The Book of Yaak

by Rick Bass

  After being passed in the House with overwhelming bipartisanship support, the bill then stalled and died in the Senate, with neither of Montana's senators, Conrad Burns or Max Baucus, supporting it.

  Cary Hegreberg, vice president of the Montana Wood Products Association, called the dedication of the proposed small-logger area "unconscionable," according to the Missoulian, and said it was a slap in the face of unemployed millworkers.

  And so it goes on, that battle with which those of us who live here are so familiar.

  I have so many stories to tell of the Yaak: things I've seen, with hopes of more to come. Flowing elk herds in the backcountry. A great gray owl sitting on a snag in the deep woods, seemingly the size of a man, watching me approach. Rivers and creeks and waterfalls; grizzly prints in the snow on a ridge one October, fresh tracks which measured almost thirteen inches by seven inches. A trophy whitetail staring across a ravine at me, deep in the backcountry, one snowy dusk....

  The Yaak is wilderness, and the Yaak, though atypical to our state—atypical to the world—carries the spirit of Montana, the spirit of a place without borders: even if many of the lands do have roads bounding them now, carving and cutting into these last places.

  The big timber companies, some of whom have already abandoned the state, have successfully sold much of the public on the idea that environmentalists such as myself believe that logging is bad, even evil. I don't have sixty or seventy thousand dollars lying around to donate to some senator, but I do have a pen and paper. I do have words that come out of my mouth, and against the power of their huge campaigns, I can say that I use wood, and love much about the culture of logging. I love the rip of a saw, the muscularity of it—the smell of wood, the sound and sight of wood. I love going into the Rosauers' parking lot down in Libby, sixty miles away, and seeing the guys in suspenders and hardhats, with the chain-saw oil and gas cans looped together in the back of their pickups, and a saw tool roped to the gas can. These to me are as much a part of the culture and a part of the wild as the lions and bears and wolves.

  That is the truth, just as it is the truth that five-hundred-year-old larch trees are not needed for phone books and toilet paper—that tired argument; just as it is also true that jobs in timber would last longer if more work were done on the trees that are cut, and if they stayed here in the state instead of going to Asia.

  You can't talk about the Yaak without talking about timber.

  You can't talk about the Yaak without talking about wilderness, and the wild things.

  Where is it all going to settle? What is going to be taken from us, and what is going to be left?

  Who has the Yaak on their minds, and who has it in their hearts? Sometimes these two are not the same thing. To me it is a sacred place, and I am worried for it and troubled by its history, and worried for its future. It still belongs to us—that wildness, a kind of which we do not see much any more—but it is being lost to us quickly, it is being bought and sold by those who neither own nor know it.

  Four Coyotes

  One

  Z-Mountain is the only nearby mountain that's not swarmed under by the rush of forest. Avalanches sweep the slopes clean each winter and keep trees from growing on it. It has a strange, humming power.

  Robert and I climbed it one fall. Robert was talking about coyote luck. He'd been camping in Wyoming earlier in the fall and a light snow had fallen in the night, and in the morning he found tracks where a coyote had walked around his tent twice.

  "Ringed by luck," Robert's friend, Terry, told him when she heard of the incident. "Coyote luck."

  Robert was quiet, going up Z-Mountain. His father, a doctor, was due in for surgery in a week to have stomach cancer cut out: a big one. Robert and I climbed hard. Robert's knee was hurting but he kept on. We didn't say much to each other on the mountain.

  The next day Robert went back to Mississippi. "Good luck," was all 1 had to say. And then a week later I got a letter from him.

  "My coyote luck seems to be holding," he wrote. "When they went into my father's belly they came out with the whole tumor and a complete cure, which was a result no one had even mentioned as a possibility. My grandmother died peacefully the next day and we buried her on the Sunday the first cold weather came down to north Mississippi. After the service, I was standing in the little country cemetery outside Shannon, looking at a moldering ruin of steel and wire mesh in one unkempt corner. A little old blue-haired lady, of which there were plenty on hand, came up and said, 'That's where we buried that circus feller that died here in '34. Nobody had any money to get him a stone, and we didn't know exactly who he was anyway, but he had that cage, so we just put that there. Bless his heart.'"

  The first time I ever saw a coyote up on Z-Mountain, which is very high, was on my next trip. I was alone. It was hunting season and I had my elk call and I sat on the knife ridge of the mountain and was calling and bugling to a bull far down on the back side. It was dusk and too far and too late for me to go down into the next valley after him. I was just sitting on the top of the mountain calling to him, and feeling that ferocious wind. The elk's shrill squeals were echoing down the valley and my calls were being carried away by the wind. I am reminded now of how Native Americans never said the names of either the dead or their respected woods-mates. They would call the grizzly, for instance, "Grandfather" or "Beloved Uncle" or "Worthy Old Man."

  For this same reason I will not speak the name of this mountain any more, nor will I tell about the fourth coyote in this story. Or maybe the fourth coyote is the one that is always absent. I think it is some combination of those two things: what is in us, and what is absent from us.

