The Book of Yaak Read Online Free PDF Page B

fall asleep and then wake to find yourself in Yaak, unless you'd been there before, you would not recognize it as being anywhere you'd previously been.
    The big jungle climbs and stretches over the tops of the low mountains. There are only a handful of peaks in the Yaak that push up above treeline. The highest peak is only about 7,500 feet tall; the river bottom is around 3,000 feet. Troy, the nearest town, possesses the lowest spot in the state, at 1,800 feet.
    There's so much I don't know about this valley; but I'm learning: about the geology of it, about the plants and flowers, about the soil, and about how the black bears interact with the grizzlies up here, how the wolves and coyotes get along together, and the wolves and the lions. I've seen lions chasing
coyotes
off their deer kills; I've seen two bald eagles battling a golden eagle in mid-flight, with Mt. Henry's snowy crest in the background. It's a predator's showcase: I've seen wolverines and lynx, martens and fishers, weasels and owls. Everything eats something else, it seems, up here on the Canadian line, and I'm reminded of the old saying, "The closer you get to Canada, the more things'll eat your horse."
    It's true that there is only a small double-digit population of grizzlies—ten? twenty? thirty?—and a single-digit population of passing-through wolves; and a dozen or so bull trout, down in Pipe Creek, beneath the huge clearcuts bladed out on the sixty-degree slopes of national forests, clearings that are now only memories of ancient cedars, and the soil and fungus of those old forests opened to blazing sunlight and aridity, and to the rains and their runoff....
    But those few wild individuals that remain in the Yaak are super-survivors, with genes that are critical to the future. They have survived the thousand miles of new roads built here since the 1970s, and the shuttling back and forth of their so-called roadless areas—having to abandon one sanctuary and move to a new, stranger one; almost always moving around, trying to make rhyme and reason out of those locked gates. Many of the larger animals—the bears and wolves—have come down into the Yaak from Canada's reservoir of wildness, and possess precisely the migratory abilities, the pathfinding urges, that will be required for our wild corridors to be linked back together in the West: for a genetic flow of health, of vigor and strength, to stretch as uninterrupted as possible once more from Canada to Mexico. I'm convinced that the Yaak is, and must continue to be, one of the cornerstones of this linkage—the most unique, atypical valley in the narrowest, most critical "bottleneck" of the northern Rockies.
    There are places in the Yaak where I have seen elk, grizzlies, bull moose, lions, grouse and coyotes all bedding and living in the same area. Everything lives together, here—everything is all crammed in on top of everything else. It's a small valley.
    A lone woodland caribou drifts through the valley occasionally, doubtless following the old ghost scent of the herds of long-faded caribou who once lived here, but began to be pushed out earlier in this century. (The last verified sighting in Yaak was in "1987.) One year when I shot a spike elk, far back in one of the roadless areas (in the Yaak, the roadless areas average between ten and twenty thousand acres per core), I returned a few hours later with my backpack to find thirty-plus ravens, two golden eagles, and two coyotes feeding on my elk; the hide had been dragged off a hundred yards, with fresh bear scat leading me to it....
    It all comes together here: the rain lashes against the mountains, the forest types merge with one another—the Pacific Northwest mixing with the northern Rockies to make new and unique forms of diversity—and what comes from all this cataclysm is the deepest wildness.
    Besides the traveling individuals that have survived in the Yaak, there are survivors that have learned how to hole up