Genevieve Bennett
My sister Kate asked me once when we were on a survey together if I walk along yelling “hey bear” so I wouldn’t walk right into any surprised bears, or if I am quiet, since the point is to monitor wild animals. I said I used to yell a lot more than I do now, but don’t tell our mom. I laugh about that the next time I am going up early over Lincoln Pass..
Walking up to the pass felt wonderful. The morning’s cold and I move fast. I don’t shout for bears. I don’t shout for bears. They wouldn’t have heard me above the wind and the little cold noisy streams running out between big red shale boulders and green ferns. Tiny white alpine sandwort, purple cupped harebells. Two million years of glaciation here have excavated long straight valleys you can look down for miles without a break in the line of your sight.
In my pack are a small single-man tent bought in college sixteen years ago, a ten-degree down sleeping bag, stove, fuel, lighter, sleeping pad, cookpot, water filter, water bottles. Headlamp, down coat, raincoat, Crocs for camp, clean underwear. A map, and a warm hat, and a little Scotch. A can of bear spray in a holster on my hip. A leatherman knife, a first aid kit, packets of tuna fish, string cheese, crackers, candy. Forty feet of paracord to hang these things out of reach of the bears at night. I have a 20-60x 80mm Vortex Skyline spotting scope, a tripod to set it up on, a lightweight pair of Bushnell binoculars, a GPS unit, a plastic baggie of silica desiccant beads, a few small brown paper envelopes, color coded stickers, a notebook, a pen, and a radio dialed into Glacier National Park Dispatch, channel Parkwide 2.
The GPS will take me to a specific spot on the route that goes past Sperry Chalet, up and over Comeau Pass to Sperry Glacier. The trail climbs a big scooped-out basin toward the glacier crouched above at eight thousand feet. Here the GPS tells you to leave the trail. Find the place, pick a good rock. Sit down on it. Get out your spotting scope. The protocol is simple and easy to follow, meant to be repeatable by any idiot or amateur, which we are. Check the compass, face north, hold your arms straight out from your sides to mark west and east, note your quadrants. Look at your watch. Begin.
For the first few minutes I only sweep my binoculars across the cliffs on the far side of the basin. Nothing but an empty amphitheater of ancient steep shale – and then maybe, if I’m lucky, a white mountain goat, drifting along a ledge eight inches wide. It does not leap like a bighorn sheep, though it can. It is all shoulders and chest. A goat can hook a hoof on an edge, lock its elbows, shift its center of mass, and do a pull up. A goat can lean into good footing on its front legs and pick up its rear quarters and wheel around and – there is no hurry here – put them down again. It can be jarring to watch, this tranquility above thousands of feet of empty air. Although I’ve seen goats on hot days goofing around sliding on their bellies down snowfields.
A hiker comes by and asks if I’m measuring the glacier shrinking. I tell her I am counting mountain goats. Are they endangered? she asks. We’re not really sure, I say. Check the ridge lines for big billies, alone, moving faster than the small herds. Check cool, shadowy places back in the clefts where the nannies and yearlings and kids like to rest together. If you see anything through the binoculars, move to the spotting scope to get a better look. Make a note of the animal’s approximate age, sex. Male goats’ horns look bigger at the base, with a sharper arc to the horn than the nannies. Write down any interesting behaviors and your best guess at wind speed, temperature, cloud cover, visibility. By August, wildfire haze can muddy your view from many hundreds of meters. By September, plan for snow.
Today, in July 2020, on a day with a forty degree swing in temperature between midnight and my late morning survey, I see no goats. This happens a lot. When I look back at my notes over the years six out of every ten surveys have come up empty. I am allowed to bring friends along
with me; probably the Park prefers it to me doing a lot of surveys alone. Many people come only once. Maybe you expect heroic alpinism—scaling cliffs, braving snowfields, bushwacking, grizzlies— here David Attenborough is narrating—goats! by the hundreds—and what you get is a long slog, a lot of it in the woods without much to look at, and then you’re sitting on a rock for ages, getting cold, or hot, and then there aren’t even any mountain goats. My feeling is, zero is still data, and a lot of times there’s some bighorn sheep or moose or marmots or, twice, a wolf, out there alone. If you sit somewhere long enough staring in one direction something will come along.
