The Deadly River Read Free

appeared to be the eldest of the group, called a halt.
    “Hold it you two. I can’t sit in a chair back in D.C. every darned day and be expected to keep up with you fellas. I need a break.” He was laughing ruefully as he said it. His younger friend managed to gasp out, “I’ll second that!” The older man settled his long, gaunt, frame on a big rock beside the road.
    The man who had been leading the group, Ray Moore, stopped immediately. “My gosh, Senator, I’m really sorry. I was so excited to be able to show you this that I never realized how tough it might be for you.” His friend, Kurt Kochran, was also attempting an embarrassed apology. But Senator Mansfield, from his seat on the rock, waved them off. “My wife will thank you guys. Now I know I have to get some exercise once in a while. She’ll be happy.” His friend, Congressman Lee Metcalf, was bent over with his hands on his knees, taking long breaths of the sweet mountain air. He looked up and laughed. “Yeah, sure, Mike. I’ll betcha twenty bucks that I never see you in a gym.”
    “You won’t see me ‘cause you’ll never be there either, you butt-head!” Both men were laughing now.
    The four men rested for a few minutes, talking about the beauty that surrounded them. Their walk had followed a ten-mile automobile ride from their starting point, Ray’s little café and truck stop in the mountain hamlet of St. Dubois. It had been a spectacular trip, following the little stream from where is gushed into the St. Dubois River up through the wild mountains to where they now sat. When they first left St. Dubois, small ranches covered the landscape, but the open valleys soon narrowed, becoming mountain canyons and gulches. The open fields gave way to the pine and fir forests that were characteristic of this part of Montana.
    After several miles, the canyon narrowed and the patches of snow became a solid foundation for the bushes and trees that grew through it. Now an entirely new and spectacular landscape had come into view. As Congressman Metcalf was to remark later, it was as if the pine and fir forest had just been an appetizer and now a main course in alpine beauty lay before them.
    The trees around them were huge, rising from the narrow, moist, valley to point into the heavens hundreds of feet above them. They were immense cedar trees, their light green needles and beautifully gnarled trunks distinctly pronouncing them the kings of this Montana forest. Their unique, aromatic, scent was everywhere, making this narrow valley a very pleasant experience for even the two tired travelers.
    It had been Senator Mansfield who’d asked Ray to stop the car and walk for a bit after they’d driven several miles between these cedar giants. He said that he wanted to experience this up close. During the mile-long walk, he’d tried to lead them off the road to walk on the forest floor whenever an opportunity arose. But snow patches and the debris from hundreds of years of cedar growth had foiled that effort and now he had gone as far as he could. It was time to talk.
    The Senator looked up from his seat on the rock and addressed Kurt Kochran. “Kurt, you have a reputation for being a pain in the ass about this environmental crap. That’s why I didn’t want to come out here. I don’t necessarily see eye-to-eye with all the things that the environmentalists are doing. I only came as a favor to Lee.” He nodded his head at the Congressman, who had found a seat on a nearby log. Hecontinued, “But you’re onto something here. This cedar forest is something I haven’t seen before. How big is it?”
    “Senator, the stand of cedars is usually only about a half-mile wide. In a few places, it gets a bit wider than that. It follows the creek bed from where we first saw it on up to the crest of the mountain range, about twenty miles from here. The crest is also the Montana-Idaho border. The cedars go almost to the crest and then a few are growing on the Idaho side