Driving on the Rim

3

I FOUND STRONG FEELINGS for my town to be always at hand. I loved its situation in the sweep of a great western river, even the steady, subdued clangor of its railroad yard, the faint but omnipresent background of our lives. And the violent weather kept everyone on their toes. My strongest impressions seem to have originated in summertime, when my life was out-of-doors and the towering clouds were like the castles in which I lived. When Gladys and Wiley didn’t need my help, I spent my days mowing lawns and watching. I say “watching” because the peculiarity of my family and of my own personality gave me the vigilance of an outsider. Remember, we had only recently come in from the road as itinerant rug cleaners, and my education at the loins of Aunt Silbie had exempted me from the pubescent twittering of my classmates. When I finally had a girlfriend, she turned out to be the true Crow maiden Debbie Stands Ahead, who confined our ardor to kisses that, lasting an hour and expressing teen love, were more powerful than the somewhat abrupt gymnastics with my aunt. I always felt in the arms of Debbie a sort of peace of a kind I would be surprised to feel years later when one of my colleagues, Jinx Mayhall, inexplicably embraced me in my hospital bed after I had been stabbed. What on earth could Jinx have been thinking? I had hoped she was embarrassed; I know I was. Years ago when I learned that Debbie had married a dentist I fondly hoped she was denying him coitus: I was still jealous. As for Jinx, I just didn’t know.

I mowed lawns all over town. I mowed Dr. Burchfield’s, my precursor in the emergency room. That he spent the weekend in his bathrobe should have told me something. Mrs. Hetherington, whose brick house was built before Montana statehood, always made me iced tea and a sandwich. She was a lonely old widow who sat by herself at a white painted table in her backyard arranging flowers from her garden. She knew I was seeing Debbie Stands Ahead. “She’s a fine young lady,” said Mrs. Hetherington. “This all used to be theirs.” After Debbie was gone I read the most god-awful books about the frontier, in which the Indian girls appeared as “dusky maidens.” For some reason I embraced this ghastly phrase and was heartbroken that my own dusky maiden was gone (to college). Debbie, forsake your dentist and his half-breed progeny, and come back to me!

Earl Clancy’s yard was almost too small for me to trifle with and he barely paid me. Earl, now retired, had been a supervisor at the waterworks, and I worked for him to hear his stories. Once a hobo, he esteemed those years as the best of his life. He had the same skinny frame and hangdog face he had probably acquired during his days riding the rails. He followed the seasons like a bird of passage and accepted adventures as they befell him. He had some skill as an orchardist and could bring his talents to McIntosh apples and Indian River oranges alike. In Florida, he was arrested for vagrancy and spent a month on a chain gang. When released, he wandered penniless down a dirt road, trying to think how to get back to Montana (it was hot). Passing a Holy Roller church, he heard the pandemonium within and a huge woman stepped out and called to him, “Come in and be saved!” Earl soon found himself rolling around on the floor, where he discovered a wallet with enough money to get him home. The stint on the chain gang had brought him to his senses, such as they were, and he went on to spend the rest of his working life at the waterworks. Because of his special understanding of the operations of the system, Earl was forgiven the very occasional summer binges that took him on sentimental journeys to pick cherries on the shores of Flathead Lake. He was the first of the innately talented, hardworking, somewhat visionary and out-of-control men I have known. I might have been one of them at heart. I hoped not, because all were bachelors and I was in search of the love of my life.

My summertime lawn mowing introduced me to the class system that burdens every community for the simple reason that east of Main Street, people mowed their own lawns. Mowing lawns in the humid summertime could be such grueling work that I began mentally aligning myself with that class of people who had others do it for them. There was a lingering contradiction here in that Dr. Olsson, who set me on my path, mowed his own lawn. But he was from out East, and that could have explained it. Still, here was another of my ambivalences: I seemed unwilling to rise to that class whose lawns were mowed by others. I wouldn’t like being called “Doctor” if that became appropriate: it would embarrass me, though I expected to love the work. Maybe that was why I drove my troublesome old car. The last mechanic who worked on it said, “Doc, you need to shit-can this rust bucket before it shit-cans you.” But I went on pouring money into it. I even lost my desire for money and developed some kind of sentimental attachment to the poverty of our early days.

