It Takes a Poacher

You want a poacher caught, you hire a poacher. That was the whole of Major William Logan's thinking in nineteen ten, when he came to run this brand new park and went looking for rangers. It takes a poacher to find a poacher, he said, and he went and got himself a good one. Joe Cosley. A tall trapper who'd been living off these mountains for fifteen years. Logan posted him to the Belly River, way up in the park's northeast corner, about as far from a supervisor as a man could get. Cosley wrote poetry. He wore a red sash. He named lakes after his lady friends, and he carved his name and his hearts into trees, hundreds of trees. In nineteen thirteen he spent fifteen hundred dollars on a diamond ring for a Canadian girl, and her family sent it back. Legend has it he once finished a long day's work near Polebridge, ran thirty-five miles over the mountains to a dance hall in Waterton, danced the night away, and ran back in time for work. He never quit trapping. A year after they hired him they fired him for poaching near Lake McDonald, and the story goes he paid the pink slip no mind, kept working, and somehow the park kept paying him. Even after they made it stick, he came and went for years, running his skins north over the line. Nineteen twenty-nine. Ranger Joe Heimes walked up on an illegal camp in the Belly River country and found a man with furs and traps beside him, and allowed that he looked a lot like Joe Cosley. Yes, I am, the man said, but you're not taking me in. They spent the night there, Cosley chewing the rag till daylight. In the morning Heimes started him for the ranger station. A quarter mile along, Cosley ran. Heimes tackled him in the brush. Another quarter mile, Cosley turned around and said this is as far as I'm going, and they went at it, and the ranger bumped Cosley's head against a tree and, in his own words, sort of knocked him coo-coo. A quarter mile more, and he ran again. So Heimes pulled the laces out of his own boots and tied the man's hands with them. They hauled him to Belton. Heimes figured on a few days in jail. The court fined him a hundred dollars, friends helped pay it, and Joe Cosley walked out. The rangers knew where he was bound, to his cache of furs on the Belly River. They caught a train around to the east side. Cosley went over the top. Fifty-nine years old, on snowshoes, across the Continental Divide, in under twenty hours by one newspaper's count. When the law got there, the furs were gone and so was he. He stayed in Canada, trapping to the end. That ring, some say he buried it in a tree, and it's in the park yet. Others say he dug it out to pay for gear. You can have the gear. Give me some old tree in the high country with a heart cut in its side, and a diamond shut up inside, and the wood closing around it, one ring at a time.