fewer still want to make their home. However, that’s a big part of the appeal for me. I...
Thirty-seven years ago I sat in the stands at Reno H. Sales Stadium and watched the Montana State Bobcats beat Rhode Island to advance to the NCAA Division I-AA title game. It was the last time I cheered in public for the Bobcats. A few weeks later I got a part-time job at the Bozeman Chronicle as a sportswriter and began my newspaper career. Being objective in my reporting was of the upmost importance. I was no longer a fan, but I now got paid to go to games, sit in the best seat in the house,...
My dog Ace and I are the same age. In dog years, anyway. He’s aging faster than me, of course, but for a short time, we’re both at the same point in our journey. The similarities are a bit disturbing. Neither of us is as strong and fast as we used to be. We’re both easily confused, and we share a multitude of aches and pains. Pushing my way through the cattails yesterday I tripped over Ace and we fell in a tangle. After exchanging a few heated words we picked ourselves up, dusted off the snow...
It snowed yesterday. Not a big dump. Only four or five inches. But it’s going nowhere. There’s a very good chance this snow will still be on the ground come March, and very little chance it will melt before then. We don’t typically get a lot of snow up here, but what falls this late stays. Malta is just far enough north to miss the chinook winds that bring relief to much of the rest of the state. Months pass in the dark of winter here without the mercury ever rising above freezing. We tell...
I saw few other hunters this season. But it appears I’m in the minority. Apparently there were so many hunters from Washington up on Frenchman Creek this fall that even they were complaining about all the hunters from that state. In most places with good hunting the locals seldom embrace the non-resident hunters. We’re very possessive about our favorite haunts and like to keep them to ourselves. In Phillips County where I live it’s a bit more extreme. It’s not just the sight of out-of-state hunt...
A recent notice from the Phillips County Sheriff’s Department advised residents not to call the department about a hitchhiker near Malta unless he wandered into traffic. Apparently the mere sight of the hitchhiker had been enough to prompt folks to call to the cops. How times have changed. Hitchhiking didn’t used to draw that kind of attention. Not so many years ago it was an accepted mode of travel, and my favorite. There was something wonderful and freeing about it. You just couldn’t be in a...
In the end, and that end was a long time in coming, the bird I’d sought wasn’t so special after all. Two and a half months into the hunting season I had little to show for my efforts. The birds were scarce or not there at all. I’d shot a few and missed a few more. Long ago I’d quit worrying about killing my limit. We ate well on a bird a day, but now even that meager a goal had become hard to accomplish. Most days I came home with an empty bag. And while it was pleasurable enough simply to be ou...
My father certainly didn’t hunt as much as I do, but from the time I was 9 or 10 years old he always made sure to include me when he did go hunting. One trip we took every fall was to his cousin’s farm in Illinois where we’d stay in an old camp trailer out back behind the barn. Dad would pick me up early from school on a Friday, and I’d settle into the backseat with our beagle Patches while he and Mom’s cousin Carlton, who was like an uncle to me, sat up front telling stories and smoking c...
My dog Ace is the middle child. Seldom the center of attention, Ace is quite comfortable blending into the background. Except when he barks. And he barks a lot. He barks in the morning when I let him out. He barks when I feed him. He barks at anyone or anything that walks past his yard in Malta. He barks when he’s riding in his kennel in the back of the truck and I turn onto a gravel road. He barks when we drive through town on the return from hunting. He barks when we’re out hunting and I sto...
The season has been slow. I’ve only shot a handful of birds since the Sept. 1. opener. It isn’t for a lack of trying. More days than not I’m hunting, so often in fact that I’ve quit telling people I’m hunting and instead say I’m just running the dogs. The birds simply aren’t there. All my favorite places have been busts, but I’m too old to find new favorite places, so I hunt them anyway. I’d heard there were birds around the grain fields, but my preference is wilder country with sagebrush an...
I hadn’t hunted antelope in quite a few years and I missed it. I missed stalking them on the open prairie. I missed eating them. I even missed crawling through cactus to get within range. So when the antelope tag arrived in the mail last August I was elated. I decided then to take the time off from hunting birds until I filled that tag. Unfortunately, antelope season and pheasant season open on the same day, and given a choice, I’ll always go with the birds. After four days chasing roosters, how...
Every hunting season is different. This one exceptionally so. Drought, heat, and an infestation of grasshoppers guaranteed it. Since the upland bird season opened in September, I’ve been out more days than not. A lack of birds in my favorite haunts hasn’t kept me home. There’s still plenty to see. I was looking at pictures on my phone yesterday and a shot taken Sept. 1 popped up. Typically the pictures I take on the day of the opener are of my dogs and a dead grouse or two. This was a pictu...