I mowed lawns for nuns and priests. We had a priest from Ireland for a while, Father Noonan, a tall, somber man known to be an extremely bad-tempered golfer. The many Irish associated with the railroad in our town thought that Noonan gave them a bad name by being so humorless. They had a point. Noonan was never happy with my work and demanded that I use an edger, which he didn’t own. When he presented me with one and pointed out the work it was meant to do, I quit. Father Noonan called me a bum and chased me off the rectory grounds as though I’d been fired. I got dirty looks from some Catholics, but that died down.

I wasn’t the only lawn boy in town, and we all liked the Dairy Queen for lunch and ogling. We had the best tans, which drew some girls, including sophomore Edna Sedlicky, who made it clear she was available for whatever we might have in mind, which scared us to death, sending Edna elsewhere for fulfillment. School threw us together arbitrarily, but meeting at the DQ as boys of common labor seemed to produce more-enduring friendships. This was how I met Chong Wells and Second Hand Smoke. The three of us were fascinated by Louis Echeverria, a Basque-Cheyenne mixed-blood burglar who told us stories of his derring-do without quite tempting us, though the allure of creeping around where we had no business was attractive. Another Indian who worked at the Conoco station, Gary American Horse, known as “Walkman” because of his omnipresent audio device, told us that Louis was known on the reservation as “Louie Crooked-Fucker,” and when we tried addressing him by this name, he fled, assuming his reputation pursued him. We never saw him again, though we learned that he moved to Billings to pimp and sell meth. At a football game in Great Falls, Chong saw him driving a new Eldorado with tinted windows. He was later arrested together with our mayor, Todd Bakesly, father of seven, for soliciting a prostitute. Louie went to jail, the possibility of which he once described to his admirers at the Dairy Queen as “the price you pay” and “the choice is yours.” He had a philosophical streak.

One summer I traveled back and forth to Wild Horse Island on Flathead Lake, where T. Sam Vaughn, the owner of our town’s bank, kept his big Chris-Craft with its cocktail bar and white Naugahyde interior. I had scraped and painted its bottom in the spring and twice touched up its varnish during the summer, after which Vaughn put me on a Greyhound for home with a check in my pocket and on my lap a nice lunch, made with his own hands. But by far my sharpest memory is of T. Sam, his wife elsewhere, a cocktail in one hand, the marine gas nozzle in the other while fumes arose around the cigarette dangling from his lips. I was sure we would go down as one of America’s regular cabin cruiser explosions, but as you see it never happened. Once T. Sam allowed me to bring Debbie Stands Ahead as my guest; he chaperoned us in separate cabins and joined Debbie in preparing meals. At midday when my work was done and Debbie had tired of sunbathing on the deck, we would swim in water so cold that those who drowned in it were never seen again. Our banker was our lifeguard, watching vigilantly from the helm as we swam furiously to keep warm. Debbie and I always watched the sunrise over the Mission Range where Debbie had Kootenai-Salish relatives. When Debbie got out of the sun to study her schoolbooks, T. Sam would wink at me and nod: this is the girl for you. In middle age, I still found myself yearning, and Debbie’s marriage to a dentist made me a lifelong connoisseur of anti-dentist commentary.

T. Sam and I were chums when I was on the boat, but if ever he brought a lady friend, I, by magic, made myself invisible once he made a locking sign with thumb and forefinger over slightly pursed lips. The two would then walk around me in the broad cockpit as though I were any other inanimate object. This proved a higher tier to lawn mowing in my study of the American class system, and the resulting aversion had much to do with my practicing medicine while pretending not to be a doctor. Perhaps, too, there was some nostalgia on my part for the days when I was presumed crazy. It always meant freedom, and none are freer than the crazy.

The day came when Mrs. Vaughn discovered the uses to which the cabin cruiser was being put, and she divorced him. “Miss Lillian” had been named after her. He renamed the boat “Miss Ruby” after a subsequent lady friend, then “Miss Alice,” then “Miss Judy,” and so on; the last time her transom was repainted, she was called “Queen for a Day.”

