The End

This is the hundredth blog entry, the last daily update, and the first entry I’ve written without Duke hanging out nearby.  Duke is now at the home of John Cosgriff.  He climbed into my lap as I drove over to John’s house, his muzzle resting on my left leg and his back legs lying on the console.  Duke will stay with John when I fly back to Georgia tomorrow for a two-week sabbatical.  He tried to follow me out the door of John’s house when I left.  I pointed back inside and made him stay, then I walked out into the dark.

Back at the cabin, as I usually do in the evenings, I paced around the living room trying to figure out what to write about.  This time I kept music playing.  I paced into the tiled kitchen area, then turned around and paced over the rug past the lamp and beside the bookshelf, then started to turn again and glimpsed Duke’s tennis balls resting on the shelf.  That’s when I started missing him.  Often while mulling over the evening’s writing, I’ve thrown tennis balls against the walls for Duke to chase or lobbed them into the air for him to catch.  Now the balls looked lonely.  If you believe in writing the truth – and I do – there was only one thing to write about.

I picked up a tennis ball and threw it against the far wall.  It bounced back to me halfheartedly, and I walked over to it and flung it again.  But throwing tennis balls, like one other activity I’ve been missing recently, just isn’t as much fun alone.  I placed the ball back on the bookshelf.  I walked over to my computer to shut off the music.  If I was going to write about aloneness, I had better let myself feel the silence first.  But I didn’t have the guts to turn the music off.  I have spent, in this single and wandering life, plenty of lonely time – I was not eager to go back to it.

I have said goodbye to more than one pretty girl to pursue this single and wandering life.  I received a Christmas card from one of them today, one to whom I said goodbye five and a half years ago when I graduated college.  I left her to wander around in my truck with a dog and no steady job.  Which has a familiar ring.  At the time that I left, I loved her.  Loved her wholeheartedly.  But the road called.  Now, she is engaged to be married and is gainfully employed in New York City.  Probably, I reflected, I made the right decision for the wrong reasons.  I sent her an email to emphasize the differences in our present situations.  If she’s keeping score, I thought, she’ll get a kick out of this.

It’s a tradeoff that I decided to make.  Probably a tradeoff that most of the fur trappers had to consider.  What is the price of freedom?  They left everything that they knew, spent several years wandering the Rockies, and then – at least most of them – returned to civilization.  Maybe what I’m doing is similar.

There was really no choice.

Hunting: What's Got Everyone So Worked Up?

If you want a hot argument, tell hunting stories in front of an anti-hunter.  You can probably elicit cursing with no work at all, and with a little effort, shoe-throwing isn’t impossible.  Few topics elicit unreasoned vitriol so reliably.  Unsupported generalizations are common:

• “The hunting community is mainly composed of grown men (and some women) with nothing more intelligent to do than kill little birds and animals because it provides fun and excitement for people who need to feel potent.”  (source)
  
• “Collectively, hunters resemble an army of under-trained, unsupervised amateur killers roaming around destroying 200 million animals a year, making it unsafe for hikers, campers and wildlife . . .  A hunter's lack of feelings - empathy and compassion - for animals and lack of respect for nature go hand in hand.”  (source)
  
• “killing for fun teaches callousness, disrespect for life and the notion that might makes right”  (source)
  
• “hunters are PATHETIC morons who have to kill things to feel like a man because they can\'t satisfy their wives”  (source)
  

That some people who oppose hunting express themselves in vehement and unreasonable ways is not surprising – irrational argument is common on all sides of nearly all hot-button issues in the United States today.  But what does surprise me is the extent to which anti-hunting fervor exceeds anti-meat-eating fervor.  As I mentioned in a post the other day, it’s hard to distinguish, from a moral perspective, shooting a deer that will be cut up and eaten from slaughtering a cow that will be cut up and eaten.  It is true that with hunting, there is a greater chance that the execution of the animal will be imprecise and the animal will suffer before it dies.  But hunting has the compensatory virtue of allowing the animal to live a natural, free-ranging life before it is killed – most commercial beef-producing operations, in contrast, confine the animals to be slaughtered in conditions that must be far less pleasant than the shaded woods or open prairie in which game animals live.  To me, these factors tip the moral balance in favor of hunting over commercial meat production, but reasonable opinions may differ.  Let us merely say for present purposes that, from a moral perspective, hunting and commercial meat production are in rough equipoise.  If you consider commercial meat production morally acceptable, you should hold the same view of hunting.

A Confined Animal Feeding Operation (CAFO) in the San Joaquin Valley.  This is actually a dairy farm, but beef cattle are kept under similar conditions.

