Six: a legendary elk on an iconic landscape

Dateline: Gardiner, Montana

I don’t have many claims to fame, and some of those are sufficiently dubious that I don’t care to recall them. I can, however, make this assertion with confidence: I spent more time, eyeball to eyeball, with Elk Number Six than did any other human being.

I don’t make this declaration lightly; hundreds of tourists watched this elk’s aggressive antics in the Mammoth Hot Springs area of Yellowstone National Park. Additionally, his tendency to utilize certain yards in nearby Gardiner, Montana, as winter daybeds (notably PJ’s and Travis’) – and the hand-feeding of elk and deer in G-town – ensure that a select number of residents have indeed been in very close proximity to this particular elk at times.

Having said that, though, I still make the claim that I spent more time with Six than anyone else. You see, for most of the eight years I rangered at Yellowstone National Park, the arrival of crisp September nights and shortening days meant one thing with certainty: bull elk, following the lure of fertile cows, would appear in Mammoth Hot Springs for the rut. This group of bulls included such notable royalty as Six and Ten. My life would not be the same until November.

During those long weeks, I got to know all of the players – Ten and Brutus and Bumpy and Muddy and Stumpy and so on – very well. More often than not, though, it fell to me to share much of the daytime, and more evenings than I can count, with Six. This is not bragging, mind you, because much of that time was borderline miserable, at least for me. There were years when we weren’t more than a few blocks apart for the entire rut. I lost sleep on those all-too common nights when he circled my house, bugling all night. My relationships with friends and one lover were temporarily damaged by Six. I lost weight. Sometimes I damn near lost all perspective.

I got the calls when he was standing in front of the Mammoth Hotel irrationally slashing at anything and anyone that came close; people hated him. I got the calls when he was limping around Mammoth or when he was in Gardiner, in some alley or yard which was judged to be uncomfortably close to the hunt zone boundary; people were worried about him.

I was with him the first time he was dehorned and I personally put the dart in his butt the second time. I followed him late into the evening after both dehornings – bellowing, waving my arms, honking the horn, and once banging on a dumpster with a wrench to break up fights between Six and other bulls. Until he understood his antlers were gone, he would continue to challenge other bulls and he could easily have ended up mortally wounded in such a contest. Everyone knew that, but I was the only one so desperate to give him time to adjust to being weaponless that I stupidly followed him around in the darkness with a flashlight; as to what I would have done if I’d found myself between two furious 700-pound bull elk at night, I still have no clear idea.

In sum, then, I was with Six when he was frenetic from hormonal rage and when he was sedated. I was with him when he was healthy and when he was injured. I was there he was king of the proverbial Mammoth hill and I was there when he was beaten. I saw him during the zenith of his aggressive behavior towards the throngs of unwary humans, and perhaps most importantly, I witnessed him display remarkable acts of regal indifference and tolerance towards those same crowds.

For all the Number Six stories which people will tell - and people do love to spin yarns about Six - few if any of those tales will be poetic reminiscences of the time he did not charge into a group of clueless elderly people who inexplicably found themselves standing next to him. Or the time he charged, but did not contact, a man talking on his cell phone who never noticed the massive bull elk who could have easily driven an antler through man’s body, had he so chosen.

No, Six is famous for his tendency to damage cars and chase people. Much like Bear 264 or any number of identifiable wolves, Six had passed from reality into the realm of folklore years before his death. As such, the myth of Elk Number Six had already grown out of all proportion to the animal. Every day during the rut, someone would come up to me and tell me something new about Six – he’d killed a man a few years ago, he’d been shipped off to Canada but made his way back, that he was the 'son' of an elk that used to run around Mammoth in the 90s.

Stories like this will endure and Six will likely always be famous for his aggression. But the ironic truth is that his fame was a result of his tolerance. Six was figuratively born in the wildland-urban interface, of which Mammoth Hot Springs is a tenuous, but instructive, example. His notoriety wasn’t solely due to his belligerence; any number of elk are as willing and capable of inflicting damage on people and property. His fame came from the stage where he played out that violence. He charged, punctured, dented and threatened amid the paved streets and buildings of a pedestrian mall packed with loud, unpredictable, aromatic crowds of humans. Had Six been unleashed in a Billings shopping center, I doubt the risk of injury would have been significantly higher.

