The name on the hunting license was Wade Corbett. I had known it all my life, as had every living soul in Park County. Wade Corbett was the outfitter who vanished in the Absaroka Mountains in October of 1985, during an early snowstorm, leaving behind a wife named Lucille, a nine year old daughter, and a search that went on for six weeks. They found his horse. They never found Wade. The gold watch in the pouch had his initials on the back, and the clipping said Local Outfitter Presumed Lost. I stood on the stepladder in the firelight with my son holding the base, and I could not make my fingers close.
Beneath the watch lay a folded letter in the square pencil capitals of my father. Marla, I have meant to tell you a hundred times. On the third day of that storm, I found Wade Corbett in a ravine above Sunlight Basin with a broken leg and a bad cough. He was nearly gone. I brought him down on my horse and I hid him in the cellar of this house until the roads cleared. He begged me not to tell. He had reported a ring of poachers who sold animals to rich men, and the ring had threatened his family. He wanted them to think he was lost. I swore on the Bible of my mother.
I read it twice while my son stood quiet beside me. Wade Corbett had gone north in the spring of 1986, in the cab of a pickup that my father drove as far as Billings, and he had made himself a new life in Alaska under another name. My father had kept every promise. He never told my mother. He never told me. The elk head, the one he said he had shot in the Absarokas that same October, had been a gift from Wade, a thank you, and Daddy had hung it over the hearth as a reminder of the secret he was keeping behind it.
An elk mount lifted from a ranch house wall gave one daughter the weekend to bring a lost outfitter home to Cody.
Wade Corbett had passed in 2012, in a small town near Fairbanks. I learned it from the second letter in the pouch, a short note in the hand of a stranger, from a woman who signed herself Ruth. Mr. Pelkey, Wade left word that you should be told. He asked me to say that he never forgot your kindness, and that he missed his girl. I sat down in the recliner of my father with the letter in my lap and looked up at the bare spot above the mantel. Susan Corbett was sixty. She had grown up in Cody without a father. And I held the proof that he had loved her until his last breath.
My brother Cal showed up at the ranch house on Sunday morning with a trailer hitched to his truck and a man from Jackson who dealt in western antiques. Cal is sixty five and has never been able to hold on to money. “Marla, that mount is worth twelve thousand dollars,” he said, stomping into the living room in his boots. “Dealer has a buyer in Dallas. Daddy would want it sold.” The antiques man was already circling the elk head, where it leaned against the sofa. When Cal stooped to lift it, my son, who is six feet four, put his hand flat on the antlers and said politely, “It is not for sale.”
Cal looked at the pouch in my hands, then at the watch glittering on the coffee table. I handed him the letter of my father. He read it standing, his lips moving. By the second paragraph, his big shoulders had gone slack. “Wade Corbett,” he whispered. “Daddy hid Wade Corbett.” He sat down hard on the arm of the couch. The antiques man cleared his throat, said something about another appointment, and carried himself quietly out the door. Cal stared at the cold fireplace for a long minute. “I thought he was just a stubborn old man,” he said. “He was keeping somebody alive.”
I found Susan Corbett Pike on the Powell highway, in a small tidy house with a rusty swing set in the yard. She was a nurse, tall and gray haired, in blue scrubs, home from a shift. When I introduced myself, she stiffened. “If this is about a donation, I cannot,” she began. I held out the gold watch. She stopped, mid sentence. She took it, turned it over, and read the initials, and every muscle in her face seemed to let go. “That is my father,” she said, in a voice I could hardly hear. “That is the watch my mother gave him.” She pressed it to her cheek and wept.
The money consequences were mostly kindness. Susan received the letters of Wade, thirty seven in all, which my father had kept in a coffee can in the cellar, and she received a small bank account that Wade had opened in Fairbanks in 2001, with eighty one thousand dollars, meant for her. The woman named Ruth had kept it for her all these years. The Cody newspaper ran the whole story on the front page, and the county commission, in a rare moment of grace, voted to restore the name of Wade Corbett to the roll of local pioneers.
In the name of my father, Hank Pelkey, who passed in November and who kept a promise for thirty eight years, I started the Cubby Fund. It pays for legal help, relocation aid and counseling for families in Park, Big Horn and Hot Springs counties who are protecting a witness or searching for a lost relative. In the first year, we helped twenty two families. A woman of seventy, in a red wool coat, set a pair of old boots on the desk and said, “My husband walked out in a snowstorm.” I asked her to tell me everything, and I poured the coffee.
In December, Susan came to the ranch house for supper, and my son hung the elk head back over the fireplace. Not because we wanted to, but because Susan asked. She stood in front of it in the firelight, a tall woman with a wineglass in her hand, and looked at the glass eyes for a long time. “He gave this to your father,” she said. “And your father kept it up there, so a little part of him stayed.” She touched the antler gently. I handed her the gold watch, and she wound it, and it began to tick. We stood and listened to it in the quiet.
