Free Badluck Way: A Year on the Ragged Edge of the West by Bryce Andrews Page A

and Orville were standing by the trailer watching, James and I rode angles back and forth behind the stragglers, zigzagging our way up-country. When an animal broke off the left side of the herd, I chased it down, turned it, and hustled it back in the right direction. On his side, James did the same. One of James’s younger stock dogs trotted gamely along with us, nipping occasionally at the heels of lagging cattle.
    When we got back to the trucks and the ramp, Orville stopped complaining about beef prices, his bottom line, and the goddamn wolves long enough to shake my hand.

    After the cows arrived, our days started at 6:30, or earlier if we had to move a herd. I rolled from bed, fumbled through a shower, and ate whatever was close to hand in the kitchen. At the window I looked out to read the thermometer. Most early-June mornings the temperature hovered between twenty and thirty degrees Fahrenheit.
    We spread the cattle across the ranch according to our grazing plan. There were two large herds: one of 680 steers and the other of 790 heifers. Both belonged to Orville Skogen. In addition to the yearlings, we pastured 200 cow-calf pairs from a family ranch down by Ennis.
    Once, I talked with the matriarch of that family—a silver-haired,no-bullshit woman—when she came to drop off her cattle. She was on horseback and I was afoot, and somehow we got started on the subject of wolves. She had heard rumblings about the new incarnation of the Taylor Peak Pack, now called the Wedge Pack, which sounded like trouble.
    “How do you figure,” she asked, “to keep them out of my cattle?”
    I told her, as Jeremy had so often told me, that we were going to do everything in our power to keep the worst from happening. We would patrol the herd diligently, I said, and track the collared wolves in the pack with a telemetry system on loan from the University of Montana. When the two groups of animals got too close together, we would haze the wolves back into the wilderness and sleep out beside the cattle.
    I went on, warming to my task: We had nonlethal shotgun loads—cracker shells and rubber bullets. We had an experimental contraption called fladry, a one-string fence of twine and plastic flagging that was thought to frighten wolves. When her cows and calves moved into the riskiest places, we would ring their pasture with fladry and monitor the results. The hope, I told her, was to keep the cattle safe and learn something new about coexisting with predators.
    She took this in, listening with her mouth set in a grim line. When I finished talking, she let the silence hang long between us. Finally, she spoke:
    “You’re going to put a string of flags around the cows?”
    That was the plan, I said.
    “How does that keep the wolves out?”
    I confessed that I didn’t exactly know, but we had reports of it working well to protect sheep herds in Europe.
    She let more silence pass, and then asked me if I owned a gun.
    I mentioned my newly acquired pump shotgun and reminded her about the cracker shells and rubber slugs.
    “No,” she said. “A real gun, a rifle. With bullets.”
    When I told her I didn’t own a rifle, she stared at me as though I had revealed a deep-seated, appalling vice. Looking down from the saddle, she fixed me with a hard, appraising glare. It got to me. For a moment I was ashamed to be a man of twenty-three, presenting myself as a ranch hand, with just a shotgun to my name.
    As she watched me think this through, her face softened just a fraction.
    “Tell you what,” she said. “If you need a gun, you call me.”
    “Thank you,” I replied. “I’ll keep it in mind.”
    “Do that,” she said. “We’ll get you what you need for the wolves.”
    She spun her horse and rode away, leaving me among her family’s cattle.

    With our summer herds settled and grazing on the ranch, my own life fell into a reassuring, exhausting rhythm. Each morning, unless we were scheduled to move a herd from one pasture to another,