October

I've wandered around the Scapegoat Wilderness a few times, looking for grizzly sign. The Falls Creek Grizzly spent most of its life in the wilderness, part of it in the Scapegoat, as far as biologists can tell. I've walked up the North Fork of the Blackfoot to the Scapegoat Divide, and up the Dearborn River to its beginnings in a high cirque called Halfmoon Park, looking at the country he might have roamed, the wilderness other bears now live in.

In Halfmoon Park in September I lay on my back and listened to the rocks falling from the high face of the walls in the sky that seemed deeper blue that high up. The sun was high by the time I got to Halfmoon that day, after the long uphill walk from lower on the Dearborn, crossing and recrossing and moving through a long valley burned off in 1988, thick with dead standing and fir and larch my height or a little better. The east facing high walls were slowly falling into shadow. I climbed up the scree to the base of the high walls, the rock bright and rough as sandpaper, and ducked under truck sized boulders of white limestone, a few late red Indian Paint Brushes scattered around. A herd of forty or so Mule Deer spooked in the silver Fir, the objects, I was sure, of some of the hunters in camps below on the Dearborn. The deer flowed up the hill like a herd of water, dodging and leaping, stopping to look back when they crested a small rise and could just see over the edge back towards me.

Around me on the ground in the bunches of grass were white bits of bone and antler, chewed by mice and ground squirrels, deep green kinickkinick, huge black ants energetic in the sun, and fine white gravel broken down by the ice of the winters. Above, every half hour or so (I'm guessing, as I don't take a watch when I'm in the mountains) a rock let go a few hundred feet up, and it skittered down the scree slopes after barking off a ledge or two, the snap and crash the only noise in the cirque.

I imagined the snaps were seconds in a clock that ran on its own time, a clock who face and numbers I could never understand. If the seconds were half an hour long, then up here, I remember thinking, a minute would be more than a day and a night, but even that's not close to the scale of the time that has gone by in this cirque. In one of those days of long seconds, you might see a grizzly move by, as old as the hills, moving up high in the fall, down the river in the spring. Someone once said the mountains move, too, just not in our idea of time, and I can see that's true. The bear is our key to this kind of time.

(rough panorama of the north half of Halfmoon Park)

To me, wilderness is being alone in the mountains. I can say I don't understand why people don't go in the mountains by themselves, but that might sound mean. I've had a great time sitting around fires, shooting the shit with outfitters. I had a group of three yell at me once, what the hell are you doing out here by yourself? and sit me down and cook me an elk burger, and we talked close to dark, when I had to get set up before night. They thought I was nuts on two counts: walking, and being by myself.

To be alone out there with the gentle fears that always show up near dark, the fears that must be in the DNA from our old days, when we were both hunters and prey - that's part of the wilderness. Dusk and dawn are the times of the hunters, and we still have something left in us that makes us aware at those times. Now, we aren't prey, and we seldom hunt, and the only way we can feel that old way - somewhat equal with the land and the animals - is in the wilderness. I'm not afraid, but the awareness that a little fear brings is what is missing almost everywhere else away from the wilderness.

In Halfmoon park, there were old diggings in the cirque near the pond, old scars in the ground from bears digging for roots, and old scats in the trail leading up to Halfmoon, but no grizzlies. I was in the wrong place at the wrong time. That's OK - my point is to find the spirit of the bear in the wilderness, and if I get lucky and see one, great. If not, tracks and scat and knowledge they are around is well and good. I'm smart enough not to want to sing to bears, or think they are my friend, or think I can communicate with them. They are wild, and I'm looking for a hint of the wild. The difference is I want to know where the boundaries are, and define what there is to know and what can't be known, and leave it at that.

Around 1920, the well known American writer William Faulkner wrote a long story called "The Bear," and in it he chronicles the hunting of the last bear in the wilds of Mississippi. It's a story, not necessarily true to fact, of course, and the language can be thick and the story line convoluted. But the thing the boy learns is that you only see a bear when the bears lets you see it, when you aren't carrying a rifle, when you aren't hunting the bear. Bears appear when you aren't looking, and stories appear when you're not thinking of them.

I was crossing the Dearborn one morning, a few miles downstream from Welcome Creek, feeling my way across a log in my boots, balancing myself with a long stick stuck down in the stones of the water. Two steps, stab the stick in the gravel, be sure I had balance with my pack, then two more steps. Halfway across, I looked up for a moment, and saw a man on the other bank, in the waist high grass. He was looking away from me, arms crossed, just watching the ridgeline, and in his posture I knew he had no idea I was near. I looked down again to keep my feet on the log and kept moving, carefully, looking up after each step. He slowly turned, surveying the east ridge, and when I dropped down into the grass, dragging my stick from the water, he heard me and turned.

