One man’s wilderness (45 page)

I beached the canoe high on the gravel, turned it bottomside-up, and tied it fast to a willow clump. Squadrons of gnats and mosquitoes were waiting to pounce on me, whining and biting. Bandanna knotted around my throat, headnet, cotton gloves, ammunition bag, and walking stick, I set out along the stony creek bottom.

Up ahead there was something brown and out of place. No rocks that size in the area. Through the binoculars I made out a high rack. What was a bull caribou doing down here where not a breath of air was stirring? I kept some brush clumps between us as I stalked closer. At less than 100 yards away I ran out of cover, so I just stayed put and watched him.

Insects were whirling around me like sawdust blown from a power saw. They were crawling over each other on my shirt and piling up on my gloves. The bull also was having a battle with the tiny fiends, stomping and shaking, twisting and turning and shivering his hide, lying down and getting back up again. He was rubbing his antler tips with his hind foot, flicking his ears, shaking his antlers violently—no rest at all.

Why doesn’t he climb to a breeze or take a swim? Anything but stand and fight something he can’t hope to kill or scare away. Well, if he didn’t have better sense, maybe I could force his hand. With a yell and a waving of arms, I spooked him. He struck an almost dumbfounded pose for an instant and urinated. Then he threw his antlers back and off he clattered over the stones, eyes bulging, nostrils flaring, tail upright, and flashing white.

Away we go! Good luck to you, old boy.

I left the creek bed and climbed up through the spruce timber, over pillowy hummocks of sphagnum moss. A headnet is not to my liking while traveling, but a must today with the bugs as thick as they were. I stopped to examine a worn game trail that crossed my route. There has been very little traffic along it recently.

Out of the spruce, I climbed steeply through the cottonwoods and the high-bush cranberry and the hellebore to the foot of the big rockface. I picked my way up and across it, keeping my body hugged against the granite and digging fingers into the handholds of the crevices.

One bad step and I would keep right on going down the mountain, but risk now and then is good for a man. Makes him come alive and tunes his body to a greater efficiency. Finally up and over the rock to the low bushes where fat blueberries were forming on the leafy twigs. Off to the left was the thin stream of the waterfall spilling over the black rim in a long drop to the circular pool below.

The steady ascent along the slope of the canyon, higher and higher. The chittering alarm of ground squirrels as they flicked away and did quick about-faces to peer from out the rocks.

Very few bugs now. It was a relief to shed the headnet and the gloves. Here were the first forget-me-nots of the season, some petaled as blue as the sky and golden centered, and some with pink flowers mixed into the bouquet. I stopped now and then to scoop a palmful of frosty water to my lips. There’s no water in the world like that born in the high country.

Sheep droppings began to appear. Up, up, up to the big pasture that is such a pleasure to travel, with its slopes on either side rich with flowers. Orange, yellow, pink, blue, and white, dabs and smears of color like bright paints against the palettes of grass and moss. A cool breeze was stirring down from across distant glaciers. The gates of heaven are near.

Two ewes were skylined on the rimrock as I headed for my lookout knob in the upper pasture on Allen Mountain. Through the lenses I could see the beige coloration on their backs and flanks, the coal-black eyes peering out of their white faces as they studied the stranger on their mountain. They were shedding their heavy coats of winter.

Rags of fog now. The wisps blown on a damp wind from out of the snowfields, curling, spreading, disappearing. Finally, there it was, my observatory among the black boulders; two hours from the lowlands. No wonder the eagle soars the high places. Far below was the valley of Emerson Creek, with its many waterfalls in feeder streams that tumbled their courses from the snow saddle in the mists. Peaks all around me, some granite-ribbed and snow-blotched, some stabbing up starkly on either side of the glacier that curved between them like a great white, blue-rutted highway. Others were off in the direction of the lower lake, huge mounds of marble cake streaked in green shadows, all with a regal bearing that awed a man in their presence.

I unloaded my gear from the pouches of the ammunition bag, set up the scope on the tripod, and settled into the best seat in the house.

A pair of pipits were the first performers. They inspected the rocks that jutted out of the grasses behind, bobbing their tails constantly in the wind and flying short distances now and then to flash their white tail-feathers.

I trained the scope on what looked like a small mining operation in the slope across the valley. Bear diggings. Maybe all that energy pays off if the bear breaks into the bedroom. I could picture him busting into the main chamber of the den, ground squirrels going in all directions, and that shaggy intruder swatting with both forefeet, trying to scoop one up in his jaws.

Not too far away I spotted a mother brown bear with three cubs. It was probably the same family I had seen at different times during the spring. The cubs had grown and were lighter in color on their backs. The old sow was almost blonde, with her lower legs a dark brown. She was rounded out like a cask. Must be lots of vitamins along those slopes.

The bears were working slowly up country through the green alpine meadows. When they reached the creek, the old girl splashed out into a pool below a waterfall and appeared to take a bath while the cubs went at it in a free-for-all on the bank. All three were never in the hassle at the same time. The third one always stood aside, anxious to take on the winner.

I watched the ravens rising and floating and falling in and out of the mist
above the crags that reared from the great snowfield. Their whoops and guttural yelps sounded as though they were coming over an amplifier in the vast stillness. They have a lot to talk about.

In the field of the big lens I picked up a set of bleached caribou antlers along the creek bottom. They were hitched together with a section of skull, and could not have been shed. I saw no other signs of bones about, so the bull had not just died there. Some hunter probably decided the antlers were too heavy to pack back to camp. I must examine them up close sometime. I might pack them back to the cabin and put them into my pile of antler finds.

