Katy’s Refuge Preserves the Wild Life in Montana : Remote tavern near Glacier National Park is a sanctuary for animals of the two-legged variety.

A large sign hangs on a ragged red-frame building in the Montana hamlet of Bynum: Katy’s Wildlife Sanctuary. It is something of a legend in these parts, and travelers to and from Glacier National Park slow in curiosity.

Katy’s is neither an animal refuge nor a branch of the Nature Conservancy, both prime concerns in the great outdoors of Montana. Katy’s is a bar-- the bar for miles around. It preserves nothing but good times.

It was after 7 p.m. on that early September night--but still light--when a friend and I parked out front and opened the squeaky screen door. The place was empty, except for Katy Rash herself, sitting at the bar and smoking a thin brown cigarette.

“I feel like the Maytag repair man,” she said with a crooked smile. “Business is slow. I’m all alone. Nobody needs me. By September, the tourists are dryin’ up. The kids are back in school. And all the men are in the fields until midnight, working double time to get the wheat in before it snows.”

She popped a couple of Rainier beers.

“But I tell ‘em that’s OK with me,” she went on. “They’ll just have more money to spend this winter and I guarantee they’re gonna be in here every night spendin’ it.”

Katy’s place, which is 13 miles north of Choteau on Highway 89, sports a pool table, a row of video games, a big jukebox and room enough to dance. The mirrored bar is as cheerfully cluttered as those in Irish pubs: baby pictures and school photos of customers’ kids, ribbons from county fairs, a jar of wildflowers, a row of mugs, a bottle of aspirin.

Above the old-fashioned cash register is a sign: “No Credit. Don’t Ask.”

Katy has red hair, a Texas twang and a small tattoo on her shoulder.

She’s 42 years old, she volunteered; the two larger photos are of her daughters.

“The 24-year-old’s goin’ back to school this year . . . University of Houston. The other one? She’s pretty and she knows it. They’re good girls. They’ve been up to visit me, but they don’t like the cold weather.”

I asked how long she’d been in Bynum.

“Five years,” she said, “and two days. I had bars in Louisiana and Texas before comin’ up here. It was time to try someplace new.”

Texas and Montana have some drinking habits in common, Katy allowed. There’s a lot of call for beer and for bourbon. And not much demand for Chardonnay.

When I asked about the name of the bar, Katy handed me a coin and nodded toward the jukebox.

“Push P-5,” she said. “That’s where I got the idea.”

Country music filled the room as a good ol’ boy named Moe Bandy rambled through lonesome lyrics about a Texas tavern called the “Wildlife Sanctuary.”

And how had she adjusted to life on the high Montana plains?

“When I first moved to this country from Texas, I had to use a lot of moisturizer,” she said. “My skin was just fallin’ apart in this dry air. Now I’m used to it.”

A 1988 Texas license plate was nailed over the bar; its strange message: HACSAW.

“My buddy in Texas sent that to me,” Katy said. “‘Put it over the bar, Katy, and I’ll come visit,”’ he promised. But he died of cancer and heart trouble before he could get here. That was Aug. 28.”

Her eyes were teary. She raised a glass in his memory.

Then the door swung open and in came a customer, a young man who had missed out on a free birthday drink the night before because he had partied too late with friends. He also had missed work. Katy chided him, like a friendly aunt, then said that his girlfriend had been calling.

Just before I drove away, I watched from my car as the young man came out to his pickup truck, retrieved a mounted deer head from the front seat and carried it inside.

I wondered to myself if it was a matter of show-and-tell, or if the trophy would be left as a deposit on his bill.

Then I remembered the sign: “No Credit. Don’t Ask.”