Nature Noir (19 page)

How many lions are there in California? No one really knows. Because they are hard to see, cougars are hard to count. And because they are hard to count, it would be difficult to manage their populations in any precise way. In 1988, the last official study of the state's lion population resulted in an estimate of 5,100. Official figures show that well over 2,000 of them have been killed under permit in the state since 1972, and the pace is quickening: More cougars were killed in the last decade than in the preceding two decades, and by early 2004, one hundred more had been shot in the first four years of the new millennium than had been killed in all of the 1980s. There is no assurance, say experts, that lion populations can sustain such losses in the long run. In the meantime, those that survive exist in the spaces between thirty-six million people and countless domestic animals who are actively invading the wilds.

When I came to the American River, I thought a ranger's job was to save something, or someone. Sometimes it is, when you hear about a bad situation early enough to stop it before it happens. But so often—as in the case of Ricky Marks and Mary Murphy—the whole story unfolds one step ahead of you. Or it's all over and done with before you even hear about it, as it was in the matter of Barbara Schoener. Then all you can do is to try to memorize the details and give a good account of them in your report. As time went on, it became clear to me that this was an important part of my job, too. A ranger is privileged to be intimate with things few other people spend much time with, and your job is to witness and remember.

What my memory had distilled from eight years of witnessing in the American River canyons by the time of Barbara Schoener's death was a glimpse of the general direction of things there: the return of a cool ponderosa pine and Douglas fir forest, pushing up through live oaks and black oaks; the profusion of wildflowers in the meadows after cattle were removed; and the growing frequency of sightings and tracks of mountain lions and black bears. After a century and a half of condemnation to usefulness there was a great longing back toward wildness in these canyons, and they had begun to go that way with an energy like continental drift, like roots heaving pavement. It was desire; it was the force behind everything that happens without human permission or design. It is present in the heartbeats of tiny birds who roost in trees on nights when we would quickly perish from exposure, if not for our houses and warm clothes. When this energy brings the missing parts back to a place, it can be uneven and unpredictable or, as it was for Barbara Schoener, even dangerous.

I will never forget how she looked, surrounded by the way things are at that time of the spring on a north-facing slope: young Douglas firs, green ferns, and moss in the dappled light.

At five o'clock in the evening on April 24, as the low sun turned the tops of the conifers orange, four of us walked down into the forest below Ball Bearing Trail and knelt in the ferns around the neat mound of duff and sticks that covered the body, except for the top of the scalp and the neatly tied running shoes. The evidence technician and I began to remove the pile of twigs one at a time, inspecting them for animal or human hairs, which we collected by touching the twigs with pieces of adhesive tape and then sticking the tape to white evidence cards. The two sheriff-coroner's deputies presided, taking notes and labeling, and packaging the evidence in brown paper shopping bags.

The little glade seemed strangely peaceful.

When we finished, for a moment the glistening internal wilds of spine, ribs, and intercostal muscles looked like food, like the inside of some deer. We gently rolled her over. Her face was gone. From below us through the deepening shadow of the forest, the roar of the rapids along the Middle Fork rose and fell on a breeze. That sound is behind everything I remember in those canyons, like the sound, or a name I know but cannot pronounce, of some larger turning of things into other things. We photographed her, and then we put her in a body bag and bore her back up the hill.

S
OMEONE HAD BEEN STEALING TREES
from the prettiest groves of black oaks in our forty-two thousand acres, at a place on the west rim of the North Fork called Big John Hill. Ranger Ron O'Leary had been checking the area for weeks, but so far he hadn't turned up a lead—just, each time, more stumps.

One April morning a neighbor along our boundary heard a chainsaw running and called the Sheriff's Department. Knowing that Big John Hill was part of Auburn State Recreation Area, the deputy who took the call asked his dispatcher to have a ranger handle it. I heard their conversation on my scanner and started rolling that way before our dispatcher called me. On the way I radioed O'Leary, up at Mineral Bar.

