Badluck Way: A Year on the Ragged Edge of the West by Bryce Andrews

He preferred coyotes. With the radio blasting, the window wide open, and the AC blowing, he spent the long evenings of summer chasing them across the Flats. His favorite method of dispatch was to pull up alongside and shoot from the driver’s seat.
    At least once he missed his mark and found the pistol empty. The exhausted coyote edged ahead. The driver looked across the heaving line of his quarry’s backbone and mashed the gas pedal until the V-8 screamed.
    Steve stopped there, paused, and then shrugged.
    “Could be a bunch of bullshit, but that’s what I heard.”
    He paid his tab and shook my hand. Pulling on a dirty oilcloth coat, Steve nodded to the other guys drinking at the bar and took his leave.
    As I waited to settle up with the bartender, I listened to more talk from the regulars. Down at the far end of the bar, the man in the black Stetson was still going strong about his days as a deputy sheriff. When I stood to go he was midway through a story about some notorious Virginia City woman who ended up handcuffed to the side-view mirror of his cruiser.
    “I put it in gear and drove right down the street,” he said. “She jumped on the hood and broke off both windshield wipers.
    “Goddamn.” He chuckled. “She had a sense of humor.”
    Walking down Main Street in the dark, I thought about two notable artifacts on the ranch left over from the action hero’s tenure: a pair of log cabins from a movie shoot below the beginning of Bad Luck Canyon and a stone hot tub in the absolute middle of nowhere.
    Made of stacked logs and set on stone foundations, the cabins are meant to look scenic and old, and they do. By now they have outlasted any interest in the film for which they were built.
    I spent one night in the bigger of the two cabins when we had a herd of cow-calf pairs bedded down nearby and the wolves were prowling through. Mice kept me awake, but other than that, the cabins were unused. They’d sat through storms and turned gray, settling on their foundations until no trace of Hollywood remained. Given a few more decades of freeze, thaw, and wind, they would be indistinguishable from half a dozen other homestead shacks on the place.
    The action hero’s other legacy was a bit more useful. Before selling the ranch, he’d engaged the services of a renowned mason from Ennis. The contractor had hauled load after load of cobbles from a nearby creek and cemented them into a massive tub. Pink, green, and black, the stones were smooth to the touch and as big around as beach balls. The tub was a low cylinder, fourteen feet across and four deep—beautiful craftsmanship.
    The water came out of the ground fifty feet away and collected in a crystal-clear scalding pool, the kind for which Yellowstone Park is famous. Strange, thick algae grew in the pond, and a steel pipe ran downhill from it to curl over the tub’s east wall like a kitchen faucet. The pipe gushed hot water day and night.
    At night, the stars above the tub were so beautiful that I woreout my neck looking up. I spent hours soaking, swimming circles, and listening to the faraway drone of airliners. I traced dark skylines with my eyes: first the slump-shouldered hills of the Gravelly Range, then the toothy peaks of the Madisons. A tiny pinprick glow from a talc mine fifteen miles away was the only man-made light.
    When I used the tub I thought of its builder rolling and hefting the stones, and then concentrating on the meticulous task of cementing them together. He must have worked for weeks, maybe months, to set the boulders as precisely as jewels. I compared those labors to my own job of fencing, herding, doctoring cows, and setting out salt, and came away impressed.

    The clerk at the Ennis grocery store asked me where I worked. When I told her, she said she knew a lot about Roger. They hadn’t ever talked, she admitted, but she held forth on how much he loved the wolves and his future plans for the Sun Ranch. She called him a “greenie” and lowered