Kevin Van Tighem

The windy forests of the high foothills and Front Ranges are the birthplace of rivers: rivers like the Oldman, beside whom I sit most evenings on what I’ve come to know as the whiskey chair. Sometimes I hold a glass of ice cubes flavoured with a bit of whiskey, other times a cup of warm tea or hot chocolate, but regardless of what is cradled on my lap the river is the same — chattering steadily as it courses its way between the Douglas firs that shelter me and the jungle of young poplars on the gravel island that appeared a few years ago after a larger than usual spring flood. It’s a young river here so near to its birth places; still eager and full of purpose.

Some of the floods have been larger than usual, of late. Since we took on the responsibility of caring for our piece of God’s country back in 1993 we’ve seen four “hundred-year floods”. The big ones can be horrifying in the moment — hungry, roaring surges of chocolate water loaded with flotsam, pounding against the outsides of each bend, collapsing cliffs, pulsing through the cottonwood groves and pouring across our buckbrush flats. But when they pass, and they always do, they often turn out to have given birth to millions of new willows and poplars whose seeds drifted on the June winds to light on fresh deposits of silt and gravel along the river edge. Spring floods are birth events, at least for river forests.

If Earth is our mother, she is constantly giving birth: to poplar forests along the downstream river and to the river itself along the eastern slopes of the Rocky Mountains. Each spring she gives birth to billions of plants that lift green arms to the sky and push new roots deep into the living earth, making it soft. Amid all that greenery, does give birth to fawns and eggs hatch in nests. Mother bears emerge blinking from their dens, followed by newborn cubs who have never heard a river before. The river tells them of its birth, and a thousand other things a bear needs to know, as the mother planet goes spinning through the sky at this far edge of a universe that has offered, so far, no hint of life anywhere else in all its cosmic vastness. Birth might be a phenomenon that exists only here on this living planet — making it that much more miraculous.

This spring I went up into the birthplace of our home river because it’s always been a good place to be. But there were problems there; birth complications. Hiking up a newly-bulldozed road on Cabin Ridge, I saw steep sidehill cuts oozing water, the soil dark and shiny like a head wound that won’t stop bleeding. The water draining down the open faces of savaged soil collected in ditches full of silt and algae. In some places so much groundwater was escaping from the hillside that it formed rills and brooks that chattered cheerily along beside the sun-blasted road. It was a happy sound —or it would have been, had I not known what those cheery little rivulets were doomed soon to discover: that they would evaporate into nothing before they reached the valley floor.

Rivers are born of meltwaters and runoff that originate on the land. Shaded by vegetation, soaking into soft spongy soils, much of that spring runoff becomes groundwater. The healthiest rivers are those sustained by groundwater springs. Healthy land; healthy river. But the Oldman no longer enjoys that kind of uncomplicated birth because a century of resource exploitation has left the land wounded. Most recently, coal companies in pursuit of profit felt no compunction about ripping many kilometres of rough road into the mountainsides. The raw cuts release groundwater that would otherwise have filtered slowly down to the river below. The escaping water is trapped in eroding ditches and fans out across the raw scars the bulldozers left behind, where it evaporates in the sun and wind and is gone. It never even reaches the river.

The Oldman is a major tributary of the South Saskatchewan River. Monitoring has shown that the natural flow of the South Saskatchewan has decreased more than 12% in the last sixty years. A lot of that decrease is because of lost groundwater — lost to large logging clearcuts that dry out in the summer wind instead of shading moist soils beneath the tree canopy, lost to seepage from coal, oil and logging roads that slice into the slopes and sever shallow aquifers that used to connect with the river below, and lost to compacted roads and off-highway vehicle trails that divert snowmelt and rainwater — and eroded soil — straight into the river each spring instead of letting it soak in.

That quick release of spring runoff is also why we see bigger spring floods more frequently. And then the summer rivers run shallow and warm for want of what was meant to be their sustaining groundwater flow.

In September, one can forget all this. This is less a season of birth than one of quiet nostalgia, as this year’s generation of newly born birds fly south, fawns lose their spots and begin to look like their mothers, bear cubs grow fat along the river, and leaves begin to fall. The river is always small and quiet at this time of year, as its natural groundwater flows diminish. The bull trout are gone upstream to spawn; for them, at least, it is still a birthing time. For the rest, it’s a time of maturing and moving on.

I like the birth metaphor for the eastern slopes of the Rockies; all our rivers, after all, rise there. But in the face of the harm we continue to wreak upon those hills, ridges and valleys, another metaphor seems more appropriate. When birthing goes wrong, what was meant to be a time of joy and renewal becomes a time of grief and tears. Those sidehill cuts on the new roads carved so violently into the face of mother Earth glisten with water that will never reach the river. It looks not like birth or renewal; to me it looks like tears. And tears dry up on one’s face. After enough have been shed, all that remains is thirst and sorrow.

This evening, admittedly, the river showed no evidence of grief. Its faith seems boundless. Mine: not so much. We could heal those cuts, dry those tears, restore the wounded slopes and make of those river birthplaces the safe and blessed refuges a mother needs when engaged in the solemn, joyful work of renewing life and re-creating beauty. But we don’t; as if there were no longer any need for birth and renewal. As if we’ve given up.

Of all the processes that give our planet life, it seems to me that birth is among the most sacred. And of all the things that make life possible, water is the most essential. For both those reasons, the birthplaces of our rivers deserve more love, more care, fewer tears and less violence.

If we are ever judged, it seems to me that the first question might well be: “How did you treat your mother?”

[A talk to the Agricultural Service Boards of Alberta, January 26, 2017
by: Kevin Van Tighem]

I’m here to argue that how we manage carnivores should be based on biology, should be humane, and should advance the public interest. I’m going to focus mostly on wolves. In my view what we’re currently doing doesn’t meet any of those tests. I’ll come back to biology and humaneness but I thought I would start with some thoughts about the public interest. 

This is 2017. Alberta is very different from back when I was in diapers. 

Back then, in the early 1950s, Alberta was a predominantly rural province and agriculture was the heart of its economy. The oil giant was just starting to awaken. Our provincial government was Social Credit, a party whose roots were prairie agrarian. The Provincial Cabinet contained farmers. 

By the time, I became a young adult in the early 1970s, the urbanization of Alberta was well underway. The economy was on crack cocaine with booming oil prices. Resource industries were fast outstripping agriculture in importance. The political face of the province changed accordingly – we elected a government of mostly urban lawyers and oilmen. 

Now as I enter old age, the trend lines have taken us to yet another place. Alberta is overwhelmingly urban, the clock is ticking on the oil economy, agricultural families feel forgotten and our new government represents the socially-diverse, politically-progressive urban centers far more than the agrarian hinterland. With electoral boundary review, we’re going to see that shift to urban power accentuated. If you’re rural, that can feel more than worrisome. But Alberta is not just you, or me; it’s everyone, and most of us are urban animals now. 

So, how might carnivore management serve the public interest today? 

It’s in the public interest to keep people from being injured or killed by potentially dangerous animals. That part of the discussion goes mostly to bears, which I’ll return to briefly towards the end but today I’m focused mostly on wolves. It’s in the public interest, certainly, to ensure that wild predators don’t kill our livestock. But just last month, my MLA tabled a petition signed by over 10,000 Albertans asking for more humane and biologically-sound treatment of wolves. So, it’s also in the public interest, in 2017, to maintain healthy wild populations of those predators across their natural ranges. The petition reflected how much of our province’s population values the role predators play in nature and is concerned about wildlife ethics. There will be those who want to dismiss the petitioners as naïve, misinformed urban idealists. Some are. So, what? They are still Albertans. They are entitled to have their views respected as much as you or me. And anyway, many aren’t. My signature is on that petition and so are several southern Alberta rancher and farmer friends. 

There is another piece of the public interest that I think applies here. We hear a lot about social license in discussions about our bitumen, oil and gas industries. You can’t secure and protect markets for your goods, and permissions to operate on the landscape, if you don’t have social license to operate. Basically, people need to think what you are doing is legitimate and, if not necessary to them, at least acceptable for them to tolerate. 

Social license is an ongoing issue in agriculture too. We see it in challenges to GMOs, the use of antibiotics and growth hormones in meat production, factory-farming and so on. Those are all social license issues. When I was a toddler in the 1950s farming and ranching had no substantial social license problems; it was how Albertans saw Alberta. It isn’t like that now. 

I recently attended a meeting of the Porcupine Hills Coalition, a group of people who have pulled together to make sure the Alberta government gets its sub-regional land use plans for the Porcupine Hills and upper Oldman right (for a change.) I looked around the table and saw several cattle ranchers, some acreage owners, land trust representatives, biologists, and representatives of the major Alberta environmental groups. It struck me that I was seeing the product of a remarkable kind of social license building. 

Thirty years ago, those ranchers would not have been in the same room as those environmentalists. Thirty years ago, as one of those environmentalists, I was publishing essays like “The Curse of the Cow” calling for cattle to be pulled out of Alberta public lands and forest reserves. We were adversaries. Now we’re allies. Environmental groups, in case you haven’t been paying attention lately, are increasingly lined up in support of public lands ranching in the Alberta foothills. That’s a man-bites-dog story in the Alberta I used to know and it came about, I believe, largely because of Cows and Fish. 

Cows and Fish happened because of bold people in the ranching community and bold people in the conservation community who decided to get out of their echo chambers and into each other’s lives. The ranchers stopped making excuses and acknowledged that their cattle can do a lot of damage to creek bottoms if left to their own devices. The conservationists stopped pointing fingers and acknowledged that ranchers care about stewardship and know a thing or two about livestock. 

Most of you know the story. Where Cows and Fish projects came together, streams got healthier, riparian areas recovered, and forage production and herd health improved too. And adversaries became friends. And ranching strengthened its social license with a growing sector of society that had spent much of the late twentieth century antagonistic to it. 

