When our bus passed Floating Island Lake, I knew there weren’t many distractions ahead, so I stopped lecturing and opened the floor. Someone from the back asked why I’d swapped the backcountry for graduate school. You would think I’d have a pat answer prepared, as often as people asked. Instead, I had a story. “The Panther Creek fawn,” I said, flipping on the microphone.
The story takes place at Mount Rainier National Park and begins with my boss, Bob, and me heading down Cayuse Pass in our pickup, wrapping up a deer incident that had tied us up all week. Bob said, “It’s never going to get any more exciting than this.” He meant my job, ranging in the wilderness. His assessment followed a busy month: a few medical emergencies, a body recovery, a small wildfire. He was suggesting that I leave this job—the best job ever—before the worst possible thing happened: before I kicked steps down Sunrise Glacier with my Gore-Tex mittens wrapped around a stretcher pole, looked down on the splinted victim grimacing under an oxygen mask, and asked, Is this all there is? I knew that if boredom gripped me, it would never let go, and all the memories I had banked would depreciate. If I didn’t get out with valuable memories, I’d have nothing. My measly salary would not sustain me into the future.
If I left the backcountry too soon, blame Panther Creek.
The call came over the airways from park dispatch. An eyewitness reported unleashed dogs running down deer at the unofficial Panther Creek site. Visitors used the site mostly for activities that involved things that they could easily carry downhill but were not valuable enough to worry about carrying back up. Things like beer bottles. Sometimes wine. Dogs, of course, could transport themselves back uphill. But regulations prohibited dogs, leashed or otherwise. “Unofficial” meant the park service did not maintain the site and discouraged anyone from using it.
In the Panther Creek pullout, with pinecones the size of walnuts crunching under my boots, I pushed aside a curtain of fir branches and found the site’s social trail. Social trails start like game trails, with a few individuals stomping down dirt, breaking branches, carving a path that’s just barely passable into an otherwise impenetrable forest. Park rangers did not build terraces or install water bars on the social trails, which meant the soil washed away, especially in steep areas. I always tried to cover the trails with branches to keep the visitors off and prevent erosion.
We avoided the social trail and bushwhacked. Bob said the chief scientist had come from Seattle to tour the park, “who knows for how long.” It was not a question; by “who” he meant “nobody.”
After several minutes, I said, “Well? Is he coming to our district?”
After several more minutes, Bob said, “He won’t be going anywhere important.” And so it went.
Descending the slope, I concentrated on keeping myself perpendicular to the ground. Stand with your feet together. Your heels are a vertex where two lines meet: one line runs up your back from your heel to your head (the spine line); the second line (the trail line) extends forward from your heels and runs along the floor or trail you are facing. When you stand on level ground, the trail line and the spine line naturally form a ninety-degree angle. Now imagine yourself standing on a hill. Whether you’re heading up or down, you’ll want to lean. But, if you don’t want to fall, you’ll work at keeping the trail line and the spine line at a ninety-degree angle. When a hiker carrying a heavy backpack is plodding uphill along a steep trail, he leans forward into the hill. As he tires, he leans further, shrinking the angle formed by spine and trail lines into an acute angle. Weight comes off his heels, toes slip backward, and his nose dives forward. His palms, after breaking his fall, skid downhill until they are roughed with trail rash.
When hiking downhill, people let the steepness worry them into a backward lean. The angle created by the spine and trail lines expands to an obtuse angle. That forces their heels to slide out from under them, dropping their butts and backpacks into the dirt and leaving them flailing like flipped turtles.
Neither Bob nor I was what would become known a decade later as “multitaskers.” My personality precluded concentrating on more than one serious project at a time. When multitasking buzzed into the lexicon, I associated it with a level of nervousness more characteristic of red pine squirrels than park rangers. Did you know that red squirrels can race headfirst down a spruce trunk, count their cone stashes, track a potential mate, check on juveniles, cut spruce cone stalks, scold juveniles, and ditch mates, all while simultaneously chattering an alarm call? Did you know that red squirrels don’t live very long?