That’s what I would think – but it ain’t so.  Polls show that about 22% of the US population would support a ban on all hunting (source), but only about 2.8% of the population follows a vegetarian or vegan diet (source).  That means that almost 20% of Americans – one in five – eat meat, but oppose hunting.

Why?

I think it’s about the public’s views of hunters, not hunting.  Re-read the bulleted quotations above.  Many people stereotype hunters as unappreciative morons who kill animals to feel powerful.  To be fair, I should note that most of the above quotations come from individuals who posted their opinions on the web; only the third quotation comes from a well-known organization (The Humane Society of the United States).  Most anti-hunting organizations, like People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA), refrain from overt stereotyping even if the information they disseminate appears misleading or inaccurate.  But I suspect the hunter-as-buffoon stenotype drives the passion of many individual activists. 

And that, I think, is the real danger of canned hunts.  When someone pays hundreds of dollars to shoot an animal that is confined in a small space, the act of killing the animal may be no worse that what occurs in a beef slaughterhouse, but it’s hard to argue that the shooter is motivated by an appreciation for nature or respect for the ancient workings of the food chain.  To the American public, the motive matters.  Stereotyping buyers of canned hunts is easy and effective, and asking the public to distinguish canned hunts from legitimate hunts is probably asking too much – like it or not, all hunters will be painted with the same brush.  For that reason, if for no other, hunters like me should oppose canned hunting.

Glaston Lake

If you stand on a frozen lake after a few days of warm weather when the sun has melted some water atop the ice, then you unzip your jacket and hold the sides out in the wind, you can sail across the lake.

Glaston Lake is about two and a quarter miles west of our property, over rutted prairie dotted with cows and sagebrush.  The prairie is flat enough that you can see where you’re going, and treeless enough that fifty percent of the visually observable world is sky, but it has enough topographical variation that you can find a hilltop to aim for if you’re in an ambling mood.  You amble across the prairie, reach the hilltop, gaze across the newly revealed landscape – look! more grass and sagebrush, and is that a cow in the distance? – and then you see another hilltop or a ridge that can serve as your next aiming point.  If you still want to amble, the stroll continues.  You weave your way among the sagebrush.  Happily, if you like prairie, this is a process that can be repeated indefinitely.

The prairie north of Big Timber, MT provides excellent ambling.  Since you’re not far from the Rockies, you can see the snowy Crazy Mountains in the west and the white-topped Beartooths in the south.  And if you amble east from my family’s property, and you have permission to cross the Lavarells’ land, you can go all the way to Glaston Lake.  Which is how Rebekah and I ended up there.

“Jeb, are you sure the ice is thick enough to walk on?”

Of course I wasn’t sure.  I’m from Georgia – what do I know about lake ice?  Nothing.  But I figured if I fell in I could probably get back out, and I wasn’t far from the warm cabin.  So, I calculated, the risk of frostbite or hypothermia was low.

“Yeah, it’s been really cold,” I said.

“There’s standing water on the ice,” she pointed out.

“Right.  Well, there have been a couple warm days recently, but it was cold before that.”

I slid out on the ice.  You could push off and slide a short distance, sort of like ice skating in boots.  I listened for cracking and heard nothing.  Luckily the ice was thick enough.  Duke trotted out after me and even when he added his seventy pounds to my hundred and seventy, there was no cracking.  I threw a tennis ball for Duke, and Rebekah came out on the ice.  She spotted what looked like a fishing rod lying on the ice, and we walked toward it.  Duke brought his ball and I threw it again.  There was an auger hole in the ice and a short rod lying beside it – someone had been ice fishing.  Rebekah bent to examine the rod when her sunglasses fell onto the lake.  The lenses caught the wind and the glasses slid across the ice.  They moved rapidly – about the speed that I could sprint on solid ground.  Neither of us could catch them.

“Damn!” she said.  The glasses skittered away.  They were almost out of sight when they came to rest on a rough patch of ice, a black dot against the white lake.  “I guess they’re gone.”

 For no good reason I took that as a challenge.  I started across the lake after them, and experimented with several styles of walking on the way.  With long steps, you got too unstable on the slippery ice and I felt like I was about to fall.  Short sliding steps felt stable, but the going was slow.  You could stutter step then push off and slide for a foot or two, I found, but I figured that if I tried to ice skate for several hundred yards in my hiking boots busting my butt was the most likely result.  Which is how I came to be standing upright, unzipping my jacket, and holding out the sides to catch the wind.  I slid across the watery ice.  It was, I thought proudly, a mode of locomotion of which mountain men probably hadn’t conceived.

There’s some reward in novelty, even if divorced from practicality.  It would be harder coming back.  But who thinks of the future when the present is so much fun?

