Yellowstone Wolf Project.

I. Big Sexy
 From Bozeman to Gardiner, the highways were slicked black by a late
winter storm, and I noticed how thin Regina had grown from long hours,
eating little, the new hole she'd carved into her belt using the
tip of a hunting knife, then the one-street town,
then the northern entrance to Yellowstone, its high arch, bull and cow
elk suffering scabies, orange lichen
painting a cluster of boulders from a two-year-old rockslide. I told her
about the life-sized bronze statue of a grizzly in Bozeman's
airport lobby, reared up
and snarling like a movie bear--scripted, unnatural. Up ahead, a group
of wolf watchers, wolf paparazzi, had gathered at a turnout, and she
pulled over so I could look
through high-powered zoom and see the first free wolf of my life,
watched him nap on a hillside in Wyoming, belly full from a recent kill,
nicknamed: Big Sexy.
           II. At the Kill Site
We spent the morning dodging huge domelike patties of bison dung
roasting golden brown along the path, hiked across rollers of scrubland
sage and crumbled
escarpments, followed a single set of wolf tracks for hours. Once, in a
low valley next to a river bend, she pointed out a yellow flower wet
with snowmelt,
and suddenly they were everywhere they hadn't been before. I
remember the first that we saw of the cow elk carcass was a rumen pile,
stomach ripped out
and dragged clean from the body--they do this to keep the acid in the
stomach from bursting and ruining the meal--then a spine,
curved and wet, still clinging helplessly to the skull, and finally
three of the four legs scattered about. She set to work to collect what
data remained,
sawed through femur and thick white marrow (healthy), plucked teeth from
her mandible to identify age (a mere four years),
put the saw into her backpack before settling down on a bluff to eat
lunch. We ate peanut butter and jelly on wheat
above a river so blue it was green, so clear that the smoothed boulders
stared back at us like hats behind a hat shop window.
           III. The Herd
While crossing the narrow bridge, we slowed the truck for a moment to
watch a family of river otters on the jagged ice shelves below--the
river's white teeth, teeth
of melt and flood--when a herd of bison came stampeding from behind, an
angry herd of stampeding hooves and heft that made it a few feet from
the bumper
before we sped away, lucky or blessed, the herd getting smaller in the
rearview, our heartbeats normalizing. I thought it must have been the
fear of being alone
that set them charging across that bridge, that startled them in one
direction versus the other, although I couldn't have been certain.
In any case we spent a few quiet minutes inside
that coarse, sage-covered Lamar Valley which rose on both sides into
peculiar mountain peaks, listened as snowmelt became the current of a
mindful river that knew how to take its time.
           IV. Grass
When later we found an elk that had died over the winter of natural
causes--a rare luxury-- had frozen, thawed, and been eaten,
tufts of tall grass were already laying claim to it, as though the earth
had hands and was holding it still, pulling it down into the softened
hillside.
All that remained was a chunked pile of bones after the Silver wolves
stumbled on its smell, a boon, stripped its body clean,
went to sleep it off on Junction Butte. It's no wonder elk live
such startled, stressful lives, persisting across the white valleys of
winter
like furred stoics, blanketed by the fear that come spring they'll
bleat and shit while being eaten alive. And to imagine that this cow
lasted eighteen winters:
arthritic, necrotic; it goes beyond the scope of intellectual measure,
life in the raw dead wet of eight-foot snow drifts,
to lick young clean of amniotic fluid, eat the sack, nose a bleached
scapula as sagebrush buttercups bristle the riverbank, dip into the
river, take a drink.
           V. Off the Bridge
Overnight, snow fell everywhere it wanted to and holed us up for the
entire morning. By noon though, the sun had cleared the roads,
and by evening we bathed in the Boiling River. On the way home that
night the wind rose up and pushed our car as though it had grown angry
and wanted to throw us
off the bridge, three hundred feet to the river below. And when we got
back to the bunkhouse near Tower Falls and Hell Roaring Flats,
I noticed a chart on the wall I hadn't before with color photos of
invasive plants: bull thistle, spotted knapweed, dalmation toadflax,
houndstongue, and leafy spurge. A few of the pictures came with special
instructions on how to remove the plant if found, while others required
professional
assistance. Once, a spore hitchhiked in on a shoe, a seed fell from a
crate of imported potato chips, a bud lurched up from the ground in
spring,
and soon the native plants were choking to death. Soon the lodges were
sprouting up in Mammoth, orange peel dropped in the middle of the road.