Maple branches smacked my cheeks hard enough to score my skin. The trees had been fighting off encroachment from bigger mammals than me for thousands of years, and I couldn’t match the speed or agility with which they fought back when I brushed their branches away. Pines huddled together, blocking the sun, dimming my view. The trail was steep, and the prior winter’s torrential rains had sluiced all the fallen leaves. The absence of duff left ancient and angry roots completely exposed. Firs and cedars stuck their mossy, high-arched toes across the unmaintained path, catching my two-pound leather Pivettas and tripping me up as if they were J. R. R. Tolkien’s mischievous Ents.
When we arrived, empty beer bottles were poking through a band of gray cobbles in an outwash along Panther Creek. We walked on top of downed trees to reach a logjam in the middle of the creek, where a fawn bleated for help. Her hind end was torn. None of her bones looked broken. We carried her to shore. “Yeah, so there’s this animal policy,” Bob said. I placed my hand over the fawn’s warm ribcage and felt shallow, irregular breaths while he continued. “We can’t do anything with this fawn until the chief scientist goes home.”
“We could carry her up. Or ask a vet to come down.”
“Not happening. No interference with the wilderness experience.” That’s what I heard Bob say, but when he winked one of his almond-shaped eyes, I knew what he meant was that overachieving managers from Silk Stocking Lane should not be making policy about things they knew nothing about. Things like animals and woods and Wilderness.
That capital W is not a typo. The United States Congress designated Mount Rainier a Wilderness in 1988. It was a special designation, setting the park apart from places like Glacier and Yellowstone National Parks, where any rube could tromp through woods all day, get spit on by a grizzly bear, and still not claim to be in Wilderness.
Like Paradise Meadows and Grove of the Patriarchs, Wilderness defined Mount Rainier. It affected our management policies and discouraged activities that disrespected nature. The Wilderness Act prohibited contraptions that were noisy, visually intrusive, or ostentatiously mechanical, as well as new roads, nonemergency trail and site markers, and permanent storage caches. I loved the word wilderness and the simple bits of the Act that I understood. I did not understand about the deer.
Bob reminded me that park visitors believed their entrance fee entitled them to a show. And the show included watching animals suffer. Worse, we were selling the rights to witness an animal’s degradation, her painful death in front of camera-clicking, bulb-flashing, satisfied strangers. Too many people felt they could improve their self-image or make themselves appear more erudite or scientific or masculine if they were cavalier about observing another individual’s brutal death.
“Is that a line item on their entrance ticket: degrading wildlife?”
Bob watched the fawn and winked again—to shake a wind tear from his eye.
We had worked in the Service long enough to have watched plenty of wild animals suffer and die because of a policy that deemed their death “natural.” Now it was happening for the first time in an area where I could influence, in a small way, the outcome.
A senseless standard—a paradigm—was weighing us down. A paradigm is a nebulous and sticky substance. Like Dr. Seuss’s oobleck, you can’t figure out where it came from or how to rid yourself of it. As far as practice and policy, except for vehicle accidents, neither of us knew of any ca
se where a park service employee had euthanized an injured wild animal, let alone called on a veterinarian to treat one. Bob and I agreed to rescue the fawn as soon as the chief scientist returned to Seattle. I covered Panther Creek’s unofficial trail with leaves and brush to keep hikers away while the injured fawn waited for help.
The next two mornings, I bushwhacked back down to Panther Creek with blankets for the fawn. Never mind maple whips, a heavy backpack, and running downhill; people my age didn’t worry about things like that. Without any expectation that she would eat or drink, I filled my aluminum Sierra cup in the creek and set it next to her. Unfurling my damp fingers in front of her muzzle, I offered up translucent yew berries. She lay with her wound exposed and jaw reclined on an ankle, looking at me with eyes pleading for help. I believe that injured fawns have pleaded with people for help for thousands of years. Above her, a great hemlock tree curled its two central branches upward, so that they looked like wings on a green sea eagle. The tree’s top bent toward Panther Creek, nodding as if scanning for trout. Exposed roots clung like talons ready for liftoff. I did what humans have done for the same thousands. “Don’t worry, babe,” I said, patting her shoulder with the back of my hand. “I am going to help you.”