If not exactly enamored of mankind, Six was undeniably comfortable around humanity. During the rut, the most difficult time of an adult elk’s life, Six spent most of his time next to a busy gift shop, a post office and a fast-food joint. He stood in the road as cars and RVs rumbled by less than an arm’s length away. He chased people up steps onto the porch of the old Mammoth Engineers Building (the pagoda). He drowsed next to sidewalks teeming with boy scouts and tour groups. How many other wild animals, much less hormonally-enraged bull elk, would tolerate such close proximity to so much human activity for so long? As 'wild' as people considered him, Six was, in the parlance of wildlife management, habituated.

In conclusion, my familiarity with Six and his history lead me to make one more audacious assertion: his death was not, as Al understandably called it, a freak accident. It was a predictable outcome of his close association with humanity and our constructed environment. Over the years, I have seen many cases of habituated wildlife, from sea turtles and dolphins to coyotes and bears. In almost all of these situations, the animal eventually meets a premature demise, be it from carelessness around armed humans, coronary heart disease from eating our food, or being hit by a car. Six should have died on a snowy ridgeline in the company of winter cold and a mountain lion, or simply infirmity, but he died tangled in a fence behind a motel because that is representative of how he lived.

If I’m right and I spent more time with Six than anyone else, then it stands to reason that I learned more from Six than anyone else. I suspect that all the experiences which he bestowed on me in his distinctly inelegant way will take a lifetime to truly understand and appreciate. For that, I publicly thank the glorious, majestic, infuriating pain in the ass who was Elk Number Six.

Rest well, Six. If nothing else, you deserve that.

In a very real way, my life will never be the same

Farewell 2008

These are personal musings, ill-fit for a place of business email, or for that matter, polite society. These are things for a more personal nature and therefore uncomfortably nebulous to all involved. I’ve chosen to put them here, thereby giving people the opportunity to read them instead of shoving them down anyone’s throat and scaring the hell/bejeezus out of someone who doesn’t know me well enough to predict such ramblings. So take as much or as little as you want, and enjoy the ride.

My friends

For reasons that mystify even me, I’ve lived much of my life here as if I were poised to leave at any moment: don’t get too comfortable, don’t put down roots, always stand ready to run. This was partly a side-effect of my years in the itinerant seasonal lifestyle, but also in some measure due to my own personal demons. During my tenure here, I’ve sometimes kept distance between myself and the people who would care about me.

Maybe I did it to make this day less painful, or maybe I did it because, sadly, that is an inescapable part of who I am. When I get fed up, and I grumble about disappearing into the austere, scrubby West Texas desertscape (a territory the size of New England with only 30,000 people), or spending my days in a corrugated metal shack in an Inuit fishing village (ala Dr Joel Fleischman), wise friends like Carrie Guiles warn me that, if I’m not careful, I might actually do it.

Despite all that, I’ll be damned if I don’t leave some stalwart and unforgettable friends behind. To name any of them would only serve to draw emphasis away from those whom I would undoubtedly forget to mention, but it’s no secret how heavily I have personally leaned on the knowledge, compassion and generousness of MacNeil and Lucy, and Bob and Terri. I fear that I was an often a noticeable burden over these past few years, but I know they would never admit it.

My %$&ing health

The world seems to be moving very fast, and I seem to be falling further and further behind. Humanity went from horse-drawn buggies to landing on the surface of the moon in less than a century and the Caspian tiger was described to western science and became extinct over a span of 60 years. And in the month of August, 2004, I went from being able to live out of the back of my truck to joining the ranks of the millions of Americans who will never be able to afford their own healthcare.

That, of course, is because have MS. I don’t necessarily look or sound sick, but I am. I’m lucky right now – damn lucky – and that luck could hold. But it may have to hold for the rest of my life; barring an affordable medical breakthrough I will be sick forever. There is no cancer to fight, no infection to battle, no bones to mend or transplants to await. I just have to learn to live with a vague prognosis which my doctors toss around: a progressively degenerative condition. You will never be better than you are right now, they imply with a practiced clinical lack of emotion, and you will get worse. Those are my bad days.

On my good days, my fumbling GIS experience gives me some hope that I could still contribute to wildlife conservation from the confines of a wheelchair. Then, I reason, all the chicks will want me for my mind. Having said that, though, I have a copy of National Geographic to which I frequently refer in my mind. It was an article about stem cell research, and one of the photos was a guy standing next to his wheelchair. He had been rendered unable to walk by MS, but a treatment utilizing his own (adult, marrow-derived) stem cells changed that. Now if it were that easy, we’d all be healthy already, but I can’t call it anything other than progress. Every day, there are discoveries being made that could change my life a few years down the line. A new US administration can’t hurt either.

