Wid

(Her gray ponytail hung halfway down her Levis jacket. Her boots were black and square-toed. She pointed a ringless left hand off toward the stumpy hillsides where the Army Corps was clearcutting the slopes in preparation for the filling of Libby Dam.)

"Wid Bisterfeldt grew up here in Montana, way up yonder, just south of the Canada border, up in the Yaak River country. His daddy was raised up there, and his granddaddy too, far as I know. As a family they were Bohunks, stuck to the old country ways of bringing in brides for the boys from Bavaria, growing cabbage and turnips, speaking German around the supper table. The Bisterfeldt boys all were big blond fellows, with big hands, born to log. That is what Wid was doing when World War Two broke out.
"You hear plenty about how the Japanese were all herded together into camps down on the Snake River in Oregon, where they are still farming onions today, but the American Germans in Montana took it from just a little different angle. Nobody wrote any songs about them.
"Wid, he lived so far back in the woods he didn't even know about Pearl Harbor and Hitler and whatall, until he hauled a wagon load of fence rails down to Libby in the spring of '42 and found out that nobody was buying anything from Krauts. Didn't matter that his family had been in that country fifty years longer than the mountains. By God, he had a German name, therefore he must be a Nazi agent.
"So Wid hauled his load back into the hills, and he and Hilda and the boys (never were any Bisterfeldt girls that I remember) started surviving up there on what they had canned and what they could grow or kill. It was a heavy snow that year and their work horse died.
"In May of '43 Wid showed up in Libby, trying to buy a horse. There was plenty of horseflesh around in those days because the Army was still using them and the French Canadians were still eating them, but the only animal he could buy from anybody was a proud-cut, six-year-old grade roan that the Army buyers had culled at the rail head. The rancher who sold that horse to Wid was trying to get even with Hitler, and, what's more, he demanded fifty dollars for the critter. Fifty bucks in those days should've bought three good young horses, but the Bisterfeldts were in a bind, so Wid paid the asking price.
"The horse wasn't even broke to lead. Word around town was that Wid carried it home. He was big enough to have done it.
"Around the Fourth of July, he was back in Libby, with the roan hitched to a wagon full of cow parts, heads and hides and legs and chunks of beef, all flyblown and tore to smithereens. Most of them carried the Rocking-B, the brand of Will Brown, the guy who had sold Wid the horse.
"Wid reported that there was a grizzly bear roaming the Yaak River country where the Cattleman's Association had a grazing allotment, and that the bear had developed a taste for Hereford. There were six dead cattle in Wid's wagon, who knows how many back in the woods. Wid volunteered to destroy the bear, for fifty dollars.
"Now, Will Brown didn't have much of a choice. Most of his hired help had run off and joined the service, and nobody really ever wants to mess with a grizzly anyway. Will couldn't afford to have his whole herd tore into pemmican, so he said yes, that he'd pay fifty bucks bounty on the bear. A week later Wid delivered a grizzly hide and head and Brown paid up.
"All through the war years it went just about like that. Wid would show up in town once a year with a wagon load of cow parts, some rancher or other would commission him to catch a bear, and the big fellow would bring in a grizzly hide. It wasn't until the mid-Sixties, when Wid's boys sold the home place and moved to California, that the real story sorta bubbled to the top.
"Up on the headwaters of the Yaak there is a long rock ledge, full of weather pockets, a natural bear motel. In the winter there might be ten or twelve grizzlies up there hibernating. Wid Bisterfeldt was a bear meat eater, liked the greasy stuff better than elk meat. Scalloped spuds and bear ham was his favorite food. The rest of his family preferred beef and dumplings.
"After the town turned sour on his family just because of their name, Wid figured the rules were bent a little against him, so he took to freezing the grizzly hides from his winter meat hunts in an ice cave north of his home. In the summer when the cattle grazed up into his part of the mountains, he'd harvest enough parts off of several head of Herefords to make jerky and canned beef for his wife and kids, then carry the remainder of the carcasses down to Libby, tell a bear tale, get the eradication job, then come back to town and sell a bear hide for fifty dollars. Gave the grizzlies a sour name all over that part of Montana, but it sure got the Bisterfeldts through some lean years."