I became Vaughn’s physician, and as time went on, his mind would drift to the bygone days of the cabin cruiser, which proved to be less reminiscence than a prelude to dementia. I continued seeing him as he lived in contented oblivion at the Mountain Shadows Rest Home. I hope that Ruby, Alice, and Judy are with him, and even the younger Lillian. T. Sam was a good soul.

This wouldn’t be a bad time to talk about how I came to be rescued from Christianity in time to become a doctor. I have previously described my days as a wanderer in a family of steam-cleaning Pentecostals, my carnal toils in the arms of my beloved aunt, my years as a ninny and scholar so oversexed that every time the cheerleaders of my school performed the pyramid at a ball game I came close to shooting off in my pants. Fear of this caused me to stoop even when such an event was a remote possibility and to develop a sort of meditation technique for classroom days to keep my mind, if not on the work at hand, at least off the flesh of females. In those days everything reminded me of girls, not excluding tomatoes, chickens, and parking meters — and even, at desperate times, my own shoes.

The day came when my beloved parents grew sardonic about their faith and entered a period they called Boozing for Christ. There was a curious synchronicity, if you shared quarters with them, between this and other forms in which they awaited the Rapture. Visiting my mother’s family in Arkansas, they had been passengers on a powerful bass boat that sped through a crowded water baptism on the Ouachita River, scattering and injuring worshippers. Expecting divine retribution and not getting it seemed to undercut their faith. I think their particular kind of Christian longs for punishment, longs to be shriven, the only road to paradise they could picture. In any case, while awaiting trial for criminal endangerment, my mother and father began hitting the bars. Sometimes a Christian will deliberately go down a bad road just to produce eventual suffering. They’re crazier than pet coons.

They were soon virtual derelicts in our town, my father hanging on to his connections among veterans of foreign wars and my mother seeing the very few friends that couldn’t quite give up on her. Our home was a disaster and I was the subject of various rescue attempts, not just because I was the sort of obsequious ninny who appeals to rescuers but because my basic needs were not being met, and so I smelled bad, though I still did my schoolwork. Eldon Olsson became our family doctor; we were among his few patients. I believe he did this out of concern for me. I’m not sure how this happened except that through hunting on Gladys and Wiley’s ranch he became their friend, and thence my parents’ friend. They could see through their fog that monitoring my health was not a bad thing, and it might be preferable that I received the usual vaccinations. I had been born with a small abdominal hernia, and Dr. Olsson taped a silver dollar over it until it closed and left me with a conventional belly button. He removed my tonsils and bought me the ice cream that was the only reward for what in those days was a gruesome office procedure. Later on, we shared a love of hunting, which was once a boy’s introduction to the natural world, leading often to science and conservation, curiosity and a love of earth. These activities put an end to my puling and whining and that part of my youth whose only promise consisted of fucking my aunt. He bought me a twenty-gauge Winchester shotgun with brass tacks in the stock like an Indian gun, and he kept it at his office. He bought me a white Shakespeare Wonderod and a Martin Blue Chip reel. He kept these at his office as well. I think he tried to maintain some sort of connection with his former professional life, writing articles on matters affecting doctors in law and insurance, all the while counting down to those golden hours when he donned his tattered sporting clothes, put Eskimo Pie, or “Pie,” his setter-spaniel mix, into the converted hearse which was his hunting car and which sometimes sported a canoe on the roof or a johnboat on a rusty trailer bumper hitched below rear doors that divided at the center and opened to the sides to accommodate the coffin. Pie, named for her black and white colors, sat in the back and watched where we’d been; Dr. Olsson drove; I opened his beers and adjusted the radio.

Dr. Olsson, I now recognize, was a country boy, a short, strapping middle-aged Swede with a groove in his chin, jet-black eyebrows, and thick, unruly hair that tried to form bangs, which, since they wouldn’t stay out of his way, were trimmed asymmetrically to accommodate his shooting eye. He too was the son of drunks and had worked his way through school on the green chain of a plywood mill, a terrible job. He still had the hands of a mill worker and occasionally drank wine with the air of someone either on a fabulously exotic mission or saluting the international community. His medical worldview, which I inherited, was that it is unreasonable to expect everyone to get better, much less survive, and great cruelty can be involved in unreasonably prolonging life. In his earliest days of practice, he had served in a Minnesota prison where — he once astonished me by saying — most of the murderers had killed someone who richly deserved it. Dr. Olsson wouldn’t pass muster today, but I revere his memory. I’d give anything to ask him why I think Tessa’s demise was my fault.

