Pecked to death by ducks

by Cahill, Tim

  seem an imposition. Primitive necessity, it seems, can snap the thread of linear thinking. It can send us skittering from deerflies directly into the cosmos.

  Or so I thought, lying on my back in the high-country wild-flowers. Directly above, the sky was a thin, shimmering blue, that bright, soaring blue you see high in the mountains, a blue that seems to rise forever. Staring into it, I had the sense of space beyond and a feeling that, if I really worked at it, squinted a little, I could see them up there, all those exploding stars and swirling nebulas dancing their mad galactic polka.

  I was visualizing the shape of the galaxy—I have a lawn sprinkler that throws out water in the same pinwheel pattern—but I had just returned from flying over and then into a full-blown hurricane with the air-force hurricane hunters, and I had a feeling. Photographs of that storm, taken from the GOES satellites, showed a mass of clouds arranged in the precise same pinwheel shape you see in high-resolution telescopic photos of spiral galaxies. There seemed to be some cosmic significance here beyond the mere conservation of angular momentum. From certain distances a galaxy could be mistaken for a hurricane.

  No one who has to deal with deadlines is allowed any such mildly cosmic insights. When camping, however, I tend to go right from the turkey tetrazzini to Alpha Centuri. I was thinking about our galaxy—a flattened pinwheel system of stars, gas, and dust—with Earth positioned about two thirds of the way out on a spiral arm. The evening promised to be clear, and I would be able to stare into the galactic center, the Milky Way, spread out across the sky. There the great mass of stars are concentrated, and gravity sends them spinning in various figures about one another. If there are planets, they may spin around one sun for a time until the gravity of another takes them on a quick do-si-do.

  And if there is intelligent extraterrestrial life, surely it evolved in that galactic center rather than out here in the boondocks of a spiral arm. Life-forms waving at one another as their planets go square dancing around the spinning stars, a federation perhaps, feeding on technical cooperation: Intelligent gas clouds swooping down with visiting comets to see how we're doing here in the

  PECKED TO DEATH BY DUCKS A $6

  outback, thinking we're just as cute and cunning as can be with our hydrogen bombs, waiting for us to finally come to it, the insight that unites life, the Universal Principle that, I imagined, could be deduced in the similarity of shape between galaxies and hurricanes.

  The note in my journal about this little flight of science-fiction fancy is a drawing of a pinwheel and the words "galaxy" and "hurricane" followed by several emphatic exclamation points (!!!!!!!!!). Which, apparently, indicated that this concept, whatever it was, when properly elucidated, would change the face of physical and astronomical science as we know it. Without putting too fine a point on it, I have to report that the face of physical and astronomical science remains unchanged. On the other hand, three days later, back home, I started the book, working from my finished outline.

  The writing went well, better than it had in months, and it occurred to me that my trip to the Beartooths had helped. Helped a lot. Some folks sleep on a problem, but you can camp on one as well. Camping is for the mind what a high-speed run on the highway is for a car. It tends to blow out all the sludge that accumulates in the type of urban driving most of us are forced to do in order to earn a living.

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  But here it was, and I was holding it in my hands at four in the morning with a cool Montana wind beating against the windows and one dim lamp burning against the night. I emptied the cylinder, cocked the hammer, and aimed at the light. "This is stupid," I said aloud. "Useless." I locked the gun away and walked into the living room. My pack and boots were laid out on the floor, where I'd put them the night before.

  What I needed was a few more hours of sleep, but even the TV at 4:00 a.m. didn't have its usual somnambulant effect. There was a man selling financial security through real estate, another selling salvation through Jesus, and a cartoon about a boy with large, perfectly round eyes and no pupils who could fly. I flicked off the set and sat on the couch in the darkness for two hours, fully dressed.

  Tom Murphy rang the bell promptly at six, as I knew he would. We got into his car and drove south, through Paradise Valley, toward Yellowstone Park, fifty miles away.

  "I thought about bringing my pistol," I said.

  "What have you got?"

  "A .38."

  "Not much use."

  "I know."

