It is easy, in some cases, to learn of a person's past and understand how it forges one's present identity. For instance, the first time my family took a vacation to Chicago to visit one of my mother's sisters we seemed to possess a mysterious and admirable quality in the minds of the people we were introduced to simply because we were from Wyoming. Wyoming was our identity.
In college too, I was known as the kid from Wyoming. But it was not only identity by the space I occupied, or had occupied, but the mythology that accompanied it. And I fit in well with the mythology, in fact participated in creating it. Some of the stories I told left some students either awe struck or in a state of disbelief.
I actually knew the man riding the bucking horse on the Wyoming license plate, and he had given me an old cavalry saddle.
My father while hunting being gored by a wounded buck deer, one tine going completely through his left arm and nearly piercing into his rib cage; he then bulldogged the animal holding it to the ground until it bled to death.
I recounted how Red Howard, a friend of ours was attacked in his chicken house by a Bobcat he surprised while checking to see what the commotion was. Red literally had to smother the cat with a bear hug, and escaped serious injury from teeth and claws only because he was wearing a heavy sheepskin coat.
I told of seeing golden eagles swoop down out of the sky to take their prey, peregrine falcons taking ducks and other birds on the wing, coyotes bringing down deer. I had actually done ranch work, worked cattle, been bucked off both horses and bulls.
But if there was anything that identified me, and still remains in the minds of many of my friends from long ago, it is guns and coyotes. Despite the fact that I hunted and trapped all kinds of animals, the coyote seemed central to my animal identity.
The day my family moved out to the Dome the Indian Paint Brushes were in full bloom, and a recent thunder storm, with terrifying lightening strikes, had left the air scented with sage and smelling of ozone. When the storm passed, a horse from a half wild herd caught in the open on the high prairie, lay dead, killed by the lightening. Within a few days I could see ravens and magpies flying around the carcass, and early one morning, soon thereafter, a lone coyote, that had fed on the horse during the dark hours, trotted away from his repast and disappeared down the draw.
At night, and in the early morning, the coyotes would break into the silence with their howling and high pitched yipping. I felt mystified as I lay in my bed at night listening, wondering how many there were, and how far away? My sister and I would sometimes howl back at the coyotes, amused that they would respond to almost any high pitched sound, even the mocking shriek in our giddy laughter.
I was eager to learn everything I could about coyotes, much coming from simple observation. Although coyotes are known to run in packs in Yellowstone National Park where large herds of elk and buffalo, when winter killed, are their major winter food source, I never witnessed such behavior on the prairie. Most often I observed coyotes hunting alone. Sometimes a pair were seen, but I never saw more that two adults together at any time. In the late summer and early fall when the pups had not yet gone their separate ways they might have seemed to form a pack, but by winter they only appeared as single animals or in pairs.
I observed that Coyotes seemed to be territorial, although this is disputed by some coyote observers. My view was that a dog and bitch which paired up kept other coyotes out of their area which they marked with urine, and patrolled regularly. When a coyote was trapped or shot others moved into the area, but even a crippled coyote in an established territory with the help of its mate seemed to be able to hold onto its claim. I say this because I twice saw a coyote with only three legs over a two year period in the same vicinity, which indicated to me that it was able to defend its territory. This particular coyote, which was missing a front leg, most likely had it shot off, because it was severed too high up to have lost it in a trap. It was a very wild animal, never stopping once it sighted a human being.
By the time I was ten I had badgered my uncle Don to give me a Remington .22 caliber single shot rifle. The gun had a broken stock, so he didn't feel much loss parting with it. My father made a replacement stock for the gun out of a couple of pine boards, shaped with a coping saw, and carved, grooved and bolted together. He made a trigger guard out of the handle of an old spoon, but the screws that held it in place had to be inserted where the two boards joined, and this did not make a very strong connection, so eventually we just left it off.
I also begged a few traps from my grandfather, who was a trapper himself. With my rifle and traps, and my father as guide and teacher, I was ready to take to the hills in pursuit of the wily coyote.
In those days, the majority opinion about the coyote in the West was that it should be hunted and trapped. Coyotes were a continuous threat to livestock, especially the young. Only traditional Shoshones and Arapahoes, objected to killing coyotes. The coyote had a mythological role in Indian tradition. It was a trickster, a creature whose ways were to be studied with lessons drawn from them, but there was no disposition to kill the trickster. However, knowing about the special place the trickster coyote had for the American Indian was years ahead of me.
There were a lot of coyotes on the reservation in the last half of the 1940's. Not only did we hear them howl, but on moon lit nights I could look out of my bedroom window and watch a pair of them, patrol the outside of the fence around the camp while our dog patrolled the inside of the fence. Occasionally, when I got up early in the morning and went outside through the back door, a coyote would jump out of the 55 gallon oil drum we used for a garbage barrel and run off into the sage brush.
My father had gained quite a lot of experience trapping coyotes during the years he worked with big sheep outfits, most of which were vanishing when I was a youngster. Now, that I reflect on the past, I see that my relationship to coyotes was bequeathed to me by my father for whom coyotes were an economic liability which could be turned into a recreational and economic asset. I didn't just naturally want to trap and shoot them. I was a cultural creation of the times.
But along with the relationship with coyotes he instilled in me, there were corresponding bonds formed between father and son, and between us and the land. Reflecting back, from my first memories my father seemed very close to me. When I was a pre-school child, and he drove his pickup truck around to the scattered cattle and sheep ranches, and visited bearded old trappers, buying hides and furs to resell to support his family, he would take me with him. This was the beginning of my cultural preparation, but it was also the beginning of my understanding of the role my father played in our family and in society. Later, as we walked side by side hunting and trapping--fishing too, he was making that bond stronger; teaching me what he knew, what he thought would make a good citizen out of me. I don't think he put a great deal of thought in forming his understanding of how I should be raised, or the kind of person I should be, he seemed to be teaching me to be what he was.
My father was a good teacher. He taught me the ways of the earth and its creatures. But this knowledge was not sentimentalized, we were not squeamish, we killed without reflection, and without conscience. Yet there was an unstated ethic in it all. We were not out to destroy the earth, just experience it, feather, fur, and blood.
