Читать книгу Howl - Susan Imhoff Bird - Страница 10
ОглавлениеSnow lies thick on the ground, frozen on pine needles. She sleeps in a curl, nose tucked under tail. Her body warms her body. Last spring’s pups are almost yearlings, nearly as large as Sophie. Almost capable of joining the hunt. Elk forage for food in the valley below. A calendar would say it’s January, 2008. A map would place her in west-central Idaho, near the Sawtooth Mountains. And biologists would say she was a two-year-old female that belonged to the Timberline pack. Her stomach is full of yesterday’s elk, and she rises on stiff legs, sniffing the air in the pre-dawn dark. She straightens her forelegs and bends chest to ground, her pelvis high. She arches her back and lifts her nose. She howls. The sound floats on the frozen air. It slips into the trees. Walking from pup to pup, she nudges shoulders. She nudges each yearling, her mother, her father. They sleep. She steps away. She moves into a trot, and runs steadily west.
She turns north, then west again. She traverses a mountain, arrives at a cliff. Far below, a river. Chunks of ice pile on both banks, and the swift water flows green under thin sheaves of ice growing in from the edges. She picks her way down, paws finding purchase on a rock, in a crevice, on a wind-buffed shelf. She reaches bottom and she swims the frigid river, its current pressing her body downstream. She hauls herself onto the frozen bank. Shakes. Water flies a dozen feet, freezing as it lands on snow, on deadwood tossed from the river, on the rocks that have tumbled down the cliff. Up. She climbs the other face of the deepest river gorge in the country, pausing only once to look back upon what she has left. A cartographer would label this Hell’s Canyon, would neatly print Snake River on the twisting ribbon of blue. He would print Idaho on the right side, Oregon to the river’s left. She continues west, then north, follows curves of land. The river here is less strident. She scents elk. She stops. A researcher for the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife would document her as one of the first wolves to step foot in Oregon in over sixty years, would know her river as the Imnaha. And when she finds her mate and gives birth to pups just months from now, the researcher will call her new family the Imnaha pack.
Green shoots crouch beneath winter-gray sage and shrub. A mist, white and translucent, rolls over a ridge, hovers, and disappears into the morning. Later the cloud of fog returns, then rolls away as I turn my back. It’s June, but the fifty-degree weather feels like I’m in some mysterious, mountainous land where the inexplicable can happen at any moment. I’m in the Lamar Valley, searching a hillside of hummocks for coyotes.
“See that tree?” Pete says. “Follow that line to your left, where you see that green vale, then follow it up, about halfway up that sagebrush rise, then there’s that little dirt patch; there’s the den.”
I find the tree easily, but the dirt patch eludes me. Pete’s scope is mounted on a tripod, and he beckons me over. I put my eye to the eyepiece—squint the other shut—and lean close to eliminate peripheral light. Coyote pups seem to leap into existence from the grassy hillside, their light brown limbs tangling and separating and finally sorting themselves into six different bodies. They frolic, nip and push, halt, turn a head to an elder. They run and leave the frame of the scope, rendering the hill green once more. I turn from the scope and scrutinize the hillside. I try to find them unaided, and fail. I still can’t find that dirt patch.
“They’re out of sight again,” I say, and Pete hops over to scan for the pups. He finds them within seconds, and adjusts the scope. He steps back, offering views to the rest of us.
We lucked into Pete this morning. Doug Smith had told me Pete was out here working with Rick McIntyre, somewhere. What Doug hadn’t told me is that Pete Mumford is young, energetic, and gorgeous. Mark says he’s a nice young man, but Kirsten and I have nicknamed him Jesus, for his curling longish blond locks, his piercing blue eyes, and his manner, gentle yet authoritative. Disciples would follow this man anywhere.
Those blue eyes are steadfast and focused as he responds to questions, and a few days’ beard growth runs cheekbone to exquisitely formed chin. A thick headband holds back golden hair, sunglasses perched atop, and his acid green down-filled jacket shows a month’s exposure to pollen, wind, and weather. His tan Carhartts are battle marked, and he wears brown-laced hiking boots and a communication device velcroed into the harness strapped across his t-shirt-covered chest. Slim-hipped with a skier’s physique, lean and muscled, he radiates energy and enthusiasm.
A member of the Wolf Project team for only the past month, he describes his job much like McIntyre’s, to help people see the wolves, to manage crowds and traffic situations when needed, and to stay on top of what’s termed citizen science—opportunistic data collection from the near-constant supply of wolf watchers. (In addition to the daily crowd of wolf watchers who provide information, a number of wolf watchers use radios to communicate their sightings to Rick, providing location and behavior information that adds to Rick’s immense collection of wolf observations.) A native New Yorker, Pete graduated Cornell in the winter of 2011 with a degree in Natural Resources, then moved west to work on a bison vegetation study in Yellowstone. The following winter he volunteered to help with the annual winter wolf study—he describes this animatedly, his arms up, hands pointing to his head and shoulders, “look, free labor”—and got his foot in the door.
I peek again at the coyote pups, then step back from the scope to let another watcher look. Squealing erupts on the hillside, a veritable yip-fest, and we all smile at each other.
As the yips fade I turn back to Pete and ask what he likes about being part of the Wolf Project team. His eyes grow huge.
