The Possible World

So the road into Denali does not climb Denali, or protrude into Denali, or scatter humans all over Denali. It's a 92-mile narrow dusty ribbon that does its best to not ruin the place. We're the intruders here, but the road instructs us well back, peasants attending royalty.

Dawn is sly on the shoulders of the mountains and then spills color into the valleys. Not just color: all the colors. Every color you ever needed. The whole box.

The big mountain itself is the tallest, from base to summit, in the world. Alaska is relatively new, as land masses go. Most of it is formed from whatever gets scraped off the Pacific plate as it dives under North America. Bits of this and that are jammed together and crumple up along their edges, nowhere more enthusiastically than in the Alaska Range. And that's still rising.

Wildlife? Sure. The Dall sheep showed up clearly, but far away, against a dun mountainside. Grizzly bears revealed themselves to good binoculars and loped effortlessly over enough acreage to make it clear that binocular distance is best. Moose tramped by, observed by a grizzly. Wolves eluded us, but wolf territory sprawled for miles in the braided-river valleys, and the possibility of wolf turns out to be so nearly the same thing as the reality of wolf that I was hardly bereft.

And then, there, unmistakable, was my caribou, way off in the distance. Not the caribou I had anticipated; I've seen the pictures, and so I know caribou are supposed to arrange themselves in long picturesque strings on the tundra against a snowy backdrop. The one in front is supposed to fling his antlers back in a splendid yet saucy posture, with the rest trailing behind in admiration.

This was just the one guy, but he was the one in front. I've seen ungulates before. Lots. Deers and elks and mooses and goats and antelopes and sheeps and what have you. But this one took the ungulation cake. If you can maintain that much majesty on nothing but lichens and tundra scuzz, you've got nothing left to prove. If I'd seen a whole string of them I might never have come to, and that's a fact.

Toward dusk we and several dozen of our closest relatives happened on a much more intimate scene, when a moose grunted irritably across the road, with two admirers in tentative pursuit. Adolescents they were, their antlers the moose equivalent of a boy's first mustache, and now and then they scraped their heads at each other half-heartedly, wondering if they were doing it right. A chesty man nearby boomed out that he'd seen a massive bull moose hanging out in the woods and that he'd probably come out soon, because--cue the nasty, knowing chuckle--"he isn't about to let her get away." Suddenly I longed for a more distant sighting, with no narration, and maybe--what the hell--one bull moose partisan choking on his Budweiser.

Sightings are nice. But it's the realm of possibility that floats the heart: wolf and caribou and bear and moose and marmot and pika possibility. It's the gratitude and humility that comes with a glimpse of how the world was and how it should be, a world in which we are clever, vulnerable, insignificant creatures of the margins. And beyond any individual miracle of an animal that might cross our path, it is the vastness and the perfection and the beauty of their rightful home that I want to gather with my eyes and decant into my soul, to sip from for the rest of my life.

Wolf Testicles On The Loose

We've had a lone wolf wandering around Oregon for several years now, purportedly trying to find himself a date. And all this time I've felt kind of sorry for him. I mean, I know that's what they do--they are allowed to hang around the pack for a few years as juveniles and then at some point they get punted out or they decide to leave on their own, and try to make a life for themselves. It makes sense from an evolutionary standpoint, not that they're necessarily consulting that manual. You want to shake up the gene pool and have a lot more variability going for you as a species. That way, if anyone gets a particularly good genetic idea and there are stresses in play, they've got more of a shot.

Still, this one seemed kind of sad. We've got, like, 24 wolves in Oregon. They got brung in on purpose, and ranchers have been pissed off about it ever since. Ranchers are an introduced species, and like many other such, they and their charges have kind of taken over. The wolves were nearly eradicated in the 1940s. They get a lot of bad press. Some of the wolves do eat livestock. A couple dozen cattle have been killed by wolves in the last decade, in fact. And those were cattle we were planning to eat, ourselves, so. Wolves have also dented up the coyote population, which should come out as a plus to the cattle population, but whereas field biologists might be able to tease out the ecological strands here, reg'lar folk find it easier to stick with whatever idea they started with.

All our wolves are up in the northeast little corner of the state, and here this one wolf--OR-7, he's

called, because the gene for creative naming is associated with people who work with quarks and not with people who work with radio transmitters--off he goes, all over the place, right through the whole state and into northern California, and mind you, we don't have one of your piddly eastern seaboard states here. He's traveled a long, long way. Looking for a mate. That's what the biologists are assuming he's doing, but maybe he's just oversensitive to howling. Anyway, it's a long shot. It's like looking for a heart in Dick Cheney.

The farther he got away from northeast Oregon, the worse I felt for him. How does a wolf find another wolf in a state this big? If you crank your big wet nose in the air and find a female wolf scent molecule, and swivel it till you find two female wolf scent molecules, you're in business. You have a plan and a direction. You've got to believe that the female wolf scent molecule distribution is pretty diluted here, though. It's got to be hit or miss, and mostly miss.

And yet. Do not underestimate the power of underutilized testicles riding on a four-paw operating system. Looks like OR-7 has found his match. He's come back into Oregon and he's found himself a girl. Scientists suspect denning has taken place. Somewhere, maybe, is a snoozing rumple of fuzzy pups, dreaming of our hamburger.