The Carry Home (26 page)

When I finally donned my pack that morning I was barely running on one cylinder, dreading the thought of walking fourteen miles in eighty-degree heat. To make matters worse, Jane, despite having a good thousand miles on the boots she was wearing, developed a bizarre set of blisters. She moved down the trail like someone walking on hot coals. Together we looked like something a grizzly might drag out of a snowbank in the April thaw.

Jim and Nancy agreed, given our sluggish pace, to make a quick sprint to the trailhead, where they'd take our car to retrieve their van, then return with both vehicles to pick us up. An hour or so after they left us, the manager of the Silver Tip guest ranch drove up in a horse-drawn wagon, heading the other direction. Next to us he halted.

“Are you the two people dying on the trail?”

We hit the trailhead just as darkness was falling, weary as hell but in high spirits. We'd just taken off our packs and settled
into lounge mode, when Jane said she thought it would be really funny if I mooned Jim and Nancy as they returned with the vehicles. I thought it was a great idea.

After about twenty minutes, Jane pegged the lights coming up the road as those of our car. Right according to plan, I turned and dropped my hiking shorts, bending over and waiting for the horn to honk and the laughter to begin. The next thing I heard was a window being rolled down, then a strange woman's voice: “Nice cleavage. But do I know you?” It was two women from Colorado pulling over to ask if we knew of any camping sites nearby. Of course my standing as a source of reliable information was compromised. After mumbling an apology, I offered what I knew as far as campgrounds and prayed they'd leave quickly, which they did. Jane found the episode incredibly funny—hilarious, really, judging by the fits of laughter I could hear coming from her the entire time I was struggling to dispense campground information. For years afterward she could pull herself out of a bad mood just by thinking about it.

AT REST IN YELLOWSTONE

T
he journey was winding down. Just one more night in the backcountry. With every passing hour, I found myself wishing it wasn't coming to an end. I wanted to keep going, keep walking through Yellowstone for another week or two or three, until the snows of autumn pushed me home. Tom asked if I had any worries about reaching this point, about reaching the end. But by then I'd had a strong glimpse of the life I knew Jane would want for me. I was at the point, I told him, where maybe it was less important to imagine my eyes and ears and nose and skin as portals for her to experience the world, as I did in northern
Canada, than to see them as doorways for making my own way back among the living.

The national park's nature school, known as Expedition: Yellowstone!, was Jane's favorite teaching job—a nearly perfect fit, where kids came brilliantly uncorked by a land beyond their wildest imaginings. It was also a serious classroom. Fourth, fifth, and sixth graders from schools around the country spent months back home learning about the park, and then they boarded busses and rolled off for Yellowstone to see it for themselves. Their experiences were grounded in the latest research of bird and wolf and bear and bison biologists, geologists and volcanologists, plant scientists, historians.

There's nothing better, Jane used to say, than seeing the face of a ten-year-old fresh out of bed at the Buffalo Ranch, walking out to find a pack of wolves cruising up the valley a mere three hundred yards away. Or being high up on Specimen Ridge, standing by as a young boy closes his eyes and runs his fingers over the stone skin of a petrified tree. She worked with incredibly talented people at Expedition: Yellowstone!, many who greatly deepened her own knowledge of ecology and natural history. She'd grown more confident here, able to hatch teachable moments wherever she was, night or day. And like the kids, she too got to wake up to bison ambling up the valley, watch bull elk battle for harems, see pronghorn calves go in a matter of days from wobbly legs to lightning speed.

A few months ago I found a big manila envelope in her office where she kept letters from her students, some of whom
kept in touch with her well into their teen years.
Dear Ranger Jane
, wrote Rod from Denver.
Yellowstone is the most awesome place ever. I loved the hikes. Do bison ever need doctors? When I grow up I'm going to be a veterinarian
. Or from Shelly in Bozeman:
Dear Ranger Jane, Thanks for all the neat things you taught us. I liked the web of life game best. I had a dream about geysers. I was sad when I woke up and I wasn't really there
.

Her job in Yellowstone occurred across four months of the year, two of them in spring and two in fall. On her days off, which came in blocks of three, in the early weeks of autumn, either I'd go to Yellowstone or she'd drive two hours back across the Beartooths to Red Lodge. But by October, and continuing through the entire spring season, the Beartooth Highway was closed, which meant one of us faced a five-hour commute. So instead we often met halfway. In September and early October, we showed up with loaded backpacks to hike into the wilderness for a couple days, often near Becker Lake. In early spring we came with skis and chili and bourbon, heading off to some backcountry cabin on the Boulder River or Mill Creek or the Crazy Mountains.

It was hard, the two of us being apart so much, a problem made worse by my own comings and goings. On the weekends she spent in Red Lodge, there was always way too much to do: paying bills, working on the house, doing laundry, mowing the lawn, buying toilet paper, seeing the dentist. But it was different on those rendezvous in the backcountry. By then we'd been together more than a dozen years. We'd struggled through times of little money, helped each other when we were sick, tended
friendships, stood together and watched parents suffering and dying. And because of all that, when we got to the outback, we slipped into the relationship with barely a ripple.