“Are you serious? Who wouldn’t be excited to be doing this? Wolves? For me it’s the total package—they can run forty miles an hour, they’re graceful, can go three weeks without food, they’re amazing. The eccentricities in their dynamics keep us curious, and guessing, and what a great way to work.”
Pete moves to the back of his truck and brings out his wolf-finder divining rod. He waves it around in every direction. The antenna searches for signals emitted by the collars that many of the park wolves wear. Each collar has a separate frequency, and Pete scans for the wolves of the Lamar Canyon pack. No beeps. The antenna goes back in the truck.
Pete talks science, biology, and his eyes lift skyward momentarily before he responds to my more politically probing questions.
“The work isn’t about liking wolves—it’s about law, and science, and best practice. Do you know the McKittrick story?” Pete asks.
“No,” I shake my head.
“He shot one of the first collared wolves released in the reintroduction, Number 10, back in April of 1995. It was barely a month after the wolf and his mate had been released from their holding pen. The day before the shooting, Chad mired his truck on a muddy hillside where he’d planned to hunt for black bear. The next morning a friend helped him free the truck, but before they left the area they noticed a large animal uphill, some kind of canine. Chad grabbed his gun and even though his friend said hey, maybe it’s a dog, Chad shot and killed the animal. They hiked up to the body, and when they reached Number 10 and saw the radio collar, they panicked. They dragged the body downhill, then unbolted the collar from the wolf’s neck.
“Chad wants the skull and the pelt, so he skins the carcass and dumps the body in the brush. The friend wants Chad to turn himself in, promising to support the defense that it was an accident. Chad refuses. The friend worries about the collar, that it might still be transmitting, and eventually throws it in a creek not far from his home. He has no idea that these collars send a mortality signal if the wolf has stopped moving for a specific number of hours, nor that the collar is waterproof.
“Pretty soon McKittrick was caught, thanks to the radio collar—which was quickly located—and a few people who weren’t willing to lie to protect him. He was charged and found guilty of killing a member of a threatened species, possessing its remains, and transporting those remains. After a few appeals, he finally served a three month sentence in 1999.”
Pete tells the story matter-of-factly, but I hear what sounds like empathy for both sides. McKittrick was a barely employed, unsubstantially educated man who made a poor decision, and Yellowstone lost an animal on which they’d spent ten thousand dollars to bring into the park. The alpha female lost her partner, and numerous park and law enforcement personnel spent hours attempting to ameliorate the consequences of McKittrick’s decision. It’s part of wolf history in the park. McKittrick isn’t evil and wolves aren’t to be glorified. Interestingly, this case resulted in a Department of Justice directive—the McKittrick Policy—that requires prosecutors to prove that the defendant knowingly killed a protected animal. The word “knowingly” is at issue, its definition not clearly stated, which places a higher burden of proof on the prosecutor. As such, the policy has effectively hobbled prosecutors and drastically reduced the number of criminal prosecutions against people killing protected animals.
“This work is complicated. We have to balance protection with leaving the wolves alone, and we have to work with state and federal agencies, and people, too, ordinary people. As a scientist I can objectively approach wolf interactions. If a wolf were impacting my livelihood, my business, I’d want some kind of control. No matter our level of awe about them, there are limits to what we as a society can allow, can tolerate. I’m okay with that.”
Pete has been steadily scanning the hillside. Coyotes howl from somewhere beyond sight, and we all fall silent, listening. Seconds later we hear an answering chorus, drifting toward us from another direction. The volley of howls and yips seems to suspend time, but it is over almost instantly. I ask Pete what else drew him to the study of wolves, besides their charisma.
“The complexity. The dynamics still aren’t well understood, the lifestyle, pack organization. We know a lot, but not with certainty. Wolves, like us, are cultural learners. They pass knowledge down through generations. Each wolf in the pack plays a part in its social structure. A beta male may be the alpha male’s brother and key lieutenant, while another brother might be the omega, bottom of the social ladder. Young adults often disperse to start their own packs. But when packs fall apart, like when an alpha gets killed, the structure doesn’t work as well. Young wolves, without enough training, can get overly aggressive or go after livestock instead of sticking with what they know, elk and deer, wild game.
“There’s always some surprise, something cool, something that makes you go wow, that was amazing. I’m curious, I like to learn, and they’re always teaching us something new.”
I release Pete to the rest of the wolf watchers, and turn away from the coyote hillside and toward the Lamar River. I inhale air from miles away, air that has traveled here over small valleys, skimming lake surfaces, rolling up mountain peaks and swooping down their craggy sides, leap-frogging over the bison by the river to brush past me before skimming the next rise of hillside. Sun-warmed, river-fresh. I’ve left my bicycle behind for three days now, and am operating at a lower frequency than usual, breathing in peace and breathing out tranquility. My day is structured only by the movements of the wolves that live in the canyon, the wolves that seem to be hiding from us this afternoon. There’s a crinkled brown paper bag with two cinnamon rolls from the Bearclaw Bakery in the car and my water bottle is full. I look out at cranes high-stepping through marshy river edges. I am possibly the hundred millionth person to stand here and whisper, thank God this place exists.
Emerson’s words echo: the landscape belongs to the person who looks at it. I possess this beauty, me alone, as I breathe it in and store it in my cells. I color it with my past, seeing mountains I skied as a girl, rivers I splashed through, meadows where I ran and swung on tree limbs. I place myself inside it all. I move into vrksasana, tree pose. I am balanced. A breath, two, five, then I become human again and walk back to the car.