I would argue it’s in Alberta’s public interest to manage carnivores not only to reduce conflicts with and costs to agriculture, but also in ways that contribute to the social license for agriculture. Agriculture is important socially, economically and, in the case of range livestock production, ecologically. But there are other ways to use rural land and if agriculture loses social license, those other land uses could take over in a changing Alberta. Already, Brad Stelfox’s analysis of economic and land use trends says that rural residential subdivision is the biggest threat to near-urban and foothills agriculture. But, at least in Cows and Fish country, the ranchers aren’t defending the land from subdivision on their own any more. 

So, I think the public interest in carnivores revolves around keeping their populations viable and visible, keeping them from depredating on domestic livestock, and strengthening the social license for rural agriculture in an increasingly-urbanized world that judges failure harshly. 

So, let’s hold that thought and move on to biology and ethics and, again, I’m going to focus mostly on wolves here because they have always been controversial and challenging, and because I’ve spent most of my adult life among and around them. 

Wolves are like us in some ways, except that none are vegan. They are strongly family-oriented, they are social and territorial animals, they learn by trial and error and apply that learning to improving their life skills, they are capable of affection and grief, and they are often very difficult to get along with. 
So: like us. 

Somewhere in deep history, that similarity led us to bond with wolf ancestors to the extent that we adopted dogs as favoured companions. But just as we are often conflicted in our human relationships, so it is with canids. We may see the dog as man’s best friend, but many of us see the wolf as our worst enemy. Many do; others sentimentalize the wolf as a wild spirit – sort of like dog-elves. 

Wolves are just wolves, but most of us simply can’t see them that way. Nonetheless, as with everything else on this planet, we have assumed responsibility for managing them. 

The smart way to manage wild animals is to be very clear on what you are managing them for, and then to work with their biology to get the results you want. 

In my view, then, Alberta is a shining example of profoundly mis-managing wolves. We have it almost completely wrong. We aren’t clear on what we are managing for, and the things we then do in the name of management have the perverse effect of turning their biology back on us and compounding the problems one might assume we are trying to solve. 

In terms of management objectives, we say we are trying to prevent wolf problems. In reality, we are trying to keep wolf numbers down. Those are not the same thing, but muddled thinking makes us equate one with the other. The wolf problems we are concerned with here, I would argue, are the killing and displacement of domestic livestock. Others might say human safety or depredation of game herds are also wolf problems. Human safety is not, although I can’t understand why. We’d be so easy to catch, it seems strange wolves almost never try. I would argue that in Alberta depredation of game herds is not an issue either, with the complicated exception of some badly-impaired caribou ranges. We have deer, elk, bighorn sheep and moose coming out of our ears compared to when I was young; where’s the problem? 

So, that leaves livestock depredation, and wolves can certainly cause problems in cattle and sheep country. Sometimes they do; sometimes they don’t. They get killed regardless. That’s a problem. 

In the 1990s I worked in Waterton Lakes National Park as a conservation biologist. During my time, there, three young female wolves, all radio-collared, dispersed into the area from Montana (the fools: they were protected there!) and became the founding alpha females of three separate wolf packs. We called them the Belly, Beauvais and Carbondale packs based on their den locations. I tell the story in more depth in my book, but suffice it to say that soon I was working with Alberta Fish and Wildlife and the Blood Tribe on a wolf-monitoring initiative. We kept track of the collared wolf packs and also tracked livestock losses. A lot of the producers in the area figured disaster was about to befall the cattle industry as a result of those wolves. 

Alberta’s wide-open wolf-killing policies combined with a lot of local paranoia resulted in a blitz of wolf-killing. Over the next sixteen months 54 wolves were killed in the area. That included all the Belly, Beauvais and Carbondale wolves. Ironic, because those wolves were never associated with a single livestock loss, other than a possible kill of one calf in the Carbondale. Meantime, a small group of uncollared wolves – apparently four in total – killed or maimed over thirty head of cattle just north of our area in the Breeding Valley area. The last three of those wolves finally succumbed to poison because without radio collars the problem wildlife officers couldn’t locate them. They caused all the problems, but were the last to die. 

A few years later a friend of mine took over management of a large grazing coop north of the Breeding Valley area. He soon learned that he had a pack of 8 wolves in his area and that they had seven pups. As he learned his way around the landscape and its wildlife over the next couple years, he started to have some losses to wolf predation. In 2003 things got ugly; he lost 28 head that year to wolves. It didn’t help that an old grizzly was following the pack around and expropriating their kills, forcing them to kill again sooner than they would have otherwise. 

There were radio collars in that pack too, as a result of a different study. The collars enabled Joe, his neighbours and Fish and Wildlife to whittle the pack down to just four or five animals by 2005. The pack produced pups again that year. Joe knew his way around by then, so he made it a habit, which he continues to this day, to check his herds every day or two, always at a different time of day, so that the wolves are discouraged from spending time near them. He has essentially trained those wolves to avoid his cattle and it has worked. He has had only one or two losses to wolves since 2005. But he now lives in fear of losing wolves, because he knows that if that pack vanishes he will have to deal with new wolves he doesn’t know. 

Last winter one of his neighbours snared several of the pack. He is waiting to see if the survivors keep the behaviours they had before. If he doesn’t lose cattle, it will be because some of the wolves survived. If he does lose cattle, ironically, it may well be because wolves were killed. 

What Joe has learned is that wolf biology can be our friend when it comes to reducing risk to livestock. There is no wolf manager as effective at keeping wandering young wolves out of trouble as an existing wolf pack. The established pack will either chase away or kill any wanderers or, sometimes, incorporate them into the pack in which case they become part of its established behaviours. 
Wolves are good wolf managers. 
We aren’t. 

When we manage wolves by simply killing them, we can actually get some pretty perverse outcomes. 

Rob Wielgus and Kaylie Peebles, in an exhaustively-peer-reviewed analysis of kill records for Montana, Idaho and Wyoming, found a result that, on first glance, seems to defy logic. They found that killing wolves results in more, not fewer, livestock depredations the following year. They had very detailed data on wolf populations, wolf pack numbers, lethal wolf removals and livestock losses. They found that for each wolf killed in a given year, there was a 4% increase in sheep and a 5 to 6% increase in cattle killed by wolves the following year, at a regional scale. 

This is similar to what John Gunson and Jon Bjorge found in Alberta in the early 1980s. Reducing a local wolf population from 40 down to only 2 reduced cattle depredations for two years – and was then followed by a significant increase as other wolves dispersed into the area. They evidently didn’t have cattle producers who rode their herds as regularly as my friend Joe does or they might have had a different tale to tell. 

Wielgus figures that what is happening is that breaking up wolf packs increases pup survival rates, can lead to new packs forming, and reduces predation efficiency. All those factors increase the risk of livestock losses. Young wolves aren’t skilled; left to their own devices they are likely to kill the easiest prey they can find. Small wolf hunting units can’t defend their kills from bears and other scavengers, so they have to kill more often than larger, established packs to get the same amount of food. Wielgus and Peebles found that wolf killing only led to reduced livestock losses in cases where more than 25% of the wolves in the area were killed in a given year, because that overwhelmed the reproductive rate and actually led to a population reduction. But, they pointed out, it’s awfully hard to sustain that level of wolf killing and neither is it socially acceptable. Wolf Armageddon is not the best way to strengthen the social license of agriculture, especially public land cattle grazing. 

In Alberta, the prevalent wolf management paradigm is that all wolves are potential livestock killers and therefore we need to keep wolf numbers down. If your objectives are to keep wolf numbers down, then you need to kill an awful lot of wolves because they breed prolifically and disperse constantly. But they’re hard to kill, so you need to use the most lethal tactics you can, regardless of whether those tactics are humane or not, and you need to get lots of people involved in the business of killing wolves. 

So in Alberta it is legal to kill wolves year-round on private property and most of the year on public property. Baiting is allowed as late as mid June in northern Alberta to improve the odds. That virtually guarantees that every year nursing pups are left to starve in their dens. Snares are not only allowed but encouraged, even though the heavy musculature and strong gag reflex in wolves means that many take hours or days to die. Snares are considered killing devices and, as such, trappers aren’t required to check them frequently. Year-rounding shooting, baiting and snaring still aren’t enough, though, so the controls on use of poisons are also pretty loose. The poison of choice in Alberta is strychnine, which causes excruciating pain and often results in secondary poisoning of other animals. It’s banned in the U.S. but not here. And just to up the ante, unaccountable third parties are allowed to offer bounty payments to encourage more people to kill wolves. I don’t need to tell you that; some of your own Municipal Districts are in the bounty business, using ratepayer’s taxes, ironically, to increase the risk of livestock losses. 

For some reason, we find it easy to absolve ourselves of humane considerations where wolves are concerned. It goes back to the intense ambivalence we feel about wolves, I suspect, but some of it simply goes to our human ability to close our minds to things that are inconvenient to think about. We think we need to kill lots of wolves, so we choose not to think about the suffering our killing techniques cause, not just to the victims but to the survivors. Because, remember, wolves are like dogs and humans in the intensity of their emotional bonds and their ability to experience grief. What an inconvenient thought – it’s way easier to think of them as dumb robots, isn’t it? But they aren’t. 

And here’s the sick irony: killing lots of wolves does not reduce wolf numbers. What it does is to increase wolf problems. Because we are maintaining a state of social anarchy out there in wolf country. Packs no sooner form and start to function than they are broken up. Young wolves lose their teachers and also lose the social discipline that kept them from breeding. We end up with more packs, younger packs, smaller packs or lone dispersers – and much greater risk that those inefficient hunting units will turn to easy prey. When they do, we have no way of figuring out which wolves were involved, because there is no pattern to things. 

That’s what we saw in the Breeding Valley area during my Waterton years – while established packs in the Waterton area lived on wild game and kept other wolves away. That’s what Joe Engelhart and his neighbours worked so hard to overcome in the early years of this century and now try to maintain: a stable, intact wolf pack they know. 

So we are not using biology to manage wolves; just the opposite. We are not managing them humanely; just the opposite. And we are not reducing livestock depredation problems; just the opposite. And yet there are many who say we need to keep on doing what we have always done to prevent the problems we are actually perpetuating. 

What might a biologically-based, humane and actually logical approach to wolf management look like then? 

