Long Claws
Remember how you feel. One day, fear like this will only be a memory and you’ll find that life without it is not as good.
ILLUSTRATION: Tony Shasteen
Editor’s Note: To help celebrate RMEF and Bugle’s 40th anniversary, we reached out to two of this magazine’s longtime editors, Dan Crockett and Don Burgess, to pick some of their favorite hunting stories from the archives for each of the 2024 issues. Both of them chose this story, first published in the November/December 2002 issue as part of the “Spooked” special section of eerie stories.
Fiction by Jake Mosher
My great-grandfather said that the only satisfaction he got from having money was being able to do something with it. In his mind, a penny saved, at least if it could be used to buy gas to go fishing or hunting, was a penny wasted. For 101 years of his life, I doubt he had $100 to his name at any given time. And if he did, from the time I was old enough to sit on his lap and listen to his stories about what Montana was like before it became “civilized,” he gave it to me. When I was old enough to walk to school, there was always a dollar in my lunch box to buy a soda with on the way home. In high school, he made sure my truck stayed running, which, considering how I drove it, couldn’t have been cheap. And right up through my freshman year in college, whenever we went anywhere together, he would make a production out of shifting around uncomfortably in the seat of his 1959 Willys Jeep, pulling over, jerking his wallet from his back pocket and removing the bills.
I don’t think I was any happier to do so when I was 10 than when I was 20. And I know I wasn’t any happier to be going somewhere with him. The 80 years between us didn’t keep him from teaching me how to catch a trout on a dry fly, how to shoot a running elk by holding your scope in front of him, squeezing the trigger just before his shoulder meets your crosshairs, and even how to box, something he taught me late at night when my parents believed we were both in bed.
“Sometime you may have to thump a man,” he’d say as I circled around him in the loose straw on the floor of our barn, trying to hold the heavy gloves up in front of my face. “Seems in this day and age there’s more men need thumping.”
When we were finished, when my arms were sore and my calves ached from dancing on my toes, we would sit under the kerosene lantern hanging from a spike on the beam above us, and with the heavy breathing of sleeping horses in the background he would tell me the most fascinating stories I’ve ever heard. Stories of mining accidents, of hunting parties that disappeared in the mountains, of cowboys who would drink until they couldn’t see and fight until they couldn’t move, of bank robberies and shootouts with outlaws.
Our relationship was that of a grandfather to grandson once removed, yet that much closer. For almost 21 years, I loved him like no other, and his gruffness couldn’t mask the fact that he was fond of me, too.
I was sitting on the floor of my college dorm room, untying my baseball spikes after an afternoon practice, when I got the call. It was the first and only time in my life that I knew exactly why the phone was ringing before I picked it up. I had a dozen people who might have been calling for a dozen different reasons, and my great-grandfather hadn’t been ill. But as soon as the phone rang, I knew that he was gone.
He had expressly forbidden me to attend his funeral.
“You take your fly rod and bid this old bastard farewell by going and catching a trout,” he’d said. “If they’re in season, shoot an elk. A cow elk. Bulls, bulls, bulls…all you young men think about anymore. Time was when we’d lop their heads off and leave the antlers laying right where they fell. Couldn’t eat no damn horns.”
A day later I drove from Washington back to the Big Hole Valley of southwest Montana, but as my great-grandfather had instructed me, I didn’t go to his funeral. My father knew that I wasn’t going to and didn’t try to change my mind. Instead, he gave me a small key and told me there was something waiting for me at the bank in Butte.
I knew whatever my great-grandfather’s safety deposit box contained, it wasn’t money. That wasn’t his style. Part of me didn’t want to open it. Part of me figured it was the last thing my great-grandfather would give me, and that when I opened it his loss would be complete. I took it home without cracking the lid, went and made a few casts in the Big Hole to keep my word, and then my curiosity got the best of me. I carried the box outside to the barn, where he and I had spent so many hours, and opened it under the beam where our lantern had hung, shaking my head in disbelief when I saw what was inside. I picked it up, held it in my hand and heard his voice tell its story—the one story he only told me once.
