There’s nothing better, Jane used to say, than seeing the face of a ten-year-old fresh out of bed at the Buffalo Ranch, walking out to find a pack of wolves cruising up the valley a mere three hundred yards away. Or being high up on Specimen Ridge, standing by as a young boy closes his eyes and runs his fingers over the stone skin of a petrified tree. She worked with incredibly talented people at Expedition: Yellowstone!, many who greatly deepened her own knowledge of ecology and natural history. She’d grown more confident here, able to hatch teachable moments wherever she was, night or day. And like the kids, she too got to wake up to bison ambling up the valley, watch bull elk battle for harems, see pronghorn calves go in a matter of days from wobbly legs to lightning speed.
A few months ago I found a big manila envelope in her office where she kept letters from her students, some of whom kept in touch with her well into their teen years. Dear Ranger Jane, wrote Rod from Denver. Yellowstone is the most awesome place ever. I loved the hikes. Do bison ever need doctors? When I grow up I’m going to be a veterinarian. Or from Shelly in Bozeman: Dear Ranger Jane, Thanks for all the neat things you taught us. I liked the web of life game best. I had a dream about geysers. I was sad when I woke up and I wasn’t really there.
Her job in Yellowstone occurred across four months of the year, two of them in spring and two in fall. On her days off, which came in blocks of three, in the early weeks of autumn, either I’d go to Yellowstone or she’d drive two hours back across the Beartooths to Red Lodge. But by October, and continuing through the entire spring season, the Beartooth Highway was closed, which meant one of us faced a five-hour commute. So instead we often met halfway. In September and early October, we showed up with loaded backpacks to hike into the wilderness for a couple days, often near Becker Lake. In early spring we came with skis and chili and bourbon, heading off to some backcountry cabin on the Boulder River or Mill Creek or the Crazy Mountains.
It was hard, the two of us being apart so much, a problem made worse by my own comings and goings. On the weekends she spent in Red Lodge, there was always way too much to do: paying bills, working on the house, doing laundry, mowing the lawn, buying toilet paper, seeing the dentist. But it was different on those rendezvous in the backcountry. By then we’d been together more than a dozen years. We’d struggled through times of little money, helped each other when we were sick, tended friendships, stood together and watched parents suffering and dying. And because of all that, when we got to the outback, we slipped into the relationship with barely a ripple.
A SHORT WALK FROM WOLVERINE CREEK, WHERE TOM, BRIAN, and I made our next-to-last camp, the trail came to an abrupt end, obliterated by fallen timber, leaving us to head off cross-country in the general direction of the northern border of Yellowstone. To get there meant first climbing a sharp divide toward Lost Creek. The bad news: it was covered with the mother of blowdowns. There’s nothing so tiring, nothing so sure to bring a hiker to the edge of exhaustion, than a blowdown in a mature conifer forest. Years after the fires roared through, when the winds of spring and then autumn were blowing, trees began toppling into a vast hodgepodge of pick-up sticks. Most fell with massive root systems intact, which held the bases of the fallen trunks four to six feet off the ground. Going anywhere meant an endless series of zigzags, mostly up steep inclines. Where the fallen trees were low enough to the ground, we slid over them, doing our best not to come off the other side unbalanced by the packs. Sometimes we clambered up onto the biggest trees—those not spiked with lines of branches—then walked their trunks above the down timber, happy to make forty or fifty feet at a time. Sometimes we crawled. It took nearly two hours to make the first half mile.
As we finally topped the ridge, our hearts sank to find the slopes on the other side covered with blowdown as far as the eye could see. Broad-shouldered Cutoff Mountain rose two thousand feet above us, the entire cloak of forest that once covered its steep slopes completely burned and toppled, leaving the peak looking more rugged and forbidding than ever. Though we started the day with full bottles of water, there was little left, and from where we were, water was a long way away. Needing to reach the banks of Lost Creek, we headed first toward a ravine lying to the northwest. For no particular reason, though, at the last minute, that choice felt wrong. So I turned the party, and we made our way across still more blowdown toward a similar draw to the southwest. After two hundred yards of the usual brutal going, against all odds, we stumbled across the top end of a section of trail recently cleared by a cutting crew; by no small miracle, it ran all the way to Lost Creek.
