E-Book Overview
Tom Bishop's collection of stories is divided into slices of time and takes place in the northern Rocky Mountains. The earliest story is set during a brutal winter in which the men of a Lakota clan follow a vision of an elk herd to find meat to save their starving family. The next group of tales take place one hundred years later, in the early twentieth century. A country storekeeper uses defanged rattlesnakes to guard his business; dealings with a bootlegger cost a man his friends, his home, and his job; and deer hunters at the height of the Great Depression go out in search of "Hoover Steaks."At the end of World War II, an illegal quail hunt costs the host rancher over a thousand dollars when a hunter is killed and his widow demands restitution. In "The Fragile Commandment" an abusive farmer is killed by his stepdaughter with a pitchfork, and "Someone's Dog" is the story of a trout fisherman who finds a dog by his favorite stream. The title story, "The Great Mormon Cricket Fly-Fishing Festival" involves trout fisherman who want to bring in enough money through their festival to pay for a weekend fishing party.Regardless of the time period, the people, situations, dilemmas, and problems found in these stories replicate those of the twenty-first century.
E-Book Content
The Great Mormon Cricket Fly-Fishing Festival and Other Western Stories
The Great Mormon Cricket Fly-Fishing Festival and Other Western Stories
Tom Bishop
University of New Mexico Press h Albuquerque
©2007 by the University of New Mexico Press All rights reserved. Published 2007 Printed in the United States of America 12 11 10 09 08 07
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Bishop, Tom, 1937– The great Mormon cricket fly-fishing festival and other western stories / Tom Bishop. p. cm. isbn-13: 978-0-8263-3928-7 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Western stories. 2. West (U.S.)—Social life and customs—Fiction. I. Title. PS3602.I766G74 2007 813'.6—dc22 2006029417
3 Book and cover design and type composition by Kathleen Sparkes This book is typeset using Janson 10/14, 23p6 Display type is Latino Elongated
f This book is for my wife, Buellah, whose patience, tolerance, and support have been and are deeply appreciated.
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Contents h Preface ix Acknowledgments
xi
A Long Time Ago . . .
The Vision of Hehaka‘To
3
A Hundred Years Later . . .
Courting Miss Ellen 19 I Cain’t Go 29 Bootleggers 41 A Hoover Steak 101 And Then . . .
The Contest 119 The Fragile Commandment 143 Cardinals and Tanagers Flying By Someone’s Dog 159
151
Yesterday . . .
The Great Mormon Cricket Fly-Fishing Festival Bonefish in Wyoming 189
175
Preface h When I was very young, I stood on the tallest rock and saw the country, and I knew I belonged there. I saw how the mountain reached out and gathered the land to itself to keep it from falling apart. I saw how the mountain held the sky above it. We all were one. I heard stories of people who had been there before me, and I see people who are there today who have their own stories. There were and are so many stories of people in the country that I had to write some of them so as to not forget or tangle them. Even though the West as a frontier ceased to exist after 1890, the West as an emotion or, in some cases, as a cultural and social experience lingered far into the twentieth century, and vestiges still are present in small places today. It is a part of the sense of history that humans carry and that we have such a strong tendency to nurture. I was fortunate to not just meet but to live with men and women who in their vibrant youths had been a part of the real West. They all are gone now, those who remembered. In the bunkhouse at night some of them told