“It came in the year of fire, when so much of Montana burned that for two months we didn’t see the sun, and ash fell from the sky like snow. It came first to hunt the animals—the cattle, the elk, the bear and wolves—and then it hunted us.
It came first to hunt the animals—the cattle, the elk, the bear and wolves—and then it hunted us.
In 1910, I was a boy. A boy in a place and a time where a hell of lot more was taken for granted than it is today. Things maybe didn’t move as fast, but they were a whole lot wilder. Had rainbow trout in the Big Hole right up to 10 pounds, scary-big buck mule deer anywhere there was a little sage, and while I don’t guess there were as many elk as there are now, we had wolves and grizzlies, and if anyone had tried bringing us more of them we’d have lynched him.
We didn’t know as much in some ways, but in others we knew more. We never figured a man could go walking on the moon, but we knew that if we didn’t do what our parents told us we’d get boxed on the ear. Knew that if we talked out of turn in school we’d get whacked with a yardstick, and knew that a man was only as good as his word. And most of all, we knew that we didn’t know it all. That there were things beyond our imagination. Things that couldn’t be explained ’cause there weren’t no explanation. Seemed most of what we couldn’t explain was in the woods.
In 1910, when the whole West caught fire, I believed it quite possible that there wouldn’t be no more woods. That the fires that turned the sky orange at night and black during the day would burn until every tree was gone.
For whatever reason, Mother Nature decided to spare our valley that summer, sending sooty rain to fall from her smoky sky for three days.
The first night the rains stopped, I lay in bed with my window open, a wonderful cool breeze blowing in, the sound of the Big Hole running higher than it had all summer, a lone wolf celebrating by howling again and again. I was listening to the wolf, trying to figure out exactly where he was, when a howl was cut short and replaced by a noise I’d never heard. It was a sound like a man screaming when he hurts so bad there ain’t no words to describe it. A sound so terrible that I pulled the covers over my head and plugged my ears, my eyes jammed shut as tight as they’d go. Even under the covers it echoed in my head, rising and falling in pitch, so loud I imagined it could be heard all across Montana. I didn’t realize I was screaming myself until I felt my father’s arms around me, pulling me tight to his chest.
When it finally stopped, I’ve never heard anything as quiet as that night. I clung to my father’s nightshirt, him just holding me, not saying anything. When I quit shaking, he whispered that it would be all right and pried my fingers loose and left the room. I lay awake the rest of the night, waiting to hear that scream again, listening to the muffled voices of my parents in the next room, wondering what it was that had come to our valley. A couple of times I thought I heard my father say something about claws, and I know the word “fire” came up more than once, but my ears were trained more toward my window. All night I lay there and listened, my forehead hot, my muscles so tight that when dawn finally broke, I was sore. And any childhood notions I’d had of bravery were temporarily shattered.
Seems back then parents didn’t try so hard to shield their children from the harsh edges of the world. Not so much sugar-coating as there is today. You grew up with a good understanding of the dangers in life and the consequences of ignoring them. I figure that’s why my dad took me with him that morning out across our pasture to the edge of the timber to find what was left of the wolf. Looked like something turned him inside out. Peeled him open like an ear of corn. We stood there, neither one of us saying a word, my dad’s .30-40 Krag resting across his shoulder, letting what we saw soak in—55 pounds of guts and bone.
Seems back then parents didn’t try so hard to shield their children from the harsh edges of the world. Not so much sugar-coating as there is today. You grew up with a good understanding of the dangers in life and the consequences of ignoring them.
My grandfather was waiting for us when we got home; and where my folks didn’t try to hide things from me, he went out of his way to show me. Half Blackfeet, a man who generally knew a whole lot more than he said, my grandfather never spoke a word he didn’t mean. He looked me up and down, then hooked a finger under my chin, black eyes gleaming, and said, “Long Claws is here.”
