Dark Hearts, Wild Things : ON A GLORIOUS MOUNTAINTOP, WHAT SHOULD BE A PURE MOMENT MIXES WITH THE SADNESS AND FRIGHT OF WHAT’S GOING ON BELOW

I spend the mornings locked in my little pack-rat office, writing letters to the congressmen in D.C. who will decide the fate of public lands up here. * In the afternoons, to calm my rage and sorrow, I get out and go hiking--crawling through the cedar jungles, stumbling clumsily down ravines into trickling streams and then climbing, all afternoon, to some windy peak of God, so that I can get a view of my valley--of what’s here, and of what’s gone. * What’s here on this cold but sunny June day in the Yaak Valley--the most northwestern valley in Montana, the farthest reach of this country’s northern Rockies--is a small stretch of land without roads. Despite this valley’s and this forest’s (Kootenai National Forest’s) history of having produced, year after year, the most timber in the state of Montana--the giant trees being cut rapacity long before any of us were born--there is still a little roadless area left. * I get wound up like this. What I mean to say is there’s not any protected wilderness in this strange, wonderful valley. A few of the local conservation groups are trying to pass a Montana wilderness act (Montana and Idaho are the only two heavy logging states that haven’t yet passed such an act; they’ve been trying for more than 20 years now), and it’s a battlefield. Logging activists have dug at the tender wound of job security. Mechanization in the mills and a soft market for timber have at times pushed unemployment above 20% in my county, Lincoln County. * It’s a brutal time here, right now. Often there is barbaric rage--on both sides. * What I mean to say is, I spend the mornings writing letters--by God, I’ll smother those sons-of-bitches with the sheer volume of my mail, my letters and postcards if nothing else; if not the truth and reason of what I tell, then the mass of it. * Most of northwestern Montana, and certainly most of my tiny, wild valley, has already been logged, over and over again--but a small portion hasn’t; and what the proposed Montana wilderness act wants to decide is this: which undeveloped parts of the federal lands we will release to the local private interests--chum, raw meat to the sharks. And then, from that same question: What areas of the federal lands do we protect from road building and logging? * Some groups up here got together to form a compromise (the Kootenai-Lolo Accords), a local solution to a federal problem. There’s some big timber in these last few remaining roadless areas, and until some act is passed, it’s “tied up” under President Jimmy Carter’s (remember him?) Roadless Area Review and Evaluation Program.

If an act is passed, the sawmills could rush in--a land swarm--and build roads leading to those last big trees.

And in selling out those areas, we, the conservation community (in Lincoln County, “environmentalist” is the worst epithet imaginable) would get, via compromising, to protect and preserve--forever--a few wild places. Not so much for us, but for our children and children’s children--and for the wild things.

The local groups that participated in forming this compromise made a small wish list of the 10 (a nice even number) favorite spots in this part of northwestern Montana.

It was almost entirely political, the conservationists hedging bets, trying to guess what areas the private loggers wouldn’t miss too much--rock, snow and ice--as if it were the loggers’ domain and not the country’s to begin with. And truth be told, in some ways it is the loggers’ domain; the strength of history and culture provides a chitinous overgrowth that can easily encrust justice and reality. The past can dominate the present.

What the compromising groups came up with was this: Ninety-eight percent of the area’s available timber base would be set open to the hounds of logging, to the saws and dozers, and 2% of the timber would be protected for little babies--babies not even born--a new history, or the edge of a new history.

And in the present proposal, my valley--the Yaak--wasn’t included, even though it was covered in the accords. Buckhorn Ridge and Northwest Peaks and Mt. Baldy (get it?) were designated as “Special Management Areas” ( not wilderness), meaning they could still be made available for, among other things, mining. But not even bald-ass Grizzly Peak, nor holy, wild and windy Flatiron Mountain, nor grizzly-beloved Roderick Mountain were offered as wilderness. Not one acre in this wild rain forest of a valley, the only valley in Montana like it, is proposed for wilderness in the bill now before the U.S. House of Representatives.

The bill, officially, the Montana National Forest Management Act, is being whisked along the fast track beneath the shadow of Judgment Day: the fall elections. Cut loose all 100% of Yaak’s timber to logging. Not 98% or 99% but 100%. Get what you can and poison the rest.