“What the hell is that ammonia smell?” Bob roared. I slipped behind him into the garage. Turning sideways, we shimmied between two fire engines, following the ammonia cloud to the back. Crumpled up in a corner was a white towel soaked with deer urine.
“Oh, that’s a blanket from the fawn,” I said. Bob showed no intention of unhooking his arms from across his chest. Or blinking. I continued to parse out information. “Um . . . she can’t stand up . . . she was cold . . .”
“Who does this sort of thing.” It was not a question; by “who” he meant me.
I continued stuttering my explanation. “Well . . . she pees on the blankets . . . and then I have to bring them back here and get new ones . . . from the emergency rig.” I shrugged my shoulders. “I don’t own any blankets.”
“Christ.”
Overpowered by the ammonia smell, we retreated, while Bob yelled out, “Tomorrow!” Tomorrow, Bob assured me, our “friend” from Silk Stocking Lane would leave before breakfast. Tomorrow we could rescue the fawn.
“Six in the morning. Sharp.”
“Fine.”
“Five even better.”
“See ya.”
We drove in the dark. Bushwhacked without talking. Glacier glasses with leather side panels protected my eyes from whipping brambles, and my hands grasped thin alder branches as we slid toward the river with nothing but sound and its absence to guide us.
It was later that same day, driving over Cayuse Pass, when Bob said, “It’s not ever going to get more exciting than this.” I asked him what he was thinking would be more exciting if I were to move on. “Graduate school,” Bob said. “A PhD, like what’s-his-name. Bug guy.”
Bug guy? The volunteer? The park service paid me for patrolling the backcountry.
Bob knew I was poor. The day I moved into my government dormitory, I left the Volvo on the ranger station’s circular drive instead of using my assigned perpendicular parking space.
“And it doesn’t even have a reverse gear!” he said. Then, “Welcome to the crew.”
“I have the other four,” I replied, “and good to meet you.”
I was in college and thumbing a ride the day I bought the Volvo. A gray-haired man gave me a lift and a two-part lecture: hitchhiking is dangerous and used cars are cheap. I ignored the first part, but I could buy a car? He might as well have announced that moon monkeys had landed. My weekend job minding two little girls included a salary plus room and board, and I had a second job clerking. We picked up the cash from under my mattress and he dropped me at the dealership. I drove back to my basement apartment, proudly stopping at every red light, stalling fearfully at every green. To this day, I have never heard so many drivers honking at me. The stick shift hadn’t come with instructions. The girls’ father, a federal judge, taught me how to handle the manual transmission, and I’ve owned one ever since. Instead of hiding my cash under the mattress, I started jamming it between the leather-trimmed fabric seats. But I never stopped hitchhiking. I kept the car too long, and it broke down too often.
After a long career in the backcountry, including the premier job of backcountry ranger in Zion National Park, Bob had advanced into a more stable supervisory position. More importantly, he was stable. He had a girlfriend, and eventually a wife and child. Throughout my years at Mount Rainier, he was the oldest man with whom I had any regular contact. I was twenty-eight. We hadn’t yet celebrated his fortieth birthday. I suspected his idea about graduate school held water.
But would a graduate program accept me? One of the younger guys on my crew brought me information about an important standardized test, the Graduate Record Exam or GRE. We read through the practice tests and figured out how to sign me up. I scored in the top ninety-eighth percentile for general verbal skills, analytical skills, and biological subject matter. Some school would accept me.
But I could not envision living in a city. And I could not imagine being a scientist. I always reached toward, and then moved toward, things I could envision but not touch. Anything I could touch would be too close, and anything I couldn’t see would be too far. I always pictured myself alone on a subalpine ridge in some wilderness.
Bob felt that my hair (“you look like a backcountry ranger”) was my biggest obstacle; I didn’t own a comb. I agreed, and we proceeded to speculate about scientists in the manner that the chronically ill ponder the life of a doctor or the incarcerated imagine lawyers.
