Trophy

In 1986, I passed through the tiny town of Wisdom, Montana, in the Big Hole valley, with seven-year-old Naomi and Jenifer, who was pregnant with Alix at the time. We paused to admire the high, garish storefront of Conover’s Trading Post, freshly painted a bright pale green, with a big wooden cut-out of a reclining Indian maiden at the top of the false front wall.

Late in the morning twenty-six years later Alix and I came to Wisdom and parked in front of Conover’s; the Indian maiden still reclines suggestively, the green paint still commands attention. But inside changes were underway.

We were greeted by a fiftyish woman named Jane, and I told her about visiting in 1986 and indicated Alix as a marker of the time since. Jane told us that she and her husband had bought the store six months before. “The lady who owned it had had it for thirty-five years. After her first husband died, she remarried, but when her second husband died, here in the store, she said she’d had enough. He was the love of her life.”

Jane told us that the building dated from 1911. “It’s got a great apartment upstairs. My mother’s husband has cancer, and when he passes she’s going to move in up there. It’s the only thing she’s excited about right about now.”

The interior was in the midst of a remodel, as Jane and her husband were establishing a hunting and fishing store. There had been some such gear before, but the merchandise had been more eclectic. “A lot of novelties,” I said to Jane. Funny post cards, cheap toys, Indian stuff, shot glasses....

“Yes,” she agreed, “a gyp shop.” I suppose. There used to be plenty of such tourist places, but now one comes across only the occasional survivor, Wall Drug for a prominent example. Jane was intent on making something more respectable, a serious outdoors store of the sort one finds all over Montana these days.

But she had plenty of inventory and furnishings to move, first…. She pointed to a huge marlin hanging from the high ceiling in the back of the store. “You want that?” she asked. “It’s yours. I’ve been trying for months to get someone to take it.” She also offered a stuffed peacock, a well preserved bird displaying upright the full fan of his feathers. Trout, elk, ducks, they could stay, but not the non-native fauna. I gazed up at the big fish, walked around the peacock longingly.

“What about this?” the woman said, propping something furry up on the counter. It was the hind end of a wolf, but a bit more. Under the tail, in the anus area, was a large snarling mouth with a long pink tongue. It was frightening piece of taxidermy. Alix and I laughed uneasily and not for a moment considered taking it.

We looked through tables of sale stuff in the back, stacks of records, baskets of ancient fishing lures, amateur oil paintings, stained coffee mugs…. Alix picked out a faux-turquoise belt buckle that said “4x4,” for Dustin, and a leather hatband too, as well as a souvenir spoon. Up front, Jane called our attention to a case full of turquoise and silver rings. “The lady who owned the store used to winter down in Arizona, and they brought a lot of this Indian stuff back with them. I’m blowing it out now—I’ll go forty percent off, even sixty percent.” Alix agreed to have a look and after a minute picked out a silver ring with an oval white stone. Eight dollars, bargain.

From Wisdom we drove west across the beautiful valley, past Big Hole National Battlefield, then into the forest and up towards Chief Joseph Pass. I couldn’t stop thinking about that fish…. As a kid I’d watched celebrities on ABC’s The American Sportsman deep sea fishing for marlins, read in magazines about the long and fierce fights to land the huge creatures…. I had admired the marlin trophies I occasionally came across in a seafood restaurant, wondered at the mysteries of capture and transformation….

We had gone about fifteen miles when I said to Alix, “I think I want that fish.” She was nothing but encouraging.

We drove back, and as we came into town I worried irrationally that we would find someone else tying the marlin to the top of his car.... But, no, the short main street was as sleepy as before, with no vehicles in front of the store.

As soon as we walked in the door Jane called out, “You’ve come back for the marlin!” I smiled a little sheepishly and said yes it was true. She was thrilled. “This makes my day,” she said,. “No, this makes my month!”

She went for a ladder, and I stood under the marlin wondering how heavy it was.

At the top of the ladder I put my shoulder on the underside of the fish and lifted. Heavy but manageable. Jane brought me an exacto knife and I cut the rope holding it, then descended slowly, balancing the ten-foot long creature on my shoulder. We laid it gently on the floor and Alix put bubble wrap around the long nose (nose?) and around the tail fins. I tried to help but my hands were a little shaky with giddiness. The top fin, a piece of blue fiberglass, had slipped neatly out of a groove that ran along the fish’s back.

I had also cut down a hand-lettered sign that read “Caught by Mamie McDowell.” Jane said that the McDowells were a prominent family in the valley, among its earliest settlers and biggest landowners. But she didn’t know the history of the fish. "It’s been here a long time, I know that. And I think Mamie was pretty old when she caught it.” She said she would do some research and gave me her email.

Outside, we opened the back of the van and put the backseat down. The marlin barely fit: its tail fins touched the back of the driver’s seat, its wrapped snout the inside of the back door. Alix's large smile looked slightly maniacal.

We camped over in Idaho, at a piney and picturesque and empty national forest campground on the Salmon River. We put the fish on the picnic table, and Alix started a fire while I chopped big pieces of wood into small pieces. I said, "I kinda wish we'd gotten that peacock too...."