Neither honesty nor evasion would see the fox story to a satisfactory ending. I thought back to another time I’d tried being honest and open with my thoughts—that time hadn’t worked out so well either. One year earlier, in the Grand Tetons, I was heading down trail with three female students. The trio had traveled together from Pennsylvania, two professional women and one single mother with a romance problem: her resident son disliked her soon-to-be-resident boyfriend. She was an advice vacuum the older women were anxious to fill.
Hobbled by a pack one-third my body weight, a pebble in my boot, and a runny nose, I stumbled down the gravel trail behind them. Both older women favored dumping the boyfriend because “Men are a dime a dozen, and children” (by which they meant sons) “are priceless.” An inarticulate flaw marred the boyfriend, one perceived only by the son. In the boyfriend’s defense, someone mentioned that a highly intuitive twenty-two-year-old child should be leaving the nest. Leave the nest? That inadvertent metaphor propelled me into the discussion. What I lacked in knowledge about boyfriends and children I could make up for with my knowledge of nesting behavior.
“I know what you should do.”
They did not hear me the first three times.
“Wait. Look. We haven’t seen any mountain hollyhocks in bloom yet today.” I entwined a cluster of pink blooms between my fingers and pulled them gently forward, causing the trio to pause. They turned slightly toward me.
“I know what you should do,” I said for the fourth time, stepping down trail while they turned away and continued walking. “Once upon a time—two years ago—a pair of bald eagles nested in a spruce snag on the banks of the Snake River. Three of their chicks fledged as usual around the end of August, but one would not. It stayed in the nest and cried.”
Their tightly braided group was loosening just enough for me to feel less obviously excluded.
“The adult birds tried a bunch of strategies to get that last chick airborne. First, they ignored it. They stopped feeding it. Then they tempted it, flying past with fish in their talons, hoping the starved chick would leap from its nest to grab the fish. Nope. While perched on a lower snag, Mama tried calling it down. This chick, nearly the size of its parents, would not leave that nest. It would jump to the edge, peer down to the river seventy feet below, look back into the wide cozy nest, and hunker back down.”
“Yes?” responded the oldest woman without stopping to look back. “And?”
Even while staring at the backs of their heads, I could see their eyes rolling.
“The nest was seventy feet high. And yet, for horizontal distances you use metrics,” the other woman interrupted. I read her accusation as a question. All week I had been directing them to stay twenty-five meters away from elk and a hundred meters away from bears.
“Target distances, I guess. I shoot.”
After they muttered, “Of course you do,” I continued the true and witnessed story of how two adult eagles, under pressure to get their last chick fledged before autumn’s snow, began taking their nest apart. The acrophobic chick remained inside, gripping twigs and exhausting itself with distress calls. Nest deconstruction would eventually leave a structure so insubstantial that the chick would tumble out, raise its wings instinctively, and realize the miracle of flight. Or effect a crash landing and never recover. “Either way, we end up with two adults liberated from their chick.” Emboldened by the younger woman’s smile, I added, “If the chick won’t leave the nest, the nest must leave the chick.”
“Anthropomorphism,” said the matron, imitating a whisper while her glance indicated that I was meant to hear. She was implying that I was scientifically incorrect and emotionally immature. Unsure whether she was going to extend that insult or leave it truncated, I stopped, turned my palms upward, and waited.
The younger woman admitted that the eagle story amused her and quickly added that she would never expel her son from the nest because . . . well, she had to think about it.
“Because,” interrupted her companion, “humans are not . . .” She paused to glare at me with eyes like a double-barreled shotgun before spitting out the final word, “Animals.”
There we stood, each of us working from an infinitesimal sample size and a gargantuan bias.
I don’t know whether that eagle chick survived. I could guess a definitive maybe.
Still climbing, the River Cabin class and I entered a forested area along a stretch of logging so long retired it looked more like a two-track than a graded lane. Short-leafed Douglas firs and slightly longer-leafed pines waved us on. I waited for a group of downhill hikers to catch up with me before entering the shady abyss. When I paused, they faced me with their backs to the slope. If I had been taller than the students, or if they’d stood farther away, I would have seen bright green hillsides streaked with yellow bands of arrowleaf balsamroot, but their bodies blocked my view of the Northern Rockies’ most spectacular hillside display. I was a pygmy owl being mobbed by gnatcatchers.