I haven’t always been balanced. I toddled like most children, and earned each bruise and scrape. As I grew I became more steady, learned to skateboard, ride a bike, ski. I earned a degree, worked a corporate job, got married. Stable, settled, tethered by a house and a bank account and a husband. And then the pregnancy, the loss, the death. I lost every bit of balance I’d ever possessed.
My feet are spread so far apart, I’m immobilized. One is planted in the cemetery—with Little Joe, and the other at the hospital—with Jake. I lose equilibrium with the slightest shift toward one or the other, and crash noiselessly into a netherworld. Grieving is impossible when I navigate by clinging desperately to a thread of hope.
On Jake’s second day of life we’re told he had a seizure during the previous night.
“A seizure?” Bob asks.
“Yes, so he’s on phenobarbital to suppress them. But we have an ultrasound scheduled, they should be here soon with the machine.” The nurse is small, short dark hair, olive skin. Her eyes are walls. She doesn’t smile.
“An ultrasound?”
“They want to look at his brain. Seizures usually indicate some kind of injury to a section of the brain, so they want to look, see if they can determine why he had the seizure.”
I look at Bob. I’m in my wheelchair again this morning. I cannot walk all the way from my room to the Newborn ICU. I have another heated blanket on my lap, a plastic band on my left wrist stating that I am the mother of Jake Imhoff. I do not have a band for Little Joe.
Each day in the newborn ICU is a week in normal life. I assume the babies in the incubators to be worse off than those under lights on warming tables, until I’m told the opposite is true: on a warming table the baby is available for immediate intervention should he or she suddenly retrogress. Crises erupt and resolve, blood is drawn, tests are performed, diagnoses pronounced and options presented. What is life-threatening in the morning can disappear by evening. What appears normal can indicate severe distress. And just when I think Jake is stable, I’m told of some new complication. He hasn’t urinated, he might have necrotizing enterocolitis, he isn’t alert enough. Hourly I’m presented with something new to absorb and incorporate. You must keep hope.
There is a room off the hallway with a single reclining chair and a machine that pumps milk from my breasts. I hide here. Alone in this room I am protected from beeps and severe expressions, from bad news, from terror of the unknown, from others.
Sympathy pours toward me, and I can’t bear it. Believe. Hope. Each expression demands a reaction I can’t give because I am hollow.
Why are you keeping him alive, my mother asks. The fury of my netherworld leaps from me, pulsing, and shoves itself between the two of us. I don’t know who this woman is. Jake is keeping himself alive. His heart beats, his lungs compress and expand, his stomach digests, his kidneys filter. I say nothing.
I see pain darken the green of her eyes. My mother doesn’t believe in medical heroics. But she’s never given birth to a preemie, and she doesn’t understand that there’s nothing heroic about feeding and keeping warm a newborn baby boy—even a baby boy who’s suffered cerebral hemorrhages in both hemispheres of his brain. Bleeds, they’re called. A grade IV in his left, a grade III in his right. There’s nothing heroic about this. Nothing heroic about placing one foot in front of the other. Feeding and changing diapers, cradling and kissing my baby, hoping and praying—all while operating almost by rote, my entire belief system in pieces, my sense of self in shards.
I sit with eyes closed on the wooden deck that runs along the entry doors of the Elkhorn Lodge in Cooke City, Montana. Clear skies brought a brisk morning and a cool day, and I welcome the slender slice of sunlight hitting my body. The hill before me is naked and yet covered with trees: these are trees that burned during the town’s terrifying fire of 1988, trees that stand tall, lean precariously, and lie on the ground, dead, none able to leave this death knoll. The sun is ready to drop below the mountains though the sky remains bright on this June evening. Tomorrow morning we leave Yellowstone. Part of me will stay here, just like these trees. Will eventually decompose, will become part of the soil. Will give life to what comes next.
And how much of this landscape will come with me when I leave? I look within, searching for wild, for what’s been reignited. And suddenly I’m thinking of Daniel, our relationship flat, lifeless. I see us in our house, in shorts and t-shirts, a project.
I am on a stepladder. I jam the putty knife under a corner of paper, shove it up, between wall and ancient grasscloth paste. The wallpaper is dated, has been on the foyer walls for decades. I’d lived with it for six years, and am excited that Daniel and I are stripping it, replacing the bumpy, stringy stuff with smooth, taupe paint. It hadn’t been easy to settle on a color. Daniel wanted the sage green gone—he thought my house entirely too green—and we’d tried eighteen shades of gray-tan-beige before finally choosing this taupe. He and his fifteen-year-old son had moved into my house when we married a few months before. I’d lost more of my space than just that inside closets and cupboards.
He preps an un-papered wall, I soften old glue and scrape dusty paper from another era.
“I was stripping old wallpaper the week that Jake was born,” I say.
“Oh?”
“This puts me back there—I haven’t scraped old wallpaper in a long time. I’d taken a week off work, and was just home, nesting I suppose.”
I pause between sentences, sometimes between words.
“I’d had an ultrasound a few days before, and on that Monday morning my doctor called, told me he wanted me to have a non-stress test to check on the babies. They were concerned about the growing size discrepancy. I said sure, any day, I’m off all week. He suggested Thursday. I said okay.”
I scrape distractedly. I tear a strip of stringy paper free, and toss it in the trash pile before continuing.