  I was bugling and looking down the steep slope when the coyote answered. I gave another bugle and he trotted out of the woods, looking up at my ridge with great curiosity. I was all settled in among rock slabs, crouched and comfortably hidden. I called again and with a sly look all around, the coyote—small and pale gray, almost silver—licked his lips, as if in a cartoon, and came trotting out of the trees, up the slick rock through a dusk wind (my scent was rolling straight down the mountain, right at him, but still he had to come see)—and when he got to within forty yards of me he sat down on his haunches and howled.

  I howled back, and then began to yip.

  He answered and started toward me again—breaking off at right angles at times, as if wanting to leave, but then he'd reorient himself whenever I yipped and head straight back.

  He came all the way up. He got spooked when he saw me, curled up and tiny, hidden there among the rocks—and he lifted a paw and danced away, but I made cow elk whining sounds, or human sounds of sadness, or perhaps even coyote whines—all sadness sounding the same—and though he turned to run away, he could not bring himself to leave.

  Always, whenever I purred or whined, he slunk back in, making a rough circle around me—I shut my eyes and tried to feel a taste of his magic, and I could—and he was close enough to touch, staring straight at me as if disbelieving (and admiring) of my deceit—that there was another creature in the woods so full of it.

  Here was a human curled up like an elk calf, acting crippled but possibly not, making sounds, alternately, like an elk and then a coyote.

  Which was I? Elk, man, or coyote? He had to know.

  This was his mountain.

  It was windy and cold in that last magic hour of light before humans go home and the animals begin to come out, and I believe I had his trust. I could have reached out and tapped him on the shoulder with my rifle.

  He sat looking at me with bright sharp green-yellow eyes and a half-crooked, superior smile—as if he were laughing at my crippled predicament. I sat looking back at him, making small whining sad sounds: things were passing between us at a zillion miles a second—electron stuff, New Age kookoo stuff, emotions and brain waves colliding in the five feet that separated us.

  We were understanding, and communicating, as surely and clearly as two old friends writing letters to each other ac
ross the miles, as they have done for all of their lives. The coyote was laughing at me for being so many different things at once, and I was laughing at him for being so different and brave as to come sit next to me, a man; a man with a rifle.

  It wasn't enough to just sit there with him and be equal, however; I had to go and do something dumb by trying to convert him to the language of misdirection, and abstractions. Or maybe I was just lonely.

  I wanted to see if we could communicate in my language, not his.

  "Hey, puppy," I said, and his eyes grew wide, and I felt those waves that had been passing between us fall to the ground and disappear into the soil. He skittered sideways, floating away with his tail like a banner in the wind, loping in that sideways trot back down the mountain, watching me with an emotion for which our language has no word.

  "Hey puppy," I called out again, when he was forty yards off—two seconds later?—and he began to run faster.

  I switched back to howls and yips. He sat down when he reached the treeline below and looked back at me one last time but then he turned and glided into the trees. It got dark quickly after that. I am certain that if I had not begun speaking in my own language something even stranger would have happened.

  I had hoped to see him again the next time I went up the mountain but I never did. I did see ravens diving and playing tag—they came to investigate when they spotted me, spiraling over like kamikazes—but I never saw that coyote again, though I spent several dusks sitting in the same place, curled up like an elk calf and barking and yipping and howling, calling for him to come back.

  Two

  The first coyote I ever saw in Yaak was the winter I moved into another man's ranch while that man was away. I was in the greenhouse, writing, and it was about twenty below. You could hear sounds from a long way off. You could walk on the deep frozen snow without punching through it. There were two horses in the pasture across the road. They belonged to a man in town who was keeping them on my landlord's pasture.

  My back was turned to all of what happened. I was writing when I heard a truck come ice-crackling down the road and stop.

  The truck door opened and then slammed shut, and two beats later, I heard the blast of a rifle shot. I thought someone was shooting at the greenhouse; I thought that maybe they didn't know anyone was inside, though smoke was surely curling from my chimney.

  I ran out toward the road, where a big man in a heavy coat was tromping up the hill with his rifle, striding across what I already took to be my property, though I had been there only a month.

  Between us lay a dead coyote, stretched out on the snow in his beautiful winter coat. We reached the ruffian at about the same time.

  "That coyote was chasing the horses," the man said. He looked down at the coyote, whose eyes were shut. The horses stood across the road, pressed to the fence and watching us as if we had taken away their playmate.

  It was important to the man, I think, that I understand. I was new to the valley and it was important to him that he educate me. But there was a beautiful coyote lying in the snow for no real reason.

  "H" (the man who owned the ranch where I was staying), "wants me to shoot any coyotes I see on his land. He and I have shot coyotes before."

  I did not want to judge the man but I could feel a judgment rising from the coyote as he lay on the frozen snow where an instant before he had been running hard and fast.

  "Fur's worth a lot this year," the man said, bending down and lifting the limp animal up over his shoulder the way he might lift a sleeping child.

  "He was chasing D__'s horses," the man said again, as he walked off with his prize.

