When he returned with Pauline two years later, they hit upon a ranch called the L-Bar-T on the eastern edge of Yellowstone National Park, just south of the old mining town of Cooke City, Montana. It was run by a Swede, Lawrence Nordquist, who offered them a cabin in the woods with a view of the mountains. Hemingway loved the fishing in the nearby Clarks Fork River and he and Pauline and the family returned to the Nordquist ranch throughout the thirties, until fame and another divorce lured Hemingway to the lusher pastures of Sun Valley, Idaho.
This morning, early, we load up and head south to see Yellowstone Park for ourselves. I can’t match Hemingway’s yellow Ford, but given the nature of the weather, have accepted the kind offer of a Ford F250, a big bruiser of a pick-up that, literally, weighs a ton.
The day looks promising, a big, largely clear sky with licks of grey cloud on the Bridger mountains to the north-east. At Livingston we swing south and follow the Yellowstone River, past turn-offs to places whose names tell you all the essentials of local history. Pray, Emigrant and Miner.
The valley road, bordered by pale and ghostly stands of silver birch is still dark, but the snow-covered slopes of the high mountains ahead of us shine gloriously in the first brightness of the rising sun. Highway 89 feels like the road to heaven.
Once we’re inside the park boundaries, there’s a dramatic change of scenery. A third of Yellowstone Park was burned by multiple fires in 1988 and we pass through a desolate and depressing landscape of slopes strewn with scorched and broken pine trees.
But where the grass grows there is plenty of life. A wolf, businesslike and preoccupied, trots off into the trees, a herd of elk passes more slowly, the females calling to each other in high-pitched whinnies. Every now and then the bull elk lets out a high, pumping cry which is known, accurately enough, as a bugle. A solitary bison with its huge head and spindly back legs grazes beside an old cavalry post. He looks vaguely incongruous, as if he’s been put there by the tourist office, but once he and his kind had this land pretty much to themselves. Nearly two hundred years ago, when the explorers Lewis and Clark made the first overland crossing of America, they reported that it took them ten days to ride through one bison herd. There are now fewer than three thousand left in the three and a half thousand square miles of Yellowstone Park.
High point of the day’s journey is the Craig Pass on the Continental Divide. Not only are we up above eight thousand feet but there’s something about the name and the concept of a continental divide that has always appealed. Like the North or South Pole or the source of the Amazon, it’s a place that is far more significant than it looks.
Spend a while turning my head one way and then the other, trying to take in the fact that rain falling on one side of me drains east to the Mississippi, and rain falling on the other side of me may well end up coming out of a lawn sprinkler in Beverly Hills. We return home past the thermal wonders of the Park like the Old Faithful Geyser and the bubbling Fountain Paint Pot hot springs. I toy with the idea of a documentary on such places called This Flatulent Earth.
But the big sights are full of people and that was what Hemingway came out west to get away from. He came to write and hunt and I must try and find some of his present-day counterparts.
Breakfast at Big Sky, an hour’s ride from Bozeman up the dramatic Gallatin Valley, with rugged vertical rock faces on its east bank and a fast, bustling river. This is skiing country and the buildings are raised on stone pilings against the winter conditions.
This time of year, October, is, I’m told, about the best time to visit. Less busy than the summer, more accessible than the winter, and beautiful too, with the sun hitting at dramatically low angles.
Hemingway enjoyed driving across America. In his sixtieth year, he drove through Iowa, Nebraska and Wyoming, keeping himself going, according to his biographer Carlos Baker, by listening to the World Series and ‘stopping at grocery stores in the smaller towns to buy apples, cheese, and pickles, which he washed down with Scotch and fresh lime juice.’ Eurghh.
At the side of the road just before Big Sky resort there is a long single-storey building with a log-cabin finish called the Corral Bar. It’s a folksy, friendly place with a good smell of bacon and fresh coffee and, I like to think, just the sort of spot where Hemingway would have found the company he liked. The rest-rooms are called ‘Bucks’ and ‘Does’ and the decoration favours things like bleached deer skulls. A huge moose-head hangs out over one of the tables. It bears an expression of amused tolerance and the curly-haired bison next to it looks positively angelic. Man, beast and breakfast in perfect harmony.
The elk-shooting season begins today, and the bow-hunting season ends. I get talking to a group of hunters, all around thirty or forty, with very big moustaches, who are about to leave for three or four days of elk-hunting in the outback.
I tell them I’ve heard some pretty unpleasant stories of modern convenience hunters, would-be Hemingways who drive out to game farms and on payment of several thousand dollars, have a farm-raised moose or elk led out for them to shoot in a fenced-off area. Kill guaranteed. Maximum amount of money for the minimum of effort.
This group condemns such people vociferously. They’re not hunters. All they want is a trophy. The real difference between the two approaches seems to boil down to the same answer I’ve had from everyone who hunts. Respect for the animal.
‘I have more respect for elk than I do for most people,’ one of them maintains, which just about sums up this curious commingling of sentiment and slaughter.
They regard the tracking as an essential part of hunting, and they describe the delights of stalking their prey over difficult terrain.
‘You can find a nice fresh big bold track in snow, you know, fresh that morning and still steaming droppings, and you know you’re right on him and he’s walking five miles an hour and you’re only going three. You have to run sometimes. It gets pretty exciting.’
They seem to enjoy the risks. They tell stories of being bitten in the thigh by grizzly bears and charged by buffalo, as if these were what made the whole thing worth while.
They believe it’s important to make use of what they kill. One of them thinks that you should have to prove you’re going to eat the animal before you’re allowed to hunt it, which seems quite reasonable to me. Up here where winter lasts six months of the year, people need the meat and the livelihood that comes from hunting. Nothing of the elk they kill is wasted, even the antlers are sold to Korea for what they call, possibly euphemistically, vitamin supplement.
The other element is that of tradition. Though two or three of these hunters are old Californian hippies, they do regard the shouldering of the gun as tapping in to a great American tradition and an even greater universal tradition. As one puts it, they see themselves as part of ‘the cycle of life in the mountains’.
An hour later, having tapped in to the Great American Breakfast, we start back to Bozeman. The hunting party has forded the white waters of the Gallatin River and is clambering slowly up the steep, snow-slippery hill on the far bank. I feel a nagging envy. I’d go with them like a shot if I didn’t have to kill an elk.