Issue link: https://www.e-digitaleditions.com/i/116174
he name fits. Clyde. I picture a "Clyde" and see leathery features beneath a black, grease-crusted Stetson, floppy leather chaps polished by hard use, sterling-silver rodeo belt buckle too far worn to discern what was won by it, slope-heeled boots adorned by perpetual spurs loose in the rawls – the prerequisite Pancho Villa mustache. Add illfitting dentures, piercing black Irish eyes, an ever-present cigarette hung from the corner of his mouth, a slight frame set unsteadily on deeply bowed legs, and you have Clyde, my Utah mountain lion guide. I don't know what to make of this Clyde, nor do I venture to guess an age. There's about a 30-year gap he might fit into, according to erosion or lack thereof. He's a true curmudgeon, constantly cursing even the smallest difficulties – prone to direct an undignified kick at the door of his new diesel 4x4 because it fails to shut itself when he slides out to lay down tire chains for installation and it temporarily blocks his way. Moving in crab-like gestures, he's ungainly afoot, but when he swings into the saddle atop his long-legged mule he's poetry in motion. As we ride he cusses relentlessly at a profusion of spotted, tongue-lolling hounds, each owning a decidedly Mexican moniker. I can never quite determine what these jolly canines are doing to illicit these colorful outbursts, but when we pause to take our S P O R T I saddlebag lunch beneath a sheltering bluff, he's as gentle with them as newborns. Towards me, he has very little to relate. I simply follow suit in whatever he does. I don't take it personally. Clyde is certainly not without humor, but obviously scorns the human race and in some ways I can relate. Clyde comes highly recommended via a clique of welltraveled acquaintances, cheery fellows who huddle on the fringes of cocktail parties to crow over who has squandered the highest sum of free-flowing Texas oil money pursuing some form of vaguely familiar fauna in a country with a name right out of a long-forgotten fairy tale. Clyde is described as a character, a good 'ol boy who runs a pack of hounds that'll eat the hind-end out of a grizzly bear. This is somehow reassuring. Clyde can persuade the stock-trailer-burdened truck no farther, working the steering wheel gingerly to stay between the ditches as wheels spin ineffectively and tire chains clank and vociferously batter wheel-wells from all quarters. His artfully constructed strings of curses form another brand of poetry, combinations unique and powerful and warranting individual copyright. He skillfully backs the trailer a half-mile and into a turn-around, and we alight, flinging open the rusted iron-pipe trailer as dilapidated as Clyde's Chevy is shiny and new. The swarm of hounds flows tail-wagging and yodeling merrily through calm mule legs to wallow and burrow gleefully, the saddled mules shuffling impatiently, tucking their hindquarters in anticipation of the sudden, invisible drop to earth. There's no fanfare or battle-plan discussion; business conducted on a need-to-know basis only. I fling my burden of cased takedown recurve and PVC-protected arrows over the N G C 118 L A S S I C S