He showed me how to handle traps so they wouldn't have human scent on them, how to set them, cover the jaws with waxed paper, and lastly, conceal them by sprinkling soil lightly over them. He emphasized that when we left a trap site it had to look almost like no one had been there, certainly in a day or two, after small prairie creatures, mice and insects, had scurried over the site, and the evening breezes had brushed smooth the soil, it should look untouched.
At ten, I couldn't depress the springs on a No. 4 Victor without putting my feet on them and pulling up on the jaws, so I had to depend on Dad, but by the time I was a teenager I could, with left leg bent, put the trap above my knee, squeeze the springs down with my bare hands, hold the right spring down with my right knee, and with the fingers of my right hand, put the dog of the trap in the notch of the pan to set the trap. I practiced every day squeezing the trap springs down, eventually realizing, when I wrestled with my friends, that my grip was becoming formidable.
One thing a trapper needs to catch a coyote is bait, dead meat, carrion. We would drive down to the ranches on the Wind River to get a dead sheep or part of a dead cow to lure the coyotes to the trap site. My father believed that all but a small portion of the bait had to be buried, because coyotes lose some of their caution when they have to dig for the bait. One drawback with this method is that occasionally a coyote while trying to dig the bait up will throw dirt on the traps and spring them before they get caught. Usually, though, buried bait works best in outwitting the coyote. No trapper disrespects the intelligence of a coyote. Careless trappers are always outmaneuvered both instinctively and perhaps even intellectually by their would be prey.
Coyotes are quick to become wary of circumstantial danger. Perhaps it is seeing one of their own caught in a trap that sensitizes them, but bait, including a whole dead animal is approached very cautiously by a coyote. The unmasked smell of a steel trap, even though buried in the dirt or sand, is easily detected by a coyote, although after several days the smell seems to be neutralized by the soil. Human scent on the trap lingers for a long time as well. Our philosophy was, that if trapping on the prairie, traps should be boiled with sage brush, then dipped in melted wax, and set only while wearing rubber gloves. Every strategy must be employed. Sprinkling a bush near the trap site with coyote urine works wonders, because coyotes mark boundaries and leave messages for each other with urine. Coyotes have a singular focus when they are deciphering these messages.
After my father set the first traps it took about a week before we caught a coyote. It was in the fall, and after a week the bait was good and ripe, and with a brisk west wind everything east of it with a sensitive nose could smell it. I ran the trap line early in the morning before school, and the first time I found the coyote in a trap I nearly hyperventilated with excitement. Running back to the house I told Dad we had a coyote. He was just going off to work, but he got the .22 rifle and went down the draw to administer the coup de grace. That afternoon, after work, he skinned it out and put it on a hand carved stretcher which I also commandeered from my grandfather's supplies.
After we caught that first coyote I was a confirmed hunter and trapper. The thought of being out on the plains, down on the river bottom, or up in the mountains, hunting and trapping surged through my mind like a torrent after the spring thaw. I was converted. From that time onward the coyote was as responsible for my identity as my human friends were. One spring, the mother of some of my friends asked me if I like to join a 4-H Club, and we were asked to choose a name for it, I suggested that it be the Winkleman Dome Coyotes. Everyone seemed to like it, and the name was approved.
In time, other creatures would contribute to my identity: the bobcat and the beaver, muskrat and mink; we trapped them all, so many of them only a few individual moments stand out in my memory. Among the birds, the raven, magpie, and hawk were my daily companions. With the exception of the magpie, these birds I never shot, although I did take the young and keep them as pets. Once my father brought two young Great Horned Owls home, today a forbidden act, and we raised them until time to release them.
But it was the coyote that filled my thoughts, brought the greatest challenge, and gave me the greatest sense of achievement or fulfillment when I caught one in a trap or shot one with my rifle.
The first coyote I shot with that old .22 Remington was on the river bottom just above the dam on the Big Wind River. It was late fall, there was snow on the ground, and temperatures were getting low enough to freeze still and slow moving water. Dad and I were just getting ready to go through a barbed wire fence concealed by tall dry grass, when a coyote came out of the timber no more than a hundred yards away and started hunting mice. Intent on finding its morning meal, it hadn't noticed us at all. With eyes fixed and mind concentrated on my prey I put a shell in the chamber, closed the bolt, and rested the barrel against a fence post to steady it. At that distance for a .22 I had to calculate the drop of the bullet to know just how high to aim. But I had shot that rifle so often at so many distances the adjustment came without thinking. I fired. The coyote, hit, jumped straight up in the air and began running toward us. The noise of the shot had echoed from the timber, and he thought it had come from behind him instead of in front of him. I shot him again at seventy yards, and again at thirty yards. We could see the blood on his fur when I fired the last shot, and only after that did the coyote sense where the shooting was coming from and turn to run back toward the timber.
After he disappeared into the brush at the edge of he timber, we crawled through the fence and began following the blood trail--slowly. Knowledgeable hunters follow blood trails slowly. A wounded wild animal can travel amazing distances when pursued with haste. The coyote headed in the direction of an old beaver channel we knew well, and by the amount of blood on the snow we figured that within the next half mile or so we would find the coyote lying dead.
However, we had not been long on the trail when we discovered that something else had picked up the blood trail. The tracks were unmistakable, it was a hog. Yes, a pig. For a time the Winchesters, one of the ranchers along the river, let their hogs run almost wild during the winter. They fed in the straw stacks, but otherwise foraged as best they could. We had seen one lean and mean looking sow devour a lamb the spring before right after it mother had given birth, so we knew that this pig was just as interested in that wounded coyote as we were.
Beaver were only partially responsible for the channel. Originally, they had engineered it to float cottonwood branches to their lodges from willow and cottonwood thickets on the river bottom. But spring flood waters had enlarged and deepened it over the years until it was fully ten to twelve feet wide and four to five feet deep in many places. It had actually become a small separate channel of the river. Because the water in the channel was slow moving due to a beaver dam near its end where it reentered the river, the channel had frozen over, but the ice was not strong enough to bear the weight of that hog. We read the story in the snow, the bloody water, broken ice, and hoof scarred bank. The hog had caught up with the coyote. The coyote must have been ready to cash in anyway, and was either lying on the bank of the channel or trying to decide whether to risk crossing the ice. When the hog arrived something happened that resulted in both hog and coyote going out on the ice, or simply falling into the channel. The coyote most likely died first, and the hog unable to get out of the water due to the overhanging bank, drowned.