Not a single acre, out of 265,000 wild ones.

There are grizzlies and black bears, deer, elk and porcupines, wolves and badgers and wolverines depending on this central part of the Yaak Valley, depending on the woods around Grizzly Peak. It lures them down out of Canada. It is a reservoir for wilderness.

An old friend of mine, a Hungarian woman, uses the phrase a fish rots from the head first , and if there’s not even a vestige of big trees and wild creeks protected in the center of this last northern mountain and valley, then it follows that the rot will soon spread to the Bitterroot, and down through the Targhee and into Cache Valley, and all across the West.

Even 2% of it, there in the center, could provide a corridor for the wild things to use in their movements from Canada to other wilderness areas in the northern Rockies.

I’ve seen wolves in the central part of this valley. There are elk calving grounds in the spring, along Rat Creek, and along Zimmerman Ridge. How do you make the people in Washington, who dispense the federal lands, understand this? How do you show them?

Being quiet about this valley hasn’t helped it so far. Perhaps being loud will. As in chemotherapy, where you try to kill everything and then start over and hope the good cells come back faster than the bad ones, and maybe--a miracle--no bad ones come back at all.

It’s that desperate. I don’t want a few more good years. I want a cure for the Yaak, and for northwestern Montana (which is being “discovered” and run through the meat grinder of shameless tourist-suck.)

Who wants to listen to me rant in this fashion? My anger is uncomfortable to be around.

I want to tell you about Tiny Grizzly Peak, which is really called Grizzly Peak and is one of the areas on the border of the valley that was once proposed for wilderness designation, but then dropped, by Montana Sens. Max Baucus and Conrad Burns.

Today I drove up to the base of Tiny Grizzly Peak. It looms between Seventeen Mile Creek and the Yaak River. From some vantage points, it looks like the Matterhorn, all green cirque and bare gray cliff, with skiffs of snow cresting it even in summer. But more often than not, down in the creeks, in the cedar jungle, you can’t see the mountain at all. If you get in too close to it, you have no idea it’s there.

What’s wilderness? Logging roads surround Tiny Grizzly Peak. Trees ring it: some clear-cut and growing back in orchard-like monocultures, but some untouched--true forests, on the back side.

The theory is, and the history was, that the grizzlies would hang out down in the lodgepole pine and fir woods below the great wind-swept moss and rock of Grizzly Peak. The snow sends springs trickling down into those shadowy woods, and the bears could den up there at the tree line and then climb up into that cirque, into the avalanche chutes to chase ground squirrels and to chew glacier lily bulbs and to see the valley, and to feel the wind ruffling their fur.

Just looking up at it, I know how windy it must be, even though it’s not so windy down on Cool Creek, where I am parked.

The map shows a trail going up the backside, but I am tired of trails; if I never hike another trail in my life, I’ll have already hiked too many. I’m going to bushwhack instead, straight up the east slope, coming up through the shadows.

Academics, and naysayers who twist their lips into ringworm sneers and talk about “rosy romantics,” will say there’s basically no wilderness left anywhere in the world, and certainly not in the Lower 48. (Paradoxically, many of these arbiters of “what’s wild” would freeze to death if left to fend for themselves one week in any of their so-called “non-wilderness.”)

I know what they’re saying, in a way. But why give up? What’s wilderness? I say that if a wild thing can get in and out of the region, can move through the region as it has done historically, and can do so with the promise of being free to do so in the future--then I call that wilderness. It does not matter that the wild thing may even have to sojourn through destroyed lands in order to reach that protected, promised land.

Wilderness, for me, is defined simply by the presence of wild things.

Is a man or woman in the hospital--a woman, say, being treated for breast cancer--any less a woman because she’s ravaged on the outside, and in her blood, by the current round of chemotherapy?

It’s part of a sojourn. She must travel through a ravaged area to be made well again. But she, the woman, is still whole. Even if she is on her back, as long as she is alive, she is whole.

Her mind, that wilderness, is untouched, though the surrounding lands may no longer be the same. And when she gets well, and gets up and walks out and leaves that treatment, she will still be whole.

People who do not get into the shallow woods, or the deep woods, or any woods at all, would say that she is no longer whole--that nothing can be “whole” anymore--but I do not believe that.

