Pecked to death by ducks

by Cahill, Tim

  The few hundred bison, orphans of the Indian wars, were sheltered on private ranches. In 1905 the bison's numbers had grown to eight hundred, with seven hundred on private ranches. There was a growing sense of something lost: something wild and valuable and innately American. In the next few years the federal government established several public herds. Today there are one hundred thousand bison in America, and ten public herds.

  It's a horrifying and inspiring history, an innately American story. Strolling through the Mary Mountain herd, however, I found myself contemplating gored French tourists. Park regulations prohibit approaching within twenty-five yards of any bison. Twenty-five yards seems entirely too close to me. There is a bison cow on the Wichita Mountains National Wildlife Refuge in Oklahoma that has charged humans from three hundred yards. Her name is Belligerent.

  The Mary Mountain bison were sensitive to collision courses, so Tom and I walked in meandering zigzags through the sage on the flat valley floor. Several of the cows had new calves with them. The calves retained their golden color and were not yet resigned to the fact of their bisonhood. They frolicked and ran— "I'm going to be a gazelle!"—and acted not at all the stolid beasts they would become.

  This was something of a problem, because the calves were curious. They began following us. Cows followed the calves. And, because it was the season of rut, bulls followed the cows. They sniffed at the back portion of their various intendeds, rolled their upper lips, and shook the great strings of drool that hung from their mouths. The bulls were so deeply in love that they were literally groaning. It was a short "uhhhhh" sound that lasted for a second or two and sounded like rumbling of a Mack truck. The constant groaning played like the sound track of the movie Night

  PECKED TO DEATH BY DUCKS ▲ 78

  of the Living Dead, specifically the scene where the cannibal zombies are feeding. It occurred to me that males in love are seldom pretty.

  The groaning bulls were inclined to fight another bull that drew too close to his cow. A man on foot could easily be trampled in the melee. Occasionally, Tom and I were forced to split up and separate the cows with the most ardent suitors. We walked for several miles through the herd, each of us doing a 360 every few minutes.

  We watched their eyes. And their tails. When a bison lifts its tail, it means either charge or discharge. Or both. An agitated animal often defecates. Then charges. The bulls, however, were intent on the cows and took no notice of us at all.

  "You know," I said to Tom, "you could actually roller-skate out here."

  "It's going to be dark pretty soon," he pointed out.

  "Just clump through the high grass . . ."

  "We've got another mile. . . ."

  "You could actually do it," I said again.

  Alternately, you could throw rocks at the bison, or try to feed them, or run over and kick a dozing bull. You could do that. (You could also spend two months dying.) It might cost you your life, but you could do it.

  We had another fifteen minutes of walking and a couple of hundred bison to go. I spun around to see what was behind me: an awkward sunset pirouette in a buffalo herd.

  I was thinking, Moose are not very smart. This is the wisdom of popular culture. In Raymond Chandler's Farewell, My Lovely, for instance, Detective Marlowe is hired by a huge ex-con named Moose Malloy. Well, Moose turns out to be a mush-head, a real pea-brain. In comic strips—"Archie" and "Funky Winkerbean" come to mind—gentlemen nicknamed Moose wear team jackets, are bigger than everybody else, and are fond of the witty exclamation "Duh!"

  The two bull moose I was watching through the trees occasionally said, "Humph." The larger of the two might have weighed fifteen hundred pounds, the smaller perhaps two hundred pounds less. They were standing belly-deep in a marshy pool at the edge of Yellowstone Lake, in the far southeastern quadrant of Yellowstone Park, and they were feeding on aquatic plants. I was standing stock-still in a grove of trees—spruce and lodgepole pines— surreptitiously watching the big fellows dine and edging closer for a better view. The larger bull stared at me for a time, then plunged his head into the pond so that only the top half of his antlers was visible. The other was feeding as well, and while the two were blindly intent on their underwater meal, I moved to another tree five feet closer to the pond.