“I hung up the phone, climbed back onto the stepladder, and kept scraping. And then by Thursday, Little Joe had died, and then on Saturday Jake was born. Wall paper will probably always put me right back there.”
“Mm.” He tapes his wall. I sit.
Silence.
I don’t need much, but I need more than an “mm.” His back is to me and I watch him stretch, measure, press blue tape against the ceiling. He finishes that corner and moves to the next wall. I sit on my stepladder. Then I scrape some more. I squeeze my eyes against the tears.
Three months later, I bring it up when we begin therapy, how I’d hoped for some supportive words, some display of empathy. Oh, he says. I didn’t know you wanted me to say anything.
The therapist suggests I’d given Daniel a “love test,” expecting him to know what I wanted. Instead of simply asking.
We leave Cooke City after buying another bag of cinnamon rolls and sticky buns at the Bearclaw Bakery. We head west, a final drive through Lamar Valley, then on to Missoula. Our eyes are peeled for wolves. Mark brakes for bison, for black bears, for tourists who are too focused on taking pictures to think about driving. We get stopped by bear jams: tourists pausing half-way and no-way off the road to watch a bear amble, munch berries, or otherwise occupy itself within sight of a road. An eagle soars over Soda Butte River. A deer hides in an aspen copse, his antlers sliced by the tall, narrow trunks.
Once outside the park, we pick up speed, dry brown land changing to lush hillsides of greening shrub and tree as we enter Paradise Valley. Voluptuous growth. Delicate lady’s slippers and thunderous sequoias. Creatures both meek and predatory. Hares. Wolves. Pounding waterfalls, deer and bears and muskrats. Wilderness, untrammeled, roadless. And border lands, where roads snake through wildness, where we’re allowed glimpses of creatures in their own spaces. Places where I pedal my bicycle as dawn breaks, letting the world seep into my consciousness.
It’s slightly before five and predawn hovers, resting on the surface of the road and rising upward as far as I can see until it touches the remnants of a night sky, Venus hanging low, a flare of light just a finger, maybe two, above the hills at the mouth of the canyon. The birds are wide awake, exchanging messages, declaring their intentions for the day, and I am an interloper, eavesdropping. This portion of the world is dark and asleep yet wildly vibrant. Dew-moistened grass is slick and the breeze rustling over it releases a wet whisper that I hear beneath the slapping of tree leaves and the creak of weakened branches soon to be torn from limbs by the next violent windstorm. The early mornings here are always blustery, the cool air rushing down-canyon into the warmer city. By mid-morning the pattern reverses as the heat of the city searches for escape and pushes its way up between the sloping canyon walls. But I ride during the dawning of the day, wind against my body, clapping the flag’s thick white cord against the flagpole at the top of the street just before the canyon’s entrance, warning me that I will have to work hard these next six miles before the sweeping switchback in the canyon places the wind at my back.
I hear the water crash over the rocks of the creek bed—I cannot see it—just as I hear a critter, a squirrel or a magpie, move through the coarse undergrowth beside the road. I’ve barely entered the canyon, am no more than half a mile in, and everything inside me has shifted. The two miles I’ve ridden to reach the canyon mouth are urban, the roads mildly steep and most houses midnight dark. With entry into the canyon my world becomes wild and untamed, the grasses high and irregular, the hillside artistically barren then lush. I breathe better here.
I round a curve and approach the spot I once heard coyotes howl. I was new to riding, new to the canyon’s predawn milieu. I’d heard the howl—a brief one—then immediately convinced myself I hadn’t, when another howl tumbled down the hillside. I sucked in a breath. I was spooked. No streetlamps dot this two-lane road, no fence runs resolutely along the shoulder. Not a single house sat within a mile of me in either direction. Coyotes won’t attack me, of course not. I’m much too big. But shivers flew up my spine, the way they do when a wild animal’s howl leaps from the dark and you are solitary, exposed, ignorant of what wild creatures truly are.
I pedal past the spot of those long-ago howls—it’s been five years since that morning—and follow the curve of the road. It rained last night and every fragrance is intensified, released and flung by brush and shrub. I inhale deeply, relish the mix of all I do not know. I am the happy wanderer. I don’t need to know the name of every plant and bird and tree. I learn a few more each year, research new sightings, try to single out a unique bird call and determine its owner. I temporarily name what I do not know but intend to learn: full-petaled yellow flower in bunches, gnarled trunk twisted brown tree. Ah, arrowleaf balsamroot, a bristlecone pine. I’m often torn between making up my own name for a thing, and researching its official name. Naming is an act of creation, of possession, an act that forges a bond. But even in learning a name bestowed by someone else, I tighten the connection. The purple-red reed-like shrub in thick bunches I love—they line creek banks, they are munched by moose—the separation between us evaporates when I learn its name: ah, red twig dogwood.
As I ride I search the hillside to my left, a meadow on my right, combing the tall grass for an indication of life, a brown back, movement not attributable to wind. I anticipate a call, a throaty bark, a deep whistle or a delicate scampering through dry twigs. Wildlife is here. But the rare appearances of the deer—four foraged by the roadside yesterday, a doe hurrying along three smaller companions, their coats mangy and uneven in this late spring—the porcupine, the raccoon, tell me either that I must begin earlier, before rays of sunlight begin lighting the world, or that wildlife is better at watching me, than I it. How many sets of eyes might that be, hidden by thick trunks and fields of vibrant yellow balsamroot? The thoughtful hunter knows his quarry stalks him, just as he does it. I am a hunter of wildlife, but my weapons are none. A gently whispered good morning and my slowly moving body on a bicycle are the worst with which the deer and porcupine must contend. My hunting results only in my own deep gratitude for each brief sighting of bird or beast. And what do I miss when I blink, turn my head at the moment something flits by in the opposite direction? The more aware I become, the more I will see.