Google Earth image of Glaston Lake.  Crazy Mountains in the distance to the west; Big Timber and I-90 to the south.

 

Montana in winter is THIS awesome.

Shooting Fenced Animals

An eastern hunter with a shiny new rifle books a guided elk hunt in Idaho, sixty miles from Yellowstone National Park.  He pays his money and in return, the outfitter guarantees the hunter an opportunity to shoot a trophy elk.  No trophy, no payment – that’s the deal.  In fact, the hunter can receive a guaranteed opportunity to shoot a larger elk if he pays more, or a guarantee for a smaller elk if he pays less.  This is a “hunt” from which uncertainty has been removed to the maximum extent possible.  So when the hunter reaches the headquarters of Canyon Creek Outfitters near Teton, Idaho, he is confident that he can make a kill.  He is confident even if he has never fired his rifle; he is confident even if he is too out of shape to spend the predawn hours climbing ridges.  His confidence soars when, clad in camo and rifle in hand, he enters a fenced area from which the elk cannot escape.  The fence, the outfitter’s website carefully states, is "to maintain superior genetics.”

It’s called a canned hunt, and like most hunters, I hate that such hunts exist.  There is no “fair chase.”  The hunts turn my stomach.  I have never met a hunter who spoke well of them.  The public at large despises them, and anti-hunters use the events of canned hunts as fodder against all hunters.  It’s an effective tactic.  To most of us, there is something unsettling about an animal with no means of escape being approached by a human intending to kill it.



But of course that’s exactly what happens with every package of meat supermarket freezer.  To generalize: a cow is driven into a confined area.  A “captive bolt stunner” is pressed to its forehead and a bolt fires into the cow’s skull, stunning the cow and rendering it unconscious, but not shutting down its circulatory system.  The cow’s neck is then cut so that the cow bleeds out – i.e., is “exsanguinated” – which helps prevent meat spoilage.  At no point did the cow have a chance to escape, and at no point did the commercial slaughtering facility follow “fair chase” guidelines.

What’s the difference?  What is the moral distinction between a canned elk hunt and a slaughtered cow?

I’ll be honest; I can’t find one.  One person told me that because the hypothetical cows mentioned above had been born only to provide meat, they were not entitled to “fair chase” protections.  I think that argument misses the mark for two reasons.  First, if there is such a thing as an elk or cow’s right to a fair chase, that right belongs to the animal.  Since the right belongs to the animal, it cannot be waived by a human progenitor, even if the human who organized the breeding of the animal always intended for the animal to serve as food.  Phrased differently, it makes no difference to an elk or cow in danger of being killed whether humans always intended to kill it, or only had that idea after it was born.  Second, most of the animals offered to high-paying consumers of canned hunts were bred for the purpose.  It’s not as though the operators of the canned hunt went into the wild with a nets, captured elk, then brought them back to enclosed areas.  Instead, the prey animals come from game farms, where they were bred and raised for the same purpose for which most domestic cows were raised: to be killed and eaten.  The only difference is the manner of execution.

So in with both a canned elk hunt and a cattle slaughterhouse, animals born and raised for the purpose of being killed by humans are put to death, cut up, then eaten.  And yet Americans are morally outraged at canned hunts, but unfazed by slaughterhouses.  Why?

I don’t know, but this is what I suspect: it’s because we ignore the death that produced those meat-filled styrofoam trays at the supermarket, but focus on the death associated with a canned hunt.  When most people take home 1.14 pounds of ground round from Kroger, they don’t pause to think about the once-living cow that died to produce it.  They think of food, not death.  But when Americans consider canned hunts, they imagine the death of an animal.  They reflect on the termination of a life that, but for the hunter’s actions, might have continued.  They don’t consider the elk patties that sizzled on the grill afterwards.  They think of death, not food.  And death is unpleasant, so they resent canned hunts.

Don’t get me wrong; I still hate canned hunts viscerally.  I will never, ever, participate in one.  But when I go to the grocery store and toss a pack of flank steak into my cart, I ought – if I’m being objective – to recognize that it’s about the same thing.



The foregoing arguments apply to canned hunts carried out in accordance with governmental regulations designed to ensure humane hunts and prevent the spread of disease among farmed animals.  Many canned hunts, however, are not carried out in accordance with those regulations.  Recently, authorities prosecuted a provider of illegal canned hunts, and as a result of the prosecution, video footage of several hunts became a part of the public record.  Using that footage, the Indiana Wildlife Federation – a group that opposes canned hunts but supports legitimate hunting – made this excellent and apparently objective video.

