Black bears and porcupines are common yard pests on Chicken Ridge but Aki has never had a chance to bark at a deer walking past the house. I saw at least one deer each day of my visit to Montana wheat country.
A fine-boned whitetail doe spied on my sister and I while we wandered the ruins of an old brick factory, now pottery center, near Helena. I biked past a grazing mule deer and her sister near Missoula. On our last evening at the family ranch near Geraldine, we finally saw the little doe that had broken trails through the ranch’s shelter belt of Russian olives and other draught resistant plants.
The Montana prairie, so yielding to a wide sky, provides a good retreat place for rain forest dwellers but you have to dress in layers. It can rain hard or burn you during a heat wave.
In August, after harvest time, it’s all monochrome, stiff stubble. But last week we had sunny, warm days spiced up with afternoon thunderstorms. The still green wheat pushed to harvest height and the leaders of a tribe of prong horn antelope shepherded their young across the summer fallow.
In Fort Benton the old cottonwood trees along the Missouri River released down that floated across the red brick facade of the Grand Union Hotel, then gathered into drifts when the wind dropped. We saw deer there and along the two lane roads that climbed from the river to rolling wheat lands that appear to break like surf around Square and Round Buttes.
A porcupine scurried along the road as we drove away from the ranch our last day. I expected him to rise up and ask for a ride to Juneau, where the water rich plants in our yard would offer him a welcome break from the August drought to come.
As we round False Outer Point I notice the incoming tide, normally as stealthy as a submerging seal, splash over near-shore rocks with as little regard for silence as a surprised seal lion. Fog ghosts move quickly across Smuggler’s Cove. In minutes they become stuck in a hillside spruce forest where they will melt away as the day warms.
I look for drama, a flash of yellow warbler or the plume of a surfacing whale but there are only crows, crabby if their harsh calls mean anything, and one immature eagle that floats to its cliff top roost.
Thankfully, there is rain to dimple the sea and slick rock tide pools. It wets a midden of pulverized mussel and clam shells so they sparkle under Aki’s feet. The shower adds the drama that I seem to need on this mid-summer morning.
Walking with Aki 