  The horses watched as the man put the coyote in the back of his truck and then, carefully, his gun in the rack. He drove off, waving at me through the window as he was leaving. He looked strangely hopeful.

  I went back to my greenhouse—to H's greenhouse—and because there was an echo ringing through the woods, and through my mind, I just sat there and tried to read a book, gathering in rather than trying to create. Something felt absent from the valley. In that hard cold it would take at least a day before other things moved in to slowly fill that gaping spot.

  I don't mean to judge. If I judge, I will be judged. My only aim up in this part of the world is to observe, and to feel; to be happy, and to be sad. But not to judge.

  So I observed. And what has happened since that time is that D__ran out of money and had to move far away—to

  California—and he took a job where he cannot see the mountains, much less be in them. H sold his ranch, and I moved on.

  D_sold his horses to a man in Chicago, before going off to California. They were good horses, but old. This was six years ago, and the horses are dead now.

  It's like I'm the only one left. It's as if I narrowly escaped judgment, perhaps simply by having my back turned when the shooting began, and then by not bending down to touch the coyote as he lay in the snow (though I very much wanted to)—and by not defending him with words or argument—the language of deceit—but by merely standing there and defending him with my silence, and by observing.

  By making sure I saw everything, since he could no longer see.

  They should have let him keep chasing those horses, is what I want to say. But I will not say it: not out loud.

  I'll just keep on looking, and watching, and seeing. It's like that's what he passed on to me—lying there in cold snow with his eyes shut. And then being carried away, over the man's shoulder—head and feet bobbing, as the man walked.

  D_'s gone, H is gone, the horses are gone, but that coyote and I are still here.

  I am not always in control when I go into the woods, and I do not care. I think there is a thing in me now that I did not come into the world with, but which I will be leaving with, and it feels good.

  Three

  One spring morning I was out walking in the woods behind our cabin with my two beloved hounds, Homer and Ann. They were running ahead of me, chasing rabbits in the fruitless way that they do, having not yet figured out in the long years of chase that rabbits run in circles while hounds prefer to run head-on straight and forever, in tune with the wild thumping drive of their hearts.

  My dogs have good noses and they tend to think of most of the woods behind the house as belonging to them, in that human way of love being ownership, and they scent out anything new and investigate it. Ann—peeing Ann—even scentmarks like a boy dog, does raised-leg urinations, scratches duff, the whole thing. And where Ann pees, I pee, because I want the coyotes to respect our space. I don't want any trouble with them. My dogs are at their mercy, and therefore I am at their mercy. We'd never had any trouble.

  One spring morning I heard the dogs begin to yip the way they always did when they sighted and gave chase to a rabbit. Half-beagle and half black-and-tan, my pups have time bombs in their hot weedy Mississippi hearts, which cause them to levitate and give chase, and at such moments it's as if they're being carried away on flying carpets. Their yips this time, though, changed, and were mixed instantly with snarls and howls—the language of coyotes—and I could tell that there was a terrible fight going on.

  Thrashing, I ran through the woods, leaping fallen logs and running through cedar and fir branches, running for my life. I couldn't hear anything as I ran, but I ran toward where I'd last heard the commotion. I called out, "Homer! Ann!" as loud as I could, as if trying to break up a schoolyard fight, though I knew that back in the woods I had no reason to expect that the mere sound of my voice could change things.

  I came out on an old grown-over logging road—more of a trail, now—and turned and ran along that, still calling the dog's names. When I got to the end of that path, I almost collided with Homer and Ann as they came barreling around the corner, their little beagle legs churning, pumping as hard as they could—moving faster than I've ever seen them go, with an Oh-shit, I've-done-it-now look in their eyes. I was thrilled to see them, and crouched with arms outspread, picturing a welcome-home hug, but
they blew right past me, and at that same moment two coyotes—the largest ones I've ever seen—came loping around the corner, running as easily as horses, almost floating: a deep red matched pair as big as wolves.

  The coyotes halted when they saw me—twins—and stood there with frustration and hesitation showing on their intelligent faces. They were not twenty feet away.

  Their hearts were still driving, telling them to continue the chase (were they defending their den? Had they been chasing the same rabbit Homer and Ann had bumped?)—but I could see the gears changing in their minds; one part of their body telling them to stop while the other part said, Keep on, Go right over him, Go right through him.

  It was as if, stepping into the middle of their chase as I had, I wasn't a man: that all bets were off, and they could do as they pleased.

  They stood in the center of the path, tall and long-legged—I believe that if they had stood up on their hind legs they would have been as tall as I am—and they moved their heads from side to side, trying to look past me to see where the dogs had gone, and then they looked at me, trying to figure out how I had gotten there, and why I was standing between them and where they wanted to go.

  All this happened within a span of four, maybe five seconds—and still they lingered—and then, they seemed to understand that as I was apologizing for my dogs they should not attack them, or me for that matter, and so they turned and headed back up the mountain.

  There had been a brief passage of time when their bodies were still in control, and not their minds, when I'd been sure that they were going to jump right over me.