It would be based not on killing wolves, but on keeping wolf packs intact so that wolves are managing wolf numbers, not us. It would put far more emphasis on prevention techniques that have been shown to work – not perfectly, but well. Those include things like actually tending one’s livestock herds (which helps not only with discouraging predators but with reducing stream damage, improving range health and getting better distribution and use of forage.) Things like the use of electric fencing and fladry for calving areas. Livestock guard dogs. Combinations of these and other techniques – using our thinking abilities rather than our instinctive reactions. 

In addition to using old and new technologies and simple brain power to reduce the risk of livestock depredations, it would be worth considering the cost benefits of maintaining a radio-collared sample in the wolf population. Not only could radio-collared wolves be useful in helping livestock producers when the wolves are in the neighborhood and might benefit from some encouragement to keep moving on, but when depredations happen it would greatly increase the ability to determine if wolves were responsible, which ones, and where to find them. Because sometimes in spite of all your best efforts, wolves will get into trouble. When that happens, it makes more sense to kill those specific wolves than to throw up your hands and declare war on all wolves again. Having radio collared “Judas wolves” makes it easier to find the right pack in a timely manner and humanely shoot them instead of having to try and get lucky with poisons, snares or other pitch-and-hope techniques that are both untargeted and inhumane. It worked for many years in northern Montana after all. 

One thing I hear sometimes in discussing these sorts of things with livestock producers is a sort of exasperation. Why should they be required to have to go to all this extra work and inconvenience for an animal they don’t own and don’t even want around? How is that fair? 

Well, wolves aren’t going away. We’ve proven that – in spite of decades of inhumane, aggressive killing, we are estimated now to have more wolves than at any time in the past half century. As long as we keep getting mild winters, there are going to be lots of elk, deer, moose and sheep and that’s ultimately what controls wolf numbers. So we’re going to be living with wolves – just as we live with poisonous plants, lightning strikes, April blizzards, rustlers and bad genetics. If you want to take live animals to market, you need to put some work into keeping them alive. Discouraging wolves and bears is part of that. Yes it might be frustrating, but it should also be a source of pride. In Alberta we live in the real world; in a whole place. 

And there is that social license issue. I don’t know many livestock producers who want other people making their decisions for them. The pressure continually builds in a changing Alberta for better wildlife management and more humane treatment of animals – all animals. A lot of Alberta livestock production depends on access to public land. The future of agriculture depends on the much larger majority of Albertans who aren’t in agriculture continuing to see it as a legitimate land use in a changing world. Investing in more progressive approaches to predator management not only makes sense in terms of being more likely to reduce depredation losses, it’s an investment in social license. 

It’s ethically right, it’s logically sensible, and it’s strategically smart. 

But I have another message for another audience too – for the people not in this room. Livestock producers don’t just produce beef or mutton or other products. They protect habitat that supports much of Alberta’s biodiversity, including many of our species at risk. Well managed public land grazing leases in western Alberta are vital source water areas in a water-scarce province. And when ranchers and farmers go that extra mile to keep wolves and bears out of trouble, especially since its their good land management that supports the elk and deer herds that attract predators in the first place, they are keeping Alberta wild and healthy. Those are all ecological goods and services for which producers get paid nothing. Most do it because that’s who they are; it’s all part of their stewardship ethic. But I think the rest of society needs to start recognizing the value of those ecological goods and services and transferring some of society’s wealth to the people who produce them. A more reliable and generous compensation program for livestock losses to predators would be a good start. Where individual producers take on extra costs for herding, electric fencing or other measures, I’m not sure those costs should come out of their pockets. Agriculture needs more than social license; it needs to be socially valued. Good land stewards should be able to generate profits from all the goods and services they produce, not just the agricultural products. We’ve seen what Cows and Fish did in changing the social landscape around livestock production and making allies out of former adversaries. Maybe it’s time for producers, Agriculture Service Boards, environmental groups and others to start looking into what a Cows and Predators program might accomplish.

Or we can just keep digging, and wondering why the hole we’re in gets deeper. 

Some useful references: 

Niemeyer, Carter. 2012. 

Wolfer: A Memoir  Bottlefly Press, ISBN 978-0984811304 338 pages 

Proulx, Gilbert, Dwight Rodtka, Morley Barrett, Marc Cattet, Dick Dekker, Erin Moffatt and Roger Powell. 2015. 

Humaneness and Selectivity of Killing Neck Snares Used to Capture Canids in Canada: A Review  Canadian Wildlife Biology and Management 4(1): 55-65. 

Van Tighem, Kevin. 2013. 

The Homeward Wolf  RMB | Rocky Mountain Books, ISBN 978-1-927330-83-8 144 pp. 

Waterton Biosphere Reserve. 2016. 

Large Carnivore Attractant Management Projects in Southwestern Alberta 2013-2014. Waterton Biosphere Reserve, Alberta, Canada. (www.watertonbiosphere.com) 

Wielgus, Robert B. and Kaylie A. Peebles. 2014 

Effects of Wolf Mortality on Livestock Depredations http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0113505

June 7, 1975
Kootenay
Jim Mulchinock and I got underway about noon after the cougar episode. All day I kept realizing I’d seen a cougar but it’s still so strange that it hasn’t really registered. The weather was the same intermittent clouds we’ve had all week but now, at dusk, the sky is clear.
I’d forgotten how many avalanche slopes we had to cross on the trail. They’re best at this time of year while the alder foliage is still sparse and the spring beauty, white and yellow violets and clematis are blooming. We heard a lot of Wilson’s and Townsend’s warblers on the way, saw small grizzly tracks at the Floe Creek bridge, two Stellar’s jays in the dense alder brush, and noticed a bit of marten sign on the first little way. Heard an olive-sided flycatcher on the way up.
A couple was ahead of us. We met them as we started up the final switchbacks after eating our lunch by a stream crossing. They had apparently walked past Floe Lake and turned back thinking it was still ahead of them, as their tracks showed later, and they told us there was a lot of snow ahead. Shortly thereafter we found it, but it actually made the switchbacks easier to cope with than otherwise since you concentrated more on each step than on the actual climb. At one point we stopped and watched a grey-crowned rosy finch preen on a fallen fir tree right in front of us. There were several deadfalls to clamber over. We heard pine grosbeaks and golden-crowned kinglets calling a lot, and at one time there were a varied thrush and a hermit thrush singing in the same place. Also several winter wrens.
We were weary and bruised when we reached the top in snow up at least to our waists. We were usually on top of it but when sank through you ran a grave danger of never being seen again. The old larches and firs in the low afternoon in the late afternoon sun, and acres of glistening snow were almost unbelievable, with the silver-blue Rockwall swirling around behind it. We plodded down the slope, opened the cabin and made ourselves at home, and now I’m too tired to care much about adding anything more to this, except that I still can’t believe I saw a cougar stalking a coyote this morning.
A porcupine has girdled a few firs and left quills all over the snow around the cabin. There were mouse droppings all over the cupboard and the food left behind by the wardens had been eaten into. We cleaned it all up, got a fire going and played cribbage for a while. After dusk the Rockwall still seemed to give off its own faint radiance, with a single star in the darkening sky above and absolute silence over the white lake and slopes below.

June 8, 1975
Floe Lake
Got up at nine and the sky was blue and it was warm out, after a night spent alternately sleeping and listening to the porcupine that lives downstairs. We tried to ski up to a snow pass southeast of the lake but ran into terrain a bit too steep for us. We saw three barn swallows patrolling through a barren valley, and several more rosy finches.
After a brief discussion we decided to explore the ridge going east from Numa Pass. There was a long plod up through the fir and larch parks, following old healed-over blazes on trees that kept getting smaller and smaller. There was some open ground near the pass and the whistles of Columbian ground squirrels were everywhere. We saw a few nutcrackers and a single raven doing stalls and spins over Numa Mountain. After a cold lunch on a cold knoll we went along a long ridge that came to a point looking out onto the Floe Creek valley and the valley of the creek you cross on the way up here. There was goat sign there. We saw robins. We could see the thread of the trail leading to Ball Pass.
Next we went across wide meadows to Numa Pass where a single coyote had recently gone over into the Numa valley. Later on we found its tracks along the edge of Floe Lake. After Numa Pass we did some of the most fantastic downhill skiing I’ve ever done, down long winding bowl-shaped valleys and down a wide talus fan that we had climbed up. We followed the creek down to the lake and found a goat with a newborn kid on a rocky outcrop at the head of the lake. The kid could hardly even climb.
At about half past five we got back to the cabin, wind-burned and happy, to find eight other naturalists getting ready to set out on skis. I gave mine away and sat down to write a while. The others saw a moose on the way up. My binoculars have condensation in the right lens as a result of one of my falls. Not amusing.
This has really been a fine day.
For some strange reason “trespassers will be prosecuted” is written on the inside of the door, where you can’t see it until you’ve trespassed.
We had a huge supper of chili and rice pudding after which there was a snow slide on the Rockwall and I slept on the porch. Grey-crowns and siskins are the commonest birds here. Globeflower buds were peeking out of last year’s dead ground cover where the snow was melted up high. We met a couple from Oregon who are spending the night in the shelter up the hill.

