A Million Years with You (36 page)

I had been watching her for somewhat more than eighteen hours, during which I came to understand her dedication to her task and what it cost her. The observation took a little patience, but the wait was worth it. I've forgotten what I did this morning, but I'll always remember her.
²

 

The time came for me to rejoin the graduate students. I packed up my few possessions and studied my map. I had consulted it as we walked from the DEW Line station just to see if it matched what we were seeing and it seemed accurate enough, but when I unfolded it to figure out where I should go, I saw to my horror that at least in my area it wasn't accurate. I'd come there along an east-flowing stream—the stream that served as a fence for the pups—and I planned to start back the same way, by following that stream. But according to the map, the hill where my colleagues were camped was on a different river system. That was discouraging. I wasn't sure what to do. Worse yet, I distinctly remembered that up ahead the stream would fork. I had planned to follow one of the forks. The map didn't show a fork. How was I to find my colleagues' camp?

Baffin Island contains approximately 200,000 square miles. The only geological feature that might lead me to other people was the coastline. But I was very far from the coast, which at best was sparsely populated, and I would not know where to find a settlement if I got there. The map didn't show the coastline anyway. Meanwhile, the constant daylight I had so enjoyed was fading. Soon enough it would be evening for a while and then the Arctic night. No doubt my colleagues would eventually try to find me, but that would inconvenience them enormously—we were just acquaintances, not family or friends—and for them to find me, assuming that they'd try, I'd have to go back to my hill.

I might have panicked, but I didn't. I might have thought the map was right and I was wrong, because maps are always right and people are often mistaken. But, strangely, that wasn't what I thought. I'd lost the self-doubt and the nervousness that so affects humanity. And why was that? Because I'd been alone.

It's one thing to be alone in a town or city but quite another to be the only member of your species where the other large mammals are caribou and wolves. With the exception of my colleagues, wherever they were, I was the only person in 10,000 square miles. But I hadn't been alone. Perhaps I'd been nothing more than an observer, but my time with the wolves had given me so much peace that I trusted myself and my memory. I crumpled up the map and stuffed it in my pocket.

Then I followed the stream. I came to the fork which the map had omitted, saw some faraway hills, and crossed them as a wolf would cross, by the lowest pass between them, and kept on going until I walked into my colleagues' camp. A person is perfectly capable of doing such a thing, but the conscious mind must be clear to do it. Mostly our minds are jumbles of problems, obligations, time constraints, things other people said, and things we wish we'd said, but because I'd spent so much time in the quiet wind under the Arctic sky as one of the large mammals of the tundra, my mind had been purified of that.

 

Since then I've watched the animals who live in the woods near my house. In the devastating winter of 2008–2009 I fed the local whitetail deer and got to know them as individuals. I wrote a book about them,
The Hidden Life of Deer
. Then one morning in September I saw from my window a dark-colored lump in the field. It wasn't there the day before, so I went to look at it. To my sorrow, it was a dead whitetail doe, the mother of one of the groups I knew best. She was a very big deer, an adult with fawns when I first got to know her, so I believed she might have been at least six years old. Often enough, this doe with her older daughter and twin fawns would come to the field before sunrise and graze there together until broad daylight.

The field had recently been mowed, so the grass was short. We don't gather the hay—we leave it in the field—so dry grass was all around her, and her head, neck, and rump had been covered with some of it. I looked more closely and saw that something very sharp had made a clean, circular cut on her rump from which some meat was missing. I could find no other injuries except for a few long scratches on her shoulder. I would have liked to look at her throat, but I couldn't see it without moving her head and disturbing the grass that covered it, which I didn't want to do because I was thinking of calling a friend who knew an alleged expert in animal forensics and I didn't want to destroy evidence.

I was heartbroken about the doe, but the grass was interesting. After I finished my study of circus tigers I went to Utah, Idaho, and Colorado to study cougars and saw several deer who had been killed by cougars. All were covered with leaves or grass, just like my whitetail doe. A cougar does this because a deer is too big to eat all at once. The cougar hides the carcass as best he can and sometimes stays around to guard it.

