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The first time you meet Randy Matchett is likely to be on a dirt road or prairie field camp in remote central Montana just south of the Hi-Line. He is easy to spot in his white oversized pickup truck packed full of tools like a Swiss Army knife. He always carries with him chains and fence posts to tug himself or others out of the mud, a full mechanic’s chest of tools to fix any type of engine (from airplane to generator) on the fly, enough medical gear to serve as a veterinary lab, a rifle to sample coyotes for canine distemper virus, and a sleeping bag and pillow in the back seat to serve as his mobile home. These are tools of the trade for the lead wildlife biologist responsible for the million-acre Charles M. Russell National Wildlife Refuge. When he steps out of his truck, the first things you would notice are his felt cowboy hat and neatly trimmed, horseshoe-shaped dark mustache around a wry smile. He wears a government-issue uniform of brown denim pants and a button-up beige shirt with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service insignia of a flying goose on his shoulder. As he moves his wiry frame you will notice a slight arch in his back and limp that he attributes to a high school “rodeo” accident.
FIGURE 3. Short-horned lizard (Phrynosoma hernandesi) on the mixed-grass prairie of central Montana.
FIGURE 4. Old homestead in southern Phillips County, Montana.
I first met Randy in 1998 at the University of Montana when he gave a guest lecture on black-footed ferrets. He talked to a group of wildlife biology students about how he had spent the past four years trying to restore some of the Sybille captive stock into central Montana. I was enthralled by his story, but like most University of Montana students, I dreamed of studying the larger mammals—wolves, grizzly bears, or moose—in the mountains. I jotted down his email on the corner of a page in my spiral notebook, and did not think about him again until a few months later when I was graduating and without a job. Lost in the pile of applicants who wanted to work in the mountains, Randy put me in touch with a graduate student who paid me to do a summer job of trapping prairie dogs in central Montana. We translocated hundreds of prairie dogs onto Randy’s refuge to restore populations, and when that three-month job ended and Randy saw that I was still interested in the prairies, he offered to keep me on—a sort of on-the-job screening process that led him to offer me free housing and wages of $16 a day to help monitor his small population of captive-reared black-footed ferrets. I left my small car at the end of the pavement where the government truck Randy had left for me waited, and drove the sixty miles on dirt roads to a field camp he termed “Ferret Camp” that consisted of a handful of small camper trailers parked on an isolated tip of land along the Missouri River.
I was hired to follow the nightly movements of the small group of ferrets Randy was carefully trying to rear in the wild. He trusted his precious animals to me and a fellow drifter, Pete, an out-of-work high school teacher from Kansas. The goal was to keep track of how many of the handful of new wild-born litters would survive, and try to predict how many ferrets Randy might expect to see the following spring. The survival of a large number of kits meant that the Montana habitat was good. Also, the more ferrets that survived, the better Randy’s chances in getting more ferrets for release from Sybille stock the following spring. Like all field biologists, we shifted our lives to that of our study animals: sleeping days and working nights; eating one large meal a day; learning the feeling of a drop in barometric pressure ahead of a storm; judging the time of night by the height and phase of the moon.
We followed the kits every night into the fall, naming each one and tracking its movements between prairie dog burrows. We were collecting points on a map to create a sketch of each ferret’s life history for Randy. We rationed our food to be able to persist on a trip to town for food every two weeks and kept up our nonstop routine until the first week in November, when freezing water lines and winter started forcing us out of the camper trailers and back to the hardtop life of highways and electricity.
Pete left camp first, ahead of the north winds of the first severe cold front. Days shortened and nights grew so cold that I had to bring my truck battery into the trailer to be sure to have enough spark to start the old Dodge the next night. Like a failed homesteader, I felt the forces of weather and solitude pressuring me to leave Montana, yet I had no job to move on to. I dreaded the sharp cut of work that is field biology, from a life of continuous motion to sudden inaction when the fieldwork ends, money runs out, or the animals move on—a separation that was all the more paralyzing because we were working on such a rare and fragile animal, not knowing whether they would make it through the next five months of winter. Whether they would be here when I returned.
By mid-November a call came through on the old camp phone that was stacked on a piece of plywood in the corner of the barn. Grabbing my hat and gloves, I rushed outside and felt ice crystals instantly form in my nostrils. The chill of the cold plastic phone on my bare ear made me recoil, forcing me to hold the phone at a safe distance. On the other end of the line, the voice of a woman from the federal government repeated my name. She seemed pleased to have tracked me down in response to the application I filed the previous year to join Peace Corps. She offered a two-year contract as a biologist in the Philippines, a free plane ticket to a country I barely knew existed. I traced my mental globe to somewhere in Southeast Asia, the Pacific, somewhere warm—I did not hesitate.
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In 2002, following my two years of international service and building a life as a tropical biologist, I found myself back in central Montana. Randy offered me a full-time job to help him again with black-footed ferrets, and I accepted before even getting off the plane back into the United States. He wanted me to move up to a little waterfowl refuge on the Hi-Line of northern Montana and work full-time to help him breed and rear black-footed ferrets in Montana so that they could be released there. It was a permanent job with pay, something scripted and directed, yet we knew that the outcome for the species was still far from certain—extinction loomed.
I arrived in the small town of Malta during spring, a time of hope and activity—hope that the ephemeral prairie rains would come and last into July before the grasslands dried out and returned to their more familiar and less nutritious brown. It was a time of preparation ahead of the busy summer months when ranchers must push cows out into summer pastures, fatten calves, and harvest hay before the long winter. But in Malta I was not a homeowner, not a landowner, not even a renter, more of a squatter. I was a twenty-five-year-old wildlife biologist living in a retired FEMA trailer left over from the latest Gulf of Mexico hurricane disaster that was government surplused and then hidden behind a maintenance building on the seldom-visited Bowdoin National Wildlife Refuge—a pinprick of a refuge on the larger map of federally protected areas barely large enough to justify having a full-time staff. I often imagined the poor family who had lived in the trailer before me. I created an image of a family from Alabama or Mississippi who had lost everything, cramming four kids and a grandmother into one of many white, tightly packed, federally purchased trailers in an abandoned soccer field on the Gulf Coast, each filled with a traumatized family under the government’s care. Based on the stains on the sofa and smell of the curtains, I thought that my trailer’s family must have had to stay in the encampment for months before they could find a modular house to rent with federal disaster aid checks, likely settling in a town far from the memories of the coast and where they had few relatives.
For me, the trailer was temporary living turned semi-permanent by cinder blocks under axles and power from an extension cord. The eyesore was hidden from public view by a ring of invasive, pale, stunted, and thorny Russian olive trees—few native tree species could tolerate the winter cold, summer heat, poor soil, and infrequent rain. As I cooked dinner on the cramped two-burner camper stove with borrowed pots and pans, I was given time to think, to reflect on how quickly my life became focused on a similar trailer three hundred feet away where dozens of beady eyes of baby black-footed ferret kits were still hidden from light by sealed eyelids.