Picturebook: A Trip to Yellowstone

I turned south off of Interstate 90 at Livingston, Montana, then drove south, traveling upstream along the Yellowstone River.

I visited the park principally to see the Lamar Valley, a place about which fur trapper Osborne Russell wrote extensively in his memoirs, Journal of a Trapper.

Soda Butte and my truck are in the bottom-right of the picture.

What a beautiful damned park.

Buffalo are built to excavate snow.  They use their massive heads to sweep the snow aside, and the bone structure of their humps functions as a place to attach the muscles and tendons that support the head.  (Additionally, according to the reports of the fur trappers, the "hump ribs" made damn good eating.)

From a signboard in the Park.

Because the Lamar Valley attracts buffalo, elk, and deer in winter, it also attracts predators.  Coyotes have long been common.  Wolves were common in the trappers' days, were shot out as white people moved west, and then were reintroduced in the Park in 1995.  They have since flourished.  I saw a wolf in the valley, but he was too far away for a picture.

However, I did get close to a coyote.  Real close.  Close enough to allow Duke to talk some trash from the cab of the truck, where I'd left the window down.

Some people hunt coyotes.  I've never done it, but I'd like to, so toward that end I invested $14.99 in a set of dying-rabbit coyote calls.  The idea is that you blow into the calls in such a way as to mimic a dying rodent, hoping to lure a coyote into rifle range.  I figured that Yellowstone would be a good place to test them, so I tucked the calls into my jacket pocket.



The decision to introduce wolves to Yellowstone in 1995 was controversial.  Environmentalists, of course, loved it.  But nearby ranchers protested, fearing that wolves would spread outside of the Park and kill their cattle.  Because sometimes, animals introduced the Park don't stay there.



As I described in yesterday's post, the drive home was not uneventful.  After sundown, I slipped off the road and crashed into some trees.

That's not where the truck should be.

 The damage by daylight.  Fortunately, the camper took most of the pounding.

Truck + Trees = Thunk

I crashed the truck last night.  I had been enjoying a nice relaxing drive – darkness had fallen in Yellowstone National Park and Duke and I were heading home.  Duke was resting his chin on the console and I was listening to an audiobook about the Donner Party as we drove through the woods on a narrow, snow-covered lane.  When a truck came from the opposite direction I moved to the right to give plenty of room to pass, and I accidentally edged a tire off the pavement.  Big mistake.  The tires that remained on the snow-covered pavement didn’t have enough traction to pull the off-pavement tire back over the lip of the asphalt, so I started sliding.  Slowly, slowly slipping further down the roadside embankment.  I cut the wheels left toward the road, but that didn’t help.  Normally, as any experienced red-clay driver knows, you turn into a slide to pull out of it, but that only works if you’ve got space to slide a little further before regaining traction.  Here the bank was steep and the shoulder nonexistent.  No space.  As the narrator on the audiobook was reading excerpts from the diary of James Reed, who was bringing provisions to the stranded pioneers, it occurred to me that I was going to slide down the bank and into the trees and there wasn’t anything I could do about it.

“Shit,” I said.

The truck slid slowly, two tires still on the pavement.  I could see an orange road marker ahead and knew I would run over it.  I gripped the wheel tightly and hoped the orange marker was made of plastic.  The grille guard slammed the marker to the snow and my truck slid over it.  It thunked on the undercarriage of my truck.  “Here I met Mrs. Reed and the two children still in the mountains,” said James Reed.

Maybe, I had time to think, I should step on the gas.  I had the truck in four-wheel-drive, so maybe the front tires would get enough traction to pull me back on the road.  But I doubted it.  Likely that would only accelerate my inevitable descent into the trees and make me smack into them harder.  I looked down the bank.  Ten or twelve feet of a seriously steep descent.

“Damnit,” I said.  My left tires followed the right ones off the road.

The back end swung downhill faster while the front tires, which were still angled toward the pavement, resisted the slide.  Now I was sliding sideways.  This wasn’t good.  I watched the trees approach.  I cut the wheel into the slide so the truck wouldn’t roll over.  Even if the truck rolled, I thought, I was moving slowly enough that I probably wouldn’t be hurt.  All the same, it would be more convenient to remain upright.  “I cannot describe the death look they all had,” said James Reed in a serious voice.  If I’d known I was about to crash I would have chosen a more encouraging soundtrack.

I looked at the trees that I was about to strike.  Some were small and would probably slide under the truck without doing too much damage, but a couple were pretty big.  Too big to give way.  They might leave some nice dents.  I wished I were heading for a forest of gentle saplings instead.  All in all, events at that time were not proceeding as I would have liked.

“Shit,” I said.

