Don Burgess on the Maclay Ranch (PJ DelHomme/Elk Foundation)

My mother was D.J.’s cousin. My father took full advantage of in-law status, and I started following him through the frosted grasses of the ranch’s bottomlands in September 1951, when I was 5 years old. Riding on his back across ditches, creeks and backwaters with trusty double-barreled cork gun in my hand, I learned safe firearm carries and fence crossings. Setting out decoys in the fog and darkness, crouching in cattails, hawthorn thickets and logjams, watching the sky as the sun rose, I learned to endure the cold, developed habits of quietness and stealth, and began to distinguish the plumage, flight patterns, calls and habits of waterfowl. When I was 6, I killed my first game there, a cottontail and a greenwing, both with my mother’s double-barreled .410 shotgun.

In the hills east of the river I killed my first whitetail buck with the lever-action .30-30 Dad gave me when I was 12, and many more since. My wife killed an elk there once, and I’ve brought down a few myself, plus half-a-dozen mule deer. Our son and daughter have killed four or five deer apiece on the place. It’s been the source of much of my family’s protein, and the backdrop for many of the hunting stories I’ve written for Bugle.

The ranch has been a steady source of sustenance, not just meat, berries and mushrooms—and the odd jobs Uncle David (D.J. Maclay) and his daughters gave me over the years—but the whole mix of beauty, challenge and adventure that are fruits of and inducements to healthy outdoor recreation. Not just fun, though there was plenty of that, but genuine re-creation that restored and buoyed me up in dark times, the wealth that was still there when money wasn’t, the solace that was still there when people disappointed me, and when I failed myself.

Its sculpted, shadowed hills at sunrise and sunset are to me more evocative and sensuous than the greatest of man-made art, in part because I have worked, played, swum, hunted, fished and floated amid the brushstrokes on that living canvas. I love its secret coves of shade and water and green plants in the midst of its arid hills. I love its high open ridges, the scent of its wildflowers, trees, and stones, its marshes and swamps, its watercourses and all the life in them. I love it for the wildness that is still in it, and all over it. And for the stories and memories of my ancestors, and all the people who ever hunted, dug, plucked and wrung a living from that land. Their spirits are still there, or so it sometimes seems, their sign almost fresh: a stone hide scraper on a hilltop, an old shell casing in a draw. Standing beside ponderosas that knew those long-ago people, I can see them in my mind’s eye. My cousins who live there can see them, too, I believe, and love that land at least as much as I do.

Perhaps you know or have known such a place, and the stories of people who loved it before you. And perhaps you’ve seen it dissolve in front of your very eyes—not all at once, but over a period of months, years or decades, as a new economy, new technology, new mobility, new wealth, new people and new homes overtook it. For so long I feared it would happen to this ranch. Lying so squarely in the path of Missoula’s sprawl, so hemmed in by development on three sides, it seemed so vulnerable, so ready to fall into what I considered ruin, following the predominant pattern of change—from wild to tame, from gracefully beautiful to maimed and scarred. What a relief it is to know its 3,100 acres of wildness and beauty will always be there, refreshing and heartening even to people who can only enjoy it from a distance.

I am so thankful to my cousins Annie, Libby and Helena and their families for their love of nature and ranching, their pride, their hospitality and generosity, and their staunch refusal to sell out to old-school developers. I am also thankful to Mark Reiling, who recognized and will realize benefits from two forms of wealth in the land, and helped safeguard the wealth that benefits everybody.

Every piece of ground the Elk Foundation has helped conserve or enhance is ground that someone has loved the way my cousins and I have loved the Maclay Ranch, and I give thanks to the founders, and the employees, members and supporters, past and present. I am especially grateful to Dan Crockett, RMEF’s director of publications, for allowing me to devote many hours to the Maclay Ranch effort during my last year as an employee.

To top it off, Libby kept her cabin and several hundred acres on the eastern end of the ranch. I didn’t see that coming. My daughter killed her first elk there the day before Thanksgiving, 2007. Hallelujah.

The baby’s fine, the water’s cool and sweet, and the well’s got a lid on it.