In that fine novel I mentioned earlier, The Willow Field, Kittredge introduces us to Rossie Benasco who, as a teenager, joins an Old West horse drive, from California to Calgary, during the early days of the Great Depression. Two hundred and fifty-some horses, a handful of cowboys, less than 100 years ago. They travel from California into northern Nevada, north into Oregon, then across to Idaho and over the Divide into Montana—country well-known to so many of us who have spent our lives out West, searching for trout and other remedies for what ails us.
Following Rossie on his journey north, on a route I could picture easily, I was reminded of the time Peter Syka and I were camped above Ruby Marsh, just below the narrow strip of bristlecone pine that separates the basin from the alpine reaches of the Ruby Mountains. A fellow on horseback, leading another horse, came out of the trees and approached our camp. We invited him to share our fire and pitch his tent for the night. A part-time “government hunter,” hired to protect herds of sheep from resident mountain lions, he was bringing a pack horse from Medford, Oregon, to Bridgeport, California, on the east side of the Sierra Nevada.
“Came this way cuz I like the Rubys,” he explained. “Haven’t been here in a while.”
It was a night full of stories, probably a few tall tales. Still, it would have been clear to anyone listening that we were audience to a character from out of the past, someone the world—even as we knew it then—was all set to leave behind.
And for what? I, for one, am glad that Nevada, so harsh yet delicate in so many ways, is no longer overrun with sheep. And I’m happy bounty hunters failed to kill all the cougars, try as they might have tried to take down every last one. But it’s hard not to feel we’ve lost something along the way, a loss that William Kittredge continues to remind us of today.
Gray’s angling editor Scott Sadil is happy to report that it’s still possible to lose one’s way searching for trout, here and there above the Great Basin desert.
