This essay appeared in Fourth Genre: Explorations in Nonfiction (Vol.12No.1), Spring, 2010.

Sweat stings my eyes, and my breath comes hard at 4,100 feet, but damned if I'll quit sawing. Muscle burn in my arm and shoulder confirms the toughness of the foot-thick cedar crushing the barbed wire fence that we're here to fix.

"You want a break?" calls Jim from upslope, where he and his wife, Peg, are grappling with a tangle of wire. Behind them, the fence line threads to the horizon. After this section is repaired and restretched, we'll follow it up there and for another mile beyond in the couple of days we have left.

"Nope," I manage to say. "I've almost got it." This is my first day back at Lone Indian Ranch, and I'm ready for this. Backhanding the sweat, rm satisfied by the stain it puts on the purple leather of the work glove. My cousin Kathy knows I always forget gloves, always has some for me to use. But this trip, she's gotten me a brand new pair. They are too stiff, and I don't like how the color seems like something only a dude would wear.

The metal teeth of the saw can only chew so much wood at a time, so it's useless to press down. I imagine my arm is a piston moving back and forth, powered by the steady two-stroke punch of my raspy breath, in, out. At last, the big tree yields. While Jim and Peg climb down to me, I raise the other glove to my forehead, sweat-stain it too, and smile.

It takes the three of us to heave the cedar tree over the crushed fence line, out of the way. Uphill, from the shade of.the pickup truck, the four dogs sit up to watch the commotion for a moment, then lie back, panting, against the cooler earth.

This parched hillside is nothing like the greenér pastures of the bottomland where, earlier this morning, Kathy, Peg, and I walked out to Lower Sweetgrass Road. It's three-quarters of a mile from the ranch house to the mailbox, and 17 miles on gravel road from there to the town of Big Timber. All of this is worlds away from my softer life several hours by plane east of here. I'm easily lured back to Montana, been out here many times to help with such tasks as lambing, cattle branding, irrigating. This trip, it's fencing.

I'm new to this essential ranching chore. Fencing altered the West, tamed it. I understand the need for a bit of order, even here on the open range. The ranchers I've met—as independent as they can be—are oddly reassured by the straightness of a good fence line, grateful for it when the time comes to funnel livestock down from summer grazing to the barnyard.

This short section of fence line was restretched yesterday, before I arrived, but the five strands of barbed wire still need to be clipped to the posts. My tutorial was brief, typical: "Hold the pliers like this and bend the clip under like this," Kathy said. Using her fencing pliers like a conductor's baton, she had smoothly wrapped the clip around the green metal post. Looked simple enough. She hadn't waited around to see if I got it.

Grabbing a shiny new V-shaped clip, I had turned to the fence. Clips are made of stiff heavy-gauge wire, beefier than a clothes hanger, designed to fit the green, triangular posts that ranchers use now instead of excavating cedar post holes in this unforgiving ground. Done right, a clip hooks the barbed wire so that it effectively hugs the post. It shouldn't have been hard.

What is hard, actually, is the day-in, day-out life Kathy has led here for decades with her rancher husband, Lyle. In winter, there's the cold trek to the lambing and calving sheds every two hours, day and night. In summer, there's the manual repositioning of crop irrigation pipes several times a day, at least until the Sweetgrass River runs dry. Shipping stock to market. Harvesting the hay, or delivering the huge, round bales through deep snow to the cows in winter. Gardening, canning, baking. Hanging laundry washed in stinking, sulfurous well water to dry in the Montana wind. This place is softened by the gracefulness of the elk, antelope, and deer, but hardened by the presence of the coyotes and mountain lions who prey upon them. And then there are always the rattlesnakes. Snakes are no one's favorite, but they come with the territory as surely as drifts in winter.

The remoteness of the ranch is almost as spectacular as the constant financial worry. But Kathy and Lyle make life here seem nothing other than exactly what they want, even now that they've bowed to age and no longer keep livestock. Things have never gotten to the point that they’d abandon the place, not yet, not even now that Parkinson's disease and heart troubles have confined Lyle to the house.

