None of us has lived in Montana for fifty years now. Dad is
buried in the cemetery that runs along the Santa Rita Road north
of Cut Bank. What I have left of him is a scattering of artifacts,
salvaged pieces of a way of life that do little to bring back my
memory of him: a pair of sheep shears hanging in the basement of
my city house, a jackknife, a Hamilton pocket watch, the brass face
of a Chatillon wool scale. The .20-gauge shotgun my father used
when he hunted ducks is propped in one corner of a closet, and
a sheep bell, the patella of a yearling hanging by rawhide
clangor, sits on a bookshelf.

Inside a leather Western Life Insurance pouch, envelopes sepa-
rate tax records, life insurance policies, and loans at the Great Falls
National Bank from the single remaining sheet of his stationery,
frayed and discolored now. He designed the logo himself: an un-
furled ribbon stretches between a ewe and an oil well, a ram's head
between them. Dad's name and PO box number are printed below.
The reverse side is a Blackfeet reservation map with the location of
the ranch starred at its center. The flyleaves of a Farmer's Year Book
give land measures, parcel post rates, interest tables, and remedies
for animal diseases. Inside, advances against the herders' wages and
the count for the four bands of sheep my father ran in 1945 and
1946 are carefully recorded in a single hand. The last note he wrote
turned up in a trunk the foreman kept at the foot of his bed. There
are no letters.

I have a few early snapshots of my father with the packhorses
that he used to tend the Forest Service camps above Heart Butte.
Even these photographs do not convey much of a feeling for our
way of life then, or of Dad. Looking at them, I feel only a blurred
sense of recognition of the muscles and lines in his face, the strong
veins in his hands. In the custom of the times, he wore a hat, and
his face is often shadowed by it. In his wedding picture he looks
almost a caricature of himself, younger and more citified than my
memory of him, familiar because my mother is sitting beside him.

-xii-