Eventually we could no longer see sky for forest. Shade-loving clematis vines with pale purple sepals twined into cherry and serviceberry shrubs. Waxy spikes of yellow lilies pierced sheets of melting snow. Tin Cloth reminded us about the chocolate brownies in our lunch sacks, so we climbed out of the forest and onto a hill with a single tree, whitebark (Pinus albicaulis). Purple pollen cones, one-inch long and heavily waxed, encircled the tips of the cantilevered tree. We scattered to find rock seats facing Yellowstone River, hundreds of feet below us. Some of our classmates, glassing the dirty snowfields across the river, hoped they would turn out to be mountain sheep. They would not.
All week long we mistook boulders for bison, and bison for boulders. I told them that lonely boulders disguised themselves as bison to attract attention. I said that so they would not stop looking closely at boulders. I also said that bison disguise themselves as boulders because they want privacy. I said that because I thought it might be true.
I reminded everyone about the cow buffalo I once knew who comforted a drowning comrade while coyotes circled, nightfall approached, and my backpack thermometer read thirty degrees below zero. When her comrade sank and the pond froze over and trapped the body inside and none of the above conditions abated, still that cow buffalo stayed, pawing at the thin icy crust covering her sunken friend. No one had answered the question from the first night of class. So, I asked again. “How would you classify that type of behavior?” I asked. “Would you call it sympathy, respect, or loyalty?
A few months after the class ended, I published that cow’s story, “Buffalo’s Last Stand,” in the magazine of the American Mensa society. I interpreted her behavior as loyalty. In the 1800s, Dr. William Hornaday, the father of wildlife biology, observed similar behavior in bison cows. In Extermination of the American Bison, published in 1889, Hornaday wrote that the cows’ habit of standing with fallen comrades exemplified “stupidity.” I revered Hornaday. I’ve underlined passages and scribbled in the margins of my copy of his book. He can have his belief about the bison. I am keeping mine. That is why they’re called beliefs, after all.
A student interjected to enlighten us about bison behavior. “When a bison raises its tail, it’s getting ready to . . .” She paused, waving on her classmates until they intoned, “Charge or discharge!” After hearing that old joke from every park interpreter we encountered, everyone still found it hilarious. They swallowed the idea that a buffalo could eat, shit, mate, and die. But the notion that a free-living non-human animal expressed sympathy was unpalatable. Sometimes things we do not like to eat are good for us. I asked if any of them ate kale. They stared at Tin Cloth for a translation. He shrugged and tented his bird book over his face.
Dr. William Hornaday, a man for whom temperature should have been of the utmost importance, waited until noon before checking his thermometer. Wearing long cotton underwear tucked into wet leather boots, he was running out of food, camping without a tent, and only halfway through
a task that seemed endless. Traveling on horseback with a mule train for supplies, he’d allowed himself the company of a small party of workers, one of whom, Private C. S. West, was already missing and presumed dead. Bivouacking in treeless sagebrush and butte country east of Ingomar, Montana, Hornaday was boning and skinning the half-frozen carcass of a 2,000-pound buffalo. Brush-choked ravines bisected the flatlands, while snow-filled sloughs booby-trapped it. Wind scoured the rest. Even in a gentler season, this was imposing country. Mule-sucking mud covered the lowest elevations; steep-sided buttes, nearly vertical, commanded the highest.
But after all, it was “at all hazards,” as Hornaday writes in his journal, that he had pledged to collect the skin and skeleton of America’s last wild bison. When the thirty-eight-year-old chief taxidermist for the Smithsonian Institution finally checked his thermometer on that fall day in 1886, it read six degrees below zero.