They used to mark mountain goats for monitoring by shooting them with paintballs out of helicopters. In the eighties Doug Chadwick, a wildlife biologist who spent seven years living with the goats in Glacier and the Swan Mountains to the south, would fire ground darts containing natural-colored dyes to mark individual goats. Chadwick also served as head of the Flathead County chapter of the Montana Wilderness Association. He once flew John Denver to Washington DC to testify, in song, in front of US senators considering new wilderness designations in Montana. If you were wondering about the natural dyes.
Montana Fish, Wildlife, and Parks uses net guns and helicopters to capture goats and put radio collars on them. Sometimes a helicopter crew comes down from Fairbanks, Alaska, to help. In Alaska they use tranquilizer darts, and then come back in Piper SuperCub airplanes to monitor the collared goats. It calls for great skill to hit a mountain goat with a tranquilizer or a net from an aircraft. Not because they necessarily try to run away, but because they’re often up somewhere precarious and you could kill them in the fall.
Biologists working for the State of Montana have learned to set traps at salt licks, where goats go to get minerals in their diets. Pull a cord and a door goes down. Then you tranquilize the goat and put a collar and bright plastic ear tags on it, take some biological samples, and inject a second agent to reverse the tranquilizer. After five minutes the goat gets up and wobbles off. The collars send out lat-long coordinates to a scientist somewhere every six hours for three years. Then they open and drop off, just before the batteries die.
One older nanny collared in the fall of 2006 near the Juneau Icefield in Alaska puzzled her trackers for months. The collar sent out a mortality signal during the winter, but scientists couldn’t locate the collar nor the goat’s carcass. Then they started picking up signals again in August. The collar pinged again twice in the weeks that followed, each time from a new location. In October, Alaska Department of Fish and Game biologist Kevin White saw a bear crossing an alpine plateau. It was wearing the goat’s collar. White’s best guess is that the bear was scavenging the nanny goat’s carcass and somehow put the collar on.
In 1931 a field biologist with the Park Service named Joseph Scattergood Dixon visited Glacier, as part of a project to complete a “Wildlife Portfolio of the Western National Parks.” A little less than ninety years before my own survey below Sperry Glacier he came up that way. He stopped
at the Sperry Chalet, a seventeen-room stone lodge offering clean sheets and three meals a day, hunkered in the middle of nowhere Montana in a hanging basin a couple of miles below the glacier it shares a name with.
In Dixon’s notes: “The hostess at the Chalet told me that about July 1, when the Chalet first opened for the season and the higher mountain slopes were deeply covered with snow, there were as many as 30 or 40 goats around the Chalet. She also told me that the goats disturbed the slumber of the visitors by running and jumping on the roof of the Chalet at night.”
Dixon’s salary was paid not by his employer, the federal government, but by George Meléndez Wright, a young assistant park naturalist at Yosemite, who had convinced the National Park Service two years earlier to set up a wildlife biology program by offering to pay for it himself. Wright was a San Franciscan, son of a shipping company owner. His mother Mercedes had two brothers and one brother in law that all were presidents of El Salvador. George’s mother died of acute appendicitis when he was ten months old. His father died of cancer when he was six. George’s brothers John and Carlos went away to live in El Salvador with his mother’s family, and George was raised alone by his paternal step-grandmother in San Francisco.
He grew up at a time when the lands around the new city remained primeval. Fort Mason and the Presidio, later to become military bases, were wildlands. The Richmond district, today neighborhoods and good restaurants, was oak woodland and dune scrub. Much of the peninsula was a sea of ever-wandering sand dunes. Actually it was the largest dune ecosystem in the Western Hemisphere, before it was San Francisco. Wright took a degree in forestry at the University of California at Berkeley and a position at Yosemite at twenty-three. There he saw deer populations exploding in the absence of hunted-out mountain lions. Tourists would feed bears sweets from their hands, encouraged by Park employees.
Wright’s idea for a baseline survey of wildlife in National Parks was intended as the first step in developing a wildlife management program in the parks based on scientific evidence. This was a new idea. The attitude in the early years of the National Park Service was that by simply protecting the land from incursions and the wildlife from poaching—a constant problem in Glacier’s early days—the animals would take care of themselves. By the 1920s it had become clear that more hands-on management might be necessary. Wright spent half of his inheritance on salaries, travel costs, and equipment for Dixon and his coauthor Ben Thompson. In the years while Dixon was on the road gathering data, Wright’s ideas began to catch on. Fauna of the National Parks was published in 1933, recommending that parks attempt to restore wildlife to their status at the point in time “between the arrival of the first whites and the entrenchment of civilization in that vicinity,” though the authors admitted that in the grand scheme this was a pretty arbitrary target. In 1931 a Wildlife Division of the National Park Service was set up, and Wright appointed its chief. In 1934 President Roosevelt made Wright head of the National Resources Board, charged with traveling the country to judge where new National Parks could be created. Driving home from Big Bend in Texas in 1936, a vehicle collided head-on with Wright’s, killing him at the age of 31, along with his companion Roger Toll, then-Superintendent of Yellowstone.
