The Book of Yaak (8 page)

There was movement on the hillside below me—twenty yards in front of and below me, beneath a lone fir tree. I tensed, then refocused. A bird's head blinked nervously above the bunchgrass; then another, and another. Three blue grouse, poised to flush. Wide-open country. It would be an easy shot once they flushed and sailed down the mountain—or a seemingly easy shot, which is always the hardest. Too much time to think, and analyze.

I stepped forward to flush them, but did not shoot: and one by one they flew away, fat and juicy and lucky. It was unthinkable to me to shoot a shotgun on this mountain with any grizzly, but especially that grizzly, on it. It would be like walking into a stranger's house, upon first meeting him or her—say, the friend of a friend—and blasting a hole through the ceiling in the living room. It just wasn't imaginable. The grouse set their wings and glided into the trees, far downslope.

I once saw a small black bear on this mountain. I came within twenty feet of him as he sat upwind, looking around as if confused; and five or six years ago I saw a grizzly up here as well. Not as big as this one, it was standing on a log looking down at me as I picked berries. My dogs were with me, and one of the two dogs saw the bear about a hundred yards upslope.

Fortunately, it was the dog that minds best—Homer, not Ann. I whispered to Homer, whose hackles were raised, to leave it and come over to me. And Homer did. Then I called to Ann in a low voice, and she minded, because she did not see or smell the bear, and because Homer had not yet growled.

I took the dogs by their collars and went downslope, believing at any second the bear would charge. At the bottom of the hill, when I dared look back up, the bear was gone.

A giant bull elk burst from cover; he must have been bedded down not a hundred yards from where the bear had been feeding. For a moment, I'd thought it was another bear—a giant—and my heart and everything else in me stopped for a second, until I understood it was an elk.

At the time it had seemed to me to be only coincidence that brought the elk and grizzly so close together.

Five minutes further down the trail, the dogs and I had come upon a big cow moose. My initial sight of her chocolate-colored hump stopped my heart, and then she raised her head and stared at me in moose innocence. When I got to the 'truck I sat 011 the tailgate and ate every one of the berries I'd picked, half out of nervousness and half out of joy....

But that grizzly story was not like this one. It was a fine one, but somehow different. I'd had my dogs with me, and I'd left. This time I was alone and following the bear. It may seem foolish, but it was the only time I've ever done that—followed one. It's the only time I've ever felt the urge to do that—almost like an invitation. I can't explain it: only that it was a true gut feeling. It's fine if I don't ever get one like that again.

1 was standing there lamenting the missed opportunity, the lost grouse—a brace, at least—when I heard an elk bugling in the woods below and to my left—not far from the country I'd been in, had come up through. It was a wild autumnal sound—and I thought with some sadness of the fact that the high pitch of the elk's bugle had evolved out on the prairies, where elk had once lived, because high sounds travel far ther there—but in the last hundred years the elk had been pushed into the mountains, and in the forested mountains their high squeals did not travel very far. It was almost like an empty piece of baggage they'd brought—deep, subsonic sounds traveled better in the woods—and I wondered how long it would be before that beautiful flute music was lost to the world.

As if changing, even as I listened, the bull, close below me, ended his challenge with a series of deep coughs and grunts. I'd been seeing this bull for several years; he was a trophy, and I'd hunted him, chased him in large circles through the forest, but I had never gotten a good shot at him, and knew somehow that I never would.

I was thinking about slipping down into those woods and seeing if I could sneak up close enough to get a look at him, when I heard the deep coughs and grunts of another bull answering him, moving in on him: or what I thought at first was another bull.

I wondered for a couple of seconds why the other bull wasn't answering with its own high bugle, why it was just coughing and grunting—a much deeper cough than I'd ever heard from an elk before—and I then felt the blood drain from my face and upper body as I realized that it was the giant bear—that that bear was hunting the giant elk—was trying to lure it in for a fight.