This canyon I claim is not my own but is Emigration Canyon, the Donner-Reed party’s path of entry into the Great Salt Lake Valley, now speckled with homes. The road winds gently upward for eight miles before reaching the crest, long ago named Little Mountain. The final mile-and-a-half climb is uninhabited by humans, though parcels with water rights are for sale. Were I wealthy, I would buy them all so that the deer and owls, the rabbits and raccoons and hawks could retain their stomping grounds. From the summit on, the land is governed by multiple agencies—and one corporation—with plans and leases: two different counties, the federal government, Chevron, and a watershed. To my delight and benefit, the result of this confused management arrangement is a peaceful land devoid of homes.
Following the road down, now on the eastern side of the crest, I coast toward Little Dell Reservoir, a body of water barely large enough to kayak or canoe in—perhaps a mile from dam to distant shore and a quarter mile across. I sometimes see a fisherman quietly contemplating life or nothing at all as his line dangles into the gray or blue or green water, depending upon the clouds, the sun, the fickle wind. Some days the reservoir is Caribbean blue at its edges, other days it is glass-like, mirroring the pine-covered hillside to the south. Wind can chop its surface into millions of white caps. Predawn mornings render it glossy and iridescent as a gray pearl.
In the hollow of a curve halfway down, between summit and reservoir, deer graze then hearken, heads lifting, eyes alert. A moose munches willows in the pocket where snowmelt collects in the spring, and I grin in delight as rabbits and chipmunks dash across the road before me. A few summers ago I saw fox kits, leaping and jumping upon each other, full of energy and mischievousness in this same hollow. Hawks swoop and soar, and the rare peregrine falcon sits, regally, in a stark gray tree not yet lush with spring’s buds. My soul is damn happy, awash in a delight that springs loose and bubbles to my surface.
After riding past the reservoir, I skirt over dirt around the edge of a still-locked snow gate and begin the climb up Big Mountain. I’m still following the path of the Donner-Reed party, yet in reverse. I continue east, an anti-pioneer emigration route.
While Little Mountain is beautiful and a beloved place to visit, Big Mountain is wild. Pine and aspen coat north-facing hillsides, while those that face south are sagebrush-speckled red rock and dirt. Hawks circle, porcupine amble, deer dart and bounce and hide behind willow and dogwood and gambel oak. It is at once arid and richly riparian. A beaver dam impedes the creek, its sticks, twigs, and logs gray, weathered, and organized in that complicated way only beaver know, instinctively, to arrange. Nests rest in meeting place of trunk and limb, and when I pause to listen, at least one winged or fleet-footed critter is always calling or chattering. And all of this wildness I see from the two-lane blacktop road I travel. It is far from truly wild, yet more wild than any other place I intimately know. It is here I connect with something more genuine, more authentic, than almost any other piece of my life.
When the Mormon settlers walked and rode from the Midwest to Utah, they determined the best route into the Salt Lake Valley to be one that the Donner-Reed party had broken in 1846, a path that led from the Wyoming territory south and west through Echo Canyon. The pioneers then traveled up a long, rather gentle grade to a hill called Hogsback—a short, steep climb and descent. Next came a few miles of creek-laced path, until Big Mountain jutted into view. The final trial. The name came from Shoshone who lived nearby, and was uttered with respect. At its base they circled left, choosing the most manageable path up the side of the steep, dramatic ridge. For the next half century, wagon tracks dug deep into the earth were scars traveled by those who followed. Today the hillside is brush-covered, those tracks all but healed, and a paved road climbs a different face of the mountain. At the mountain pass, 7,400 feet above sea level, the original pioneer path and the tarmac meet in a graveled parking lot where cyclists and motorists often pause to absorb the view. Hill after hill fall away, each layered with growth both ancient and new. As far as one can see to the east, the south, the west, statuesque mountains—snowcapped peaks luminous for much of the year—rim the horizon.
At Big Mountain’s crest, the pioneers tied logs to the backs of handcarts and wagons. They descended a steep ravine that wound past rocks and trees, the descent easing after a tense mile. Logs were removed. They could now proceed downhill without fearing gravity’s speed would spill or overturn their carts.
Today’s two-lane road takes a different route down, switching back and forth, hairpin turning a time or two or three. Red dirt hillsides, scrub oak, grasses as tall as my waist. Tightly woven nests hide in branches, creek water trickles over mossy rock. It is this, the western side of Big Mountain, that I cycle up and down most often, that fills me with wonder, that I still consider wild. Half of the year, the top six miles on either side of the pass are gated and closed—no winter maintenance. These months, from late November to mid-May, are the months I find myself most in love with Big Mountain. I am often the only human on the road, surrounded by the intensely un-quiet quiet of this environment that is almost untouched, whether astride a bicycle before snow buries the road, or on snowshoes or skate skies once the asphalt disappears. No, Big Mountain isn’t truly wild, but it’s the closest thing to wild that I’m able to access an hour away, by bicycle, from home.