Park staff in Glacier National Park put out a naturalist newsletter intermittently in the years between 1927 and 1938. Rangers and other personnel contributed writing and artwork to the publication, in between other duties that included patrolling for poachers, fighting forest fires, and maintaining trails. The Park didn’t bring on an official trained naturalist until 1929, two decades after its founding.
The January 1927 edition includes a short piece titled TRAGEDY. It is a first-person account of bighorn sheep in the Park succumbing to a coughing sickness, probably pneumonia, that killed at least sixteen sheep in the vicinity of Many Glacier on Christmas Day, including five rams, ten ewes, and one lamb. Probably it was written by Chief Ranger Frank O’Brien, who makes a personal appearance in the story to spread hay around the chalet for local bighorns, and to drag away bodies. In the next issue in February, we learn the number of dead has risen to thirty six. Experts are brought in, who recommend more frequent change of feedings, and enclosing the chalet foundations to prevent sheep from bedding down underneath, “where they are exposed to unnatural drafts. These recommendations are being faithfully executed.” A final note indicates they’ve saved the skins and heads of a few to be mounted as a museum exhibit.
Chief Ranger O’Brien trained bighorn sheep in Glacier to respond to his whistle. He’d make hay trails to get sheep to walk up onto roofs and inside Park buildings, to the delight of visitors. The bighorns ate hay out of his hand. Those were the years when rangers would as a matter of policy feed elk and deer during winters when the snows were deep. Coyotes, mountain lions, and wolves on the other hand as a matter of practice were shot.
Interestingly, bears were never targeted for extermination by the Park Service like other big predators. Whatever the reason, they’ve been a special case. Most Park visitors put grizzlies at the top of the list of animals they hope to see, and also the one they fear the most.
Rangers in the early days remarked on goats’ apparent stupidity. Look into a goat’s eyes. I have. I still don’t know what looks back. They react little to us. They move slowly. A long blank face looks around out of black eyes. Thick legs. A reputation for meekness among the males (at least during the rutting season) and frequent displays of aggression in the nannies. Plain dark horns, a big humped up body that belies its unbelievable grace in high places. Glacier Park Nature Notes, 1928: “The flesh of goat is musky, dry, and unpalatable.”
That morning in July, just over Lincoln Pass I saw a nanny and her kid on the trail a few paces ahead. They looked at me and kept eating. Beyond the nanny was a little pile of warm goat turds. I wanted those turds. Moving slowly, I got out my packet of desiccant, a fresh paper envelope, and looked around my feet for a good scooping stick. I took a step forward. She did too. Hey goat, I said, a little uncertainly. She kept coming. I stepped off the trail, bowed. Satisfied, she went back to browsing. I headed toward the goat droppings. She started toward me again, a little sharply this time, and again I backed up. She did not know what I was about but she was not going to let me near that pile. We stood there looking at each other in mutual incomprehension. Her kid did a little experimental hop off a rock and kicked its feet in the air. I took off my pack and sat down. After about twenty five minutes they moved past me up the trail to the pass. I knelt and collected my prize.
When I got back to the trailhead I left my paper envelope of mountain goat turds on my car’s dashboard to dry out in the sun for a few hours. Then I took it to the Crown of the Continent Research Learning Center near Park headquarters, where they sent it on to a lab to extract the genotype for this particular nanny. The DNA analysis program is a new venture. It goes one better than collaring: not only can you place a specific goat on the map, but you can also measure genetic variation and diversity in a group of goats. This is another way of asking: are the goats very inbred? We know the bighorn sheep are. Glacier’s goats might be part of a big group of wholesomely mixing animals, or a lot of little Hapsburg dynasties up on their peaks. We don’t know. The pellets will tell us, if we can get enough of them.