Our feet hot and swollen, our tongues thick, we damn near skipped to the place where the trail crossed the creek, kicking off our boots and peeling off our shirts and shorts to submerge ourselves in the foot-deep water. Each of us was wearing an impressive collection of cuts on our legs, some of them still bleeding. I’d been acting as the lunch cook for the expedition, and I pulled out the last of our best ingredients, making fat tortilla wraps out of hard salami and cheddar cheese spiced with yellow mustard. We sat in the shade like schoolboys playing hooky, recounting with enthusiasm our recent trials. When we moved again, it was on clear trails, walking another few miles before setting up camp, near dark, at the border of the park.
Though we didn’t know it at the time, this northern line of Yellowstone was about to become ground zero for a sorry side effect of wolf management being given to the states—a handoff that occurred when the animals were taken off the endangered species list just the year before. Wolf hunting had recently become legal. And time and again, packs who were spending nearly all of their days in the park would wander for brief moments across the boundary; having never learned to recognize humans as threats, they would stand a mere hundred or so yards away from the hunters, wearing curious looks on their faces as the gun barrels were leveled. Especially prized by the shooters would be alpha males and females—easy to spot, since they were often the only ones in a pack wearing collars. Fish-in-a-barrel shooting at its finest.
The effect on the population of the park’s wolves would be devastating. In a single year, from 2012 to 2013, the population would drop 25 percent, in large part thanks to these reckless wolf-harvest policies of the states. Of course the problem could be eased by establishing so-called “sub-quota” zones along the border, buffer areas where fewer wolves could be taken. But Montana’s politicians would have none of it. Even once-respectable organizations like the Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation would drink the Kool-Aid, ignoring the fact that wolves and elk had coexisted here in relative stability for thousands of years.
What is it, anyway, that renders this creature, arguably more than any other, so much bigger than life? For some it’s a symbol of all that’s wrong with America, while for others, including me, it’s a symbol of what’s most right. Yet all of us seem happy to ignore the fact that wolves are just another animal—much like us, another predator—doing their level best to make a living in a hard, hard world. For all the attributions of wolves as “super killers” or as animals that “kill for fun,” the average lifespan of a Yellowstone wolf is only five years—partly because of territorial disputes and occasional waves of disease, but also because bringing down elk or bison is such a challenge that a lot of them end up dying in the attempt. For every time a park wolf pack brings down a prey animal, on four other occasions, their attempts fail.
What the wolf has done is to give us a more complete, more functional Yellowstone. Thanks to wolves, the grasses on the northern range greatly improved, as elk numbers fell to more sustainable levels. What’s more, those same elk shucked their old habits of hanging out in streamside areas where predators can get the jump on them; as a result, there was an enormous increase in beaver colonies on the northern range. Those beavers, in turn, who do so love to dam upstream channels, created habitat for the return of everything from yellow and Wilson’s warblers to willow flycatchers and fox sparrows. Grizzly bears, meanwhile, facing multiple food challenges from a changing climate—
from that drop in whitebark pine nuts to the dwindling supply of spawning trout in drought-ravaged streams—routinely filch the kills that wolves make, thus scoring dinners of their own. And on, and on, and on it goes.
When wolves were brought home to Yellowstone in 1995—four decades after the brilliant Aldo Leopold called for the animal to be restored to the park—polls suggested the vast majority of Americans, no matter their political stripes, welcomed the event with open arms. And yet even a conservation project as splashy as this one, covered by thousands of media outlets around the world, would—at least outside of wolf territory—soon drop out of public sight. Maybe in some future generation, when healthy wild ecosystems like this one are even more spectacularly rare, wolves will be able to garner more steadfast support. Maybe then we’ll find the resolve to say no to those who would binge-slaughter America’s wildlife to show their fury at a world that seems hell-bent on leaving them behind. In the meantime, unlike many other species, wolves are more than smart enough, more than hearty enough to survive here in Yellowstone. Even as their kin are shot to pieces a stone’s throw from the park’s border.
