Kyle Westergaard rolled up his sleeping bag in the bed of his pickup and cinched it up and placed it in an oversized plastic garbage bag so it wouldn’t get wet if it rained later in the day.
He’d spent the night in an unpaved parking lot off of the highway and not far from the unincorporated location known as Bonner. There had been a few other vehicles in the lot when he arrived the night before, but one by one they’d left during the night. He was now the only person there.
He could hear the Little Blackfoot River through the thick trees, and it excited him. Three Rivers had been a bust.
The pine trees surrounding the lot were tall and dark and the sun had not risen high enough yet to cut through them. It was cold, and he wore his oil field Carhartt parka as he balanced his camp stove on the open tailgate of his pickup and started it with a wooden match. He very much liked the hissing sound of the flame when he got it going.
Kyle reached into the bed of his truck and grasped the butt of his 20-gauge shotgun and pulled it out. It was a pump-action Remington he’d bought at a pawn shop in Dickinson and he’d used it to hunt grouse and rabbits. It was in a Cordura case and he slept better knowing that he could defend himself if anyone showed up to cause trouble during the night. He slipped it behind the seat of his pickup for safekeeping.
The Little Blackfoot River excited him because it met one of the important criteria of the treasure poem.
On the evening before, he’d crossed the confluence where the Little Blackfoot poured into the Clark’s Fork.
Begin where the rivers marry
Kyle opened a can of pork and beans and placed it on top of the flame. The loaf of white bread he’d purchased at a convenience store the day before was handy and he pulled out two slices and placed them next to each other on a blue enamel plate he’d owned for many years. His spork was in his backpack and he fished it out.
Many years before, Kyle had assembled a survival kit for his adventure on the Missouri River with his friend Raheem. Most of the items he’d gathered were from Dumpsters or garage sales in Bakken County, North Dakota. Even though the adventure had gone horrible awry when they encountered Ronald Pegram, he still treasured his survival kit and he took it with him everywhere. Kyle wondered why everyone didn’t use sporks—a utensil that combined a spoon and a fork into one. It made a lot of sense to him.
When the can was bubbling on the stove, Kyle poured the beans over the slices of bread. He liked the way his plate steamed and the food was delicious when he dug in and shoveled it into his mouth.
When he was through, he wiped off his plate and spork with wet wipes and returned them to his kit. The beans would give him gas but being flatulent while hiking was no big deal. It wasn’t like he was going to a wedding.
Kyle checked his phone. He had only a few numbers in his directory: work, the pizza delivery place in Bakken, Lottie’s doctor’s office, and Lottie herself.
He punched up Lottie’s number. It was a landline because Lottie had never even turned on the cell phone he gave her for Christmas. There was no answer and she didn’t have voice mail set up.
That concerned him because it was too early in the day, he thought, for her to be out of the house at her daily hair appointment.
A couple of other cars arrived in the parking lot while Kyle got ready. Men got out of the cars and started pulling on waders and assembling fly rods. Kyle watched them out of the corner of his eye and envied them.
A burly man with red hair walked across the parking lot with a Thermos and offered Kyle a cup of coffee.
“No, thank you,” Kyle said. “I don’t drink coffee.”
“What do you drink?” the man asked.
“I’m a Mountain Dew man, myself,” Kyle responded.
“Sorry, I don’t have one of those.”
“That’s okay. It was nice of you to offer.”
“Are you going fishing?” the man asked, letting his eyes stray over the gear in the back of Kyle’s pickup. No doubt he was looking for waders, boots, and rods.
“Not today,” Kyle said. He didn’t want to tell the fisherman what he was doing. I’m hunting for a hidden treasure chest sounded too goofy.
“Well,” the man said finally, “have a good day.”
“You, too.”
Lottie answered the phone when Kyle called back. She sounded exasperated, but he was grateful she was there.
“I just wanted to make sure you were okay,” he said.
“Of course I am, Kyle. It’s just that my right ear is a little cold.”
“I don’t know what that means.”
She hesitated. Then: “I guess I left the phone in the refrigerator overnight. I just now found it.” She sounded irritated. Lottie always sounded annoyed after she’d done something stupid, as if it were someone else’s fault and she was put out about it.
“So the phone is cold?” Kyle asked.
“Isn’t that what I just told you?”
Kyle nodded. “This is why we need to get you some help.”
“This again! Maybe you should just come back.”
“I will soon.”
Then she launched into a story about squirrels coming into her backyard and eating all the bird food she put out. Kyle had heard it a million times. He waited her out.
Finally, she asked, “Where are you again?”
“Montana,” he said. “I’ve told you that over and over again. Maybe you should stop feeding the birds.”
“What if I decided not to feed you when you were little and you showed up at my house?” she asked. “How would you feel about that?”
