Yellow sweetclover, which appeared to be strangling itself with a confusion of wiry green arms, was the least attractive and most euphemistically named weed in the bunch. Thousands of minute flowers overwhelmed each plant. Tissue-thin petals responded to mist or dew by twisting themselves into unrecognizable clumps that no subsequent amount of sunshine could reverse. Gyrating upward, green clover stalks intertwined into messy mats. Shooting below ground, sweetclover’s dense, warty taproots provided voles with a constant source of sugar.
Semiwoody Russian thistles, two feet high, armed themselves with stiff, sharp spikes. The spikes discouraged foxes and hawks from diving though the canopy to capture voles. In autumn, after their seeds ripened, the Russians snapped free of their roots and rolled away. They set their spawn in soil they had rototilled with their own spikes. Underneath the thistles’ ground-scraping skirts, voles foraged and fornicated, stopping only to blow raspberries at hovering hawks.
Russian tumblers, both thistle and mustard, entered the United States in the 1880s, stowaways in sacks of seeds shipped from Russian farmers to relatives in North Dakota. They answered to the common name tumbleweed. Despite having originated on another continent, tumbleweeds liked to pose alongside saguaro and pass themselves off as quintessentially American. Do not let them fool you. Saguaros saw America’s first nations come and go before the first tumbleweeds crashed into their stocky boles. Tumblers have now interloped into acreage the size of North and South Dakota combined. Rolling across the sets of iconic Hollywood Westerns, they have accumulated a substantial number of fans eager to believe that any dueling facade is real if tumbleweeds and dust blow between the shooters.
My Hungarian partridge, natty dressers in their maroon-and-gray tweed, would do well without tumbleweeds rolling into their autumn-colored Ribes. Described by Aldo Leopold in A Sand County Almanac as “red lanterns,” Ribes is a genus of maple-leaved shrubs that includes common currant and blackberry. Standing less than two feet tall, my Ribes turned softly in the wind as if wondering who had eaten all their berries so early in the fall. (It was the skunks.) Partridge, Leopold tells us, want nothing more from autumn than a stroll under Ribes’ red leaves.
I lived on the east front of the Rocky Mountains, far to the west of Leopold’s sand counties. Out here, if partridge chose to bask under fall’s red leaves, they would soon find themselves basking under nothing at all. First, they would look up and become intoxicated with the beams of red, orange, and yellow light passing through the currant leaves. In a day or two, still light drunk, they would hear Mother Nature laughing. “Just kidding!” The partridge would scurry to the junipers while shriveled, rusty cadavers swirled about their ankles. Oftentimes, frost came so hard and fast that Ribes bypassed their multicolored illusion; green leaves turned black overnight. In the year of Vole Forest, autumn was long and warm. Tiny broad-leafed currants turned into Leopold’s red lanterns, and a partridge could find itself a shrubby solarium with no trouble at all. Well, it could have if I hadn’t let the tumblers proliferate so that the voles could proliferate so that I could harvest liatris and rehabilitate the land that bulldozers had torn up to make room for my cottage.
Hungarian partridge, like tumbleweeds, were immigrants. For this, they forfeited even an iota of protection under the Migratory Bird Treaty Act. The federal government reserves the term migrants for native birds migrating within North America and classifies Hungarians as game. Killing migrants is a crime; killing game is a sport. A clumsy paradigm justified the indignity by suggesting that foreign-born creatures, or those with foreign-born ancestors, maligned our ecosystem and upset the natural habitat.
I wasn’t sure there was enough habitat for Hungarian people in Hungary, let alone partridges. And I had plenty of land. For the past several years, I had been maintaining a Hungarian partridge refugee camp on my property, protecting the immigrants from weeds, feral cats, and the whims of an ill-conceived paradigm. Now the endless weed patch known as Vole Forest was overtaking their currant bushes. But I had hitched my wagon to the voles. Goodbye, red-lantern autumn!
By early October, I was gathering seeds from over a dozen vole hatchways, enough to fill a brown paper lunch sack. I stored the mystery seeds in a manila envelope inside the garage. When June arrived, long days would initiate the growing season, and I could poke the seeds into warm damp dirt. Voles, I was pleased to discover, were surprisingly productive for animals who appeared to lack appendages.
