The Old Bison: Threads from the Fabric of a Western Life

By Stephen S. Lottridge

In twenty-three, intimate, often lyric essays, set primarily in the mountain and desert west, Stephen Lottridge leads us through the course of a deeply experienced and closely examined life, ranging from early childhood in the northern panhandle of Idaho through adolescence and adulthood to old age in western Wyoming. Signal events draw the reader forward as lessons in understanding and empathy unfold. Lottridge's precise, evocative, elegant prose dramatizes the pain and joy of family and marital relationships, the power and resonant kinship of the natural landscape and an enduring gratitude for mentors, talismanic beings and fellow wayfarers on the human journey. These stories offer hope and meaning for our world and species today, as turbulence and suffering, leavened by laughter, resolve into an abiding, compassionate embrace of all existence.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Fulton Books, Inc.
• Release date: May 6, 2022
• ISBN: 9781638607434

Book preview

Swallows

In Mullan, Idaho, on summer mornings in the mid-1940s, I woke up early, around five o’clock. The house was still asleep, but light was already sifting through the windows as the sun started to come up. I eas ed out of bed, quick and lithe and quiet. In my pajama bottoms and bare feet, I padded into the kitchen. Moving silently in the still room, I crossed to the counter, opened the breadbox, took out the loaf of Wonder White, undid the bag carefully, removed one slice, reached over, dropped it into the toaster and pushed down the lever. I closed the wrapping back up and returned the loaf to the box. Then I leaned over to the refrigerator, opened it, took out the oleo (we did not have butter; this was during World War II, and butter was rationed), turned back to the counter, reached down, opened the utensil drawer noiselessly, lifted out a table knife and slowly closed the drawer. When the toast popped up, I waited a quick moment to make sure the sound had not wakened my parents in the next room. Reassured, I oleoed the hot toast, smoothing the melt out to all the corners and sides and letting it puddle a little in the middle. Then I softly laid the knife down on the counter, pivoted and headed to the back door, my bare feet inaudible on the linoleum as I moved, the slice of toast flat on the palm of one hand as the other carefully opened the door to the back entry. Once through, I closed the door behind me as gently as I had opened it, then flowed along the entryway and repeated the procedure with the back door. Outside, I stepped across the rough pine planking of the short, covered porch, past the entrance to the doghouse with its musty smell of old burlap and well-gnawed bones, over a short patch of sharp, dirty gravel and onto the dewy grass. I walked a few paces farther and angled to face the west wall where the birdh ouse my father and I had built hung under the eaves.

I stood, the early air cooling my naked back, the first sun warming my thin shoulders, the dew chilling my bare feet. I could smell the grass, the night’s fertile dampness, the musky odor of the compost pile. I could see the morning glories opening, the high hollyhocks stately along the fence, the first blush on the tomatoes. I could just hear the faint susurrus of water gliding down the flume behind the house. I took a slow bite, and tasted the dripping, oleoed toast, sweet and salty and soft in my mouth. And I heard the quick, sharp call of the adult swallows as they swooped and swerved, veering to pick off flying mosquitoes and gnats and midges in midair. With beaks so replete I could sometimes see bits of leg and antennae fuzzing their edges, the adults sliced full speed toward the hole in the front of their house and, braking to a sudden stop, they alighted on the peg that served as a perch just outside and beneath the hole, stretched in and emptied their beaks into the eager maws of their nestlings. I could make out the tiny, gaping gullets from where I stood, and I could hear the demanding cheeps of the young. Then back the adults would go, they, too, calling in short, sharp cries, their teal-blue iridescence flashing in the early light as they culled the fresh morning air for food, whipping and tilting and canting over my head.

Those mornings were bliss. The day was young, I was young, all nature was alive, all my senses were attuned and serenely attentive. I stood alone, enveloped in a world I loved and understood, a world that let me be there just as I was. None of my family was awake and with me, wanting me to be someone else or even to talk about it. I never spoke about those mornings to anyone, ever. They were mine. In fact, I don’t believe that I even thought while I was out there. I just existed, together with all creation.

