Dancing at the Rascal Fair by Ivan Doig

Author:Ivan Doig [Doig, Ivan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781439124949
Publisher: Scribner
Published: 2013-08-01T07:00:00+00:00

TWO MEDICINE

* * *

With water projects abounding from the Sun River in the south to the Two Medicine River in the north, it is evident that the current creed of our region of Montana is “we’ll dam every coulee, we’ll irrigate every mountain.” But the betterment of nature goes on apace in other ways as well. Anna Reese and children Lisabeth and Peter visited Isaac Reese at St. Mary Lake for three days last week, where Isaac is providing the workhorses for the task of building the roadbed from St. Mary to Babb. Isaac sends word through Anna that the summer’s work on this and other Glacier National Park roads and trails is progressing satisfactorily.

—GROS VENTRE WEEKLY GLEANER, JULY 2, 1914

“PRRRRR PRRRRR. Right along, Percy, that’s the way, into the chute, earn a brown cracker. Prrrrr prrrrr. Bring them for their haircut, Percy. Prrrrr.”

It stays with me like a verse known by heart, that first ever Two Medicine day of shearing and all it brought. Our site of pens and tents atop the arching grass ridge above the river was like being on the bald brow of the earth, with the sunning features of the summer face of the land everywhere below. Three weeks before, Varick and I had left Davie here with his browsing cloud of sheep; when I returned with its shearing crew, the reservation grass had crisped from green to tan, the pothole lakes now were wearing sober collars of dried shore, the bannerlike flow of the Two Medicine River had drawn down to orderly instead of headlong. Even the weather was taking a spell of mildness, a day of bright blue positively innocent of any intention to bring cold rain pouncing onto newly naked and shelterless sheep, and with that off my mind I could work at the cutting gate with an eye to other horizons than the storm foundry of those mountains to the west. A long prairie swooped from our shearing summit several miles north to Browning and its line of railroad, iron thread to cities and oceans. The chasm of the Two Medicine River burrowed eastward to graft itself into the next channel of flow, the Marias, and next after that the twinned forces of water set forth together to the Missouri. Every view from up here was mighty.

Not that any scenery short of heaven’s was ever going to ease the hard first hours of shearing. The crew of shearers laboriously re-learning the patterns of the work from the year before. The sheep alarmed and anarchic. But I could grin at all that and more. The roubleproof mood I brought here to the Two Medicine when Varick and Davie and I trailed the sheep was still in command of me, still the frame of all I saw and thought as the swirling commotion of a thousand ewes was being turned into the ritual of wool. Life and I still were hand in hand, weren’t we, life.

Past noon, whenever I found chance to gaze

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