by Rick Bass
I started climbing the steep slope, through lush rotting cedars, through aspen and lodgepole—going up into spruce grouse habitat. But I didn't see any spruce grouse.
So I decided to go higher—to go to the top—to see if I could jump a big juicy blue grouse.
It had snowed the night before, I thought it would be fun to track the grouse in the new snow, if they were up there—to hunt the grouse as one might hunt a deer or an elk.
I worked my way to the top, through an absence of grouse. It was one of those days so beautiful that it did not matter. Even before I reached the top, I had all but forgotten about grouse.
I reached the ridge and looked over into the maw, the velvet green bowl of uncut valley on the other side—the largest roadless area in the valley. I don't think I can keep the roads out of it much longer, as either an artist or a scientist. I think as a general rule slow forces (like art, or continental drift) have more power than quick forces (like lightning or road building), but that the quick forces can cut more deeply.
Sometimes.
It was windy up there, and cold. Just looking at that modest sweep of green, that sanctuary, soothed something inside me, suffered and relaxed so many tensions stored up: as when you, or someone else, places their hands and fingertips over your face, covering your eyes, and then runs their fingertips slowly down and over your face, drawing out all the worry lines. That's what it felt like, over my heart, and I felt happiness.
If there were any other animals stirring—ravens drifting overhead, or ground squirrels scurrying—I didn't see them. I walked south on a game trail along the ridge, grouse entirely forgotten now, daydreaming instead about big mule deer, and about elk—and out of the corner of my eye, I noticed footprints in that new snow, fresh human footprints, I thought, and my mind went Ah, shit—someone's been up here on snowshoes —and there was that usual momentary loss and confusion I felt when I found I wasn't alone in the woods. The wildness left me like wind leaving a sail.
I was about to turn around and go back down the moun tain the way I'd come, but then I wondered why someone would be up here on snowshoes, when there was only a couple of inches of snow on the ground.
I went over to the tracks and stood over them and froze. They were picturebook grizzly tracks, slabfooted, with the long claws—and so large that for a moment—as when you first awaken from a dream—1 could not make sense of the size of them. I could tell they were grizzly, but the size of them shut down something in my mind.
The little twenty-gauge popgun, the iron stick with the cardboard shells in it, felt like a crooked twig in my hand. I felt as if I were suddenly filled with straw, and existed for no other purpose than to have the stuffing knocked out of me.
The tracks were glistening; the snow crushed and still watery from the heat of the bear's foot. I had moved him out just ahead of me, and by the casualness of the gait, he? (there were 110 cubs' prints) had not been in any kind of hurry.
I stood there a long time. In all my years in the valley, and all the thousands of miles hiked, I'd seen grizzlies twice—both times at close range—but this, the size of this, and the beauty of the location—up on this windy spine, up on my favorite mountain in the valley— the size of the tracks— moved me in a way I had not been moved before. I stood there and held onto the feeling of fear and joy mixed, almost hypnotized by the strength of the two emotions. I think that in loving this mountain so deeply, I had begun to view it, even if only subconsciously, as my mountain—up until this point. I knew where the elk bedded down, knew where the berries were best—where the moose lived, and the grouse, the coyotes.
I had to follow the tracks—had to see where they went: what that bear's habits were—even if only for a short distance.
I wanted to see the bear.
There could be no evolutionary advantage to such a long ing. It had to lie in the realm of spillover; the magic, beyond what makes sense or logic, to our short-term goals. It had to be in the realm of art. I moved along the ridge carefully, head down, studying.
The Yaak is a valley of giants—of herons, bald eagles, golden eagles; white sturgeon below the falls, and twenty-five-pound bull trout; lions, wolves, grizzly and black bears, great gray owls, great horned owls, moose, elk—all these big animals — but seeing this grizzly would be like seeing an elephant in the woods. Because the dominant, wide-ranging, no-fearing ones are selected against, many of the giant creatures—like the country around them—are becoming smaller with each generation.