Mark is driving again, and we’re miles northwest of Yellowstone, far outside park boundaries, traveling through a state that loves, hates, and spends a great deal of time and energy managing wolves. Montana.
Snow-tipped mountains edge the plains, their valleys rocky and steep. The road rises through a pass chiseled into umber rock. Where sheer faces aren’t exposed, where soil has burrowed into cleft and crevasse, the hills sprout green. Grasses, brush, pine, leafy aspen. Soon Hellgate Canyon winds narrow, each larch-covered hillside leaning into us. Sunlight barred, duskiness presses as we drive alongside the tumbling Clark Fork River and cross the Blackfoot River’s crashing core. I suppress my breath. Around the bend light shatters the gloom and Missoula beckons. Rooftops glint. I blink. We cross the Clark Fork again, again, each time whetting my appetite. We hug a brown dust hillside, then exit the freeway and enter a city that borders land inhabited by more than forty packs of wolves.
The next afternoon, Mark, Kirsten, Liz Bradley, and I are in Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks’ tiny Missoula office building, in the conference room because Liz’s office is so packed with desks, chairs, and cabinets that there isn’t room for all of us. We sit in large wheeled chairs around a boat-sized table, the space behind each of our chairs only enough to squeeze through, one hip against chair, the other touching wall. Wolf packs, forty-five of them, are depicted on the large wall map by black stars. Liz is one of six wolf biologists in the state. Her job is partially funded by the federal government, a funding stream that will be phased out in 2015, as dictated by state and federal agreement.
A tall brunette with straight, shoulder-length hair, Liz is athletic and unpretentious. If she’s wearing makeup it’s invisible. However, I’m not sure of her real feelings about anything we discuss. Liz says the bulk of her job consists of outreach and education in an effort to help people adjust to the 2011 law that removed wolves in Montana from the endangered species list. With the delisting came management plans that include hunting and trapping. And a lot of politics. But Liz isn’t worried about the wolves’ overall numbers.
“Wolves have great long term viability—they breed quickly, and travel great distances. They’re going to continue spreading, they’re going to survive.”
“What about the hunters? They are quite vocal in their opposition—do they have a valid argument? Do ranchers?” I ask.
“As for the effect on the total game population, there have been local impacts, for sure. Wolves are a part of that. We’ve added one more mouth to feed out there. However, weather has an even greater impact on game populations, always has. You really have to look at every small area, case by case, before you can label the cause of the population change. We’ve gone through waves of panic, and of depredation—some cattle, sheep—but now things are settling a bit.”
She speaks calmly and her statements are thoughtful, rational. It’s difficult to imagine anyone on either side of the argument taking offense, or even disagreeing with her.
“What do you, though, Liz, think about wolves coming back onto the land?” I ask.
She makes it clear her response is personal, not Montana FW&P’s position. “We’re trying to make a place for wildlife on the landscape. To do that, we need to build tolerance for wolves, which means setting hunting and trapping guidelines, allowing that for hunters. There also has to be some control. Some way for ranchers to feel supported, heard. And we do all of this both for perception, and for real management needs.”
I feel her walking a line, a line every state wildlife agency employee understands. She knows where her agency’s funding comes from: hunting tags. Montana hunting and fishing licenses brought in forty-eight million dollars to the state in 2014. Liz knows it’s hunters who provide the bulk of funding for her miniscule, overcrowded office, this cramped conference room with its exposed brick walls, and the helicopter which takes her out on observation and collaring missions, where she’s able to actually put her hands on those loved, feared, and hated canines. She admits the department is missing input from wildlife lovers and watchers. Almost all of her interactions are with hunters and ranchers. Hunters who pay for her department’s existence and ranchers who side with the hunters, at least as far as wolves are concerned.
I’m curious about the time she spends outside of these walls, away from paperwork and politics.
“I keep learning, all the time,” she says, her eyes brightening. “I do observation flights frequently, counting wolves, counting pups. They really are charismatic—they’re fascinating animals. And they share so many traits with humans—I think that’s why we’re so drawn to them. Collaring wolves is an experience without equal—there’s nothing like it I’ve ever done in my life.”
Doug Smith had described experiencing the same excitement Liz feels. After twenty years in the park, researching, studying, and processing wolves, he’s never lost the thrill, that powerful response to seeing a wolf, let alone touching and working with one.
“What would it be like if wolves were to move into Utah, Oregon, Washington, Colorado, in a significant way?” I ask Liz.
“Going through the public uproar is just part of the process,” Liz replies. “Most Montanans really value their landscape; they love the land and the wildness of it. Take the Bitterroot Valley, as an example. It’s well-populated, diverse. Ranchers, hunters, retirees, people living in trophy homes—they’re there because of the beautiful landscape. But you know, if you’re going to live there, you won’t be able to let your dog roam, or keep chickens out. When people feel that we as an agency are managing the wolves, it helps them create a better long-term approach to co-existence. If we’re purely pro-wolf, they feel discarded. We need to let them know we understand their needs. We’ve been able to do great proactive work in the Blackfoot watershed, utilizing a range rider and other tools, because keeping ranchers around is really a community goal.”