I HAVE A FEELING THAT I AM GOING TO SEE A GRIZZLY TODAY. I start up an unnamed side creek, a steep creek--almost a waterfall--and walk beneath a few giant cedars that the old sawyers missed: trees big enough to drive a car through, were there a hollow through them.

The ringworm nihilists would point out that this is exactly what they’re talking about: that with the invention of machines, wilderness ceased to exist; with the invention of man, it went away like a wish. That machines are used to define what’s wilderness, rather than letting wilderness define wilderness.

Wild things make wilderness, I keep thinking as I move easily up the steep slope, centuries of duff under my boots.

I won’t see any grizzlies down in this forest. They don’t like the heavy timber. Deer do, when the snow drifts, and when it gets bitterly cold. The deer will gather in large herds--40 or more--and hang out in these cedar jungles where the canopy’s too great to allow much snow to accumulate, and where the wind doesn’t blow. Deer spend a lot of time in these jungles late in winter, when they’re losing weight and don’t have calories to waste mucking around in belly-deep snow, running from predators. They herd together for warmth and protection, and mostly just stare out at the white world with large eyes.

The does are three months pregnant by this time, and to help make it through the first hump of winter, the bucks shed their masculinity, dropping first one antler and then the other, and you can read the herd’s history, moving through these jungle bottoms: Curved gleaming antlers are strewn about like bones, their sharp tips gnawed shiny by squirrels and porcupines for the taste of calcium and phosphorous. Sometimes you’ll find entire skeletons, with the head and rack intact, giant deer, and you’ll know that the deer died of starvation--all the bones untouched and laid out in the cedar jungle like children’s toys. When you find those whole skeletons, it’s not unpleasant to picture the old monarch lying down, still wearing those huge antlers, and going to sleep in the cedar blow-downs, where not even the coyotes will find him. Sparkling green moss grows on the dropped antlers back in the jungles, and the soil, the duff, has already half-buried some antlers, creeping over them, generations of deer.

I’m starting to get into the wilderness. If they’ll keep the bulldozers and the roads out, I’ll go ahead and call it wilderness. A blue grouse is drumming farther up the mountain, sounding like the deep, throbbing, start-up attempts of a gas-fired generator (man and machines defining the wilderness!), and I veer north to avoid messing with his space, his big date.

Wilderness these days consists of the promise that something, for once, will not change--not by the hand of man anyway, but instead by the slow forces that were here before us, and will be here after we are gone.

We will not be here long.

Above me, there’s wind in the trees. I’m leaving the cedar bottom, thrashing through some willow and alder that has sprung up over an old logging cut. Then I’m through that tangle and back into the pines, climbing with every step. When I get into the snow, which is still ankle deep, it occurs to me that this would be a fine mountain on which to release some woodland caribou. Some senator or local representative could round up a few thousand dollars and put a herd back on this mountain, and be a hero. There used to be caribou in these woods. Not a lot, but we don’t need a lot. They would hang out in these woods and give birth on these snowbanks, back in the shade. The downed timber would snap and pop, would warn them of approaching predators.

I come across an old trapper’s tobacco can, rusted, almost returned to soil. I crouch and examine the can, brush the moss and dirt from it--the words are indistinguishable--and I know for certain, empowered with the strength and mystery of being on this mountain, that the can bounced out of a mule’s pack as it ran away from the trapper on a hot day in June, in 1942 or 1943, or possibly as late as 1945.

I put the tobacco can back in its resting spot. The weight of its sin, its litter, has settled over the years and seasons to make its own shaped resting spot. Who am I to disturb a can’s 50 years of effort?

Up higher, I come upon two trees, lodgepoles, with grizzly claw marks--four deep grooves a little more than head-high, the bark long ago scarred over. From the ‘50s? Not ancient, but old. The grizzly who left those claw marks--it’s possible, it’s hopeful, that his or her grandchildren are still moving shyly through these steep woods.

Wispy old fluorescent-green angel’s hair lichen-- Alectoria , the caribou biologists call it--is all through these woods. It’s caribou heaven in here.

But none of them have made it to heaven yet. I pull a sprig of Alectoria down and nibble it. It’s dry, and tastes like the past. It’s hard to taste any future in it at all.

