He was an old cowboy in a battered hat leaning against the top rail of my corral. South West Gold Creek Loop, Hamilton, Montana. We'd unsaddled our horses after a morning's ride looking for a neighbor's stray calf, and now they watered and grazed behind us. It was an exquisite day, so bright and dry the valley stretched out golden and fertile for miles. Water wheels sprayed the tended fields, and the Bitterroot River traversed the valley just beyond the tree line. I was pretty much struck dumb by the sight.
"It's really something, isn't it?", I said to Kenny.
He didn't say anything right away, but then he did.
"Feels just like bein' in a corral to me."
Kenny Trowbridge broke horses for the army in WW1. He was just a kid of fifteen. There were no corrals, no fences, nobody telling you which way to go when your way was another. He lived down the road in Darby with Verna, each their second marriage. She had quite the story as well. She was the first bride to come to Jenny Lake at the very start of its settlement, the very first one, back in the 19th century. Jenny Lake, Wyoming, right near the Grand Tetons, the Big Tits. She was a mail order bride travelling west to make her life here. It was deep winter when she first arrived, and remembered crossing a frozen Jenny Lake (actually, it hadn't been named, yet) in a horse drawn sled terrified they'd fall through the ice and freeze to death. By the time she was widowed there, Verna could walk miles blindfolded and still find her way, and yet. One year she and Kenny decided to drive down to Jenny Lake just to see the place. I don't think she'd been there in sixty years or so. Here's the thing: she could not find her way around. Given the highways and construction, she simply didn't know where she was any more - a place once she knew so well. "It's like when you get older," she told me, "You don't recognize your face anymore."
Verna would call me first thing in the morning right after hunting season and invite me down for biscuits, gravy, and elk's liver. Get my day started right. God, I loved that stuff! With coffee that would support a bayonet.Then Kenny would take me into his work shed and teach me how to hand load my own bullets.There's an art to this because you're able to regulate the speed, trajectory, and punch of a bullet designed just for you and specifically for the game you are hunting. Jamie and I still hang a quilt Verna made us for a wedding present. The two of them had been married the better part of fifty years. They wouldn't still be alive - they were in their eighties when we knew them - and I imagine they passed on not that much longer after we left Montana.
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