The Book of Yaak

by Rick Bass

  But if we all know this, why is it happening?

  One thing about a breach of etiquette is that it may leave you lonely at cocktail parties. Beware the zealot.

  I know I've been behaving badly—passing out little Yaak-flyers at social gatherings, weddings and christenings included, at all occasions aside from funerals—but I can't help it. Time for the West is running out as it is being continually divided, and subdivided, while we sit complacent and idle.

  An Indian tribe without its warriors, Thoreau said. The idea of wilderness needs no defense, it only needs more defenders, Ed Abbey said. All my life, my favorite animals have been those who could kill and eat me, Doug Peacock says. I see too much play in the Rockies these days, and not enough work.

  We're losing the big animals first. In the Yaak, for instance, the animals that we most think of as defining the American wilderness, and the Rockies—the wolf, the grizzly, and other large animals ("megafauna")—are down to single- or double-digit populations.

  The new information we're gathering about otters, white-footed mice and black-backed woodpeckers is vital, a sign of our maturation as students of the woods—but like some old-fashioned dinosaur who refuses to go into the age of computers, I still want to state the obvious, the oldest, most shopworn facts, for the zillionth time: that the American West—- the Rockies—is still the only place in the Lower Forty-eight where we have wolves and grizzlies living together. Some of us have seen the statistics—that grizzlies are down to less than one percent of their former range, that wolves did not den outside of a natural park in the western United States for about sixty years.

  The creatures that require less personal space than wolves and grizzlies can sometimes better adapt and move through, across or around our increasing fragmentation. But wolves, unlike salamanders and woodpeckers, will be shot by our own species whenever we see them. And certainly the grizzlies need the space that's being lost. In a way like no other creature in our country, grizzlies simply will not barter with humans. Conservation and ecosystem biologists refer to them as an "umbrella species"—meaning that, if grizzlies are present, everything else in that system will be present.

  When it is raining, I want an umbrella, and believe me, it is pouring, and there aren't enough to go around. The spirit of the Rockies and its wildness is becoming tattered; it's falling apart.

  Sorry if you were expecting something chipper.

  The Forest Service, operating solely out of our billfolds, wallets and purses, has so far built for the corporate timber industry almost 500,000 miles of roads on our public lands. The four largest national parks in the Rockies—Yellowstone, Rocky Mountain National Park, Glacier-Waterton, and Banff, up in Canada—are, without corridors of wilderness to connect them to one another, currently of no real or lasting importance to the health of the Rockies; they are like the large showy muscles of a bodybuilder who has ceased to work out. They're not going to last; the cardiovascular system's been ignored. The wild fresh blood can't get from one big muscle to the next. We must restore the body, for the Rockies to survive: for the Rockies to remain the Rockies, rather than a theme park. Pleistocene Park.

  Maybe the spirits of things, such as wolves and grizzlies, in the Rockies, are meant to move great distances, or maybe they are not, but one and a half billion years ago, the earth that was residing not too far from my valley got up and left: was folded and pressed and thrust about seventy miles eastward, up over the Continental Divide and into what would much later become the Blackfeet Indians' sacred grounds, the Badger-Two Medicine region of northern Montana (which is also unprotected). The pattern, the rhythm, of movement—of big things traveling great distances—was set in motion by the earth itself.

  And it only got stronger. With the new mountains in place, the frigid hearts of glaciers began to form up high, sliding up and down the mountains, cutting and shaping them for the species that existed then, and for the ones that would come later.

  With sharp teeth the glaciers sculpted hideaway cirques, valleys, fast rivers, and then eased themselves groaning onto the plains, shedding moraine and clacking boulders and cobbles, stopping at the edge of what is now called the Front Range of the Rockies—where the mountains meet the plains.

  There was a second glacier out on the plains, but there was also a narrow band of open ground between the two glaciers, a corridor running north and south along the Front Range. This dry land, free of ice, was a corridor for dinosaurs, and later for humans, bears, bison, mammoths, camels and elephants—big mammals, giant mammals, and their spirits, always moving across this portion of our earth.