           VI. Laundry
The distance between the bunkhouse and laundry room at Tower Junction
was maybe one hundred yards, but at night it felt endless, my mind
becoming untethered
in the dark wild of that small distance--a roll of quarters in my fist,
every sound the sound of the many animals capable of killing me in so
many unique ways. It was
the terrible kind of dark I have occasionally woken up to and forgotten
where I was--my name, my whole stinking life a mystery--those moments
when I keep reaching
into the blackness for a switch that could make things whole again, that
wild terror of losing myself permanently to the unknown.
           VII. The Encounter
When we came over a rise on the trail and saw a grizzly digging
mindlessly on a cache, the rough brown of twilight stalling overhead, I
thought my first instinct
would be to run. I was wrong. I thought she might turn and charge us,
but I was wrong about that too. After she looked up and sniffed the air,
she decided
we weren't worth it, the hassle, disappeared just as quick, my
thumb clicking the mace can's safety back into place. I'd be a
fool to say it wasn't fear that gripped me,
held me still, because I've learned that words like awe
are only part of it. All I can say is that, for a moment, we stared at
each other as one animal to another,
and then she was gone. That I turned to my wife standing next to me,
still as an aspen, told her we should calculate the distance between us
and the bear. We took forty steps.
           VIII. Rusty Rail Lounge and Casino
A Silver wolf howl caromed against the side of the mountain and skimmed
over the procession of bison, their heads lowered, nosing the bones of
one of their own in the valley.
Then a second wolf howled from a different ridge, called back toward the
first in a language so perfect it needs only one word,
and soon the Silvers lined up like a choir to sing a response to the
unknown pack that had wandered into the park, and that was it.
A brief volley of howls, and then the valley grew silent again, the two
packs headed off in separate directions. That night during dinner, a
local blues band was giving it a go
in the restaurant's side room casino, and our waiter was forced to
lean in close: elk, rare, baked potato, the works
, almost to the edge of our lips--but the band played even louder,
trying to climb out from the suck and spill of penny slots, leaning hard
into the microphone, bells clattering to indicate another winner,
another loser, clattering for no reason at all.
           IX. The Raven
Here's something I didn't know before I got to the park: the
Yellowstone River reeks of sulfur. And on the last day she wanted to
drive over it one more time
as though she would miss the smell, as though I too would miss the
smell, and in the thick of it, out on the middle of the bridge, we
stopped to photograph a raven perched neatly on the rail.
He preened his feathers while the wind that had split that gorge
  for thousands of years kept checking his balance, and I took shot
after shot of the bird: a fit of black against the snow-whitened
  hillside,
the red stripe of rusted rail he clung to. But no matter what I did, no
matter how far I zoomed in, I couldn't get it right; it
wouldn't
  turn out. So we just left him like that, drove away, still clinging to
that rail.
           X. Snowed In
Cooke City's Motto: Come for the fall and you'll have no
choice
     but to stay till spring
. Come for a vacation, stay for the one-room schoolhouse, for the
grocery
closed till thaw, for the unyielding hope of one day seceding into a new
country: Montana, Cooke City, elevation 7,651 feet. For snowmobiles
skittering Main Street.
For the blizzard of Douglas fir, pine, and aspen. For the rest of your
natural life. O-B-A-M-A: One Big Ass Mistake
     America
 on a homemade billboard rising above
a moonshiner's trailer, roof sagging, every car in every driveway
buried in snow, every person buried in one screwed-up ideology or
another.
Public Notice: The highway becomes impassable at the end
     of Main Street and won't be cleared till spring.
     Take care to leave the same way you came in.