by Rick Bass
The land—the ruggedness of it—has sculpted my brothers and cousins into good hunters. They’ve all killed so many deer, over the years, that they tend now to let them go, save for B. J., the youngest, who at thirty-four is still in full possession of his hunter’s desire. (His birthday, the first of November, is celebrated at each deer camp; another tradition.)
There was a drought this year, like none that any of us have ever seen. B. J. was the only one who killed a deer, hunting it with his blackpowder gun, missing it, improbably, with the first shot, from a distance of only about fifty yards, but reloading (hiding, he said, behind the self-made cloud of blue smoke) and dropping the little buck, a second-year devil-spike, hammerhead-dead. It was good to have a deer in camp, and we were all proud of him and the old-school ways of his blackpowderhood, though in time-honored tradition we ragged him about the little buck’s antlered inadequacies, and about that first missed shot, and we bitched and moaned when we each paid out the dollar tithe we give every year to whomever is fortunate enough to shoot the first deer of the camp, the dollar bills impaled on an ice pick thrust into the much-perforated kitchen cabinet above the old refrigerator.
The rest of us continued to act like old folks, walked the same thousand acres we’ve been walking for decades—knowing intimately every inch of ground—and spent more time remembering than hunting. Such is the luxury of our soft times, and such too is the blessing of wild country, to provide, even for aging hunters like ourselves, a place to do that remembering, as the world keeps changing, deciding in its ancient and graceful and inimitable way day by day what to carry forward and what to leave behind.
THE SILENT LANGUAGE
It’s winter—December—and everything in Montana is buried beneath the heaviest snow in years. As with every year, but more so this year than most, I love the winter for itself, but also for the way it keeps nearly everyone else inside, releasing the woods to the gaze of only me and the deer, me and the mountain lions. I think about things going on in my mind, and then to recover my senses, when I get too lost or confused, I look at the woods.
After hiking in the woods all summer and fall, I find it hard to describe the feeling of how clearly all the pieces of the woods’ puzzle come together in winter: knowing exactly what animals are in the woods by the tracks they leave, and what size the animals are, and where they go, what they do and what they eat, and where they lie down and rest.
The snow tells almost everything. The woods are silent, except for the occasional croak of a passing raven. The geese and ducks have headed south, and in the woods it feels as if you’ve been abandoned, and as if you’re living at the top of the world—just you and the deer, marooned. Snowbound. It’s lovely.
With most of the other animals in the woods, you already have a rough idea of what’s going on in their lives. You see the deer and elk, moose and coyotes, almost every day.
The one animal you almost never see, however, that’s up here year-round, is the mountain lion. It’s a surprise to come upon their tracks each winter while out cross-country skiing, or walking in the woods, and find that they’ve been here all along, and closer than you could have imagined. (Once a lion’s tracks went right up on my porch after a fresh snowfall, investigating around my cabin as I slept, perhaps having listened to my snoring from afar and come closer to see . . .) A mountain lion’s big tracks are as easily distinguishable as any in the woods, and in the snow like that, they conspire to make you catch your breath and imagine the big cat stalking its prey, so silent with its big furred feet.
The tracks are beautiful, and when I follow those tracks it is always with caution and respect, as if I’m afraid of messing up the lion’s stalk by coming up on it from behind and making too much noise, scaring away its prey, perhaps, or interrupting it mid-hunt.
No other tracks in the woods seem to have as much meaning as the tracks of mountain lions; always, they seem to be hunting. It’s a feeling that seems to emanate from each pawprint. I always feel like I’m trespassing when I come across their tracks; I always feel like I’m somewhere I wasn’t invited.
Stories throughout the West tell of how curious mountain lions are—of how they’ll follow a man for miles, walking right in his footsteps, evidently just for entertainment. I have never backtracked in the snow to find the big fresh prints of a lion superimposed over my own, but occasionally—usually right before dusk—I’ve had the sudden feeling of being followed, or watched, especially in the summer and fall, when a lion would leave no tracks.
I’ll turn around and look back, and will see nothing, though who can say?
A thing I like to do is watch animals, when I’m fortunate enough to see them in the winter without their seeing me. I like to study what they’re doing, watch the way they’re moving, and then after they’ve moved on, I’ll go out in the snow to where they’ve been and study the tracks they made. I’ll try and match what I saw them doing to what the tracks in the snow tell me. It’s like learning, and listening to, a silent language. If you’re not in a hurry—which I’m not—it’s kind of fun.
Nobody up here gets in a hurry in the winter. I haven’t seen anybody in a week. Three days ago a truck drove past and the dogs ran out barking at it, having forgotten that trucks had permission to do that—to drive down the road past our cabin.
I’ve got this great book, AField Guide to Mammal Tracking, by James Halfpenny, and have been reading it—taking the little quizzes at the end of each chapter, after he shows an illustration of a set of mystery tracks. (What is this animal doing? What kind of animal is it? How old is this animal? Is this animal running toward or from something?) I will read from Halfpenny’s book and then think about all the hours, the days, the years I’ve been fooling around in the snow, trying to learn the silent language of the woods, and it amazes me how long it can take a person to learn something when he or she tries to do it on his or her own, without assistance.