On up through the forest I go, up through some overgrown, weedy, once-burned lodgepole; then that falls away, and I’m back into an older but smaller forest. The wind in the tops of the trees is getting stronger, and the tops of the trees seem lower as I continue to climb. Then I’m out of the trees, up onto a steep grass-and-rock shelf, a small flat tableland of huckleberries and low, wind-beaten pines and grass, June grass suddenly flowing in waves in the wind.

When I’m in the forest, it’s like I’m a beast, or a dark person, a dark thought-- like I am separate from the world, and have nothing to do with it--and there are days when that’s not an entirely bad thing.

But up on this flat shelf, moving through bushes that are lower than I am, moving along the crisscross of deer trails in the swirling, 40-m.p.h. gusts that are sliding down off Grizzly Peak (just ahead of me, rising like a wave, with not a tree on it, looking like Denali), walking upright and through open country, I feel like a human again.

Like--as the ringworms say--an intruder.

I’m not as strong or fast as an animal. The ringworms say I have more intellect, but in this high wind, that won’t do me any good: It’s not like I can use my great brain (weighing three pounds?) to avoid the possibility of Mr. Grizzly.

The sun’s sharp in my eyes, straight from the west (this time of year it will set in the northwest), but it’s mild. The conditions are perfect for my stumbling onto a napping grizzly on his or her daybed, provoking trouble. He or she might attack out of just-awakened terror or territorial defense, and it would be my fault.

And for 50 years, 100 years, forever, I’d be the boy the grizzly ate . I could set local tolerance of grizzlies back irreparably. There’s never been a grizzly mauling in this valley, but in that strange, human, illogical way, one setback would shine stronger; its legacy and legend would last longer than, say, two or three attacks. People might say, “Almost a hundred years people have been living in this valley, and there never was any trouble--not until those damn wilderness proposals came up.” Or, “The bears, they’re getting meaner. Used to be they wouldn’t fool with people in this part of the country.”

I hike at least 10, and usually closer to 15, sometimes 20, miles a day, four or five days a week in the summer, and farther in the fall and early winter, when I hunt deer and elk. I’ve seen two grizzlies up here in six years, and call it, conservatively, 5,000 miles of walking through the woods.

Biologists say there may be nine or more grizzlies that move in and out of this valley. (I’ve never found a den, though I’ve looked hard, up high on many of the north slopes.)

Still, there’s never a day that I’m out hiking that I don’t know they are out here--and I take care. I freeze at large sounds (elk usually). And if one day there weren’t grizzlies up here, it wouldn’t be hiking anymore. It would just be walking.

I just want to get out into the woods. I just want there to be some woods left to get out into.

Some woods that you cannot drive into. There are certain churches where it’s not fashionable to bring your car in with you. You have to leave your car in the parking lot before going in to see God, to chat with God.

Heathen! my enemies cry. Or, hissing, pagan!

I don’t mean to be a pagan. And how am I the pagan, and not they, for my not worshiping roads and autos, for my not believing they’re the be-all, one-all, need-all?

It’s lonely up here, but I like it.

LINCOLN COUNTY HAD A NONBINDING STRAW VOTE late last spring to see how many of its voting residents wanted to have wilderness--any wilderness--in this valley. These few remaining unroaded acres, up in the Yaak--it’s their final chance to be established as wilderness, and saved forever, or to become tree farms, like all the rest of the valley. Fiber factories.

If it’s so damn renewable, as timber companies are always shouting, then why don’t they just keep farming, and renewing, what they’ve got?

Only 2.6% of the county voted for the remaining roadless acres in this valley (and the one to the south, along the rocky Cabinet Mountains) to be preserved as wilderness. The rest voted for the accord, or preferred no wilderness, or supported the Forest Service’s wan “compromise” proposal, which would classify only rocky crags as wilderness. Forty-five hundred local people had seized control of the federal wild lands.

Two point six crazy percent sounds like such a tiny number. But then I think about it. There are about 2,500 people in the town of Libby--the county seat of Lincoln County. Nine hundred and seventy-five in Troy. Ninety-nine hundred registered voters in the whole county (the largest county by land size in Montana). And a little over half them voted; call it, to be conservative, 4,500 voters.

At first I thought the 2.6% was just me and Elizabeth. But 2.6% of 4,500 voters is--hell, that’s 100 people. That’s the equivalent of four big woodland caribou herds.

