Ancients on the Range

Mammoth tusks. Images of ancient ivory filled my mind as I followed the mud and ice track in my pickup, meandering off the high ridgeline of the Continental Divide yesterday. It was a lovely day for the drive into our county from the Montana outback. I’d only passed one other pickup over the last hour of driving, averaging a nice clip of 50 miles an hour. 

I was on the way home, and only 30 miles from the ranch as the crow flies. It would take me another 3 hours as I drove down the Lemhi Valley to Salmon, Idaho, and then back up the Salmon River and Pahsimeroi to home, my drive circumnavigating the snow covered rugged peaks of the Lemhi Mountains. 

I was reflecting on a conversation I had over 25 years ago. It seemed like yesterday. 

“You know what I found up there on Spring Mountain?” Bill said.* He’d been telling me about a recent foray while looking for elk “sheds” on the alpine spine of the high Divide. Sheds are elk antlers, dropped each winter all over the high country. Quite a few locals go “horn hunting” for them all over the vast ranges. There’s no telling where a bull elk might “drop” his mass of antlers, weakened in their connection to his head by the push of a fresh velvet set that rapidly grows with the flush of spring grass in May and June. 

The antlers can be worth a lot of money. A nice set can easily bring $250 on the Asian alternative medicine market, and buyers set up temporary purchasing depots at crossroads throughout our high country.  

But I could tell Bill had found something more than a normal set of antlers. Most of us simply call them horns. I knew him well enough by the sparkle in his eye that he was excited. “Did you find a huge set of horns?” I asked.

“Well, kinda.” He waited with what I knew was a pregnant pause for full effect. He was building gravity, and he knew it. 

“Well?” I connected with his permeating stare. “You kinda gotta tell me now. I ain’t leaving until you do.” We were in his log yard where he’d been hauling and “decking” big Douglas-fir logs off the mountain. Bill was more than a jack-of-all-trades. He was the King.

He was a logger first, being his own faller, skidder, loader and truck driver. He was the most independent of the Gyppos, a term reserved for “cowboy” loggers who could do it all–they lived and breathed the woods and big timber. They worked for no-one except themselves, often making deals directly with ranchers or barn-builders. None of their wood would be graded or stamped by government approved log graders. Many gyppos had their own sawmills, and Bill was as comfortable running his 36″ circle saw blade on his mill as he was in the woods. 

His arms were more than guns; they were cannons. The raw weight of green lumber and rock built muscle better than a bench press. The rock part of it was real: Bill had hard rock mined and found gold underground, cowboyed with the best of them and was familiar enough with wild country that often times he’d simply sleep out in it so he could continue to work the next day and the next, doing what he loved. 

He wasn’t alone. He had a wife that shared with him in all adventures; after their kids struck out on their own. He was always an out-of-the-box thinker; fact is, he threw away the box. I remember there was a time when they bought two “powered parachutes” that carried them together across some of the remotest country in the lower 48. This was despite the extreme danger to the fragile craft and those onboard by wind shear and the freakish downdrafts that could pour suddenly off the rock-strewn snowfields of 11,000 foot peaks. But they ignored the risk and meandered around in the thin, high altitude, freezing air. A simple engine failure of one of their Rotax engines could easily end it all, but it didn’t.

Many of our neighbors in the valley simply didn’t believe the tales Bill told of his exploits, but when I spent time with him, right about the time I was ready to call his latest tale a fable, he would produce evidence. There was VHS video footage of those high altitude flights; the massive logs he managed to wrestle out of the hills, the huge elk he’d managed to hunt, or the fish he managed to catch. He built at least 3 full size log homes by hand with just a chainsaw and an axe. He skippered fishing boats along the wild Alaskan coast when he was feeling crowded in remote Idaho. He could do anything as long as it was in the wildest of country.  

“Well?”

He looked around, acting nervous, as if there might be someone who could hear what he was about to say. There was no-one, of course. Bill’s nearest neighbor was miles away. And then, leaning forward, he simply said one word: “Ivory.”

“At this time of year? How?”

He knew immediately what I meant. The ivory I referred to was elk ivory. The “eye” teeth of mature elk were solid ivory. Elk ivory. They were sought after by jewelers who crafted them into earrings set into pure native gold. But they were unattainable legally at this time of year, as elk hunting was illegal in the spring. One thing about Bill I knew: he was no poacher.

“No, no, no. Not this time of year, pardner. I’m talking mammoth.” He let that sink in.

“What? Like you mean…wooly mammoth?”

“Yep,” he said simply. And more than a little smugly. 

“Where?”

He swung his head up toward the still-covered snowy massif up-valley above us. 

“Up there on Spring?”

He slowly nodded. “Two sets, as near as I could tell. Both just barely poking out of an ashy bluff. They must have both got buried alive during one of those ancient volcanic blowouts. I went right up to them. They were solid ivory, for sure. Wooly mammoths, like you say. About two and a half or three inches thick after you go down from the point. Massive. Really impressive.”

I kept my eyes on his the whole time. Bill definitely had the ability to BS, but my BS meter wasn’t going off. Usually I could tell. All I saw was earnest eyes.

“Why didn’t you grab ’em?” 

He laughed, slowly shaking his head. “I tried. I mean, I really tried. I pulled and picked at the ash around them, but it was pretty much like concrete. The fall rains we had last October–remember?–must have exposed them. They’re right along a draw bottom. But they wouldn’t budge.”

“You gonna tell the Forest Service?” It was on US Forest Service lands, like all the mountain ranges around us.

“Not on your life. Those people will take heavy equipment to dig it out, make a mess, and bring in half the world to see it, and put it in some museum locker somewhere. No way.”

“So now what?”

“I’m gonna bring Cheryl up there to see them.”

“And?”

“That’s it. Maybe the kids, but no-one else. For me, it’s just good enough to know that they are there. There’s not too many things out there like that on this earth, you know. I’d as soon leave them be. There’s secrets up there yet–and that’s good. I’ll never tell anyone–so even you, pardner–don’t even bother to ask.”

And I didn’t. I knew there was no sense in trying. Bill had his secrets, that was for certain. He’d never tell me where he hunted elk or caught big trout. 

He kept those secrets, and took them with him. It was only about 7 years later that he passed from that heart trouble that had been murmuring, hinting that something was wrong in his chest ever since I knew him, and even before. One day he was larger than life, and the next, he was gone. 

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The road twisted before me off the Divide, over ice, through drifts, and back on washboarded dirt. Frost heaves where the road buckled would send an unprepared driver of pickup upward, head slamming to roof with neck-breaking impact. I didn’t account for one of the many myself–thankfully, I tucked my head just before I hit. It was because I was ogling up toward those barren and jagged ridges, imagining where in the expanse those mammoths died some 10,000 or more years ago. It would take weeks, even months to cover the hundreds, no, thousands of miles in search of ivory. But although I’m hoping Caryl and I will someday have the time to cover some country horseback, I know that the fact is that the ivory needle in the haystack is a hard one to find. More than likely, we never would.

And so, the wishes of one man named Bill may be forever honored. Those ash-buried mammoths may rest easy, never to be found again. A simple slide of an ashy hill may bury them unfindable for several more thousands of years. 

And Bill’s secret will forever be that. The mysteries of our mountain wilderness are many. And in this world of information overload, I see those as a refreshing but simple truth that despite all that knowledge, all is not known.

Happy Trails.

Glenn 

*Bill’s name and place names were changed to honor him and preserve his wishes.