Somehow, both the hog and the coyote managed to slip under the snow covered ice so that we couldn't see either of them. We figured neither the coyote or the pig were worth getting wet for, so we left them to the river.
Sometime during my teen years I thought I needed a better rifle, so one Christmas my folks gave me a new seven shot Mossberg .22 rifle with a scope. With that rifle I could shoot a rabbit in the head at thirty yards, and hit jackrabbits on the run if I fired before they really got wound up. I shot three ducks on the wing with it: two canvasbacks, and a mallard with a tag on one of its legs. I also downed a feral, sheep-killing dog on the run. Dad called me Dead Eye.
I shot my first coyote with that rifle on Sage Creek. Milward Ward, the Shoshone rancher who lived down the Big Horn Rim from the oil field, had given us permission to trap on his property, and we were scouting the creek bottom when I spotted a coyote hunting in the sage brush above the creek bank. There were a couple of magpies behind him hoping that if he made a kill they could get a scrap or two of it. Or maybe they were there just to pester him. One would fly above him and tread air until the coyote would make a jump for it; but the magpies managed to stay just out of reach.
The coyote was too far away to make a killing shot, so I called it in by sucking on the side of my left fist where the thumb presses against the index finger. This makes a sound similar to a cottontail rabbit when it is in distress. I didn't learn this from my father, I learned this technique from a trapping magazine, and this was the first time I had tried it in the field, although I had perfected the sound through practice. I knew well what a cottontail distress call sounded like, because we caught and used live cottontail rabbits to bait our bobcat box traps.
Too cautious to come straight to me, the coyote circled down wind, and made his way through a shallow draw which eventually brought him close to the creek. I had guessed that was where he would show up, but my concern was that in changing location so much from the time I first saw him he would get wind of us before he emerged from that draw. However, the wind favored us that day, and he came out of the draw about fifty yards from me. I had taken a sitting position in the tall sage brush, and was well concealed when he appeared. I put the cross hairs on him as he focused on the spot the rabbit sound came from, and fired. It was a good solid hit in the chest, but he still managed to run far enough to make it to the bottom of a rock outcropping on the rim above us. Had he gotten into the rocks we might have lost him, but he went down just short of his would be refuge. We waited a good while before approaching him to make sure he didn't get up and make it to the rocks.
When we finally got to the coyote, my father told me that it had been a pup that spring, so that would explain why it fell for my dying rabbit call, which amused him, nevertheless.
As a teenager, the story I told most often about shooting coyotes took shape in the high country of the Absaroka Range of the Rocky Mountains. My father and I were wrangling cattle for the Winchester's. In the fall of the year cattle were rounded up to be driven down to ranches at lower elevations for wintering and calving. As usual, I had my .22 Mossberg in a saddle scabbard just in case I saw a coyote. There had been a pretty good rain earlier that morning and the ground had turned into very heavy and sticky mud. During occasional dismounts it stuck to our boots and made it hard to get our feet in and out of the stirrups. Little did I know that under those adverse conditions I would make the most amazing shot of my life at a coyote.
Dad was riding high up on a ridge when he yelled at me. I looked up and saw a coyote trotting up the ridge just ahead of him. I was about fifty yards away, any farther and it would not be a good shot for a .22. I pulled my rifle out of the scabbard, swung my right leg over the back of the saddle, and tried to pull my left foot out of the stirrup. The mud held it there like glue. I couldn't keep my balance and fell, jamming my rifle barrel deep into the mud. There is no way I could shoot with mud in the gun barrel. My heart sank as I got up and looked at what I had done. But one solitary piece of grass was sticking out of the gun barrel. I hoped against hope and pulled it gently. A miracle! The whole piece of mud came out with the blade of grass.
Now, all this took less time than might be thought. But even then the coyote should have been long gone. However, the coyote was apparently attracted to the entertaining sight of me falling from the horse into the mud, and had stopped to enjoy the show. I slammed a shell in the chamber just as the coyote started to trot away, then broke into a lope. It was beginning to disappear over the slope of the ridge, and about all I could see of it was its head and the top of its back. I whistled. In a split second: the coyote stopped and turned toward me, I put the cross hairs on its head and pulled the trigger. It dropped right in its tracks.
I mounted my horse and rode up to the dead coyote. I could hardly believe what I saw, I had hit it right between the eyes. Was it an accident? That shot could not have been better placed if it had been made from a few feet. And to make the moment even more satisfying, if not exhilarating, I had a witness to confirm what I had done, whose word no one would doubt. To the uninitiated reader the mention of such an unlikely shot might seem distasteful, even bragging. But making good shots and telling others about them were just as important to hunters as a brave recounting coup around a campfire.
The horse I was riding was an older gray with an unusually large girth, which gave rise to his name, Double Guts. He was a gentle horse under normal conditions; that was probably why he was the only horse available for me to ride that day, the better mounts already taken. Double Guts had not moved so much as a leg during my fall into the mud, and didn't even mind the report of my rifle, but he sure hated that coyote, repeatedly snorting, throwing his head up, and pulling at the reins, as I knelt to examine the animal. He liked it even less when I picked the coyote up and tried to throw it across the back of the saddle. He spun around, nearly jerking the reins out of my hands.
Finally, my father rode his horse up close along side so that He could not spin away from me when I swung the coyote over the saddle. I tied the coyote down, remounted, and we were off to the ranch house, old Double Guts, snorting frequently, clearly displeased at having to carry that predator on its back, which if not a threat to him, was a constant source of aggravation.
When we reached the cow camp, we were met by Jake Shongutsie, an old wrangler who worked for the Winchesters. Jake was a traditional Shoshone, and while he had made some reluctant adjustment to some aspects of the modern world, he retained many old Shoshone views.
