Fire Season (27 page)

The wolves have not been helped by their designation as an “experimental, non-essential” species, which denies them full protection under the Endangered Species Act. They’ve tended to stray outside the man-made political boundary meant to encompass their approved habitat, and when this happened they were either rounded up and rereleased inside the recovery area or trapped and locked away in captivity, depending on how often they’d strayed. If a wolf killed three cows in a calendar year, it was in turn hunted and shot by government marksmen for doing a thing that made sense—eating the slowest, dumbest, meatiest thing around, an interloper poorly adapted for survival in a wild landscape. The wolves, too, may prove susceptible to the rigors of the wild, their genetics concentrated among so few founders. And despite the prospect of a year in jail and a $50,000 fine for anyone found guilty of killing an endangered species, more than two dozen wolves have been poached by persons unknown.

Leopold’s story of killing a wolf, a deep parable about good intentions and unforeseen consequences, has yet to be absorbed by those who still view predators as vermin rather than as creatures of power and majesty—an inextricable presence in a healthy biotic community. Remove them and the weave of life in a place begins to fray: we know this now, in part because Leopold learned it the hard way.

He had his final revelation on the subject of Southwestern land health during two trips to Mexico in 1936 and 1937. By then he’d long been settled into a professorship of wildlife management at the University of Wisconsin. Along the Rio Gavilan in the Sierra Madre Occidental, while hunting deer with a bow and arrow, he wandered through grass-rich hills of live oak and wide-open stands of ponderosa pine, marveling at the beauty and integrity of the landscape. Here was a place untouched by cattle, where a healthy population of deer coexisted with their natural predators—wolves and mountain lions—and fires burned freely over the mountains with “no ill effects.” He saw no evidence of overbrowsing. Erosion too was nonexistent. The contrast with the mountains of Arizona and New Mexico came as a shock: Leopold realized that in all his years as a forester he’d never seen truly healthy land. “Our own Southwest was pretty badly misused before the idea of conservation was born,” he wrote in his essay “Conservationist in Mexico.” “As a result, our own conservation program for the region has been in a sense a post-mortem cure.”

The postmortem cures continue to this day. Gila trout, once on the brink of extinction, are thriving in the headwater creeks of the Gila River. Cattle grazing has been reduced in riparian areas, bringing increased stability to the watershed. Wolves again howl on this side of the border, and the free-burning wildfire Leopold once disparaged as “Piute forestry” has been allowed to roam on its native terrain. With every passing decade the Gila continues a process of rewilding and renewal—tentatively, uncertainly. Yet the paradox inherent in the concept of “managed wilderness” is as stark as ever. Which fires are good and which are bad? Can wild wolves and domesticated cattle coexist on public lands? Does poisoning streams of non-native fish to restore native species have consequences for amphibian and invertebrate life that we can’t yet comprehend? These questions remain unresolved in our time, the politics surrounding them as prickly and polarizing as ever.

As for parables of good intentions and unforeseen consequences, they are not the province solely of scholars and the famous dead. One late-July evening, Alice and I hit the trail for an evening hike. We are a couple hundred yards below the tower when we come upon a tiny fawn alone by the side of the trail, in a little clearing. It doesn’t move—its legs are tucked beneath its quivering belly—but it appears alert, and frightened by the dog’s curiosity; it makes a little mewling sound like a newborn kitten. I keep Alice at bay while I gingerly inspect the fawn for wounds. I find none. For reasons more instinctual than intellectual, I assume it’s been abandoned—alone and helpless in an exposed place, right next to the trail—so I cradle it in my arms to carry it back to the peak, thinking I might find a way to save it. It kicks its hind legs and bolts off. It runs perhaps thirty feet before its legs give out and it collapses, whining and crying. Alice gives chase and has to be restrained again. This time the fawn does not resist when I pick it up, and we march up the hill, the dog circling us and jumping until I order her ahead of us on the trail. Shyly she obeys, and we march like some strange, tragicomic parade through the woods to the meadow on top. There must be something about the fawn’s coat that doesn’t jibe with my sinuses; by the time I reach the cabin I’m sneezing violently, on the verge of an asthma attack, and frightening the poor creature even more.