Woodland caribou, incidentally, are a species that the state of Montana wants to go ahead and declare extinct so that it won’t have to spend any time jacking with them.

A hundred people in this county; dark hearts, wild flyaway hearts. Maybe some of them will have children! Maybe, in a good year, twins.

That other 97.4%--they’re not devils. They’re just . . . more domestic stock? Strong stock, perhaps, in some ways. Not needing, for instance, to fly away into the woods at every opportunity, not needing to bathe small injuries, small flutterings of the heart, in solace and cool breezes.

Many of these millworkers and families originally approved of the early accord that would have set aside some wilderness down in the Cabinet Mountains and on the perimeter of this Yaak Valley (though none, as I’ve mentioned, in the valley’s center). Loyal company men and women, they supported their employers, who helped negotiate the compromise that would release new timber into the local mills. New short-term jobs would be started up again--the boom-bust cycle would be set into motion again, the dangerous sweep of that rickety Ferris wheel. But then, once the Lincoln County Commission announced it was going to take the local straw vote on this national issue--from that very moment, the press--the Western News, whose masthead reads “Dedicated to the Development of Lincoln County,” and the Tobacco Valley News, over in Eureka--tried to undermine the accord.

They, and a few others, suddenly slipped suspicion into the compromise and successfully manipulated the issue back into a polarized “us-versus-them” issue (millworkers versus environmentalists), after a year-and-a-half of negotiation on this particular compromise.

The Montana Wilderness Assn. wrote, after the local referendum: “Emotional hostility to the idea of wilderness was expertly tapped by accord opponents. At an anti-wilderness rally in Libby, consultant Dennis Winters, contracted by the Western Environmental Trade Assn. to generate grass-roots support against wilderness, said the accords would lock up the land for ‘goddamn ever’ and cause 30% unemployment in the community. . . . Wilderness is an easy economic scapegoat under such circumstances.”

“And along with that,” shouted Winters, “comes wife batterment, child molestation and all the rest of it. Now do you think that the environmentalists give a damn about the fact that kids are going to be molested as a result of this?”

I’VE GOT TO WATCH OUT, OR I’LL BE CHARGED. THE brush is thick here at the base of the 60-degree green cirque. The wind’s stronger, sweeping off of all the snow cornices and rushing down the avalanche chutes. I’ve got to be careful or I’ll step on a sun-sleeping grizzly, and I’ll do that species, and wilderness in this valley, more harm than I could ever do good.

I stop and look up at Tiny Grizzly Peak--so accessible, just above me--high above me. It’s so close that I could hit it from below with . . . with a . . . a rocket launcher.

The wind is cold and exhilarating. What thrills me about this small, wild valley, so full of wooded ravines, crazy-quilt rise-and-fall topography, and very few high peaks to climb to orient yourself--a hell of a good place to get lost--is that in my whole lifetime, there’s no way I’ll see it all once, much less learn it.

Down in the creeks, the fishhook-shaped side drainages never bring me back off a mountain to where I thought I might come out. Back in there, it’s always dark and disorienting. There are very few places where you can get up out of the trees and turn all around to see just exactly where you are.

But I am going to orient myself today.

It’s a matter of principle and hysteria, set off by this small, local political bandwagon’s chant, “No Wilderness.” In my blacker moments, I accuse “them” of being jealous of those creatures--people included--who are still less than numb, who are still able to find joy in the world.

I accuse the ringworms of that same thing when they accuse me of being a rosy romantic rather than a scientist.

I used to be a scientist. A biologist, for a short while, and then a geologist, for a long while. I’ve made my choice. I know which is better--for me. One way of life has limits, and the other does not.

The rock glitters above me--schists and quartzites, metamorphosed by perhaps the truest forces of God, heat and pressure, one side of the world sliding against the other, and one side giving, buckling, folding, but not fracturing, only compressing, becoming smaller. And this rock is shiny, scrubbed clean in the high country of the Yaak by wind and snow and then more wind. The sun shines off the spring campion like velvet. It’s emerald green, but the tiny yellow buds that are beginning to form on the campion give it a gold sheen, the bears’ cirque shining like copper touched by God.