I liked Jake, he had known me since I was in the second grade, so I never expected to receive the silent treatment when I proudly showed him the dead coyote, and tried to tell him the story of my incredible shot. He just grunted and walked away. I asked my father why Jake had reacted that way. Dad just said that Indians don't like to kill coyotes, he wasn't sure why. Some time later, I learned about the fabled trickster at the Indian Agency, and from what I knew about coyotes, it wasn't hard to see why such a tradition should have arisen. The coyote was an amazing animal to me too, only I stood within a different cultural tradition.
If I were to tell of other coyotes I shot with a .22 rifle and recovered I would be a liar. Other coyotes fell to that .22 rifle, but they were in traps. I also shot some that got away wounded. To most of the cattlemen and sheep men who let us hunt and trap on their ranches it didn't matter. A bullet in the body of a sheep and calf killer meant they would most likely die eventually. Of course, finding the animal was important to us, because it meant both bounty money, and money for the pelt, if it happened to be winter and the pelt was prime.
Some people have a false picture of the coyote's ability to bring down large game. While they weigh only about thirty pounds, and subsist on mice, rabbits, carrion, and even berries, they are capable of killing deer and antelope, especially late into a hard winter and in the early spring when these animals are in a weakened condition. Predators live well during hard winters. The spring of my junior year in high school I asked my father if he would drive us about forty miles west to Red Creek. Red Creek, which empties into the Big Wind River, is a few miles east of the town of Dubois. I had been on Red Creek the year before with an Indian from the Indian Agency at Fort Washakie. He was interested in taking a Geiger Counter up there to see if there was any evidence of uranium in the rock outcroppings. I found the copious fossils in the rocks more interesting than prospecting for uranium, and wanted to show my father the many fossilized shells I had seen there.
It turned out to be a cold, windy day. We left the car were the road became impassable due to snow drifts, and set off up the mountain by foot. After looking at the fossils we lifted our eyes higher up the face of the mountain where one of the slopes had some timber growing on it, and determined to climb up there just to see what there was to see. We had walked about a mile up the mountain when we came to a steep drop off in the terrain due to the eroded upthrust of the rock formation we were walking on. We made our way north a few hundred yards to a place where water from melting snow had over millennia run down the mountain and cut through the formation creating a pass through the rock. At the bottom of the gulch blown full of snow we saw fresh deer tracks along with coyote tracks.
The tracks left the gulch but continued on to the higher ground we were headed for, so we decided to follow, feeling that something interesting must be happening ahead. We were not disappointed. The deer tracks took a sudden turn back into the gulch and there was deer hair and blood on the snow. From the tracks it became clear that there were two coyotes pursuing the deer. The deer had floundered in the deep snow, but managed to get out and continue on solid ground, but not without sustaining further injury by the coyotes. We could see far enough ahead to realize that the deer and the coyotes had topped the rise and so were out of our field of vision, so we headed straight up the mountain to our left until we could see where they had gone. About three hundred yards ahead of us the two coyotes were feeding on the deer they had downed.
We had been walking in the teeth of the wind all the way up the mountain, but it was gusting so hard near the top of the ridge that we often had to turn our backs to it to keep our faces from freezing. The coyotes, busy feeding, obviously couldn't hear anything over that wind, and unable to get our scent, we went undetected until I took an impossible shot at one of the coyotes. Dad just laughed when the gun fired, because the wind blew the sound away just as effectively as it blew the bullet, wide of its target, into the mountain side. We watched the coyotes run off into the wind, and then went down to inspect the kill. The winter weakened deer had literally been run into the ground, and further weakened by the wounds to its flanks, and neck it was unable to resist being eaten alive.
One spring we watched two coyotes attack an elk above the town of Dubois on Horse Creek. I don't remember why we were there, but we were with Albert Winchester, who had a cow camp on Horse Creek. Albert had driven us up the road in his pickup, but it was late afternoon and the ground had thawed to the point we couldn't go any farther up the mountain. We would just have to wait until the sun went down and the ground refroze before we could continue. That gave me the opportunity to take my rifle and see what I could scare up in the timber. I had hardly left the road when I spooked three elk bedded down in the timber. They plowed laboriously through the deep crusted snow, and headed up the mountain side at about a hundred and thirty degree angle until they came to a barbed wire fence. This was cattle country, and the mountain had been fenced to keep cattle from straying. When the elk got to the first fence which ran straight up the mountain they turned and followed the fence to the top. When they were about half way up the mountain two coyotes materialized from somewhere and began following them. They ran along side the elk on hard ground, while the elk labored hard breaking through the crusted snow.
The coyotes harassed those elk, especially the lagging one, all the way up the mountain, making threatening moves at the elk much the same way a cow dog would make toward a cow. When the elk got to the top of the mountain and encountered the second fence the first two elk jumped it and continued on. But the last elk had become too weak to clear the top wire. When it jumped it caught its front feet between the two top strands of wire and flipped over the fence onto its back. The coyotes were on it in a flash. The elk managed to pull its legs free of the wire, get up, and follow the other two, but it had obviously been injured. My father and I knew we had no hope of following in that deep snow, but we did hike up to the place the elk had fallen jumping the fence. There was elk hair and blood on the snow. The coyotes had seen an opportunity and taken it. I don't know if the coyotes were able to down that elk or not, but I do know what their intention was. Coyotes are perceived as cowardly, but they can be tough customers when hungry.
The reader should be cautious about being judgmental when hearing of these coyote killing incidents. People who interact with the natural world in a predatory or subsistence manner are not bad people, necessarily. The coyote kills the rabbits, the deer, sheep, and calves; we killed the coyote. We didn't eat its flesh, but we did sell its hide and collect the bounty on its head. We no more wanted the coyote to suffer extinction than we wanted the sheep men and cattlemen to go out of business. There was an interdependence there, a symbiotic relationship. We were as much a part of the natural world as the coyote. We lived a good life, and our actions should not be criminalized. I looked forward to being out on the trap line after school with my father. Spending my leisure time trapping and hunting kept me away from bars and other places of danger and debauchery when I was a teenager.
Alcohol, death and injury were frequently associated, then, as now. I lost several friends in car accidents, fights, and shootings, when I was a teenager, all due to alcohol. I stayed out of trouble, because I had interests instilled in me which were of much higher value to me than those other options. I owe the moral teaching I lived by, which equated bar rooms and alcohol with evil, to my mother and the church she brought me up in, but to my father I owe the bonding of father with son in the context of family and with all of the created world, including the world of the coyote.