Still, the fences need to be kept up, if only for appearances. It's a job for a team of people, which is where Peg, Jim, and I come in. I have come from the Midwest, where I, a mountain girl at heart, have lived reluctantly for 20 years. They have come from their boathouse in Seattle, where they moved when their Navy lives drew them from here back to the sea. Like me, they return whenever they can.

Back at the road, I had turned to my first fence post with confidence. Kathy made the job look easy enough. But my novice efforts failed again and again. If I let go to grope for the pliers with hands encased in the new leather gloves, the clip would slingshot off the wire. I'd fumble for it in the shin-high bristle of prairie grass. Retrieve it, reset it, realize the pliers were backwards in my hand. Clumsily reposition the pliers, rehang the clip, snag a barb, pull back, drop the clip, fumble in the grass. I know Kathy and Peg must have enjoyed sidelong glances at me, but people here admire self-reliance and so they had left me alone.

It's the excuse of helping like this that brings me back here, but what really gets me here is bigger than that. Being here reminds me that there are still a few unregulated, unplanned, unsystematized places in the world. Where I live, the sidewalks are even. The lawns are edged, and gardens are fussily tidy. In winter, streets are plowed before dawn to keep commuters happy. In autumn, the leaves are hauled away for you. Food comes wrapped in cellophane with expiration dates, and no matter what a person might have a hankering for, it's all just a few blocks away. What I hanker for is to escape that predictable world of congestion, unrelenting traffic lights, noise, and commercialization. I stick out in that world. If my neighbors think I'm odd, wanting to spend my free time working on a ranch, I don't care. It's not silly to me. Not at all.

That morning, out by the road, there was no electric hum, no urban vibration beneath my feet. Not a single ring tone. electronic beep—not even the sound of an engine. Not a car or truck went down the road all morning. I could hear the calls of distant birds. I could see cows moving across the pasture nearby, and the four dogs as they snuffled prairie-dog holes. I could feel the stillness of the earth, and it made me happy.

At last, I had finally managed to wrestle a couple of clips onto the post. Didn't look quite right. "Does it matter if the ends are pointing up?" I asked. The clip was wobbly and deformed, like a child's efforts to shape something out of clay. I knew Lyle would have something to say if he saw this. He took pride in doing things right.

Kathy had come over.

"Hold the wire and the clip together like this. Use the pointed end of the pliers to pull the double-bend around the wire like this," she said. "It goes pretty well that way, and you can remove it more easily later, too." Still pithy, but encouraging.

Holding the clip as she showed me, I had turned to face my second chance. I was able to see, then, how it stabilized the wire on the post just so. Pulling the clip into range, I had pinched it in the parrot-like beak of the pliers, flipped the whole handful in a wide arc around the wire. How easy it had suddenly seemed as the clip tightened smoothly, just right, ends down. I reached for another clip, repeating the routine. Again it went right, and the work began to take on a satisfying rhythm, the sort of calm rhythm I missed in the willy-nilly multitasking world at home. Soon, we were done, and the fence stood in precise, even lines, like new recruits straightened by a drill sergeant.

As we had walked back toward Kathy and Lyle's updated 1880s log house, I remembered other trips up this driveway. I'd seen this view in all seasons, and I loved knowing how the ranch buildings hiding in a dip past the ranch bridge would ease into view. I remembered Lyle as the true cowboy he was, raised in Wyoming helping his family manage their stock of hundreds of horses. A big man, he always turned to each new task with a hearty "All right!" I remembered one time when we were feeding the sheep and he asked me to drive the pickup ahead a few feet, slowly. I remembered how he hadn't checked first to see if I could drive a stick shift, and how I hadn't stalled the engine, not once. I remembered, too, the time he came into the lambing shed at 1:30 AM when I was using a hair dryer to warm a lamb I'd pulled, breech, from its mother. Together, we settled the mother, the twin, and that breech lamb into a straw-filled pen. As we turned off the lights and closed the shed door, I remembered, the world had seemed so quiet, so right.