June 9, 1975
Floe Lake
We were all up by eight and wasted the morning gluttonously stuffing ourselves on bacon, eggs, bread and delicious floppy pancakes which were more like crepes, made by Larry. It was almost eleven before we finally got underway, and the sky was blue with the sun hinting at what it would be doing to us later.
We headed up to Numa Pass through a sparkling sunny larch park where fox sparrows sang on all sides. George and Jim passed me halfway there and got to the pass just ahead of me. Erasmus was delighted with the view and scenery – he couldn’t stop talking about it. He and Eddie were the only people who didn’t burn, and that was only because their Tanzanian skin is already pretty dark.
While cascade after cascade of snow crumbled from the sides of the Rockwall and went booming into the fans below – the boom always reaching you a few moments after you’d seen the impact – we skied and skied and skied. It was without any qualifications the best day of skiing I’ve ever had, with the sun shining and the snow granular and undisturbed and lying in long, smooth bowls.
Eventually we all regrouped and loaded ourselves up again to head down Numa Creek. There was a long run through a series of tilted bowls to the rim of a rather awesome cliff. Apparently there was a hiker last year who did himself a lot of damage going down the same cliff in the wrong spots and sure enough, we missed where the trail goes down. Instead, we found a place where the cliff was still cliff, but was covered with snow. Here we descended very nervously with me, for some crazy reason, leading. I made two and a half traverses safely, then my cockiness vanished in a cloud of wet snow as I went sliding, rolling and tumbling the remaining hundred yards down. Everybody, myself included, expected me to dead or close to it but nothing broke, although my pack picked up about ten pounds of snow.
It took us a long tedious hour before we were all down, and then we found that there was another cliff again. All this time a boreal owl was tootling disinterestedly across the valley below, completely unaware of and unconcerned by us. Other creature’s lives don’t mean much to nature, and ours are no more important than theirs. We found a long avalanche chute that was dry and followed this down to the valley floor which was, at this point, covered with a long lobe of white chunks of old avalanches, reaching up to the barren scattered rock of Numa Mountain. It was a magnificent wild place, but hard to move through. There were old bear tracks here, and the tracks of the coyote.
Here we had the problem of finding our trail to get home on. We pushed through the willow and alder thickets along the creek for about a half mile, at which point I got separated from the others. I followed the creek for a while longer but it kept getting deeper and steeper and harder to stay near, so I cut off to the right through the woods. There followed a couple miles of the most agonizing, exhausting bushwhacking I’ve ever done, walking for yards and yards on fallen logs, or splashing through mossy melt pools and springs, or getting bogged down in snow, and all the time my skis kept getting tangled in the branches overhead, until I was getting a little frustrated. And all the time I was angling farther away from the stream, hoping to cross the trail.
At length I came out onto an avalanche slope that was an utter panic of smashed, twisted, strewn-about trees. I forced my way across it diagonally to its foot without finding the trail. I struggled from its foot through an old tangled forest to the creek, without finding the trail. It was now 5:30 PM so I waded across the stream wearing my boots and finally found the trail on the other side. The others hadn’t been down it yet so I set out merrily sloshing my way toward the highway.
The scenery at this end of the trail was quite spectacular but I was pretty tired and didn’t stop too much. At the Tumbling Pass junction I stopped to gently prod a porcupine with my ski pole as he scrambled up a tree. He made a heartbreaking, bawling sound, almost babylike, so I left him alone. He’d eaten most of the plywood trail signs at the junction.
The hermit thrushes were singing everywhere but as often as not you’d only hear the loud first note and the rest of the phrase would be lost in the sound of water flowing below the trail. I kept one beady eye open every time I passed an avalanche slope (and there are some beauties here) and was finally rewarded by the sight of a black bear and three cubs, two hundred yards above me. She was aware of me, and kept her eye on me, but didn’t seem too concerned.
An hour and a half after I found the trail, George, Jim and Erasmus caught up with me and the rest of the walk was like a forced hike as twilight sneaked down from the peaks to try and trap us. We found more old grizzly tracks about a mile from the end of the trail, so that we began and ended with grizzly sign. Also lots of marten scats, a moose track and a few elk tracks.
At the bridge by the Vermilion River Erasmus pointed out a porcupine feeding unconcernedly on a little shrub on the ground. It was the first time I’d seen a black porcupine without his quills displayed, but they were up in a flash when he noticed us and then he went scurrying off into the woods.
The rest of the day was a mixture of eating like pigs, complaining of aches and pains, having showers, and going to bed. Which is where I am now as I finally get to close this slave-driving book.

June 10, 1975
Kootenay
Again today the coyote spent a long time making crazy sounds around the bunkhouse. Jim, Heather, Pat and I went up and saw it in the horse corral where there are also two horses., waiting to have a cougar over for dinner.

[a guest column by Lorne Fitch]

Like stalking a deer, my approach to the pool was slow and stealthy. The mountains forming the valley and the stream had an ancient quality to them and yet as I threaded my way through the willow, spruce and alder, they appeared new and fresh to me. As I peeked over a downed spruce log into the pool, a trout—the trout—aligned itself, nose into the current, the equivalent of a magnetic compass bearing.

Easing myself into the run at the end of the pool I was instantly aware of the force of the current. Unlike a sleek trout I felt more like a piece of plywood oriented perpendicular to the flow and as manoeuvrable. By comparison the trout kept its position with effortless undulations of its tail, almost heedless of the current. 

Water is denser by multiple times than air and is thus foreign territory to us air-breathers.  Being transported to Jupiter where the pressure of the overlying atmosphere and the force of gravity is greater than Earth’s might provide a comparative, crushing feeling of the aqueous atmosphere of trout habitat. It was in this wet crucible that trout took their forms, forged in a dense medium tumbling with the force of gravity, ever downward.

If trout were airplanes, they would be of the needle-nosed, svelte, ultra-maneuverable and fast, fighter jet variety. The tail is the equivalent of the jet engine, offering propulsion on demand as well as serving as a rudder. As the trout is propelled forward the dorsal fin prevents it from rolling and yawing. Twined pectoral fins prevent rolling and pitching, help the fish to turn and provide braking power combined with the paired pelvic fins. As a drag-racer, a trout’s 0 to 60 acceleration rate would be breathtaking, as is the ability to turn on a watery dime. 

The patterns on the backs and sides of trout, the blushes of color, the artful array of brilliant spots are maps of a world at its beginnings, amidst mountain building, glaciation and violent weather events. They, their kin and their ancestors were able to adapt to an environment of dramatic change, of chaos and of stunning variability. Trout have an ecological taproot thousands upon thousands of years old that anchors them to a landscape. To have survived so much, they are now at risk of having their essential landscape anchors swept away in an orgy of accelerating human land use desires. 

Trout are the oracles of their watersheds. Their presence, distribution, abundance and population viability provide both a wise and an insightful counsel, and a report card on our stewardship of watersheds. These same properties and the trends in them are also prophetic predictors of an impoverished future if we do not heed the silent messages from the trout.

Oblivious to me and the human world, the trout slipped silently under a root wad and remained there with only an occasional flick of a pectoral fin. From above it almost disappeared from view, intricately camouflaged from an avian predator. A grasshopper failed to make a leap landward, falling short onto the surface of the pool. The ripples spread out from its struggles, telegraphing to the trout that something of interest had landed.

From its lair amidst the roots the trout rose slowly. I assumed it was to get the trigonometry right—distance, vector and differential velocities. Calculations completed, then the muscular tail drove the trout upward. Mouth open, like the maw from hell, the grasshopper disappeared into the void. The trout continued skyward, escaping into another medium momentarily, until burst speed was overcome by gravity.

With a mighty splash the trout slapped the pool surface and darted into a rock cleft, out of the current. In due time the grasshopper would become trout flesh, trout energy, trout memory.

Time passed and an aspen leaf floated by, under the vigilant stare of the trout. Not a food item, not yet, but in the fullness of time as the shredders dismantled it, the leaf would have become the fuel for a caddisfly or a mayfly and them for a stonefly, all definitely trout food units.

This trout was large enough to have survived mergansers, kingfishers, osprey, mink and maybe even river otters. Beyond a certain size the risk of being something else’s dinner declines. It sat on the bottom of a pool with only two motivations—food and seasonal sex.

In the cold water of that mountain stream, with winter ice cover persisting for months, metabolism slows, as does growth. The combination lent itself to a long life span for a survivor of juvenile times. This trout, I reckoned, must have been an octogenarian in trout years.

Another grasshopper floated on the pool’s surface. It had a different shape and drifted somewhat erratically, like another trout had taken an unsuccessful bite at it. An easy meal is never something to be ignored, so the trout rose again slowly to mid-pool depth to reconnoitre. There it stopped for a moment,  pausing, ever so attentive to danger. You don’t get big and old by being neglectful of caution. Sensing no danger it accelerated and hit the grasshopper with full bore enthusiasm.

But after another skyward orbit the trout found itself attached to, impaled at the end of an almost invisible monofilament line, unable to break free. The grasshopper was a fake, an artful rendition of the real thing, with a sharp hook hidden amidst the wrapping of the fly. I admired the trout in my grasp—sleek, muscular and torsional. It was like hanging onto a writhing, greased and decompressing coil spring.

After having escaped many predators and enduring floods, drought, a forest fire in the watershed and sediment from logging clearcuts and roads, the trout had fallen prey to a two-legged predator. Later that evening I ate the trout and just as the grasshopper had become part of the trout, the trout became part of me. As the stream flowed through the trout, it then flowed through me, binding and bonding me to both.

No longer do I kill native trout, whose range along the Eastern Slopes has shrunk, populations have cratered, and all species are imperilled, by whatever the scientific designation might be. I also cannot bear the thought of killing a trout, however inadvertently, with catch and release. Admittedly, I relax this principle for catching (and eating) non-native trout, many of which compete with their native cousins.

That does not stop me from walking beside or wading in a stream, seeing the surface shimmer and dimple with the energy of the current, hoping to see a trout rise to break the surface tension. In that is enough joy, without the feeling of the tug of a trout at the end of a line. Although I miss the contest of angling in streams with wild, native trout, I realize that if catching fish is the only objective, you miss so much more of what is arrayed around you.

I still find I can make an association with trout, be continually inspired, by observing them in the riffles, beneath the overhanging banks, tucked into root masses and in the pools of crystal clear water. The way trout orient themselves, how they both resist and work with the current, their tenacity in the face of many odds, gives them a grace humbling to observe. 

It is in those wooded glens and valleys, the quiet beaver ponds, places with the backbone of the Earth exposed, where native trout still swim, that one is reminded of things older than man, of mystery and of humility. 

Trout are the embodiment of all of the elements of a stream and its watershed, writ large by their presence. They are creatures that once lost, cannot be put back together again. Cannot be made right, populations restored, even with the wealth of a thousand mines.

Taxonomists place trout in rigid pigeon-holes of the standard, Linnaean scientific classification. But there are some creatures so emblematic of their environments they might be placed in separate categories—based on uniqueness, symbolism and connectedness. For me, a biologist and an angler, trout occupy a separate place, one of the heart.

