I see you everywhere (29 page)

We’ve been listening to Doris, all of us, to the frequency that tracks her comings and goings, along with her twins, ever since they left the den last month. She’s the most local of our subjects, hanging out on the near slopes of Gannett. So far the signals have been strong and easy to follow, her forays close and fairly routine. I come out to look for her as often as I can these days, whenever I don’t have to be at the station. I follow a logging road partway up the mountain, then bushwhack almost randomly, stake out a perch and glass the slopes, close yet not too close to the den. Today my persistence paid off.

I’m careful to stay downwind and keep my distance. One thing that keeps me careful is remembering that guy at the conference in Flagstaff who wasn’t. A grizzly sow broke the guy’s collarbone and took off a piece of his jaw, but she left it at that, lesson enough for coming so close to her babies. High summer, a field of flowers blooming their heads off. He told Glas_9780375422751_3p_all_r1.qxp 7/2/08 10:21 AM Page 195
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me the smell of Queen Anne’s lace, even now, fills him with panic. So strange, the things our minds just won’t let go of, the things that loom absurdly large and make us quake with fear. I’m not afraid of the dark, of heights or thunderstorms or solitude. What I’m afraid of is a particular kind of pointlessness. Fear of futility. Futiliphobia. Oh, here’s a laugh. The guy who was mauled? He studies salamanders. And now the bottom half of his face looks like it was hit by a truck and then replaced with part of a dime-store mannequin. Through the binoculars, through all the branches, it’s tough to get a clear, uninterrupted view, but if I could see Doris clearly, she could see me, too. So I’ve hidden myself in a thick stand of lodgepole pine, wedged low between two fat trunks, in a thicket of huckleberry bushes. Berries are months away still, so the bushes don’t interest the bears, not yet. Doris and her female cub are eyeball-deep in that elk, but the male sits off to one side, as if it’s a restaurant and he’s still waiting for a table.
Go
on, little buddy,
I’m thinking.
Pull your scrawny butt up to the counter and
get your order in.
The scent of raw game reaches me in tendrils, though the carcass could be frozen to the ground.

There’s a yin-yang to the climate here in May. A few thousand feet down the mountain, it’s full-glory spring; turning off the main road, I drove through meadows of buttercups, shooting stars, and biscuitroot—

the valley an orgy of pollination. But up here, even as ferns pierce the dead leaves and begin their slow uncoiling, the shady hollows are bright with snow, places the sun will never quite reach. Doris stops gorging herself, just for a minute, to cast a look at her reticent cub and issue a soft, sandpapered bellow, invitation to join the picnic. At last he sidles in next to his mother and tears off a strip of something I’m glad I can’t see in more detail.
There you go,
I cheer him on, so relieved I almost speak.

What would Doris think if she could comprehend the fuss she’s caused, if she could have so much as a mental glimmer of all the paperwork flying around on her account, the way she’s talked about behind her shaggy back, by rangers, biologists, and vets, by mothers with kids Glas_9780375422751_3p_all_r1.qxp 7/2/08 10:21 AM Page 196 196

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on trikes, by Game and Fish bureaucrats sitting at plywood desks in Cheyenne who secretly wouldn’t give a hoot if the Wind River Range became tier upon tier of golf courses, ski resorts, and woo-woo yoga retreats where meals are garnished with Russian caviar (screw the sturgeon) and orchids flown in from Tahiti? Maybe you’d say that what Doris doesn’t know can’t hurt her, but you’d be wrong. Because Doris got her little family in hot water. Now she and her cubs, who are two plus change, maybe on the verge of weaning, maybe not, are probably about to be moved. Moving three grizzlies at once is not a piece of cake. Even two, though we do it if we have to. I’m pushing for them to go soon, July at the latest, to get a firm hold on their new surroundings while it’s still summer. The clock is ticking. The bureaucrats are doing their jerkoff dance. Ever the world may turn.

Sometimes I wonder how I got here, or rather, I wish I could wonder. In fact, the path was fairly straight. When I was little, I loved this TV

show called
Daktari.
Dr. Something (Marsh? Tracy? Wilmerding?) is a noble vet who champions the persecuted wildlife of Africa (that was back when people talked about Africa as if it were a single country, like France or Japan). The noble vet has a cross-eyed lion, a clownish chimp, a jeep with zebra stripes, and the people around him have jolly-ho colonial accents.
(I say there, chap, these bloody poachers must be stopped!)
That’s it, I said to myself, sitting on the family couch with its blue fleur-de-lys upholstery, eating my Cap’n Crunch, trail mix of the sixties. That’s exactly what I’ll do. When I grow up, I’ll take care of wild animals in the wild, not in a zoo.