On every trip up that driveway, I marveled at Lyle's ingenuity in using the steel frame of a scrap flatbed trailer to build an inexpensive but serviceable ranch bridge across the Sweetgrass River. The flatbed, resting on immense boulders on both sides of the creek bed, fit perfectly across the river, and the bridge was unexpectedly stout. The only downside—to me—was the way the driveway dipped slightly down to the bridge. On this gentle June morning, it seemed quaint, but I remembered how insufficient the six-inch-high steel sides seemed against the fifteen-foot plunge to the water on an icy winter's day. You'd never see a bridge like this back east.

After crossing the bridge, we had strolled up a gentle rise to the cattle guard, a common ranch device made of rows of five-inch pipe set a few inches apart. For some reason, cattle guards stop cows, while letting ranchers pass a fence line without the hassle of gates. We hopscotched casually from one pipe to the next.

I saw it first.

"Jeez!" I said, managing somehow not to overreact. "Look at that snake!"

Instinctively, everyone had frozen. Except for the tip-off of disturbed grass around it, the snake resting by the nearest fence post was nearly invisible with its mottled brown and black camouflage. It was so big and long that it seemed like a fire hose without water in it, collapsed and flat in coils against the ground.

The dogs had nosed forward, curious. "Sally! Get back!" Kathy had hissed at her bigger dog in a low voice. "Emma," she growled at the smaller one. "Back!" Automatically, each of us had scanned the four feet of snake to get a look at its tail. No rattle. Only a bull snake. Everyone relaxed a little and stared respectfully at what was, after all, a remarkable creature.

The snake had stared back sullenly for a long minute. At last, moving without seeming to move, the way only a snake can, it had retreated toward the ditch under the cattle guard. Its unblinking black eyes never left us. It reminded me of a naughty child trying to slink away from trouble. Finally, sensing safety, it had bolted into the dark. Amazing, I thought, how fast snakes can move. And incredible how hard they are to see—always a matter of concern in this place. I wondered what else might have just hopscotched over, grateful for my thick leather hiking boots.

An event like this back in suburbia, where such wildness has long been banished, would involve screaming and, possibly, hysteria. There's none of that here, where snakes are just a fact of life—especially not over a bull snake. Sure, snakes can be dangerous, and no one will argue that they can be startling. But once you determine it's not a rattler, well, then the moment is over, a footnote.

Rattlers are a different story. There's no mistaking that haunting, ominous sound. The very next day, Kathy nearly stepped on one, on her way in early from fencing. Sure, she admitted, she got a good jolt of adrenalin, but then what else was there to do but give the snake a wide berth and resume her hike down the hill. Another time, she called to tell me how she nearly stepped on one as she was leaving the house. The vibrating hum rose literally at her feet. "It was right there by the door, so I went back through the house and out the back door," she said. A snake that close to the house isn't welcome, even in Montana, Kathy said, "so I got a shovel and ambushed it from the other side." After she killed it, she headed on into town.

A trip to Big Timber is a tooth-jarring ride on washboard billowing with irrepressible dust, unless it's whited out by snow. Kathy? s family still lives in Big Timber. They came here when she was 11, when her dad, my step-uncle, abandoned Chicago's corporate world in 1953 to raise the family here. "People are starting to think I'm native," she proudly tells me. "I don't bother to correct them." It only took 50 years.

Kathy can't tolerate the intense Montana sun after midmorning anymore, so she stays inside after lunch when Peg, Jim, and I pile into the ranch truck. A pickup truck on a Montana ranch is like the people: tough, hardy. This one is dented and battered from years of hard work, and the windshield is cracked.

As the engine grinds in low gear away from the house, the high prairie quiet is punctuated by the four barking dogs running alongside. Peg and Jim's dogs, medium-sized and jet black, flow like nighttime shadows across the grass with Sally, the Australian shepherd. Bounding comically—and impressively quickly for a dog with four-inch legs—is Emma, the Welsh corgi who seems to have no idea she's little.

