UNLESS YOU CONSIDER the impenetrable 30 acres of head-high cattails in the old oxbow slough, the wildest part of this working alfalfa field is the stand of green ash and slag-bark cottonwood trees on its east side. I don’t go into this treeline much except to hunt for shed antlers or to push out the neighbor’s cows—or, every few years, to consider hanging a treestand. To call it woods is to exaggerate its size and density, but it’s always dark in there, cool, and slightly unsettling, a place you could imagine finding a human hand or the lid of an old chest.
I don’t often enter the trees, because their inhabitants come to me. That woodlot holds an astonishing number of whitetail deer, and most evenings in the fall, all I have to do is wait in the waving orchard grass way across the field to see what comes out. It’s almost always does and fawns—generally twins—first, and then younger bucks. At least in October and November, when I’m hunting the place regularly, the older bucks emerge last, like they’re waiting for an audience before they’ll make their appearance.
The rest of this field is so unwild that you can hear the switch and hiss of diesel engines on the Burlington Northern Santa Fe tracks across the Milk River, and when the wind is right in the summer you can hear the crack of a bat and the rising crowd at the Glasgow Reds baseball field. I’ve heard a jogger on the nature trail in the city’s Sullivan