Like I said, I haven’t progressed very far. But now I’m trying to be more careful. I’m paying attention to the claw marks at the tips of the tracks, to the differences between back and front feet . . . . It’s nice, being out in the woods in winter—whether on skis or snowshoes or on foot—and I like the fact that the more silent it gets, the more frigid and austere, the more it helps my focus. Even though I don’t see nearly as many animals in winter (they can hear me coming), I can still continue to learn about them. Even though I can hear nothing, they are still speaking to me. Because spring is a long time away, and because in winter I have all the time in the world. I can spend a long time traveling only a very short distance each day, following tracks.
A somewhat horrifying thing—but somewhat thrilling also—when you’re following mountain lion tracks through the woods is to come upon a kill: the blood-red snow and the thrashed-out area; deer hair everywhere and a leg here, a leg there—a few bones and sometimes a bare skull. Coyote and raven mop-up tracks will cover those of the lion; no meat is ever wasted in these woods.
No other track in the woods, in winter, has for me such a lingering force as does the mountain lion’s. I seem to be able to feel the echo of the lion’s leap, as it caught the deer—biting the neck to strangle its prey, bringing it down and then tearing out the entrails with a strange burrowing motion. (I’ve found fresh kills with the entrails separated neatly from the carcass.)
When I am walking or skiing or snowshoeing in the woods in winter and come across lion tracks—especially at dusk—I try to walk bigger, to discourage any nearby lions, propping my arms out away from my sides, and I walk in ludicrous yeti-like steps that would make anyone who saw me hoot, but there is nobody, it’s winter . . .
I’ve seen a lot of animals in the woods up here, and I have seen a lot of amazing sights—have been chased up the tree by a bear, have seen deer giving birth, otters playing in the river—but some of the things I haven’t seen have moved me just as deeply.
I have seen two wolverines’ tracks out in the center of the frozen river, headi
ng resolutely north, upstream, the tracks crossing the international boundary, back over into Canada, as if disappointed with what they had found in the United States.
I’ve seen the huge pie-plate prints of a woodland caribou, up on Caribou Mountain, even though they’re supposed to be extinct in Montana and down to only a dozen or so in Idaho, just a few miles to the west.
I’ve followed a set of wolf tracks through the woods too, near a cattle ranch along the river, back in the 1980s, when wolves were not thought to exist in Montana anymore. I saw where the wolf had stood on the riverbank and looked across the broad snowy pasture and then had turned and gone back into the woods.
So everything’s out here, still, in the winter—except for the bears, who are sleeping like children. (I’ve heard that sometimes down in its snow cave a bear’s warm breath will melt a kind of blowhole in the ice and snow, a hole going back up to the surface, and while traveling across the snow I look for such holes. I like to imagine the bears beneath my feet, curled up and sleeping in all that snow. . . . I’ve also read that if you find such a hole and put your ear next to it, you can hear the bear half-breathing, half-snoring, and that it is a sound described as “a tremulant hum” . . .)
It is a fine thing, is what I mean to be getting at, to be seeing all the animals’ tracks so frequently, without seeing the animal. To know that a thing is still out there without ever really seeing the thing—just feeling its presence. To see the tracks but not the animal can yield a brief comfort sometimes when I am in the woods and grieving. Some moment will turn slightly, as with a screw. I’ll sense some thought, some presence, some feeling, without actually hearing or seeing her, my mother, and while I do not understand it—my loss of her—I will know with rock certainty that she is out there, in a different way, a way I cannot understand.
I have seen dozens of lions since I’ve lived up here. It is the second lion I ever saw that is most interesting to tell about. Two young girls and I were walking through a grassy meadow far back in the woods. We were going fishing. I saw the lion first, about fifty yards away, resting under the only tree in that meadow, looking back at us. The girls had been laughing and singing and I believe that the lion—a big one—had come to investigate their voices. The lion’s head was as round as a basketball, with beautiful, round, mascara-lined eyes, it seemed, and cheeks smudged with charcoal blush. It looked like the face of a human, watching us. The grass was tall and all we could see was the lion’s head, watching us back.
I thought at first it was just a deer lying in some odd position that made its face look like that of a lion. (It strikes me only now as startling that the lion and the deer, predator and prey, have the exact same color of fur.)
To tease the girls—to frighten them—I said, “Hey, look at that lion lying down, out there in the grass.” I lifted them up on my shoulders—Amanda, twelve, and Stephanie, ten—and they said “Yeah, a lion!” They were thrilled, and I felt badly then and had to tell them that I was teasing, that it was just a deer looking at us straight on, in a manner that made it look like a lion—that it had its ears tucked back or something.
Just then the lion turned its head sideways, looking as regal as a queen, and I couldn’t believe it, but there it was, right in the middle of the meadow. It was the meadow we had to walk through to get to the lake.
I’d read all the books. I knew that lions were leery of adults and would run from you if you approached them. I didn’t want this lion stalking us. I gave the girls the canoe paddles and I walked out across the meadow, through waist-high grass, toward the lion, certain that it would come to its senses and bound away, once it saw what was up.