It was a sound from ten million years ago, a sound from the Pleistocene: a sound from the center of the earth. It took my blood to a place my blood had never been before—old memories, old fears, that did something to my blood, something massive.

It wasn't true
terror
that I felt. I don't know what it was. I didn't panic. But it took no huge leap of logic for me to intuit that if my
blood
was frightened, or even made uncomfortable, then maybe I should be, too—and I left, went down the hill, staying downwind of the sounds: and above me, the two giants kept calling, and I wondered how it would turn out, and whether the grizzly was serious about stalking the bull, or only playing, only curious, as I'd been, when I'd first considered trying to sneak in on the bull.

Later that year, after the bears were asleep, near the end of elk hunting season, I was up there again, and I saw the giant bull running through the trees below me, and was glad he escaped: and I wondered if he'd known, that day he'd been bugling and coughing, that he'd been calling to a grizzly and if he, like the grizzly, had just been messing around. It was impossible to know.

That had been October second, when I'd seen those snowshoe-sized tracks. The next morning I worked hard in the office, knowing that later in the afternoon I would be going back out into the woods again, and hungry for grouse. It was a lovely cycle that I tried to fit myself into every October, to work hard through the morning and early afternoon, but then to end the day walking, bird hunting. I didn't need a lot—even two or three hours was enough, as long as I could do it every day—as long as I could count on the regularity, the stability of it. In this respect science is very much like art: you have to do it every day, to stay in the rhythm of it. To stay sharp. To stay strong. And yet: this is good only to a certain point. Beyond that point, the overflow, the excess—the part beyond our knowledge or abilities—almost always comes into play. Call it luck, or grace—the "surprise" discoveries, which have been so critical to science's advancement.... What is this magic overflow factor that the universe has been blessed with? Is the quantity of it constant? Is it diminishing? Is it our duty to safeguard those places where we sense it may be richest—where it might even originate?

The next day I went out to hunt grouse again and also do some scouting for the upcoming elk season. There was a big patch of country to the north of me that had not had roads built through it, though it was bordered and ringed by them. I parked along one of those gravel roads and started up into the woods. Right away I saw a ruffed grouse, but it was too young and would not flush; it only stood on a log and fanned its feathers at me. I tried to make it flush, but it only hopped and half-flew into a cedar jungle, so I had to let it go. 1 pushed on up the mountain, hoping for a wild flush from a mature bird.

An hour later, 1 was a couple of miles up the mountain, but I did not have plans for the top. I wanted to stay lower, looking for ruffed grouse, rather than blues.

The sun was orange over Buckhorn Ridge. I was working along a deer trail, noting old elk signs. Hie trail followed a shelf along the mountain, a southern exposure, with aspens above and below me. I was going to cross it and then go into some big cedars arid follow those woods up the mountain just a little farther before turning back and heading home. It was the time of day, late in the afternoon, when you are most likely to see all sorts of animals, though because of the strong wind, I did not think I would see any. Sometimes the wind was in my face, but other times it quartered from upslope, from the north. The aspen leaves were beautiful, shading to bright yellow, and they rattled in that strong wind.

I came around a bend in the trail—the whole valley below me—and saw a golden bear walking slowly toward me, not forty yards away. Too close; too damn close. She was smallish—about twice my size—and her thick forelegs were chocolate brown, while all the rest of her fur was sun-struck blonde.

The wide face, the round ears, the hump over her shoulder—another grizzly, but coming
toward
me, unlike yesterday's, and averting her gaze—- not making eye contact. Swinging her head and shoulders left and right of me, looking everywhere but
at
me. I was stupid enough to believe for a second that she did not know I was there. The wind ruffled her fur, blowing from behind me now, like a traitor, and in that cold instant I knew she knew.

One yearling cub appeared behind her, ten or fifteen yards back, looking exceedingly nervous, and then directly behind that one its twin, also looking troubled: not playing, as cubs do, but looking hesitant, looking uncertain.