A
SHORT WALK FROM
W
OLVERINE
C
REEK, WHERE
T
OM
, B
RIAN
,
and I made our next-to-last camp, the trail came to an abrupt end, obliterated by fallen timber, leaving us to head off cross-country in the general direction of the northern border of Yellowstone. To get there meant first climbing a sharp divide toward Lost Creek. The bad news: it was covered with the mother of blowdowns. There's nothing so tiring, nothing so sure to bring a hiker to the edge of exhaustion, than a blowdown in a mature conifer forest. Years after the fires roared through, when the winds of spring and then autumn were blowing, trees began toppling into a vast hodgepodge of pick-up sticks. Most fell with massive root systems intact, which held the bases of the fallen trunks four to six feet off the ground. Going anywhere meant an endless series of zigzags, mostly up steep inclines. Where the fallen trees were low enough to the ground, we slid over them, doing our best not to come off the other side unbalanced by the packs. Sometimes we clambered up onto the biggest trees—those not spiked with lines of branches—then walked their trunks above the down timber, happy to make forty or fifty feet at a time. Sometimes we crawled. It took nearly two hours to make the first half mile.

As we finally topped the ridge, our hearts sank to find the
slopes on the other side covered with blowdown as far as the eye could see. Broad-shouldered Cutoff Mountain rose two thousand feet above us, the entire cloak of forest that once covered its steep slopes completely burned and toppled, leaving the peak looking more rugged and forbidding than ever. Though we started the day with full bottles of water, there was little left, and from where we were, water was a long way away. Needing to reach the banks of Lost Creek, we headed first toward a ravine lying to the northwest. For no particular reason, though, at the last minute, that choice felt wrong. So I turned the party, and we made our way across still more blowdown toward a similar draw to the southwest. After two hundred yards of the usual brutal going, against all odds, we stumbled across the top end of a section of trail recently cleared by a cutting crew; by no small miracle, it ran all the way to Lost Creek.

Our feet hot and swollen, our tongues thick, we damn near skipped to the place where the trail crossed the creek, kicking off our boots and peeling off our shirts and shorts to submerge ourselves in the foot-deep water. Each of us was wearing an impressive collection of cuts on our legs, some of them still bleeding. I'd been acting as the lunch cook for the expedition, and I pulled out the last of our best ingredients, making fat tortilla wraps out of hard salami and cheddar cheese spiced with yellow mustard. We sat in the shade like schoolboys playing hooky, recounting with enthusiasm our recent trials. When we moved again, it was on clear trails, walking another few miles before setting up camp, near dark, at the border of the park.

Though we didn't know it at the time, this northern line of Yellowstone was about to become ground zero for a sorry side effect of wolf management being given to the states—a handoff that occurred when the animals were taken off the endangered species list just the year before. Wolf hunting had recently become legal. And time and again, packs who were spending nearly all of their days in the park would wander for brief moments across the boundary; having never learned to recognize humans as threats, they would stand a mere hundred or so yards away from the hunters, wearing curious looks on their faces as the gun barrels were leveled. Especially prized by the shooters would be alpha males and females—easy to spot, since they were often the only ones in a pack wearing collars. Fish-in-a-barrel shooting at its finest.

The effect on the population of the park's wolves would be devastating. In a single year, from 2012 to 2013, the population would drop 25 percent, in large part thanks to these reckless wolf-harvest policies of the states. Of course the problem could be eased by establishing so-called “sub-quota” zones along the border, buffer areas where fewer wolves could be taken. But Montana's politicians would have none of it. Even once-respectable organizations like the Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation would drink the Kool-Aid, ignoring the fact that wolves and elk had coexisted here in relative stability for thousands of years.

What is it, anyway, that renders this creature, arguably more than any other, so much bigger than life? For some it's a symbol of all that's wrong with America, while for others, including me,
it's a symbol of what's most right. Yet all of us seem happy to ignore the fact that wolves are just another animal—much like us, another predator—doing their level best to make a living in a hard, hard world. For all the attributions of wolves as “super killers” or as animals that “kill for fun,” the average lifespan of a Yellowstone wolf is only five years—partly because of territorial disputes and occasional waves of disease, but also because bringing down elk or bison is such a challenge that a lot of them end up dying in the attempt. For every time a park wolf pack brings down a prey animal, on four other occasions, their attempts fail.

What the wolf has done is to give us a more complete, more functional Yellowstone. Thanks to wolves, the grasses on the northern range greatly improved, as elk numbers fell to more sustainable levels. What's more, those same elk shucked their old habits of hanging out in streamside areas where predators can get the jump on them; as a result, there was an enormous increase in beaver colonies on the northern range. Those beavers, in turn, who do so love to dam upstream channels, created habitat for the return of everything from yellow and Wilson's warblers to willow flycatchers and fox sparrows. Grizzly bears, meanwhile, facing multiple food challenges from a changing climate—from that drop in whitebark pine nuts to the dwindling supply of spawning trout in drought-ravaged streams—routinely filch the kills that wolves make, thus scoring dinners of their own. And on, and on, and on it goes.

When wolves were brought home to Yellowstone in 1995—four decades after the brilliant Aldo Leopold called for the animal
to be restored to the park—polls suggested the vast majority of Americans, no matter their political stripes, welcomed the event with open arms. And yet even a conservation project as splashy as this one, covered by thousands of media outlets around the world, would—at least outside of wolf territory—soon drop out of public sight. Maybe in some future generation, when healthy wild ecosystems like this one are even more spectacularly rare, wolves will be able to garner more steadfast support. Maybe then we'll find the resolve to say no to those who would binge-slaughter America's wildlife to show their fury at a world that seems hell-bent on leaving them behind. In the meantime, unlike many other species, wolves are more than smart enough, more than hearty enough to survive here in Yellowstone. Even as their kin are shot to pieces a stone's throw from the park's border.