Doug had said the same thing, but shared concern about the “social carrying capacity,” the level to which we as a society are willing to tolerate and live with wolves, and wondered if we’ve already surpassed it. When wolves were stripped of their protection in 2011 in Montana, Wyoming, and Idaho, liberal hunting regulations leapt into place. Already, close to two thousand wolves have been killed in those three states. Thirty-plus years ago they were labeled endangered, twenty years ago they were brought back and allowed to reestablish, and now the governments in states where they live are working hard to bring their numbers back down to the legally mandated minimum. In Montana, that’s thirty breeding pairs. In Wyoming, outside of Yellowstone itself, ten. In Idaho, fifteen. In Utah, poised to deal with state management if the federal endangered species classification is terminated, that means two breeding pairs. Some people are in an uproar over this. Others want even more wolves killed. And then there are those who have reached their caring capacity, who are tired of the hubbub, who no longer really care about wolves at all. Some people are embittered, angry that their lives are affected by so many outside forces, and scapegoat the wolf. Some shy away from these controversies, overwhelmed by the shifting world—changes in climates and economies—believing the solutions are out of their hands.
Doug believes man and wolf can coexist. The problem, he says, is that not only do we compete for prey, but we are too similar. Wolves form life-long bonds, use highly sophisticated non-verbal communication, parent their young, make use of extended family, defend their territory, and are the top predators in their natural environment. Man’s desire to be the hunter places him in direct competition with a powerful, competent creature. In some, Doug says, wolf hatred runs deep.
Unearthing the roots of today’s anger toward wolves is something many, from Barry Lopez in his book Of Wolves and Men, to Doug Smith, have attempted to do. Ralph Maughan, who hosts the Wildlife News—a website chronicling wolf news from the start of the reintroduction in 1995 to the present day—believes he has one answer. He claims it wasn’t until almost a decade into the restoration that a “militant anti-wolf narrative” developed, led by key politicians in wolf-recovery states, and some who aligned themselves with the Tea Party or similar anti-government groups. The wolf became a scapegoat for the recession, any decline in ranching economy, and the fact that a hunter was unable to track and kill his intended prey. Today, Ralph claims, what we see is cultural conflict. He argues that the current controversy over wolf restoration in the West is not really about wolves at all.
It’s the end of Liz’s work day, and she’s stayed late just to talk with us. I don’t believe I’ve accessed Liz Bradley’s true feelings about managing wolves in Montana, but I realize she wants to keep her job. She likes working with wildlife, and it’s clear that she loves working with wolves. Before we part, she bends forward, tucks a strand of hair behind her ear, and rests her elbows on her thighs. She leans into her words.
“The most important thing we can do today is have our children develop a love and appreciation for the natural world. Once that’s established, the rest of the decisions come easy.”
Not so very long ago there was a mountain. As mountains go it fell somewhere between Sagarmatha—Nepal’s Goddess of the Clouds—and Magazine Mountain, a bump in the flats of Arkansas. It was an ordinary mountain, unnamed and taken for granted by all who lived upon or traveled its sloping sides. That number was significant, from insects and earthworms burrowing in its soil to the bushy-tailed foxes in their earthen dens to the red-tailed hawks and robins, warblers, thrushes, and hummingbirds whose nests dotted the aspen whose roots hugged each other deep below the pine-needle- and brown-leaf-covered soil. At the seam where the mountain met another, where the creek flowed, lived a beaver colony, replete with fish and frogs, water striders, bluebirds, mallards, grebes, and songbirds, whose voices soared from the glade.
If we were to count the flowers, the penstemon, the lupine, all of the balsamroot and Indian paintbrush and wild hollyhock, the lives supported by the mountain would climb to numbers we can barely comprehend. Thick with conifers, aspen, scrubby oak, the occasional twisted and gnarled juniper, the undergrowth is springy and green, gathering sunrays filtered by towering trees. Last fall’s leaves and needles carpet the soil which is rocky, nutrient rich, bustling with insects and earthworms that tunnel and commune.
This mountain hosts visitors as well. Those who come to graze, to find sustenance. Those who come to hunt. Those who come to die. Deer, elk, moose, these solid thick-haunched creatures find plentiful saplings, willow growth, grasses, and plants. Hawks, ravens, turkey vultures, and eagles circle above the mountain, searching out what has died. And the mountain welcomes its top predator, the wolves that trot along its flanks and edges, the wolves searching for the wounded deer, the weary elk, the very young, the old.
This is Aldo Leopold’s mountain, the one that need not fear its deer, its elk, for it is a mountain well-familiar with the howl of a wolf. It is a mountain in natural harmony, full of life, full of death. Decomposition begets new life, the mountain active in each step of the circular process. Leopold, considered by many a father of the conservation movement, described an ecological ethic that resonates with me for its simplicity and inclusive view of the universe. His land ethic
. . . simply enlarges the boundaries of the community to include soils, waters, plants, and animals, or collectively: the land . . . a land ethic of course cannot prevent the alteration, management, and use of these ‘resources,’ but it does affirm their right to continued existence, and, at least in spots, their continued existence in a natural state. In short, a land ethic changes the role of Homo sapiens from conqueror of the land-community to plain member and citizen of it. It implies respect for his fellow-members, and also respect for the community as such.
On Leopold’s mountain I share responsibility. Flora and fauna are rife with cellular knowledge telling them how to grow, how to behave, how to participate. Because this is my home, too, I am obligated to sink into my deeper self, to connect with my own cellular knowledge that guides me to think and behave in ways that benefit the earth. I deserve to live among richly varied, healthily functioning, glorious, green mountains, and I accept accountability for their health. I know I am one part of a brilliantly complex, interrelated existence.