Not long ago, at a professional meeting on the environment, a young woman who was an animal rights advocate, contested my evaluation when she heard me draw these moral conclusions. She said that in her judgment I had committed a far greater wrong by killing animals than I would have done by going to the bars and possibly becoming a drunk. "At least you would only be hurting yourself," she said.
Everyone is entitled to their opinion, but being ethical takes a rational commitment to both society and the environment with the intention of doing the greatest good for each. And, of course, that is a value judgment itself. To speak of the greatest good is to make an evaluation; some forms of good are ranked higher than others. It is impossible to give goodness a practical meaning by speaking only abstractly about it. Practical goodness is what does good, and does it in the context of a whole environment: people, beasts, and the rest of what we call the world.
But while we are conscious of ethical issues now that embrace non-human animals, we had no such consciousness then. We were not ones to cause suffering without thought, but sometimes trapping and hunting causes suffering which was not planned. When that happened it did not linger in our consciousness to give rise to a bad conscience; it was quickly forgotten.
Hunting and trapping were ways one lived from the earth's natural resources, like grazing cattle and sheep on the grass of prairies and mountains. And when hunting and trapping are associated with raising livestock, an additional characteristic is given to the understanding of hunting and trapping it did not have before. A social element develops between those who hunt and trap and those who have land and livestock. Keeping predators down is therefore not only an economic and recreational activity, it is a social activity as well. This social element may also be present in hunting and trapping animals other than predators.
Simply put, being a positive contributor to society through hunting and trapping promotes a greater good than being a social renegade, vandal, trouble maker, drunk or radical animal rights advocate. We were good people from the point of view of those we interacted with, and the whole environment: wildlife, cattlemen, and sheep men, benefitted from our interaction with it. Certainly, like excesses in most things, one can become so egocentric that nothing else in the world matters except what benefits me. Undeniably, some cattlemen and sheepmen would liked to have seen every coyote killed, but that is not the view of hunters and trappers. They value that lifestyle too dearly to wish extinction on coyotes.
And speaking of lifestyle, if someone should have given me a violin when I was a boy, and provided violin lessons, instead of giving me a .22 rifle and a few traps I could have done something constructive for society with equal or greater value, but that possibility did not lie within my social environment. I lived out my early years at a time and place where guns were a part of our culture. Today, the computer may be the equivalent of what the gun was back then. But I find it difficult to imagine that a boy, spending his leisure time with a computer playing war games and e-mailing his friends, can bond with the earth, and with his father like I bonded with the prairies, mountains, and with my father. Alienation or a spirit of indifference is more likely to be the result of such an alternative.
I entertained the thought of playing the violin when I was young. My uncle in Scotland was a well known fiddler and violin maker, but my Dad had no interest in violins. From the time he immigrated and set foot on Wyoming soil he was dependent on its natural resources for making a living and providing for his recreation. I emulated my father, and we did things together, outdoors, in the wild.
I might have done well, even been very good at the violin. That may be a scenario which exists in some hypothetical alternate universe. But I was cut off from the possibility of learning to play the violin, almost to the degree I am in this universe cut off from knowing the possibilities of that alternate one. So, I'll never know if I would have been good as a violinist. And I'll never know whether as a violinist I gained the same personal identity by bonding with my father and the wider world in which we lived in such a way that the word "love" must by used to describe it. But I do know what happened in this universe, in this world--I had the best father a boy could have asked for. And I was a good hunter and trapper; for my age, maybe even among the best.
Many years ago, shortly before his death, I was at my father's bedside talking about the old days when we hunted and trapped together. Did he remember the time I fell dismounting from old Double Guts and jammed my rifle barrel in the mud, but still managed to shoot the coyote trotting up the ridge; did he recall the one-eyed bobcat we trapped in the tall sage brush on the Big Wind River? And he would respond with a word, a smile, or a nod of his head. Then he said, "I wish you had been with me when I first came from Scotland to this country; we could have had some great times together--out on the range."
The thoughtful reader will have recognized that this book is not just a story. It is a story, but a philosophical probing of virtues (in the Aristotelian sense), as well. It is a story of home and family, of neighborliness, generosity, and spaciousness in living. It is free of the clutter of humanity in bustling cities. Nothing could be further removed from the ethic of this story than that confronting a congested population where the faces of humanity blur from sheer numbers and the pace of life, a pace which frustrates long lasting commitments and relationships.
This story is a story of change and growth, but also of constancy, an idea which has lost considerable ground to change in recent times. It is a story which somehow seems to say that the best of life's experiences do not need to be searched out in some foreign country or even outer space, but can be found right in our back yard, or within confines of our own homes, be that a dwelling or a land. There are limitless novelties in these places; all one has to do is open up to them like an artist who spends a lifetime going back and painting one scene over and over because of the new things she or he sees in it.
There is change in life, but also constancy, and in seeing something new one builds on something old. Because all material things change and pass away, the constant must always be understood as the spiritual dimension of a person or place.
The most satisfying thing about writing this story is that it has given me the opportunity of living life twice, for spirit to meet spirit, and seeing something new the second time, realizing where I came from, and where I am going as spirit.
This story is about knowing one's friends (and by implication enemies), well. It has an ethic of work and play, one touching on the development of a sense of place, a bonding with the land, and interacting with its wild creatures. It is not subsistence living, but without recognizing one's dependence on place one cannot not subsist anywhere for long.
Thus, it is fitting that the story conclude with the story of the Schmoyer place, part of the Winchester ranch that had formerly been the home of another agricultural family, an old homestead that had lost its inhabitants, but through its artifacts begged someone to tell its story, put it into history, while bringing it back to life.
Yet, in the rocks and soil of the Schmoyer place there are artifacts that tell of another people who lived on this land, and carved pictures in the ledges. This story must also be mentioned to put the Schmoyer place in context. The story must also include me, because I became a part of that place. Thus I provide the spiritual continuity between the past and the present. Fifty years after my first visit, drawn by the constancy which remains despite change, I returned to the point in the circle where I began, and that writes the final pages of this book.
