Howdy. I'm back from the Milk River country, after another glorious week in Montana. You wouldn't know it from this photo of the rather forbidding landscape, but the coulees, draws and river bottoms abound with game - everything from jackrabbits, rattlesnakes and coyotes to deer (mulies as well as whitetails) , elk and the occasional cougar. The land is a mixture of prairie (the native grasses include Indian rice, buffalo grass and needle-and-thread), sagebrush flats and dramatic coulees.
The coulees are steep and hundreds of feet deep, with sheer cliffs and/or rock-and-rubble formations that only a fool would try to scale or descend. This makes for some interesting climbing and game-spotting challenges, and one of the great pleasures of my visit was watching mule deer run along a wisp of a game trail on the side of what appears to be a vertical wall of stone - or, even more treacherously, clay. If deer weren't so abundant, their beauty and grace would be less taken for granted. It about breaks my heart that so many folks in deer-infested suburbs have no idea what swift, powerful, wary and wild creatures deer are in their natural element. Sometimes I'd glass them from half-a-mile away, across a deep coulee, and by the time I got the binoculars up they invariably would be staring at me, measuring the threat. . .
The word that keeps coming to mind for this high and lonesome is "elemental" - those gray areas are not snow, but clay, calcium and salt deposits. Some of those clay cliffs you see are dinosaur fossil repositories, yet to be extensively explored. If you walk the ridges and high plateaus, you encounter numerous teepee rings made from stones. These are about 15-20 feet in diameter, and mark where the Indians secured their teepees against the brisk winds of the Plains. There are hoodoos galore; some of the natural stone towers are surreal looking. You can look at a boulder here and, because of its color and the way it's worn, mistake it for a piece of rusting machinery. How about a rock with five symmetrical fist-sized holes worn clear through it. Worn by - who knows, and over what period of time?
Here's another shot for all you animal lovers. this is part of the string of ponies kept by my friends, whose ranch incorporates most of what you see above (and a lot more). They still ranch the old-fashioned way; in the fall (or when there is a fencing calamity) they still get on the horses to round up the cattle and herd them down from their summer range. In fact, just two years ago, my host David broke his leg when his horse got into quicksand. Imagine that: almost losing your life because your horse got into quicksand on a cattle drive. That's David's wife, Julie, with the horses.
