The Names of the Stars: A Life in the Wilds

ISBN-13: 9781250139191

Media Type: Paperback

Publisher: Picador

Publication Date: 10-03-2017

Pages: 288

Product Dimensions: 5.40(w) x 8.10(h) x 0.80(d)

PETE FROMM is a five time winner of the Pacific Northwest Booksellers Award for his novels If Not For This, As Cool as I Am, and How All This Started, his story collection Dry Rain, and the memoir Indian Creek Chronicles. The film of As Cool as I Am was released in 2013. He is also the author of several other story collections and has published over two hundred stories in magazines. He is on the faculty of Oregon’s Pacific University’s Low-Residency MFA Program and lives in Montana. His second memoir The Names of the Stars: A Life in the Wilds was named an Honor Book in the 2016 Montana Book Awards.

Read an Excerpt

The Names of the Stars

A Life in the Wilds

St. Martin's Press

North Fork of the Sun River Bob Marshall Wilderness, Montana May 2004

The storm seems, for a bit, to settle, a monotony of squalls, the rain no longer quite streaming down as if the sky itself were nothing but water. I dip low, peering out the cabin window, studying the overcast, the thermometer's red column straining toward forty, the gusts cutting across the meadow grass in waves. The lulls leave almost silence, just the occasional pop of fir in the stove. Then the rising beat of wind batters the cabin logs, and the drum of rain skitters across the cedar shingles. Already after nine, and weather regardless, still the ten-mile loop to check the grayling eggs' progress, my daily chore. I shrug into the tired rain gear, top and bottom both, adjust the jacket's hip zippers to leave the bear spray free, the handgun.

Out in the wind, the spray lashes in under the eaves, stinging my cheeks, trickling into the start of my beard as I walk around the cabin, raising each of the bear-proof shutters, battening the hatches. All the routine. Then up the muddy track, over the hump and into the trees, toward the opening of the burn, the turn down toward the North Fork. Plodding, working up some heat, I watch the water bead off the oil I'd worked into my boots last night, watch my walking stick pock the mud, the cowbell I'd tied to its top all but silent with the easy rhythm. It's hood-up, head-down weather, little more than just the trail before my feet, until I start following bear tracks, last night's traffic, a reminder to keep my eyes up, to tuck the deafening hood behind my ears, to start making some noise. I sing, the only way I've thought of to constantly announce my presence, belting out "The noble Duke of York, he had ten thousand men ..." as I enter the darker woods.

The rain, it turns out, instead of easing off, had only been warming up, and as I cross the pack bridge over the roiling brown North Fork, it comes down sideways, stupendously, stupidly hard, lashing the surface of the river to a froth. I lunge up the ridge toward the Spruce Creek eggs, laughing at just the wildness of it. Already soaked through, toes turned out in the mud as if herringboning up a ski trail, I make the ridge and cross the mile of recent burn, forgetting to sing to the bears, the blackened spear points of the trees easy enough to see through.

Until I reach the Hansel and Gretel stretch. Here the trail cuts into an older burn, dog-haired with fifteen-year-old lodgepole pine. Twelve feet tall and only inches apart, they're furred so tight to both sides of the trail — their needled branches threaded together, crowding in from both sides, whispering and shushing in the wind — it's more a green-walled tunnel than path. Even so, unable to see more than a few feet, unable to hear anything over the sighing and moaning of the trees, I don't muster up much more than a murmur myself, the pissing-down rain just too much, too loud. Who on earth would be out in this mess?

The sodden, impenetrable wall of pines an arm's reach to each side, I thump my walking stick against the occasional rock, rattling the cowbell, keeping time with Burl Ives, the Big Rock Candy Mountains, mumbling out "Oh, the buzzing of the bees in the cigarette trees, the soda water fountain. ..." Working my way, again, through my old bedtime repertoire for the boys, the lyrics hammered into me through endless repetition.

I swing through the corkscrew bend near the drop down to the river, "where the lemonade springs and the bluebird sings," and there, two steps in front of me, lies a half-eaten elk calf. Half-eaten.

I stumble over myself, yanking off my hood. The calf lies spread-eagled on its back, gutted, a portion of the hams torn off from the inside, strings of meat limp against the ivory line of bone. Staggering back, I pull out my bear spray, push away the safety catch. With my other hand I unsnap my revolver's holster, wrap my fingers around its grip.

Another step back, another, rain running down my neck. No day-old calf can be more than a snack for a grizzly. Not something they'd eat part of and come back to. And even if it were, there's nothing scraped up over the kill, nothing hiding it as if the bear means to return.

I've chased it off. With the Big Rock Candy Mountains. Still stepping backward, I scan the trees, their dank, blank walls, seeing no more than four or five feet.

Rounding backward through the bend, bear spray out front, the calf disappearing behind the trees, I turn and walk, fast, back the way I'd come. I pound my stick, try shouting, "Coming through, make a hole, make a hole," what my dad said they were always shouting in the navy, barreling along the ship's tight corridors. At first my voice is hardly more than a squeak. I try again.

The Spruce Creek eggs are on their own today. And tomorrow.