I set it up in a bed of sweaters and jackets in the tin bathtub. I heat some soy milk in a pan on the stove; I manage, by squeezing its jaw and tilting back its neck, to force it to swallow a little milk spooned onto its tongue. I’m scared I might make it choke, but with a little practice I become reasonably adept at making it take the milk.

I radio the Embree work station and ask the guy there to call Gila Wildlife Rescue, to see if I can get some guidance on how to feed and handle the fawn. I know the guy who runs GWR. In fact I’d just been at his house a couple of weekends earlier, where he showed me an owl, two kit foxes, and a fawn he was nursing back to health. Unfortunately the listing for him in the phone book is out of date, so the guy in Embree calls and leaves a message with the state Game and Fish Department. After a couple of hours they call back to say they’ll send an agent out of Las Cruces to pick up the fawn. I’m surprised they don’t have someone closer but relieved at least that help is on the way.

“Do they know it’s a five-mile walk to get here?” I ask.

“I’m not sure,” comes the reply. “I’ll check.”

Ten minutes later he radios back. “Game and Fish says to return the fawn to the place where you found it, leave it there, and let nature take its course.” What I am really being told, gingerly but unmistakably, is that it’s my fault for interfering in the first place. I’ve disrupted the natural order of things. I should undo my error, return it to the place of its discovery, forget about it.

I begin to entertain a host of troubling questions: Have I doomed it merely by touching it? Will the scent of me, the scent of a human, ensure its rejection by its mother no matter what? Will its immune system have any defense for the microbes I carry? Is my own stupid sentimentality the real cause of its doom? Have I—and the dog—frightened off its mother, a doe who would’ve returned when we passed? All of a sudden I realize I don’t know the first thing about the nursing habits of newborn mule deer. What had looked so jarring to me—a little fawn alone in the woods, defenseless against all who would harm it—may have been an utterly natural occurrence. I feel the warm flush of shame at the depth of my ignorance.

At dawn the next day the fawn is no longer in the old tin tub. I find it looking lifeless, curled under one of the bunks in the corner of the cabin, an unmoving little coil. I feel its side: warm to the touch. I heat more soy milk and forced some down its gullet with a spoon.

In the afternoon I rouse it and carry it outside, place it on the ground. It wobbles and sways but remains upright. I walk a little ways off. The fawn begins to follow. Every moment afoot its legs appear stronger, more sure of each step, until I jog a few paces and it breaks into an awkward lope, hind legs splayed to maintain a precarious balance. I lead it around the meadow for a hundred yards, the fawn following like the obedient pet I do not want it to become.

When we stop, the fawn moves between my legs, its muzzle in the air, searching for a nipple. What, I think, do I have that resembles a nipple? A saline spray bottle, a nasal moistener. I empty the bottle, rinse it, and realize I’ve run out of soy milk. I remember some powdered milk, years old, stowed in the back of the pantry. Insufficient, no doubt, but it’s all I’ve got. I heat water and add powder and suction the mixture into the spray bottle. I hold the bottle between my legs like a nipple. To the fawn it does not feel like a nipple, of course, but after several false starts and milk dripping down its chin it finally understands the mechanics and suckles for a few seconds on the nozzle, and I deliver perhaps half an ounce to its shriveled stomach.

Since it seems strong, I decide now is the time to return it to the place I found it, if return it I must. When we reach the scene of our first meeting I sit on a log and wait to see if it will recognize the place. It comes toward me, jaws in search of a nipple once more, its cries louder, and all of a sudden I begin to weep. The fawn wanders unsteadily along the slope below the trail, seems to sniff at the earth in recognition, in a way I’ve never seen it sniff. It walks a few feet and curls next to a log, and there I leave it. It does not stir as I walk away up the hill.

