The Book of Yaak (11 page)

Grizzlies, like people, live in cultures, handing down behavioral information about their home—where to eat, when to travel, where to hibernate, where to hide—from generation to generation. Cubs typically stay with their mother for three years, so the Forest Service is essentially asking pregnant grizzlies to move, and even worse, is asking subadult bears, out on their own for the first time, to be able to seek out and adapt to these scattered-about, 70 percent-effective
displacement compartments.

So many of the corridors between wild cores are not yet protected; they exist tenuously. One summer day I find myself sitting in a field up in the Yaak, barefooted with two local conservationists, Chip Clark and Jesse Sedler, and a third man, Evan Frost of the Greater Ecosystems Alliance, out of Bellingham, Washington. Evan has come here because he recognizes the vital location of Yaak—that it is the only logical corridor between the Rockies and the Northwest; and that it is 011 the ropes, that it won't last another ten years if we don't do something
now.

We're talking about how absolutely critical it is to have corridors; we're discussing creeks in Yaak, elk wintering flats, grizzly denning areas, wolf runways....

Like the trappers and mountain men who first came to this country almost two hundred years ago, we're describing routes and passes—special places that are a long journey away through wild, rugged country. Evan's listing the valleys to cross, the rivers to get from here to the Pacific Northwest. It's a short list, and you're there: fresh, new genes. Meanwhile, Jesse and I are diagramming how a wandering wolf could come out of Canada, down through Yaak, and head all the way to Mexico.
If.

We're sitting there in the late-summer sun, surrounded by cool dark trees. Clearcuts have scarred our valley, made it unattractive to humans, but there are still some cores left.

Evan and Chip and Jesse are spreading out mylar sheets to overlay on maps of the Yaak, computer generated maps that show remaining stands of old growth—
stability
—and grizzly radio-collar telemetry locations, and polygon mapping of elk herd movements. All this has been put together by Jesse in his spare time on a borrowed computer, data gotten from cruising the valley on his old motorcycle with a busted-out headlight, like Easy Rider, dodging deer in the dusk; and data gotten from Chip, too, during his and Jesse's stand examinations for the Forest Service.

People are going to shoot the big things, for as long as they're around, because, quite simply, people are afraid of big things. They assume that the big things are as full of the same kinds of hate and anger that our own species is, and so wherever there are roads into the wilderness, people all too often shoot and kill these big things when they see them.

The wolf that was killed in Yellowstone in 1994—the first known wolf to make it back down to the park on its own in over sixty years—was DNA-tested and discovered to have come directly from Montana's Ninemile Valley—or, if not, then a direct relative of that pack's ancestry, which started out from Canada and Montana's Glacier/Pleasant Valley country, up in this dark wooded part of the state.

All through the Rockies, there is a clanging discordance resulting from our clumsy activities. It's a disruption of harmony and grace; it's a sound such as you might hear were you to drop a frozen turkey from an airplane onto a piano, disrupting the composer's performance. I can barely even talk about the woodland caribou. They used to be all through the upper part of this valley, but now we have only one lonely bull that wanders over every few years during breeding season, sniffing the ancient scent of the soil, old migration corridors, where once so many of his kind lived. (There are about twenty-five of them left over in the Idaho panhandle, about thirty miles away....)

He's somewhat of an embarrassment the way he keeps hanging on (one year he showed up on the Bonners Ferry golf course). Neither the state nor the feds will list the woodland caribou as an endangered species in Montana, and I get the feeling they're all wishing he'd hurry up and die, and that the other two dozen would go ahead and kick off too, so that the problem would just go away. In several old barns throughout the northern Rockies, you can find caribou antlers and skulls mounted in the lofts, but they're old, almost as old, in some ways, as the dinosaurs.