O'Leary and I rendezvoused near the village of Weimar along Interstate 80—a grocery store, a gun shop, a tiny post office, and some rough little dwellings—and from there I followed him east along the wooded toplands toward the canyon of the North Fork. Dropping into Specimen Gulch, the road turned to gravel. At our boundary it devolved into a few pairs of red-clay ruts wandering off in various directions into the pines. We stopped and got out to listen. The cool air was pungent with bear clover bruised by our tires. To the east toward the canyon rim, we heard the complaint of a chainsaw. We locked up Ron's Jimmy, and he folded himself in behind my shotgun rack. I put the Jeep in four-wheel drive, and we followed one set of ruts toward the sound of the saw. The ruts climbed steeply onto the groves of Big John Hill. On all sides of us the charcoal-gray trunks of black oaks split into symmetrical, wineglass-shaped bowers of branches supporting a ceiling of spring leaves sixty to seventy-five feet overhead. The leaves hadn't sunburned to the darker color they would be by midsummer, and the morning sun filtering through them bathed everything beneath in luminous pale green.

The track we followed forked often, and at each fork I stopped to listen for the saw, then steered toward it. Soon we saw stumps and tangled piles of limbs on either side. By now the trail was nothing more than two wheel marks of crushed vegetation slaloming through the trees. A stick popped under one of our tires. I stopped to listen out the open window for the reassurance that the saw was still running. It was.

Toward the hillcrest, our way was blocked. The tree poachers had felled an oak across the trail to keep prying eyes away from their larceny; no doubt they planned to cut their way out when they left. The dense forest on either side afforded no other way through. We didn't have a saw, but the Jeep was equipped with an electric winch. I got out, hit the gear release on the winch, grabbed the hook at the end of the cable, and, leaning into it, paid out the cable toward the fallen tree. By the time I'd made it fast, Ron had the winch control in his hand. He hit the switch, the cable went taut, and the whine of the electric motor dropped half an octave as it took up the load. Rustling and snapping branches, the tree began to inch toward us. A hinge of bent and splintered wood still connecting trunk to stump suddenly gave way with a loud snap. The saw, no more than two hundred yards away now, stopped abruptly. Ron took his thumb off the winch control and we stood stock-still, hardly daring to breathe. The rapping of a woodpecker echoed through the forest.

The saw started again. Ron hit the winch control and the broken stubs of branches on the fallen tree dragged dark grooves in the forest floor. The saw stopped again. Ron stopped the winch, and again we held our breath. The saw started, and again so did the slow progress of our tree. Eventually we had enough room to sneak the Jeep between the tree and its stump. We got in, closed the doors gently, and continued. O'Leary removed my camera from its case on the floor.

Around another bend in the trail, suddenly they were right in front of us: two men and two pickup trucks, both partially loaded with oak firewood. I stomped on the accelerator to close the remaining distance. To my right the camera flashed off the inside of the windshield as Ron caught them in the act.

The photograph would show one of them—a stocky man with a drooping mustache, his muscular arms below his T-shirt covered in bluish tattoos—just looking up to see us. The other—huge and lanky, with long, stringy blond hair, wearing a red flannel shirt and jeans—would be captured still intent on his saw. A whitish blur of wood chips was frozen in midair, cascading down his pant leg.

We bailed out and began walking toward them. The first man tapped the sawyer on his shoulder. The other looked up. The tattooed one nodded darkly in our direction. The big man—his driver's license would show he was six feet seven—hit the kill switch on the saw and uncoiled himself upward to gape at us.

"You're under arrest for cutting park trees!" I called out as I walked toward them. "Keep your hands where I can see them."

I moved in, patted them down, removed their knives—both men carried them—handcuffed each in turn, and sat them behind the prisoner cage in the Jeep's back seat. O'Leary stood back, watching carefully, which one ranger always does so the one preoccupied with searching and handcuffing doesn't get taken by surprise. The two men said nothing. When I closed the door on them it was just after eleven
A.M.
The day was growing warm, and the air was full of the rich scent of spring—oak leaves, deer brush flowering, bear clover, and moist soil. O'Leary was on the radio, requesting two tow trucks.

