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Watching for Grizzlies Anyway
- University of Nevada Press
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Watching for Grizzlies Anyway I’ve always been intrigued by the way connections can be forged even between people who disagree. The buckskinning camps where George and I vacationed drew a cross-section of some of the most cantankerous outlaws not behind bars. In camp, however, people from every conceivable economic and educational level of society were polite to one another, respected the camp rules, and usually avoided discussing politics and religion. This may or may not have been related to the fact that everyone, from toddlers to ancients, were armed with every weapon available to the fur trappers of the 1830s. About dark one fall day, an old red vw van, its entire skin decorated with peace signs, hand-painted slogans and symbols, and tattered bumper stickers, pulled into camp, driving slowly along the whole line of tipis and cook fires and staring people until it stopped a hundred yards beyond our lodge. Two women wearing faded cotton dresses, a man in jeans and a dirty T-shirt, and a boy about six years old emerged. The man stretched, yawned, lit a cigarette, and sat down on a log. The women set up a wall tent and carried a cooler and a kerosene stove inside; the boy followed with two bent metal yard chairs. Then the women started hauling armloads of bundles wrapped in plastic and blankets out of the van. Unwrapping clothes, they hung them from the tent and guy ropes, and from the top rack on the van, dragging the blankets inside the tent. Clothing traders! The word spread in whispers and giggles. Within minutes, every woman in camp was headed for the tent to look at fringed 70 Nn n o p la c e li ke h ome leather shirts decorated with elk teeth, at leather and wool dresses with beaded and quilled shoulders and hems. One of the women came out of the wall tent eating a sweet roll. “Look all you want,” she said as we fingered fur skirts and beaded moccasins. I found a price tag on a leather dress covered from neck to ankles with yellowed elk teeth: twelve hundred dollars. The woman waved her sweet roll and said, “If you want to try something on, go on inside.” The club’s new bride snatched a dress and ducked inside the tent flaps. A minute later the second woman came outside, holding the boy’s arm. “Hiding behind the cooler,” she said. “Spying.” She threw him to the ground and he scuttled away. At dark, when George and his son Michael came back from the shooting range for supper, the old van was still parked in front of the tent, with music blaring from the radio. Red, doing his job as booshway, strolled up to our fire as I dipped a spoon into the stew pot. “Hey, Red. Have supper with us?” I said, filling a bowl. “Just ate a sandwich Sandy sent with me; she’ll be up tomorrow.” He gestured with his cup of beer. “George, I’m going up and ask ’em to move that van out, kinda explain about how we do things in camp. Since they haven’t noticed. Come along?” Mike followed, and while George and Red talked with the man in the dirty T-shirt, he climbed in the van where the boy was fiddling with the radio . After a moment, the music stopped. Then Mike came back to our fire. “Weird kid,” he mumbled. “I told him that we don’t have radios in camp, but he wouldn’t say anything, just stared at me.” I heard a shout and looked up to see the stranger waving a fist in Red’s face. Both George and Red backed up a couple of steps, their hands automatically dropping to the hilts of their belt knives. Then they ambled back to our lodge. “I take it he didn’t want to move the van,” I said. “No, he sure didn’t,” Red said, glancing over his shoulder. “Said they had valuable stuff in there, worried somebody might steal it. I told him we’d post a watch.” He chuckled. “I didn’t tell him we’d be watching for [54.197.64.207] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 21:19 GMT) Watching for Grizzlies Anyway Nn 71 grizzlies anyway.” As he spoke, the man drove the old van slowly past us, glaring. “Maybe he’ll feel better when he gets to the other end of...