In the night I come as close as I’ve ever come to prayer. More hope than prayer, in the end, but fervent in the way we think of the desperate and prayerful. I wish for the fawn to be wild, to run in high mountain meadows under moonlight, to feel the cold splash of crossing a creek in autumn. To know desire, pleasure, pain. To at least be given a chance. A life. Not merely birth and death.

Even more I wish I’d never seen it.

The next morning I amble into the meadow to piss and I hear its faint cries. By walking in ever larger concentric circles I discover it lying next to a rock near a salt lick visited by its own kind, mature mule deer, whose droppings litter the ground there. It had walked up the hill god knows when. I did not hear it in the night. When it sees me—or maybe when it hears me, for its eyesight appears poor—it comes to me with its muzzle more insistent than ever for a nipple, its teeth gripping the inseam of my pants and gnawing, sucking. Again I fill the saline spray bottle with milk and get a little down its throat.

I call the dispatcher on the radio, in one last effort to enlist help. I tell him to try anything to reach my friend at Gila Wildlife Rescue, to let him know I can either meet him at the pass or drive to town with the fawn. I will find a way to carry it the five miles down. Then the district office comes over the radio and says: Game and Fish instructed that you take it away from the tower, do not touch it, and let nature take its course.

“Roger that,” I say, helpless and sick with remorse.

That afternoon the fawn curls up beneath the sawhorse, ten feet from the cabin door, the place it seems to feel offers it a modicum of safety as its strength wanes.

Alice is lovely with it, resisting her urge to sniff at it, paw at it, make it a plaything. The fawn even comes to Alice and crouches beneath her in search of a teat, and Alice simply stands with her legs splayed and looks at me, uncomprehending and perhaps a little scared. Much of the day she barks into the trees at the edge of the meadow, barks seemingly at nothing, at phantoms. As if to say: Do not come near the fawn. Do not prey on the defenseless.

My radio remains quiet. I sit on the porch and watch the fawn’s torso rise and fall with each breath. In its last moments of strength the fawn lies on its side and gallops in place, all four legs churning like pistons, like a dream of running. Its cries grow louder, higher pitched, more insistent. Then all of a sudden it is still.

To bury it or leave it as carrion would seem a desecration—either one the act of a conscienceless murderer—so I build a pyre. I’ve been saving dry wood for weeks under a tarp for late-season bonfires. I burn one batch of wood down to a flaming bed of red-hot coals and then I place the fawn on the bed and cover it with yet more wood. I stack it as high as the stone circle will allow. The flames leap and the wood crackles. Before the fire burns completely down a deluge pours from the sky and reduces it to a core of molten coals and a drift of blue-gray smoke. It rains a quarter inch in half an hour. The meadow is perfumed with the smoke, and for days afterward the memory of that smell will haunt my every waking hour.

J
uly ends with midnight lightning over the Black Range, anvil-headed cumulus glowing in the moonlight. Two days pass before the sleeper smokes show; in the span of an afternoon I call in three new fires. John at Cherry Mountain spots two more. The observer plane manages to find a fire deep in a canyon ten miles south of me, where smoke would have to rise 500 feet for me to see it—as it eventually does, three hours later. On the last day of July ten active fires are visible from my vantage: the Diamond, the Circle Seven, the Powderhorn, the Outlaw, the White, the Trigger, the Wily, the Hightower, the Rainy, the Thompson. The forecast calls for a spell of hot, dry weather ahead—high pressure building over Arizona. Fire season lives.

Fire myths ancient & modern
*
a memory of smoke in lower Manhattan
*
last fires & lazy days of rain
*
waking above the clouds
*
elk in the meadow
*
a hidden cache of curiosities
*
the consolation of words & the escape from words
*
questions for lookouts past