That was the first I heard of Long Claws, and despite pestering him half a dozen times a day for the next week to tell me more, it was all my grandfather said. But one morning he woke me before sunrise, saddled our horses, and took me eight miles upriver to the mouth of a crick coming in from the Pioneer Mountains. Here, our horses got nervous. Mine started crow-hopping, doing that sideways dance that means spurs or not he ain’t going farther. We tied them to a big piece of driftwood, far enough from the bank so they wouldn’t get to bucking around and drown in the river while we were gone, then started up the crick, slipping quietly along an elk trail as though we were hunting. We crept along until we came to a small opening where the carcass of a cow had been chained to a giant Doug fir. It was grizzly bait, and I knew enough to stay back. Somewhere in the loose dirt around that cow were two or three traps that would snap a man’s leg quick as lightning.
“You want to trap an animal with bait, you set your trap in a trail, not at the bait.” It was the first thing my grandfather said all morning. He pointed up the elk trail to where it came into the opening across from us. Looked there as if the ground had been turned over. Chewed up for 15 feet, little trees ripped from the earth, a path 6-feet wide heading away from the creek. We followed this swath of destruction for a few hundred yards, my grandfather in the lead, never looking down yet never stepping on a dry twig, a loose stone or any pinecones.
I could smell the bear when we stopped, that rancid odor that gives them away and don’t smell like anything else. I could see the trap drag, too. A chunk of fir 2 feet through and 5 feet long covered with spikes like a giant’s war club. It had hung up in the crotch of a double pine, its heavy chain stretched out in front of it. But what I saw in the trap was too small for even a young griz. Took me a few seconds before I realized the hunk of fur in the trap weren’t no animal, just a hind leg. It lay there with the hip socket shining in the sun, dull white against brown hair and dried blood.
That’s the way it went for more than a month. Every few days someone would wind up missing. Some we found, others we never. Got so some people wouldn’t leave their houses. Those who did, they did as much looking over their shoulders as in front of them.
My grandfather said the same thing he had a week earlier, “Long Claws is here,” and we turned around and walked back to the horses. Never did see the rest of that grizzly, never asked my grandfather how he knew it was there or how he knew what had happened to it, and was never so happy to get out of the woods. I could feel eyes on me as though the trees themselves were watching.
Bright sun in open country gives men courage. I suppose that’s what made me turn my horse in front of my grandfather’s halfway back to our house and demand some answers. I was only 11 years old, but if he wanted by me without speaking he was gonna have to shove me out of the way.
“Fire calls Long Claws,” he said. “Like a lantern in a window.”
“Where does he come from?” I asked.
My grandfather shrugged.
“He’s come before?”
“Yes. Long Claws is very old. My father’s people spoke of him.”
“Have you ever seen him? What’s he look like?” My grandfather eased his horse even with mine.
“I saw a picture in a cave drawn by people who lived in the ground and hunted with spears. There was a picture of arms and legs and heads and bodies all over, and something standing among them. Claws half as long as your arm.”
“Are we going to kill him?” I asked.
“We are,” my grandfather said, “But a day will come when you’ll wish that we hadn’t. You’re young and are going to live a long time. You’ll see a world in which there’s no room for Long Claws. A world where things move fast as falling stars and people believe they know all there is to know. You’ll know what it’s like to walk in these mountains without grizzlies and how it feels to listen for the howl of a wolf and hear only the wind.”
That night I heard Long Claws screaming again—not as close as the first time, but just as bad. I lay in bed shivering until I heard footsteps, and even then I was too scared to peek out from under my covers. This time it was my grandfather who sat on my bed.
“You’re scared,” he whispered.
I nodded, unable to speak.
“Remember how you feel,” he said. “One day, fear like this will only be a memory, and you’ll find that life without it is not as good.”
“Why…why does he scream?” I asked.
“Because he is lonely. Because loneliness has turned to bitterness and because no matter how much he kills, no matter how much he takes from the world, he can’t feel whole. And since he can’t, he tries to make the world feel what he does. Can you imagine what it’s like to be the last of something?”
I thought of looking up our valley to the mountains beyond and knowing that as far as I could see I was the only human being. My grandfather stayed with me until Long Claws’ screams faded and I drifted off to sleep. I think that sometime in my sleep, for the first time in my life, I felt alone.
The weather didn’t stay cool very long, and the hotter it got the more Long Claws killed. Tore up our neighbor’s Angus bull one night, ripped apart a pair of cow elk the next. All up and down the valley, weren’t a house with a window or two that wasn’t lighted up at night, and men started carrying guns with them everywhere they went.