I must have been eight or nine then. Now I am more than seventy years older. So much water over the dam, under the bridge, down the flume that has long since dried and gone. Such experiences of sheer being, too, have gone. Even in the purest moments now, and they are rare, I am aware of my gratitude for them as I was not aware then, as I did not have to be then—simple gratitude, unexpressed, unformulated, inhered in my joy. Bliss included gratitude simply because it was bliss.

Now, again, these many years later, I watch swallows. In Jackson, Wyoming, on summer evenings in the 2020s, I go out onto the back deck of my house at sunset. I live alone now, so being quiet is needless. Yet I am quiet. I silently heat water in the tea kettle, move slowly to the cupboard, fumble out a tea bag and, turning back to the stove, drop it in a large cup. When the steam begins to whistle, I lift the kettle, hold the string of the bag, pour water into the cup, replace the kettle, and stand patiently while the tea begins to steep. I pick up the cup in one hand and, carrying it uncertainly, make my way across the linoleum, around the sharp-edged counter to the glass door. I open it carefully with the other hand, step out onto the rough boarding of the deck and slide the door to as gently as I opened it.

The last rays of the setting sun lie warm on my face. The evening air drifts cool around my bare feet in their sandals. I hear birds calling. I smell the grass and the last blooms of the old lilac. I stand for a moment, taking it in, and then sit quietly down on an unsteady, plastic deck chair I have padded with a ragged, worn towel. I lift the chipped cup and take a first sip of the savory tea, redolent of chamomile and lavender. I look up and see swallows darting and weaving across the darkening sky, gathering food for their nestlings.

It is the same, but different. Constant pain rides through my body. I am aware of my whole history, filled with mistakes and regrets and sorrows. If I take a moment to listen, other sounds drift in: cars, airplanes, lawnmowers sometimes, trucks on the highway across the valley—all the blights of the internal combustion engine. And yet, I live together with the sunset, the clouds, the grass, the trees and the magic tracery of the swallows in flight. The swallows do not nest in the flimsy birdhouse behind me. They do not nest at my house at all. But they catch insects over it and fling their sharp chirps as they do. I consciously marvel at their skill. I marvel at the beauty of the sunset. I marvel at the whole creation of the world around me. I marvel at the universe as the first stars blink into view. And most of all, I am consciously grateful for the moment, for all that it holds, and for whatever fate allows me to be here to experience it. It is an old man’s bliss—impure, alloyed, compromised—but bliss all the same, the good-morning bliss of a young boy become the good-night bliss of an old man.

Boyhood

Fishing the St. Regis with the Bear

Let me tell you the story of fishing the St. Regis with the bear.

This happened when I was eight or nine, the same summer that watching the swallows in the early mornings in our yard in Mullan, Idaho, entranced me. Young as I was then, I already knew how to rig up and handle a fly rod by myself and read the river.

The St. Regis was a fine trout stream back then, before they moved the highway right alongside the river. That realignment straightened the runs and pools and destroyed the deep holes under the overhanging banks, so the water ran shallow and inhospitable. Where there still were some trout, the stream got fished out. But this story took place before all that, back during the war. In those days, after you got over Lookout Pass, the road dropped down by the river for a while, true enough, but then it bore away from the water, up over a rise called Camel’s Hump, and down through the forest to the little settlement of St. Regis. From there, a narrow dirt track cut back through the willows down to the river. That was where we usually camped on summer weekends. This particular evening must have been on a weekday, though, since we were fishing the upper river, just a short ways off the road. During the week, after my father got home from work, we would often go for an hour or two’s fishing in the long, hanging summer evenings. Even the upper river still had beautiful holes then and deep, long runs with lots of native trout, big and small.

