It’s day three into my
14th season at Grand Teton National Park, and now I must pass the
infamous pack test. By carrying 45 pounds for 1.5 miles in less
than 46 minutes, I’ll qualify for “arduous duty” as a wildland
firefighter keeping an eye on lightning strikes.
I wear a
vest packed with weights and walk with a climbing ranger who
teaches physical therapy at a nearby university, and a fire
information specialist who has a recuperating ankle. I teach
journalism in the winters, and I’ve added a new worry to the usual
drag of winter-weight: Thanks to a skiing accident, it’s the
four-month anniversary of my abdominal surgery.
The pack
test is not a race. It’s a job requirement but also a benefit,
since we’re paid to maximize our health as we return to outdoors
work. And this season, with my healing scars, I’m happier than ever
when we pass the finish line, the entry test of summer, in 41:11,
only four seconds off my pre-surgery time.
Even though
the test is tiring, the ritual of the after-dinner walk pulls me
from the reading chair. I bring a small meerschaum pipe — a
less-healthy ritual — and cross Cottonwood Creek to walk a
gravel road through some of the meadows that anchor the Tetons.
I hear a coyote bark, and elk trot for cover as a shape
appears above the roadbed. It’s tall and dark. It turns and
lopes towards me, followed by a gray coyote half its size.
The head is too small for bear, too big for dog. It’s a
black wolf, and the coyote yips and then nips the wolf’s haunch.
The wolf pivots off its back legs and flashes teeth at the coyote
without losing its pace.
The wolf seems almost unhurried,
though he’s headed straight for me. I stand amid cottonwoods,
and neither canine notices me nor the smoke of my tobacco, which I
hoped would signal that I’m a pipe-smoking human. I remind myself
that wolves don’t attack humans. But this wolf, with teeth at its
tail, will soon run smack-dab into a human.
When the wolf
reaches 60 feet, I sidestep behind a cottonwood. The wolf cocks its
eyes into mine, then loads its head left. Its body curves behind
the head, and the wolf and coyote slip through the sagebrush,
parallel to the creek.
Now I see the whole wolf, not just
its black head and thick shoulders. A hint of sandstone-red in its
ruff, a fade of peppered gray along the side, a thick black tail
tucked between its hind legs. No ear tags or radio collar. The lush
tail tips down to its ankles.
Again, the coyote rushes
and the wolf snaps back; tormented and tormentor pace each other
until they disappear into lodgepole.
I follow and spot
wet pawprints where the wolf crossed a feeder creek. Soon, I cross
a large warm scat, with the remains of scavenged elk after-birth.
This creek marks the coyote’s territory; once outside, the coyote
might lose the ferocity that comes from protecting its kits.
It’s also just where the wolf might pause and drop a
distinctive mark.
As I walk to the cabins for rangers,
the dusk fills with the group-howl of coyotes. At the cabin of a
couple who plan to be married near the rock where the wolf was
heading, I tell this new story. When a large bat appears in their
living room, their Australian shepherd tries to herd it. Someone
grabs a broom, I hold the door open, and within minutes the
circling bat is shooed out, but not before it hits me in the chest.
“Seasonals,” as we call ourselves, often are asked why we
migrate each summer to these mountains. There’s a cowboy song
called the “Night Rider’s Lament” that answers that question better
than I can. Like the seasonal, the cowboy works for the luxury of
living wild, for the joy of seeing a “hawk on the wing and spring
hitting the Great Divide.” What we lose is a big paycheck, health
insurance and all the other things you can get in town.
These are good mountains, and the people who work public land on
these mountains are some of the finest you’ll ever meet. Or
at least the luckiest. I can say that sometimes, after work, you
might get to see a feisty coyote humbling a wolf. Or you’ll walk
through the aroma of cottonwood in spring flush.
This is
a landscape worth working for, a place that pads our paychecks with
a daily dividend of wildness.
Ron Steffens is a
contributor to Writers on the Range, a service of High
Country News (hcn.org). He migrates among Oregon, Wyoming
and Vermont, where he teaches communications at Green Mountain
College.
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