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S P O R T I N G C L A S S I C S 1 0 7 with the help of a couple of friends and the day-to–day ease of habit. I met him through my aunt and uncle, who owned a neighboring ranch. Their place had bad water—alkaline, no good to drink—and every few days I would throw a half-dozen plastic bleach containers in the back of the car, and drive over to the old man's place, and fill them from his well. I can close my eyes and see the kitchen. Slick tablecloth, checkered dish towel draped over salt and pepper shakers, sourdough crock on the counter, stockman's calendar on the wall, denim jacket hung over a chair back, crumpled tan Stetson on the seat, mud-flecked boots under it. Half an inch of dead flies in the well of a storm window, and out that window the bulk of Heart Mountain—sere or snow—dusted, dawn-rosy or gray as lead when the days shut down. I have, over the last five years, spent a fair share of time in that kitchen. My old man tells me that "the latch string is out," which means I may come any time and stay as long as I want. After meals, my old man washes the dishes carefully, refusing my offer to perform this chore, and stacks them in a metal rack. Often the radio is on, soft but distinct, with "news of Cody and the Bighorn Basin." My old man sits back down, and we talk. We talk about things we don't like, and the things we do, and my old man has plenty of both. He dislikes snowmobiles, the Forest Service (passionately), Charlais cattle, magpies, people who drive across his land and cut his fences, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and the whole idea of Coca-Cola. He likes a far greater number of things, including Chevrolet pickup trucks, Pendleton shirts, cats, jackrabbits, Hereford cattle, horses (he remembers some he owned 40 years ago and still grieves for them at times), people who show spirit and dignity under difficult conditions, Indians, neighbors, and certain memories. Most of the memories have to do with hunting. Like the time a bunch of hunters straggled into his cabin up in Sunlight, half-frozen after getting caught in a blizzard. They told him they'd lost a .30-30 saddle gun on the summit of the conical, nameless mountain that towers up on the edge of his homestead, and that he could have the rifle if he wanted to fetch it. He found it the following spring and used it over the decades to take a tremendous number and variety of game. There was a bighorn killed right at timberline after a long stalk: the sheep all belting past through the talus, my old man's rifle swinging on the biggest, the heavy sound of the bullet striking, the spasmodic kicking of the dead ram. The moose he woke up to find browsing alder shoots 50 yards from the cabin: the bead front sight silver against the moose's black side, the shot waking up my old man's wife, the moose running a few steps toward the springhouse before falling. The elk: so many he's lost count. Elk taken for their racks, elk bugled in for friends, crippled elk finished off for hunters he was guiding. Depression elk—hillside salmon, government beef—one way to stay solvent when times were hard. A grizzly taken in the day's last light in a high-country meadow: the first shot breaking the animal's jaw, its outraged bellow echoing from mountains and banks of shadowy pines, the second shot anchoring the bear, the third shot finishing it. Or the time my old man was guiding, and they spooked a very ordinary mule deer buck out of a blowdown. They already had camp meat and a full packload, but the client wanted the deer, which stood on the edge of the trees watching them. The hunter asked for my old man's .30-30 and was reluctantly given the gun. He worked a shell into the chamber, and in so doing, sandwiched the sling between the lever and stock, preventing the action from locking. The hunter squeezed the trigger. Nothing. He yanked it. My old man waited until the buck faded into the timber. Then he took the rifle back, saying, "You have to pull right hard." My old man talks about hunting and game and the way things were then and the way they are now, and I listen. I sit across the table from him. The dawn lights his face, or the warm evening light filters into the room from where the sun is setting behind Elkhorn Peak up in Sunlight. My old man talks, and I listen, even though I've heard the stories before. If he knows he repeats himself, I hope he also knows I want to hear. Note: Selected from The Wingless Crow, published in 2008 by the Penn State University Press. pole canyon by david jackson