  Paleontologist Jack Horner has discovered fossils along the Front Range—zillions of fossils of a previously unknown dinosaur he calls a myosaur. Based on population densities (a volcanic eruption along the mountains pelted them with an acid rain of almost 700 degrees Fahrenheit), Horner believes the myosaurs traveled in great herds like our bison did. Once there were hundreds of thousands of individuals, even millions, in those herds. But now, though the spirit of this imperative lingers, our herds—elk and antelope—are smaller. They have few predators to concentrate them into the giant herds, and they have less country in which to travel. They are being forced to violate the big echo, the mandate, of the mountains: be big and live big, dramatic lives....

  Horner believes that Tyrannosaurus Rex followed these vast myosaur herds not as the arch-predator of all time, but as a scavenger. The myosaurs prospered when angiosperms—deciduous plants—came on the scene, which enabled the myosaurs to strip leaves, Horner proposes, and migrate north to south and back again, with Tyrannosaurus Rex, the terrible lizard king, weighing in at sixteen thousand pounds, plodding along behind them, feeding on the bodies of the drowned myosaurs at river crossings, the sick and the diseased, much as grizzlies move down low in spring to feed on green-up grasses and the carcasses of winter-killed deer, elk and moose....

  We need to sew the Rockies back together. Various environmental organizations are undertaking a three-pronged program to try and help. The plan is to help protect (and, where possible, enlarge) the small handful of existing large cores of wilderness in the West. The plan is to work for the protection and recovery of the rare and endangered species still living in the Rockies. And the plan is to help reform the manner in which the commodity interests (fueled by our consumption) operate on public lands. We are all responsible, of course. Its all woven together. It's not so much a system of good guys and bad guys as it is a system of those who love the land failing to protect it.

  Take the Red Desert of northwestern Wyoming. Most of the dangers of fragmentation involve one system being rendered useless within itself. But there used to be an elk herd that spent its winters in the Red Desert, and its summers in the Wind Rivers, a long way off. Now the Red Desert elk herd is cut off from the Wind Rivers due to logging and road building, and lives year-round in the desert, in total genetic isolation.

  Sure, it's going to take a little work to sew these places back together. But are we going to do it, or are we going to just rollerblade off into the sunset?

  I'm all for the small things. They stir my intellect with their intricate, almost incomprehensible beauties and complexities. But I am for the big things, too, the sight of which bypasses the intellect and shoots wild-juice and adrenaline straight into our hearts. The first time I saw a grizzly up here I was on a steep hill picking berries, when it stood and revealed itself to me. Despite having read for years not to run, I whirled and took two or three big steps down the mountain before my mind could kick in and say Stop it.

  I love that.

  "Save the grizzly! Save the sea otter! Save the whooping crane!" writes Doug Chadwick, who, having finished a beautiful and exhaustive book on the fate of the elephants, began to study beetles. "But what about the small, the slithery, and the leafy?" he asks. This, more than any jumble of technical jargon, any assemblage of word-proof and science-speak, describes the essence of what is called conservation biology, an ancient co
ncept that American land managers (having ignored it for too long) are only now beginning to notice. ("Take care of the land organism as a whole," Aldo Leopold said to us a half century ago. "Nature will bear the closest inspection," Thoreau said almost one hundred and fifty years ago, "as if anticipating our coming trend to notice the big things but not the small—the other part of the whole. She invites us to lay our eye level with the smallest leaf, and take an insect view of its plan. She has no interstices; every part is full of life!")

  Still, there is understandable reason why, in our panic, we've been practicing single-species conservation—what Chadwick calls "emergency-ward" biology. The big guys are the first to go. And if they go, it means of course that everything else will follow them. The essence and practice of conservation biology, beyond the recognition that all of nature is a weave, with all relationships interconnected, is that populations must not become fragmented, cut off from one another. If they do—if they are made into "islands"—then those populations will surely follow the course of any isolated population: they'll go extinct, swarmed under by the weeds of the world, unless there is recruitment of fresh genes. And the way that is done is through individuals. And the paths those individuals take are called "corridors."