We drive past the now-deserted barns and corrals and head uphill. It's a bouncy, first-gear trip past the graveyard of rusting, abandoned farm equipment. Across a dry creek bed, we head steeply up to the section of fence line where the fallen cedar is crushing the fence. From my perch in the bed of the pickup—among posts, clip boxes, spools of wire, and fencing tools—I can scan beyond the ranch buildings below, across to two mountain ranges miles away to the west and south. This is indeed "Big Sky" country, but the state slogan barely captures the cloudless and intensely blue dome overhead.

When Jim kills the engine, silence floods in like water from a burst dam. The dogs dive for the shade under the truck. The only sounds are their panting and the drumming wings of a fly trapped against the windshield inside the cab. We stand a moment, stretch, look around.

Downhill, the shaded gloom of the dense underbrush in the draw looks like work. Thickets like this crop up wherever there's a hint of water. It's brown now, but in spring it was green with the brief nourishment of winter runoff. In the shadows, we can see the fallen cedar holding the fence hostage. I offer to saw it, because that way I'll be able to stay in one place for a while. I hate to admit it, but I still have snakes on my mind.

While I work on the cedar, Peg and Jim assess the rest of the job. At the bottom of the draw, Jim rigs up a gate that will allow springtime debris to float under without letting the cows through once it's dry again. On the flank of the hillside above, Peg yanks on wire trapped by long grass that was whipped and woven over it by the Montana wind. I happen to look up as a 30-foot length pops loose. In its abrupt freedom, the barbed wire arches and swings like an oversized jump rope.

Peg is washed out by the intensity of light and heat out there. Not that I mind this dry high-country heat after the humidity of the East. But there's a searing quality to this place. It's easy not to notice, especially when there's a cooling breeze, until the sunburn follows a person to bed later, pulsing redly into the night.

Today, there is no breeze. The heat is building especially fast. Once all the wires have been located and freed, we go up to the truck for some water. Jim pulls the stretching tool out of the back and sets it by the endpost we'll use to pull the wire tight. These stout wooden posts, sunk deep, are the anchors of a good fence line. Without decent endposts, this work would be futile.

The three of us spread out maybe 50 feet apart, the two endposts now bracketing us. The newly unburied wire is tangled, and the strands are god-awful hard to separate. The tenacious nature of barbed wire puts everyday burrs to shame. It will snag anything within reach with ferocity, including itself.

We pull. We jiggle. We flick the wire up and down. We coax. Sometimes, a section loosens abruptly and undulates wildly. As each strand is freed, we pull it out of the way, secure it from rebounding and retangling.

It is quiet work now, since we are too far apart to chat. I am distracted by a tickle near the outside of my elbow. I can't let go of the strands of wire without chancing that I'll lose control of them. Feels like the tickle of a fly. I jerk my arm outward and back. Doesn't go away. I thump my arm a couple of times, hard, against my side. Still there.

I glance down, but the uprolled sleeve of my blue workshirt is blocking my view. Finally, I contort enough to see, and am surprised by a vivid red line sliding toward the cuff of my glove. My blood looks out of place in this nearly colorless landscape. I didn't feel the bite of the barb, and I wonder vaguely whether my tetanus shot is current.

I let go of the wire, reach for a handful of dry grass, mesh it together, press it against my arm. There's no point in going to the truck for a bandage; it's such a little thing. People at home would be astonished by my casual response. The sight of blood there nowadays generates reactions that border on ridiculous; recently, a wrestling match at the high school screeched to a stop for a full ten minutes so people with Latex gloves could mop up a bit of blood. Here, a scratch is nothing. It is trivial, compared to the rest of the dangers that are, simply, a matter of fact.

In three days, I will be at the airport, wistful to be leaving. I will survey my torn arms with pride. But right now, I am mildly annoyed because I'd imagined naively that I could avoid the nicks and scratches everyone else had.

