Choteau Creek

There is a creek southwest of Dante. It is the creek in which I spent most of my childhood. It is a creek that holds hundred—if not thousands—of memories, a creek that is a home to all sorts of creatures, from leeches to beavers. It is the creek that holds my childhood.

I can’t pick a favorite memory, so I will tell you of a time I remember vividly. I woke up around eight in the morning, and I figured Todd, who was my best friend at the time, would be coming over pretty soon. It seemed like he always timed it perfectly. Whenever I woke up and got settled, he would be knocking on the front door asking my mom if I could play; I always said yes.

Today Todd, Steve, my brother, and I decided to go to the bridge, as we did many days. We rode our bikes to the far side of the bridge, where it was easiest to crawl down into the deep valley. Near the bridge was the only way to get out. It was late summer, so most of the water had dried up. The only water that was left was the two small streams on both sides of the valley. They were small enough to jump over. Reeds filled the rest of the valley so thick in some spots that you could not pass through them.

So we began to weave through the reeds on the left side of the valley, chasing small frogs and toads whenever we would see them. Most of the time, they would quickly disappear into the reeds or jump into one of the small streams. We knew you didn’t have a chance of catching them after that. When we weren’t chasing animals, we kept pushing farther and farther upstream, until we hit a beaver dam.

It was an impressive dam, stretching all forty feet across the valley. To our amazement, the area behind the beaver dam was filled with water. There was so much water; you could see the ripples where the carp and gar swam back and forth.

 At this point we had two decisions: carry on and go farther than we had ever gone before, or turn back and call it a day. Steve and I were hesitant, because we knew that there were probably snapping turtles in the water. But with Todd’s urging, we decided to push forward.

We hopped over the beaver dam, and, to our surprise, sank up to our necks in water. We swam upstream side by side for a quite a while, until we came to a bend in the stream.

We took the corner and found a whole herd of cattle in the stream less than twenty feet away. We all froze. We had no clue what to do. There were thousands of pounds of pure muscle staring straight at us. As we were staring at them, I noticed a big, hefty bull towards the back. Its big, beady eyes were fixed directly on me.

 Out of the blue, Todd yelled at us to run. We all ran to find the quickest way out. To our dismay that was the slowest way, back where we came from. We were hoping to be able to run out the side of the valley, but the walls had steepened and gotten much taller. So, screaming and splashing the whole time, we made our escape back to the bridge.

When we crawled out of the water to take a moment’s break we found big, slimy leaches all over our bodies. We began to frantically pull them off and throw them on the ground, stepping on them when we finally pulled them all off. After the fright, we noticed all our feet were bloodied from stepping on the leaches.

We had had enough. We washed off our feet and climbed back onto the bridge. We hopped onto our bikes and rode home side by side.

Robert Daum