five hundred feet away, thank God.
“I’m Michael, Michael Powers,” he says, offering a hand. “And this here’s my son, Hayden.”
Hayden’s cheery face peeks from underneath a fishing hat. He turns back to his own scope, fixed on the grizzly.
Not a soul is frugal with his scope here. Everyone wants to share the joy of seeing the bear, the eagle, the wolf, the playful coyote pups. Michael Powers is from Arizona. He spends two weeks each summer in the Yellowstone area with his wife and son. His personalized license plate is DRUID21, for the alpha male of the Druid Peak pack that, during the first dozen years of Yellowstone’s wolf reintroduction, was one of the most viewed wolf packs in the world.
“It’s like going to see a movie knowing there’s no script, until the moment something happens. You may come in with an outline, but all that’s there are the main ideas—yes, there are so many bison, this many wolves and packs, this many black and grizzly bears. But the details come as you interact with the place. Optics play an important role in this—wildlife here is accustomed to people, and pretty aware, so I believe if you want to see them as naturally as possible, it’s better to view from a distance. That’s why I love sharing the scopes. That’s why I tapped on your window.”
Wildlife viewing takes time and a wallop of patience—lots of standing still and squinting into scopes. I can’t reconcile cycling, here, with looking for wolves. I try not to think about my bike stashed in the car as Michael continues.
“My job is high stress, and I can just feel that peeling away from me when I’m out here watching wildlife. It just slips away. One day I watched a big male grizzly make his way along the hillside north of Soda Butte. Then he disappeared behind the hills, and I knew where he was going. I said to my wife, let’s get in the car and go to the Trout Lake pullout, and Hayden was in the back in his car seat—he was three. We parked, facing where I thought the grizzly would appear, and suddenly there he was, cresting one of the hills right in front of us, and Hayden shouted dog! He hadn’t yet learned the word bear. No one else was there. Just us.
“Then one time Hayden and I were watching the Cottonwood pack on an elk kill. The wolves had eaten and were mostly just lying around when I saw a coyote trying to sneak in. I got Hayden on the scope and said, watch this—I knew what was going to happen. The coyote appeared in the scope and then a blur of two wolves shot out of the grass, chasing the coyote away. For a moment it was quiet, and then Hayden said, Dad, that was amazing.
“I want this experience to be available for everyone. There’s nothing like it, anywhere. And Hayden’s picked up on that too. He’ll go looking for people who haven’t been able to see the wolves or the bears, and offer them a look through our scopes.”
I lean into his scope and look again at the grizzly. Her cubs are not in sight. She lifts a paw to her mouth, chews, shakes her head. She could kill me with the swipe of a paw. Could tear me apart in seconds. Would kill anyone, anything, do whatever she had to do to protect her cubs.
A dozen years ago I received as a gift a cookbook titled Wild Women in the Kitchen. A collection of recipes and stories and folklore, it’s packed with brief tales about infamous women throughout time, from Joan of Arc to Sarah Bernhardt to Cher. I ignored the book for years, mainly because cooking is not one of my passions. Five years ago—long after Bob and I divorced—I decided to open it and read some of the stories. Who were considered wild women, and how are they different from me? The recipes I skimmed or ignored, but I read one, then another, then a dozen of the biographical paragraphs before I paused to contemplate. These women dared to be themselves, they made decisions based on their own needs and desires. They moved across countries and oceans, they followed their hearts, they lived bravely, their lives affected others. They spoke up. They trusted their paths. From Jane Austen, who dared to wittily write of society’s conventional restrictions upon women, to Alice B. Toklas who in 1907 fell in love with Gertrude Stein and later published a cookbook with a scandalous recipe for hashish fudge, to Eleanor Roosevelt with her famous Sunday evening salons. These women were courageous. True to themselves. I considered my own life, realizing how far from wild I was. Not only were these women wild, most seemed to have found—or created—their own tribes.
It rains during the night, and in the morning I discover I’d planted my tent on top of a natural drainage. My sleeping bag, on top of a pad, is damp. I tug a hat over my hair, some pants over my long johns, a jacket over my top. Mark and Kirsten are already at the splintering wooden picnic table. Water boils. Coffee is imminent.
“Sleep well?” Mark asks.
“Mm-hmm, you?”
“Good, great,” they nod.
I don’t tell them I woke up in midnight dark, remembering the artificial sugar packets in my duffle bag, terrified a bear would sniff them out and I’d be exposed as a fool. A maimed or possibly dead fool, who couldn’t follow simple rules. I’d slept poorly after that.
We drink coffee. Kirsten makes oatmeal. Mark jots in his journal, I open my own and try to pluck thoughts from the ether and write them down. I can’t. I expand here, and my mind is a galaxy filled with words, concepts, ideas, possibilities. But I can’t pin one down. I belong here, I’m of this land, I share a trace of origin with these creatures—the crane, the grizzly, the wolf—yet I am foreign, out of place. When those wolves, almost twenty years ago, were released here in the park, they stepped into the unknown. Transplanted, they were allowed time in one-acre pens to adjust to the climate, the smells, the air. And when the gates fell open, some clung to the familiar and wouldn’t leave. But eventually, all the wolves left wire fences behind and ranged over the 3,400 square miles of the park. They mated, formed packs. They created families. They explored new land. Attacked prey. These early wolves were invited interlopers, running free, carving out territories in land taken from them decades before. In the pens they’d been restrained. Released, they struck out and reclaimed everything they’d once been.
Mammoth Hot Springs was once an army post. In the park’s early years, poachers, souvenir hunters, and entrepreneurs who set up camps and tours, outmanned and outmaneuvered the park’s gamekeepers and wardens. Park administrators sought federal help to protect the beauty and stability of the ecosystem. The army arrived in 1886—fourteen years after the park’s official opening—and stayed for thirty years. Mammoth, now, is soldier free, but remains Yellowstone’s official hub. Mark, Kirsten, and I walk past log cabins, graceful two-story brick and frame buildings, a sandstone chapel constructed by Scottish masons, all built during the army’s tenure. We head to the Yellowstone Center for Resources, to see Doug Smith, head of the Wolf Project.
Doug Smith is a Paul Bunyan. His stride is twice that of mine, and were we not inside a grand building constructed in 1897 he’d be ducking as he passed through doorways. He is a man larger than life, his energy traveling in an aura disturbing electrons and protons throughout his environment. Jumping and sizzling, they mix and reform and change the air, the furniture, those around him, me. As with the teacher who magnetically engages his student and the actor who hooks and hypnotizes his audience, Doug captures his visitors’ attentions and I sit, mesmerized, noticing little of his office other than a wall of bookshelves to his right and a huge map of the park replete with hand-drawn odd-shaped circles and ellipses delineating wolf pack boundaries, labeled with pack initials and written in dry erase marker, pinned to the wall directly behind him. A plaid shirt on a hanger is hooked to a high shelf of his bookcase. A large computer monitor sits on a credenza behind his back, and at times during our discussion he turns to it, locating visual aids to illustrate his words.
A scientist, Doug relies on observation and its resultant charts and graphs. But Doug is anything but dry and didactic; his tall, tightly muscled form is in constant motion, and his voice moves from exultation to solemn respect in split seconds. Doug eats an unpeeled carrot while we talk, occasionally