February, 2022

Lorne Fitch is a Professional Biologist, a retired provincial Fish and Wildlife Biologist and a former Adjunct professor with the University of Calgary.

Farmers grow wheat to feed the world, or at least that’s the way I hear it.  So it must be frustrating when they see bushels of the stuff dumped at highway verges where the roads lead up into the mountains, or spilled along the railway tracks where bears, deer and pigeons gather daily to glean the squandered wealth.  There’s something wrong with a farm-to-markets transportation system that tolerates so much wastage.  If farmers had to wait until the grain reached tidewater before being paid for what arrives, one can’t help suspecting the system would get fixed in a hurry.

I can only assume that those truckers dump grain in order to lighten their loads before they head up over the mountain passes. Apparently they get paid regardless of ultimately arriving with less in the hoppers than when they set out.  It doesn’t make much sense, but the ravens and rosy finches are okay with it.

And, to some extent, so am I.

At Gail’s request, a couple years ago, I threw a shovel and an empty cardboard box into the back of our vehicle and started watching for grain piles. Coming home from the cabin one evening I saw the telltale golden mounds at a pullout on Scott’s Lake Hill.  The wheat was fresh and dry, so I got out the shovel, loaded a few kilograms into the box and took my harvest home.

In our home, we live with the heat turned down to reduce our fuel consumption.  We spend a lot of time sitting under blankets, nostalgic for the warmth we enjoyed in our more profligate and less responsible youth.  So we cheat a little. Gail sewed some bags, filled them with the wheat I’d salvaged, sewed them shut, and they became magic bags — throw one in the microwave for a couple minutes and it warms you for an hour, wrapped around feet or under a blanket.  The grain inside may not be feeding the world, but at least it helps keep the chill at bay.

We’re an old couple now; no getting around that. Gail has gotten brittle; I’ve gotten stiff. We make strange, often-embarrassing, sounds and mutter a lot about aches and pains. Things we did and took for granted when we first met just aren’t on the menu any more. But the relationship, like the years, goes on.  This winter has been especially challenging, isolated yet again by a virus that seems likely never to go away, further isolated by one of Gail’s brittle bones having snapped when she fell in front of the mail box, and by the icy sidewalks that seem to be more a feature of winter than ever before.  Maybe it’s climate change. Maybe it’s just that we notice things differently when we age.  Whatever: we seem to be trapped indoors more often than we used to be.

The other day Gail was working on her weaving and it occurred to me that she must be kind of cold up there.  Her weaving room heats up nicely on sunny days but cools off way too fast on cloudy ones, and this was a cloudy one.  I popped one of her magic bags into the microwave and when it was done I took it up to her.  She gave me a grateful smile as I handed it to her: something she hadn’t expected. 

Later that evening, as I quietly cursed my cold feet — another feature of the aging process —after having gone to bed, Gail came in and tucked a magic bag under the covers for me.  Equally unexpected, and no less appreciated.

And that’s what it’s come to. Love evolves over time from the tireless passion of those early years, to the shared worries and joys of raising kids together, to the rekindled adventures of late middle age when the nest has emptied and the world beckons… to now, when a bag full of wheat can be enough to put that glowing ache back into the deep centre of one’s chest that reminds you of why, all those years ago when you said “I do,” it was actually the most brilliant thing you ever said.  Winter is cold and claustrophobic and there really isn’t much to talk about from one day to the next, but that magic bag says everything that matters because it was brought to you in kindness by the one person who thinks about you, and cares enough, to have made that effort. A small effort, but quietly huge.

I’d prefer more wild prairie and fewer grain fields.  If we have to have grain fields, I’d prefer to see that grain go to feed people who need it.  But even what’s wasted on the roadside can still have value.  Sometimes it can become part of the way old couples say, “I love you.” 

(August 2020)

I procrastinated too long and the day became too hot for my planned run.  The only thing to do was to wait until evening when things cool down.  So it was nearly sunset when I walked up the hill and began to jog-trot up our little road toward the Snake Trail.  Late summer smoke light:  the Livingstone Range hazy along the horizon and the river already lost in shadow beneath the canyon slope.  The last rays of sun were softened to a rich orange-gold by the smoke of some faraway forest burning in BC and a strange light gilded the hills and fields with a glow that seemed to come from inside the ripening grasses.

Round bales of recently cut hay glimmered in that sideways light, each sending a long shadow across Mowats’ field.  A hawk that was perched on one watched my approach and then launched itself into the sky, silent as if it too felt there was something sacred about the late-summer stillness that ought not be disturbed.

I left the two gates lying rather than close them, as I’d be back soon enough and there were no cows in the coulee.  Vesper sparrows flicked off the barbed wire fence and vanished into the grass as I thudded my way up the edge of the draw to the neighbours’ place.  Thunder, their under-employed border collie, wasn’t waiting to chase me along the fence when I arrived; he was watching a cat and didn’t notice my approach until the last minute.  He’s always a bit conflicted between his compulsion to herd things, me included, and his impulse to be my friend, and his duty to defend the yard.  Today he just looked embarrassed at having been caught unprepared.

Happy little voices as I passed the house; the kids were playing on their backyard trampoline. I don’t know their names but they’ve decided that we are friends. Usually they compete to shout hi at me but this evening they were so absorbed in their play that they didn’t see me at all.  Across the Texas gate and up the last stretch to the Snake Trail, where bindweed flowers blinked from the road edge and a mule deer stood transfixed until the last minute, then bounded down the hill.  And still, everywhere, that magic light and breathless calm that happens only in late summer when the birds have gone quiet and the wind dies down, although it rarely does.

And fiddle music; something unexpected.  Across the coulee I could see Mike’s machine shed, the door half open to let in the cool.  All I could see of Mike was a pair of legs extending out of the shadows, but I could hear him playing a jig.  I never even knew he had a fiddle, let alone that he could spill such perfect music into the heavy quiet of a foothills evening, an unexpected gift of cowboy culture to accompany the crunch of gravel under my feet as I turned onto the Snake Trail and the long hill up to the hobbit house.

The golden light was gone and the fields blue with shadow as I turned and began the long descent back to our cabin.  The trampoline was empty and the kids gone inside, but Thunder was on duty again.  He chased me along the fence until I said hello to him, whereupon he skulked guiltily back to the porch, peering back over his shoulder.  He may never figure this relationship out.

When I stopped to close the gates, bits and pieces of fiddle music still trickled down the coulee.

Through the haze the mountains were a line of dark against a pale yellow glow: Omakai’stoo (Crowsnest Mountain) and the Seven Sisters pulling the shadows up around them as they have done each night for eons.  Secrets everywhere and a sweet cool breeze at last, smelling of hay and gumweed. Crickets cheeping.  An owl.  Then the sound of the river and a light on in the cabin window.

Sometimes one actually aches with gratitude.

[From my old journals] 

August 21 and 22, 1981

Sheep scouting – Spray Lakes area

This autumn I was invited again to go out for sheep with Glenn Webber and his uncle George but since the season in that area opens August 24 I couldn’t take the time off, and Rob Harding went in my place.  The season south of the Bow, however, opens on September 2, during my regular days off.  I’d already decided by the beginning of this month to hunt sheep in the Kananaskis in spite of the inevitable competition.

To get an early jump on the hordes I started scouting on the 21st after work.  I found the  Spray Lakes road under construction but managed to pick my way around the worst spots and the heavy equipment to a point near the mouth of the creek that drains from the basin between Mounts Lougheed and Sparrowhawk.  I arrived at 6 PM and parked as far off the roadbed as I could, then set off up the slope with Penny [my springer spaniel], my spotting scope, and my binoculars.  The forest is pine/feathermoss, thick near the road but growing more open higher up.  I cut two or three well-used elk trails and a couple piles of moose droppings. At length, after crossing a little brook and starting up a steep side hill, I saw light through the trees and emerged onto a rubble slope of big jagged talus that spreads down from the ridge that forms the northwest side of the basin.  I glassed the south side of the basin from here and saw only an empty, well-worn trail.

I picked my way up and up and up the rubble to the ridge line which, while still steep, has been used enough by game to be reasonably well-worn. There, in the open spruce and first stand, I got my first view of the upper basin — steep talus slopes grading downward into steep, lush grassland incised with gullies and full of clumps of stunted fir and spruce. A small, lush basin; ideal summer retreat for the discerning sheep.  No sign of sheep, though. The basin is spectacularly walled in by the cliffs of Mounts Lougheed and Sparrowhawk.

I moved up the ridge to a better vantage point where I could see more of the basin and promptly saw sheep — five ewes, two lambs and a yearling ram. They were at the uppermost edge of the steep meadows to the north, feeding and travelling.  They eventually moved into the edge of the talus near a cliff band and bedded down. At one point they stopped and appeared to be looking down into the basin at something but I couldn’t see what.

I set up the scope and gave the rest of the basin a thorough going-over but finally decided there was no more life there. About 8:15 I got ready to leave and did one last scan with the binoculars. There were the sheep again, only now they were way down in the meadows, feeding and moving.  Something didn’t feel right about them being there, so I set up the scope to look more closely and sure enough, they were a different band.  All rams!

Two were darker than the others and obviously mature.  The remainder were half curls or a bit bigger. I watched the mature rams for a long time and finally decided that one was just legal and the other was about three-quarters curl. After feeding along the meadow a while the biggest one and two other lay down.  I sneaked back behind the ridge and started down but I wasn’t watching behind me and I walked right out in the open. I think that at least a couple of them saw me, although there were a mile away, so I stayed in sight but angling downhill away from them.

I glassed all the visible slopes before I went back into the trees and found two more bunches of sheep on Wind Tower just west of the notch, one of six and the other of five.  I was back at the car at 9:05 with enough light for another half hour of travelling if I’d needed it.

In my notes that evening I said I felt the the sheep might remain there for a few days. However, either I was wrong or there’s another ram herd in the same area because the following day I returned and found rams again, in the next valley to the south.