The great thing about hunting and fishing with the local doctor is that landowners don’t dare to deny him admittance to their land. A doctor denied can hold his powder until the landowner’s hour of need, and then it’s all she wrote. People in ranching country know this, and so doctors flit around in social zero gravity, always ready with the silver bullet, always invoking a shamanic aura at the gate to the golden hills where we followed Pie to the coveys. I tagged along in this wake of such privilege and in time became a dead shot with my little Indian Winchester as we traversed the sundry Edens in search of game. My personal Virgil in these wild lands, in the high country beaver ponds where we filled our creels with trout, on the short-grass prairie where we found the grouse and partridges in bluestem and snowberry hideaways, and on the windblown prickly pear places where we stalked antelope, was always a step ahead of me, tireless countryman — he aroused in me a wish to become a doctor.

One day in late October on a vast juniper savannah north of Two Dot and next to a tiny spring where watercress grew and where Pie sipped and slept, we ate our lunch, following the hawks with our eyes and admiring the partridges we’d laid in front of us. The warmth of blue sky that had persisted all through September had given way to a steelier blue and the suggestion that the clouds sailing across us on prevailing westerlies would soon bring snow.

Dr. Olsson was watching me, and at first said nothing. Then, “We’re going to get you out of your house before we lose you altogether.” My rejected first impulse was to stage some defense of my household culture, which for all its deficiencies was mine and mine alone. But it was clear that Olsson would leave it at that and allow his remark to acquire its own weight.

One of the unusual things about Dr. Olsson was that he had never married. He had no children and was all in all a very proper fellow who neither drank to excess nor flirted, though he confessed to me that he once played strip poker with the nurses back in Ohio. My mother told me that he had been in love with a girl in school who married his best friend. His shamed grin at this confession was enormously appealing. I rarely saw him without a clean shirt, pressed pants, and often a tie. His great passion was hunting partridges with his black and white dog. Unless she was in trouble for running off or breaking point, she was just “Pie.” Pie was a shrewd little mongrel, four years old, with a brisk, upright tail, a liver-colored spot on her right ribs shaped like Australia, one black ear, and a finely speckled muzzle. She hunted and pointed birds and would not retrieve the ones we shot, though she helped us find them. She handled nicely on Dr. Olsson’s whistle, changing direction on one blast and returning on two. Dr. Olsson was inordinately proud of his whistle, which was of chromed brass and made in England, an “Acme Thunderer.” It hardly thundered but had a nice sharp sound when compared to the spit-filled gurgle of a police whistle.

When Pie thought hunting was afoot, she would whirl in place, faster and faster, then tip over and bite her own leg, only to jump up with a cry and dash to the screen door, where she slid to a stop and awaited assistance. She was an outstanding and enthusiastic bird dog, found in a ditch alongside the Two Dot road where she had been tossed from a moving car. A Canadian tourist delivered her to the All Creatures veterinary service in Big Timber, where Dr. Olsson acquired her. He had her dewclaws removed, had her vaccinated and spayed, then brought her home and propped her beside him in bed where, night after night, he read the essays of Montaigne while feeding her treats with his free hand. Given the degree to which Dr. Olsson was besotted by his new prize, it was not unexpected that when she was half grown he trained her firmly in unstinting daily increments. By six months, Pie knew “here,” “heel,” “whoa,” and “no,” and she had them learned for life. After that, her days became less stressful as Dr. Olsson introduced her to game birds — partridges and grouse — freely allowing her to make mistakes as she determined her objectives and strategies in the mysteries of wind. Dr. Olsson told me, “A bird dog needs to be just that much wild” as he held thumb and forefinger an inch apart. I didn’t think she could be very wild with her head on a pillow every night, but in the field Pie revealed not just energy and purpose but a thousand-yard stare. Dr. Olsson said, “They know things we don’t know.” Twice in the early days of Pie’s training, she either left Dr. Olsson or got lost. Most would leave a personal garment on the ground, go home, and return in the morning hoping to find their dog. Dr. Olsson curled up on the prairie and slept until Pie found him. When he walked Pie around town, attentive at heel, people commented, “Here comes old Dr. Olsson and his wife.” Pie was the wife and I was the child. He wore a sport coat when he was hunting, a worn old tweed from J. Press clothiers in New York. Sometimes he called a covey a “bevy,” an old-fashioned term. He wore glasses except to shoot, and he trusted Pie so much that when she was pointing a covey he patiently removed his glasses, slipped them into his pocket, and then flushed the birds. He was an excellent shot. Dr. Olsson took me hunting as frequently as I was willing to go. He found me a timid shot at first and suggested, “Step forward, shoot a lot, and claim everything.” I gradually rose to holding my own and even began to understand the management of a bird dog in the field. It required concentration on the dog. Shooting also required concentration. Understanding habitat and wild country took concentration. I had never tried concentration before, being such a random, disorganized young man when Dr. Olsson took me under his wing that he was lucky I didn’t accidentally shoot him. He taught me to use the recoil to speed the slide for the second shot on the Winchester. It took me a long while to understand any of this, and I was predictably abashed as Pie led us to the birds I had missed while Dr. Olsson had harvested at extraordinary range.