We all went, all five of us plus our dog, Sport. We spread out along the stream so as not to get in each other’s way. We always gave each other plenty of elbow room and never fished the same stretch of water at the same time. Still, we didn’t stray too far. It was bear country, after all; the water was still running full and strong and we three children were still young.

As I recall, my mother was not fishing. I think she was sitting on the bank above the gravel bar, keeping an eye on us and on the countryside. Although she may have been the best fisherman among us, she often did that, kept watch. Maybe my sister was not fishing either, since she often didn’t. Much later in her life, she told me that she had never enjoyed our outings. She would have preferred something more feminine. But I did not know that then. I was immersed in my own love of being out there. My father and brother were elsewhere on the river, not far, but mostly out of my sight.

I was fishing an old dry fly on a Montague Trail, nine-foot six-inch, split-bamboo fly rod with a double-taper line and a long gut leader. I still miss those old gut leaders. You had to soak them before you used them, that’s true, but the knots held better than they do in nylon, and you didn’t have to keep tying on so much replacement leader at the tip. But back to the story.

The river curved around the gravel bar, wearing away a dark cut bank and creating a deep, arcing, slower channel for maybe fifty feet before it straightened out into a reach that ran shallow and rough past me. I had waded out into the upper end of the shallows and was casting into the edge of the channel run under the cut bank. The sun had set behind the mountains to the west, but there was still plenty of light. Dusk was still quite a ways off. The land to the east, across the stream, was fairly flat and heavy with brush and smaller trees.

Back then, the northern panhandle of Idaho showed lots of blackened tree trunks, fallen and still standing, from the big fire of 1910. That fire remained living history then. All along the highways, we read memorial signs to firefighters who had been killed. From where I stood in the water, I could see black sentinels rising here and there. Jutting out over the river from above the cut bank, just where I was casting, stretched the long, thick, charred remains of an old giant. Its root ball held it horizontal, though the tip had broken off some time before, so it extended only to midstream. I had to roll my cast in under that deadfall or, more often, cast upstream from it and track the fly just under its end.

In those days, I mostly fished barefoot. This was before people started throwing beer bottles into the water and using them for target practice. (That drunken recreation came along mostly after the war, though not necessarily because of returning servicemen.) There were some sharp rocks and snags in the riverbed, of course, but mostly the bottom was worn river rock, and I had learned to sense my way without having to look down all the time. Besides, I liked the feel of the frigid, snowmelt water tugging on my legs, with the summer air on my face and shoulders. (I never could completely understand why my father wore hip boots—still can’t.) So there I stood, shifting slightly now and again, casting, retrieving as the fly drifted down, casting again, mostly ignoring the whine and sting of the mosquitoes on my face and arms. Occasionally, I paused to wipe them off as the fly hit the shallows, before I drew the line up and cast again.

You get into a rhythm. Everything is in this moment, in this place. You are the water, you are the air, you are the fish, you are the eternal present. There is no time, even as the dusk draws in. The place is infinite, and specific. Time goes on forever and doesn’t move. You only realize it’s later, later. That evening, such a rhythm went on for what must have been quite a while, I suppose. It was peaceful.

After some time, as I inhabited and surrendered to that place and moment, something changed. Something small, a different movement, slight at first, then more insistent. A new color, dark; a new form, animate. I let the fly sail into the shallows and shifted my gaze. Big ears, a plump, cumbersome, lithe, furred body, claws—and a black bear broke full and alert from behind the root ball. He padded, sure and focused, onto the scorched trunk, out over the deep run, and lay down carefully on the end. The log bounced slightly. The bear looked at me. He looked at the water. He lay splayed out on his chest, his hind legs dangling, his left front paw gripping the log and his right front paw on the downstream side swinging free.

I looked at him. I looked at the water. There was a choice here, I suppose, but I was not aware of any concern. I was fishing; he was doing whatever he was doing. I was still mostly in the trance I often fell into when I was fishing. I stripped my fly off the shallows, dry cast it two or three times, and dropped it gently above the log at the head of the run. Small trout were rising, as they had been all evening. They were not yet adept at catching large, floating insects. Some would hit the fly, but not be able to take it. Others missed it altogether and splashed it under. The big ones, from the cold shadows under the cut bank, would wait another half hour or so before they would come out to feed.