I parked at 2:35 just north of the creek that drains the south side of Mount Sparrowhawk and headed up through dense timber to where I came out onto a steep rubble slope on bedrock, less coarse than yesterday’s.  I picked my way up this slope through open pine timber to the edge of the open rubble above, then cut over to the edge of the ridge I was climbing.  There I plopped down and began glassing, and promptly found seven rams bedded high in the talus near the ridge line of Sparrowhawk.  The heat haze off the talus was too shimmery for me to make out the horns so I rested and glassed up the rest of the slope, then loaded up my pack and started climbing again.

It was about 3:15 when I first saw them.  At 4 two stood up and all were watching me.  At 4:15 all were moving about and feeding, but no sign that they were concerned about me any more. I almost think Penny’s romping about may have been a sort of reassurance to them.

The ridge I was climbing levelled out and I walked to a saddle overlooking the head of a narrow basin between the main ridge of Sparrowhawk and a spur, which I was on. Here I found several snow fences and, below me, a new weather station. They want to build a ski area here, the jerks.

Moved into loose rubble and picked my way up and around the spur, stopping once to glass the rams from a closer range. One half-curl is very distinctively coloured; very pale and bleached-looking. The two biggest rams appeared just legal. I suspect these were the same sheep as I saw yesterday, but I’m not quite sure.

From the east side of the spur, where I found myself sitting on the rim of a seventy-metre cliff, I had a birds-eye view of of the whole upper basin, a wilderness of rocks and ridges and talus sweeping up to the pinnacles of Mount Sparrowhawk. There were big meadows below me, sweeping down into a shrubby, open-forested creek bottom, but most of the basin looked pretty barren except for way up near the head of it where it looked the like the country at the head of [secret] Creek — all grassy ledges and cliffs and little meadows and lakes.

I glassed the whole thing, resting my eyes now and then, but saw nothing until two small rams from the herd I’d already seen picked their way around the north side of the spur and moved onto the top of the meadows to graze.

I went back to the west side of the ridge and watched the remaining five rams a while, then headed back to my cliff top for one last check. It was 6 PM by now. I thought I’d check the creek flats for elk or deer — and there was another legal ram, picking his way nervously across the valley floor towards my side of the valley. I watched him move, a few steps at a time followed by long waits while he watched and looked ahead of him, about 200 metres up an avalanche gully to where scrubby willows gave way to a little wet green meadow at the base of the talus below me. There he drank, fed for a while, and then bedded down.

Heading back I saw the remaining five rams just starting through the saddle the others had already gone through. They saw me and all stood watching intently as I headed down the snow-fence ridge. They were quite alert and I hope they weren’t too disturbed as they are now near to where they could easily lose themselves into the headwaters of Ribbon Creek or the basins off Mount Buller.

I found a flagged ski run heading back to the road so I followed it down and may or may not have removed all the flagging…

What’s ridiculous is that anyone could look at the dryas/bearberry vegetation and sparse timber of those slopes and tell that this is a wind-blown, low snow-accumulation area useless for high-intensity ski development. I’ll wait a few years and say I told you so — in the meantime I suppose I’ll have to find another sheep hunting area.

August 28, 1981

The plot thickens, the suspense builds, opening day approaches.  This evening’s scouting trip was enough to turn the most hardened sheep hunter into a quivering mass of nerves.

Tuesday I had to go to Pincher so I wasn’t able to go out Monday or Tuesday evening. On Wednesday I was talking to a park warden friend in the Banff office who inadvertently gave me a clue to another area. I went out Wednesday evening to see if my friends were still on Sparrowhawk but since I didn’t leave Banff until six and stopped a few times to glass from the road, I didn’t get going up the hill until after seven. It was hard climbing since I’d made the mistake of eating first, and just as I topped out at the head of the former future ski run onto the open slope facing south, a thunderstorm that had been lurking to the east sent down a sudden shower of sleet. I took shelter next to a stunted pine and glassed all around, including the area my warden friend had suggested.  I could see four sheep feeding there but they were too far away to make out what they were, except that two seemed dark enough to be rams.

After the rain came wind, a howling wind raging down the slopes from the swirling underbelly of the thundercloud. The whole valley was lit with the most intense, pure colours I’ve ever seen, the sky all purple and blue, the lake a glowing blue, the opposite slope intensely green. It was a holy moment: the crazy wind and the glowing colours.

When the wind stopped it was growing dusky, but I had gotten so close to the ridge top it seemed a shame not to go the rest of the way. I headed up to the last trees and just as I arrived I saw a sheep bedded on a little green hanging meadow up valley but downslope of where I’d seen them last Saturday.

I tied Penny to my pack and crawled up through the trees to where I could watch them. There were three or four others in sight, my same bunch of rams. Suddenly they started downhill, trotting as if they’d seen some danger. More and more passed through my scope until I realized there were too many.  It turned out my herd of seven plus one had grown to twelve, with three legal rams.

They ran into the bottom of the gully, near the little weather station, then stopped and began to feed. Sort of like a mad dash to the fridge for an evening snack.

It was almost pitch dark but the time Penny and I got back to the road — this time the sheep didn’t see us.

However…the other four kept eating at me. And since there are still three or four evenings before opening day, I decided to go look for them this evening.

I headed out and parked and got underway a good hour earlier than last time. Which was just as well as it was a long hard haul up the slope through a dense jungle of menziesia and rhododendron to the ridge from which I figured I could glass the hidden saddles (new name). At length the trees thinned out enough for me to start glassing the opposite slope where lush green meadows were hung in tatters above an awesomely steep and inaccessible valley side.

No sheep.  I checked the saddles farther along — no sheep there either. Again I glassed across from me and there, on a ridge crest at the top of the most inaccessible saddle of all, was a sheep. I set up the scope. A ram — a big ram. How big I couldn’t see as he was resting on one horn, sleeping.

But then I saw some more sheep to his left a couple hundred yards. Six in all; all rams — and all full curl or slightly less! Big heavy-horned rams.  I might have been in Banff to see sheep like that — I’ve never seen such big rams outside the park so far.

Back to the first ram.  He’d stood up and another full curl ram was with him, but now I could see him better he almost stopped me dead. He’s as big a ram as I’ve ever seen — wide horns, better than full curl, and apparently not broomed.

All of these moved out of sight.  The two went over the far side of their saddle and the six went into a ridged area.  So I looked around some more and there — on the farthest saddle from me — were eight more rams, at least three full-curl and the rest heavy horned enough that I could tell they were all legal even at that distance.

This was not possible.  Sixteen rams, all of them bigger than any sheep hunter less than a mile from a road could hope to see one of in his lifetime.

They’re in an inaccessible area but I think I’ve got it figured out.  After I’d gotten back to the road I travelled around for a while, looking the access situation over, and I may even get a chance at the big one if they don’t wander too far.  Wednesday will tell. But will I be able to get any work done until then?

The most delightful thing about the hidden saddles is that they are totally invisible from the road.  From the road it looks like a solid mountain wall. So only a chosen few should know of the area, I hope.

September 1, 2, 3, 1981

On the evening of the 31st I carried a load of gear up into the basin in which I meant us to camp (us included myself, Mike Dyer who won’t be hunting, and Wayne Smith). I set up camp just inside the trees off a shrub meadow in a depression that receives lots of deadfall from avalanches. From the meadow I could see the open meadows where I first saw sheep when glassing this area on the 26th.  There were none there today, nor behind the cliff toward the saddle to the south when I scouted out there (where the big one was on the 28th).

I scuttled back down to the valley, finding a far easier route down the south slope of a drainage channel — through buffaloberry and wildrye — than the one I had followed up the hill through menziesia.

Mike and I arrived at the Spray Lakes about 10:30 the next morning and saw about six other parties of hunters as we drove to our jumping-off point.  We also stopped long enough to spot four rams at the north end of the range.  It had rained during the night and the clouds were low and broken, covering much of the sky and most of the peaks.

I hauled another load and Mike carried most of the food up. We set up camp, had a bit of lunch, and set out scouting. We headed south to a ridge that comes off the east side of the cliffs, hoping to see up the upper valley. However the angle was wrong to see the parts of the valley I wanted to see, so we headed back to camp. We did see about twenty or so sheep in a basin high up on Mount Lougheed.

Back at camp we were pounded by a rain squall until three.  I had arranged to meet Wayne down at the road at five to guide him up to camp but I was determined to check the upper valley to make sure my rams were still there, in order not to waste opening morning going after them.  So I set off up the gully behind the cliff to the three saddles from where I thought I should be able to see.

It was a long slog but the sheep had worn enough of a trail to make it not too bad.  I bellied over the first saddle and saw nothing. Sheep tracks led across a steep shale slide that funnels down to a cliff between the first two saddles, so I picked my way across, stepping in their prints. Between the next two saddles was an even steeper shale slope, soaked by the rain, where I had to lean to my right and use my hands to stay up.

I crawled to the rim of the third saddle to where I had a panoramic view of the whole upper valley, with a dying glacier at the head, a blue lake cupped below me, and green rocky slopes ahead and to my right. No sheep. I kept hearing rocks clattering ,though, and suspected that the sheep might be below me.  I crawled a couple feet forward and looked up to see, 150 yards away, a young ram staring straight at me.  Two big rams were feeding with their backs to me, moving through a krummholz clump.

I got out of sight quickly and headed back to camp, then down to the road to meet Wayne.  He was an hour late, so I watched the competition, which was all over the roadsides now, glassing and driving and peering furtively at me and one another.

By the time I got back to camp with Wayne (who was woefully out of shape) I was thoroughly tired out.  However, I was prevailed upon to brew some coffee and ended up drinking enough that, with my anticipation and nervousness about the competition, I scarcely slept that night.  It rained off and on, and a ground squirrel peeped for half an hour at about 2:30 AM.  A couple pikas called.

I woke just before shooting light — late! — and put the coffee on.  While the others bleared around getting themselves up I stepped out on the meadow and promptly saw two pale sheep — looked like ewes — crossing the meadow high above us.  I told the others and we quickly finished our coffee and set out up the damp valley bottom. 