I moved carefully, slowly, through the lodgepole. My body told me to turn around and leave, as did my mind—but there was some other sense, some other thing, that drew me
— that overrode those two imperatives. I felt it and trusted it and walked carefully down the trail, being careful not to step in the tracks, and feeling very fortunate, very lucky, to be on the same mountain with this bear, to be in virtually the same point in time and space with him. Walking just to the side, and behind, his footprints.
I felt something filling me, coming from the feet up, some kind of juice, some wildness, some elixir. I walked slowly, carefully—expecting to see the giant head and shoulders just ahead of me, at any second, looking back.
But there was nothing: nothing other than cold air, and winter coming. To my right—to the west—lay the beautiful uncut velvet of the roadless area—the wilderness. To my left, below and beyond me, lay the swaths of clearcuts. This was the edge, and it seemed very much to me that the giant grizzly was walking the edge of his territory, checking it out before he went back into the earth to sleep for five or six months. Checking things out—noting the new roads below, and the newly savaged hillsides—the patchwork of them drawing ever closer, and I imagined that it was a ritual he did, every year; and I hoped that his sleep was not as troubled as mine.
But there was no trouble in my soul, in my heart, that afternoon. There was only glory and wonder—only peace and awe.
There are places and moments where we must put away the yardsticks and rulers; and it is the artist's job to convince us of this, not the scientist's job to even attempt to prove it—often with the very use of those same rulers and yardsticks.
Do scientists dream of howling?
I know that they do.
The tracks disappeared as the bear walked out of the thin snow—as the new snow disappeared into the open sunlit places. I thought of his four-inch claws and of how the mild sun must feel on his thick coat.
When I couldn't follow after his tracks any more I felt again a burst of reverence, a mix of fear and euphoria. It was as if I'd made a small new discovery in science—as if one curious piece of data suddenly and gracefully connected with another. It was like writing a sentence that surprises and pleases you, one that carries you from all that has come before into new country. It was about anything but control.
I paused, wanting more. I pushed on in the direction I felt he had gone. But after a while the wild juice inside me, the fizz of it, waned. I was still out in open country; he must have disappeared within the sanctuary of cover. I sat down on a cold rock in the wind, tried to feel the sun on my face, rested for a long while, and thought about what I had seen. I didn't want to leave the mountain, as I had the sense one has when one is in the presence of a great man or woman, someone who's meant a lot to you, and whom you finally get to meet. You want to savor the moment and say the right thing, but also, especially if the day has been long and that person is old and tired, you don't want to be a stone, a thing that weighs them down, and so you quickly savor the encounter and are reassured, almost relieved, to see that yes, there is something special and different about him or her, some force, something indefinable—a thing you can see and hear and feel, taste and smell, but not know or name—and then you say good-bye and leave soon enough.
That was how I left the mountain—grateful, more than grateful, for having seen the tracks—and for the bear having heard me coming and having moved slowly away from me, rather than toward me. I knew it was ve
ry important not to overstay.
It was late in the day. There was still about an hour of strong sunlight left, but already the light was turning from yellow to copper. The burned-out, frost-bright berry fields on the hill below me looked as if they might have just had a bear pass through them.
There was movement on the hillside below me—twenty yards in front of and below me, beneath a lone fir tree. I tensed, then refocused. A bird's head blinked nervously above the bunchgrass; then another, and another. Three blue grouse, poised to flush. Wide-open country. It would be an easy shot once they flushed and sailed down the mountain—or a seemingly easy shot, which is always the hardest. Too much time to think, and analyze.
I stepped forward to flush them, but did not shoot: and one by one they flew away, fat and juicy and lucky. It was unthinkable to me to shoot a shotgun on this mountain with any grizzly, but especially that grizzly, on it. It would be like walking into a stranger's house, upon first meeting him or her—say, the friend of a friend—and blasting a hole through the ceiling in the living room. It just wasn't imaginable. The grouse set their wings and glided into the trees, far downslope.