Around fifteen years ago Park biologists reported that they were seeing fewer goats come down to a particular and well traveled salt lick on the southern border of Glacier. At the same time, outside the park state wildlife biologists also flagged big declines in mountain goat populations. Wildlife populations naturally grow and ebb again. Goats move around a lot, and in unpredictable ways. In those years it was impossible to say if we were losing goats in Glacier, or if this was a problem, because no one knew how many goats there were to begin with.
Ideally the Park could have put a team of professional scientists on the case, but the baseline for wildlife biology budgets, especially when it comes to fieldwork in the high country, is barely above sea level. So the Park began a Citizen Science program, one of the first efforts like it in a National Park. We volunteers can pick the survey sites we’d like to hit, string together interesting routes through Glacier. For example you can decide to go in at Saint Mary Lake and hike to the goat survey site at Red Eagle. (No goats.) In the morning keep going south, through a ghost forest of bone-white, hollowed-out trees that burned back in 2006 and howl like wolves when the wind blows. Switchback your way up to Triple Divide Pass. Here you can stand on an alpine pass where the waters of the North American continent fall away from you in three directions, to the Pacific, the Atlantic, and Hudson Bay, rather than the usual two. Today rain is hanging in the air and you can’t see more than twenty feet in any direction, and so you bag your survey plans here and continue down along red Precambrian mudstone cliffs laid down a billion years ago, before the Earth had any plants or enough oxygen in the atmosphere for you to survive more than a few minutes. Go for a swim in Medicine Grizzly lake if you have time. You’re on the Continental Divide Trail now. Climb to Pitamakin Pass, named for a Blackfeet warrioress. Wind gusting forty-something miles an hour up there rips the map out of your hands and drops it in Oldman Lake eight hundred feet below you. Go east to Dry Fork, stop for another survey (one billy, wandering green cliffs). Come out at Two Medicine. Take off your boots. Sit, and put your feet in the cold water of Two Medicine Lake.
The data collected over the years suggest that goat populations truly are falling. Scientists estimate a decline of somewhere between 30 and 57 percent over the decade after the program began, from a best-guess range of somewhere between 1,885 and 3,269 goats. That is a pretty hand-wavy set of numbers. Don’t blame the volunteers: “After two years of data collection, biologists compared the data collected by volunteers to data collected by professionals using the same methods and found that data collected by volunteers in ground surveys were statistically similar to those collected by biologists in ground and aerial surveys.”
So said a 2017 paper in the Ecological Society of America’s Ecopshere journal, authors Elizabeth P. Flesch (present address: Ecology Department, Montana State University, Bozeman) and Jami Belt (Klondike Gold Rush National Historical Park, P.O. Box 517, Skagway, Alaska, now head of the citizen program at Glacier). The gist of it is that we volunteers are also part of a carefully designed experiment. Actual population numbers of goats in the park are unknown, but we can measure whether population estimates generated from data collected by volunteers are statistically similar to estimates from professionals. And it turns out the volunteers are doing pretty well. We could be wrong, but at least we’re wrong in a similar way to the trained biologists and helicopter counts. The goats shrug off science wonderfully. They hide from the surveys, chase us away from their droppings, refuse to come down into the valley where they might be counted. They do what they like. Another of the volunteers was on the telephone with his mother in New York City, telling her about a survey he’d done recently in the Park. She asked, “They just let the goats run around in there?”
Glacier National Park had nearly three million visitors last year. As a point of reference, the population of the entire state of Montana is about one million people. There are tourists everywhere, bumpered on the Going-to-the-Sun Road, filling permitted backcountry campsites, the Highline trail along the Divide tinkling with a thousand bear bells.
The goats in their own ways are adapting. For example they seem to have started to use us as shields from predators. At Logan Pass, where their ancestors would once have stuck close to escape terrain, they sun in the meadows by Hidden Lake and pose for photographs.
Escape terrain means the steep rocky areas where goats are safe from predators below. Goats prefer a 50- to 80-degree angle of slope. The source of that particular fact is the funniest academic paper I have ever read. The paper’s authors describe their methods like this:
“The 2014 grizzly bear treatment was a styrofoam bear head and furred fabric cape. Treatments were reconfigured in 2015 to decrease weight for improved transport and accessibility to remote sites more than 15-km into the backcountry…The 2015 grizzly bear treatment was a researcher with a large dark brown coat, hat and pants combined with a bear mask (Rubies Costume Company; New York, New York)…We hiked undetected to within 200 meters of the group [of goats] and remained hidden in vegetation.” Then the scientists would emerge for a “treatment.” In other words, they dressed up in bear costumes and jumped out from behind bushes to see if the goats would run away, and how steep a slope they’d go for. Then as a scientific control, they tried it again with bighorn sheep costumes. The paper continues: “After the 180-second treatment the technician returned to the vegetation to hide… Goats almost always fled immediately upon detection of our simulated bear threat, while they did not flee from our simulated [bighorn sheep] control.” Then back to the office, to combine this experimental data with a used-unused conditional logistic regression model to evaluate components of landscape variables associated with escape terrain. Thus is the edifice of human knowledge assembled.
