"A River Runs through It and Other Stories"

The other stories, still more elements, and even more male:

• The lumberjack and the cowboy followed many of the same basic economic and ecological patterns. They achieved a balance if they were broke at the end of the year.
• But of course caulks would have ripped out at the edges of a shoe and made you stumble and trip at the toes, so the design started with a row of blunt, sturdy hobnails around the edges... Then inside came the battlefield of caulks, the real barbwire, with two rows of caulks coming down each side of the sole and one row on each side continuing into the instep to hold you when you jumped crosswise on a log.
• I suppose that an early stage in coming to hate someone is just running out of things to talk about.
• about an hour after everyone was in bed and presumably asleep there were attempts at homosexuality, usually unsuccessful if the statistics I started to keep were at all representative.
• punching. Fortunately, I guess, I always realized this might be just theory, and I continued to act as if he were the best fighter in camp, as he probably was, but, you know, it still bothers me that maybe he wasn’t.
• my mother who inherited the unmentioned infirmity of being part English.
• I went back to the United States Forest Service and fought fires, which to Jim was like declaring myself a charity case and taking the rest cure.
• I had as yet no notion that life every now and then becomes literature—not for long, of course, but long enough to be what we best remember, and often enough so that what we eventually come to mean by life are those moments when life, instead of going sideways, backwards, forward, or nowhere at all, lines out straight, tense and inevitable, with a complication, climax, and, given some luck, a purgation, as if life had been made and not happened.
• You can’t imagine what a Christianizing effect it has, even on a mule, to stand for a couple of hours in the hot sun minus a foot.
• In the early Forest Service, our major artist was the packer, as it usually has been in worlds where there are no roads.
• The unpacking was just as beautiful—one wet satin back after another without saddle or saddle sore, and not a spot of white wet flesh where hair and hide had rubbed off. Perhaps one has to know something about keeping packs balanced on the backs of animals to think this beautiful, or to notice it at all, but to all those who work come moments of beauty unseen by the rest of the world.
• You may know, when a fire gets big enough it generates its own wind.
• The rest of us slowly extended the fire trench down the sides of the fire. The bottom of it we let go for a while—a fire doesn’t go very far or fast downhill.
• through burning branches and feathered ashes so light they rose ahead of us as we approached.
• It doesn’t take much in the way of body and mind to be a lookout. It’s mostly soul.
• By three-thirty or four, the lightning would be flexing itself on the distant ridges like a fancy prizefighter, skipping sideways, ducking, showing off but not hitting anything. By four-thirty or five, it was another game.
• as the boy stands there with nothing to do but to watch, seemingly the sky itself bends and the stars blow down through the trees until the Milky Way becomes lost in some distant forest. As the cosmos brushes by the boy and disappears among the trees, the sky is continually replenished with stars.
• it began to snow. It was August 27, and the stuff was damp and heavy and came down by the pound.
• it had begun to melt. Hundreds of shrubs had been bent over like set snares, and now they sprang up in the air throwing small puffs of white as if hundreds of snowshoe rabbits were being caught at the same instant.
• The snake lay there as if he had never left his coil. He whirred and watched. He just barely left the next move up to me, and I made it fast. I almost set a record for a standing backward jump. It was getting so that I was doing most of my thinking in the air.
• But pretty soon the line crossed an old fire burn, maybe one of those 1910 burns, and the only trees standing were long dead and had no bark on them—and were as hard as ebony. I could get only about half an inch of spur in them and so I rocked around on the tips of my spurs and prayed the half inch would hold.
• you have an extra hazard to overcome—you have to lean even farther back on your rear end and swing a little ax to chop off the limbs as you go up, because your belt is around that tree and it has to go up if you are. Also going up with you are at least 250 yards of number nine wire, getting heavier and tauter every time you stick half an inch of spur into this totem pole of Carborundum. Below on the tree are the sharp stubs of branches you have chopped.
• when I finally reached the ground I felt as if an Indian had started a fire by rubbing two sticks together, using me for one of the sticks.
• Until this time I hadn’t been old enough to realize that you can’t hate a guy without expecting him to return the compliment. Up to now, I thought you could hate somebody as if it were your own business.
• and in the center circle of male magic sits the cardshark,
• Once their bets became official by my handing over their money to Bill, they gathered every night to see the cook shuffle, peering in a semicircle around the table like a bunch of rail birds at a race track watching their favorite horse work out.
• They were mapping the back country where, they said, “the government hadn’t figured out yet what they had stolen from the Indians.”
• From the divide the mountain I had lived on was bronze sculpture. It was all shape with nothing on it, just nothing. It was just color and shape and sky. It was as if some Indian beauty before falling asleep forever had decided to leave exposed what she thought was not quite her most beautiful part. So perhaps at a certain perspective what we leave behind is often wonderland, always different from what it was and generally more beautiful.
• Sometimes all you have left to win with is the knowledge of why you’re taking the beating and the realization that nobody else is going to save you from it.
• (the long march:) Since it never got closer while I watched, I didn’t look until it was there. I have always been grateful to Hamilton for being, if not where I expected, at least where I could understand.
• But then she started to dedicate a stave to each time he had double-crossed her, and each stave she ended with: “Yŏu aŕe ăs cróokĕd ás ă túb ŏf gúts.” She liked this line and used it as a kind of refrain, and from it I picked up the scansion and realized for the first time that she was speaking iambic pentameter,
• It’s as simple as this—you never forget the guys who helped you fight the big fire or clean out the town.
• Coyotes are wily animals, but wily animals including ourselves and coyotes have more set patterns than we think.
• when there are a lot of guys in a fight it usually doesn’t last long, for the simple reason that a lot of guys don’t like to fight. Only a few like to fight and know how. Most guys take a couple of punches on the nose and swallow blood and suddenly grow weak with sisterly feelings about brotherly love.
• as Bill said, we were a pretty good crew and we did what we had to do and loved the woods without thinking we owned them, and each of us liked to do at least one thing especially well—liked to swing a jackhammer and feel the earth overpowered by dynamite, liked to fight, liked to heal the injuries of horses, liked to handle groceries and tools and tie knots. And nearly all of us liked to work. When you think about it, that’s a lot to say about a bunch of men.
• Perhaps, too, at daybreak I might see my four-gaited moose steaming beside a lilypad.
• Bill sat twisted in his saddle like the Egyptian bas-relief. Collectively, Bill’s outfit—Bill himself, his favorite saddle horse, his favorite pack horse, and his dog—were about the finest the early Forest Service had to offer... the trotting dog and horses became generalized into creeping animals and the one to the side became a speck and those in a line became just a line. Slowly the line disintegrated into pieces and everything floated up and away in dust and all that settled out was one dot, like Morse code.