And can you believe it, that’s what I’ve done? Yet it’s not at all what I expected. This work is to
Daktari
as, say, Newark is to Paris. Last night I was at R.B.’s place (the place he borrows) when his wife called from Sarasota. R.B. is nomadic—takes his dogs to Russia, Alaska, wherever there’s work; big game or conservation, it’s all the same to him—but his wife stays put where life is warm and comfy. That’s how their marriage works. Or works for
her,
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while I was with him. I guess what bothered me, a little, was that he didn’t seem self-conscious about talking to her while I was right there in his kitchen chopping onions. He didn’t make excuses or say he’d call her back. He talked to her for a while, and he laughed a lot, which made me wonder. It’s not that he ever bad-mouths his wife, not that I’m supposed to think he can’t stand her, but sometimes laughing is a proxy for sex. Or it sounds like that. So there I was, hostage to their shared, married amusement, and it began to feel as if I, not Simone, was the distant point of the triangle here. If that’s true, fine, but I’d rather not know. I was silent when R.B. hung up. I could have let him off the hook by changing the subject, but I didn’t. And I couldn’t look at him. He leaned across the counter. “Okay, doll, out with it.”

“Out with what?” I said. “I’m just making a sauce here.”

“You’re jealous.”

“That’s not in my nature,” I said. Which is true. Over the winter, while he was in Brazil, then back in Florida, I didn’t call R.B. once, didn’t wonder where he was, or with what other doll. At blocking things out—some things—I’m better than I used to be. I let him be the one to call, and he did, a few times, telling me he missed me. I think he did, but the calls were more to stake his claim, remind me he’d be back in the spring. For the first time in my life, I preferred being alone to finding someone else. Evenings, if I didn’t go to a bar with Jim or Buzz or Vern (all safe), I’d go back to my trailer and read.

“We were talking about the salon,” he said. “She’s had a bunch of weirdos in this week. One guy walked in and asked if she could shave a hand flipping the bird onto the back of his head. Jesus, the world we live in.”

“Florida,” I said, “is not the world we live in. Well, not me.”

“You
are
jealous.”

I looked at him and smirked. “If I’m jealous of anyone in your life, it’s Rosie and June. They’re the only ones who can kick me out of your bed.”

He laughed. “With my blessing.” Rosie and Junebug ( June when she’s good, Bug when she’s lazy or sulking) are R.B.’s blueticks, from whom Glas_9780375422751_3p_all_r1.qxp 7/2/08 10:21 AM Page 198 198

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he’s basically inseparable, partners in business and crime. They’ve grown to like me, though. They greet me with cold noses and warm tongues every time I show up. They no longer bark, an honest approval that pleases me. R.B. works a pair of bear dogs, too, the ones that do the serious work when he’s here, but they live in a kennel out back. Rosie and June made sure of that.

R.B. leaned over my shoulder to smell the spaghetti sauce. He squeezed my waist, lifting me off the floor just a little, before leaning down to take the big pot from under the counter. I had a flash just then of all the guys’ kitchens I’ve stood in over the past ten years, chopping garlic and onions, drinking wine or beer, exchanging those appetizer kisses, prelude to the meal that is prelude to the bed. Freight train of kitchens, freight train of kisses. For a minute I was at the rail crossing, watching car after car after car pass by, an endless sooty blur. I looked out the window, but the night was too dark to give me a view of anything but me and R.B. behind me, at the sink, staring down into the pot as it filled with water. How much spaghetti, I wondered, have I shared with how many men? I watch Doris and her cubs for an hour before they eat their fill—though they’ll get another meal or two off those bones. Doris sets about covering the carcass, scolding her kids to pitch in. (Her irascible complaints are surely the ursine version of
Who do you think I am, your slave?
) At her mother’s urging, G63, the young female we’ve nicknamed Tipper, drags in a couple of downed branches, kicks up some leaves and icy clods of soil. Her brother, G62, helps out for a few minutes, then sits back and watches, the way he did during most of the feeding. When they’re done, it’s not like you can’t guess there’s an extremely dead, mutilated something under all that debris, but unless you’re an idiot human (a tourist hiker), you know that meal’s been claimed, and you know by what sort of creature. You are outa there.

