Sunlit Riffles and Shadowed Runs by Kent Cowgill

Author:Kent Cowgill
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780299289133
Publisher: University of Wisconsin Press
Published: 2012-10-19T00:00:00+00:00

I hadn’t been anywhere near the place for many years. But a few months ago, a trip west took me within fifty miles of it, and on an impulse I followed the county road that fed off the interstate toward the tiny hamlet where the ill-tempered old man had told the tale that cost me my left arm. The gas pumps were gone. All that remained was the cinder-block building, now a down-at-the-heels bar and café.

It was midafternoon. Late September. A plump, middle-aged woman behind the bar was the only person in there. Sliding onto a stool, I ordered a beer, and when she returned with it I told her why I’d stopped—told her I’d been there years earlier, in the heat of summer, and talked to an old codger whose name I never learned. I told her a little of what he’d told me, about a remote valley not far to the north that he’d called the Devil’s Arse.

It was clear neither the old man nor the bizarre name meant anything to her.

I added that the place had a lot of rattlesnakes.

Her eyes lit with instant recognition. “Oh, you must mean Paradise Valley,” she said. “It’s real private. No one around here knows much about it at all. The word is it used to be crawlin’ with snakes, back before it was bought by one of them Japanese corporations. They put in a herd of buffalo to graze it all down—built a fancy lodge and a helicopter pad that’s right next to it, apparently. Now they fly in their top honchos and I suppose some of their clients for a few days of R and R. Or at least that’s what folks say they do, I ain’t never seen the place myself. Most of the year it just sets there idle, except for the staff, and none of them are from around here.”

I finished the beer and thanked her for the information, rose to leave.

“Kind of a shame, ain’t it?” she went on. “The waste, I mean—that it’s used so little. I hear the fishin’ up there’s still purty good.”

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