The bleeding persists, so I use the relatively clean purple leather cuff of one of my work gloves as a compress. Soon, it is bloodstained, but the bleeding has stopped. I rejoin Peg and Jim in our funny barbed-wire line dance. It makes me oddly happy to know, with time easing toward lunch, that my gloves are further seasoned, and so am I.

Once the rusted, tangled wire is clarified into five lines, we decide to finish this section before we head back.

"Bottom strand first," calls Jim. He's standing at the endpost near the truck, wire stretcher in position. This leaves only me and Peg to handle the entire length of wire.

We work bottom strand up because sometimes the first wires to be done loosen some when the others are redeemed, and it's the top wire that needs to be tightest. We double-check that nothing is between the bottom strand and each fence post. We signal Jim, and he starts ratcheting the line. It tightens, begins to straighten.

"More?" he calls.

I look up at Peg, who is between Jim and me, and shrug. Gauging tautness requires judgment I don't have.

"A little more," she calls up to him.

Almost imperceptibly, the wire moves and straightens a bit.

"A little more!"

The wire moves again, tautens.

"There!" she shouts. "That's good!"

This moment seems surprisingly subtle after all we've done so far. It seems magical the way the wire is suddenly just right to lift and clip six inches up each post. My clipping technique is getting smoother, I notice, and the pliers feel more natural in my hands.

We coax the next strand into position, and again Jim stretches the wire. Again, I'm entranced by that moment when the wire transitions from unruly and limp to orderly and straight. We pull it up over the bottom wire, clip it six inches further up the post.

I race to do more than my share of the clipping. I like the repetition. Seeing the fence begin to stand up proud once again is reward enough. But I wonder how we'll ever manage to get the final three strands off the ground and into position over those we've already restrung. Our work is hampered by a hump in the hill that draws the old wire into the dirt. How can Jim possibly restretch it and still leave enough slack to let us to cajole it into position up on the posts? But he's done a lot of fencing over the years. I hold my tongue. Patience, I know, is a good thing on a ranch.

Jim stretches the wire, just a little.

"0K," he calls down. "Pull on it; see if that's good enough."

This time, Peg goes to a certain fence post at the apex of the hill and motions me to another strategic position farther down. Just holding the wire above the strands already in place is difficult.

"More," she says. Without holding these higher strands in position now, we'd never get them there later. The wire tightens a little in my hands.

“More!”

Tighter.

"A little more."

The wire dents the leather of my gloves.

"There!" she shouts. "That's good!"

We quickly clip that wire, replay the process once, and then there's just the top strand to go. First, we stop for a moment, survey this world yet again, smell the incense of sun-baked sage and cedar, listen to the quiet. Our brief stillness wakes the dogs, who sit up to watch briefly, then melt again to the earth.

The pace of the ranch—even when it was a working spread—is in time with just itself. There is no nine to five, no Monday through Friday. No stoplights telling you when to stay or go. No time clock. No planner. The wall calendar might have a few notes penciled in, but otherwise time is measured by the tasks of the season. Always, four AM is time for coffee and the new day. It unfolds simply according to whatever needs to be done. At 8:30 PM, it's time to sleep.

Now, though, it's time to finish the final strand. I wonder about wrestling the top wire into place near the top of the posts when it is hugging the ground, hard, like a child who doesn't want to leave its mom. Peg and I get a rhythm going to flip the barbs of this strand past the other four. Jim will need just the right touch. Too much, and it'll make the other strands go slack, or snap.

"Ohmigod!" I mutter to myself through clenched teeth. "How the heck are we gonna .. ."

Jim ratchets the stretcher tool.

"One more," says Peg. I can't believe it. I am thinking of those fancy cheese cutters people use back east, the ones with the little wire that slices through cheese as if it's butter. I'm wondering how much more pressure my leather glove can endure.

"Good!" she says.

I grab a clip and expertly tether the wire to the post, relieving the pressure on my hands. Good, I think. Good.

Jim secures the wire to the endpost, Peg and I finish the clipping, and we pile into the truck to head down the hill. After lunch, we go back out. When we finish fixing one section of fencing, we move to the next, and the next, and beyond.