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Three weeks into April, winter eases. Snow pulls back from soil and road, melting underneath itself. My belly is lean, muscles on fire. Each breath hurts. The road tilts up, more so than last fall, and with each push on the pedals my quads quiver. I will ride to where the snow stops forward progress. I’ve cycled up a gradually climbing canyon, down a short descent, alongside a crystal-edged reservoir, and around a metal gate stretched across the road, its Closed to Motor Traffic sign chipped and rusty. The road is mine alone on this late winter morning. I’ve skirted narrow strips of ice, and navigated slick black pavement. Rivulets of snowmelt follow the path of least resistance, which sometimes angles left, sometimes right, rarely flowing straight toward me.
I’ll be halted soon. I know that when the road curves again it will position me due east, where the sharp hillside on my right blocks sunlight. I will gain the shady stretch where winter’s blanket lies thick and frozen on the ground, its blunt edge confrontative, where my skinny tires become useless.
I dismount. Snow covers the road and lies on gray branches and leans against boulders. It clings to clumps of autumn’s late grasses. I walk my bike from the last clear patch of asphalt to the road’s edge. I lean it against the trunk of a gnarled scrub oak, its bark cracked and scarred.
Below my handlebars, attached by a loop of zip-tie, dangles a small, metal cylinder. The container is just over two inches tall, an inch in diameter. I peel off my gloves to unscrew the lid. I hold the open tube and walk to the snowy edge of the road where scrub oak grow thickly down the hill. I shake some of Jake’s ashes into my hand, then send them floating out over the crusty snow. I love you, Jake. I miss you. He is everywhere here. I walk to the other side of the road where the red dirt hillside soars, and scatter the rest of the ashes over the scarlet earth, the snow patches, a stream of meltage running in the berm.
He’s been gone three years and three months. He would have turned twenty-two today. He is twenty-two.
This is my third observance of this ritual, my solitary ceremony. Me. Jake. We meet here surrounded by what appears dormant but is filled with life. Moose and deer stand motionless, hidden by willows and pines. A beaver silences its gnawing, a squirrel pauses, a magpie gazes my way and keeps its peace. All I hear is trickling water; even the wind has calmed its constant whistle through bare branches. These gray trees, not a bud in sight, will burst into thousands of leaves unfolding with green life in mere weeks. I breathe in crisp air, then let it go. The silence is broken by birdsong, a solo.
The canyon walls press, constrict. My lungs no longer burn, but my chest aches. A whisper, somewhere else. Go, leave. Head north. True north.
When I married Daniel eight months ago I thought we would share this, that he’d be here beside me. But instead, I am more alone than before. I ache today for Jake. But I’m devastated by my failure to create the relationship I crave and need—the profound connection I thought was finally in my life.
I sprinkle ashes.
I write Jake’s name with my finger in the snow at the edge of the road.
Wolf stands with forelegs planted, head lifted, as the wind ruffs her smoke gray fur. The land rises behind her—shrubs and bunch-grasses as tall as her chest, a valley and rising hill beyond, aspen and willow throughout—she is host. Her eyes lock on mine and I stare. I am a guest in her land. I bow my head, and she lifts her nose. Our exchange complete, she turns and sniffs the air before moving off, loping, her long legs moving the grass as does a summer wind, a burst, here and gone.
As we drive along the narrow road into Lamar Valley I see this part of Yellowstone for the first time. I’ve visited West Yellowstone, and driven up to Old Faithful from Jackson in the south, but I’ve never been on this northernmost road that sweeps east to west, from entry gate at Gardiner, Montana, to entry gate in Silver Gate, Montana, moving through Wyoming in between. Immense and verdant in early June, the valley cradles the surging Lamar River, hundreds and hundreds of bison, lolloping black bears, and countless eagles, cranes, coyote, and other smaller creatures. And a pack of wolves, the well-known and beloved Lamar Canyon pack, a pack trying to survive its decimating losses of the winter. The alpha female—well known throughout the wolf-watching world as the 06 female—and the beta male, 754, had both been shot by hunters in Wyoming, outside park boundaries, just months before.
Bison, large as cars, plod with massive shoulders hunched around their necks, eyes blinking, gargantuan heads swinging side to side. A herd crosses the road. A dreadlock-bearded bull, its horns ridged and curving into its wooly mane, leads the leisurely procession, two younger bulls following, neither as filled out, as wooly, or as impervious as the first. A few cows, three or four calves that bound and weave between the plodders. Hooves pound the ground, deadened clomping, the sound of two hundred years ago.
Our eyes dart left and right searching for movement or at least familiar, recognizable shapes. Cars halt in each paved pullout along the road, and people stare into the river-split valley, some with binoculars, others with cameras, and the serious wildlife viewers with tripod-mounted scopes. We drive past a collection of cars and small buses and I want to tell Mark to stop, to let me out, let me see what’s going on, but I hesitate from the sheer unfamiliarity of it all. I’ve never done anything like this.
Mark drives on, and I squash the voice inside that says go back, fearing I might have missed something important, a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. I don’t want to be wrong. Nerves tighten my gut, and I perch on the edge of the back seat in our rented Dodge Durango. People litter both sides of the two-lane road, scanning for wildlife, and we continue west toward the heart of the valley, North America’s Serengeti. Another mile, two. None of us know exactly where to start. I begin to release my worry over the spot we didn’t choose, when Kirsten’s words register.
“Gray thing running,” she’s
