The Book of Yaak

by Rick Bass

  He's somewhat of an embarrassment the way he keeps hanging on (one year he showed up on the Bonners Ferry golf course). Neither the state nor the feds will list the woodland caribou as an endangered species in Montana, and I get the feeling they're all wishing he'd hurry up and die, and that the other two dozen would go ahead and kick off too, so that the problem would just go away. In several old barns throughout the northern Rockies, you can find caribou antlers and skulls mounted in the lofts, but they're old, almost as old, in some ways, as the dinosaurs.

  Another species at the edge of extinction is the bull trout, a little-known fish still found in northwestern Montana. The bull trout doesn't run to the ocean, but it's just as vulnerable to fragmentation as if it did. They are definitely top of the line carnivores, as far as fish go, and by nature, by design, they are a migratory species, like just about every other big thing in the mountains. Bull trout live in deep lakes, but then travel up into the tributaries to spawn in the fall, sometimes traveling (when dams and fishermen will allow it) as far as 160 miles. They don't die after spawning, however; they return to their lake. Sometimes they live to be as old as ten years; perhaps in the past, say some biologists, they lived even longer.

  They can get as large as twenty-five pounds. Though I've never seen one, I've sat on the banks of the North Fork of the Flathead in September and October, aspens and mountain ash ablaze with fluttering gold against a blue sky, and I've stared long and hard, watching for one of the twenty-pounders to go cruising slowly upstream, the sight of which in the shallow stretches of the river, on the way up into Canada, would be as improbable as that of a submarine....

  To keep from putting all their eggs in one basket, the bull trout have evolved so that some of them spawn every other year, while others spawn every third year, so that if there is a drought, or a fire, or some-such, a whole lake's population will not have been lost; there'll be some survivors back in camp who didn't make the journey that year.

  There is a fine-tuned, ringing sound of quiet and almost inexplicable harmony up here; but you can barely hear it now, over the sound of the sawing, bulldozing, hacking....

  Once the bull trout have made their great cruise through the forest, beneath cool cedars and across shallows (their huge humped backs tingling with fear, perhaps, at the knowledge of ospreys and eagles above—traveling at night, perhaps, under the moon, past coyotes, lynx and lions)—once they've made it up to the creek's headwaters, the cool springs and gravel where they are to dig their redd and lay their eggs, they do so with a strength and passion that I someday hope to see. They bury their eggs a foot and a half deep, excavating (with their tails and blunt heads) a redd that is roughly the size of a pickup bed.

  The eggs are fertilized; and then, beneath those gold larch trees, the red cliffside maples, and the aspen-blaze, with the days growing colder (higher oxygen content), the bull trout head back downstream, coasting, to their lake.

  The fry are born around or on January first. They don't come out of the gravel after hatching; they wait until spring (225 days after conception) for that. But such is their fury, their lust to enter the system, the harmony, that even as immature fry they are predators; they'll roam around under the gravel and feed on anything unlucky enough to get in their way.

  They remain in their river for one to three years, until they're about seven inches long, before beginning their migration down to the lake they can taste and smell and feel and hear: the lake they have never seen or been to, but which is their home, which has always been their home. These days there is an introduced species, lake trout, in those lakes, which eat the young native bull trout with a vengeance upon their arrival, but still the bull trout migrate, drawn by the music.

  What's hurting them, beyond our introduction of lake trout into the system? Roads, as ever; fragmentation. The dwindling of clean rivers. Sedimentation from road building, and from large clearcuts on the steep sides of mountains, so that the soil washes straight into the creeks and rivers, prevents the eggs from being fertilized. Even though the Yaak River is still clear, for example, there's about a quarter-inch of sediment covering the best spawning eddies. When I ask a biologist what can be done to save the giant trout, he tells me that "the answer loud and clear is habitat protection."

  There are bull trout in the Yaak, the biologist says, "less than twenty of them"—but they're there. He won't let me use his name. He tells me the name of a creek and the first image that comes to mind is the scabrous lunar-gray clear-cuts perched on, and sliding from, the steep slopes overlooking that creek. Less than twenty bull trout—maybe only ten or so each year—cut off by Libby Dam to the north, and by sedimentation downstream—moving back and forth through the autumns, as they have through the millennia—back and forth, back and forth, nature around them getting smaller and smaller in every eddy, in every deep pool.

  "I've got this theory," I tell the biologist, "that even though the populations in Yaak are down to low numbers, they're maybe a hundred times more important, genetically, than populations that have higher densities. T hat for these individuals to have survived in the face of such heavy development, they must have supergenes, survivors' genes—and should be saved at all costs. I believe their genes can save the other populations."

  I'm not a scientist any more, and I probably never was a very good one. Too dreamy. I respect scientists. But I feel like we use different languages sometimes, even when speaking about the same thing, so you can imagine my relief when the biologist says, "Exactly!" to my goofy survivor's theory. "The fish up in that creek are high-grade ore," he says. "As good as gold."

  And hatcheries are 110 way to protect that highly evolved speciation, that lovely, ringing diversity.