I break out of the trees, glance down for tracks, finding only my own. Moving fast, able to see again, I look everywhere: across the short grass, the blackened rocks, up into the sooty burned snags, across the river's steep cut, up onto the burned clear face of the other side's cliff. I all but ski down the mud to the pack bridge and run up the opposite side, slowing for the dark timber of that bear highway. Shouting, "Kiss me goodnight and say my prayers!" — one song I never sang to the boys — I step carefully over the same tracks I'd walked over this morning, the rain drumming.

Rounding the cabin, I open the shutters, letting the gray murk leak in through the windows. Under the porch roof, the nesting robin blasts off by my face, and I let out a quick "Jaysis!" as if I'd been charged by a winged grizzly. Catching my breath, I unzip my rain gear, shake off what mud I can. Then I unlock the door and step inside as if my return had always been in doubt, lean back against it and take a long, deep breath. "Boys!" I call to the single, empty room. "I'm home!"

The bear had done me a favor, no doubt about it, slipping back into the pines, watching maybe, instead of challenging me for its kill. Or adding me to it. All its choice. I shake my head, the heat from the stove's banked fire taking away the chill, but not the shiver that runs through me.

I pick a log out of the wood box, open the stove, work it in over the coals. Then another. Latching the door, I stand back and pick a clean white splinter off the face of my wool shirt.

A month ago I'd been fighting to bring the boys in here with me. A monthlong campout. A wilderness experience they'd have for the rest of their lives.

Nolan, nine; Aidan, six. My sons. Neither one of them much bigger than that calf.

Nine and six. I realize with something approaching surprise that I'd only been a father for nine years. But what was I before? A kid myself for what? Seventeen years? And then off to college, the wilds of Montana, and then?

Plenty followed, I know, decades' worth, but all of it, everything I've ever done, or at least the reasons for it, when there were any, seem to have simply vanished. Before being a parent? There were just those first thirty-six years. And then Nolan. And Aidan.

Before — after.

But only nine years in, I've nearly fed them to the grizzlies. And, even so, I can hardly wish them here more.

Great Falls, Montana April 2004

After moving to Montana at seventeen, I'd spent years dreaming of mountain men and their lonely, manly feats, of finding a cabin too remote to find, something off a postcard, a wolf hybrid, maybe, nosing out the door to savage all strangers. But instead I'd wound up in Great Falls, on the plains edged up against the spine of the Rockies, but not in the mountains themselves. A big, slow, muddy river backed up by dams stretched through town. Our house was an eighty-year-old Craftsman bungalow on a street lined with elms. I walked Nolan and Aidan, a third-grader and a kindergartener, back and forth from Roosevelt Elementary every day. Wild man become mild man.

In April, the sun barely warm, the trees just starting to bud out, the three of us kicked a rock along the sidewalk as I listened to stories of their day away from me when, a block shy of our house, a pickup wheeled around the corner and instead of straightening out, swerved straight at us, jerking to a stop only after bumping up against the curb. The boys stared as Steve, a fisheries biologist I knew, leaned out his window and grinned. "Hey," he said, "if you ever feel like getting a job, I might have just the one."

"Work?" I said. "Me?"

"We might need somebody to babysit grayling eggs up on the Sun. With your experience ..."

I smiled. My winter with the salmon eggs, twenty-five years in the past, coming home to roost.

Still leaning out his window, he said the grayling thing would probably mean camping out for a month or so. He'd just left the first meeting about it, and details were sparse. "After your winter on the Selway, a month out in the spring should be a cakewalk," he said. "Right?"

The boys, shy at the best of times, clustered beside me, not missing a word. "What about these two?" I asked. If I was thinking at all, it was to hope they'd give us a wall tent. Set up alongside some deserted Forest Service road, a little creek, the boys splashing in the beaver ponds, making boats to throw into the rapids, bomb with rocks as they shuddered downstream. A little fishing. Bows and arrows. Chopping wood. Building fires. Enough visitors dropping by to keep them primed. All this in the first second or less. "They could come?"

"I don't know why they couldn't," Steve said.

I asked him to find out what he could and let me know. He nodded, an eyebrow raised as if he'd only been kidding, a one-liner about my extravagant employability.

He wheeled across the street to his driveway, done, but Nolan clamped onto my hand, just beginning. "Can we?"

"We'll have to find out more."

"But can we?"

"He didn't even know if they were actually going to do it. Or when. Or where."

"But if they do, can we?"

"We'll see."

"Even if they don't do it? Can we still go camping for a month?"

"Let's wait and see what he finds out."

"But can we camp for a month, no matter what? During school?"

They'd been to the Selway, Indian Creek, more than once. For years I'd had to tell them bedtime stories based on my winter there. The bobcat riding the deer over the cliff. The mountain lion leaping down a canyon. "We'll think about it," I said.

He gave me a look. We'll think about it? Worse than We'll see.

Aidan picked up a stick, wheeled left, right, testing its sword qualities. Nolan plugged along beside me. "Can we make moccasins if we go? Like the ones you made at Indian Creek? The ones that go up to the knee?"

