James Burke - Bitterroot

Fifteen minutes later I followed his daughter up to the log house that was planted with roses and hung with wind chimes. She stood at the sink, ripping the intestines from a rainbow trout, the water from the tap splashing on her wrists. Her eyebrows were drawn together as though she were trying to see through a skein of tangled thoughts just in front of her face.

"What's the problem with your old man?" I asked.

"Midlife crisis," she answered, feigning a smile, suddenly knowledgeable about the psychological metabolism of people thirty years her senior.

"Why's he carrying a revolver?"

"Somebody shot into our house down in Deaf Smith yesterday. It was probably a drunk hunter. Dad thinks it's the militia or these people dumping cyanide into the Blackfoot. He treats me like a child," she said, her face growing darker with her own rhetoric.

"Excuse me?" I said, trying to follow the progression of her logic.

"I'm almost seventeen. He doesn't get it."

"What militia?"

"They're down in the Bitterroot Valley. A bunch of crazy people who think it's patriotic not to pay their bills. Dad writes letters to the newspaper about them. It's stupid."

"Who's putting cyanide in the water?"

"Ask him. Or his friends who think they're environmentalists because they drink in bars that have logs in the walls."

"Your old man's a good guy. Why not give him a break?"

She scraped the dark and clotted blood away from the trout's vertebrae with her thumbnail, then washed her hands under the tap and dried them on her rump.

"The only person he ever listened to was my mom. I'm not my mom," she said. She walked out the back door with a bag of fish guts for the cats.

I found Doc beyond a wooded bend in the river. He was false-casting his line on a white, pebbled stretch of beach, then dropping his fly as softly as a moth in the middle of an undulating riffle. The light and water on his nylon tippet looked like liquid glass as it cut through the air over his head.

"What's going on with you guys?" I said.

"With Maisey? Just growing pains."

"No, the gun. These militia guys or whatever," I said.

"Wars don't get fought in New York or Paris. They get fought in places nobody cares about. Welcome to the war," he said.

"Maybe I picked a bad time to visit," I said.

"No, you didn't. See, a German brown is feeding right under that overhang. He's thick across as my hand. If I was you, I'd float an elk-hair caddis by him," Doc said.

I hesitated for a moment, then waded into the stream. The coldness of the water surged like melted ice over my tennis shoes and khakis. I pulled my fly line out of the reel with my left hand and felt it feed through the eyelets on the rod as I false-cast with my right, the brightly honed hook of the caddis fly whipping past my ear.

FAR AWAY, near Fort Davis, Texas, unbeknown to any of us at the time, a man named Wyatt Dixon was being released from a county slam. For the ride out to the railroad track on the hardpan he was chained at the ankles and wrists and waist. His bare feet had been stomped on so that he limped like an old man when he walked from the jail's back door, under armed guard, to the van that awaited him. Inside the van, a three-hundred-pound deputy hooked Wyatt Dixon to a D-ring in the floor, wheezing while he worked, avoiding Dixon 's eyes and the grin that shaped and reshaped on his mouth.

Ten minutes later, as the sun was setting behind a low ridge of arid mountains, the van stopped at the railroad track and Wyatt Dixon stepped out and stood in the hot wind, his red hair lifting like silk, his nostrils dilating with the smell of freedom.

He was lantern-jawed, his eyes as empty and as undefined by color as a desert sky, his skin brown from the sun and clean of tattoos. Four deputy sheriffs pointed their weapons at Wyatt Dixon, then a fifth one methodically unlocked all the manacles on Dixon 's ankles and wrists. When the net of chains fell from his body, the men around him involuntarily stepped back or extended their guns farther out in front of themselves.

"That boxcar's gonna take you all the way to Raton Pass, Wyatt," the fat deputy said.

Another deputy threw a sack lunch into Wyatt Dixon's hands. "You ain't got to get off to eat, either. Not in Texas," he said.

"Y'all know where my boots is at?" Wyatt Dixon said, grinning as stiffly as a swath cut in a watermelon.

The freight and cattle cars clanked together, and the wind blew chaff out of the flat-wheeler that Wyatt Dixon was supposed to climb into.

"Better get on it, boy. The mosquitoes out here use soda straws on a fellow," the fat deputy said.

"I'm moving, boss man," Wyatt Dixon said, and limped across the rocks like a man walking on marbles, then pushed himself inside the flat-wheeler as easily as a gymnast.

A cruiser pulled behind the van, and a tall man in a gray suit, wearing a Stetson and shades and a wide, flowered necktie, got out and carried a cardboard suitcase to the boxcar. A badge holder with a gold sheriff's star pinned to it hung from his gunbelt.

"Don't be telling yourself you got a reason to come back," he said, and flung the suitcase into the boxcar.

It burst apart on the floor, spilling out clothes, a white straw hat, a tightly folded American flag, a box of clown makeup, a pair of football cleats, an orange fright wig, and a plastic suction device, like a reverse-action hypodermic, that was sold through comic books to remove blackheads from facial skin.

"Why, thank you, sir. Y'all treat a fellow in princely fashion. God bless America for such as yourselves," Wyatt Dixon said.

"Get this piece of shit out of here before I shoot him," the sheriff said.

A deputy began waving at the engineer in the locomotive.

A few minutes later, when the sun was just an ember among the hills, the freight train made a wide loop on the hardpan and passed in front of the van and the sheriff's cruiser at the crossing guard. Wyatt Dixon stood in the open door of the boxcar, his white straw hat cocked on his head, his American flag flapping from an improvised staff. He drew himself to attention and saluted the men down below, his bare feet discolored like bruised fruit.

On a foggy dawn, three days later, Doc, his daughter Maisey, and I sat in my truck at the foot of a broad, green mountain that rose into ponderosa pines that were stiff and white with snow that had fallen during the night.

Doc opened the cab door quietly and leaned across the truck's hood and focused his field glasses on the tree line. Then he gestured rapidly at his daughter.

"Here they come," he whispered.

With feigned resignation she took the glasses from her father and looked up the slope toward the spot where he was pointing, her mouth twisted into a red button.

"Lord, you ever see anything that beautiful?" he said.

When she didn't reply, I said, "That's something else, Doc."

The herd of elk, perhaps over one hundred head, moved out of the trees and down the slope, their hooves pocking green holes in the snow, the mist glistening on the bony surfaces of their racks. They fanned out over the bottom of the grade and flowed like brown water across the two-lane road, their numbers and weight and collective mass knocking down a rick fence without any interruption in their momentum or even recognition that an obstacle was in their path.

They swelled into a meadow channeled with wild-flowers and grazed into the tall grass by cottonwoods that grew along a copper-colored stream. Their humps were coated with crusted snow, and the heat of their bodies melted the snow and made the entire herd glow with a smoky aura against the sunrise.

"What do you think, Skeeter?" Doc asked his daughter.

"My name is Maisey," she replied.

We drove into Missoula and ate breakfast in a cafe across the street from the courthouse. Through the café window I could see the crests of the mountains ringing the city and trees bending in a wind that blew down an arroyo. Deer were feeding on a slope above the train yard, and the undersides of their tails were white when they turned their hindquarters into the wind.