  "You can't reproduce the wild," he says, speaking my language. "T here is no substitute for the wild."

  The intricacy of the thing we're stumbling over, sawing to pieces, digging up and flooding, or draining; the harmony of what existed in the Rockies, before we got hold of the piano. The big things help us understand the small things. The big things are a gift to us, bequested to us from the foundation of all the small things below, the background and bedrock that lifts the big things up before us and sends them on their way through the mountains, so that an understanding of and appreciation for the wild will be visible to us even before our dull-lidded, quickly numbing gaze....

  Individuals; genes. The more numb we become, the louder nature seems to play, trying valiantly to get our attention—not to save itself, so much as to rescue us. That caribou down on the golf course in Bonners Ferry. The big things are trying to teach us intricacy, trying to show us, on the broadest possible scale, that we've messed up.

  The wolf biologist Mike Jimenez tells of a lone male wolf he followed down in Idaho, the first known wolf in that state in a long damn time. Jimenez refers to that wolf as "a superindividual," one with those survivor's genes, as good as gold.

  Hunting on his own, the wolf was bringing down adult moose, which was a thing I had not thought possible, and which I don't readily understand, when deer and elk were also available.

  It's almost as if that wolf was trying to say something, trying to show something: and perhaps speaking not just to us, but to the spirit of the woods, the spirit of the bigness that is being lost.

  The animals are not resting—the grizzly families being evacuated from GBHMU to GBHMU, and the lone wolves padding hundreds of miles at a time, from Canada to Yellowstone in a single year.... If they're not resting, why should we, who claim also to be bound up with them in the weave, take our rest? Any good work that is going to be done—any conservation biology that is to take place must happen now, this year, these next few years. We can rest only after we make a good resting spot.

  "When despair for the world grows in me," Wendell Berry writes in his poem The Peace of Wild Things,

  and I wake in the night at the least sound

  in fear of what my life and my children's lives may be,

  I go and lie down where the
wood drake

  rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.

  I come into the peace of wild things

  who do not tax their lives with forethought

  of grief. I come into the presence of still water.

  And I feel above me the day-blind stars

  waiting with their light. For a time

  I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

  The white sturgeon, a river monster weighing up to one thousand pounds, is also found up here at the edge of my valley, in the Kootenai River.

  I want to mention that sturgeon haven't reproduced in the wild in over twenty years—not since the Libby Dam went in (flooding the once-wild Ural Valley). I want to mention that all the sturgeon in the Kootenai are a population of ancient ones, with no juveniles, and that, like the one caribou, the dozen or more bull trout, and Yaak's handful of grizzlies, they aren't yet listed as endangered species. I want to tell how it is my dream to put on a scuba tank and mask and swim down the Kootenai River until I come upon one of the old giants, one of the thousand-pounders, as he or she rests on the bottom, its belly flat against the earth, feeling, perhaps, the last of those harmonics, the ones that mandate it to be big in this country, to be big or die, but not to compromise....

  How messed up is Yellowstone? One statistic says it better—or worse—than anything. Gold mines, clearcuts, irrigation projects, oil and gas leases, road building, livestock grazing, hydropower construction and that damn Imax-Zoo ring the park, preventing any sustained or substantial migration corridors into or out of the park; once more an island, a single loud discordant clang in what used to be a harmony. The biologist John Weaver lays this on us: that 67 percent of human-caused grizzly mortalities in the Greater Yellowstone ecosystem have occurred on 1 percent of the land—the private lands surrounding the park, choke-holding the park.

  I hike up a steep timbered hill to a special spot I know of in the Yaak. It's at the edge of one of those roadless areas that we have to save, that we must start with, if any of this is going to work. It's springtime, and I've just read David Quammen's disturbing essay on the mysterious worldwide demise of amphibians, and how he proposed it may not be ultraviolet or global warming hijinks at all, but something more basic: habitat fragmentation, even at the level of amphibians. And it's never really occurred to me before, what frogs and salamanders do to maintain genetic viabilities, genetic vigor. A grizzly or a wolf can always get up and go, but how far, really, can a frog go, whether by flood (over the dam's spillway, or down the sedimented creek) or across the road? It's a whole new problem to brood about.

  I am so much like the creatures in this endangered valley, and in all of the Rockies. All I want is a place to hole up and riot be seen. It is late in the day, and I am in some old-growth cedars at about five thousand feet, when I hear the sound of frogs. I have been looking for bear sign, but Quammen's essay is on my mind, and I move quietly toward the sound.

  I'm tired from hiking all day. I find the little pond from which they're calling. It's not even a pond so much as a rainwater puddle, a snowmelt catchment, about the size of someone's living room. I've been on this mountain a hundred times, but never knew it was here, ephemeral—and the frogs grow silent, even at my stealthy approach.

  How long will this little high-elevation marsh last? In what brief period of springtime must the frogs find it, lay their eggs, and then hatch? And from that point, where do they go? What kind of frogs are these? I don't even know their damn name. They're not leopard frogs, or green frogs; they're kind of funky-looking, tiny, but with big heads, as if for shoveling, burying themselves.