The goats, meanwhile, are becoming nuisances to the tourists. They nibble backpacks, lick the railings for the salt left by our hands, sniff around for human pee, lap up antifreeze in parking lots. Getting their minerals these ways, they don’t migrate to the salt licks anymore. Park employees try to haze them away from the visitor center at Logan Pass by shouting. They shake boxes of rocks and plastic bags. They trained a border collie to herd the goats across the road. The goats have quickly learned that we are ridiculous, but we won’t hurt them, and they keep coming back.
Once a young male mountain goat with a broken horn kept me awake for hours while I was camped at Lake Ellen Wilson. He’d been hanging around there all summer. He’d go back and forth just very softly sidelong brushing my tent in the dark. He’d wake me up like that. I lie there listening hard – a bear? That is always what you think. A bear? – but hear only the quiet, and the lake, and I go back to sleep. Another brush past the tent. Hooves on gravel. A light touch in passing. I can see against the wall of the tent the shape of a big body inches away from me. Did I see it? Nothing, again, for a long time. Sleep again. And he’d come back and keep doing that. At three in the morning he followed me when I got up to pee and then he wouldn’t let me go past him to get back to my tent. Each morning I get up and do a loving-kindness meditation. In front of other people I have formally undertaken the precept of doing no harm. Still I’d had enough, and I picked up a couple of rocks the size of oranges and I ran at him barefoot in my underwear yelling. A rock bounced past his feet. He still stood there. He was about the same weight as me, and he did still have that one good horn. I kept coming at him. Another rock took sail at his ankles. I screamed like a blue jay. The goat turned and fled into the dark. “Sorry,” I said, watching him go.
When my surveys take me along the Continental Divide Trail, I meet a lot of through-hikers going all the way from the Mexican border to the terminus at Waterton Lake in Canada. At Morning Star Lake in 2021 on a cold day in August I talk to a through-hiker for a while who does smallmouth bass surveys back home as part of another citizen science project. He said with pride that some of their methodologies were being adapted by the mountain lion guys. We talk about all the “non-intrusive” monitoring technologies that are appearing: game cameras, remote acoustics, sampling water for DNA, drones and robots equipped with sensors, machine learning to interpret the data. The highest good recently has become to be invisible and I wonder about it. He has ultralight gear so he’s cold when he sleeps. I ask if he wants the old puffy jacket I have with me but he doesn’t take it. We have a cup of coffee together and he says thanks for cheering him up. But for the most part throughhikers are just in a hurry to get out of there. They’re skinny and cold and cranky after three thousand miles, and they’re only seventy miles from the end. They pass through, and leave no trace.
Above my fireplace there is a photograph from the National Park Archives, probably taken in 1926, of the mountaineers Dorothy Pilley and her husband Ivor Armstrong Richards near the top of Stark Peak. Beyond them is Grinnell Glacier and the Garden Wall, where the Continental Divide falls nearly three thousand feet back down to the earth in a riot of flowers and rock and snow.
Pilley and Richards are climbing with the old gear: stiff heavy manila ropes, hobnails in the soles of their boots. Both are looking down, at Grinnell Lake far below them. Ivor, in a striped sweater and wool vest, has his hands on his hips, hinging forward to look at the lake without leaning too far out over the drop. Dorothy is dazzlingly relaxed. She has a clean loose white shirt on and trousers tucked into puttees, and a handkerchief in her hair. She has one hand on the rock behind her and has a hip thrown out over the drop. She might as well be leaning on a bar waiting for a gin.
They are climbing roped but there is also terrific scrambling in Glacier. It’s possible to get on a goat trail and pick your way up easy ledges and loose scree to many of the peaks here, and as long as you don‘t mind twenty or thirty miles of hiking and vertical exposure that makes your heart jump up into your throat, you can bag a lot of summits without much technical difficulty.