One fall, sometime during my thirteenth year, my father took me over to the Schmoyer place, on the north side of the Big Wind River, several miles below its confluence with Bull Creek to scout out the land. Supplementing work and enriching leisure, in the fall and winter months we were hunters and trappers. On the north side of the valley along that stretch of the Wind, high sandstone ledges stand above the river bottom. Early settlers took advantage of the protection these ledges offered from northerly storms and built cabins and out-buildings along their base.
We descended from the flats above by way of what he called an "arroyo" (a term he no doubt picked up from Mexican sheep herders), a deep cut into the sandstone escarpment made by water running down from the high country into the river. A light dusting of snow was imprinted with fresh bobcat tracks. We followed them up river until they disappeared then reappeared through the open door of an old root cellar dug down and into the erosion mound at the base of the sandstone ledge. The root cellar seemed to be the only visible evidence that this place had once been inhabited. "The old Schmoyer place," the words seemed to come involuntarily from my father's lips. I asked my father about the Schmoyers, but he had not known them. Years ago, he said, they sold out to the Winchesters and left, "God knows where they are now--maybe dead." I made my way to the cellar to look inside.
This was, I thought, the best built root cellar I had ever seen. Timbers, still in amazingly good condition, lined its sides and trussed up the cedar pole roof. Over many years more sand and rock had eroded from the top of the ledge and fallen onto the dirt mound that formed its roof, but it had withstood it all. I reasoned that this cellar with a little work could easily be made usable again, but it would be a long way to bring carrots and potatoes to store.
This was a good place for trapping. The river swung in toward the sandstone ledges bringing the river bottom almost to an end except for a narrow finger of land along the cliffs that provided continuity with land farther down stream. This feature, plus the arroyo which offered a trail through the sandstone cliffs to the flats above, spoke clearly to those who understand wild things that many paths, both seen and unseen, converged here.
We used steel traps for coyotes, beaver, muskrats, and mink, but for bobcats my father and I used box traps. Strange as it may seem we had an almost affectionate prey-predator relationship with bobcats. We liked to take them home alive, even tried to make pets out of them. But we eventually pelted them out and sold the furs.
We set a box trap near the old root cellar door. We knew the ways of the cat. This bobcat would visit the cellar again.
Daily, as I checked that box trap on the old Schmoyer place I was drawn by the stark desertion of that place to contemplate change, change dictated by philosophical and economic forces that at the time I knew nothing about. It seemed to me that in the scheme of things there was the potential, almost determinism, for displacement for one people or family, by the acquisition of others who had larger interests. "Big fish eat little fish," the proverb goes. It just seemed to be the way things were.
That fall, after the wind had cut the snow to expose the ground, I could make out a rock foundation where a cabin had been. It did not seem to have burned down; there was no charcoal to be seen. It had probably been torn down and hauled away by someone who wanted the logs. A tree was growing through the center of some old bed springs, and a rusty oil-burning stove, half buried by time and soil, stuck barely through the frost browned grass. There were other things revealed by a sweep of a foot across the grass or a kick at heavier brush: bottles, a crushed milk pail; here an old tin cup, and there a porcelain coffee pot. Inside a broken crock I found a girl's shoe, brittle and shrunken by time and the elements.
I reasoned that this family must have had a cow, at least. They would have had milk and cheese to eat along with the root vegetables stored in the cellar. Cows have to freshen, so there would have been a calf to sell for a little money--if it lived. They must have had a garden to grow the vegetables. But times must have been hard, the going too tough, and so they sold out and moved on.
The old shoe awakened my imagination to the girl who had worn it. I wondered about the color of her hair and eyes, the sound of her voice. Was she was pretty; would I would I have liked her? Did she have brothers and sisters? The artifacts remaining didn't reveal any of these things. What about her mother and father; were they happy on this isolated homestead, or was life a relentless grind of hard work and finally failure? Did her father turn to whiskey? There was a whiskey bottle, unmistakable by its shape, among the debris. What would my life have been like on this remote farm had I lived here? I studied that place, those ruins, and artifacts, full of haunting unremembered things, and I feared that this was no happy place.
When after those many years I returned to the Schmoyer place, drawn by the resurgence of a latent sense of place. The site had changed some, the foundation stones of the house were hidden by heavy brush. Try as I might I could not locate a single stone. The timbers of the root cellar's roof had finally rotted sufficiently for Winchester cattle walking over it to cave it in. Rain and melting snow were doing the rest of the destruction, or maybe reclamation. It won't be many years until the timbers are returned to the soil--reclaimed by the wild which always waits on the down hill side of settlement.
A five foot bull snake slithered out of the ruined root cellar to remind me that this was his home now.
My interest no longer being in trapping bobcats, but my disposition for meditating on those ruins still strong, I decided to cross the river to Winchester ranch house and ask Hazel, now a widow, and well up in years, if she knew anything about the Schmoyers. I can't imagine why I hadn't asked years before. I must have been too engrossed in the inner, psychic life of the place to engage its external history.
To my surprise Hazel remembered the Schmoyers well, although it had been nearly seventy years since the Winchesters had bought the Schmoyer place. She recalled that Schmoyers milked nine cows, raised chickens, sold eggs, and made about $200 a month, quite a good living in the 1920's and 30's.
The clue for my understanding this family should have come from the quality of the old root cellar rather than a girl's weathered shoe. The cellar would have provided a more realistic picture of life on the Schmoyer place.
Hazel also informed me that although Schmoyers would have had a root cellar, most every one did, what I thought was a root cellar may have been the Smoyer chicken house which was also dug back into the erosion mound at the base of the cliff. Furthermore, there were three Schmoyer children: two girls, Marion and Ruth, and a boy, Ray.
Old enough to strike out on his own about the time the farm was sold, Ray left home and went to Montana. Hazel wasn't exactly sure why Ray left, or why Schmoyer had decided to quit farming. Perhaps the older Schmoyer felt he couldn't continue without Ray's help, or he just couldn't turn down the money the Winchester's offered him for his farm. Ray may have left because he had a conflict with his father, or Schmoyer wouldn't consider turning the farm over to him. Obviously, the girls didn't inherit the farm. Farm property was seldom turned over to women in those days.