So while I will likely never fly through the air as I did during my black belt years (one of the best jumpkickers in the state of Texas, dammit), I’m cautiously optimistic about the future in my better moments. I try to think about how well I’m doing right now, and not worry about later. Right now, I climb mountains, I hike trails, I eat crappy American food, I run off to the Canadian arctic and the tropics. I can walk, I can talk, I’m strong (for a skinny guy). There are people who right now can’t get out of bed or see or play golf or ride a horse or play with their children. In sum, then, right now I have nothing to complain about.

How a little epiphany can go a long way

I leave the GMGM (some of you recognize my little acronym for the Greater Mammoth-Gardiner Metroplex) with a clear memory of the day I received a ‘welcome packet’ from the NPS; it was about 4 years ago when I started a term position following years of seasonal and temp appointments. It was full of notepads with the arrowhead, and pencils, and a letter which welcomed me ‘to the NPS family’. That’s funny, I thought. If I so recently became a member of the family, what the fuck have I been for the past decade? Maybe that’s one of those things people learn at Fundamentals. Yeah, the observant readers will detect a little bitchin’ in there, but in seriousness I bear the NPS no ill will, as I’ve come to believe it’s not personal. I don’t even rule out working for the park or NPS again someday.

But honestly, even given the bureaucratic angst which is news to no one ‘round these parts, it was a hard decision to leave because aside from the NPS there was the park. It felt downright ungrateful: how dare I choose to leave Wonderland, a place which draws admiring people from all over the globe? After all, was it not trapper Del Gue who said, in the iconic tale of Jeremiah Johnson:

“I told my ma and pa that the Rocky Mountains is the marrow of the world.”

Indeed. I long ago learned never to underestimate the profound effect this area can have on people: I’ve met the terminally bored, the terminally ill, the sad, the neglected, the abused, and even a few addicts who came to this 2.2 million-acre corner of the world to start their lives over. Some of those people succeeded and some didn’t, but each of them saw the quiet, lofty peaks of the GYE as beacons of hope, escape, or salvation. More than once, my family proudly proclaimed that in Yellowstone I’d ‘found my place in the world’. And so I found myself often asking how I could walk away from such a beautiful place. Answers came from many sources, including the pragmatic advice of a more contemporary mountain man, Jeremiah Smith, who said (and I paraphrase), “Dude, there are other beautiful places.”

More perspective came during one fateful Death March. Surveying for dead stuff along a transect, we found a spot where a griz had recently been busy scavenging a spring meal from a nearby carcass. I sat down in that bear’s daybed as it overlooked the Yellowstone River and Hellroaring Creek far below and the Blacktail Plateau in the distance. It may not sound incredible, but that was a remarkably intimate and powerful experience for me. My eyes roamed the same slice of the expansive landscape that a robust and formidable predator had seen earlier that morning. The same patch of blue sky soared over both of our heads. The little bubbling rivulet nearby continued to make the same sounds that he had heard. The soil underneath me was the same ground on which the great bear had rested only hours before. For a few moments, with the clarity of uncharacteristically uncluttered emotion, everything – the land, the sky, my life – looked different.

The profound realization that came to me was not about bears, however; it was about people. I wondered how many of those living here had taken the opportunity to sit in a grizzly’s daybed and think about life. Not many, I suspected. People instead had fallen into the routine of work and day-to-day living. The landscape around them had ceased to become the context of their lives – it existed only on the edge of their consciousness, a background to the trials and tribulations of life. They had come to take the park for granted. And, I realized with painful immediacy, I was one of those people. At some point, I ceased to live here and began simply working here. I’ve lost my way and I need time to find the trail again. There are things that I need to accomplish that simply aren’t possible in the GMGM. So while it’s difficult to leave, it’s not as hard as it would have been a few scant years ago.

Folks have urged me to reconsider, to change my plans to leave. As much as I fear life in the stark, brightly-lit world that exists outside the boundaries of the parks, forests, and wildlife refuges in which I’ve spent much of my life (and where people pay attention to fashion and carry iPhones), I can’t. I hope that folks can understand why now.