I looked up again to see if the sheep were visible — and there was a hunter!  He was dressed in red, picking his way along the top of the mountain.  My adrenaline level shot up and I began hiking harder but my lack of sleep and excess of climbing yesterday kept me to a fairly slow pace.

We’d only gone another fifty yards when up ahead of us, in the hollow at the head of our basin, four shots rang out. I was horrified. All my best-laid plans had gone awry; the competition had beaten us in somehow.  I heard someone yell, “I got him!” — but it was just steep enough that I couldn’t hurry to see what had happened.  Up on the meadow a bunch of fifteen or so ewes and lambs were grouped on a rock outcrop, looking down at what I shortly saw to be five legal rams heading up out of our basin.

Three of the rams joined the nursery bunch and they all headed up into the cliffs of the headwall.  The other two stayed hidden in the krummholz halfway up the slope.

As I reached the rim of the upper basin I could see two guys in red, with backpacks, picking their way across the talus to a ram lying below the headwall.  Up in the shale at the head of the gully I’d climbed the previous day there were new tracks gouged in and my heart sank to the ultimate depths as I realized they had gotten “my” ram.

Nothing left to do but keep on going to the three saddles on the forlorn chance that there might still be a straggler left behind.

Mike was a bit below and Wayne about a hundred yards back, but I was too charged with a sense of urgency to let them catch up.  Up the gully I went, picking my way up the rock-studded snow patch to the boulder rubble, then up the rubble to the shale near the head of the gully.  I tried to catch my wind just below the saddle, with the grey cloud growing darker and tangling down the cliffs above, and jacked a shell into the chamber and put on the safety.

I climbed to the saddle and was just about to crouch down and creep over the top when out ran two big rams, fifteen feet from me.  They’d been grazing just over the saddle. I found the front one in the scope and got off a single shot before they disappeared into a cleft between the saddles. I ran a few steps and one came into sight, trotting about thirty yards from me.  The other one was gone, until I saw it lying dead in the bottom of the cleft. I’d got a ram!

I moved back onto the saddle, in case the second ram might stop in gun range until Wayne could catch up.  It ran a few more yards, then stopped uncertainly and stood looking at its dead companion.  Assuming (I guess) that the danger couldn’t be too great since its companion was lying down, the other ram began to graze.

Wayne was way down the slope, a couple hundred feet, and moving pretty slowly. He was wiped. I kept sneaking a look at the ram, then waving at him to hurry, going crazy. Snow flurries kept wisping off the peaks up the valley, with white sheets of sunlight shimmering through. 

Finally Wayne arrived, having dumped his gun and pack to make his climb easier. I gave him my rifle to use and he used my pack as a rest. Through binoculars I could see the ram hunch up at his shot and when it ran out of sight between the second and third saddles I figured we had two dead sheep — 8:30 AM on opening day.

I waited while Wayne went back for his own gun, and then went down to my sheep while he went after his.

Mine was almost full curl on one side but broomed down to 4/5 on the other — 37 1/2 inches and 34 inches with 14 1/2 inch bases. A beautiful ram.  He was right where I’d feared I might drop a sheep, though, on a gully that funnels down to a cliff.  Mike and I tied him to a rock outcrop and got to work cleaning him.  It took almost two hours to get him caped and all boned out, but only about five minutes for word to get around to the ravens that a new smorgasbord had opened in town.

Meanwhile, Wayne had discovered that he had wounded his ram and it had fled into the upper valley. A yearling goat that had been at the tip of the third saddle and had decided that there was too much activity for its liking had also headed up the valley and Wayne found his sheep when the goat paused to sniff at it on a ledge a quarter mile up-valley.

There were three hunters working their way up from the valley when Wayne left his sheep and started back to us to get his knife and tags that he’d forgotten in his abandoned pack [no comment…] By the time he got back to his sheep, one of the other hunters was nearly finished caping it out.

The other hunter evidently sincerely believed that it was his sheep — he had shot at my supposedly-secret herd first thing that morning and said that he had wounded one — so Wayne didn’t argue too much. It was another disappointment for him, after already feeling bad about being out of shape and about having wounded it.

So it appears that the others at the head of the valley had shot at my rams first thing this morning and spooked them through our basin before we got into position. The two we got must have felt that the retreat to the high saddles would be enough to get them out of danger.

Snow flurries had been coming and passing while we boned out my sheep. When Wayne got back we headed down with him carrying the head and cape and Mike and me each carrying half the meat — around sixty or seventy pounds each from the feel of it.  It was a slow arduous trip down.

The remaining rams were perched at the crest of the saddle north of camp, peering watchfully in all directions.  Just as we went out of sight somebody on the other side of that saddle fired twice, so there might have been up to five sheep shot opening morning.  I can’t help feeling that’s too heavy a kill, but of course I was partly to blame.

Once we had the sheep down at the road nobody felt like climbing the hill again, so we headed back to Banff to clean up and go to bed early after a supper of tough, chewy sheep.

On Thursday I hiked up at 3PM to camp and packed out the remaining gear.  There were two guys sitting skylined on the saddle to the north and two other hunters picking their way down the edge of our basin. They stopped to visit and told me that all opening week last year there had only been two hunters on the mountain — so it looks like I got there just in time for the last of the good old days.

[editor’s note:  I did indeed.  A couple years later the whole range was included in the new Spray Valley Provincial Park which put it permanently out of bounds for all hunting.  The good thing about that was that it put a final nail in the coffin for plans for a golf resort and ski development in the area. Nobody interviewed the sheep; unlike me, I suspect they fully approved of the change.]

Written in 2019:

The updates from Parks Canada say that Verdant Creek patrol cabin has burned down.  That’s a sad loss.  Over the years, I spent a few nights in that cabin but one memory has stayed with me vividly for decades.

Back when I was a seasonal park naturalist in Kootenay National Park in the late 1970s, we were encouraged to get out into the park as much as possible to learn about it and develop personal experiences we could share with visitors.  Ian Jack and Larry Halverson encouraged us to hike into the warden cabins on our days off, whenever they weren’t being used operationally.

The hike into Verdant Creek goes over Honeymoon Pass.  Descending from the east side of the pass, the trail angles diagonally down a long avalanche path.  Unlike most other slide paths in the area that tend to be choked with alders and other shrubs this one was quite open — mostly grasses and low greenery.  One summer day in 1976 I was hiking down this slide path when my heart seized up and I stopped dead in my tracks, paralyzed by a feeling of total, abject terror that had come out of nowhere.  It was like those rare nightmares you wake from unable to move.  I looked slowly around; nothing there.  It was a bright sunny morning. Standing immobile, I tried to make sense of the fear: maybe something carnivorous was eying me? But there was no cover anywhere near me.  I remember saying to myself, as much to be reassured by the sound of my voice as anything else: “Something’s going to happen.”

But nothing did. So far as my senses could tell me, I was frozen in fear for no reason at all.  I took a step forward, then another.  The panic began to subside.  A few steps more and it was gone.  I kept looking back and around me as I continued down the slide path but there was nothing there — nothing visible at least.

When I got to Verdant Cabin I dumped my pack, opened the place up, hauled some water and sat down to brew a cup of tea to go with my lunch.  As I waited for the kettle to boil I head the thump of footsteps and, looking through the window, saw a fellow naturalist hiking past.  Not having expected to see anyone else in that valley, I went out and invited him in for tea.  It turned out he was doing a long day hike through the Verdant valley.

Before I could tell him what had happened to me, Jim said, “You know, I just had the strangest experience when I was coming down from Honeymoon Pass.”

It felt suddenly like the hair was standing up on my neck.  “How’s that?” I asked.

“I was just about to go into the trees at the bottom of that open slide path when I just got hit with this feeling of complete terror,” he said.  That would have been about seventy metres farther down the trail from where I’d had my experience.  “I couldn’t see anything there, but it was almost overpowering.”

Neither he nor I experienced anything like that on our way out of the valley later.  I still don’t know what it was.  I’m convinced that it wasn’t my subconscious picking up a nearby predator; it wasn’t the feeling of being watched.  It was an overwhelming sense of imminent doom.  Whatever the case, the cabin might be gone but I still think of Verdant Creek as a haunted valley.  In the aftermath of this summer’s burn it will likely be even more eerie.  I plan to go see once the trail re-opens.

[Update, 2022: the Three Rivers Dam was completed the following year and has now been in operation for almost a third of a century. It is heavily silted from upstream erosion and drains down to mud flats for part of each year. Today a different Conservative government plans to open its headwaters to coal strip mining. This essay was originally published in Trout Canada and reprinted in my book Coming West]

I went down to the Bow River often during the strange evenings of my adolescence. It was a place where I could leave self-consciousness and tension behind. The sound of water lapping at the rounded cobbles was rhythmic, soothing and sure. Standing beside the evening river, I watched the rings of rising trout break the reflected light of street lamps.

“Who hears the rippling of rivers will not utterly despair of anything,” Henry David Thoreau said. I think he was right. The Bow River helped me through many difficult times. That is the way it is with rivers, with clear flowing waters. They flow quietly through our lives, as constant and reassuring as the changing seasons or the ebb and flow of time.

One evening I drifted a muddler into an eddy at the tail of a long, quiet riffle and hooked a brown trout. The sun had set already. I had planned on this being my last cast but this was a big fish and he was not going to be hurried. He burrowed deep and stayed there, the powerful throbbing of his fight communicating itself up my line, through the rod, into my arm. The water was dark, full of quiet urgency as it slipped past and under the Crowchild bridge. I felt both fascinated by and fearful of the heavy thing alive at the end of my line, unseen beneath the river’s flickering surface.

At length the fish turned into the main current, allowing the force of the river to help as it headed downstream, away from the pull. Unable to resist, I followed, obeying the pressure of fish and river, hands shaking at the thought of my leader separating. Its side broke the surface of the river and a tail splashed; then the fish was deep again, holding behind a slab of old sidewalk that city crews had dumped there. I held the pressure on. Nothing happened. The river lapped and chuckled as it always had, going somewhere else, letting me know that this was just between me and the fish.