I’m standing around in the low bushes. The grizzlies had mercy on me (I try to put out of my mind the dimming thought that perhaps there aren’t any left on Tiny Grizzly Peak). I’m looking around for the wire cables that I know I can find, the ringworms’ cables, that will lead from off the top of the peak.

There used to be fire-tower lookouts on the highest points in this valley: Grizzly Peak, Lost Horse Mountain, Clark Mountain, Caribou Mountain--17 in all, I think. Before all the roads were laid across the valley, and across the mountainsides--like a net cast from the sky, a net thrown to catch pagans, perhaps--back when fires were more of a danger than they are now, men and women spent long portions of their lives up in these towers, living in the ocean of sky, living in small lighthouses with a stove and binoculars and a 360-degree view of this part of the world, big glass windows all around them, and a little catwalk around the outside.

All of the fire towers, once abandoned (satellites spot the fires now, spot the grizzlies, too, perhaps), were torn down, and the timbers hauled off by pack horses. But back when these 17 or so crow’s nests were operating, they had communication--heavy-gauge copper wires running through the woods, going from fire tower to fire tower, across the creeks, up through the old forests--across millions of acres of trees--back then, a sea of trees. These sailors above the forest could communicate immediately, day or night, by ringing the old hand-cranked magnets they had attached to these brown-burnished copper wires--one ring, Fire Tower 1 (Swede Mountain); two rings, Fire Tower 2 (Blue Mountain)--and across the mountains, the message could sing, fire sighted .

It’s rare to find the cables, walking the woods these days, but copper doesn’t rust. You can still find a trail of that wire buried in the duff, or running along a creek, and you can follow it down a mountain, across bare rock, for quite a ways before losing it. I like to come upon it at odd times and know what it means, what it is: history.

The ringworms are cackling, nudging one another and winking, believing that the fact I can take pleasure in this might confirm their thesis that there is no more wilderness left, that when the first wave of auto-emission lead was found on the North Pole, all wilderness fell away into the past, extinct.

It’s what’s in us, and nowhere else, they might say, and it’s true, the wilderness within men and bears, and women and wolves, is larger than what remains outside us these days. But wilderness is still there. A little bit.

Two percent, I think.

I leave the swamp and start up a rocky spine that rises out of the windy grass and moss. I head for the highest point on the bare mountain. I could be in Asia, in the Himalayas. There are a few trees left--10 or so, maybe, on the whole mountain, and none higher than my waist, but hundreds of years old--and I’d cut them with an ax, or with a dull butter knife, before I’d let the mills come up to Grizzly Peak, up onto the rocks and ice, and get these last 10 trees or so.

A LITTLE RELIEF IS NEEDED. AND THAT IS THE WORD.

One small town--my neighbors, my friends--of 2,500 people, and two senators continue to hold the life force of this valley, its fate, in their grasp. They hold it by the throat as they would a snake.

Up on the peak, it’s dizzying; the steepness below me, the nearness of the woods. Any old tiny grizzly in the world could nip up here for a quick look around, could stroll the brief, bare open ground, grazing on the good high grass, could roll and play on the glacier, and then duck back down into the trees, into the swamp, into the cool shadows and dark.

I poke around in the rocks and rubble at the highest point on the bare mountain. There’s a government survey marker. The elevation of Grizzly Peak, Tiny Grizzly Peak henceforth, is 6,077 feet.

The lookouts’ fire ring is still here. That’s really probably all they had to do up here, then as now: cook, eat, read, write letters back home, perhaps, and watch for fires. There are all sorts of cooking instruments strewn about in the ashes. There’s a huge iron skillet (Bacon? How the grizzlies must have loved that scent! I’ve read in old journals that the grizzlies would sometimes come up to the base of the fire towers and rub their itching backs against the wooden posts, shaking the tower, as well as their cousins in that tower) and the skillet, though orange with rust, could probably still be used, if the rust were scrubbed off. It’s not like any skillet I’ve ever seen, but I won’t be moving it. That was then, and this is now. It deserves to rust. I have a skillet at home.

Lupine sprouts up through various rusted bread-baking pans that have not fared as well as the skillet. What fine times these old boys must have had up here! Baking, cooking, eating all the time, in this forever high wind! Dead now! Rest their souls!

The mountain is covered with glacier lilies. They surround the slow-melting snowbanks, drinking and getting nourishment from that cold water.

