Secrets Elk Keep

I

This morning I watched as five elk swam the river. It was early. No one else was around. I stood here, resting against the porch rail, my jacket collar pulled high around my neck. This fog that now covers the valley shifted over the top of the water, down between the willows, and across the tops of distant ridges. The elk—four cows and a tiny calf—moved down from the mountain and along the bank. They slipped quietly through the fog, steam rising from their warm bodies, surely blowing from their wide nostrils. Never pausing, never wavering, they moved steadily off the ridge, picking their way down to the bank between sage and willows.

I watched as they stepped into the quick-moving water, even the newborn calf. They swam easily against the current, cutting through the brown and murk, swift after days upon days of rain. Long legs pulled them from water to bank where they shook once, then raised their long faces toward the wind. And they didn’t stop. Despite the rain, despite the heaviness of the fog and the harshness of a morning without sun, warmth, or even a clear view of the mountains, five elk were on the move. I wondered where they were headed, but maybe they didn’t know; maybe they only knew that to survive they had to keep going.

II

The elk disappeared though this rain persists. Almost thirty straight days of rain, sometimes hail, a few days and nights of snow, and cold—the only constant.

My body had already adjusted to the heat of a Pennsylvania spring when I made the near two-thousand-mile drive to Wyoming to take a job wrangling on a guest ranch. The last time I lived on the ranch May greeted me with sun and days ending with the soak of sweat. Those four years feel like a lifetime ago and I miss my former crew. We were young, college students mostly, and we came from all over the US; almost none of us had worked a ranch job before. Green as we were I’m surprised we all survived. But survive we did and every one of us fell in love with Wyoming, which is why all these years later, after almost everyone from that first summer has moved on with their lives, I’m back for one more season.

Right now I’m the only female wrangler on the ranch. There are girls who work in the kitchen, who do the housekeeping, and who work in the office. There’s even a girl who wrangles the kids. But up at the corrals it’s the boys and me. The other cowboys almost all come from ranching families, meaning this work is in their blood. They don’t know what it means to live any other way. I tell them of my life back east, my family’s small farm, and the years I spent as a graduate student in Philadelphia. They look at me as if I’ve come from a foreign country. They work within a tight kinship and often speak a language I don’t understand; so much is said in the tipping of hats, the pointing of fingers, the low and calloused grunts of men. I promise myself that eventually I will prove myself to them; eventually they will warm to me. But now, as the skies above threaten to open and the wind howls over the gray valley, I realize that everything about this summer feels different, feels cold.

III

I’ve grown accustomed to the ways my body keeps itself warm. Alone on long rides I’m a scientist of shivers. Today I put one of my first rides on my wrangle horse, Cash. After breakfast we made our way up into the north corner of the small pasture to check fence. Clad in my best gear—wool socks, dry boots, cotton long underwear, thick jeans, button-up shirt, jacket, chinks, gloves, scarf, and felt hat—I hoped to stay dry, maybe even warm. The guys were either checking or building fence...