We arrived at the cabin in late afternoon, just as the shadow of Grouse Ridge fell over the porch, with a five-year-old boy, a one-year-old girl, a big yellow dog, and a flat tire. It had been a four-hour drive, in two separate vehicles, and my wife and I were both subdued and mildly amazed. After a dinner of cold chicken, we walked back to the west to catch the last warmth of the fleeting sun, threading our way through range cattle of various colors and temperaments: black, tolerant, whitefaced, skittish, shorthorned, indignant. From the ridge, we could see miles of country and acres of possibilities--the alpine meadows near Hogback Lookout, still bright with Indian paintbrush and brown-eyed susans, the great gray spires that guard the Beaver Creek Canyon like stone sentinels, and far below, the dammed and humbled Missouri.

I'd been dreaming about this trip to the Big Belt Mountains for months, thumbing it like a trump card in an otherwise unremarkable hand until it fairly gleamed with purpose and prosperity. In our lives, September marked the beginning of everything: fiscal-year budgets, health-plan deductibles, kindergarten, hunting. The old year--with its long indoor summer of deadlines and contracts--was a closed book. The new year, resurrected by the opening day of grouse season, was only two sunsets away.

The next morning, I tightened the lug nuts on the spare tire, tucked the flat behind the front seat of the station wagon and headed back to the nearest town, alone. Halfway to Helena, I heard on the radio that Elvis had died--20 years ago that day, but still news, and thousands had gathered at Graceland to remember him. In his 42 years, the King had produced 18 number-one singles, 33 movies, and countless unauthorized biographies. He had sweated and toiled until, finally, his heart had given out like a used carburetor.

With the spare on the driver's-side front wheel, I had to lean hard toward the center line to stay on the road. While leaning, it occurred to me that, in the year of his expiration, Elvis had not been much older than I was now, and yet here I felt hardly used at all. I vowed to work harder towards that end, and resolved that I would not forget the King's dying day again either, that his passing would, for now on, be inextricably linked with the smell of road dust, the crack of gravel under bald tires, and the heft of a lug wrench in my hand.

I made it back to the cabin by midday, feeling somewhat overheated by the sun and throttled by thirst. We loaded the kids into the car and drove down to Trout Creek with swimsuits and towels only to find a bed of dry gravel. We hiked into the canyon anyway and were rewarded with more views of towering rock spires, carpets of bunchberry dogwood with their cardinal red fruit, and the occasional ripe raspberry. While the dog worked the edge of each thicket, I tried not to imagine the grouse flushing, the slap of the stock against my cheek, the report of the twelve gauge.

Instead, I prattled inanities for my daughter's amusement, tickling her bare feet as she rode in the baby pack, and reaching over one shoulder with the sweetest berries cradled like gems in my open palm. We met a German couple on the trail hiking with a white Pomeranian, a black Rottweiler, and no water. The air was parched even in the shade of the canyon and the big Rottweiler's tongue looked as dry as a razor strap. The Germans had been traveling around North America for five years: Canada and the United States in the summer, Mexico in the winter. They gave no explanation for their restlessness, and none was needed. At the end of the conversation, they admitted that they really had nothing to complain about.

Later in the afternoon, we motored back up to Indian Flats and down the western set of switchbacks to Beaver Creek for a real swim. Then we lit a fire and sliced mushrooms and red peppers into a cast-iron pan. While the kids gorged themselves on marshmallows, my wife and I roasted some cubes of last season's elk, warmed two slices of sourdough bread, then cracked a bottle of champagne. We really had nothing to complain about either.

The grouse season opened the next morning: ruffed, spruce, and blue. Ordinarily I would have been up before dawn, walking the ridge across from the cabin, the dog running ahead of me with his tail up and his nose down, flushing birds far out of shotgun range. But this day I sat quietly on the porch, keeping watch over two sleeping children while my wife tried to accumulate an hour or two of peace and quiet, like a bear hoarding the memory of huckleberries against winter. She'd have both kids during the week, while I stayed at the cabin with only the grouse and the dog, so I didn't feel too badly about the half-dozen shotgun blasts that found my ears from the other side of the ridge. I still counted them, of course, but I did not count each one as a dead bird and reckon the decline in the remaining population. I wished those other hunters the best of luck on the last day of the Labor Day weekend, because tomorrow morning they would be at work, while I--still younger than Elvis--could hunt as I pleased.

Home at last. Boy and dog seem totally unaware that in just two days, the grouse season opens.

But after I'd walked Grouse Ridge myself, with the setting sun at my back, and then again with a rising sun throwing shadows ahead, I had to wonder what yesterday's hunters found to point their guns at. I saw gray jays and mountain chickadees, red squirrels and red-breasted nuthatches, gnarled old fir trees with big branches for roosts, rocky knobs overlooking thick clumps of spruce and open meadows alive with grasshoppers. But no grouse.

That second afternoon--which seemed to promise many more hours than any one day could hold, long quiet hours with no demands other than my own--I decided to drive back down Beaver Creek to its confluence with the Missouri, to hunt the cottonwoods in the creek bottom and the sagebrush hills that rose like sleeping elephants from the meadow grass.

If the kids had joined the Lab and me, we might have taken a trip to the Eldorado Bar to mine sapphires, which is in its own way as much fun as hunting Easter eggs or morel mushrooms, and requires the same sort of optimism and concentration. Or we might have dunked worms in a deep eddy of the river, prospecting for carp or walleye or who knows what, since any live thing on the end of a fishing pole is enough to make them smile.

But the kids were gone until Friday. My son would learn to color and to cooperate and to cope with all the petty boredoms of kindergarten. My daughter would test her ability to stand after twirling 20 times on the carpet, shake her head "yes" for no and "no" for yes, reward her mother's attentions with unreasonable screams and unexpected smiles.

Thinking of them, I felt again that vague sort of inadequacy inspired by the death of the King. A shameful feeling, as if I had been caught whining or shirking or coveting my neighbor's goods. I reminded myself that my family had returned home in the car. I remained here with the truck. These were my days.

The Labrador and I bumped along beside Beaver Creek to within a mile of the Missouri, then turned north onto a spur road towards the Gates of the Mountains, through an old burn with bare hillsides, thinly populated by weathered and broken stumps. The route was generally dusty, raked by a dry wind that reeked of barren rock and burnt sage, so I was altogether unprepared for what lay at the end: red-and-white signs announcing private property, a cluster of trophy log and cedar homes with monstrous picture windows, a neat row of boat docks, and the cool green river.

We sat in the truck with my forearm propped on the window ledge, gawking in not quite the same way as Lewis and Clark must have from the same vantage point. Feeling that we were being watched, I looked up to find a middle-aged man like myself in a white t-shirt leaning on the railing of a bright, unweathered deck. I waved, but he did not wave back.

On the way out, I noticed a tiny marker for Spring Gulch that I'd missed on the way in. I parked and looked up the ravine, noticing first a trail of tansy and golden asters, then the green ribbon of grass, and finally the thick clumps of snowberry and wild roses. I grabbed the shotgun and a handful of shells and started up after the dog, following a trickle of live water past thickets of chokecherry until the gulch narrowed and fir and pine began to close in. On the way back down I sent him into every likely looking hole but no grouse flew out.