The Charlie Russell stretches another 120 miles, enveloping Fort Peck Reservoir. The sun sets over Montana's wildlands. A person can stand on the cultivated benchlands above the Missouri and have no idea that the wild breaks are below. Conversely, when deep in the breaks visitors have a profound sense of being completely cut off from the rest of the world.
Mule deer are the most abundant large mammals in the breaks.
Mature big-bodied bucks display high sweeping racks, as opposed to the wider sets of antlers more common elsewhere. Whitetails are limited from Cow Island downstream, where heavy brush adjoins crop lands near the river. Several transplants since 1951 have restored thriving herds of elk to densely forested parts of the breaks. The last of the Audubon bighorns was killed near Billy Creek in 1916. In 1979, twenty-seven bighorn sheep were planted at Chimney Bend.