A lion hunter from Arizona showed up one day, sure he was gonna kill this beast. Turned his hounds out around the remains of a sheep and headed off into the woods after them, big old pistol jammed through his belt, fancy cowboy hat with a silver band on his head. The screams I heard that night were the worst ever, and even my grandfather wouldn’t let me see what Long Claws did to him. Said crows were picking pieces of him out of the trees.
Then there was the drunk who passed out alongside the road between the bar and his house a couple of miles out of town. Found him cleaved pretty near in two. And the school teacher’s wife and daughter, the first people Long Claws killed during the day. Caught them washing clothes in the river early one morning. Teacher shot himself when he saw.
That’s the way it went for more than a month. Every few days someone would wind up missing. Some we found, others we never. Got so some people wouldn’t leave their houses. Those who did, they did as much looking over their shoulders as in front of them. Weren’t a stick that cracked in the woods or a splash made in the river without getting somebody’s heart pumping.
Then it snowed. Temperature fell 60 degrees in one afternoon, and that night it snowed 10 inches. It was the end of September, and winter came all at once with no warning. Again our valley filled up with animals, elk and deer filing out of the mountains, pawing great circles in the snow along the Big Hole, looking for grass. For three nights there were no screams, only the sound of geese heading south, flock after flock. My father walked me to school every morning and sometimes helped the new teacher build his fire. I remember sitting at my desk, the windows beginning to fog and frost from the heat inside, and seeing eight soldiers bundled in heavy wool uniforms ride by. I watched them pass, the steam from their horses’ mouths billowing out in front of them, rifle scabbards cinched tight to their saddles. They were the last old-style cavalry soldiers I saw, and as far as I know I’m the last person who saw them alive. They were old men: Indian fighters who’d known Custer, Texas Rangers who’d killed outlaws in the desert, and a man who was rumored to have fought side by side with General Lee. They didn’t know what to do with themselves anymore in a world where they weren’t needed, so they’d decided to hunt Long Claws. I expect that whatever they felt that night when they died, each of them was a tiny bit relieved that he weren’t lying in a hospital bed regretting not doing the things he wished he’d done, living the way he’d wished he’d lived. I heard the screams and muffled gunshots, as soft as the last notes of the geese, so far away that when morning came I wasn’t sure if I’d dreamed it.
That morning, there were ice crystals hanging in the air so thick you could cut trails in them with your hand. I could see the sun, a pale pink disk way up in the sky, but none of its heat reached the ground as three generations of us rode out that dawn. We headed west, up the slushy Big Hole, then turned north into the Pintler Range, following the soldiers, their windblown tracks as faint as the screams I’d heard the night before.
We trailed them up a narrow canyon, its steep rock cliffs coming in and out of view in the fog and ice, my grandfather in the lead, me next, my father coming along behind. My horse was the first to shy, spinning sideways, the whites of his eyes whiter than the snow around us, nostrils opened wide as they’d go. I took up the slack in the reins, pushing my boots into his side, hugging him with my legs, turning him in tight circles, letting him walk without letting him go nowhere until my grandfather caught his bridle and held him long enough for me to get off.
You ride a horse for a long time and your legs sort of forget how to move. You get used to that rocking motion, and it takes you a minute to get your feet back under you. Snow was up past my knees, and I fell three times before getting ahead of my grandfather. And just as I stood up for the third time, a breeze blew all the fog out of the canyon, letting the sun shine through, blinding me. Took 15 or 20 seconds for my eyes to focus, and when they did the country didn’t look nothing like I’d figured. Canyon was wider than I thought, full of fallen boulders and twisted fir trees, and the cliffs were a hell of a lot higher. I covered my eyes with my mittens, letting them adjust to the light slowly, looking down at my feet, then up the trail ahead of us.
The soldiers were there, or pieces of them anyway, scattered among the boulders, big blotches of red snow, scraps of horsehide, hunks of meat and bone in every direction. Looked like a picture of hell frozen over. When I close my eyes I can still see the bloody drag marks where men tried pulling themselves under the rocks.