As my fly bobbed slowly under the end of the log, three things happened suddenly and simultaneously. A small trout, maybe five or six inches, rose and hit the fly, I raised the tip and tautened the line in instinctive response to the strike, and the bear swung his lightning paw at the fish. The bear missed, I missed, the fish missed. Fortunate all the way around, as I look back on it now. I took a pause—not to consider really, just a pause—and then we continued, the bear and I.

My mother, not sure I was aware of the bear, had softly called my attention to it as he came out onto the log. I have struggled with my relationship with my mother (with my whole family, actually) all my life. But one of the great gifts she gave me was embracing nature fearlessly. She allowed me and my brother and sister to get wet, cold, tired, even lost with calm acceptance and enjoyment of it all. We were careful in the woods, even cautious when need be, but not afraid. So she called my attention to the bear just so I would know it was there. She did not move from where she was sitting. She did not try to make me stop fishing. She did not try to chase the bear away or make us leave. His presence called for attention and care, that was all, just as our presence asked that of him. We were, after all, unbidden, though polite and relatively discreet, guests in his home. At the same time, we were as much a part of nature as he. I felt all that as a gift from my mother, and likewise from the bear. My appreciation for both of them has deepened and grown richer over the decades since, but I was aware of it even then.

I think he must have been a young bear. And I, for all my seriousness and competence, was a young human. So we played. I cast carefully upstream from him and watched the drift. We both watched for fish. If one rose to my fly away from him, I would try to set the hook. If near him, I would not, and he would slap. I am not sure that he was hungry. He looked well fed, sleek and healthy. And he did not show himself to be particularly adept at catching fish. But he did seem rapt in his enjoyment and focus, as was I.

I eventually stopped trying to catch trout. Now and again, I cast farther toward the bank, rolling the line to avoid the log, to see if he would move back. He did not. I doubt if he even saw the fly. He saw the movement and splash, and reacted to them.

After some while, I reeled in my fly and stood silent and still in the cold water and warm dusk air, watching him. The evening rise was in full energy, but the fish had learned to avoid the water under the log’s end, under the black form. There came a lull. The bear seemed to consider for a moment, then put all four paws under himself, stood adroitly, turned in perfect balance and ambled off along the log, down onto the bank, behind the root ball, and away. Or perhaps not away at all, but to some place unknown to me and home to him.

I thought to move up above the log and fish the end of the evening rise. The idea of catching a big trout there enticed me. But also, and more powerfully, I wanted to keep my encounter with the bear intact inside me. And time had reasserted itself. I saw that it was almost dark. So I headed slowly to where my mother sat, breaking down my gear as I ambled. She smiled at me. I smiled, too. She said quietly that she guessed Mr. Bruin had decided it was time to go home to bed. My sister emerged from behind the tussocks where she had been looking at flowers. My brother came up from downstream; my father came down from upstream. Sport dropped the rock he had been playing with and trotted over. My father had fish. My brother may have, too. I had my bear and, for that close moment, I had my family. My mother softly told everyone the story of the bear as we trailed in the dark to the car and rolled home together, all of us, to our beds.

Patience, Perseverance

My mother taught me patience. She taught me perseverance. Evidently, I went through a period in boyhood when impediments discouraged me, and I would give up on an undertaking almost as soon as I began. If I couldn’t do it, whatever it was—building a box cart, repairing my trike—I would throw things down and recoil in rage, sometimes in tears. I remember such times. My view was cosmic, absolutist. Frustration blinded me. I could not see forward. Sometimes I did not care that much about the project to begin with. I might have thought it was something I was supposed to want to do. But often, I did care.