  In many respects the theory's so simple it hardly needs talking about. Areas of richest biological diversity are most important to conservation, because they're likely to have the highest concentration and complexity of relationships.

  You protect the richest ecosystems first, and you especially protect those that are strategically located between other ecosystems, to allow genetic transfer between the systems.

  Like some wild species hiding out in the dense, wet timber, right up on the border, I seem unable to leave, in my frantic heart, this one relatively small but cornerstone valley: the most biologically diverse ecosystem in the Rockies. If Yaak falls, then British Columbia's reservoir of wildness no longer has a straight shot down into the Salmon/Bitteroot County (from where it would have a straight shot into Yellowstone, to the southeast, or into Oregon's Blue Mountains, to the southwest).

  Northwest Montana, and Yaak, similarly connects the northern Continental Divide ecosystem—Glacier, Bob Marshall, Badger-Two Medicine, Swan Valley—to the Selkirks of northern Idaho, and to the North Cascades, which connect to the Central Cascades and the Pacific Coast Mountains.

  If Yaak is not saved, if we allow it to fall, we might as well cut open the body of the Rockies and reach in and wrench out the bloody red heart and twist it free.

  Because the Yaak so strategically links north to south and west to east, it has the combined, teeming diversity of all the ecosystems of the West. Not just bears, but nearly every other species imaginable: wolverines, woodland caribou, orchids, owls, sculpin.

  Am I asking you to flock to this place to come see it? I am not: not until there is some system of preservation, some plan, in place. It frightens the hell out of me to be focusing on the Yaak—drawing attention to it. But it is so very much at the edge—so heavily fragmented, by the twelve hundred miles of roads, and the giant clearcuts—that if I do not draw attention to it, it will surely be lost. The lushness, the biodiversity, is still hanging on here. Even as I write these words, in the early fall, the chitter of a kingfisher is mixing with the caws of ravens. Earlier this morning, I heard coyotes; last night, I heard elk. There is still a symphony, still a harmony: barely.

  A male grizzly may cover one thousand square miles in his life. (Leopold called this, with eloquent casualness, "cruising range.") Michael Soulé, known widely as the father of conservation biology, explains that "Roughly speaking, large animals are rarer—many orders of magnitude rarer—than small animals. Among mammals, there is a fairly consistent relationship.... The bigger the animal, the less its [population] density or the larger the home range.... Hence body size is a useful surrogate for abundance ... and can be used in a preliminary ranking of corridor candidate species."

  Once again, in the West, conservation biology always seems to circle back to the grizzlies. Never mind that once the great bear gathered in great numbers on California beaches to feast on the carcasses of washed-ashore whales, or that it roamed the deserts of Texas and Mexico, the prairies of Kansas and the forests of Minnesota. All we are talking about for right now is trying to hold on to what we've got. And if grizzlies don't have cores of pristine wildness— they will not tolerate man —and if they cannot move from core to core—then they're gone.

  Soulé calls this phase "relaxation"—"the gradual loss of species from a habitat island," and adds, ominously, "Area-sensitive species, particularly the largest ones, are often the first to go." The big guys, he tells us, are keystone and indicator species, "strongly interacting with many other members of the community.... It may even make good sense to maintain such large animals in a system when expensive management interventions will be necessary to sustain them—for the disappearance of large animals often leads to the decline and extirpation of many smaller animals."

  All of this is telling us what the heart already knows. The next words beyond "conservation biology," if that practice is not heeded, are the dreaded "restoration ecology"—a practice that will be as hard on taxpayers and wildlands as open-heart triple-bypass surgery is on a heart attack victim.