"We can make those even if we don't go."

"It'd be better if we made them out there."

Out there. Wherever that was. Already planning with the same meticulous care as his father.

"We could make all our clothes out of deer skins," he said. The fall before we'd spent a staggering amount of time brain tanning an antelope hide, ending up with enough soft suede leather for a decent rag. We hadn't tackled deer hides yet, had no ready supply of deer skins, but, you know, details.

"We can chip flint for arrow points, kill a bird for the fletching. We'll start all our fires with flint and steel." He went on and on. All afternoon. All evening.

Last thing that night, in bed, story read, lights off, I leaned over for the hug and the kiss, and he said, "Can we?"

"I don't know, buddy. We'll see."

Even in the dark I could make out the roll of his eyes. We'll see.

Boys safely tucked in, I filled Rose in with the few details I had, ending as casually as I could, that if it worked out, it'd be pretty cool for them. She raised an eyebrow. "Grizzlies," she said.

"Grizzlies?"

"They're all over up there."

"That's like worrying about lightning."

"In spring? When they come out of hibernation? Starving? You in a tent with all your food? You might as well hang out a sign. Dinner served nightly."

"We'd lock the food in the truck."

"If you're by a road."

"Well, yeah."

"They're snack-sized," she said, shaking her head.

Lions didn't thrill her much either. "The sneaky bastards." There were wolves out there, too. Fast, freezing water. Falls. Cuts. Illness.

I waved my hands, sang, "Lions and tigers and bears, oh my."

She stared.

Bob Marshall Wilderness, Montana May 2004

With the fire roaring, I kick out of my boots, clumps of mud falling from the soles, dropping from my rain pants. I leave stark, bare prints on the oak floorboards as I slop my clothes over the drying wires above the stove, get dressed all over again, as if I could restart the day. I pull a chair up before the stove and hold my hands out, my fingertips a bit pruney.

My heart long since slowed, the grizzly rush fading out of me, I slump back, blow out a breath. My clothes steam on their wires, water dribbling down now and then, the drops hissing and dancing across the iron top of the stove, and I close my eyes to listen. Dozing maybe, a little, I wake to something: a change in the air, a sound, a movement. I sit up. The drumming of the rain's gone silent. I stand, step to the door, push it out. It really isn't raining.

Wisps of ground fog cling to the willows by the creek, around the trees across the meadow, but above it almost seems that there are lighter spots, a thinning here and there in the clouds. I push into my drier boots, not bothering with the laces, and step into the novelty of dry air. I wander, eventually, to the woodpile, hooking the ax off the bunkhouse porch as I pass.

For the next hour the steady thunk of the ax, the dry fir leaping apart, the haul of armload after armload into the cabin keeps me occupied. I glance, only now and then, at the tree lines, for bears I don't really expect to see, and at the sky, for blue I have only fainter hopes of spotting. After my last load in, the wood box stuffed to bursting, I unlock the storage side of the bunkhouse, climb the ladder to the mouseproof platform, and retrieve the chocolate chip cookie mix I'd packed when I'd still been packing for the boys. "Treats tonight," I say, as if they're beside me, a habit I cannot break. "A we're-not-bear-shit-yet celebration."

Later, I pull the last batch from the stove, admitting, finally, how impossible this would have been, for me to push them through that Hansel and Gretel stretch day after day. But the smell of warm cookies filling the cabin, the sun, no lie, making an appearance minutes before dropping below the mountains, I can't help but wonder what a month like this, with the incubators within sight of the cabin instead of five miles away, no ten-mile daily loop to endure, would have been like with them. If it would have been something, like Indian Creek, that would have set them off on a trail they'd follow for life. And, if so, I wondered how many grizzlies would step back into the shadows to let them pass. Or not.

I set the cookies on the table, no one here to feast on them, and then I push them aside, unable to muster the appetite for a single bite. Not having even told Nolan I'd found a source for deer hides in Great Falls, had hidden some away in my packs before leaving. Now I pull them from beneath my bunk, spread them out on the table, and in the middle, tightly rolled, almost forgotten, are their T-shirts, patterns for the mountain-man wear I'd make for them out here. Nolan's Roosevelt Roadrunner, Aidan's Batman. They stop me cold.

It's just too easy to picture them inside the shirts, here in this cabin, tearing out into the rain, asking if they could put the next log into the fire, light the lantern, chop the wood. I sit for a while just watching the shirts before finally picking up my pencil, tracing around them, then reach for my knife, cutting out the fronts and backs, leaving the flank's wild tag ends edging the bottoms of their vests, pounding stitch holes around the perimeters. Instead of thread, just sewing them together, I light the lantern and cut miles of leather lacing to cross-stitch in an X pattern. Savage wear extraordinaire.

Surrounded by them, I pull my chair close to the fire, the rain once again drumming down, and they crowd in, watch me pull the laces tight, crossing the Xs. They get in my light. I swear I can smell them.

---

Excerpted from The Names of the Stars by Pete Fromm. Copyright © 2016 Pete Fromm. Excerpted by permission of St. Martin's Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

---

<