I once saw a small black bear on this mountain. I came within twenty feet of him as he sat upwind, looking around as if confused; and five or six years ago I saw a grizzly up here as well. Not as big as this one, it was standing on a log looking down at me as I picked berries. My dogs were with me, and one of the two dogs saw the bear about a hundred yards upslope.
Fortunately, it was the dog that minds best—Homer, not Ann. I whispered to Homer, whose hackles were raised, to leave it and come over to me. And Homer did. Then I called to Ann in a low voice, and she minded, because she did not see or smell the bear, and because Homer had not yet growled.
I took the dogs by their collars and went downslope, believing at any second the bear would charge. At the bottom of the hill, when I dared look back up, the bear was gone.
A giant bull elk burst from cover; he must have been bedded down not a hundred yards from where the bear had been feeding. For a moment, I'd thought it was another bear—a giant—and my heart and everything else in me stopped for a second, until I understood it was an elk.
At the time it had seemed to me to be only coincidence that brought the elk and grizzly so close together.
Five minutes further down the trail, the dogs and I had come upon a big cow moose. My initial sight of her chocolate-colored hump stopped my heart, and then she raised her head and stared at me in moose innocence. When I got to the 'truck I sat 011 the tailgate and ate every one of the berries I'd picked, half out of nervousness and half out of joy....
But that grizzly story was not like this one. It was a fine one, but somehow different. I'd had my dogs with me, and I'd left. This time I was alone and following the bear. It may seem foolish, but it was the only time I've ever done that—followed one. It's the only time I've ever felt the urge to do that—almost like an invitation. I can't explain it: only that it was a true gut feeling. It's fine if I don't ever get one like that again.
1 was standing there lamenting the missed opportunity, the lost grouse—a brace, at least—when I heard an elk bugling in the woods below and to my left—not far from the country I'd been in, had come up through. It was a wild autumnal sound—and I thought with some sadness of the fact that the high pitch of the elk's bugle had evolved out on the prairies, where elk had once lived, because high sounds travel far ther there—but in the last hundred years the elk had been pushed into the mountains, and in the forested mountains their high squeals did not travel very far. It was almost like an empty piece of baggage they'd brought—deep, subsonic sounds traveled better in the woods—and I wondered how long it would be before that beautiful flute music was lost to the world.
As if changing, even as I listened, the bull, close below me, ended his challenge with a series of deep coughs and grunts. I'd been seeing this bull for several years; he was a trophy, and I'd hunted him, chased him in large circles through the forest, but I had never gotten a good shot at him, and knew somehow that I never would.
I was thinking about slipping down into those woods and seeing if I could sneak up close enough to get a look at him, when I heard the deep coughs and grunts of another bull answering him, moving in on him: or what I thought at first was another bull.
I wondered for a couple of seconds why the other bull wasn't answering with its own high bugle, why it was just coughing and grunting—a much deeper cough than I'd ever heard from an elk before—and I then felt the blood drain from my face and upper body as I realized that it was the giant bear—that that bear was hunting the giant elk—was trying to lure it in for a fight.
It was a sound from ten million years ago, a sound from the Pleistocene: a sound from the center of the earth. It took my blood to a place my blood had never been before—old memories, old fears, that did something to my blood, something massive.
It wasn't true terror that I felt. I don't know what it was. I didn't panic. But it took no huge leap of logic for me to intuit that if my blood was frightened, or even made uncomfortable, then maybe I should be, too—and I left, went down the hill, staying downwind of the sounds: and above me, the two giants kept calling, and I wondered how it would turn out, and whether the grizzly was serious about stalking the bull, or only playing, only curious, as I'd been, when I'd first considered trying to sneak in on the bull.
Later that year, after the bears were asleep, near the end of elk hunting season, I was up there again, and I saw the giant bull running through the trees below me, and was glad he escaped: and I wondered if he'd known, that day he'd been bugling and coughing, that he'd been calling to a grizzly and if he, like the grizzly, had just been messing around. It was impossible to know.