More pressure, more resistance; then the fish gave a little. It was too dark to see into the water, but street light flickers showed the line of water behind my leader, and the bulges and swirls where the old trout struggled just below the surface. He ran again, held, then slid almost unresisting to the shallows where I dragged him, suddenly, from the secret water to the grass. Before he could flop back in, I pounced on him and subdued him with a stone.

The river flowed on through the night as I sat beside my victim and tried to fathom why I felt so moved by the night and the river and the trout that lay beside me in the grass, the chill of the water still on him.

That evening, in some way that I still cannot explain, remains in my memory as a pivotal event that helped me clarify my self, and my relation to the world. Perhaps it suffices to say that sometimes experience becomes parable. In any case, I can say now without embarrassment that I love the Bow River. It may seem a little alien: the thought of loving something you cannot hold, that is not human, that lacks the awareness to return that love. Yet I cannot look at the Bow River now without remembering countless things that, over the years, have become part of who I am. The late night struggle with the old brown trout. Evenings spent watching the passing water and wondering what was to become of my life. Canoeing in an October snowstorm with my wife-to-be. Obeying my two-year-old son’s orders to bring him more rocks to throw.

Everyone has a river in their life. For me it was the Bow River, a few blocks from the family home in Calgary. For some friends of mine it is the Oldman, sliding peacefully past the garden their grandfather first dug sometime in the late 1800s. Kids dream dreams by their rivers. Fishermen cast flies upon them. Canoeists float along them. We build our homes near rivers. We walk with our lovers along their banks.

I remember canoeing the Oldman one day several years ago, slipping quietly from riffle to riffle as farms and river bottom pastures slid past. To me, this was all a new landscape; to others it was the home river, deeply familiar. I floated past buildings that had been put up a century ago, fences that showed signs of frequent repairs, old trees surrounding older houses, and pools where generations of anglers had fished. It occurred to me then that this river, which I was only discovering now for the first time, was part of the fabric and definition of countless people’s lives. Farm kids had grown up here with the sounds and rhythms of the Oldman River worn deep into their hearts. Fishermen had developed that strange, jealous affection we all know so well for secret holes and favourite lies.

Every river in Alberta is like that. Each river has its own alumni whose lives will never be the same again, once the rhythm and magic of running waters have touched them.

Although we are a river people, the West’s wealth is limited when it comes to rivers. Our rivers are the more precious and beautiful for their rarity. We don’t need many to value them for what they are. As Roderick Haig-Brown said: “I have known very few rivers thoroughly and intimately. There is not time . . .  .”

My rivers are the Bow and the Oldman, the Maligne, Ram and Elbow, a few lesser streams, and that is all. My friends have their rivers. There are rivers I have never seen. They belong to others.

These are our rivers, and we are theirs. We can live away from them for long periods, just knowing they are there. Losing one, however, can feel like losing an arm, a child, or a much-loved parent.

The Oldman, for instance: the provincial government is going to flood it. Many of us still cannot really come to terms with that idea. Miles of river will soon be gone, forever, always. The rest will change, its wild vitality replaced by calculated artifice as computers determine how much flow it will have from one day to the next.

A part of me, and a part of many other Albertans, will be lost when the Alberta government closes the gate on the Three Rivers Dam. Little pieces of countless peoples’ lives died when the government filled the Dickson reservoir on the Red Deer, and the Bighorn reservoir on the North Saskatchewan. The Bow River may be dammed again soon. Each dam stops the laughter of the water, buries favourite trout pools, and erases the scenes and sounds that define somebody’s memories of their life and home.

Rearranging Creation is easy when you see rivers as lines on maps, and consider them merely to be water resources. That is why the West’s free flowing rivers are in trouble.

Damming rivers is sometimes presented as an essential matter of economics. The government’s own numbers, however, have proved that the Dickson, Three Rivers and Milk River dams are all money-losers. Besides, money is not the issue. Our lives, and the quality of our lives, is what our rivers are all about.

It is our government that is building the Three Rivers Dam on the Oldman. In a democratic country we elect governments to help arrange society in the ways that best satisfy our idea of a fair and rational civilization. Governments change as our needs and values change because they know they must respond to our wishes if they hope to survive. That is the theory.

A democratic government exists to serve the people who elect it. So how does the resignation with which we sit back and let economists and politicians who know little about the real value of our rivers build dams and reservoirs we neither want nor need, relate to our privilege of living in a democratic society?

I don’t know. I do know that when the part of me that is the Oldman River disappears at last beneath the muddy waters of a wind-scoured irrigation reservoir, I will be a little less whole. The province of my birth will be a little less like home. I also know that I will have gone down kicking. The government has no doubts about where I stand; many of my letters reside in their files.

I guess few others bothered writing. The dam is going up.

I once heard that politicians work on the basis that one letter represents the wishes of a thousand voters. When I contemplate the fact that Alberta’s living rivers are at the heart of what makes our lives rich, and that the sound of running water echoes in the hearts of we who have chosen to make our homes here, I cannot help feeling that we have failed ourselves. I remember the words of British Columbia poet David Zieroth, anguished over the possible fate of his own home river, the upper Columbia:

“…And when I ask you

where are your friends

. there is only silence.

It is the sound of the mountains coming down

with their creeks, coming down through the ice.

It is the sound of men fighting, men

failing to fight, and men

passing . . . “

In 1997 I pitched the idea of a book on elk, deer and other ungulates to Stephen Hutchings, my publisher at the time with the now defunct Altitude Books.  My stock must have been pretty high with him because he not only gave me a contract, but he included a travel budget so that I could interview experts across the west.  With that cheque in the bank, Gail and I bundled up the kids and camping gear  and headed off on a road trip that took us from Montana and Wyoming through Colorado and Utah and back.  It was a memorable experience, not least for the inspiring biologists and conservationists I got to meet.  I was actually a bit star-struck and terrified half the time, but I pulled it off.

Sadly, the book didn’t do well.  It came out as Altitude was crashing towards bankruptcy and both the production quality and marketing effort fell short.  But researching and writing it was wonderful.

In Missoula I met a very fine gentleman named Jim Posewitz who had been an inspiration to me ever since I’d been introduced to his book on hunting ethics, Beyond Fair Chase (https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2707069-beyond-fair-chase).  I told him it should be mandatory reading for hunters and he assured me that, at least in Montana at the time, it was; a copy went to every newly licensed hunter.  Jim came across as a sensitive and deeply thoughtful man with a gentle sense of humour and a generous spirit. He had founded Orion, the Hunters Institute, to promote both ethical hunting standards and principled wildlife management.  He believed hunting should always bring out the best in both humans and our prey, not the worst; that hunting is not automatically synonymous with conservation, but that it should be.

When I mentioned that I would be interviewing Jack Ward Thomas the next day (at the time, arguably the leading authority on elk biology and management on the continent) Jim chuckled and told me:

“Jack Ward Thomas is the reason I got into this whole thing in the first place.  It was in 1985 at the North American Wildlife Congress in Boston, and he stood up in front of the whole conference of wildlife officials from across the country and floated the idea that we should start dealing with elk as a commodity in order to get more budgetary attention.  And not one person in the whole room stood up at a mike and seriously challenged that idea.

“That night I got up at 3 AM because I couldn’t get to sleep for thinking about how much this troubled me, and I opened a book I’d brought along — Speaking for Nature, by Paul Brooks — and started reading about how early American thinkers had debated ideas about public ownership and control of wildlife in the Boston Commons.  And here I was only three blocks from there in a motel.

“So later I wrote my first letter to Jack and I began by claiming a mutual friend “whose favourite way of tormenting me is to forward copies of your papers.” And he wrote back a very gracious letter acknowledging the legitimacy of my views and then went on to tell me that what I really needed to do was to get out on the stump and get more people to hear this.”

When I met Jack the following day, he was as gracious as Jim had described him.  He had a courtly, Texan collegiality but came across somewhat less humble than Jim had.  At that time he occupied a wildlife management chair endowed to the University of Montana by the Boone and Crockett Club.  His task, as he explained it to me, was to take on a few doctoral students each year and try to remediate their undergraduate training.  “We keep saying that wildlife management is 95% people and 5% biology but universities train biologists 95% biology and 5% people.  So I try to fix that.”  And based on some of the graduates he turned out, he did.

Unfortunately for North American elk, some of those who were in that conference audience back in 1985, the one both Jim and Jack had participated in, went back to their states and provinces and acted on Jack’s advice: they commodified elk.  Commercial elk farming exploded across the continent in the late twentieth century.  Not just for meat and velvet sales, but for the corrupt and degrading practice of “high fence hunting” —shooting captive-raised elk that had been bred and fed to produce big antlers.  It’s illegal in Alberta but you can buy a canned hunt in Saskatchewan and the bull you assassinate might well have been raised here and trucked across the provincial border just to feed your fantasy of being a real trophy hunter.  But you won’t be; you’ll just be someone who went to a wildlife brothel.  Game farming, and its resultant long-distance transport of elk, is directly responsible for the spread of chronic wasting disease across the continent — a disease for which there is no cure, that is always fatal, and has now spread into wild deer across most of Alberta.  Commodification of wildlife has been, and continues to be, a root cause of some of our greatest conservation disasters.

Fortunately for Montana, Jim went back from that conference with a renewed sense of mission.  It’s largely due to his advocacy, and the network of wildlife conservationists with whom he allied himself (including my good friend Dave Stalling who still lives in Missoula), that Montana remains free of elk farms and elk feeding stations.  They fought against the current and won.

Unfortunately for Montana, however, CWD spreads across state borders once it infects wild herds.  It’s arrived there now in spite of those who worked with such success to keep that state’s wildlife populations wild and healthy.

Jack Ward Thomas died in 2016.  Jim Posewitz died in 2020.  They were both conservation giants and I’m glad I got to meet them, however briefly. Their legacies live on but so, of course, do the conservation challenges that inspired — and sometimes confounded — them. They both did the best they could, and it was a lot.  But where commodification of wildlife is concerned, Jim was the one who was right. That’s because he always put principle ahead of pragmatism.

Which is why, of the two of them, he’s the one I would most hate to see forgotten.