  How much simpler, and cost-effective, to practice preventative medicine. Already, in the beleaguered Kootenai National Forest in Montana, costs are up due to the closing of some roads that should never have been built. We're paying to drill holes in the old roadbeds and to plant alders in order to speed recovery. The current Forest Service plan has divided the forest into numbered compartments, and when habitat-effectiveness rating for grizzlies falls below 70 percent (a mark I remember from school as being a D-minus), the Forest Service blithely assumes that the grizzlies will pack up and move into a nearby "displacement compartment"—some other place with a 70 percent rating—and they, the Forest Service, rotate these compartments every three years! It's self-deception at best, raw greed at worst. These compartments are sometimes called Grizzly Rear Habitat Management Units—GBHMU's—and remind me eerily of our government's similar shuttling of the Indians from reservation to reservation.

  Grizzlies, like people, live in cultures, handing down behavioral information about their home—where to eat, when to travel, where to hibernate, where to hide—from generation to generation. Cubs typically stay with their mother for three years, so the Forest Service is essentially asking pregnant grizzlies to move, and even worse, is asking subadult bears, out on their own for the first time, to be able to seek out and adapt to these scattered-about, 70 percent-effective displacement compartments.

  So many of the corridors between wild cores are not yet protected; they exist tenuously. One summer day I find myself sitting in a field up in the Yaak, barefooted with two local conservationists, Chip Clark and Jesse Sedler, and a third man, Evan Frost of the Greater Ecosystems Alliance, out of Bellingham, Washington. Evan has come here because he recognizes the vital location of Yaak—that it is the only logical corridor between the Rockies and the Northwest; and that it is 011 the ropes, that it won't last another ten years if we don't do something now.

  We're talking about how absolutely critical it is to have corridors; we're discussing creeks in Yaak, elk wintering flats, grizzly denning areas, wolf runways....

  Like the trappers and mountain men who first came to this country almost two hundred years ago, we're describing routes and passes—special places that are a long journey away through wild, rugged country. Evan's listing the valleys to cross, the rivers to get from here to the Pacific Northwest. It's a short list, and you're there: fresh, new genes. Meanwhile, Jesse and I are diagramming how a wandering wolf could come out of Canada, down through Yaak, and head all the way to Mexico. If.

  We're sitting there in the late-summer sun, surrounded by cool dark trees. Clearcuts have scarred our valley, made it unattractive to humans, but there are still some cores left.

  Evan and Ch
ip and Jesse are spreading out mylar sheets to overlay on maps of the Yaak, computer generated maps that show remaining stands of old growth— stability —and grizzly radio-collar telemetry locations, and polygon mapping of elk herd movements. All this has been put together by Jesse in his spare time on a borrowed computer, data gotten from cruising the valley on his old motorcycle with a busted-out headlight, like Easy Rider, dodging deer in the dusk; and data gotten from Chip, too, during his and Jesse's stand examinations for the Forest Service.

  People are going to shoot the big things, for as long as they're around, because, quite simply, people are afraid of big things. They assume that the big things are as full of the same kinds of hate and anger that our own species is, and so wherever there are roads into the wilderness, people all too often shoot and kill these big things when they see them.

  The wolf that was killed in Yellowstone in 1994—the first known wolf to make it back down to the park on its own in over sixty years—was DNA-tested and discovered to have come directly from Montana's Ninemile Valley—or, if not, then a direct relative of that pack's ancestry, which started out from Canada and Montana's Glacier/Pleasant Valley country, up in this dark wooded part of the state.

  All through the Rockies, there is a clanging discordance resulting from our clumsy activities. It's a disruption of harmony and grace; it's a sound such as you might hear were you to drop a frozen turkey from an airplane onto a piano, disrupting the composer's performance. I can barely even talk about the woodland caribou. They used to be all through the upper part of this valley, but now we have only one lonely bull that wanders over every few years during breeding season, sniffing the ancient scent of the soil, old migration corridors, where once so many of his kind lived. (There are about twenty-five of them left over in the Idaho panhandle, about thirty miles away....)