There was a black ring from a campfire, a canvas tent partially set up and a stack of saddles. Didn’t see one living thing until we pushed a hundred yards or so farther up the canyon, and then this horse came walking by us, eyes glassy, feet moving steady, acting like it didn’t see us. Walked within two feet of us and never turned its head. Above it, there was only one set of tracks—punch holes in the snow, even-spaced and deep—leading higher into the mountains.
Every four or five steps there was blood in the snow, red droplets strung off to the side. My grandfather picked at them with his mitten, crumbling the frozen blood in his hand.
It sounded different this time, more haunting. It came from all around us, again and again and without rhythm. And then, as suddenly as it had begun, it ended, leaving the night so silent that I wished it would begin again.
Long Claws might have been wounded, but he didn’t act it. Went straight up the canyon, climbing over stones half as large as our house, stepping over fallen logs rather than going around them. I struggled to keep up with my father and grandfather, now both walking ahead of me, doing their best to tramp a path, the loose snow falling into their tracks like quicksand. In an hour I was tired, and after two, each step was a chore. The ground kept getting steeper and the canyon narrower until eventually it weren’t no wider than a man and rose so sharply that we climbed as much with our hands as we did our feet. The sun drifted out of view overhead, leaving a sliver of dark-blue afternoon sky above us that seemed close enough to touch.
Humans rely most heavily on their sense of sight. I reckon that’s why we’re all more comfortable in the daylight. As it began to grow dark, I could feel eyes on me again just as I had that morning with my grandfather when he showed me the remains of the grizzly bear. I could feel things looking at me even though there weren’t nothing but rocks and snow. The swish of my feet grew louder, I didn’t feel as tired, and my rifle, a Winchester .30-30 lever action that moments before had felt unbearably heavy, seemed now an extension of my arm. There was more blood in the snow than there had been, larger clumps that were still soft under my boots, and from time to time, over the backs of my father and grandfather, I could see the top of the chute we were in, a pair of bright blue stars perched on either side.
We didn’t climb all the way to the top that evening. Instead, we packed into a crevice between two giant rocks that formed an arch over us, the ground bare under us, stone at our backs, one point of entry in front of us.
I concentrated on this opening, on keeping my rifle pointed at it, on listening for any new sound.
From somewhere far below us came the howl of a wolf. Then much closer, we heard Long Claws scream.
“Is it coming?” I whispered to my grandfather.
He put his arm around me and squeezed, letting his rifle settle to the rock between his knees. “No. It’s saying good-bye.”
I didn’t think sleep was possible that night, but sometime in the silence I drifted off and dreamed strange dreams of wooly mammoths, of saber-toothed cats, of the clink of stone on stone as spearheads were chipped from rock, and of grassy plains overflowing with huge bison. They were the most vivid dreams I’ve ever had, and just before I woke, they ran together, swirling like the water in the Big Hole when she floods in June.
When I opened my eyes, the world outside was bright, and my father and grandfather were standing over me, stamping their feet and clapping their hands to warm up.
It didn’t take long to reach the top of the chute we were in. We crested out onto a hogback mountaintop, the Big Hole Valley traced in ice fog below us, other snow peaks visible in all four directions, some close, others so far away they formed a horizon of light blue. Long Claws’ tracks wound back and forth along the ridgeline, his steps closer, with more blood between them. We found where he’d walked to the edge of a 300-foot cliff and lay down, leaving the snow smooth and crimson. From there it was clear he was tiring. His tracks turned to a solid line in the snow, as his feet dragged. We followed him to a saddle where the mountain rose again, to a jumble of upthrust shards of stone from which his track didn’t emerge. In the midst of odd slabs of granite, standing like ships’ masts, it led into a cave. We stood there, trying to see into that dark hole in the stone, waiting as though something was going to happen.
“He’s not coming out,” my grandfather said finally.
“We should make sure,” my father said.