Another species at the edge of extinction is the bull trout, a little-known fish still found in northwestern Montana. The bull trout doesn't run to the ocean, but it's just as vulnerable to fragmentation as if it did. They are definitely top of the line carnivores, as far as fish go, and by nature, by design, they are a migratory species, like just about every other big thing in the mountains. Bull trout live in deep lakes, but then travel up into the tributaries to spawn in the fall, sometimes traveling (when dams and fishermen will allow it) as far as 160 miles. They don't die after spawning, however; they return to their lake. Sometimes they live to be as old as ten years; perhaps in the past, say some biologists, they lived even longer.

They can get as large as twenty-five pounds. Though I've never seen one, I've sat on the banks of the North Fork of the Flathead in September and October, aspens and mountain ash ablaze with fluttering gold against a blue sky, and I've stared long and hard, watching for one of the twenty-pounders to go cruising slowly upstream, the sight of which in the shallow stretches of the river, on the way up into Canada, would be as improbable as that of a submarine....

To keep from putting all their eggs in one basket, the bull trout have evolved so that some of them spawn every other year, while others spawn every third year, so that if there is a drought, or a fire, or some-such, a whole lake's population will not have been lost; there'll be some survivors back in camp who didn't make the journey that year.

There is a fine-tuned, ringing sound of quiet and almost inexplicable harmony up here; but you can barely hear it now, over the sound of the sawing, bulldozing, hacking....

Once the bull trout have made their great cruise through the forest, beneath cool cedars and across shallows (their huge humped backs tingling with fear, perhaps, at the knowledge of ospreys and eagles above—traveling at night, perhaps, under the moon, past coyotes, lynx and lions)—once they've made it up to the creek's headwaters, the cool springs and gravel where they are to dig their redd and lay their eggs, they do so with a strength and passion that I someday hope to see. They bury their eggs a foot and a half deep, excavating (with their tails and blunt heads) a redd that is roughly the size of a pickup bed.

The eggs are fertilized; and then, beneath those gold larch trees, the red cliffside maples, and the aspen-blaze, with the days growing colder (higher oxygen content), the bull trout head back downstream, coasting, to their lake.

The fry are born around or on January first. They don't come out of the gravel after hatching; they wait until spring (225 days after conception) for that. But such is their fury, their lust to enter the system, the harmony, that even as immature fry they are predators; they'll roam around under the gravel and feed on anything unlucky enough to get in their way.

They remain in their river for one to three years, until they're about seven inches long, before beginning their migration down to the lake they can taste and smell and feel and hear: the lake they have never seen or been to, but which is their home, which has always been their home. These days there is an introduced species, lake trout, in those lakes, which eat the young native bull trout with a vengeance upon their arrival, but still the bull trout migrate, drawn by the music.

What's hurting them, beyond our introduction of lake trout into the system? Roads, as ever; fragmentation. The dwindling of clean rivers. Sedimentation from road building, and from large clearcuts on the steep sides of mountains, so that the soil washes straight into the creeks and rivers, prevents the eggs from being fertilized. Even though the Yaak River is still clear, for example, there's about a quarter-inch of sediment covering the best spawning eddies. When I ask a biologist what can be done to save the giant trout, he tells me that "the answer loud and clear is habitat protection."

There are bull trout in the Yaak, the biologist says, "less than twenty of them"—but they're there. He won't let me use his name. He tells me the name of a creek and the first image that comes to mind is the scabrous lunar-gray clear-cuts perched on, and sliding from, the steep slopes overlooking that creek. Less than twenty bull trout—maybe only ten or so each year—cut off by Libby Dam to the north, and by sedimentation downstream—moving back and forth through the autumns, as they have through the millennia—back and forth, back and forth, nature around them getting smaller and smaller in every eddy, in every deep pool.

"I've got this theory," I tell the biologist, "that even though the populations in Yaak are down to low numbers, they're maybe a hundred times more important, genetically, than populations that have higher densities. T hat for these individuals to have survived in the face of such heavy development, they must have supergenes, survivors' genes—and should be saved at all costs. I believe their genes can save the other populations."

I'm not a scientist any more, and I probably never was a very good one. Too dreamy. I respect scientists. But I feel like we use different languages sometimes, even when speaking about the same thing, so you can imagine my relief when the biologist says, "Exactly!" to my goofy survivor's theory. "The fish up in that creek are high-grade ore," he says. "As good as gold."