I said howdy.

He seemed at a loss for words, but then said we had some horses get loose.

I said I had seen two horses yesterday, trotting downstream, and hadn't seen anyone, until now, to tell.

Those were ours.

I couldn't grab them, I said.

They're headed back to the trailer, he said. One of them is green.

I nodded.

You out here by yourself?

Yea, headed to Halfmoon Park.

He looked across the Dearborn, as if checking for someone else.

It seemed like he couldn't think of anything else to say, so I said I was going to keep going. I wanted to get to the upper Dearborn before dark, I said.

He said their camp was just up the trail, and nodded as I moved off.

When I walked past the wall tents, two men at a folding table waved, and I waved back.

It’s morning at the cabin on the Teton River. I sit on the front porch as much as I can from dawn to dusk and write, because the windows in the cabin are small and it is dark inside, and out here I can see the canyon and smell the cottonwoods and the river. This cabin has been here for around eighty years, but the buffalo skulls hanging on the gables are older still, since the last wild bison was shot in the late 1800’s. The cabin has seen a new roof, a new floor, and another room added on the back. The log ends are checked out, some are dry rotted a little, and the roof line sags. The screen door hangs on leather hinges, the front door closes with a whittled latch on the inside that is lifted with a string that hangs down the outside of the door. The high sound of water from the Teton is all around. I’m glad I’m here for a week. It’s almost October, and I’ve watched the full moon rise directly at the mouth of the canyon, not long after the sun has dropped at almost the same point on the rocks.

This cabin was hand built by a man named Lorman Bruno. He was Métis, a descendant of Chippewa Cree and French-Canadian trappers. The Métis language is spoken with French nouns and Cree verbs, a mix of cultures and ideas that linguists say is not seen anywhere else.

Some Métis went into hiding here in the Teton Canyon during Louis Riel’s uprising in Canada, fighting to gain equal rights for themselves, half breeds as they were called. But Louis was caught and hung by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, and the Métis scattered across the west, pulling two-wheeled Red River carts loaded with their possessions. Some of the Montana Métis formed a community in the Teton Canyon, one that wasn’t secret but was ignored by the local sheriff. They survived in their hand built cabins until the 1940’s, and some of their descendants now live in Choteau. The story of the Métis is another history of the west that is both close to the surface and almost forgotten.

An old glass plate photo shows Lorman and his parents and six of his eleven brothers and sisters, formally dressed and posed in a photographic studio in Choteau. Lorman is in a cotton print dress, since Metis boys wore dresses until they were five or six years old.

Lorman Bruno is a heavy, bear sounding name. I can imagine him living bear-like in this cabin, and talking to the bears at night as they walked the banks of the Teton River. Stories have it that when Lorman was older, he was a kind of Métis shaman, and he practiced his medicine in this cabin. Just what he did or who he doctored is lost; no one can say anything for sure, because the memories of Lorman are just that, stories passed down, the original tellers too old to remember, or dead. He might have had something to do with bears. They would have traveled by this cabin when he lived here. They still do.

I met Al Wiseman last year in the spring, and he told me that Lorman had a pet black bear when he was young. Al told me that Lorman found a cub in the timber one day, and brought it back to his parents cabin. He was lucky - the mother bear wasn’t around to maul him. He kept the cub for some time, Al didn't know how long, but long enough for the bear to grow. He had to give the cub to a pair of trappers who were passing through, as the cub was now a bear and tearing the cabin up, as bears will do. Al said he couldn’t recall if he heard if Lorman was sad, but I think he must have been.

Al also told me why the latch on the front door of the cabin has a pull string that hangs out front. It’s the Métis way of making a door latch, he said. You can pull the string in and lock the door. if you want people to come in, you leave the string out. And then he sang a few lines of a Métis song in the French and Cree, about how a woman left the door string out for her lover.

The only thing for sure is that there is history anywhere you look, and on the Teton there are other Métis cabins dissolving back into the earth, taking their stories with them. And there are Métis graves, too, by old trees, graves marked with stones. And there are unmarked graves; the people who once knew the graves are dead, too. Sitting on the front porch of this cabin, under the buffalo skulls, I wonder what happens when the rememberers themselves die out.

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September: Missoula Black Bears ≈ October ≈ November: Spiraling down to winter