We were all too damn close. The mother stopped about thirty yards away, the villainous wind gusting at my back—and she circled a quarter-turn and pretended to gaze out at the valley below.

She was so beautiful in the disappearing sunlight that seemed to paint her that gold color.

Her cubs came anxiously up the trail behind her—almost dancing in their nervousness, seeming to want to rise to their hind feet and turn away, and go back in the other direction, but obliged to follow—and I understood now that she too was nervous—that she was trying to move me out of her territory.

Instinctively, I circled a quarter-turn to the south and looked out at the valley, too. I dropped my head to show her I was not a threat. I felt fear, but even stronger, apology, even dismay. I felt incredible respect for her, too, and a surge of gratitude. We both studied the valley for a moment. 1 was waiting to see if she would charge—a thing passed between us, as if we were wired directly together, for a moment—the knowledge and understanding by both of us that she had every right, more than every right, to charge me (and whether in bluff or attack, no matter; she was almost
mandated
to charge)—and yet she chose not to.

I am convinced it was a conscious decision not to—that it was a thought, a rational decision—the mind overriding the body. It was merciful and generous.

There may be only a couple hundred grizzlies in the Lower Forty-eight outside of national parks (Glacier and Yellowstone)—and here were three of them, waiting for me to move aside, so they could continue down the trail, into history—into whatever fate awaited them.

I turned and walked weak-legged down the mountain in blue dusk, the sun now sending up orange sundial rays from its nest for the night, behind the far mountain. I reached the truck in dimness, half an hour later, and drove home to my wife and daughter. I held on to that new fresh feeling of still being alive for as long as I could; and even today, I can still feel, can still remember, the gratitude.

I am not going to speak against science. Science has its own wildness. But the science we have been taught pauses at the edge of borders, does not usually spill over, unless either by elaborate design, or by accident. We are taught not to leap.

In art, as in the wilderness, you can stumble into grace and luck, into magic, not just on the rare occasion, but every day; every single day.

I am too hungry, too gluttonous, to remain a scientist any longer. I want to consume—to devour—unmeasured things; to wallow in the rich overflow. To see it, or taste it, if not measure it.

A thing in my blood tells me that there are things in the world that, if touched and measured, disappear.

I do not mean to speak against science, or even to argue that we have too much of it. I mean only to suggest that we do not have enough art and wilderness. I think that magic is becoming rarer every day—rarer than timber, oil, or steel, and as a glutton, I want the rare things, the delicious things.

I want as much luck and grace as I can hold. Not measure, but hold.

I
T TOOK ONE HUNDRED
and sixty thousand letters, it is estimated, to return wolves to Yellowstone and Idaho: to capture and transport wild wolves from Canada back into what remains of our own forests. Will it take two hundred thousand letters—or a quarter million, or a million—to protect the last roadless areas in the Yaak? How thrilled I would be if I knew that's all it would take; I would write each one of them myself, and be done with it.

But when the last roadless areas of Yaak are roaded, and clearcut—if that happens; if we allow the encroachment, the steady gnawing, to keep happening—where then will we get our wilderness, our old forests? Can you fit one on a helicopter as you can a wolf, and bring it in from Canada? Our ability to achieve the quick fix, purchasing a wolf or grizzly as if off the shelf, slapping a radio collar on it, and then turning it loose on our side of the border—those days are coming to a screeching stop. Right now, we're still in the mindset of being able to plug holes. But when the big wild forests are gone—when nothing but a hole remains—what will fill us, and where will we shop?

A day for cooking. I know I should be spending time in these pages chronicling the last days of the wild creatures, here at the edge of the century, in this land of giants—but it seems a day to pause.

Nearly everything is frozen—the snow continuing to pour down for the eighth day in a row—- and there is a silence, a profound resting, all throughout the woods.

It is a time for death, too. This is the week, according to my journals, when, on walks through the woods, you begin to find more deer carcasses, the leavings of lions and coyotes, and of the winter itself—the absence of one thing, food, and of another thing, warmth.