“ ‘Bread! Bread!  Bread! Bread!’ was the begging of every child and grown person except my wife,” commented James Reed.  With a crunch the back of the truck struck some small trees, and the nose continued to slide downhill.  I heard the whump of another tree sliding under the side of the truck and reflected that this was probably the slowest-moving car crash I’d ever witnessed.  The nose of the truck slid until it crashed into the outward branches of a big tree.  It slowed as the branches shattered progressively, then came to rest against the trunk.  Spruce branches lay across the windshield.  The truck was still.  The engine cut off because I hadn’t pressed in the clutch.  For a split-second there was silence, then James Reed interjected, “I give to all what I dared and left for the scene of desolation and now I am camped within 25 miles which I hope to make this night . . .”

I looked at Duke.  He was resting his chin on the console, which was now uphill of him but still appeared comfortable.  By mutual agreement we shut off James Reed and relaxed for a moment before getting out to assess the damage.  In the end it wasn’t too bad – some dents and tears, but mostly on the camper.  A tow truck hauled me back up the bank, then I drove the truck back home.  On the second leg of the journey we did not listen to Reed.

 

Chinook Wind

A mountain man choosing a wintering spot wanted to pick someplace that had mild winters, or at least periodic warm spells throughout the winter.  He’d want to make a good choice for two reasons: first, a warm winter would allow him to get out of his lodge occasionally, wander around outside, and maybe kill some fresh meat to replace the dried meat he’d been eating for weeks.  Second, if he picked a bad spot, his buddies might make fun of him for years.  Captain Benjamin Bonneville, for instance, picked a bad spot to build what he envisioned as a year-round fort.  He sited it just west of modern Pinedale, Wyoming, where the winters are bitterly cold, and the fort – which he immodestly named Fort Bonneville – was abandoned the first year.  For the duration of Captain Bonneville’s stay in the west, the trappers called his construction “Fort Nonsense.”

I think Big Timber, Montana, the town just south of the cabin where I’m spending the winter, would have made a good spot.  It’s along the Yellowstone River, so there was plenty of water.  Game was likely plentiful, and there were plenty of cottonwood trees to supply bark on which horses could feed after snow covered the grass.  Best of all, throughout the winter, periodic warm Chinook winds sweep in from the northwest to warm up the valley.  A few weeks ago in this blog, I wrote about the cold.  For three or four days I don’t believe the thermometer topped 0°F.  At one point it hit -15°.  But two days ago, amid a hard west wind, the temperature rose to 40°.  Yesterday and today, it topped 50°.  John Cosgriff, whose family has ranched around Big Timber for generations, says that’s what he likes about the winters west of the Crazy Mountains – it gets cold, but every once in awhile nature cuts you a break.

Chinook winds come about this way.  When a west-moving mass of air hits the western edge of the Rockies, the mountains force the air up.  As the air moves up, it cools because the decreased atmospheric pressure at higher altitudes allows the air molecules to spread out.  This cooling of air as it rises is called “adiabatic cooling,” and it happens all the time.  But all airmasses have a temperature below which the moisture that’s locked into the air will precipitate, or condense into droplets and fall as precipitation.  The point below which moisture will precipitate in a given airmass is the airmass’s “dewpoint.”  So if west-moving air cools enough as it rises along the Rockies’ western slopes – i.e., if the adiabatic cooling is sufficient – to drop the air temperature below the dewpoint, then rain, sleet, or snow will fall.  The airmass continues to move west, but now, having dumped its moisture, the air is drier.  After the air crosses the Rockies, it descends again.  And as it descends, the atmospheric pressure on the airmasses increases, shoving the molecules closer together.  The air heats up.  This is called adiabatic heating.  And here’s what causes the Chinook wind: the rate of adiabatic temperature change is different for moist and dry air.  Moist air being forced upward cools at a rate of approximately 3.5°F every 1000 feet.  But dry air being forced downward warms at a faster rate, about 5.5°F per 1000 feet.  So when the dried-out airmass descends to the base of the Rockies on the eastern side, it becomes warmer than it was when, moisture-laden, it first climbed the mountains’ western slopes.  The dried-out, warmed-up airmass continues moving east and when it arrives in a town east of the Rockies, such as Big Timber, the townspeople call it a Chinook wind.

Two days ago, when the Chinook wind blew through.  The wind picks up around the microphone when I step from the lee side of the cabin.

I am a big fan of Chinook winds.  The warmer weather feels great; it makes me want to lace up my hiking boots and take to the hills.  Now I can go outside in just one jacket and can wear gloves instead of mittens.  If I were a cold-inured Montanan, I’d go outside in only a tee shirt.  But hey – I’m no mountain man.  I’m just writing about them.