by Norman Maclean
[Chronicling his life as a young forest ranger in the Bitterroot mountains, the narrator describes Bill Bell, generally acknowledged to be the best and toughest ranger in his district of the U.S. Forest Service.]
Every profession has a pinnacle to its art. In the hospital it is the brain or heart surgeon, and in the sawmill is it the sawyer who with squinting eyes makes the first major cut that turns a log into boards. In the early Forest Service, our major artist was the packer, as it usually has been in worlds where there are no roads. Packing is an art as old as the first time man moved and had an animal to help him carry his belongings. As such, it came ultimately from Asia and from there across Northern Africa and Spain and then up from Mexico and to us probably from Indian squaws. You can’t even talk to a packer unless you know what a cinch (cincha) is, a latigo, and a manty (manta). With the coming of roads, this ancient art has become almost a lost art, but in the early part of this century there were still few roads across the mountains and none across the “Bitterroot Wall.” From the mouth of Blodgett Canyon, near Hamilton, Montana, to our ranger station at Elk Summit in Idaho nothing moved except on foot. When there was a big fire crew to be supplied, there could be as many as half a hundred mules and short-backed horses heaving and grunting up the narrow switchbacks and dropping extra large amounts of manure at the sharp turns. The ropes tying the animal together would jerk taut and stretch their connected necks into a straight line until they looked like dark gigantic swans circling and finally disappearing into a higher medium.
Bill was our head packer, and the Forest Service never had a better one…
As head packer, Bill rode in front of the string, a study in angles. With black Stetson hat at a slant, he rode with his head turned almost backward from his body so he could watch to see if any of the packs were working loose. Later in life I was to see Egyptian bas-reliefs where the heads of men are looking one way and their bodies are going another, and so it is with good packers. After all, packing is the art of balancing packs and then seeing that they ride evenly – otherwise the animals will have saddle sores in a day or two and be out of business for all or most of the summer.
Up there in front with Bill, you could see just about anything happen. A horse might slip or get kicked out of string and roll frightened downhill until he got tangled around a tree trunk. You might even have to shoot him, collect the saddle, and forget the rest of what was scattered over the landscape. But mostly what you were watching for took Bill’s trained eye to see – a saddle that had slipped back so far the animal couldn’t breathe, or a saddle that had slipped sideways. In an outfit that large, there are always a few “shadbellies” that no cinch can hang on to and quite a few “bloaters” that blow up in the morning when the cinch touches them and then slowly deflate. Who knows what? The trouble may have started back in the warehouse where the load cargoer couldn’t tell weight or didn’t give a damn and now an animal was trying to keep steady across the Bitterroot Divide with lopsided packs. Or maybe the packs balanced, but some assistant packer had tied one higher than the other. Or had tied a sloppy diamond hitch and everything slipped. The Bitterroot Divide, with its many switchbacks, granite boulders, and bog holes, brought out every weakness in a packer, his equipment, and his animals. To take a pack string of nearly half a hundred across the Bitterroot Divide was to perform a masterpiece in that now almost last art, and in 1919 I rode with Bill Bell and saw it done…
The unpacking was just as beautiful – one wet satin back after another without saddle or saddle sore, and not a spot of white wet flesh where hair and hide had rubbed off. Perhaps one has to know something about keeping packs balanced on the back of animals to think this beautiful, or to notice it at all, but to all those who work come moments of beauty unseen by the rest of the world.
copyright (c)1976 by the University of Chicago; published in “A River Runs Through It and other stories”
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