I kept walking—getting closer and closer.
And began to walk more slowly.
The lion kept watching me. When I was within about thirty yards—close enough to see the animal’s eyes—I could see some flicker of interest, some curiosity, and more—intelligence—in the big animal’s eyes. I knew I should turn around and go back to the girls and lead them on home, but I couldn’t help it: I knew I could flush that lion into running away, and besides, the lion was drawing me on, as if hypnotizing me, and there was also the strange, foolish notion of territory; I’d been fishing this lake for six years and didn’t want to be run off from my fishing spot.
But mostly, it was hypnosis that made me keep walking.
The lion looked left and right, when I went inside that thirty-yard perimeter—as if looking for another lion to consult on this odd behavior in humans. (Coming right in to me, the lion seemed to be thinking, too easy!)
The books said the lion would run away.
This lion didn’t know that.
At twenty-five yards, there was an exquisite tension—and that is the only way I know to describe it, with the word “exquisite.” The tension had been building as the space between us compressed, and the lion had been handling the strange compression beautifully, and I had been steady and unfaltering in my own approach. A relationship was forming between us, with no two other things in the world at that moment for either of us except each other—and I paused, so aware of the tension and compression of air that to take one more step would suddenly have been as freighted a movement, as nearly impossible, as if I had been wearing lead boots on the planet Jupiter.
I knew with an instinct, a certain knowledge deep in my genes, that if I took one more step that compression would shatter, and I would become in that instant predator or prey, and that the lion would charge me, or would run away. The lion knew this too. We were both suspended at arm’s length—twenty-five yards.
I took a step forward, and the lion jumped up and turned and bounded away in a swimming, arching motion through the tall grass and into the woods at the other side of the meadow.
The girls were ecstatic when I went back to them; they had not felt the compression. They had only seen the lion run away.
“That was so beautiful!” Amanda cried. “A lion!”
“A real lion!” Stephanie said.
“You girls will remember this,” I said, “the rest of your lives.”
Euphoric—feeling privileged to live in such a wild place as to still be able to see a lion—we continued on through the tall grass toward the lake. We were following a deer trail through the grass, and at times the grass was taller than our heads, and the trail through the grass narrowed so that it was brushing our shoulders on either side.
When we got to the lake, we slid my canoe into the water and were about to get in when I looked out at the meadow and saw that the lion had come back and was closer than before—only about thirty-five or forty yards away, with that big round beautiful face, the head as big as a small pumpkin.
This time I was not hypnotized by the animal’s beauty, nor was it (I could feel this) in a mood to fool around with any games of compression. The lion crouched low into the grass when it saw we had it spotted. We stood up on the canoe’s thwarts to get a better view, and the lion sank lower still, disappearing completely in that sea of cool green grass, and then it did a strange and beautiful thing: it stuck its tail straight up into the air, its long black-lined tail as straight as a rod—held it stiff and straight like that for a moment—and it began twirling the tail back and forth, making it into the shape of a question mark, swirling it with a lazy, hypnotic seductiveness, trying to lure us out into the meadow.
We had gone to the lake to go fishing, but only because we were running late. What we had planned originally to do there was to play our favorite game—“Tiger in the Grass”—and had it not been so late in the day, that is what we would have done.
The way that Tiger in the Grass is played is simple. Stephanie and Amanda and I get down in that head-high summer grass and then begin crawling through it, growling, pretending to be tigers, crawling and parting the grass before us, growling all the while, until we hear someone nearby, and then we pounce and try to land on that person, surprising them: the “tiger” seemingly appearing from out of nowhere, so perfectly hidden, down
in that tall sea of grass.
There is no telling which of the three of us the real tiger would have stalked and leapt upon, had we been down on all fours, oblivious, in that high meadow.
The reason I do not give the name of the lake is that I do not want hunters to go there with their dogs and hunt the lion. I was not smart—or not thinking, that day—but I will be ever after. The woods need lions. It was a thrill and an honor to see this one.
Nonetheless, it was now evident that we were being stalked. I gathered the girls behind me—it was nearing dusk now, and the lion had disappeared from sight completely, was somewhere down in that tall grass. I told the girls to talk in loud voices, deep men’s voices, not children’s voices, and we held hands and held the paddles and fishing rods before us and started back through the meadow, through the head-high tunnel of grass out of which the lion could lunge at any second, and I have never felt so fierce, so furious, so protective in all my life, and I knew then how a mother feels, for I love these girls dearly, and if the lion had jumped out I know that I would have throttled it with my bare hands before I would have let it get to them.
Like three-people-who-had-become-one, we moved slowly down the grass tunnel, and the girls were braver than anyone could ever have asked, saying, “Just go away, lion,” and things like that, in deep voices, and I was saying pretty much the same.
The lion could have made an attack at any time, while we were in the grass. It knew that, and I knew it, and I think that the girls knew it. But we passed through the meadow in safety, made it back to the trail through the woods, and whether the lion followed us or not, we could not see.