Up on Grizzly Peak, I turn in circles and squint, making little window-frame pictures with my fingers, trying to look off in a direction that affords me a view to the horizon of only rolling, deep green forest below, but I can’t do it. Always, everywhere, there is the huge steep-sided leapfrog leprosy of clear-cuts, tree farms on the federal lands.

There are little sections of green uncut velvet here and there, but none stretch to the horizon, or anywhere near it. After a while, the paradox seems to be trying to short-circuit my high spirits--this cold, glorious, flower-covered mountaintop, what should be a pure moment, one of the few left, mixing strangely with the sadness and fright of what’s going on below, just below, and I avert my eyes and look down at the glacier lilies.

Two percent!

“I spur my horse through the wrecked town,” Gary Snyder writes in his “Riprap and Cold Mountain Poems,” and “the wrecked town sinks my spirit.”

I sit down in the lilies and curl up in the wind so that I can’t see the vast road system below, so that I can’t see all those bare, rain-washed squares that have erased whole sides of mountains, and I position myself so that all I can see is sun and sky and lilies and the moss carpet up here on top of Tiny Grizzly Peak. Hopefully, they will not be coming to get this moss.

I wish I could have Snyder’s Zen quality, Snyder’s turn-the-other-cheek ability.

I settled at Cold Mountain long ago,

Already it seems like years and years,

Freely drifting, I prowl the woods and streams,

And linger watching things themselves.

Men don’t get this far into the mountains,

White clouds gather and billow.

Thin grass does for a mattress.

The blue sky makes a good quilt.

Happy with a stone underhead,

Let heaven and earth go about their changes.

But heaven and earth have been getting a lot of help with their changes in this forest, in this valley, ever since we brought our machines in, all the way in: all the way to the very edge.

Even if we--that 2%--are pagan, don’t the saints need us, in order to compare and contrast against their holiness, in order to define their sainthood?

DOWN THE TRAIL THEN--OFF of Tiny Grizzly’s steep open fields, and into the trees on its backside, 4,500 acres is all they want to protect of this cut-over, road-laced ecosystem--4,500 acres to a grizzly bear?

I’ll take the trail back down, rather than bushwhacking, to see what I’ve missed.

Down through the old, scorched giant larch skeletons from the fires of 1910 and 1931, across that wooded, swampy shelf, where the bears and the caribou would live, and into a stand of fire-blackened lodgepole.

It is the nature of lodgepole to burn. In the spring, the black trunks of the lodgepole and the new-growth lime green of the grasses go well in a stunning color combination that so far only Andre Agassi seems to have discovered.

The trail drops down into huge huckleberry patches. This month there will be berries, and that’s when I’ll have my best chance of seeing a bear--a grizzly bear or a black bear.

The trail rides down the mountain like an escalator. I don’t like trails. I understand they’re necessary and understand that I’m blessed, exceptionally blessed at the moment, one brief moment, with good health, but I always feel guilty and lazy when I use them.

The wild things are back in the trees--the pagan things.

As if confirming my thoughts, a cow elk, blasphemous and wild, crashes down through the heavy timber.

I’m such a pagan that even the elk won’t have anything to do with me!

Farther down the mountain, the huckleberry bushes thin, and I start to see strawberries and aspen. The strawberries will be out a month before the huckleberries. The entire woods will be scented with their blossoms, and the woods will be warm and full of that ripe July sunlight.

Aspen, larch and lodgepole mixed, now, and alder, too--good deer country, I’m thinking, and two mule deer does, big with pregnancy, bound through the trees off to my right, climbing back up the mountain.

I begin to find small, dark bear scats on the trail. Bears are habitual users of trails, and it’s fresh scat, but it’s small: I don’t think it’s a grizzly.

I walk more quietly. It’ll be dusk soon. The wind is high above me in the trees; it’s cool and windless down in the forest. I pass an old, bright-white cow-moose skull and skeleton--her marrow still healthy: What got her? A bear? Wolves? I come upon a tiny meadow at the base of an avalanche slide. There are a few charred stumps out in the meadow, and out among the stumps and rocks, I’m thrilled to see, finally, a large bear, a black bear.