“Don’t worry about being a scientist, for crissakes,” said Bob. “Just get the degree and figure out what the hell those people are up to.” That was all the advice I had ever received about graduate school.
And really, together with the comb Bob gave me as a going-away present, it was all the advice I needed.
Ever since I was a pissant ranger at Glacier National Park, I had been wondering what scientists were up to. One time, a scientist from park headquarters—a guy with a PhD—asked me to help gather samples for an aquatic study. I hadn’t yet earned my bachelor’s degree in Zoology and was honored to accept the responsibility, along with two glass bottles, an eyedropper, and written instructions.
After hiking to a backcountry cabin sheltered by a stand of aspen trees, I ran down to Cut Bank Creek, scooped water into a glass bottle, and added a drop of whatever from the eyedropper. Holding the bottle of creek water up to the sun, I shook it gently and watched mosquito-sized red shrimp flipping and rolling in their tiny glass chamber. Inside the cabin, I placed the bottle reverently on the bed stand. When the sheepherder stove was hot and crackling and water was heating, I checked on my tiny charges. Oh . . . my . . . God. All the mosquito-sized red shrimps had sunk. I had killed them all.
I slept poorly. At first light, I hiked twenty-five hundred feet up Pitamakan Pass. Then down twenty-five hundred feet. Seventeen miles. Breathtaking scenery, and I didn’t see another person; people found the high concentration of grizzly bears off-putting. At the Two Medicine Ranger Station, I caught a ride to my regular post, the East Glacier Ranger Station, and shuttled to headquarters the next day.
Guess what? The scientist knew the shrimp would die. The little bottle with the eyedropper contained a poison. He wanted to count them. I’ve killed animals so a guy with a doctorate in biology can count them? To clarify: I killed animals so a guy with a doctorate in fisheries biology could supervise while another guy with a master’s degree in fisheries biology could do the actual counting (while an undergraduate student recorded). There I stood—filthy and sweaty and sore. And there he sat—suited and comfortable and cool. You know how that goes. Everyone assumes the dirt-smudged person, the standing person, the one with uncombed hair, is the more ignorant of the two. Shit on like a shrimp. Yup, I might just like knowing w
hat they were up to.
I might like to know why the Panther Creek fawn had to die. Oh, I forgot: Death is natural! Nature is cruel! Is that what the ranchers told themselves during the Helena fox massacre? The reverend who preached about the massacre juxtaposed the murder of the foxes with a description of the crucifixion of Jesus of Nazareth, the Christian God. The juxtaposition, according to the reverend, illustrated a mystery: Why does senseless cruelty exist in a world with a loving God?
By the time I ranged in Mount Rainier, people had stopped interpreting cruelty as a senseless act. We did not watch wildlife suffer because we were poor, ignorant sheep farmers. We watched them suffer because we were rich and college educated and white-collar. The animals’ pain covered us with the dirt we desired so that we could pretend to know the cruelty of the world. We watched wildlife suffer and die and turned our short jaws this way and that. “Nature is cruel,” we said, and then we pretended that bearing the burden of this knowledge toughened up our flaccid souls.
Meanwhile, on the bus with the River Cabins class, I tied myself in knots trying to justify what had spiraled into an unacceptable animal story. I stood on the bus with my back to the “Do Not Stand While Bus Is Moving” sign, facing students who were wondering what kind of person was leading them along bear-infested trails. What kind of person, professor, naturalist, did not understand that it was unnatural to minister to an injured fawn? They wondered if I was one of those people—those people—who bragged about not being able to kill spiders.
The bus swung into a curb wide enough to drop its outside tires on the soft shoulder. I was telling the students that every time the Panther Creek fawn had gazed up at me, she was pleading for compassion. The last time I saw her, she was lying dead with open eyes and I felt a gut-hollowing sadness. The bus hit a gigantic pothole, and I had trouble holding on with only one hand free. “I kill spiders,” I said just before the momentum forced me to turn and, like the sign above the driver’s head said to do, “face front.”
Fox and I Page 11