But the fact is, the Schmoyers sold out and left. Neither they nor their progeny remained on the land. They are mere memories. Phone books in the area contain no Smoyer names, and computer searches of Wyoming and Montana yield nothing . Time has swept them away.
Upriver from the Schmoyer's place lay the Nations place. During the time I was a boy, over a period of years, the Nations family would still come back occasionally to visit the old ranch. There was something about it they did not want to leave, or something of it they took with them which kept taking them back.
Constancy and change are two ideas we human being wrestle with. Constancy suggests security and belonging, change encourages freedom and the pursuit of novelty. It seems we have difficulty holding the two together, to provide a suitable analogy or model as to how constancy and change can function together. Because everything physical changes, is constancy to be found in the metaphysical; and is there any constancy even there? As may be recognized, at this point we are in the domain of philosophical and religious faith.
In the ripple and flow of time across the territory now known as Wyoming, mountain men trapped beaver, hunters exterminated the buffalo, and the Shoshoni settled their territorial disputes with the Crow over the land cradling the upper stretches of the Wind River.
It was the enticing force of the slip stream of Manifest Destiny that brought my European ancestors to Wyoming. In the history of the West my father came late, but like most of those who came before him, he too sought to live by exploiting the natural resources of the land.
But the land, especially a vast and wild land, has seductive power over those who would try to tame it, to wrestle a living from it. Eventually, in the struggle for survival there comes an understanding; and the relationship between the human and the land deepens into a marriage and a birthing, an exultation of raw beauty, shared experience, mutual dependency, and productivity.
Successive waves of new immigrants brought rapid and continuous change to the land. My father watched those forces work in Wyoming with mixed feelings. He knew as well as anyone that change was inevitable, but he did not like the way things were changing. He did not think the world should remain static, but believed that change should take place within some kind of constant based on what it meant to be a person in a community attached to some place. Perhaps it was his own experience as a Scottish immigrant that sensitized him to the importance of place and the tragedy of displacement as the consequence of change.
My father had never heard of Heraclitus, that ancient Greek philosopher who argued reluctantly that reality instead of being grounded in permanence seemed to be characterized by change; but in his own way he wrestled with the same vexing problem. He had an aggrieved feeling for things that once were not literally everything, but for the spirit of those times expressed in the people who engaged the raw spaciousness of the land. It was as though he felt the loss of that first bride, that common law linkage with the land and the people he had first come to. "Change should take place within a marriage," he used to say, " but the marriage itself should not change."
He would call my attention to remains of old sheep camps and deserted homesteads, frontier institutions that had once supported families whose names he remembered, but who had mostly disappeared, he said, "like dust blowing in the wind." Some had gone broke and moved on, but most had sold out to larger "outfits". Whichever way it was, their presence had vanished, their voices had faded away into whispers of his memory, and the richness of their characters lived on only in the stories he told.
The Schmoyers and the Nations were just one more phase of a process tied to a particular ideology about land, and people. They claimed land which once supported nomadic American tribes--the latest, the Crow and the Shoshoni. But they too gave it up to someone with greater resources and a wider economic vision.
Despite the belief that under certain circumstances it is deemed necessary, one would think it a difficult decision to give up one's place on the land, whether it is surrendered for financial reasons, an opponent's superior weapons, or someone's greater purchasing power. But the land seems always to be changing hands, and each time it does part of the personal bond that makes it home, part of what makes community is lost to someone. And with contemporary society's fixation on mobility, the sense of place as space inseparable from one's identity is progressively weakened. It is no wonder that many of the younger generation are content to spend so much time in cyberspace!
A bit of Buddhist wisdom says that to call a place home you must have lived there for a thousand years. By this view one is joined with the ancestors and the community, past and present, in a spirit of continuity with the land. This doesn't seem to be the popular viewpoint of the western world. Here there seem to be successive waves of displacement and acquisition largely driven by the creation of new economic situations and the needs of those with the power to bring these economic conditions into being.
Within this economic process the monetary value of land is seductively inflated as it changes owners, and the social value of the survival and continuity of a community, whether a family farm or a small rural town, rooted in the idea that the land is home, is eroded and subordinated to the values of acquisition, consumerism, individualism, and competition. These counter-values progressively compromise and subvert the idea of permanence rooted in the personal and community values of "land as home," but also a place of endless novelty and adventure.
In the story of settlement, corporations, and affluent individuals who are usually new to a locality, are the among the latest to stake their claim to the land. Of course, corporations are the formations of the affluent, the stock holders, but corporations threaten the idea of land as home in more impersonal ways than individuals do. Corporations have no ideological or spiritual ties to place, moving on when motivated by purely economic considerations. Also, corporate survival is more important than the survival of any of the individuals within it or outside of it.
Corporations operate with detachment from bonds which join people to place, thus are among the newest forces of large scale human displacement from the land. Agribusiness swallows up the small farmer and undercuts the economic base of small towns. Industrial and technological corporations turn fields into factories, and by economic promises dissuade the dispossessed and the unwary from esteeming land and community as home. When people are removed from the land, the land loses its personal dimension and becomes merely a geographical feature of the corporation and a means to an economic end.
Of course, it would be simplistic and wrong to describe farmers and ranchers who enlarge their holdings by buying out smaller operators as promoters of the corporate model. Those farmers and ranchers who have expanded their operations can still feel close to the land, still consider the land their home; but the corporate spirit of acquisition and competition which pervades our economy works against it for future generations.
I can't imagine there ever not being a Winchester ranch, now "The Winchester Land and Cattle Company." My psyche is too permeated by memories of helping put up its hay, irrigating the alfalfa fields, branding the calves, building its fences, and trapping the river bottom to let go of that reality. I have lived to know all four generations of Winchesters living on their cattle ranch. Old Jack, the patriarch, I mentioned was killed by a horse when I was about ten, and Albert, died a few years ago after a stroke and a fall from a hay wagon, incidentally, in the same field his bother at age 14 was dragged to death by a horse. But the Winchesters still occupy; young Jack, and his son Larry, still work the place. The land is still their home. Other family members who are also stockholders in the ranch make their pilgrimages for the family reunions. Most still know where home is.
