While the grizzly sleeps

It snowed last night, another day of quiet cover. The ground is white, the house cold. From the kitchen window I can hear last night’s stories rising from the snow like steam from a hot spring.

I live in a small town in the Canadian Rocky Mountains. Behind my house is a yard, and beyond that a shallow ravine, a remnant strip of forest in a valley once owned by the trees and the wild things that lived among them. It has since been subdivided, and is now owned, at least for the moment, by the people whose houses line the streets. One of them is mine.

Some animals have adapted to this new order; the signs are everywhere. In the summer I watch squirrels scamper through the high branches, and black-capped chickadees flit from bush to bush. Sometimes I’ll hear woodpeckers – hairy, downy, pileated – knocking on the trees, asking permission to enter. Occasionally I’ll see a herd of elk, or a lone mule deer, browsing low shrubs or stripping bark from trembling aspen trunks. Once in rare while a black bear trundles into the yard, looking for a handout. The grizzlies, warier, have left for good.

While you may see these animals during the pleasant days of summer, you rarely witness the wild drama that is their lives. Approached, they disappear without a trace, their secrets reserved for the cold, white months of winter, while the grizzly sleeps. There are fewer people here then, and most of them keep to the warmth and comfort of their houses, leaving the woods to the wild beasts and their curious followers. And there’s snow, telling stories the eyes must look hard to hear.

This morning, from the window, I saw footprints in the snow, the third day in a row. The tracks were dog-like, nails showing in the snow, but laid down in a straight line and smaller, more efficient, than my own lab’s well-bred snowshoes.

Closer inspection revealed another pattern. The prints followed the same route as yesterday, and the day before: up from the ravine, across the yard, through the garden, under the porch, along the side of the house, stop. Back through the yard, through the shrubs, into the ravine, through the trees, gone.

Coyote, hunting the margins for house cats. A new game.

Once, the snow told of the tables being turned. In the ravine, the big fat tracks of a cougar – almost the size of a person’s hand – overlapped a coyote’s. Travelling together, perhaps, to protect themselves against the cold darkness of the night? Not likely. Cougars hunt coyotes, which also brings them into yards and onto balconies after dogs. They are quieter than stars, but their tracks give them away, unsettling the new residents on the forest’s edge.

There are other, wilder stories. One winter, not far from my home, in Banff National Park, researchers stumbled upon the body of a cougar, its body riddled with puncture wounds and its tail ripped clean off. The bare-boned but unburied carcass of an elk lay in the woods nearby.

Pound for pound, the cougar is one of the deadliest predators on the planet. A 100-pound female can take down a moose or an elk many times its own size. Not even a Siberian tiger can make that claim. But a cougar, even a grizzly bear, is sorely outmatched against a well-organized pack of wolves.

A quick examination of the snow-bound evidence told the story: The cougar had killed the elk and eaten her fill. Meat drunk, her instincts deadened by a belly full of flesh, she lay resting near the elk. When eleven winter-hungry wolves stumbled upon the scene, they thrashed her. In the wild, especially during the lean months of winter, there is no quarter.

One thing seems clear: The better you comprehend the workings of nature, the better the tales winter tells. And another: wilder landscapes make for wilder stories.

A friend, Wayne, showed me one of the wildest snow stories I have ever seen. Wayne, once a logger, is now a part-time trapper, a photographer, an author, and a full-time conservationist. He wears a police officer’s moustache and his eyes are keen as an eagle’s.

Wayne lives part of the year in a cabin by a lake. There are no subdivisions and his “yard” is more than a million acres of B.C.’s Muskwa-Kechika wilderness. He has spent more nights in the wild than I have in a bed.

What is it? he asked, handing me a colour photo of a winter landscape. What happened here? Tell me the story.

The story was invisible, silent. All I could see was the stage: the flat, white, frozen lake covered with snow, surrounded by a solid green forest of conifers. A line started in the foreground, at the edge of the lake, and ended at a small disturbed patch in the middle, like the big hand on the face of a watch. It was a set of tracks, the disturbance a mystery.

Look carefully, he said. What kind of tracks are these? I started to guess. Wolverine? Porcupine? Marten? Yes, marten. See how they move, lunging through the snow, two by two by two. Marten.

What happened here? he asked, pointing to the patch of disturbed snow in the middle of the frozen lake.

The tracks seemed to stop in the middle of the lake. A bird, a hawk, came down out of the sky and grabbed the marten, I said. After a short scuffle, it flew off with the marten. The story was rising from the ground. Hot steam.

Close, Wayne said. It was probably an owl. But the marten tracks go both ways. It went out to the middle of the lake and came back alive. What are these marks flanking the tracks?

It looked like something, a toque perhaps, had been dragged along the surface of the snow. But as far as I knew neither marten nor owls wore hats.

How ‘bout this? Wayne said, his weathered hands turning the photograph to the light. One night, under cover of darkness, a marten left the cover of the forest to cross the lake. As he reached the middle of the lake an owl dropped from the sky, intent on airlifting his dinner to the nearest tree. A scuffle ensued. The marten, hungry and afraid, twisted in the owl’s grasp and bit into the soft flesh beneath its beak. As it died, the owl’s grip loosened. The marten dragged the owl back to the forest and ate it.

But martens, I knew, preferred the dark safety of the forest. Why would one try to cross the white mirror of the lake? I looked up “marten” in Ben Gadd’s Handbook of the Canadian Rockies, what many of us in this part of the world know as The Bible.

“Not many predators will take on a marten, for they are quite nasty in the clinch. The jaws of these beasts are deadly weapons, full of sharp teeth. But fishers, lynx and great horned owls will.”

Perhaps this one was hunting owls.
END