And hatcheries are 110 way to protect that highly evolved speciation, that lovely, ringing diversity.

"You can't reproduce the wild," he says, speaking my language. "T here is no substitute for the wild."

The intricacy of the thing we're stumbling over, sawing to pieces, digging up and flooding, or draining; the harmony of what existed in the Rockies, before we got hold of the piano. The big things help us understand the small things. The big things are a gift to us, bequested to us from the foundation of all the small things below, the background and bedrock that lifts the big things up before us and sends them on their way through the mountains, so that an understanding of and appreciation for the wild will be visible to us even before our dull-lidded, quickly numbing gaze....

Individuals; genes.
The more numb we become, the louder nature seems to play, trying valiantly to get our attention—not to save itself, so much as to rescue
us.
That caribou down on the golf course in Bonners Ferry. The big things are trying to teach us intricacy, trying to show us, on the broadest possible scale, that we've messed up.

The wolf biologist Mike Jimenez tells of a lone male wolf he followed down in Idaho, the first known wolf in that state in a long damn time. Jimenez refers to that wolf as "a superindividual," one with those survivor's genes, as good as gold.

Hunting on his own, the wolf was bringing down adult moose, which was a thing I had not thought possible, and which I don't readily understand, when deer and elk were also available.

It's almost as if that wolf was trying to say something, trying to show something: and perhaps speaking not just to us, but to the spirit of the woods, the spirit of the bigness that is being lost.

The animals are not resting—the grizzly families being evacuated from GBHMU to GBHMU, and the lone wolves padding hundreds of miles at a time, from Canada to Yellowstone in a single year.... If they're not resting, why should we, who claim also to be bound up with them in the weave, take our rest? Any good work that is going to be done—any conservation biology that is to take place must happen now, this year, these next few years. We can rest only after we make a good resting spot.

"When despair for the world grows in me," Wendell Berry writes in his poem
The Peace of Wild Things,

and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children's lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

The white sturgeon, a river monster weighing up to one thousand pounds, is also found up here at the edge of my valley, in the Kootenai River.

I want to mention that sturgeon haven't reproduced in the wild in over twenty years—not since the Libby Dam went in (flooding the once-wild Ural Valley). I want to mention that all the sturgeon in the Kootenai are a population of ancient ones, with no juveniles, and that, like the one caribou, the dozen or more bull trout, and Yaak's handful of grizzlies, they aren't yet listed as endangered species. I want to tell how it is my dream to put on a scuba tank and mask and swim down the Kootenai River until I come upon one of the old giants, one of the thousand-pounders, as he or she rests on the bottom, its belly flat against the earth, feeling, perhaps, the last of those harmonics, the ones that mandate it to be big in this country, to be big or die, but not to compromise....

How messed up is Yellowstone? One statistic says it better—or worse—than anything. Gold mines, clearcuts, irrigation projects, oil and gas leases, road building, livestock grazing, hydropower construction and that damn Imax-Zoo ring the park, preventing any sustained or substantial migration corridors into or out of the park; once more an island, a single loud discordant
clang
in what used to be a harmony. The biologist John Weaver lays this on us: that 67 percent of human-caused grizzly mortalities in the Greater Yellowstone ecosystem have occurred on 1 percent of the land—the private lands surrounding the park, choke-holding the park.

I hike up a steep timbered hill to a special spot I know of in the Yaak. It's at the edge of one of those roadless areas that we have to save, that we must start with, if any of this is going to work. It's springtime, and I've just read David Quammen's disturbing essay on the mysterious worldwide demise of amphibians, and how he proposed it may not be ultraviolet or global warming hijinks at all, but something more basic: habitat fragmentation, even at the level of amphibians. And it's never really occurred to me before, what frogs and salamanders do to maintain genetic viabilities, genetic vigor. A grizzly or a wolf can always get up and go, but how far, really, can a frog go, whether by flood (over the dam's spillway, or down the sedimented creek) or across the road? It's a whole new problem to brood about.