That had been October second, when I'd seen those snowshoe-sized tracks. The next morning I worked hard in the office, knowing that later in the afternoon I would be going back out into the woods again, and hungry for grouse. It was a lovely cycle that I tried to fit myself into every October, to work hard through the morning and early afternoon, but then to end the day walking, bird hunting. I didn't need a lot—even two or three hours was enough, as long as I could do it every day—as long as I could count on the regularity, the stability of it. In this respect science is very much like art: you have to do it every day, to stay in the rhythm of it. To stay sharp. To stay strong. And yet: this is good only to a certain point. Beyond that point, the overflow, the excess—the part beyond our knowledge or abilities—almost always comes into play. Call it luck, or grace—the "surprise" discoveries, which have been so critical to science's advancement.... What is this magic overflow factor that the universe has been blessed with? Is the quantity of it constant? Is it diminishing? Is it our duty to safeguard those places where we sense it may be richest—where it might even originate?
The next day I went out to hunt grouse again and also do some scouting for the upcoming elk season. There was a big patch of country to the north of me that had not had roads built through it, though it was bordered and ringed by them. I parked along one of those gravel roads and started up into the woods. Right away I saw a ruffed grouse, but it was too young and would not flush; it only stood on a log and fanned its feathers at me. I tried to make it flush, but it only hopped and half-flew into a cedar jungle, so I had to let it go. 1 pushed on up the mountain, hoping for a wild flush from a mature bird.
An hour later, 1 was a couple of miles up the mountain, but I did not have plans for the top. I wanted to stay lower, looking for ruffed grouse, rather than blues.
The sun was orange over Buckhorn Ridge. I was working along a deer trail, noting old elk signs. Hie trail followed a shelf along the mountain, a southern exposure, with aspens above and below me. I was going to cross it and then go into some big cedars arid follow those woods up the mountain just a little farther before turning back and heading home. It was the time of day, late in the afternoon, when you are most likely to see all sorts of animals, though bec
ause of the strong wind, I did not think I would see any. Sometimes the wind was in my face, but other times it quartered from upslope, from the north. The aspen leaves were beautiful, shading to bright yellow, and they rattled in that strong wind.
I came around a bend in the trail—the whole valley below me—and saw a golden bear walking slowly toward me, not forty yards away. Too close; too damn close. She was smallish—about twice my size—and her thick forelegs were chocolate brown, while all the rest of her fur was sun-struck blonde.
The wide face, the round ears, the hump over her shoulder—another grizzly, but coming toward me, unlike yesterday's, and averting her gaze—- not making eye contact. Swinging her head and shoulders left and right of me, looking everywhere but at me. I was stupid enough to believe for a second that she did not know I was there. The wind ruffled her fur, blowing from behind me now, like a traitor, and in that cold instant I knew she knew.
One yearling cub appeared behind her, ten or fifteen yards back, looking exceedingly nervous, and then directly behind that one its twin, also looking troubled: not playing, as cubs do, but looking hesitant, looking uncertain.
We were all too damn close. The mother stopped about thirty yards away, the villainous wind gusting at my back—and she circled a quarter-turn and pretended to gaze out at the valley below.
She was so beautiful in the disappearing sunlight that seemed to paint her that gold color.
Her cubs came anxiously up the trail behind her—almost dancing in their nervousness, seeming to want to rise to their hind feet and turn away, and go back in the other direction, but obliged to follow—and I understood now that she too was nervous—that she was trying to move me out of her territory.
Instinctively, I circled a quarter-turn to the south and looked out at the valley, too. I dropped my head to show her I was not a threat. I felt fear, but even stronger, apology, even dismay. I felt incredible respect for her, too, and a surge of gratitude. We both studied the valley for a moment. 1 was waiting to see if she would charge—a thing passed between us, as if we were wired directly together, for a moment—the knowledge and understanding by both of us that she had every right, more than every right, to charge me (and whether in bluff or attack, no matter; she was almost mandated to charge)—and yet she chose not to.