What was especially curious to me on that particular day, with Jane in a jar on my back, was that I felt calmer in the face of all the lunacy. I’d come to know a lot more now about how the world can close in, go dark when you feel powerless and afraid. I too had spent time feeling cheated out of the good old days. I got how awful it can feel, at least at first, when you figure out there’s no one to blame.
THE NEXT MORNING, SORE BUT UNDAUNTED, WE STARTED THE gentle thirteen-mile walk down the Slough Creek Valley toward a developed campground in Yellowstone, where my friend John would meet us with food for the final dinner. The last day. The sun was full on, ringing in the sky, bringing shimmer and shine to the grasslands of Frenchy’s Meadows—so named for a trapper in the late 1800s who set off on a fiery mission to eradicate the grizzly bears of the area, only to end up devoured by one. Though we saw no bears, mostly just elk and bison, the real stars of the show were sandhill cranes, their wild, primitive chortle echoing up and down the valley off and on throughout the morning. At one point Tom and I were locked in a particularly intense conversation when we looked up to find a pair of sandhills not ten yards off the trail, plucking bugs from the branches of a sagebrush.
Besides loons (and, in later years, wolves), the sound of the sandhill cranes, which every spring rang through the skies above our house, was for me the most appealing of all the songs of the wilderness. On several occasions I’ve been lucky enough to see their fabled mating dance, when a breeding pair comes face-to-face, each then launching into the air again and again with the most graceful hops and jumps, fluttering softly back to the ground. For the Greeks, and later the Romans, the dance of the cranes was said to be a celebration of the joy of life.
The walk was one of the finest in many years. The terrain offered less a hike than a sweet amble, one that matched perfectly the easy mood of Slough Creek, falling to the south slowly, flush with meander. Once again I found myself revisiting that Aboriginal idea of the dead being able to experience the world through the senses of the living. On that last day in Yellowstone, I was really hoping it was true. Because if it is, Jane would’ve wrapped herself around that trek like a long-lost friend. John was waiting for us about three miles out, eating his lunch on the trail; together the four of us made the final push to the campground. He’d gone to incredible lengths to give us a good welcome, and after a long plunge in Slough Creek, he served up beer and venison chili and salad and Dutch oven cornbread, and we ate until it seemed we’d never have to eat again. Late in the night, after we’d gone to bed, Martha arrived. Doug—my canoeing partner in the Thelon River country of Canada—would find us the next morning at six thirty, arriving in time to join us for the final trek to the ceremony site.
On first planning this trip, I’d intended to have the last scattering just west of the main Lamar Valley. But on that last morning, it just didn’t feel right. I found myself wanting to be farther upstream, within view of the old Buffalo Ranch, where Jane had worked as a ranger for so many years. The place where, in the 1830s, the wonderfully literate trapper Osborne Russell laid down on his elbow beside the Lamar River, writing in his journal how he wished he could remain there for the rest of his days. Changing the plan, though, meant that instead of walking three miles from the Slough Creek Campground, it would be closer to five. I told the group, feeling a bit sheepish. But no one seemed to mind.
It’d been raining off and on all through the night, but by dawn, most of the storm had moved on, leaving only gray sky. We hit the trail before seven, strolling out of the campground and then up the highway, the air filled with the smells of Yellowstone: wheatgrass and patches of Douglas fir, sagebrush and bison dung and an occasional whiff of sulfur. On reaching the west end of the valley, we descended to the Lamar River, traded hiking boots for water sandals, then forged across the sixty-foot-wide flow to a small delta on the south side. Once I settled on a spot for the ceremony, Doug pointed out that I’d chosen a place exactly halfway between a bald eagle nest and an osprey nest. Just up the valley was the Buffalo Ranch, so-named for having served as cowboy central in the early 1900s for the effort to bring wild bison back from the edge of extinction. It would later become a cluster of restored cabins, a cookhouse, and a classroom. And for parts of seven years, it had been Jane’s home away from home.