Leopold suggested it possible to view the earth as a coordinated whole, its parts—oceans, land, crust, atmosphere, and so on—similar to the organs of a body, each having its own, definitive function. In the 1970s, decades after Leopold’s death, chemist James Lovelock took this a step further and presented his Gaia principle, a theory suggesting our planet was indeed a self-regulating, complex system formed by organisms—biota—interacting with their inorganic surroundings. Joseph Campbell, one of the world’s foremost authorities on mythology, challenged the biblical condemnation of nature, instead seeing man as part of nature, embracing the Gaia principle. He viewed the entire planet as a single organism, human beings as of the earth, the consciousness of the earth. Campbell was adamant that we must learn to again be in accord with nature, to “realize again the brotherhood with the animals and with the water and the sea.”
I am neither biologist, nor chemist, nor naturalist. Nor mythologist. I’ve never called myself an environmentalist. Politically I often sit on a buck rail fence—I picture my pigtailed ten-year-old self perched there—leaning left but never hopping completely off my perch. I pay taxes. I vote. I use canvas bags at the grocery and turn lights off when I leave a room. I compost coffee grounds and vegetable peelings. But my yard is not xeriscaped, and I don’t drive a hybrid.
I care deeply about this earthen world, and passionately about my own small section of it. I ride my bike through canyons and mountain passes in the West that retain some of their wildness. Before daybreak the canyon is dark and mysterious, filled with birdsong, scamperings, chirping, and the silence of a hawk floating through the air, its body silhouetted against a lightening indigo sky. A great horned owl family lives above a bend in the road, and I honor the path where deer cross from eastern hillside to the hollow across the tarmac. The hillside covered in gambel oak where each year I float some of Jake’s ashes is sacred.
I don’t want to lose one scintilla of this experience. I know I am one with the earth. I’ve been riding and hiking canyons and mountain passes for years, taking for granted that they will be here for me. That more cabins will appear and a road might be widened, but that overall, these canyons will retain their wildness and bounty. And that wildness includes top predators. Grizzlies and wolverines and mountain lions. Wolves.
Most Americans know wolves only through fairy tale, fable, and myth, and more recently, through the controversy raging over their status as a protected, endangered species, their reintroduction in 1995, and their loss in 2011 of protected status in portions of many western states. We don’t know what it’s like to live with wolves, but according to polls and surveys, we want them back on the landscape. Whether because we want to hear their howls or because we find them to be charismatic creatures or because we believe they have the right to exist, the majority of us want them back. And they are coming back; the question now seems to be, for how long?
Those who don’t want wolves on our landscape are fierce and vocal. Many are backed by well-funded organizations such as the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association and the Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation. Stories and fables proliferate, some growing more fantastical as time passes. Facts are bandied about, figures abused. What began in 1966 with the first Endangered Species Preservation Act and manifested in 1995 as a reintroduction of an extirpated species has deteriorated into, at times, a playground battle of name calling, rumors of conspiracies, and figurative if not actual fisticuffs. Legislators vote for increased control, even when state wildlife departments have data proving wolves kill few domestic animals, and reduce prey animals by almost statistically insignificant numbers. Hunters and their organizations argue that wolves are reducing elk numbers, without controlling for weather, where the land is in terms of fire cycle, and other predators on the land. Disheartened, I’ve studied pictures of men, many triumphantly holding bloody wolf carcasses, one posing in front of a wolf whose leg is caught in a trap, a ten-foot circle in the snow stained pink with its blood.
A century ago we shot, poisoned, and trapped wolves out of existence. We’ve always done it this way is not a justification for abusive practices, whether that abuse is of animals, of other humans, or of the land. We live in an era filled with new discoveries and understandings of that which surrounds us: scientists point to plastics, coal, and toxic wastes as destroyers of our air and land’s ability to support us. Fewer trees and less soil mean decreased carbon sequestration. A warmer earth is killing polar bears and pika. To close our eyes and ears to these understandings is both foolish and harmful, and I believe we are too smart, too creative, too capable to continue ignoring good science. When we can find wilderness—even small spots of wildness—and become still, we better understand the importance of our surroundings. We can better hear our conscience.
Humans have always changed and will continue to change the landscape. Historically, Euro-Americans annihilated humans and animals that were in the way, justifying their actions from a platform of “white man was meant to rule.” We now face consequences—ecosystems in disequilibrium; a thinning ozone; landfills overflowing with refuse that takes hundreds of years to break down, while leeching toxic chemicals as it does—resulting from that stance. Having wolves back on the landscape won’t change the economy, will probably not save the rainforests. It won’t stop new fossil fuel extraction, and won’t solve water issues in the West. But it is a correction. An apology.
Liz Bradley knows all of this. The history, the current political environment. But her parting words are of hope, echoing Leopold’s conviction. Love and appreciation of the natural world guides us toward better decision.
We’re in Montana, and I want to look for wolves, not just talk about them. But we’ve run out of time. I will return in the fall to explore the Blackfoot Watershed, a community of ranchers, with a range rider. I picture a ruggedly handsome man on a horse, clad in chaps and a big old hat. He slouches in his saddle, crow’s feet crunching, the anticipation of a smile dancing on a corner of his mouth. He is dauntless. He searches the watershed for wolves. He gallops over fields and moseys up draws, protecting sheep and cattle from predatory canine teeth, bared and sharp. Out there, somewhere, are wolves.