I think some of my solitary ways derived from my early training under Dr. Olsson. He lived in rented rooms with Pie, drove an old car, and within two years of arriving in Montana knew the country better than the natives did. At sixty-five, he would not infrequently walk twenty miles in a day, wear me out when I was seventeen, and outshoot me. At times, I never raised my gun but only watched in awe as he squared up, focused, got his face down on the wood, and fired. When I visited him in his rooms and surveyed the sparse furniture, the half-filled closet, the worn shaving utensils carefully laid out by the sink, the wedding photograph of his parents, the small brown radio and single bed, I got an inchoate sense of why I would never outshoot him. In the single-car garage, he hung his birds next to his snow shovel and lawn mower. The garage contained a small workbench and vise as well as his reloading tools for the rows of shells lined up along the back.

We took Pie afield year-round, rain or shine, in or out of hunting season. In the off-season, we counted coveys and entered the information into Dr. Olsson’s partridge log, which he sent to the department of fish and game without acknowledgment. I was very anxious to do away with the hawks that decimated our partridges during the winter, especially the northern harriers who hugged the ground and left many a feather pile behind. But Dr. Olsson gave me my first inklings of a holistic view via the old phrase “the balance of nature.” He insisted that I learn to love the hawks. I didn’t find that easy. When he learned that I had shot one from a tree out at Gladys and Wiley’s, he stopped speaking to me for twenty-nine days, which I thought would kill me. I once poured my heart out about my love of hunting and nature to Wiley and my father, who squinted through their cigarette smoke as I talked. When I’d finished, Wiley asked my father if he thought I’d been drinking.

I think that Dr. Olsson was an atheist. When news of some fatality or another came to our attention, he always said the same thing: “Live it up.” Over time this seemingly casual remark acquired a kind of resonance, and the subtext for “Live it up” came to seem, “That’s all there is.” It might have explained his friendship with Wiley, who often quoted the old-time trail cowboys to the effect that if you waited for Jesus to feed you, you’d starve to death.

It was widely felt that I was Dr. Olsson’s surrogate child. When I overheard this, I was thrilled. This was the beginning of the hope of being a doctor myself, a wish so far-fetched that I shared it with no one and hardly took it seriously until Olsson urged me to think of making something of myself and medicine appeared as a duty that had befallen me. Running a modest practice with patients you knew inside and out, and from the downstairs of your home, was a model I must have gotten from Dr. Olsson. Olsson lived within his modest means, but surely something had propelled him from his place of origin.

Dr. Olsson had some money, or at least enough to do as he pleased. Now and then, he’d take a trip. He loved the Huntington Library in California, where Tessa had once worked. He went to Japan. Always it was something specific he wanted to see. He wanted to see Kyoto. He flew to Germany to have dinner with a Wehrmacht doctor under his charge in the war, a POW neurosurgeon. He flew to New York for the opera, the symphony, and the art museums. At such times, I took care of Pie and did a responsible job of it; I think he trusted me, though he called every day about her. One year he went back to Ohio to bury his sister; it was December. Partridge season was finished and he left me with Pie.