So, my mother taught me. Here’s how she did it. One evening after supper, before we had begun to clean up, while my father was still finishing his coffee and condensed milk at the head of the table, my mother called me to her and said she wanted to talk to me about something. I obediently pushed back the cane-woven, wood-frame chair, got up from my place beside my father, walked around the table to where she sat and stood respectfully beside her.

Now, it would be well for you to understand my mother. When she said she wanted to talk with you, you came, stood up straight, and listened. She was firm, serious and absolutely self-confident. At other times, she could be wrathful, punitive, demeaning, and sometimes raging and desperate. But at a time like this, she was centered, calm and sure.

She looked directly into my eyes—she sitting and I a nine-year-old boy standing beside her, arms at my sides, breathing shallowly. She turned slightly toward me in her chair. My father, brother and sister were seated around the table, but they faded from my view in the booming silence. Then she began quietly, clearly, I know you get frustrated and angry when you can’t do things at the first try.

I started to deny it. I actually didn’t know what she was talking about, and it sounded to my ear more like an accusation than an acknowledgment. Those incidents flew from my mind as soon as the moment passed. Or they seemed to. But the residue, a kind of riding unhappiness, remained and colored my spirits. I had not known that those outbursts troubled her, and certainly not that she cared if they troubled me. So I was surprised, uncertain, braced to be punished for some unknown offense.

I am going to help you, she said, enunciating clearly. Go and get me a slat from that orange crate in the cellar.

That sounded ominous, but also mysterious. Where is it? I asked timidly.

You’ll see it, she replied. Just by the bottom of the steps.

I didn’t remember seeing it there, but I went. The stairs were dark, of rough-hewn, two-by-twelve planks. At the top, I pulled the string dangling from an eye hook screwed into a bare stud. A dusty bulb came on, its light vaguely washing over the furnace and the stacked shelves of preserves. In the dimness, I made out an empty orange crate lying on the dirt floor beside the bottom step.

In those days, growers shipped citrus fruit in wooden crates with spaces between the slats for air to circulate. One of my uncles, my mother’s older brother and her favorite, mailed us Florida oranges and grapefruits for Christmas every year, and we saved the containers for other uses. My father had broken this one partially down, and the loose boards were stacked on the remaining frame. Brushing aside the matted spiderwebs dangling from the splintery side of the unplaned stair joist, I bent over, slid the top slat off edgewise, lifted it in one hand and, bracing myself with the other against the sharp stone wall that bordered the stairs, headed back up, switching off the bare bulb as I stepped into the brightness of the kitchen.

Everyone was in their same places around the table, waiting. On stage, I dutifully carried the slat over and handed it to my mother. She took it from me, placed it carefully beside her on the table and said, not exactly unpleasantly, but firmly, Now, go to your room and bring me a ruler and a sharpened pencil.

I did. I handed them to her. With her left hand, she took up the ruler and placed it diagonally across the middle of the slat. With the pencil in her right, she traced a single line along the ruler from one edge of the wood to the other. She looked at it closely. Satisfied, she deliberately and neatly laid aside the ruler and pencil, parallel to each other on the polished, bare pine of the kitchen table.

Then, not really smiling, she leaned back in her chair, stuck her left leg forward, ran her hand into the left front pocket of her slacks and drew out her penknife. It was a case knife with an orange handle. She handed it to me. Now open the knife. Holding it tightly in my right hand, I slid my left thumbnail into the slot, pushed open the blade and carefully snugged it straight. Now, she said, I want you to make one cut along that line.

I looked at her, at the slat, at the graphite line, at her. She spoke again, Take the knife, press down, and make one slice. Along the line.

I obeyed, holding the board with my left hand to keep it from sliding while I cut. Once. I raised my eyes to hers.

Good, she said. She reached out her hand for the knife. I hesitated, looked at her, at the slat, back at her. She held her hand outstretched, a self-satisfied expression lurking somewhere well behind her steady, not entirely unkind, gaze. I carefully folded the blade in,