Abandoning their wet, writhing newborns in the nursing chamber, they marched past the voles and into the tunnel. Silent, solemn, and quick, the adults pushed through the thick vegetation at the entrance and joined with thousands of fellow emigrants fleeing parallel tunnels. Keeping their heads down, they merged into a single line and marched into the sun. Condemning all the summer’s newborns to a slow and lonely death of starvation was not a decision easily made. The queens, however, did not have the sovereignty to think exclusively about their own colony; a greater command forced the abandonment. A species cannot survive if its leaders do not know when to say “die.”
The queens selected a three-tooth sagebrush that was splitting at the base, and their minions swarmed, biting into its soft bole and spraying it with formic acid until the vessels collapsed and the shrub withered. The stem hole became the ants’ new main chamber.
Thatch ant mounds the size of red-tailed hawk nests blistered the territory. They were indistinguishable from every other pile of detritus. Who would notice if an ant nest moved from one side of a blue-roofed house to its other side?
The aphids noticed. They clung to the soft, velvety branches of white sage, sucking its sap and excreting honeydew. Orange-headed thatch ants were addicted to that honeydew. With their sharp, deep mouths and formidable arsenal of venom, they fought off any creature threatening the aphids. In this way, aphids and ants, like magpies and flickers, had twined their lives together into one thicker, stronger cord.
The white sage noticed. When the ants left, red polka-dot ladybugs swarmed the white sage, devouring the aphids. Bigger, hungrier insects followed the ladybugs. By the next new moon, most of the sage had been squeezed through grasshopper offal and returned to dust.
The round-bellied magpie noticed. Mindful of her neighbors, the matriarch waited until the ants’ evening dormancy before wallowing in the thatch mound and dusting off her mites. It mattered very much to one of her fledglings, who waited until after the ant emigration before dropping feetfirst into the abandoned ant nest. A cloud of fungal spores enveloped the fledging, blotting his black hood feathers until they turned gray. He was still gasping when a boney-legged Cooper’s hawk grabbed him.
The ants had feared only one enemy: shade. As they had for thousands of years, for a part of each day, for eight months each year, the thirty thousand ants needed sunlight. In that sagebrush steppe country of short grass and cactus, it had not seemed like much to ask. But a blue-roofed house—the first permanent human-built structure in that township and range since the most recent ice age had abated—had sprung up in an instant. It sheltered a person who tended weeds that blocked the sun and brought forth a monster shade that devoured the ants. Weeds and people were impractical enemies. Weeds were too numerous and dynamic to battle, and houses—even cottages—were too large to attack. Thatch ants had not survived thousands of years by casting blame. They’d survived by recognizing their immediate enemy and choosing, correctly, whether to fight or flee. Because they could not fight the shadow, they fled.
In that sagebrush steppe country of short grass, cactus, and cottage, eight hours of sunlight was, in fact, too much to ask.
A month shy of the year’s shortest day, the adult black widow disappeared. A couple of months later, I would find a beaded curtain of tiny brown-and-white juveniles along the far wall of the garage, each suspended spider looking like a carved wooden ball. I was without any black-and-red adult spiders until late the following spring, but I still had the voles. As long as the wee
ds grew unimpeded in front of the cottage, I never ate breakfast alone.
That same month, a vole flew over my pasture. It was riding in the talons of a tawny-hooded and pale-eyed hawk. Juvenile, rough-legged. Born on Arctic tundra and raised on voles, the juvenile hawk had arrived in November, discovering familiar climate and unfamiliar neighbors: yellow sweetclover, thistle, tumbleweed, kochia, and me. It landed on Gin, the juniper downslope of Tonic, and without waiting for the vole to die began picking it apart.
One day, the hawk hovered and dropped, feet first, into Vole Forest, tangling its toes in the thorny shrubs. After getting snagged several times, it pitched over into a patch of sweetclover. After that, it hunted mostly in the swale meadows across the dirt road, coming back to bounce on Gin’s top branch when it needed a lookout post. I watched from inside, binoculars pressed against the window. Eventually the hawk would stare back, mesmerized by the large black binocular “eyes.” Generally, after striking a rodent, the hawk would ignore me, flying off a quarter mile to the wooden “private property” signpost to eat its catch. But sometimes the rodent it was aiming for escaped and the hawk would hit the ground with a loud thud. Realizing there was nothing between its claws, the juvenile would turn its head and look right into my big binocular eyes. I felt sure that it was looking for comfort in its time of embarrassment.
