Encounter At The Summit

A hunting trip can be a series of flashes, the least important of which is the one that grows from the barrel of a gun.

We are blasting down U.S. 93 from Missoula to Hamilton in Mel's broad-shouldered Ford van. November in Montana. The Bitterroot Mountains rise around us, tall and impersonal, so unlike the humanized mountains of the East or even the West Coast. These are hard mountains, black-faced with fir and pine, that don't give a damn who dies on them. Lewis and Clark's men had to tighten their belts here in the fall of 1805; the roots they gnawed to supplement their jerky supplies were bitter. These are not the sort of mountains you want to stare at for any length of time. They are too complex in their geology and history, too big in every dimension to soothe the soul.

It's snug in the van, though. Mel has the heater turned up high, and over the radio Loretta Lynn is singing Don't Come Home a-Drinkin'. Her voice has that special timbre, somewhere between a sneer and a snivel, common to road-house cocktail waitresses and lady country singers. Mel opens a fresh tin of Copenhagen. I tuck a hefty pinch in my lower lip and the juices start to flow. It's a nicotine hit unlike any other—a small, warm, friendly explosion in the chilly caverns of the skull.

"Nope," says Mel, "they ain't come down off the peaks yet. They're still on top, lyin' up by day in the lodgepole tangles and feedin' at night. Plenty of sign, though, up in the Skalkaho Country." He rolls down the window and squirts a shot of snuff juice into the slipstream; the left side of his van bears a ragged, tan racing stripe. "Me and Harold, we was up there just yesterday. Deer sign lower down, but all the elk sign was way up near the top. We'll have to climb for 'em, I fear." He closes the window and the cold, clean mountain air disappears in a blast of heat and song and Bull Durham smoke.

Melvin McNeal, strawberry rancher. A strange, almost sissified occupation for a mountain man, but then the times have changed drastically since the firm of Bridger, Beckwourth & Broken Hand, Unltd. closed shop. Put Mel on a mountainside, though, and his true nature shines like a beaver pelt. The swift, shuffling gait that never varies, uphill or down. The quick, sneaky, game-seeking eyes common to muggers and born hunters. Bent-shouldered, big-knuckled, as spare of words as he is of flesh, Mel McNeal would not have been out of place 150 years ago, riding down into the Great Basin on the back of a raddled mule with a Hawken over his pommel and Jedediah Strong Smith leading the way. His scruffy, rust-colored beard underscores the image. "I won't shave again until I've got a bull elk in the meat shed," he says.

Already two deer are hanging there, glazed almost black in the dim, sweet, frigid air of the shed behind his house. The smell of hanging game has always seemed exciting to me—a ranker, wilder smell than that of the beeves and swine we used to whiff in the butcher shops before the supermarkets took over and hid all meat from the senses, under plastic. I suppose that in the smell of slow putrefaction there resides some arcane folk memory, the promise of full bellies for the tribe. Mel's two deer, young and tender but pathetically small without their heads, hides and guts, dangle from the roof beam by their ankles. I lay a hand on one of them: smooth, hard, cold. Like the Bitterroots, where he killed them earlier in the season.

Mel's yard is a bit of a zoo. Peacocks and guinea fowl scamper around, kicking the gravel and nattering at one another in the incessant warfare of the bird world. Domestic mallards waddle up, blatting for a handout. These are the Godzillas of duckdom: twice the size of the few wild mallards that have dropped in, uninvited, to spend the winter with Mel's pen-raised flock. "Aw, I like having birds around," he explains. "Not just for the eggs and the meat, either. It's more the idea—peacocks in Montana! They're a tough bird, though. They hold their own pretty good against the foxes and the hawks and the coyotes. And the neighbor dogs are flat skeered of 'em!"

Out beyond the yard is a pond full of icy water and Kamloops rainbow trout. Mel calls them "cannaloops," confusing their real name, which comes from the distant Pacific Northwest, with "cantaloupes," and in a way they are like melons to him: starved for trout, all he need do is pick up a rod, hike through the yard, flip a spinner into the pond and come home with a couple of three-pounders. For his serious fishing he heads for the mountains.

Deer stew and home-baked bread for dinner. Mel's wife Jan is a shy, plump woman who blushes readily at compliments about her cooking ("Nothin' much," she says). Like so many mountain women she takes her skills for granted, makes little of them, unaware of their natural beauty and her own. Instead, she affects an air of weariness and worthlessness, tempered with flashes of desperate independence which she has probably learned from the huge face of the color television set that dominates the McNeals' small living room. The only book in the house is a Bible. Now and then she flares angrily at her two sons, Sean and Max, themselves shy boys still under the tutelage of women, but her rages are perfunctory, ritualistic and immediately followed by a lot of loving. The boys will be O.K. once they are allowed to think of themselves as men.

In the bedroom hang Mel's trophies. A royal elk of seven points, a wide-racked whitetail deer, a solemn mountain goat, a pronghorn antelope, a pair of black bear hides and the heavy, glowering, bug-eyed head of an elderly bull bison that Mel tracked down and killed in Yellowstone country years ago. The presence of the dead animals in the bedroom is at once awesome and ridiculous. It would be like making love in a wing of the Museum of Natural History. I am put in mind of a remark my daughter made when she was three years old and saw her first mounted deer head. She stared at it for a long time, then said firmly, "The rest of him lives in the wall."