Inside the cave, our eyes adjusted slowly. The walls turned from black to grey, the light behind us growing dimmer as we moved farther into the mountain. I was back in the middle, between my father and grandfather, feeling as though I was dreaming again, wondering when I would see the creatures I had seen the night before. We moved an inch at a time, my grandfather in the lead, his rifle near his shoulder, enough space between us so we weren’t shoving each other. Up ahead we could hear something—like the scratch of a mouse behind a wall. It grew louder as the cave grew darker, the scratching turning into a scraping like a whetstone run the length of a scythe. We were drawing close to something. An animal that smelled similar to bear, but stronger, the cross between something long dead and the sharp odor of fresh blood.
The cave swelled, its ceiling of damp rock growing higher. Something moved in front of my grandfather as orange flame leapt from his rifle barrel, and then there was no sound save the ringing in my ears from the blast.
The back of the cave was solid, opaque ice. An animal the likes of which I’d never seen lay crumpled against it, shaking. Soon all movement ceased. Above it, long striations cut into the ice, reaching toward two dark shapes encased in the ice, one large, one small, featureless in their frozen tomb.
Long Claws might have weighed four hundred pounds. Strange I don’t remember him better. Had thick, black hide all over, massive hind legs, an elongated head with broken canines leaking from a broad muzzle, and those great claws attached to shorter front legs. Eyes were closed, and they were small. Above one of them there was a dime-sized hole. My grandfather didn’t let me look too long before turning me back toward the pinhole of daylight behind us, where my father and I waited for him.
“What was it?” I asked my grandfather when he came out of the cave a few minutes after us.
“Something time forgot,” he said.
“A monster?”
“Monster’s just one of our words,” he said. “Has no meaning in nature.”
He gave me the claw before he died a few years later. Said I should keep it to remind myself that what happened was real. Said that the time would come when if I didn’t have proof, I’d doubt myself. The day he gave it to me we talked for a long time. He said that with each passing generation the woods are a little less wild. Said we gnaw away at the wilderness like a porcupine girdling a tree, not realizing we’re killing something essential to us.
He gave me the claw before he died a few years later. Said I should keep it to remind myself that what happened was real. Said that the time would come when if I didn’t have proof, I’d doubt myself.
Pretty soon I’ll have been alive in three different centuries. A big portion of what I’ve seen is gone for good, and more and more I think I understand what it must have been like for Long Claws. It’s hard to keep changing. Hard to keep watching the familiar disappear. I’ve had to learn how to drive a car, how to look up in the sky and not be surprised to see an airplane, how to go hunting on opening morning knowing that an occasional lion track is the wildest thing left in the world. I’ve had to bury my son and daughter. I don’t guess I feel all the bitterness that Long Claws must have, but I get a sense of the loneliness. I get a sense of the frustration, too.”
As I stood there holding that big old claw, still dark with the blood of those old horse soldiers, I could see my great-grandfather sitting on a milking stool, finishing up the story after a late-evening boxing lesson. He ended it saying, “Must be partly why we’re out here with these boxing gloves on. So’s you can reach out and clip the man who don’t hold a door for your lady someday. Best not to tell your folks I said that, though. Now, let’s see you throw that jab a few more times and keep your right tucked up against your cheek.”
I don’t know what I’m going to do with a 14-inch claw. I’ve thought of confounding the paleontology experts at Montana State University, thought of putting it up for grabs on Ebay (which, if it brought enough money to get me up to Alaska for a week of hunting would probably please my great-grandfather to no end), and I’ve thought of giving it back to the wilderness. For now, I’m keeping it. I’m keeping it, and I’m thinking about what my great-grandfather said about every generation eroding the wilderness. He did live to see country devoid of grizzlies and wolves, and a society that would have laughed him out of town if he’d mentioned Long Claws (provided they could have ducked his left hook).
I wonder sometimes what I have that my son won’t. The lion? The black bear? The possibility of hooking a 10-pound brown on his next cast in the Big Hole? With this wonder comes uneasiness. A longing for something I can’t quite put my finger on and that I doubt exists anymore. A feeling that we’d be a little better off if occasionally we’d wake in the night to a blood-curdling shriek. If we’d fear more than forest fires in drought years like these, and if we could at least, once in our lives, find something in the wilderness so foreign and wild that we couldn’t explain it.
Jake Mosher grew up in Northern Vermont and has lived in southwest Montana for nearly 30 years. He is an award-winning nature photographer and an avid hunter.