  All any wild thing wants is a place to settle in, a sanctuary—some guarantee of security—with the ability, the freedom, to roam if it wants to, or needs to. I take Berry's poem to heart; I curl up there on the hillside and rest, very still, waiting for the frogs to forget about me, and to start up again. I've heard frogs singing so loudly in the desert in southern Utah during breeding season—so many of them jammed into one waterhole—that the din, the roar of it, made me nauseous—but when this little chorus starts back up, it's nowhere near that thunderous. This pond's not that crowded.

  Earlier in the afternoon, farther back into the roadless area, I'd heard a grizzly flipping boulders looking for ants; it was right up at snowline, and the boulders were immense. I feel certain it was a grizzly. There was no way I could go higher to see, though; I was afraid it might be a sow with cubs. I turned and went back down lower on the mountain without having seen it—having only heard, instead, the music of those boulders tumbling down the mountain....

  I lie in the spring grass like a child, listening to the frogs and thinking about the future: about grizzly music, wolf music, elk music and frog music. I try and feel the old earth stretching beneath me; whispering, or singing.

  "I listen to a concert in which so many parts are wanting," Thoreau wrote, also in the springtime, in 1856. "Many of those animal migrations and other phenomena by which the Indians marked the season are no longer to be observed.... I take infinite pains to know all the phenomena of the spring, for instance, thinking that I have here the entire poem, and then, to my chagrin, I hear that it is but an imperfect copy that I possess and have read, that my ancestors have torn out many of the first leaves and grandest passages, and mutilated it in many places. I should not like to think that some demigod had come before me and picked out some of the best of the stars.

  "I wish to know an entire heaven and an entire earth."

  The music of predators and their prey: the kind of music we can hear most easily and clearly, though we are learning to hear the other, subtler harmonics, too, even as they grow fainter in the Rockies: the beetles and the rotting logs, the mosses and the frogs.

  I'm still curled up as blue dusk comes sliding in. I'm on the side of the mountain that faces civilization. Two miles away, below me, there is a logging road: someone's been cutting firewood—I just heard his saw shut off. I imagine it's already dark down there. I picture the woodcutter, a neighbor, sitting on a stump and resting from his day's work: mopping his brow, and also listening—to the silence, at first, and then to the sound of the night.

  After a while I hear his truck start up, and he drives away; I watch the yellow of his headlights wind far away down into the valley, to the river, as he heads home, where he will sleep, and rest, as will I.

  We will not hear anything, as we sleep, but the frogs will keep singing, the elk will keep bugling and the wolves and coyotes will keep howling, until the fire within thern goes out, and there is true silence.

  Winter Coyotes

  AT NIGHT IN WINTER I like the lonely, scary sound of coyotes. I like how it is after a day's work of sawing wood when light leaves and darkness comes, and the coyotes begin to speak.

  It's a feeling like falling. Your sweat freezes. It gets colder once the sun is down.

  All day long you've been big, sawing wood—or striding mountains—in the bright bold sunlight, and now you're falling. The trees seem taller; their reach extends almost to the stars. At such a time you may discover the true landscape, where you can project yourself only as far as your senses will carry you: a place where you apprehend the idea of size, and of what you are in the world.

  The Blood Root of Art

  LET'S DO THE NUMBERS.

  In trying to sing the praises of a place, in fighting to earn or draw respect to an endangered place, you can only say pretty things about that place and think pretty thoughts for so long. At some point, you can no longer ignore the sheer brutalities of math, nor the necessity of activism. It's always a tough choice. You have to decide whether to use numbers or images: you have to decide whether the fight requires art or advocacy—and to try to have an awareness of where the one crosses over into the other.

  I think it is like a rhythm—deciding when to choose the "soft" or supple approach of writing pretty about a place—writing out of celebration—versus writing about the despair of reality, the e
numeration of loss.

  The numbers are important, and yet they are not everything. For whatever reasons, images often strike us more powerfully, more deeply than numbers. We seem unable to hold the emotions aroused by numbers for nearly as long as those of images. We grow quickly numb to the facts and the math. Still, the numbers are always out there:

  * Logging on the public lands in the Forest Service's Region One (the northern Rockies) cost the government between $100 million and $200 million more than they received for those sales in 1993; and,

  * Siltation levels in streams are 750 times higher near logging roads than in undisturbed sites, often contributing to excessive erosion, flooding, scouring, road-slumping, and destroying water quality for sturgeon, trout and salmon, which—tough break!—have evolved to require clear, cool water....

  * Forbes notes that in the Gallatin National Forest—where recreation provides 16 jobs for every one logging job—the unemployment rate is 1.8 percent. Dr. Michael McGarrity writes, "The pristine environment, not logging, is the driving force in the current economic boom"; and,

  * The Forest Service ranks as the world's largest road-building company in the world. Almost half a million miles of logging roads exist in this country—more miles than the federal interstate system—and another quarter million miles of logging roads are planned, paid for by taxpayers, for use by international timber companies; and,