To most Americans a ranger is a nostalgic figure, living a simple outdoor life reminiscent of that in the nineteenth-century American frontier. Surrounded by herds of elk and the world's tallest trees at California's Redwood National and State Parks, she's a jack-of-all-trades who can splint a broken bone and replace a busted fan belt on her truck with equal facility. At Sequoia and Kings Canyon in the high Sierra, he might ride up to you on horseback, wearing the flat-brimmed campaign hat that is the ranger's most recognized symbol. At Glacier Bay in Alaska, she might paddle up in a sea kayak to explain the habits of grizzly bears, in whose proximity she beds down each summer night unprotected but for a tent and a can of pepper spray. In Glacier National Park in Montana, he might appear out of an early June sleet storm to orient you on an indistinct trail across a high pass. Answering visitors' questions in a cliff dwelling at Mesa Verde in Colorado, her knowledge of Indian culture might be deeper than that gleaned from book-learning, for your ranger could well be Navajo or Hopi herself.

All of that feels very Old West-y, but in fact the ranger is a distinctly modern figure, who didn't appear until the historical moment—between 1850 and 1900—when it became possible to imagine nature as no longer an adversary but a conquered and cornered thing in need of preservation. That the first rangers were contemporaneous with the emergence of the Arts and Crafts Movement in the field of design is no accident. By the second half of the nineteenth century, the great cities and their steam-powered factories had become smoky, clamoring horrors and mass-produced factory goods were on their way to eradicating the mark of human hands on the things people used, wore, and lived in. Some urban people—the upper classes, anyway—were suddenly filled with a yearning for rusticism: fabrics, furniture, and architecture with the marks of a craftsperson's hand, and the clear air, uncrowded vistas, and birdsong that were increasingly obscured by coal smoke, miles of brick, and the deafening cacophony of the streets.

The Arts and Crafts Movement is said to have begun in England, but national and state parks were an American invention. Parks were meant to evoke the presettlement landscape, and their advent was driven by an immediate nostalgia for the western frontier at the time of its closing. However, where the frontier was characterized by expansiveness and progressive subjugation, parks were created by a new and diametrically opposite force: the intentional refusal of progress and the encouragement of picturesque primitiveness.

Today at a park or wilderness boundary, all sorts of things are said no to: roads, off-road vehicles, loud music, fireworks, and firearms. The U.S. Forest Service has at times interpreted the Wilderness Act as prohibiting the agency's own use of chainsaws for trail maintenance, bulldozers for firefighting, and generators to light ranger cabins within designated wildernesses. An American company that produces washboards, hand washers, and mangles for the Amish (whose religion forbids the use of some modern contrivances) has among its other customers the National Park Service, which supplies these antique laundry implements to some of its rangers in remote backcountry cabins.

The creation myth of the national park idea is a scene oft related by historians: In September 1870, seated around a campfire, members of an expedition to survey the natural wonders of the Yellowstone Plateau talked about the area's future. Some of them felt Yellowstone's geysers, hot springs, and other curiosities ought to be leased to entrepreneurs for development. But one, an eastern lawyer by the name of Cornelius Hedges, is said to have maintained that, rather than fragment Yellowstone's marvels into private hands, they ought to be protected in a public park.

Returning to the East that winter, Hedges's fellow expedition member Nathaniel P. Langford was sufficiently taken with Yellowstone and Hedges's vision for it that he spent the winter lecturing and publishing on the subject. He was sponsored by Jay Cooke of the Northern Pacific Railroad, who saw a Yellowstone park's potential to boost passenger receipts as a tourist destination. The railroads would later be influential in pushing legislation for Yellowstone and other parks through Congress.

In the course of his speaking tour, Langford is said to have caught the attention of Ferdinand V. Hayden, director of the federal government's Geological and Geographical Survey of the Territories. The following summer Hayden organized another expedition to Yellowstone, taking with him the photographer William Henry Jackson and the landscape painter Thomas Moran. With their powerful images assisting the cause, Congress began deliberations on a park bill in December 1871. The act creating the park was signed into law the following March by President Ulysses'S. Grant.