It is reassuring to me that in this world of rapid and sometimes painful change, some important things never change. One of those things is the reliability of my old pal Homer to provide interesting tidbits about the world around us and the skies above."What we have here, fellows, is a waxing, gibbous moon."
Homer made this announcement just as the pickup topped another rise and the expanse of southeastern Montana sprawled out before us under the starlit sky, bathed in the soft glow of the nearly full Hunter's Moon.
"That would be what your waxing gibbous is. It happens with a waning moon, too," he said.
And that glow from the heavens, combined with the knifing beams of our pickup headlights, were the only illumination evident as far as we could see across the stillness of the rumpled and unkempt night plains.
We were on a Montana-style triple date: three aging friends crammed into the front seat of the pickup, and three unruly dogs lounging under the camper shell in back tucked in among shotguns, rifles, camping gear, and enough assorted supplies to assure our comfort for several days afield.
Late in the day, my dog Coal and I had joined up with Homer and our mutual friend Earl down in Billings. We were bound for a couple of days of hunting and catching up with another old friend, Bunny, a rancher far up the Tongue River Valley, not far north of the Wyoming line. Homer and Earl had both kept up with Bunny over the years, visiting his place occasionally and engaging in some of the environmental battles Bunny had been tied up with for most of the last three decades. But I hadn't been there in nearly 20 years.
So most of my keeping up on things had come from news passed along by Homer. There was also the information I gleaned from the news accounts over the years about coal mining plans, the mysterious never-say-die scheme for a Tongue River Railroad, and now the looming threat of the impacts of coal bed methane development on the precious water resources of that entire ignored corner of Montana. And once or twice over those years, I had run into Bunny at legislative hearings or other meetings in Helena. But I had not visited that Tongue River country for a long, long time. I expected things to be vastly different.
I don't think we met more than one or two vehicles over the last 50 miles of the drive that brought us finally down the ranch road and up to the front door of the bunkhouse. That sandstone bunkhouse, squatting on the bank of the Tongue in the shadows of looming cottonwoods has been there for more than 100 years. Crickets chirped in the balmy night air, too balmy, it seemed, for late October. And Bunny was there waiting to greet us.
It is funny how after so many years it can seem like nothing has changed about a person. Sure, we are all so much older. There have been trials and tribulations with work and family. Kids have grown. Friends and relatives have passed away or moved on. Our lives have been altered in many ways.
But there we sat around the kitchen table in that old bunkhouse, a bottle of whiskey as the table centerpiece, talking into the night about the things that matter in this world. And the sounds of laughter and the twinkles in the eyes were the same as decades ago. When the talk got down to the land, nothing at all had changed about the way the land and the soul seem all tied up together. And it gets confusing sometimes to hear someone like Bunny talk about it because the land is a living, breathing part of his life.
"In a way, I'm glad not too many people out there think much about this part of the world. It's fine with me if they think it's flat as a pancake, bone dry, and has no wildlife value or natural beauty to speak of," Bunny said, after relating a story about a relatively high-level Montana bureaucrat recently dismissing southeast Montana as a wasteland devoid of those very things.
"But that doesn't mean I think it's OK if they make choices that destroy our water or make it impossible for us to work and live here the way we have for the last century and half or so," he said.
I noticed stacks of file boxes in one corner of the room, dusty legal file boxes filled with briefs and filings and court documents detailing years and years of battles waged by the determined ranchers and farmers of that corner of our state to protect exactly the things Bunny was speaking about.
There we were, talking about the ranch and the water of the Tongue that ran clear and cold just beyond the bunkhouse wall. We talked about the cattle Bunny would be moving down from summer grazing on Custer National Forest the next day. And we asked his advice on where we should concentrate our efforts the next day as we hunted for deer along the river and the margins of his hay fields and at the foot of the ponderosa-studded breaks.
Before dawn, Bunny was back, loudly rousting us for our day on the hunt before he headed off to his own day of ranch work. First light found us in the chilly mist just above the river, moving out slowly in search of deer. Canada geese honked as they moved low over the ranch buildings to feed upriver. Pheasants crowed. Coyotes howled mournfully. Turkeys gobbled on the fringes of the irrigated hayfields. Three heavy-antlered mule deer bucks eyed us from a safe distance atop a sandstone cliff then sauntered off out of sight. The blue of the cloudless October sky deepened, and we were enfolded in the smell of sage and the ageless beauty of a forgotten corner of the Earth.
We walked the ground for a couple of too-brief days. We gazed at the horizon and wondered at the folks, like Bunny's grandparents and their parents, who had so long ago seen the promise in this remote valley with the ribbon of life-giving river snaking its way down from snowfields high in a distant Wyoming mountain range. We thought about what it had taken for those folks to settle, endure, and, yes, prosper. And we marveled at how wonderful places like the Tongue River Valley have experienced so little change even as so much that we cherish about the land around us is vanishing before our eyes.
On the afternoon we left, we rumbled to a stop on the county road where Bunny, his son Art, and others, all on horseback, were moving fat black cows toward winter pasture. Bunny rode up beside the truck and leaned down from his saddle to look in the window to exchange a few words of goodbye. We reported on the day's hunting success and thanked him for his hospitality. He wished us well, and then, as an afterthought, he leaned way down to squint at me on the far side of the pickup cab.
"And Tollefson, if you write anything about us in that newspaper up there in Missoula, you make sure you say something nice," he growled.
Change has not come to the Tongue River Valley and the people who live there in the same way it has to much of the West. The Tongue River Valley and the people who live there are like that. And like Homer's nuggets of information, that is another reassuring thing to remember back here in the world.
Greg Tollefson is a freelance Missoula writer whose column appears each week in Outdoors. He can be reached at gtollefson@bresnan.net.
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