A Few Dirty Thoughts from Henneberry Cabin
by Mason Parker
Southern winds move through the canyon spires, filling my lungs between swings of the maul. Ponderosa wood cracks under the weight of the wedge. I collect the pieces and walk through the white swinging door into the cabin to feed the furnace—great god of the homestead, destroyer of cold winter nights, creator of body odor and ball sweat. Kitchen table is littered with breakfast plates and beer cans. The air holds slight wood smoke and lingering syllables of last night’s conversations—apartheid, child brides, nu-metal, masturbation. The struggle to get negative COVID tests so the four of us could enjoy this isolation together. The commune daydreams. 124 acres west of Missoula. Undeveloped. Untouched. Leave the office job and let the land swallow us. Deep longing to feel the spirits of pine and trout in my lungs and guts. I always thought Missoula was a small town filled with big gods. There’s a wine stain on the floor.
This weekend the coyote derby will spill wild canine blood into the gravel and the water flowing through the canyon. Killers roam the sage and cattails with small caliber carbines, so I keep a large caliber pistol in my beltline and pray they don’t take a shot at my dog. He’s got coyote-like features—tampered fur, light-brown, and a thin frame with a pointed snout. The first time I saw a ki-yote, it wrestled free from a dumpster on a foggy night in Dallas, standing long-legged in Lot G of the Regent apartment complex. A scavenging forest spirit whispered to life inside the urban sprawl, a manifestation of mist and dew caught mid-fall before it dissipates into the duff.
I speak a few words over dead things, things I’ve killed, hoping the short mantras will smooth the process of reintegration. Dusk settles over the Montana canyon and coyotes yap at a crescent moon roughing up the fragments of light and space over the slant peaks of the Pioneers. Coyotes howl. The dogs outlive the killers.
There is a bench next to the Beaverhead River where I sit with Waylon in the morning after breakfast drinking bitter coffee, watching the water move, and talking about the breakup of civilization, the decline of the American project. Massive ice-forms split from the riverside and are carried north where the train stops in Dillon to load the spoils of the talc mine. The chunks of ice catch the sun, make vivid color and melt back into the flow of the river in mid-afternoon, moving then as water toward the Jefferson, the Missouri, the Mississippi, and finding their form as a gulf and finally an ocean.
Shitting in the outhouse, the draft rises through the pit toilet so the skin of my taint and scrotum hardens, but softens quickly after I pull my pants up. They are fleece-lined and sturdy. The pants. I strap on Yael’s pink and purple backpack covered with Days N’ Daze and Mischief Brew patches, holding four liters of water and a small knife with a handle made to look like hazy, golden beer. There is a hangover between everything as we climb a nearby peak. Waylon, Tori, Yael, and myself. The dogs find the rotten carcasses of poached white-tail dumped and hidden from the wardens among the undergrowth. There’s at least seven or eight bodies in the late stages of decomposition. It was a bad year for poaching. People are starving and bored. The dogs lick a ribcage and take turns rolling inside it. They come away smelling like rot—it merges with the mountain sage. The stream that feeds the river has frozen and the dogs slide across the swirling infinite, cold and varying blues—it moves in the stillness of complex, frozen layers. The snow happens in patches and the dogs move over the ridge to chase a herd of mule deer that dots the saddle like watermelon seeds spit back into the bowl. I’m suffering. The cold makes my lungs crackle and my heart beats too hard in my chest from a lonesome, sedentary winter. It makes my collar bone ache. We scramble a bit in the last moment before completing our ascent. There is a cairn atop the peak. It is covered in vulture and eagle shit. In the distance, Bloody Dick peak rises from the Big Hole wilderness. That’s right, there is a Bloody Dick inside the Big Hole. From this height, the terrain is as sensual as a body outstretched on the bed. All nipples and curves and crevices. Or maybe bodies are sensual like the terrain. The wilderness is moaning and cracking, pushing and thrusting, gouged and gushing, and it’s serene.
After we descend, it is more beer and wine and whiskey, more dancing, more food, more conversation. The talk grows existential. I stop taking wine around midnight. The hangover after two days of heavy drinking is too much to bear anymore. I sleep curled up next to the dogs by the stove. The color cast on the walls in the room is an orange held between haze and illumination, pulsing and gyrating, moving with the shadows and other darkness through the night.
In the morning, we trek to the feet of the Humbug Spires. The way is narrow and everything is frozen, though the far-reaching limbs of the Douglas firs have kept the ground untouched by the mild snows that dusted Montana this winter. The landscape grows rockier the farther we go, and the quartz structures loom over us, the opposite of a monolith, rather an orgy of pock-marked, obese stone bodies mingling and distended. The gradient becomes steeper and the temperature drops, though we are still hot and stripped down to our bottom layers. The trail is carved by two sets of footprints in the snow, meandering through tree trunks both upright and fallen, over slick boulders and along the hidden shoreline of a black ice pond. We come to an old prospector’s cabin made of big logs stacked and rotted. By time. By the elements. I imagine the life of a prospector in this place. Just chopping wood and jerking off with a deep, unending cough while the furnace casts devilish colors and shapes onto the walls. Everything that is yours in a 12-foot space. I imagine his name is James McNamara—an Irish settler who rode a steam train to Butte, then traveled south on horseback rather than descending into the mines.
Far above, the Humbug Spires look like greyed cockroaches upright giving praise to the sky, and us, peering upward below them, we must look the same way. Human and stone as insects standing bewildered under one sky. The wind moves, the spires knead the clouds. Snow begins to fall.
Mason Parker is an Okie-born, Montana-based writer. His work is featured in or forthcoming from BULL, Expat, Cowboy Jamboree, and X-R-A-Y, among others. He was the winner of the second annual Bear Creek Gazette writing competition. In his free time, he enjoys exploring the Selway-Bitterroot wilderness with his partner and two dogs.