She and I had been off and on in Yellowstone for twenty-three years, and for the last eighteen, Yellowstone had been just beyond our back door. The place soaked into us slowly, revealing some new weave in every season: on top of mountains, in the bottom of canyons, in the swells of these savannah hills. Over the years, we’d left the roads with our packs on and waded knee-deep across rivers, eaten dinner in the shade of lodgepole forests, slept with grizzlies. And as time passed, we’d come to revere this park: the curious look of earth pushing out big pours of boiling water; the spring light on the sage fields of Lamar; the fluty ring of bugling elk in the fall. Even the smells were oddly filling—sometimes like black pepper and lemon peels; sometimes like eggs and toast.
ONCE AGAIN, ONE LAST TIME, THE CLOUDS BEGAN TO GIVE way, revealing patches of something close to autumn blue. We sat on the ground in a circle, at which point I invited my friends to share thoughts or memories of Jane. Doug, looking more sad than I’d ever seen him, told us that the Lamar Valley had always been a big part of the work he did as a biologist, that he’d never again set eyes on the place without thinking of her. Once everyone had a chance to speak, I told them that this place, more than any other in the American West, was where two of the things Jane loved best came together: wild nature, and the chance to share it with children. From here she had set off with her young charges across the Lamar Valley, making long treks with them toward the Buffalo Plateau. Some days they’d fanned out into the Norris Geyser Basin to test pH in the thermal features, or headed for Mammoth to study the travertine terraces. On several occasions, she’d called me from a pay phone near the trailer she lived in at Tower Junction, telling me how she couldn’t get inside because of a big bison blocking her way.
The whole of the Lamar Valley seemed at ease that day, gently animated: Blue bunchgrass and junegrass and milk vetch trembled in a light breeze. Just up the valley, loose gatherings of bison were lowering their heads and pulling up mouthfuls of grass, chewing for a minute or two, then stepping on.
We sat for a few minutes in silence. Then I explained to my friends how, on this trip, it occurred to me that embracing Jane in the present meant letting go of her in the past. I thanked them for being the ones who early on carried me back to the wilderness—to the river and the tundra; for quaffing beer with me on summer nights under the stars, for hearing on countless occasions some new version of the nature of my sadness.
I explained how, on this trip, it occurred to me that embracing Jane in the present meant letting go of her in the past. I thanked those friends for being the ones who had earl
y on carried me back to the wilderness—to the river and the tundra; for quaffing beer with me on summer nights under the stars; for hearing on countless occasions some new version of the nature of my sadness. As if on cue, the last of the gray clouds drifted apart to drench us with sun, washing the entire Lamar Valley with light. Just to the north, from somewhere high up on the steep, grassy slopes, a pair of coyotes called out with abandon, launching into a lively call-and-response of yips and howls.
At the end of the ceremony, I pulled out a sheet of paper with a few lines on it from Wendell Berry—a passage I found a year after Jane’s death, pasted into one of her journals:
And there at the camp we had around us the elemental world of water and light and earth and air. We felt the presences of the wild creatures, the river, the trees, the stars. Though we had our troubles, we had them in a true perspective. The universe, as we could see any night, is unimaginably large, and mostly dark. We knew we needed to be together more than we needed to be apart.
When the time came to scatter the ashes, each of us was left to simply find our own appealing place in those vast, open meadows. For Doug, it was a spot near a big bison wallow, the bare ground layered with course brown hair. John, on the other hand, picked a patch of grass in perfect line of sight with the bald eagle’s nest. I went toward the river, finding a low point on the delta. The following spring, the floods would come, carrying Jane’s remains on to the Yellowstone, then the Missouri, then the Mississippi, then the Gulf of Mexico.
The Carry Home Page 17