But there have been other eyes on the Winchester Land and Cattle Company. They are not corporate eyes, but those of affluent people from both the East and West Coasts who want to own a piece of the West. The Nature Conservancy has also expressed interest in the ranch should the Winchesters ever sell it.
What might happen to the Winchesters and their contributions to their community should their ranch be sold? The details are unknowable, but we can look further up the Big Wind River to see what has happened, and is happening to the ranching communities there.
Some ranches on the headwaters of the Big Wind have already been developed into small acreage ranchettes. Conditioned by the mobile nature of our society, some of the buyers are interested in the property only for a summer home; others are simply real estate speculators.
Purely from the perspective of economics, it is difficult to fault a rancher who takes the opportunity to turn land into more cash than it is worth as agricultural land. And this practice is gaining in popularity.
Other ranches on the head waters of the Big Wind have been purchased by the affluent. Sometimes they are stock holders in major corporations like Morton Salt and Disney, then for some reason they are resold. The "Diamond G" was once just a cattle ranch in one of the most scenic areas of the Absaroka Mountains. Since then it has been bought and sold several times. Mrs. Walt Disney once owned it. The present owner is a former New Yorker who operates the ranch by employing a ranch manager.
These are the new forces in the settlement of western lands. There is no appeal to treaties, land is not taken by force of arms, or by the doctrine that applying the labor of one's hands to the land renders the land the property of the laborer. These acquisitions are largely driven by developers, real estate speculations, or the desire to have something which few others can have. In most cases, for the new owners, the land is not a condition of existence, nor is there any ancestral or sacred significance attached to it. It is an object to be acquired, not a subject with which to share identify, to give oneself to.
Correspondingly, the spirit of community erodes with this flux of population detached from the values that promote a sense of place and of vocations wherein people and land bond. The unity of people and place eventually deteriorates until the need for community is replaced by the demand for individuality and privacy. As my father observed, change has taken place not only within the marriage, the marriage itself has changed.
A new set of values has come to dominate our belief systems, and in the process has predisposed us to accept, with few questions, ideas of impermanence, flux, and temporality. But to compromise our intuitions that somehow the nature of reality also consists of the constant and the changeless amounts to an unwarranted philosophical surrender. When those with a long relationship with the land and its people move on there is a disintegration of that marriage, a loss of home, the sense of belonging some particular place and to someone.
It would be incredulous to affirm that everyone should remain in the place of their birth; the different kinds of interests we cultivate and the diverse talents we have often take us elsewhere. But we should not think of this as dispossession. We can always know were home is, always feel the power of the land and a people to draw us back to the place we were born and reared, where we learned that the soil and our flesh were the same, and as a community we shared a common spirit. The tragedy is that too often we return to find the land violated and the community in tatters. Such conditions bring to mind a passage of a Ute Indian poem collected by Nancy Wood, which laments their loss of the Colorado mountains: The land is worn out and sick....We would not welcome the return of these mountains to us.
The first inhabitants of the land were the first to lose it. Then came settlement. The old Schmoyer place, which fills the chambers of my memory, is a microcosm of the world. In a way, we fail our home when we allow our sense of place and community to be devalued by something deemed of greater importance. We become too inured to uprooting, too willing to be uprooted by novelties and the promise of greater prosperity. If our sense of place is among our highest values we should devise ways of building communities with economies that embrace the land as an intrinsic and non-negotiable value for the character of the community. This would assure that more people would remain at home on the land, and that those who leave would retain the value of the land and a love for its people.
Change may be inevitable, but we live in a world where everything seems to be following the arrow of time at breakneck-speed. The evaluative mind simply cannot keep pace in a world where novelty and impermanence out race constancy and permanence.
The essence of life is to be found in the back current behind the head of the arrow, in that space which swirls against the forward motion, something which resists its progressive nihilism and creates an enduring structure. If the surge for stability within the relentless motion of change is not joined, values which define our humanity and our community will be swept away in pure process. Likewise, if the constancy of a value, born of a people living in a place inseparable from their personal and communal identity is not affirmed, then displacement will be assured, the new settlers will keep coming, and the inhabitants of the land will continue to blow away like dust in the wind.
The Winchesters are of a mind that it is time for the ranch to be sold. Regulations on grazing on the summer mountain range, cattle losses from wolves and bears, even rustlers, and the fact that there is too much work and too few who are willing to do it at the wages ranchers are able to pay are the reasons for the decision.
When Jack Winchester left South Carolina, for whatever reason, he was in search of a new place and a new identity. Ignoring his past, his displacement, he said his origin was a buzzard egg, hatched by the Sun. That statement expressed the essence of Jack's psyche. He created his identity on the Big Wind River, that is where Jack Winchester was from, no other place. His history began and ended there. The Winchester mystique was born among the sage, and cotton wood trees growing on the river bottom, sprang up from the pines and mountains above Dubois. It grew out of the hard work Jack and his sons, especially Albert put into the ground and the building the herd of cattle.
The ranch will be sold. But the question is not only one of the land losing its Winchester identity, but whether the Winchesters can maintain their own strong familial identity, still feel that force that draws them together at family reunions. The glue for this cohesion has always been the ranch which Old Jack and Albert created in the midst of a sea of sage brush. If this sense of name and place, this identity, is lost, then change has overwhelmed constancy.
The Nature Conservancy has a theme, "Saving the Last Great Places," The Nature Conservancy has agreed to buy the Winchester property. While I have a hard time imagining the Winchesters vacating their ranch, I can think of no other buyer I would rather have acquire it. The Nature Conservancy will not allow development. The ranch will not be divided up into ranchettes or be carved up for people to have a summer home in the West. The ranch will largely retain its character. There is a bit of constancy tempering the forces of change, planting a stake in the soil, tethering oneself to it and standing ones ground despite the power of the oncoming wave of change.
I can go back home there because the spirit of the place will be preserved; from the petroglyphs left by the first people to the crumbling buildings of the old homesteads. I shall not say as the ancient Utes did, lamenting the loss and changes to their mountain home, the land is sick, I would not have it back. I can still feel the spirit of the Winchester Ranch, and it is in the spirit that there is constancy.