The clean cut was also interesting. One cougar-killed deer in Idaho, although partly eaten and covered with leaves, also had a clean round cut in her skin, just like the doe in my field. As far as I know, the large members of the cat family are the only predators who hide a kill with leaves or grass or who—because of their virtually all-meat diet—have carnassial teeth sharp enough to make a clean, sheared cut in another animal's hide.

According to Fish and Game, cougars would be an endangered species if there were any in New Hampshire. It was said that if their presence were acknowledged, Fish and Game would have to protect them and didn't have the money. But our neighbors saw one; Sy Montgomery's husband, Howard Mansfield, saw one on the morning of his wedding day; Steve and I, driving home one day, saw one leap across the road; our son saw one near that road; a friend found a young one dead by the edge of a highway; and I saw one walk out of the woods not fifty feet from where the doe was lying. Four of these sightings took place in an area of about twenty square miles and could have been the same cougar. The only other wild cats in our vicinity are bobcats and, very rarely, Canada lynxes, but these are too small to kill a deer like her, as she weighed about two hundred pounds. Adult bobcats weigh between nine and forty pounds (with very few at the high end), and adult lynxes weigh between eighteen and twenty-four pounds. Adult cougars, in contrast, weigh between seventy and two hundred twenty pounds and one had been measured at three hundred pounds.

In some ways the scene was confusing. The corpse of the doe was in the open. I wish I had measured the distance to the nearest cover, but I didn't. A cougar tends to stalk a victim from cover, then make a lightning charge, but he also can flatten himself almost to invisibility, especially if he's in dry grass, because he's the same color. I thought the carcass was a bit far from cover, but maybe not, or maybe the cougar, if it was a cougar, sneaked a short way.

I found the dead doe at about eight-thirty in the morning. She was beginning to stiffen, so I guessed that she had probably been killed at first light. No doubt she had been grazing with her fawns and older daughter. What puzzled me was that while she lived, she was vigilant. I'd seen her grazing with her family dozens of time, and always she would look up every few seconds. Also she was lying partly on her belly with her legs somewhat sprawled, as if she had been jumped on. The other kills I'd seen were lying on their sides. Her daughters would have been with her, and I wondered if she died protecting them. If so, she might have faced the cougar.

Whitetail deer, especially the females, normally protect each other by flagging their white tails as they run away, the most conspicuous sign in all of nature. Then the other deer also bolt with their tails flagging. But on two occasions I've seen a large doe and her family encounter a coyote, and far from flagging and running, the doe raised her head and with her ears straight up like a rabbit's she marched stiffly toward the coyote as if she meant to kick the stuffing out of him. She would have done this with her front feet. On both occasions the coyote lowered his head, ears, and tail, and assuming an indifferent demeanor, he trotted away (but did not run) at an oblique angle, just as the young wolf on Baffin Island had done the day our group arrived, just as the Ju/wasi had told us to do in the presence of a predator. Possibly the doe didn't understand cougars. Possibly she'd never seen one before. Most of us have never seen one. So although she would not have mistaken him for a coyote, he might have seemed chaseable. I have some trouble with this theory, though. Virtually all mammals (except us) are good at recognizing the intentions of another mammal.

More easy to understand was why whoever killed her had eaten only a few bites and then covered her with grass. Cougars don't want to be seen, so he certainly wouldn't want to be out in the middle of a field with daylight coming. Perhaps he was in the woods somewhere, up in a tree, planning to eat later. I looked in all the nearby big trees but didn't see him. I also looked for tracks, but cougars are difficult to track except in soft snow, so I found none. That night I set up a game camera near the carcass, but all I got was a photo of a bear's nostrils, taken soon after dark when the bear came up to sniff the lens.

I think he didn't like its scent, which no doubt was my scent, because he dragged the carcass away from the camera. In the morning we found the carcass at a distance, ripped apart with much of the meat eaten. That was too bad, because the forensic expert hadn't seen it. After that, there was no use in him or anyone else looking at the throat because the bear had torn it up.