I liked to do that kind of thing when I first moved here ten years ago. Now virtually all of my time in Glacier is on a wildlife survey. I hike twenty four miles in mud in the woods to get to the coordinates where I’ll do a single survey, and I might not see anything. As a result I’ve become a pretty fast hiker. These days I can bang out a survey, about ten miles walking, and an hour and a half in Going-to-the-Sun Road traffic in eight hours, and be home by five when my daughter Marie gets out of childcare. When she was a baby I would pack in a breast pump and pump while I looked for goats. If reaching the peak of a mountain is like a door you walk through into being more than what you were before, this time on surveys feels more like a gradual tuning.
Approaching Triple Divide on a blue-sky August afternoon this year, my friend Erin Barstow asked me what the Park scientists will do if these surveys show for certain that mountain goats are disappearing from Glacier. It’s a good question. I don’t know the answer.
Goats like alpine terrain: rocky, cool, high-elevation. One third of the Park is considered alpine these days. The climate is warming three times faster at these high elevations than the global average. Imagine water rising up all around mountain peaks. That water is rising temperature. The alpine zones at the top are disappearing at a faster rate than the places below. Until now, mountain goats have been one of the species least affected by humans in North America. Even today there is little scientific consensus on what climate change will actually mean for mountain goats here in Glacier. Warmer winters could mean less snow and easier access to forage. But ice layers are more likely to form on warm winter days, that leave the snowpack impenetrable and the goats to starve to death. It’s unclear which dynamic will win out.
When white settlers came to the place that became Glacier Park, it was at the tail end of a Little Ice Age that began in the 1400s. The glaciers had already reached their maximum by the mid 19th century. When Grinnell Glacier was first photographed in 1919 it was already shrinking. Glaciers have assembled themselves and receded again here for two million years. They were more or less gone ten thousand years ago, and then they came back a few thousand years after that. Today we are in a period of warming, which of course we humans have hastened. Glaciers, mountain goats, grizzlies, alpine harebells, cedars, camas and huckleberry and yellow aster and summer snowfields: none are a fixed part of this place. We just got to be here to see them.
Truthfully I have never felt that much of a connection to mountain goats. But they live here, and now I live here, and they might be in trouble, and so I do the surveys. I have always assumed the data generated would do something to contribute to their survival. As I wrote this essay, I wondered for the first time if what I’m actually doing is documenting a population collapsing.
The days of feeding animals to prop up their numbers are almost certainly over. There are other choices. We could introduce more goats to shore up the population, or choose new places for new herds. Mountain goats have been introduced in the Greater Yellowstone ecosystem, Olympic National Park, Colorado, Nevada. In Montana as in many places, the introduced populations are thriving, and are considered by biologists to now be viable feeder populations for struggling herds in the native ranges.
We might also encourage the goats along on a journey north. Glacier National Park is nestled at the center of an 18-million acre ecosystem where the Great Plains rise up into the Rockies, the largest intact ecological community in this country. All of the original big predators remain here—which is what I think most people really mean when they say “wild.” Mountain goats might fare better farther north along the spine of the Rockies up in Canada, where there are a tenth as many people and a slightly cooler climate. Goats are already at the southern end of their native range in Montana. One could easily imagine a future where they go north, and cease to be here in Glacier. Do the goats need our help to do this? I couldn’t tell you.
Of course there is one more option: do nothing, and simply witness. What is our responsibility here? Science has no answer. Still I am sure our urge will be strong to turn this into a technical question, of wildlife management, instead of an ethical one, which it is.
In September 2021, four months pregnant, I did a couple of loon surveys in the Quartz lakes basin of Glacier’s North Fork with my sister Kate and a local friend, Katie DeGrote. We slept in an old patrol cabin at the foot of the lake. There were grizzly claw marks many inches deep in the door. You go to the privy and there is bear hair stuck in the latch, more claw marks. Early white settlers in the North Fork noted that the bear pelts smelled like kerosene: there are a few oil seeps up here, never developed thanks to the place’s National Park status. Open the cabin door and it looks equally grim. Mouse shit all over the place. There are bars over the windows which are themselves blocked by thick boards fixed with eye bolts, keeping the animals out but not letting in a crack of light. Throw open the doors and windows and air it out while you make dinner on the front steps. Splash a little water or industrial cleaner (which you find somewhere in a cabinet) on the mouse droppings, and sweep them up with a newspaper and a roof shingle.