Doris is both smart and stupid in a way that’s helped put her species on the endangered list. No, I take half of that back: she’s not stupid, no Glas_9780375422751_3p_all_r1.qxp 7/2/08 10:21 AM Page 199
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more than I am. No amount of animal intelligence could enable her to guess, before it’s too late, that the idiots in the fancy chalet-style condos who left a shiny white bag of free food for her to find last Thanksgiving are the same idiots who could get her shot by a ranger (if not by the idiots themselves). You can be smart and doomed all the same. Her only crime was to lead her cubs out of the area we humans have officially spelled out as WIL-DER-NESS (that is, what we’ve ordained as her rightful territory) and into a new condo complex, built to look out on, and so flirt with, said wilderness. From a mile away, Doris could probably smell the putrid garbage that some guy forgot to load into the arse of some aircraft carrier masquerading as a car. Doris was understandably delighted. She had kids to feed, to fatten for a threemonth nap. By the time Buzz, Vern, and I made it over there, responding to a hysterical phone call from yet another idiot human, the bears were reveling in supermarket offal. They made off quickly when they saw the truck coming toward them. G63 lumbered away with a Chips Ahoy bag in her teeth; her brother, as he followed, tossed aside a large yogurt container. That’s how they became Tipper and Danny. Once we name our subjects, they’re like family. When we talk about them at the station, a stranger would assume we’re gossiping about a bunch of coworkers or cousins. Doris got her name before the cubs were born, well before I came. Buzz tells me that after they’d collared her, when they released her and she was stumbling, woozy from drugs, back into the woods, Sheldon remarked that she had the figure and bearing of a 1960s sitcom housewife. “Your typical Mabel or Doris,” he said. Because she’s one of those grizzlies with a golden coat, Doris stuck. Our golden girl, Buzz calls her. She’s his favorite.

Sheldon is the team vet. He’s a slick guy with a full head of surferblond hair, and he just reeks of trust fund (the logos on his shirts alone, forget the second house on Columbia Gorge). It’s no secret he regards the biologists on the team as less educated, less skilled, and probably less evolved. (That would be me, Buzz, and Jim; also Vern, who’s a plant guy Glas_9780375422751_3p_all_r1.qxp 7/2/08 10:21 AM Page 200 200

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but sometimes joins us if we need a little extra muscle in the field.) Or maybe he just feels outnumbered.

One visit from a bear to a condo might rank as a misdemeanor, but repeat visits—even without hysterical complaints—amount to felony. Doris, who has a perfectly logical head on her shoulders, was back at the condo the very next day, cubs in tow. That time, there was no loot to be had, and maybe she’d have wandered back to the woods without being noticed, except that she happened to show up when a couple of human cubs were riding their bikes in the driveway. She made an instant retreat—

but that was a close call no one wants to replicate. Buzz and Jim decided we’d give her the winter to develop a little amnesia. We badly want bears in this range; there’s plenty of space for a larger population down here, but not if they get a taste for Twinkies and fish sticks. The idea was, if Doris returned to the condos this spring, then we’d send her north. Hence our nosy vigilance since she’s emerged from her den.

During their first summer, the two cubs were hard to tell apart by sight. Whenever we checked in on Doris, whose signal showed up clearly for most of that season, there’d be talk about whether we should tag and collar the cubs while they were small. Sheldon thinks a radio collar turns a bear into a sitting duck for poachers, but he would never dare say so to Marty Cone, our man in Cheyenne. Marty’s attitude seems to be that every mammal in every national park should wear a radio. Tuning in, on one of our routine flyovers, would be like surfing the AM dial at rush hour on the San Diego Freeway. Marty’s the anal kind of guy who probably wishes we could stamp them all with barcodes, every squirrel, cougar, coyote, and mouse. “I need to see more organization,” Marty is fond of saying, but he says this over the phone, from the tasteless comfort of his office, when he can’t
see
a damn thing out here where the real work takes place. To assuage our pride, we call him Conehead, and whenever I speak to him, I picture him wearing the skimpy kidney-brown macramé