The first time I saw Fox, I was playing binocular eyes with the juvenile and he was pawing around in the egg yolks under Tonic. I had stashed four yolks in the soil that morning, adding them to the one uneaten from the day. Before he headed into the swale at the edge of my property, Fox ate one yolk and left four behind. It was one too many for Tennis Ball. Calling for reinforcements, she circled the yolks. A battalion of magpies now devoured the yolks they had ignored that very morning. They ate like there would be no tomorrow, like this was their last day on earth. Which was exactly how the fox ate. And why not? Life was precarious for the unboxed animals; they faced an unknown future. The devil of a difference was that one wanted to be fat while facing that future; the other, the fox, wanted to be fleet.
Two weeks before spring equinox, the juvenile hawk was strutting through the resting alfalfa field, now serving as a paddock for someone’s cattle. When I dialed down the spotting scope’s magnification, black Angus cattle and Fox came into view. Trotting through the paddock with their heavy hooves, the Angus were flushing sleepy rodents from their underground cubbies. Fox and the hawk scurried behind them, bagging the drowsy rodents. It was as if the Angus were novice bird dogs, always flushing, never retrieving.
On March 15, a thirty-minute morning walk along an irrigation canal brought me to the cottonwood copse where the rough-legged juvenile slept. Thirty-foot-high cottonwoods shaded patches of foamy, dirt-encrusted snow. Rivulets seeping from the snow dampened a patchwork of duff. In the adjacent pasture, a deer carcass had attracted a motley crowd of scavengers, including the roof-thumping magpies. After swooping on me, TBall commenced flirting with a turkey vulture. The rough-legged juvenile was already soaring high above the trees. The clouds had written themselves into long lines composed of a random series of dots and dashes, covering the sky in a Morse code so evenly dispersed that anomalies like soaring hawks couldn’t hide themselves from me. I watched the juvenile join more hawks, circle higher, disappear. Next year, it would return from the Arctic with indistinguishable adult plumage and enough world-weariness to avoid a little person waving big binoculars.
Too often in life, I was propelled forward not by what I chose, but by what did not choose me.
I walked home through a strong crosswind blowing down from snowy mountains that were five miles and two tiny houses upriver. A band of dried grass and forb stalks separated the gravel road from the paddock’s barbed wire fence. I called out the plants as I passed: fescue, mustard, cheat, mullein, sunflower, Russian thistle, rabbitbrush, knapweed, sagebrush, wild rye, bluestem, wheatgrass, sow thistle.
As I approached a horse-mowed pasture, an odd pattern of vegetation broke my stride. Turning into the wind, I spread my arms, hovering like a kestrel. Seedlings lined every vole runway, waving their single pair of leaves like flags at a motocross race.
They were not liatris.
The voles had been foraging along the gravel road and bringing home piles of seeds from a heinous yellow weed: the not inappropriately named sow thistle. Imagine an armed dandelion with the flower shrunken to near invisibility and the stalk stretched to a menacing height. Translucent barbs covered the white stem and the spindly taproot.
Somewhere in Montana, voles were collecting liatris seeds to stock their pantries. Not here. I had hitched my wagon to less hungry and more clever voles than that. These voles had been collecting sow thistle seeds in order to grow a protective fence around their homes and highways. And since Vole Forest had been protecting the voles from predators all winter, vole holes now pockmarked three acres. Their runs covered the ground like netting. In the following months, I would pinch so many sow thistle seedlings out of the soil that my thumb and index finger tore into bloody fissures deep enough to hide an ant. Luckily, I hadn’t added to the disaster by planting my bag of seeds, all of which ended up sealed in a glass jar and brought to the dump like common bagworms.
