J.D.’s Columns

Two Short Hits        Cindy and I were on a high school skip day, holding hands on a bench at the entrance to a veterans’ cemetery on a hill above Hot Springs, South Dakota.  The rest of our classmates were in the springs down in town.       Maybe it was the little rows of crosses reminding me that life is a finite deal, or perhaps it was the Nebraska ditch weed. I was overwhelmed. In a fit of teen emotion I rather too loudly said “I love you.”      She looked into my eyes, smiled, and said “That is weird. Let’s go swimming.”         Earl Marshall and I were in his truck on a gravel road that runs along the edge of Mount Fanny, three thousand feet above Cove, Oregon and the Grand Ronde valley. Way down below the farmers were burning off the stubble from that year’s wheat harvest.       I remarked that I had grown up in wheat coun...

Butts        Two cigarette stories. The first I heard in a pen full of chickens along French Creek above the River of No Return in central Idaho. The second was told in my own front yard by a gray-haired food photographer on a motorcycle.     ONE      “No thanks, don’t want no damned cigarette and I’m gonna tell you just exactly why. See that tower up there? Sixty-seven feet tall. At the top is what in 1965 was the world’s finest and most sensitive television antenna, ten feet long with more metal than a brand new Honda car. Has the remote control attachment too. You can spin the thing and zero right in on the signal.      “It took a long time’s worth of egg money to buy that tower, antenna, and the Magnavox console that came with it. Better part of eight years to save ten quarts of coins. I figure maybe a couple thousand dozen eggs.      “All my life I wanted to ...

TWO BEAR STORIES   One: The Bear Stick   (Heard from Gene Fuzzell, High Sheriff of Idaho County, Idaho, winter of 1973.)         “Word came down that Limpy Miller might be having trouble up on Marshall Mountain. He was doing a little hard-rock mining up there, minding his own business mostly, but he did receive Social Security, so every couple of months he would make it out to Riggins, cash his checks, buy a few rounds, and then go back up Carey Creek grade to his claim. Postmaster in Riggins called me and said she had six checks waiting for him, so I went up to look in on him.        “When I got to his cabin, it was pretty obvious that something was wrong. Out in front, in a peat bog area, was the remains of a little bitty black bear with its left front paw caught in a bear trap.  Laying twenty feet from the carcass was a pointed lodgepole stick the length of a tipi pole. Limpy Miller wasn’t anywh...

Fraidy Cat      More than fifty years ago, I was perched on a barstool in Wisdom, Montana when a stubby older fellow in a hard hat limped through the door, climbed up on the stool next to me, ordered a double shot of Jim Beam with a beer back, looked me in the eye and asked “How you doin’?”     I allowed as I was fair to middling and asked why he was so stove-up. He launched into a tale about a thieving pack rat that was robbing doodads from his mining partner and how he had laid a trap for the varmint at the end of his bunk, waited most of one night with a pistol, then blew away the rat, sure enough, right along with the big toe off his right foot. He ended the story with “You never learn younger.”     That chunk of advice has rattled around my brain ever since. It has only been recently, as I have grown impossibly old, that it has begun to make sense. For instance, I have discovered that I am afraid of alligators and mou...

  Si, Cisco McCall, Idaho      Long Valley, Idaho once was home to a cross-bred, world-class, stick dog named Cisco.  By "stick dog" I refer to a critter with an obsession for fetching chunks of wood that overrides all other considerations crossing its mutty mind, like digging holes in petunia patches, rolling in cow manure or in Cisco's case, even the urge to mate.      My daughter and I were living in a bunkhouse while I tended light steers on a couple of local summer-pasture pieces of flood-irrigated land that have since been converted to second-home acreage. Like all good cowfolks, we had to have a few dogs to decorate our truck when we went to town.        The foundation stock of our pack of dogs was an un-spayed Australian shepherd named Eagle, with one blue eye and a Ghandian attitude toward aggressive behavior.  She was bred to be a sheep dog, more of a feeler than a hee...

Wid Bisterfeldt Libby, Montana (Her gray ponytail hung halfway down her jeans jacket. Her boots  were black and square-toed. She pointed a ringless left hand off toward the stumpy hillsides where the Army Corps was clearcutting the slopes in preparation for the filling of Libby Dam.)      Wid Bisterfeldt grew up there, way up yonder, just south of  the Canada border, up in the Yaak River country. His daddy was raised up there, and his granddaddy too, far as I know. They were Bohunks, stuck to the old country ways of bringing in brides for the boys from Bavaria, growing cabbage and turnips, speaking German around the supper table. The Bisterfeldt boys were big blond fellows, with big hands, born to log. That is what Wid was doing when World War Two broke out.      You hear plenty about how the Japanese were all herded together into camps down on the Snake River in Oregon where they are still fa...

Lady and the Tramps Ontario, Oregon (The one-eyed horseshoer and I were leaning into the campfire about midnight after three days of drinking beer and swapping lies. I don't remember the subject of conversation, but this is one of Dewie's tales,)      I've been riding, breeding, feeding, doctoring, buying, selling and trading horses for forty years, and I've done pretty good by it. At least I've always had a few more horses than I could afford. Worst I ever got took in a deal, though, was when I got to messing around with improving the bloodlines of a dog.      My wife brought home a little cocker pup looking like it came straight from Disney, all flop-eared and misty-eyed, so she called her Lady. When Lady wasn't more than about six months old, she came into heat. I just couldn't see putting a dog that young into motherhood, so we made a bed for her in our six-horse trailer and fed her in there. Every cowdog in the county fought for the...