Where were the caribou? Not one could I pick up at first. Then I saw a band of bulls on a high slope, some lying down chewing their cuds, others swaying their antlers, pulling at willow branches and dropping their heads now and then to graze along the ground. They looked in prime shape, white-bellied, white-bibbed, a mahogany chocolate sheen along the flanks and back. Some showed gray on their necks. These would wear those handsome white capes in late August and September.

I tried to examine one bull in particular through the 60-power eyepiece. His antlers were massive. On each side a branch curved out in back where none of the other racks did. He was double-shoveled. Those horizontal brow-palms seemed to match perfectly. Over and over again I tried to count his points, but he would move and I would lose my place and have to begin again. Forty-two to forty-five, I figured. They were magnificent to view, those heavy-beamed boughs of bone against the green of the slope. A trophy hunter would leave his wife for a head like that one.

There were many bands of sheep, ewes, and lambs scattered here and there. On a high pasture like an oasis in a desert of rocks, I spotted six big rams on Black Mountain. Two had better than a full curl. They were in their chosen isolation, wild mountain dandies living high off the grass away from the women and the kids.

Boulders of every size and shape showed in the rock slides. Some were splotched with orange lichens, some covered with growths that resembled
dried flakes of leather. Others appeared as though smeared in places with brush swipes of red lead. Still others were just clean, many-sided chunks of granite. I had picked my way across those jumbles many times, always with the thought of stepping on the wrong rock, the key rock in the pile, and starting the whole slope into motion. Or slipping and jamming my foot down hard into a tapered space and not being able to pull it out again. Either way a man would have to settle with the Lord right there on the mountain.

Close at hand the mosses and grasses were full of tiny flowers. It is another world of beauty. The more I see as I sit here among the rocks, the more I wonder about what I am not seeing. Mine is only surface vision and poor at that, even with the powerful eye on the tripod and two others looped about my neck.

A flickering movement off to my left. The stones seemed to move, and turned into a mother ptarmigan and her brood, the young not fully grown but brown as their mother in her plumage of summer. They were feeding, huddled like chickens as they worked along the slope.

I checked on the bear family again. They were having lunch. The old sow was sprawled half on her back with the cubs gathered around her. They didn’t take very long. Then they all bedded down for a nap, the cubs a study in sleeping positions—on their backs, legs in the air, on their sides as if flung there limp and lifeless. The old mother stretched out on her belly, head on her forepaws, claws agleam, seemingly dead to the world, but I knew only too well how fast she could come alive if the wind brought the man scent to her.

Clouds piled on the tops of some far peaks. A man could lose himself up there. I munched on my biscuit sandwiches, my eye following the flight of an eagle below. His white head and tail caught the sun as he searched beneath him. Sailing and circling, the wind currents lifting, gently buffeting him as he soared.

Everywhere I looked was fascination. Those great masses of broken rock that the mountain sheep bounced over as lightly as if on level ground. Chunks of the peaks falling away over the years had made these treacherous accumulations, like enormous tailing piles of giant prospectors.

Gleaming snowfields showed not a sign of a track. They would be blinding
to walk across in the bright sun. And all those beautiful waterfalls, some dropping from the high buttresses like thin streams of molten silver and seeming to vanish in midair. Others along the creek below spilled in wide, bright aprons between banks as green as new leaves.

It was time to leave, so I picked up my walking stick. I had taken a long look into the heart of the high places and felt like a man inspired by a sermon that came to me firsthand, that came out of the sky and the many moods of the mountains.

When a man climbs high it always seems an amazement, as he starts down, to realize the distance he has covered. Going down is no easier than going up. It is more treacherous and you must be careful of your momentum. You feel the play of different muscles along your thighs and your shin bones as you jolt your way down the mountain.

I crossed the big pasture and took several sips of water from the trickles that made music over the stones—like a wine-taster not being able to decide which vintage was best. Down through the canyon with the rock-strewn slopes on either side and finally, just above where the canyon walls ran together, the triangular eye of turquoise that was the lake peered up at me.

A brief stop at the Eagle’s Back, a dizzy jut of granite on the mid-slope of Falls Mountain. Climbing out on it, I stood feeling suspended over the entire upper lake that gleamed beneath in robin’s egg blue. On the far side was the warm glow of logs that is home—the place I wanted to leave in the morning and the place I wanted to return to at the close of the day.

I thought I would just sit for a spell and glass the timbered bottom and the edges of the big cottonwood park for a glimpse of my giant bull. I might be lucky enough to catch him in the open. At one point I thought I saw a movement, a form that slowly changed shade, but a prolonged watch of the area revealed nothing more. I would check it out closer on the way down. I was happy that the temperature had dropped and the bugs were not as active as before. I was unhappy, though, that I couldn’t find my walking stick when I started on down.

I broke out into the willows that grew around the edges of the cottonwoods. There were no fresh moose droppings or tracks. But then I came to a clump of cow parsnips freshly cropped and the grasses mashed around them.

Funny, I thought, I have never known a moose to eat this plant. I looked about. The leaves of the cottonwoods quivered against the sky. Suddenly the brush to my right rustled and crashed. I spun, expecting to see the bull getting up out of his bunk—and every hair on my head stabbed electricity into my skull.

A huge brown bear was coming head on, bounding through the willow clumps not fifty feet away! His head looked as broad as a bulldozer blade. I threw up my arms and yelled. That was all I could think to do.

On he came, and I thought, “At last you’ve done it, nothing can save you now.” I was stumbling as I retreated in terror, shouting.

I tripped and fell on my back. Instinctively I started kicking at the great broad head as it burst through the willow leaves. And then as he loomed over me, a strange thing happened. The air whooshed out of him as he switched ends. Off he went up the slope, bunching his huge bulk, climbing hard, and showering stones. Not once did he look back.

I was shouting, encouraging him in his flight. What seconds before had seemed so terrifying was now almost comical. What had saved my skin?