Mule deer paraded across the west pasture and onto my packed-snow driveway, a neat sled line of herbivores heading to herbs. Seven pairs followed the lead deer, all moving sprightlier now without rotten snow caving beneath their hooves. I waited behind the cottage to say good morning. Cutting away before reaching me, they pranced uphill, joining scores of mule deer already polka-dotting the slopes with their bright white rumps. That’s how I spent the ides of March: dismissed by deer, abandoned by hawks, double-crossed by rodents. Already, viridescent weed rosettes were poking through the dense, dry stalks of the deeply rooted Vole Forest. Maybe we are all hitched together in the universe. Maybe Muir’s quote was not referring to rodents. Either way. I decided (some would say immodestly) that I am less tightly hitched to voles than I had once imagined.
After another day with the River Cabin class, I changed the Vole Forest label on my diagram to voles. The fox had been attracted to my property when he realized it was a vole sanctuary. It hadn’t been Vole Forest that had attracted him. In fact, the forest had been keeping him at bay. I labeled two more stars: egg yolks and dogs.
two black dogs
The aborted liatris project left me with a weed sanctuary and a new appreciation of voles, which is to say: none at all. Other than shading a thatch ant nest and then reducing it to a concave mass of damp detritus, Vole Forest served no purpose. Meanwhile, underneath its canopy, voles proliferated to an unimaginable density. One day, a desperate dam grabbed hold of my leather boot toe. Wrinkling her hindquarters like an accordion, she squirted out two shiny babies. They looked like kidney beans in tomato sauce.
I thought about decimating Vole Forest. I thought about the voles who had kept me company for so long. Without the forest for protection, hawks, weasels, and rubber boas would slaughter most of them. Imagine blood dripping from a vole impaled in the talons of a red-tailed hawk as it flies over the pasture. Imagine a weasel slinking into a vole’s tunnel and sinking its jagged canines into a vole’s hairy hind end. Imagine a turgid vole bulging from either side of the tightening belt of a rubber boa. The more I imagined, the guiltier I felt.
Owning land is a big responsibility. Every step taken, path set, weed pulled, and tree planted fosters a hundred million or so consequences. A great land baron, Nature’s tenant in chief, must justify her actions and their consequences. She cannot level a forest—not even a vole forest—simply out of spite. The voles had done their damage; razing the forest wouldn’t change that.
The fox lay on the top edge of the draw’s shady side listening to a mess of knotty weeds rustling in the wind. Across the draw, in the bright sun, a spring runoff was seeping into cattails, down a culvert, and under a dirt road. The fox’s bright orange mother, twice his size,
was standing on the bald hill beyond the dirt road, watching him. He had played this game before. She had positioned herself just so: upwind, proximate, and elevated. She wanted to see without being seen, to hear without being scented. She would be looking for him to misstep, to expose himself needlessly, or to wander off chasing some useless creature. She was making sure that he completed the tasks necessary to stay alive, and when she caught him out, she would scream to force him back in line.
The fox sucked a sticky bit of mouse tail from the corner of his upper lip. Maybe his mother screamed because she enjoyed watching him—last year’s smallest kit—jump up with hackles raised, toes splayed, and toenails clicking on the rocky ground. Swallowing the mouse bit, he ran his tongue along his upper lip. Keeping his back to her, he, last year’s runt, curled his tail around himself as if in repose. As if.
Turning his head toward a vole run, he imagined light beams from her two blazing eyes converging over the cattails. He flattened further into the dirt, and the single beam, gleaming like sun off a water drop on a beetle’s hard shell, slid right across his back. He uncurled into semi-attack position. She would see him posing between spring and voles, water and food; his upright ears tilted forward as if listening for prey. Raising his rump, he rocked back over his heels. He looked like any normal fox preparing to pounce. Like any one of her ordinary offspring.
When she failed to uncover any punishable offense, his mother, deprived of a reason to discipline him, retreated to the horse corrals to waylay mice on their trek to the feed bins. The imagined beam of light dissipated.
He had fooled her. He was not hunting; he was spying on someone, wasting time watching another animal that wasn’t food or foe. At a cursory glance, it would seem to be a useless activity, and yet it was serendipitous, not to the vixen but to the one individual in our story who at that point believed in serendipity.
Fox and I Page 5