“Love you. Don’t leave the phone in the refrigerator.”
Kyle set out for the day with his backpack and a walking stick he picked up along the way. It got warm quickly as the sun rose and he shed his jacket.
The way the sun dappled on the grass through the walls of tall pines made him happy. He drank it in and wished he lived there, although it would be impossible to convince his Grandma Lottie to move with him. She’d only once been west of the Montana state line, and she was perversely proud of the fact. Lottie thought Montanans were arrogant and that they looked down their noses at North Dakotans. Maybe with her dementia he’d be able to convince her to come, but that thought made him feel terrible.
And take the hidden trail,
There were established trails along both banks of the river. He guessed they were used primarily by fly fishermen. Kyle thought the trails were too prominent to be the right ones.
He climbed up along the slope of the river into the timber. The river was to his right and below him.
Stay in the shadows and you will prevail.
As he climbed he stepped over a faint grassy trail that cut across the slope parallel to the river. It was a game trail—the mountains were filled with them—but it sunk into the loam, indicating it had been there and had been used for a number of years. Kyle felt a flutter in his belly and it wasn’t just the beans working.
As he hiked he looked down. There were a few fly fishermen in waders in the river. He stopped and admired them—their clothing, their gear, the way the line looped gracefully when they cast. The ruddy man from the parking lot was one of them. The man looked up and glared at him. Apparently, he didn’t like to be observed.
No fish were caught that he saw. Kyle quickly moved on.
There were a few small creeks to cross that flowed into the Little Blackfoot, but none of them were big enough to be considered a river, he was certain. The Little Blackfoot wasn’t even all that wide, but it was pretty. Although there were several hillsides that had burned over the years from forest fires, he decided that the burns were in the wrong order to apply to the poem.
At five and a half miles in, the walls of the canyon rose sharply on both sides and the trail he was hiking on disappeared.
From there you’ll have to summon strength
The walls are closing in;
Kyle climbed down the slope to the river itself. The Little Blackfoot was squeezed between two dark rock walls. There was no way to walk along it anymore.
But it comported to the poem! His hands trembled as he pulled his boots and socks off and replaced them with a pair of river sandals. He tied his bootlaces to loops in his pack and gingerly stepped between a pair of large rocks to enter the river itself.
Kyle held his pack up over his head as he slipped into the river. The stones on the bed of the river were slick and he stumbled a few times but he didn’t go down. It was remarkably cold and at one point the current was just below his armpits and it was powerful enough to sweep him away and wash him down the river.
Depending on the season,
You may have to wade or swim.
He wasn’t a good swimmer, but he was committed too far into the canyon to bail out. For a moment, he stood and braced against the current and breathed deeply again and again, trying to remain calm. Then, using a technique where he leaned back slightly against the flow and stepped ahead using his heel first one step at a time, he made it through the narrowest part of the canyon. It was so narrow at one point that he could almost reach out and touch both walls.
He kept going and somehow didn’t lose his footing.
After a few more minutes of inching ahead, Kyle could see that it was opening up ahead of him. The river was lower on his back and sun splashed the water ahead.
If you’ve been smart and found the burn,
Look west to spy the treasure,
He so wanted to emerge from the canyon to find a burn that he could visualize the place where he’d discover the treasure.
It would be in a pool of shadow at the base of a pine tree to his left. Although the metal on the chest would be discolored from the weather and dried pine needles would have fallen on it, it would be there. He could see himself lifting it up by its handles and moving it into the sunlight. It was heavy. He had no idea how heavy gold was until that moment and he started to worry about carrying it all the way back to his pickup miles away.
But when Kyle emerged from the narrow canyon he was disappointed. There was no burn. Instead, there were grassy meadows on each side of the Little Blackfoot. On the north bank, there was an old miner’s cabin without a roof tucked up into the trees.
On the left bank, where he’d expected to find the treasure, it was flat and grassy with no features except for half-buried rocks.
Still, he spent an hour looking over every inch of the west bank. He even went about ten feet into the trees to see if he’d missed anything. He hadn’t.
Kyle sighed and crossed the river to the cabin. Maybe the poet got that wrong?
All he’d found inside the cabin when he entered it were a few old beer cans and a discarded condom that looked like a thick white worm. Pretty gross.
Disappointed, Kyle worked his way back on the other side of the river to where he’d parked his truck. Rather than fight the current in the river, he climbed very high until he was on top of the narrows and he stumbled his way down the other side back to the bank.
He told himself he was not discouraged. Kyle was never discouraged, because it meant he could now draw a line through the Little Blackfoot River on the list of Montana rivers he’d made in his notebook. There were only four other rivers on it he’d not explored: the Marias, the Judith, the Rosebud, and the Powder River. Which meant he was getting closer.