I decided to take her hunting.

I think too that Dr. Olsson helped me along on my somewhat indiscriminate love of nature. I became modestly knowledgeable about mountain wildflowers and birds, though my familiarity had to be renewed with regular resort to the guidebooks. After I was forbidden to shoot hawks, my predatory impulse was transmuted into a fascination with all hawks and especially falcons, including, on a medical junket in Texas, the exquisite aplomado coursing over the low salt marshes of the Aransas lagoons. I finally understood that my old enemy the northern harrier was a beautiful bird despite his stalking our partridges. I kept a great list of creatures I wished to see: the Stone sheep, Kemp’s ridley turtle, the bird of paradise. And so on. I was particularly anxious to see a wild condor. “Who else lives here?” was a question I entertained as adolescent endorphins supercharged my imagination.

Dr. Olsson asked me to bring him my report cards, which I did, as I was not ashamed of my schoolwork, and because I thought compliance would assure me of his favor. He took me to the library to get my first and explosively important library card, soon confiscated by my mother. She said, “Don’t let me catch you there, you little nothing.” Dr. Olsson quietly got me another, and I soon began to lead a covert life in the library, establishing the excitement that would attend the sight of books for the rest of my life. Still, I remember the fear I felt whenever my mother caught me reading. “He’s got his nose in a book!” I would own thousands of books, but libraries were such a thrill that the hair on the back of my neck stood up upon entering one.

Given that Dr. Olsson’s approval of me was so urgent, I don’t know what impelled me to take Pie hunting out of season. I am tempted to pause over this conundrum, because episodes of the most incredibly opaque motivation have punctuated my life. There are viruses supposed to hibernate at the base of the spine — the various strains of the herpes virus, for example — which plague us and other mammals and which surge forth at arbitrary moments to assert their dominion over our health. This was the only phenomenon I could compare to the disruptive irregularities that cropped up in my life.

These were some of the things that inspired Farmer Lyles to forbid Pie and me from his acres on the grounds that I was “a disgrace” and moreover, “get out.” Only later did I remember Backseat Melissa Brown, by sour luck, his niece. This was a bad omen, compounded by my being no longer secure in Dr. Olsson’s converted hearse, for the driving of which I lacked permission; and my growing insecurity had made Pie restive, though she snuggled against my Winchester and her worries passed. It was necessary to find another place to hunt, and I was on a mission to prove to myself that all I had learned from Dr. Olsson about the hunting of partridges I was well able to perform without his oversight: the management of the hunting dog, the shooting, the preparation of the game (I already had a menu in mind), and a brief discourse on the rigors of the field.

I decided that I would not chance an encounter with another disagreeable farmer, and I crossed the Yellowstone River above Convict Grade, driving east until the country looked big and empty — then, as now, my favorite landscape. Pie could feel the rising excitement, and whirling in the backseat, she made little cries and licked the side window. “Cool it, Pie,” I said sharply. Pie gasped and pretended to die by sinking onto her stomach and hiding her head between her paws. I had seen this before even under the firm hand of Dr. Olsson. I threw a piece of pig ear over my shoulder, but she ignored it. Soon, though, we found a small road headed north through hawthorn and chokecherry hills, about all that the hearse could handle, and when it ended after only a few hundred feet in a clearing under an old cottonwood, we stopped and I got out. On the ground before me was a small memorial, a slab of sandstone into which some bereft soul had scratched the word “Dad.”

I carefully opened the rear door just enough to get my shotgun and held it crossways as I picked a direction of travel and went through a few surmises about the weather, which contained a delicate northerly breeze. A hint of moisture would help Pie with her job. I had just a few hours before sundown, and the unlikelihood of meeting the game warden was a great comfort.

Pie jumped from the car and stopped. She moved only her head, assessing the air, her tail at an indifferent angle while she bethought herself. As Pie was the more experienced of us, I deferred to her and stood by as she considered her options. Once she came to a decision she was off like a shot, straight up the thread of water from a distant spring, winding through the chokecherry at such a clip that I was pressed to keep up.