Beyond a physical climate that appeared life-threatening, there was the incessant reminder of political turmoil. Hornaday was collecting bison—commonly called buffalo—on lands of ambiguous ownership. US government claims, almost certainly ambitious, overlapped with those of native tribes. Custer’s fall was ten years behind him, Chief Joseph’s surrender only nine. It was the year of the Dawes Act—tribal lands were becoming private holdings—and just four years earlier, federal soldiers had massacred hundreds of Sioux at Wounded Knee.
In a sheltered niche at the base of what would come to be renamed Smithsonian Butte, Hornaday leaned over and secured wind-whipped pages of his journal with both forearms. For more than twenty-four months he had traveled through the most isolated areas of Texas, Dakota, Wyoming, and Montana to observe, measure, and record America’s last bison. He measured and counted ubiquitous bison wallows, pits denuded down to bare mineral soil, most of them hundreds of years old. After watching bulls wallowing in mud until their “degradation is complete,” Hornaday wrote that they emerged “not fit to be seen, even by their best friends.”
Moby-Dick, published a couple of decades before Hornaday entered graduate school, must have influenced him for the same reason the public denigrated it: excessive encyclopedic reporting of whaling and zoology. Melville’s eye is sharp, and he warns readers about the imminent extinction of the American bison.
Comparing the humped herds of whales with the humped herds of buffalo, which, not forty years ago, overspread by tens of thousands the prairies of Illinois and Missouri, and shook their iron manes and scowled with their thunder-clotted brows upon the sites of populous river-capitals, where now the polite broker sells you land at a dollar an inch; in such a comparison an irresistible argument would seem furnished, to show that the hunted whale cannot now escape speedy extinction.
(Moby-Dick, Chapter 105, “Does the Whale’s Magnitude Diminish?—Will He Perish?”)
While the humped herds of bison were perishing on the plains, the horned herds of elk—or antlered herds, as Hornaday would call them in his journal—fared better. The US government was aggressively protecting cattlemen in the 1880s by eradicating mountain lions and wolves and enforcing open-range laws. Elk benefitted from these practices; bison did not. Because elk readily ensconced themselves in thick forests and did not congregate in huge herds, they were harder to shoot.
Hornaday also studied the breeding behavior of these two species of ruminants, which differed dramatically. Bison bred seemingly indiscriminately within herds of thousands, while elk bred very selectively within harems that averaged between fifteen and twenty cows. Bison had more opportunities to breed than elk; their mating season was months longer. And while in bison society, most mature animals took part in the mating process, in elk society, females selected their partners, and not all males ended up with a mate. How did females choose? Hornaday assumed that they picked the meanest, biggest, toughest bull as determined by jousting matches.
A hundred and twenty years hence, in the 1990s, DNA technology would allow scientists to run paternity tests on elk calves. These tests failed to support Hornaday’s conjecture. In fact, the bulls who won the jousting matches did not win all the females. Cows gave birth to calves whose sires had lost the matches, and who had small, crooked, or misshapen horns.
On his way to Calf Creek camp, Hornaday stumbled upon a small group of bison cows and shot the lead. Blood spurted from the cow’s nostrils, and the herd pressed their noses to her flesh, refusing to leave even as Hornaday fired several more shots. Congregating around the endangered animal was behavior he had witnessed many times. He wondered why bison cows, unlike other reasonable animals, did not flee to safety. “Phenomenal stupidity,” he wrote in his journal, concluding that bison stand in the face of danger because they are inescapably “complacent.” The “stupid brutes,” he opined, were complicit in their own extinction. Hornaday’s unfortunate conclusion might have been different had he heeded this piece of advice from Moby-Dick:
Had these leviathans been but a flock of simple sheep, pursued over the pasture by three fierce wolves, they could not possibly have evinced such excessive dismay. But this occasional timidity is characteristic of almost all herding creatures. Though banding together in tens of thousands, the lion-maned buffaloes of the West have fled before a solitary horseman. Witness, too, all human beings, how when herded together in the sheepfold of a theatre’s pit, they will, at the slightest alarm of fire, rush helter-skelter for the outlets, crowding, trampling, jamming, and remorselessly dashing each other to death. Best, therefore, withhold any amazement at the strangely gallied whales before us, for there is no folly of the beasts of the earth which is not infinitely outdone by the madness of men.