  PECKED TO DEATH BY DUCKS a 8o

  It was just twilight, the end of a long summer day, and the pond was a shimmering luminescence, a mirror to the fading pastels of the sky. The smaller of the two bulls raised his great, goofy head, and there was the sound of falling water. Streams of it, pinkish silver in the dying light, fell from the animal's immense, palmate antlers.

  There was a great inhalation of air: "humph." Then the larger bull came up for air, and the sound was like that of a marlin breaking water in a calm sea. "Humph," the animal said. A fleshy dewlap, the bell, hung from his neck. A string of mossy-green subaquatic foliage dangled limply from his mouth. Color bled across the sky in long, fingerlike streaks, and there was a momentary quickening of the light on the surface of the pond.

  The moose stared directly at me, without a great deal of interest. I stood in the shadows, still as death, attempting to look like a stubby lodgepole pine. This was dull entertainment for the feeding moose: I felt like the outdoor equivalent of some inane dinner-hour television offering. The thought festered in my mind for a bit, and I didn't know why. Suddenly, unbidden, I heard in my mind's ear the voice of Lome Greene narrating a nature documentary I had recently seen on cable TV, the kind of thing you watch while munching on a bad burrito. The show was a fine one, all about bears scooping salmon out of various streams. Mr. Greene, by way of capping things off, said—I swear it—"People don't give bears enough credit for fishing." He sounded peeved about this.

  That sentence brightened my life, and for a week I bored nearly everyone I met with my effusive accolades for the fishing ability of bears. "They catch more fish than anybody, and don't you forget it," I'd tell puzzled people over a beer at the Owl Casino and Lounge. "Bears are damned fine fishermen, and people just don't give them enough credit for it."

  I wondered what Lome Greene might have to say about the feeding bulls before me. No doubt the sight would make him indignant. "Moose can eat tons of food with their heads totally under water, and not one person in ten thousand gives a rat's ass."

  There was a slight crackling of branches behind me and to the right. Both bulls turned to the sound. Long ears stood erect on their skulls and swiveled toward this new entertainment. My camping partners, Tom Murphy, a professional photographer, and Lee Hutt, a talented amateur one, were moving down a sloping trail two hundred yards away. They had set up their cameras high above, on a fragrant, sage-covered hillside overlooking the glittering marsh, anticipating that the full moon would rise over the distant mountains of the Two Ocean Plateau, where the imaginary line of the Continental Divide meanders through the high country before snaking down into Wyoming's Teton National Forest. My companions hoped the moon would rise with the colors of the setting sun still on the marsh.

  I had dithered around with Tom and Lee for a bit, decided that the hillside shot was beyond my technical capacity, and had gone off with my friend Karen Laramore to fill the water jug at a spring on the edge of the marsh. The path took us past the pond where the moose were feeding. The moose and the color on the pond: It had all seemed a once-in-a-lifetime photo opportunity. We thought Tom and Lee might want to seize the moment, so Karen had gone to get them. Now, for perhaps twenty minutes, I had been alone with the moose, and that was my moment.

  I edged closer—it seemed smart to move only during those times when both moose had their heads under water—and eventually found myself standing at the edge of the pond, perhaps thirty feet away from the larger bull. He broke water and stared at me. I took a few pictures. The animal seemed alert: He wasn't disturbed by my presence, and he wasn't ignoring me, either. There was a sense of immense power here, and my heart began thumping hard inside my chest. I felt suddenly weak, impotent
— and stupid for being so close. The two moose, huge and sleek, fed in a pond that reflected the sunset, and I didn't think about their intelligence at all. I suppose a clinical psychologist could run a few moose through some sort of giant maze and give you a reading on their IQs—"These guys are dumber than a sackful of hammers"—but the sort of intelligence that could be measured wasn't at issue here. The moose seemed another order of life altogether.

  There was, of course, a chance they would charge. I had

  planned it all out, the worst-case scenario. The pond was surely muddy, and when the moose moved, they had to pull their legs out of the ooze with a gesture that would cost them some effort. The tree I was standing behind was stout, with several low, step-ladder-type branches. I could get up the tree before the moose could get out of the pond.