The bear was very large, unfortunately for the cougar, who at first might have hoped to eat after dark but had no chance of a meal if that bear was eating. The next day buzzards, mice, ants, and flies ate more of the carcass. By evening it was covered with maggots. That night the bear or the coyotes ate more. After the following night, even the head and the bones were gone. Someone must have carried what was left into the woods. Someone else, probably someone much smaller, had licked up all the dry blood and tiny scraps. Not a trace remained.

 

I worried about the fawns. Soon enough it would be winter. The fawns were born in the spring. They had never experienced winter. They wouldn't know the warmer microclimates or the best sources of winter food. Every winter deer die of cold and hunger. How were those fawns to survive with no one to guide them? Deer can be selfish, but their older sister wasn't. The next time I saw the fawns they were with her. She had spent the previous winter with her mother and from her had learned how to survive. She and her sisters stayed together, and all of them were healthy in the spring.

 

I knew more deer than I knew cougars, despite my efforts to study cougars in Colorado, Utah, and Idaho. There I learned about them from their tracks and from sightings. By this method, the closest I came to knowing a cougar was by figuring out how a young male cougar happened to appear in a schoolyard in Boulder. He had been emigrating, as male cougars do when they grow up and their fathers chase them out of their territories. So he had come east and found a stream. He followed it upstream because the bushes on its banks gave him cover. But near the school the stream came out of a pipe, and the nearest cover he could find was by the schoolyard. There he took refuge. He was probably not hunting the children, as many supposed, and he was gone before the authorities could do anything about him.

I did come to know two cougars, however. One belonged to a wonderful woman named Lissa Gilmore. Lissa lived in Telluride, at the top of a hill with fields and forests stretching away as far as the eye could see. The cougar's name was Ruby. She had been with Lissa since infancy, but by the time I met her she was full-grown and huge—I'd say she was seven feet long from nose to tail and weighed over a hundred pounds. It was my enormous pleasure to be Lissa's guest for several days, which is how I came to know this cougar, and eventually I wrote the following about an afternoon I spent with her, taping all that went on.

 

Ruby is sitting with us in Lissa's living room, where, in a confined space, the cougar seems much larger and more daunting than she had seemed outdoors. Worse yet, she seems restless. She has found an odor on the rug. It is a drop of amniotic fluid from Lissa's pregnant cat, Yehti, who, it turns out, has been in labor all this time. However, at the moment in question no one knows this, as Yehti is holding back her kittens, surely because she is afraid of Ruby. Ruby does nothing to reassure her. Rather, she begins to rumble, then to spit. She is singing the murderous song of a cat's dark feelings, a contralto solo of envy and displeasure, which fills Lissa's house and finds its audience of one, little Yehti, crouched in hiding under a chair, quietly considering the seriousness of her situation.

Lissa and I keep right on talking, so involved are we with the relationship of guest and hostess that is developing between us. Prowling Ruby keeps up her disconcerting spits and growls. On my tape, I hear myself telling Lissa that I respect Ruby. Then Ruby turns and walks toward us, eyes front, as if she meant to walk between us when plunk—as if her rump, not her head, made the decision—her hip hits the floor beside us, gracefully followed by the rest of her body. She then twists on her back and shows us her furry white belly. I wonder how many breasts she has. As Ruby remains on her back, I ask if I can search for her nipples.

In attentive silence, Lissa and I then do just that, with Ruby lying very stiffly, her head raised, her paws bent at the wrists, her thighs spread, looking down at her belly uneasily while our hands roam like spiders through her fur. However, as Lissa quietly predicts, we find nothing. Maiden cougars have no sign of nipples or breasts. This is fascinating. I keep searching, but when Ruby's body stiffens, I stop fast. A housecat at that point might have seized my hand, clapped it to her mouth, and bitten it, and I don't want that treatment from Ruby, whose eyeteeth seem as long as my fingers and whose triangular carnassials are as massive as my folded thumb.