Close Encounters, Part 1: Of Moose and Tourons

Most tourists visit Yellowstone in hopes of encountering wildlife (and not, say, slaying lake trout… though to those people I say, don’t knock it ‘til you try it). Anyway, to prove that I’m capable of interacting with nature in ways not predicated upon ritual slaughter, an anecdote from the YNP trails:

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One of the most important, inflexible rules of hiking in grizzly country is this: do not, under any circumstances, approach an animal carcass. Grizzlies are inveterate scavengers and, even if that carcass hasn’t yet been claimed by a bear, one will soon sniff it out. And when a hungry grizz comes in search of a meal, you’re well-advised to make yourself scarce.

I’m generally a law-abiding guy, but when I stumble across a freshly expired moose not 100 yards from the trail… well, you know the adage about rules, and how they’re meant to be broken? The author of that maxim has clearly spent some time investigating the corpses of enormous mammals.

If getting excited about a giant dead moose along the trail is wrong, I don't want to be right.

I’m by myself, partway through an 11-mile trek to a mountain called Observation Peak, when I see the antlers rising from the grass to my right like topmasts. I break from the trail and wade through the brush until I find the unfortunate beast, sprawled before me in a clearing, liquid eyes half-open as though I’d caught it in a moment of repose. The carcass is fresh and flawless; it can’t have died more than a few hours ago. It doesn’t even stink yet.

I check my periphery for prowling grizzlies, and, deciding that I’m not interfering with any bear’s breakfast, gingerly prod my moose. Aside from the whole death thing, the animal looks perfectly healthy. I stroke the velvet that covers the gnarled antlers, and it’s as soft as any fabric I’ve ever touched – a texture that could never be predicted from the bleached, inanimate antlers that adorn the walls of any hunting lodge.

There’s something almost reassuring about the manner of this moose’s death, I think: there’s no bullet wound, no imprint of a car fender. It died, as far as I can tell, of natural (read: non-human) causes. And that’s why national parks exist: they’re sanctuaries for normal ecological processes, preserves not only for animal life but for death as well, places where the bodies of moose are stripped of their nutrients by bears and wolves and coyotes and returned to the soil to grow the vegetation that eventually feeds other moose, and so on and so forth. The ecosystem that I’ve been dealing with, Yellowstone Lake, is so altered and degraded by human activity that we interlopers have to actively (micro)manage it; the National Parks Service controls what fish live and die, with a guiding hand so firm upon the tiller that the ecosystem is no longer ‘natural’ in any legitimate sense. And this is true the world over: humanity’s influence has encroached upon every ostensibly wild space, whether via resource extraction or recreation or climate change. The notion that wildlife may be killed by “natural causes,” as distinguished from anthropogenic causes, is rapidly becoming obsolete. Our species is frighteningly ubiquitous.

Maybe that’s why this moose, apparently unbranded by human iron, so interests me.

Aside from being taken on that fateful Observation Peak hike, this picture is apropos of nothing; I just wanted to break up the text. I'm sufficiently secure in my masculinity to admit that half the pictures I took that day were of
cool pink wildflowers.

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Two passing hikers, a married couple, see me examining the deceased, no doubt with such curiosity and thoroughness that I could be auditioning for CSI: Wyoming. (Wouldn't be much of a show, incidentally, since almost every crime here seems to incorporate the same two ingredients: a shotgun and a case of PBR.) The man approaches the carcass to take pictures, while the woman stays on the trail and frets very vocally about grizzlies.

I mention to her husband that her concerns are probably valid and he says, “Well, I’m a touron.”

“What’s a touron?” I ask.

“Cross between a tourist and a moron,” he says. I say that I guess I’m a touron too, and ask him to take a picture of me holding the moose by the antlers, like I’ve just bagged it. An embryonic thought about respect for the dead pops into my mind and then dies in utero: ethical concerns must sometimes be trumped by great photo ops. Flies gather on moist ungulate eyes as the shutter clicks.

This moose sacrificed its life for a worthy cause: I now have the perfect pick-up line for the next time I'm chatting up Sarah Palin down at the local hockey rink.

***

I’m returning from the top of Observation Peak that afternoon when I meet three backcountry rangers. They’re closing the trail, they tell me: grizzly activity near the carcass has made the route unsafe. A 500-pound bear named Scarface has been spotted near the moose, and though Scarface is typically benign, I can certainly understand why the authorities would want to minimize contact between a feeding grizz and a park full of tourons. The rangers and I piece together a timeline, and decide that Scarface must have entered the vicinity less than twenty minutes after I vacated it. I part ways with the rangers (after a long conversation about fly-fishing, of course) and head for the trailhead, feeling in equal parts fortunate and disappointed that Scarface and I hadn’t crossed paths.

I have no idea that my first brush with a grizzly will occur much sooner, and at much closer range, than I could possibly expect. (Cliffhanger!!!)

End