Rare is the town that fails to make a list of the top ten places to do whatever: retire, ski, fish, buy an over-priced condo. As hard as I look, however, I can’t find Malta included anywhere. It even missed a recent list of the best places to retire in Montana that included Jordan. Really. Jordan with a population of 400, a dusty little prairie burg sitting on the banks of Dog Creek, was considered a better place to retire than Malta. I suppose that’s a good thing. We’ve got enough old peopl...
We hear all too often that if something is allowed to proceed, it will forever change life as we know it. It’s rarely true, but a lot of folks feed on fear and nonsense. Take the United Property Owners of Montana for instance. An organization supposedly put together to protect property rights, UPOM is on the fight with the American Prairie Reserve over that group’s plans to raise bison and change a few BLM grazing allotments. UPOM apparently has no other concerns at the moment but to put an end...
My wife and I have a new passion. It involves physical exertion, lots of teamwork, and kneepads. Sometimes it gets loud. We're mixing our own concrete and pouring a patio, one 32-inch square at a time. We finished two squares last week and only have 37 more to go. Because it's hunting season and I made a prior commitment to my dogs, we only get passionate in the afternoons. Once I return from the morning hunt, however, Barb and I get frisky. She tells me what to do. I tell her that doesn't...
I’d pretty much given up big game hunting and turned all my attention to birds. There were a number of reasons. I could shoot something every day for one. And if I was successful it didn’t take days to pack out the meat for another. But this season is different. Blame the drought or the heat or a combination of the two, but hunting birds lately is starting to feel more like an elk hunt. Over the first three days of the season, I saw one grouse and he appeared to passing through. I’m hunti...
There are places I’ll go this fall that I never see any other time of year ‑- small, intimate spots hidden from view, hard to reach, with little reason to be there unless you’re hunting or gathering cows. Some are places I’ve killed a bird or two. Others are places I always water the dogs, where the steep banks along the creek have sloughed off providing easy access to the slow-moving flow. There are a couple of ancient automobiles, abandoned on the prairie decades ago, that I always visit i...
I always get a feeling of melancholy this time of year. When I was young it was brought on by the realization that school was about to start again, that the endless days of summer were not so endless after all. Now it’s brought on by those necessary seasonal chores summer’s passing requires, one in particular. We pulled the pontoon boat out of the water last week. We’re not done fishing yet, but we have another boat for that and it’s kept in the garage when we’re not there. The pontoon stays in...
I’m always amazed when celebrities and politicians are forced to step down after a past indiscretion comes to light. Often it’s simply an inappropriate comment caught on tape that spells the end. Mike Richards, the newly named host of Jeopardy!, comes to mind. Shortly after being named to fill the shoes of the late Alex Trebek, it was discovered that Richards made demeaning comments about women and homeless during a podcast seven years ago. Fortunately, I’m technically challenged. I don’t...
I usually grow a big garden -- corn, potatoes, peas, beans, squash, and the like. This year I didn’t. So little rain fell in April and May that it seemed a good idea to skip gardening, and concentrate on fishing instead. I did plant a row of tomatoes and peppers, and I’m growing some pole beans, but that’s it. I just didn’t want to fight the drought. Instead I gave in. My yard dried out and yellowed a month ago. There’s no grass to mow, but I still knock down the weeds every couple of weeks. Wh...
Years ago, while living in Bozeman, I suggested that people who didn’t farm or ranch should live in town. I even recommended folks looking to move to Montana check out existing housing in the small towns scattered across the state where infrastructure is already in place. This was years before the onslaught of home fixer-upper shows on HGTV, and decades before anyone ever thought about working remotely. Still, it seemed a good way to slow down sprawl, protect agricultural land, and revitalize r...
It was 50 years ago this month that I first fished the Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone. I was working for an outfitter in Cooke City and had been asked to accompany an elderly couple into the canyon and tend the horses. I don’t remember how the fishing was but I suspect it was good, good enough that I soon began making the trip on my own on foot. In the ensuing half century I rarely went a summer without at least one trip into the canyon. The cutthroat were plentiful and 40-fish days were common...
I wonder what’s next? First it was disease, then drought. Now we’re dealing with wildfires and an infestation of grasshoppers. Winter can’t arrive too soon. Or can it? It snowed Sept. 9, 1970 in the Beartooth Mountains. Early snow isn’t unusual there, but this was a dump, more than a foot of wet, heavy snow. We were in the process of setting up a hunting camp at Granite Lake and the string of horses we’d left there in a pole corral escaped and disappeared during the blizzard. The wrangler...