I struggled through the brush and slipped a single waxy red shell into the chamber and closed it, sliding the safety into position. When I looked up I felt a flash of fear to find Pie no longer visible, but soon she popped up on a hillside looking back at me and then resumed her hunt. I wished it wasn’t so late in the day: I was climbing as fast as I could, Pie was casting back and forth but outpacing me by degrees, and the declining sun was on its own schedule. It was not easy to keep these three chronologies in the same plan, something I experienced as mild but creeping anxiety. I was pushing through a chokecherry thicket at the head of the spring, worrying that I had lost sight of Pie again, when five grouse erupted and flew like big brown bees straight back over my head and down the draw. In a few feet I found Pie on point, head cocked back to observe me. Undoubtedly, she wondered how I could have failed to get off a shot.

Once we emerged from the narrow draw, I was relieved to find us in ample grassland rising toward the Crazy Mountains to the northeast. I wished Pie would hunt closer so that I could see her always, but she reappeared often and I could keep track of her enough to allay my ascending fear, which was now based mostly on the decreasing angle of the sun and the spread of cold. To the west there was not a genuine horizon because the sun would fall behind the Bridger Range; as it declined toward the ice clouds above those hills its light seemed grayer. I hurried to keep up with Pie, who seemed in charge of things, and while I would have preferred a modest circle ending at Dr. Olsson’s car, Pie wanted only to hunt straight into the wind with its scenting advantages, taking us away from what I viewed as safety and what little light we still had.

Again I found Pie on point and I was relieved, not because she had found game but because it gave me the opportunity to overtake her. I held the shotgun across my chest, thumb ready to slide the safety, and advanced. Several huge birds lumbered into the air: I fired and missed. These were sage hens and since they were scarce, Dr. Olsson had forbidden me to shoot them. Well, I hadn’t shot one, though I had shot at one, and Dr. Olsson, had he been here, would have given me the cross look for which I had great respect and some fear. Perhaps I was trigger-happy. I’d have to be careful. Such thoughts were a kind of inattention and when I focused once more Pie was no longer in sight. I looked toward the sunset, then hurried in the direction I thought she had gone.

I never found her. I crossed the top of two broad coulees toward the Crazy Mountains, my last bearing before darkness fell. I’d thought there was time, but the sunset just snuffed out behind the Bridgers and I failed to resolve whether I was searching for Pie or trying to get myself to safety. I frantically reviewed the landmarks I had seen driving into the old road, but they were no longer of any use. I was lost.

Perhaps I’d never been lost before. I was startled by my state of accelerating dismay followed by panic. The broad field of references that I’d had in mind — that ridge of moraine, that tall spruce with the wind-slewed eastward branches, that rivulet, the two-track with its deceptively gradual change of direction, the yard light at the Swede’s farm, the old windmill — were all arrayed as special markers reassuringly redundant, even cross-referenced. Yet something as slight as the bulb going out in the yard light, the perspective of the spruce that concealed the stunted limbs, the rising shadows which appeared to have the same mass as the landmarks before vanishing in twilight — all conspired to arouse the feeling that I no longer knew where I was, beset by the most ancient of enemies, darkness and cold. It was like the threat of being buried alive. I struck out in any direction, hoping that clarity would soon be at hand. It was not. I struck off elsewhere and felt a sort of eclipse. As each foray seemed to sag into confusion, the forays grew shorter and more rapid. Soon they were in circles, and I lost the capacity for traveling in a straight line. I felt confined and claustrophobic. I could not get out of this small and lightless room. Announcing itself, the darkness was cold, tangible as a black bird descending at stall speed.

A vertical slab of wet stone struck my face and I screamed, less from pain than from a rush of helplessness. I bumped into other things I couldn’t identify. The river of stars overhead flared in a direction I could no longer grasp. My insignificance was so overwhelming that these impediments surrounded me with austere malevolence. My only hope was that by submitting myself to their awful power, I would be released. That was it! I would flatter the unknown and it would feel sorry for me! At last I caught on, saw the first fissure, and lay down in the densest brush I could find with my hands; I trained my humility on the hope of sunrise.

During the night and in those moments when I escaped my misery enough to think of how I had lost Pie, I was not entirely certain I wanted to survive. I imagined Dr. Olsson’s spare room without her and my heart sank in agony. Even that agony was insufficient to preparing me for what I would feel when I finally was face-to-face with Dr. Olsson.