  The sun was rising over the Absaroka Mountains, rising behind some high, thin clouds so that the light that spilled into the valley was shadowed and broken. It was a moving watercolor of a morning: Waves of subtle pastels were flowing gently across golden August pastures.

  "Nice sunrise," I said.

  "It's pretty," Tom allowed.

  "Should we tell someone where we're going? I mean exactly. In case he leaves us bleeding."

  "Bonnie knows," Tom said. Bonnie is Tom's wife, and she's used to this sort of thing. We drove in silence. The light reached the river, and for a moment the living expanse of water was a rippling mirror of shimmering pink and gold.

  "For bleeding," Tom said, "you know about pressure points?"

  "I don't know where they are."

  "Well, the best thing is direct pressure. If that doesn't stop it, press on the pressure points."

  He showed me where they were as he drove: under the arm, up by the armpit. "You can feel that real strong pulse there. Press it against the bone." For the legs the pressure point was up front near the groin, and you pressed it against the pelvic bone. "Tourniquets are out completely," he said. "People lose limbs they don't have to lose with tourniquets. And, of course for head wounds, direct pressure is the only thing. You wouldn't want to use the jugular as a pressure point, cut off the flow of blood to the brain."

  "No," I said, "you wouldn't want to do that. Or worse, use a tourniquet." We laughed—a tourniquet around the neck, wahoo, what a knee-slapper—but the laughter sounded brittle and a little forced in the car.

  "You pretty sure he'll be there?" I asked.

  "He'll be there all right," Tom said. "He had something buried, a bison carcass, I think. The hole was deep. I couldn't see into it from where I was, but he was feeding on it all day."

  "What's the land like where he is?"

  "It's a prairie situation," Tom said. "Rolling hills and sage."

  "No trees to climb in case he, uh ..." I didn't know what he might do. Nobody knows what a grizzly bear might do. They are entirely unpredictable. One grizzly might simply ignore a man on foot, while another one could feel obligated to rip him to shreds. A popular theory holds that because grizzlies evolved on the plains, where there is no place to hide, their flight-or-fight mechanism is heavily weighted toward fight.

  The bear possesses two football-sized slabs of muscle on either side of its head and these power jaws that can, according to Tom McNamee in The Grizzly Bear, "crush a Hereford's head like an eggshell." Additionally, "the large shoulder hump—the grizzly's most distinctive feature and the one which usually distinguishes his appearance from that of the black bear—is ... an enormous wad of muscle, the engine that powers the mighty digging and death-dealing machinery of the front legs." And they're fast, grizzlies. A National Park Service employee once clocked a run-

  ning subadult Alaskan grizzly at thirty-six miles an hour. I didn't like the idea of standing behind a two-foot-high tangle of sage in the middle of the prairie a couple of hundred yards from five hundred pounds or more of thirty-six-mile-per-hour grizzly. There would be no place to run, no place to hide.

  "There're some trees," Tom said, "but they're about a quarter of a mile away."

  "We have binoculars," I said. "We could watch him from the trees. It'd be safer." Grizzlies have long, slim claws that will not hold the weight of a full-grown bear. They can't climb, the big ones anyway.

  "I don't think we want to be in those trees," Tom said. "First, they'r
e directly upwind. The bear is sure to scent us there. Second, this is a big bear, a mature male with a little bit of gray on him. . . ."

  "So?"

  "Well, my guess is that he's the boss bear in that area."

  "Yeah?"

  "You think some other bears haven't winded that carcass?" Grizzlies have been known to scent a carcass—even a newly dead animal, its flesh not yet putrescent—from several miles away. The animal's sense of smell is more acute than that of a bloodhound. More acute by an order of magnitude.

  "So," Tom reasoned, "maybe this bear isn't going to let the other ones in until he's done. And if there are other grizzlies around, where do you suppose they'll be? You think they'll be out in the open? Or hiding in the trees?"

  "Point," I said.

  Tom had almost walked into the bear the day before. He is a photographer and guides people on photographic safaris in and around Yellowstone Park. Some of his Wilderness Photography Expedition clients had written in with their requirements: They wanted a short walk, no more than two miles, on flat land, and they wanted to see lots of big, hairy mammals. Tom knew of several places that would fit the bill, but he wanted to scout them out first, be sure the animals were there. He had gotten a little carried away on his walk and was five miles in when he topped a

  rise and found himself 175 yards from the bear. He dropped to his belly and didn't move for three hours until the grizzly took a nap.