  Besides, I knew there would be a signal. A moose will likely bristle at the neck, like a hissing cat, before it charges. I had seen this once when, driving in Yellowstone, my skiing partners and I stopped the car to let a moose cross the road. It was cold, and the snow was deep. The moose wanted to walk on the plowed road, and it wanted to walk in our direction. We were in a small Japanese car. This was an American moose. The ruff around its neck stood on end, and it came toward us in the strange, gangling walk that makes moose look so ridiculously uncoordinated. A great hoof, the size of a pie plate, came down toward the window on the driver's side, and we took immediate evasive action. Several hours later, when we tried the road again, the moose was gone.

  Once again I decided on evasive action, moving back into the darkness of the trees as Tom and Lee moved in for some pictures of their own.

  The moose grazed for another twenty minutes. Tom and Lee shot a few rolls of film, and I sat on a log thinking. This time we were spending, it was a moment of special beauty, with the spice of small but certain danger to it. Some prize such a moment because it gives them a sense of superiority: others are such fools, none of them give bears enough credit for fishing. It's a poor treasure, though, this spiteful superiority. These moments are the currency of our physical and emotional lives. They are what we tell our friends about in the art that comes to each of us. We write or we paint or we tell stories. Photographers prize the moment for the shot. And I don't know why I prize the moment at all, except that there is little enough left in our lives to awe us.

  Ike LUma 1>ikmm&

  I was leading, walking past some nameless pond in Montana's Mission Wilderness, when Pancho began humming. At first, the sound could be taken for the gentle creaking of a wooden ship at anchor.

  "Uhmmmm."

  It was almost a sigh. Pancho might have been saying, "Ca-ramba, this pond is a loveliness, no?"

  "Uhmmmm."

  The sound was a little louder now, a little more nasal. I turned, and Pancho gave me one of his patented llama looks. His head was precisely on a level with my own, and his face was strangely angular under the ridiculous rabbit ears. Pancho's eyes were flat brown from lid to lid. He looked like something sentient from another planet—not a Peruvian pack animal at all.

  "Uhmmmmnnnn," Pancho said, and he swiveled his head on that long, curving neck in order to survey the empty trail behind us. There were no human beings where there should have been five following us. Most distressing to Pancho, there were no llamas back there. His pals—Switchback, Doc, Snowman, Houdini —were nowhere in sight.

  PECKED TO DEATH BY DUCKS A 84

  "Uhmmnnn," Pancho said, and his long ears swiveled forward on his head in the manner of a man cupping his ears to hear a distant sound. I stepped in close and put a comforting hand on Pancho's woolly neck. The llama edged an arm's length away. Pancho was entirely placid, but he didn't like being cuddled or petted. No llama does. It is beneath their dignity.

  "Uhmmmmnnn," Pancho hummed, in mild distress. "jDonde estdn mis amigos, anyway?" he seemed to be saying.

  "Uhmnnn," one of the other llamas replied from around a bend in the trail. "Aqui, Panchito." Pancho seemed satisfied, and we stood there waiting.

  "You all right back there?" I yelled to the various unseen humans.

  "Hooty's taking a pit stop," Steve Rolfing called. Steve and his wife, Sue, own the Great Northern Llama Company just outside Columbia Falls, Montana. They breed the beasts and run commercial llama-packing trips.

  Steve was telling me that his youngest llama, Houdini, had stopped to relieve himself. Unlike horses or mules, llamas must stop to heed the call of nature. Their droppings are small oval pellets, without much odor, and look rather like something a large deer or small elk might have left on the trail. Anyone who's ever done the apple dance behind a string of pack horses will understand why llama owners, alone among packers, point with pride to the droppings of their beasts. It is minimum-impact packing.

  Another advantage: Llamas are not hoofed animals, like horses or mules. The bottom of each foot consists of two large pads, like those on a dog. While a heavily used horse trail can sometimes be worn down to a depth of two feet, the llama's pads leave less impact than a hiking boot. A kind of horny toenail above each pad curves down to a point that can grip into the slick ice of a glacier or snowfield. Llamas can carry packs there, in spots where horses would be sliding forever, falling into crevasses to be imprisoned throughout time, like mastodons frozen in ice.