Sunrise revealed my hollow in the brush. When I stood up, it was easy to see the long slope of grassland to the south and, against its far edge, the winding county road I had driven. The light, the renewed orientation were insufficient consolation for the absence of Pie. By afternoon, I stood before Dr. Olsson. I had never seen him so sad. “You’ve let me down,” he said. “I’m all through with you.”

It was a long walk to my house, and the weather had turned worse. I had to navigate in the lee of the house and still I was soaked on arrival; I hardly noticed. The very abrupt loss of the approval of the only person who had ever believed in me was a blow of such magnitude as I had never experienced, to my stomach and mind at once. And apart from that, I feared that Pie was being eaten by coyotes or shot by a rancher finding her among his livestock.

The wind stopped shortly after midnight, and then the rain stopped as well. I slipped out from under the covers and dressed, tiptoeing downstairs through the sleeping household and out the kitchen door that led directly to the garage. It was difficult to raise the garage door without making noise, but I succeeded by raising it with agonizing slowness. In the light from the street, I could make out the contours of my father’s black Ford, a six-cylinder coupe with its stick shift on the steering column. I opened the driver’s door enough to slide in and shift the transmission into neutral, which allowed me to brace myself between the car and my father’s workbench, put my shoulder against the grille and roll the car into the street, where its well-kept paint reflected the stars in the clearing sky. I drove several blocks before turning on the headlights, and soon I was tooling north toward the mountains and the last place I’d seen Pie. My feet were already blistered, but the pain was as nothing in the face of my mission, and I scarcely noticed.

I knew that I had little chance of finding her if she had disappeared into open country, but I was sure she had gotten lost, not abandoned me, and that she would seek out humanity somewhere. So I drove the county road along the base of the foothills and at each ranch I turned off the headlights, glided to a stop, walked to within sight of the buildings, and called as discreetly as I could, prolonging the call until I could be mistaken for a coyote. Several of the ranches had yard lights, and I was able to examine things quite closely while letting out my forlorn intonement of “Pie,” confident that if she ever heard me, she would respond. At a hardscrabble ranch-stead where Horsethief Creek came under the road I had to fight off the guard dog with a quickly acquired stick, long enough to make friends and send it whimpering back to the house. The dog had made so much noise confronting me that I called out Pie’s name without discretion but drew no response.

I seemed to be leaving the territory where she might be. Certainly, I was close to a series of breaks, badlands almost, that Pie would have recognized as the end of her hopes for rescue. She had benefited from such good care that I had no doubt she would pin her last hopes on humanity.

I was excessively cautious approaching the next house, a dilapidated prefab with several cars parked in front and all its lights on. Drawing closer, I realized that some kind of party was still under way — strange in the middle of the week and so close to sunrise. I was frankly alarmed at the vehemence of the voices that emerged from the structure, a kind of mechanical hilarity and laughter that had become screams. I sat in the dark and stared at the shapes and sporadic shadows behind the drawn curtains. Overcoming hopelessness, I called out Pie’s name firmly, confident that the people of the house would never notice above the din, and was answered by an inquisitive bark.

It was Pie.

She was tied with a piece of short, frayed rope to a steel tractor wheel, no food or water in sight. When she saw me, she leapt the length of the rope and somersaulted in midair. I untied it at the wheel and used it as a leash so that I could get Pie under cover of dark to my car and avoid the chance that her enthusiasm would give us away. Once in the car, we abandoned ourselves to emotion until I felt sufficiently collected to start the car, drive to a safe distance without lights, and then park again to go about removing the burs from Pie’s coat and especially her ears, which were nearly rigid with encrustation. She was so unwilling to have them removed from the backs of her legs that I had to hold her mouth shut with one hand to keep from being nipped. I threw burs out the window by the handful, until finally I could run my fingers through her coat. The light was now sufficient for us to stop again at Horsethief Creek, where she drank greedily from its crystalline waters. Then we went to see Dr. Olsson, whom we found still in his bathrobe. He looked at me, then at Pie, a study in propriety and subdued emotion. Then he said, quite formally, I think, given the occasion, “Why don’t you come in? I’ll make tea. I think we have some planning to do.”