Eating a dinner of rehydrated rice and canned chicken on the gravel beach in front of the cabin, we read the logbook. Most of the entries are from a fisheries crew, who have come to Quartz each spring for several years. They catch lake trout, implant radio telemetry receivers, and let the trout go. Later the crew returns to follow these “Judas fish” to their spawning areas. Then they gill net and kill all the invasive lake trout they can. What do you do with dozens of dead lake trout we wonder, drinking tea in a clear evening. Alpenglow on Vulture Peak above us. All this work makes room for the native bull trout, who are steadily coming back.
At night, with propane lanterns lit and swinging from the ceiling, a fire going in the woodstove, the door locked against griz outside, the cabin becomes completely wonderful. We sit around the drop-down table and play a few rounds of hearts, one of us playing two different hands to make up for our missing fourth. At night, it’s so dark and quiet that as soon as I’m in my sleeping bag I fall asleep and wake up the next morning disoriented. I get up to pee and find dawn has already happened. I leave the door open to wake up Katie and my sister (just look at this morning!), walk to the lake and stop there for a long time. There is mist on the water. A loon calls. The sun is hours behind the mountains.
“Sometimes while I am watching these birds on the water, the illusion of the untouchability of this wilderness becomes so strong that it is stronger than reality, and the polished roadway becomes the illusion, the mirage that has no substance.”
George M. Wright
Often when I am on surveys I think about a letter that Wendell Berry wrote to Wes Jackson in July 1982, and which has stayed on my mind for many years. Berry, in his capacity as a Kentucky farmer (he is many other things, among them a poet and environmental activist), was reading in The Soil Resource about raindrops falling on soil. A Dr. Hans Jenny explains that rain hits the soil randomly, and, while it can be channeled by leaves and twigs into distinct patterns, rainwater ultimately leaves that plane as it enters: randomly.
Berry writes to Jackson,
As I think you said when we talked, what is perceived as random within a given limit may be seen as part of a pattern within a wider limit… If this is so, then Dr. Jenny, for accuracy’s sake, should have said that rainwater moves from mystery through pattern back into mystery. If “mystery” is a necessary (that is, honest)
term in such a description, then the modern scientific program has not altered the ancient perception of the human condition a jot…
What impresses me about it, however, is the insistent practicality implicit in it. If we are up against mystery, then we dare act only on the most modest assumptions. Acting on the basis of ignorance, paradoxically, requires one to know things, remember things.
Wendell Berry
Go to your closest pond, dip up some water, and take a hand lens and look at it. What looks still to your naked eye is full of movement. It’s the same with my spotting scope this morning at Quartz Lake. Loons dive and surface. A nanny goat rounds the far side of the lakeshore going somewhere with great purpose. She walks across the lens of the scope and for a moment she is data in my notebook, before passing back into mystery. (What is she doing down here at the lakeshore? Where is she going with such speed? Why is she alone?) In the sphagnum moss where you sit, the ants go about their business. A bald eagle is sitting behind you in a tree —how long before you noticed? I signed up to do these surveys impulsively seven years ago, and now even if they cancelled the program I’d still be coming out here year after year just to check up on things. Erin Barstow and I are already discussing the routes where we’ll take our infant daughters once they’re big enough to shoulder a pack.
Doug Chadwick was watching the goats one day in the early 1980s when they started war dancing. If tension is building in a group, a goat might opt to shake its horns and leap around
playfully, to lighten the moment. War-dancing is infectious, Chadwick wrote, and when one goat starts it, the entire band soon joins in. On that day, as he described it later,
One big billy now pranced my way and gave a horn-toss close to me…I decided to give a small hop and head-toss myself. It felt kind of good. The billy sidled toward me in a present-threat and then leapt up and spun around one side of me. I didn’t quite know what to do next. I wasn’t in a mood for yielding, but I didn’t want to tempt those horns. Just then a yearling headed down a nearby snowbank, bucking and spinning like a dervish. One by one the rest of the herd took off after him, including the billy and myself, and our troupe continued dancing its way downhill for almost 200 feet in a spray of crystals. A spiraling kid lost its balance and landed on its chin. A nanny spun out onto her side. I kept leaping higher and higher, making one turn, then two turns while I was airborne. It was a magnificent release of tension, I found out, and just plain fun.
Doug Chadwick
About the Author
Genevieve Bennett
Genevieve Bennett lives in Montana with her daughter Marie.