  Steve and the rest of the pack string came around the bend. I put the rope from Pancho's halter over my shoulder and fixed it

  to a Velcro tab on my jacket, leaving both hands free. Pancho liked to walk two feet behind me, no more or no less, and we could have strolled along for an hour like that, at whatever pace I chose, without pulling loose from each other.

  "When am I going to see one of these guys spit?" I asked Steve Rolfing. I liked the llamas so much I was looking for some drawback to packing with them. Investigative journalists aren't paid to go around liking stuff.

  "My llamas," Steve said, a bit defensively, "don't spit. Zoo llamas spit." Llamas, like cows, have several stomachs. Foraged foods—bear grass, alfalfa, fallen leaves, pine needles—are broken down by a bacteria in the first stomach, then brought back up into the mouth in a cud that is thoroughly chewed before being swallowed a second time. Unlike cows, which are doltish and bovine with their cud, llamas, in the process of digestion, seem wise beyond the capacity of their species, even philosophical.

  "In petting zoos," Steve said, "people crowd the llamas. They try to touch their face." Llamas hate that. "So they spit."

  You can see it coming, this warning gesture: The animal swallows once, and then you can see the cud from the first stomach working its way up the long, graceful neck. Folks who continue to insist on cuddling llamas, those who mistreat them, find themselves doused in a fire-hose blast of odorous green bile.

  Llamas are the New World equivalent of camels, relatives of those foul-tempered ships of the desert whose owners can often be seen running from their own animals. Llamas—these camels of the clouds, woolly buggers that evolved on the cold, fifteen-thousand-foot-high plains of Ecuador and Peru and Chile—are regular sweethearts in comparison. They don't spook, shy, or kick; and because they have teeth only in their lower jaw, they couldn't bite even if they wanted to.

  "One lady asked me if you can go blind if you get the spit in your eyes," Steve said. "The answer is no. The real answer is to pack the llama properly, give it an arm's length of respect, and it won't spit anyway."

  In a further gesture of respect to the animals that earn his living

  PECKED TO DEATH BY DUCKS A 86

  for him, Steve has resisted the impulse to name any of his animals Fernando, Dalai, or Tony.

  While llamas can weigh four hundred pounds and more, Steve thinks the smaller animals, those weighing 325 to 350 pounds, have more stamina. "A general rule is that a llama can comfortably carry about one third of its own weight." With properly weighed and balanced packs, a llama can put in a good twenty-mile day. An overloaded or exhausted animal will simply lie down on the ground. It will spit and refuse to budge. No
amount of pulling on the halter will move it.

  As far as I could see, anyone who'd overload a llama, or waik it to exhaustion, has to be an ogre. The animals gently let you know if they are uncomfortable about something with a nasal hum. Ignore the hum and iive for hours with a sordid sense of guilt.

  We camped for the night near the alpine lake. I unloaded Pancho and buried that night's beer in a north-facing snowbank. Common sewers of the hop, such as myself, know that all beer tastes better in bottles. Backpackers, such as myself, frequently omit bottled beer from their gear in favor of more mundane survival items, such as warm clothes or food. My usual pack, for instance, weighs about fifty pounds. Pancho was comfortable carrying twice that, and the extra weight was the difference between serious comfort camping and a survival trek. In addition to the beer, we had a two-burner cookstove, camp chairs, fishing gear, tackle boxes, bottles of wine and cognac, and a pineapple upside-down cake in a large tin.

  While the night's batch of cutthroat trout was baking on the campfire, Steve whipped up a fondue on the stove. He said that he had hurt his back a few years ago while working at a ski resort. "I hammered moguls all day long for a whole season. Then the next year I had a desk job. My back gave out, and the orthopedic surgeon said the best thing for me was walking." Without a backpack.

  Steve, an avid outdoorsman with a degree in forestry, thought that he was doomed to day hikes until a friend suggested he try

  87 A TOOTH AND CLAW

  llama packing. The Rolfings bought their first llama, Pancho, in 1979. Now they own thirty of them, and Steve guides weeklong treks into the Glacier National Park region.