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MUTTSTAFARIAN: A mangy mutt, too wild to be petted, has roamed the waste rock of Butte’s Superfund site and an adjacent mine for 16 years. The dog’s unshorn dreadlocks help insulate him from the brutal winters -
BETTER THAN NOTHING: Occasionally, the dog settles down enough to spend a night in a doghouse placed on the north rim of the Berkeley Pit. Butte’s few remaining miners have named him The Auditor, because he keeps showin up unexpectedly
BUTTE, Mont. – On the fringe of this faded mining town, at the core of one of the nation’s largest Superfund sites, lives an amazing paradox. Its genus is Canus, but its species would have to be called extraordinarius. I doubt there’s ever been another dog like this on the planet.
The mysterious, mostly wild mongrel has survived for 16 years in a 5,000-acre moonscape habitat – the acidic, heavy metals-laden Berkeley Pit federal Superfund site and an adjacent mine run by Butte’s sole remaining mining company, Montana Resources. Ironically, the dog’s only help has come from miners.
“He really is a neat dog,” says Steve Walsh, operations president of Montana Resources, whose employees have informally adopted the dog as their mascot – as much as the dog will allow, anyway.
For years, workers on the night shift have put out food and water for the dog whenever he’s shown up. They’ve also installed a shanty doghouse at the base of an enormous waste rock dump. The doghouse is bleak and bedded with rags, its proximity littered with corroding food cans, but it’s better than nothing. Yet the dog sleeps there only occasionally, as if he’s reluctant to become too dependent.
Feeding time, around 7 p.m., is the only occasion when the dog can be expected to appear in all his unsightly glory. Sometimes he doesn’t show for several weeks, even in the dead of winter. Most of the time, he’s an elusive creature roaming the wasteland.
“God only knows what he does all day,” says Ron Benton of Montana Resources. “You’ve got to wonder why an animal would choose a place so forlorn.”
Not a single blade of grass, nary a tree, shrub or weed can survive on the sickly yellow and burnt-orange crust that dominates the dog’s home. Reeking of sulfur and acidity, this is the kind of soil that eats men’s boots, let alone the paws of any normal dog.
The water in the Berkeley Pit can dissolve metal, and it kills most forms of life. That was proven dramatically seven years ago, when 342 migrating snow geese landed in the pit and died before they could take off.
“It’s unbelievable how (a dog) could live in a place that’s supposed to be so toxic,” says veterinarian Ed Peretti, who has tried to track the dreadlocked mutt, but got only one glimpse of it lumbering over a rocky dump too steep for the vet to follow. With the same admiration the miners show, the vet says, “He’s one tough dog.”
The miners have a name for the dog. They call him fondly “The Auditor,” because he seems to show up when they least expect it. They have proudly placed numerous snapshots of The Auditor in a glass display case in the company’s main office, alongside ore samples and award plaques.
But The Auditor is getting old, over a hundred in dog years. So the miners add baby aspirin to the dogfood, trying to ease an arthritic limp The Auditor has developed. Somehow, he hangs on.
Perhaps this stubborn perseverance comes from his origins in the gritty town from which he likely wandered. Mining began in Butte in 1864 and went through many booms and busts, with the last big bust in the 1980s, when the historic Uptown District and the Berkeley Pit wasteland were declared a Superfund site. The Superfund designation extends fully 130 miles downstream, where tailings settled all along the Clark Fork River.
Today, things feel tenuous in Butte, which sits atop what is said to be the most intensively mined ground on the planet, riddled with an estimated 10,000 miles of abandoned tunnels, stopes and shafts. Butte’s population of about 35,000 is less than half what it was in the heyday. Many of the old brick buildings are vacant or underused.
The mining workforce alone once totaled 15,000, but now just a couple dozen miners hang on, capping tailings, doing some revegetation and water treatment for the Montana Resources pit. The company suspended even these meager operations in June 2000, because of high deregulated energy rates coupled with another plunge in the price of copper. Since then, with just the skeleton crew of miners on duty, concern has grown that some day there will be no one to feed or care for The Auditor.
The dog is so wild, he won’t let anyone pet him. He looks incredibly mangy, with fur all matted and hanging down, and only a snout sticking out. The miners believe all that insulation helps, especially during the brutal winters, and anyway, they can’t get close long enough to trim the fur. One miner has earned enough trust that he was able to shear the dog’s bangs, to help it see. The miners say, if you have the chance to take a close look, the dog has beautiful eyes.
It’s the same with Butte. Just as the dog has adapted, the town has adapted, living amid a toxic landscape, building a new economy on the money brought by a Superfund cleanup. If you can look past the town’s ugliness, it’s become a beautiful place, defined in a way few people understand, astride the Continental Divide, decorated by the old headframes, its people hard-skinned and warm-hearted. Both the town and the dog keep showing up, against the odds.
Matt Vincent writes from Butte, Montana.
This article appeared in the print edition of the magazine with the headline Like Butte, a lonely dog hangs on.
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