  That evening Tom stopped at my house and asked if I wanted to join him the next day. He was going back armed with his longest lenses. He swore that he was not about to take any chances to get good shots.

  Last year, in Glacier Park, a grizzly killed a photographer who was said to love the bears, to know their habits. Tom had seen the shots.

  "It was a sow, with three cubs," he told me. "I think the guy might have been as close as a hundred yards. And she definitely saw him. You could see she saw him. I think he followed her. This should be a safer situation. It's not a sow with cubs to protect. It's not a young male liable to strike out at anything. This is a big, mature male with plenty to eat. If we're quiet, if we're careful, he'll never even see us. I'm sure he didn't see me yesterday."

  We parked by the side of the road and began walking toward the grizzly. The valley floor was a rolling, treeless plain, punctuated by stands of sage. At one point, three miles in—two miles from the bear—we saw several ravens perched on a ridge ahead of us. Tom thought they might be attracted to some carrion below but were afraid to approach it. He thought the birds on the ridge might mean there was a bear below, feeding on something. We belly-crawled to the top and peeked over. We saw a few bison, grazing peacefully, but there, not too far away, was some grizzly dung.

  Tom broke the scat apart with his boot. It was soft and very black. "He's been eating meat," Tom said.

  "You can tell because it's so dark?"

  "Yeah," Tom said. "And here's another clue." He bent over and picked a porcupine quill from the dung.

  "This bear"—I couldn't believe it—"this bear ate a porcupine, I mean he literally ate a porcupine? And he passed the quills?"

  "Must be a mean motor scooter," Tom said.

  He handed me the quill, and I stood there with the white nee-

  die in my hand, and it scared me just about as badly as anything I'd ever heard or read about grizzly bears, ever. I couldn't imagine any animal—even a grizzly bear—eating a porcupine, quills and all. We walked down a hill and across a marsh that was full of meandering streams and land that moved like stiffened gelatin under the boot. There was a ridge ahead of us, and the bear, if he was there, was on the other side. The wind was brisk, and it came out of the southwest. We crawled to the top of the ridge—on the northeast, downwind side.

  The bear was in a bowl-shaped depression about 250 yards away from us. He was standing on a mound of dirt where he had buried something. The freshly dug mound was perhaps two feet high and ten feet long. I made a mental note to forever avoid mounds of dirt in bear country. The grizzly was black, and he glistened in the sun. In proportion to his massive body, his claws were almost delicate, each as big around and about as long as my little finger. They were bone white: the mark of an older bear. His right ear looked a little ragged, as if it had been bitten and torn in a fight.

  There were trees to the west, as Tom had said, but they were a quarter of a mile away and almost directly upwind. Where we were, there was only sage, and no one plant was over two feet high.

  Tom and I heard, very faintly, the sound of a cracking branch from the stand of trees. There was a dark shape, moving slowly deep in the woods. With the binoculars I could see that it was a bison. The bear stiffened and stared into the trees, like a dog on point.

  It is said that a grizzly's hearing is far more sensitive than a man's, and as proof, scientists point out that a grizzly will begin blindly digging in one spot and come out with a mouse or vole he's located by sound alone.

  The grizzly stood there for some time, visibly sniffing the wind. A raven flew over the bear, and he looked up in what appeared to be annoyance as the bird's shadow passed over him. The movement brought him around so that he seemed to be staring directly at us. Some people believe grizzlies don't see well, and in fact,

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  they may not see as well as humans, but experiments with brown bears proved that they could recognize their keepers at 360 feet. We were crouched down at 750 feet. McNamee, in The Grizzly Bear, warns that "it should not be assumed that a squinting, blinking, head bobbing grizzly bear is having trouble picking you out of some kind of blur." With the binoculars on him, however, I was absolutely certain that he did not see us. I could see his eyes, and I knew he didn't see us.