(Moby-Dick, Chapter 87, “The Grand Armada”)
Below Smithsonian Butte, elk bulls battling for mates were locking horns. Returning to camp, Hornaday shot a harem cow, pulled the backstraps from her spinal cord, and wrapped them in waxed cotton to roast for dinner. After splitting both rear quarters over his mule’s flanks, Hornaday abandoned the rest to the circling coyotes. Meanwhile, as the jousting bulls snorted and pissed on their front legs, cows escaped into the shadows, their hoof beats silenced by the sound of crashing antlers. Each cow was searching for her perfect partner, and despite years of research, no scientist has ever been able to discover the criteria that females use when choosing mates. Maybe it’s because each cow chose, for herself alone, the one bull that would most displease her mother.
My fox story needed a satisfactory ending. I didn’t have one. But I knew how it should end.
“Little wild animals do not enjoy long stable lives,” I said, implying that Fox could be dead when I got home. In fact, the lifespan of a wild red fox is three to five years. “The average fox dies early.” Meeting Sixth Sense’s gaze, I flashed a droll smile. That was our joke: events cannot be both “average” and “early.” She raised her eyebrows and rolled a tight little fist into her nose to mask her expression.
Earlier in the week, we’d spotted a doe antelope nursing two tiny fawns. While we were admiring her long eyelashes and the twins’ Mohawk hairdos, two coyotes arrived. They boxed her in, one coyote on each side, a steep hill behind her, and a busy road in front. Good strategy for the coyotes. An antelope can sprint sixty miles per hour but not while running uphill. And she wouldn’t cross a road lined with bumper-to-bumper buses. After stashing the twins in a clump of wild rye, she charged the coyote to her west, kicking it as she passed. The east-side coyote ran toward the twins. She reversed, and the west-side coyote ran for the twins. Back and forth it went. After several attempts to immobilize the coyotes, she came up limping, unable to defend her babies. The coyotes ate the two fawns while we watched, snapped, and recorded.
One student: “Cool. It’s like Godzilla eats Bambi.”
Another: “Good thing my daughter isn’t here. She won’t kill a fly. Traps spiders and releases them outside.” Yes, everyone’s daughter is like that. No one’s daughter finds spider squashing edifying or entertaining. But that does not
mean anyone’s daughter empathizes with spiders. Meanwhile, someone who wasn’t anyone’s daughter watched crowds enjoying the spectacle: a coyote shredding an antelope fawn, a wilderness experience that does not dirty your couch.
Me: “Wow, we are like Roman spectators watching Christians get torn apart by lions.”
Jenna (whispering): “I really wish you would mutter that sort of thing.”
Yes, death would be an acceptable ending for the fox story. For another possible ending, I suggested that he would be off looking for a mate. No one asked when foxes mated. (February.)
“He’s gonna find a mate, being a runt and all?”
“Yes, because he has especially nice digs.”
Sixth Sense glanced up and squinted at me not a split second after I regretted admitting I had visited his den.
Another student asked what I would do on the off chance that he was hanging around when I got home. Everyone concluded that the only legitimate business I had with him would be if he was a research subject. “You can collect his droppings, right?”
I could.
“You can get DNA and stuff.”
Yes.
I could, in other words, objectify him, reduce him to data points. And why not? I valued their opinions; these were no ordinary students. This was a continuing education class, filled with doctors, engineers, teachers, counselors, administrators, and artists. They were mature professionals, and every one of them successful in the common meaning of the term. For a moment, surrounded by members of my own species who seemed engaged—maybe even concerned—and who were themselves interesting (somewhat), I considered discarding the belief that Fox had any kind of personality. I considered just fitting in. With people.
I insisted that the fox would be gone when I got home. He would be hunting down a mate or a territory, or would be otherwise engaged in the vagaries we associate with wild animals. I was lying. I’d been checking in on him when I drove home every night before dinner, staying long enough to water plants and pull a weed or two. Besides, he already had a territory, mating season was eight months away, and he was significantly less peripatetic than I was.
Fox and I Page 13