He’s light-brown colored, grizzly-colored, but definitely a black bear, Ursus americanus , not horribilis , with the long nose and no visible claws (grizzlies have daggers) and without that grizzly hump.

He’s a young bear, a lonely bear, about my size--175 pounds, I’d guess, maybe 200--and I know just by watching the lonely manner in which he’s nosing through the grass and lifting small flat rocks that he’s been abandoned, that his mother has chased him off after two years of raising him, and that now she’s raising new cubs.

It’s almost dark. The bear scents me; the night-cooling air is sliding back down off the mountain behind me. I’m happy to see him--it’s always such an amazing moment to see a bear in the woods, any bear--and here’s the amazing thing: He’s happy to see me.

He sniffs, stands up (there’s a little white blaze on his chest, which will probably disappear with adolescence) and he comes straight toward me, head up, eyes curious, like one of my dogs: so lonely.

“Hey guy,” I call out to him. The first words I’ve spoken all day, and it feels good to say them.

At the sound of my voice, the young bear responds: He begins to weave, casting left and then right, triangulating on my location, and the closer he gets--20 yards, now--the more eager is his approach.

He’s no larger than I am. I know he’s not thinking attack; I know predation is not on his mind. He’s just lonely. His face is all puzzled, so that it looks like he’s about to cry. But still, he approaches with such a lack of hesitation--not an attack, not a charge--that something stirs in my mind nonetheless, some archetype, some shadow I know nothing about--and I begin moving from tree to tree, back in the forest at the edge of the meadow, not climbing any of the trees (for to run could trigger the thought of predator/prey, could release old archetypal shadows in his own mind). So I just move from tree to tree, walking behind pines like a child playing hide-and-seek, and still that big-little bear comes on (as he gets closer he looks a little larger), looking confused, sniffing the air and looking sad .

He follows me all through the woods, sniffing and watching. After a while of my hiding behind big trees, it becomes evident to him that I don’t want to play--I’ve hurt his feelings--and he turns abruptly, with dignity, and wanders off.

And watching him go, I’m lonely. And I call out again, “Hey bear.” And then I do a dumb tourist-pagan thing and try to call out to him in his language. I grunt, “Hunmphh, jhumphh, humph”--deep grunts--and he gives me another chance, swings right back around and comes high-stepping to where I’m hiding.

It’s getting dark in the woods. I straighten up and try to shake off my guilt. I’m toying with this little bear, I’m being a jerk, robbing him of his dignity. I’m messing him up. I need to make up my mind--to be friends, or to be enemies.

What if I ruin him? What if he came shuffling up to some hunter this way? Some hunter who didn’t care that he was just a little bear?

I don’t think he’ll be lonely or confused long. I think he’ll learn to be a bear, soon enough, that he’ll get over his disorientation. But to make sure, I’ve got to do something human and ugly. I’ve got to be unpredictable.

I pick up some small rocks and throw them at him. I’m a bad throw. None of them come close. Or maybe it’s my subconscious: Maybe my pagan body won’t let my arm do what my mind’s telling it to do--attack my close cousin. The stones go over his head. The bear sits down and watches them like a batter eyeing (with mild disdain) pitches thrown outside the strike zone, which surprises me; I’d always thought bears had extremely poor vision. But he’s definitely watching the flight of each of these rocks. When they hit, he walks over to where they’ve landed and investigates them: lonely as hell.

He walks on off into the timber, looking back at me a couple of times. I know that I’ve definitely given him an ambivalent message, and I feel guilty.

But I was lonely, too. I just wanted to watch a wild thing come close.

Except it wasn’t like he was a wild thing.

It was like he was just another person--and it was even like he spoke, and responded to, my language. It was like we were just two strangers out walking on a country evening, and like we lived in the same township, like we shared our lives, and though we’d never met, knew vaguely of each other--and like we had just tipped our hats and then kept on walking.

There should be grizzlies on Tiny Grizzly Peak. And maybe there are; or maybe someday there will be again, if we could protect not just the rocky peak, but a few of the woods below and around the peak.

But of that evening, all I know is that there was one man and one black bear--and though we both use the same country that grizzlies use, our hearts are different--and I came out off the trail, picked up a logging road, and in the darkness, with owls calling and the woods just beginning to come to life, I walked the six miles back to my truck, and then drove down the old logging road to my cabin, my home. My other home.