  The bear began digging in the mound of dirt he was standing on. In less than two minutes he had uncovered the front half of a cow bison carcass. We could hear him snuffling and sneezing in a cloud of dry dust. He reached into the hole and lifted up the head and the front quarters of the bison with a movement that seemed to cost him almost no effort at all. The carcass probably weighed somewhere close to a thousand pounds.

  He could, I saw, use his claws—the same front claws he'd used to dig—very dexterously, almost like fingers. There was a disconcerting sound of breaking bones as the bear gnawed away on the bison's shoulder area. He was standing sideways to us, and I could see that his belly was distended. There was a lot of meat on the bison, and the bear had probably been feeding on it for several days.

  In point of fact, this grizzly didn't seem very hungry at all. He uncovered a bit more of the carcass, flipped it halfway over, and examined the new arrangement. I had an image of a rich guy counting his money: The bear seemed to have a kind of Scrooge McDuck attitude toward the carcass. "Mine, ha-ha-ha, all mine." He scented something in the woods and turned toward the new odor, then dismissed it. Probably the bison in the woods. A second later the bear was back chortling over the carcass.

  After an hour or so he began digging a second hole adjacent to the first. He used the dirt to cover the carcass. Then he lay down in the second hole and took a nap in the sun. He was on his back, and you could just see the tip of his nose sticking out of the ground. It looked silly, and I wanted to laugh, and I knew I shouldn't laugh, so a series of muffled giggles came snorting up through my nose. I felt like a kid in church. The fear that I'd been

  living with for twenty hours had stretched itself to the breaking point and finally snapped. The bear couldn't see us, and now he was taking a nap. With his big-bear nose sticking up out of the ground.

  Tom needed to move in closer now that the bear was asleep. I chose to stay where I was. Murphy would retreat back over the ridge and come back over the top closer to the bear. He didn't want to crawl down into the bowl because the breeze could swirl around down there, and the bear might wind him. Tom began packing up his gear.

  Tired of staring at the bear's nose through my binoculars, I moved behind a small wall of sage and lay on my back, feeling just a tad b
earlike. The wind was driving wisps of high cirrus clouds across the sky, and I thought, Storm tomorrow. A dim drowsiness began a slow descent. Couldn't really focus on the sky anymore. Only forty-five minutes of sleep last night. Was I really falling asleep? Now? Two hundred fifty yards from a grizzly bear. In the wild. What was wrong with me?

  Tom whispered, "I'm going now."

  I heard myself mumble, "Bear's got the right idea." And I fell asleep. Went out like a light.

  When I woke, Tom was within one hundred yards of the grizzly. A few minutes later the grizzly woke up—there was a full half hour of stretching and yawning involved in that process— and he uncovered the bison again. We watched him feed for four more hours. Then he took another nap, and it was safe to leave.

  And when we got back to town, the first thing Tom told people is that I took one look at the grizzly and fell asleep. Which is true . . . essentially . . . but, you know, I mean, it's not in context, because, uh . . .

  Well, hell, I can't explain it. I'm just going to have to live with it. I'm the guy who spent twenty sleepless hours being so terrified of a grizzly bear that when I finally saw him, I fell asleep.

  "Falconry," I might have written a month ago, "is that extinct medieval sport wherein guys in metal suits throw birds to fish."

  I admit to a large measure of ignorance regarding birds in general and falconry in particular. Tragically, I am afflicted with the agony of ornithological dyslexia. Ignorance, however, if it is sincere and pure of heart, sometimes functions as a knowledge vacuum. Which, I suspect, is the most obtuse and metaphysical explanation of how I ended up attending the 1988 North American Falconers Association Field Meet in Amarillo.

  Not two hours after I arrived in Texas, I found myself creeping through a dusty field, sneaking up on a small pond in order to ambush a handful of migrating ducks. The sun had just touched the western horizon, and a full hunter's moon was rising in the east. The colors of the setting sun—pastel oranges and reds— shimmered on the surface of the water. It was a clear, windless day, and the mirrored image of the moon glittered on the shining water as well, so that it seemed as if all of heaven and earth was encompassed in this farmer's stock pond.