Planetary Stories Project

"To Act Globally, Think Locally – Through Stories"

Black Earth Institute

Place: near Bigfork, MT, USA

On Red Owl Mountain
By Cristina Eisenberg

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A doe burst out of the forest and tore across the meadow, two wolves in close pursuit. This drama unfolded not twenty feet from where my young daughters and I knelt in our garden peacefully pulling weeds, our pant legs wet with morning dew. One black, the other gray, the black wolf in the lead, they closed in on the doe’s haunches. In less than two heartbeats they pierced the deepwood on the far side of the meadow, leaving a wake of quaking vegetation.

We live at the base of Red Owl Mountain in northwest Montana, in a lush, verdant valley. The twin mountain ranges that palisade this glacial valley form its real and temporal borders. As wild as the wildest places in the lower forty-eight United States, it isn’t quite paradise, although the handful of us who live here think it comes close. Midway up the mountains, overgrown clearcuts show up as yellow-green rectangles against the darker green of old-growth forest. This area’s scant human presence is most conspicuously manifested by those clearcuts and by the logging trucks that come roaring down the lone two-lane highway. From our cabin you can walk due east beyond the state forest lands and not encounter much more than federally protected wilderness for one hundred miles.

Landscapes shape us and speak to us on a primal level. Most of us have a landscape we intuitively comprehend. This is mine. My deep relationship with this place has inspired me to open my senses to it and learn to read its nuances and subtleties. I open the front door of my cabin and find wolf tracks pressed into the snow. In spring, even before I see the grizzly lumber out of the forest to dig roots, I smell its ripe essence. These discoveries give me pleasure and an unspoken awareness of the natural order of things.

Humans also have a primal relationship with large predators. This relationship has been eloquently elucidated across the ages in Paleolithic petroglyphs of dire wolves and other creatures sharp of tooth and claw and in medieval paintings of wolves menacing sheep. The wolf stands at the top of early ecologist Charles Elton’s food pyramid, because no other predator controls its abundance or threatens its survival. No other predator, that is, besides humans.

Wolves began to recolonize our area in the early 1990s. Since then we had been hearing them howl from the shoulder of our mountain and occasionally finding their tracks. But we had never seen them — not until that misty August morning when they ran across our meadow. For some long moments after they passed, we knelt motionless in the garden, at a loss for words because of how unprecedented what we had just seen was. Then curiosity kicked in and we stepped outside our small fenced yard to follow the wolves’ trail — a trail so fresh I could still smell their musky scent, which held more than a hint of blood and mystery.

I marked one track and from it we located others in a gallop pattern. We even found the spot where one had turned to look at us, because of how this had caused its left front foot to break forward. Fascinated, we continued to follow the subtleties of their trail — which sometimes consisted of little more than a few bent blades of grass that even as we watched were springing back upright. And I wondered how many other times wolves had run through our land, and I’d missed the evidence.

We followed their trail south until it reached the barbed wire fence that bounds our property. The deer had leaped onto our neighbor’s land and the wolves had followed, squeezing between two strands of wire, leaving clumps of hair on the barbs. Those wolves had been real enough, and in their passing they affected everything in their path and urged me to consider questions beyond the pale.

In the fifteen years since wolves had returned, the deer had been behaving differently — more wary, not standing in one place eating all the shrubs down to nothing. After the first three years I seldom saw deer browsing in the meadow, and then only for brief periods. And after a decade, the meadow was nearly gone, shrubs and young aspen filling in what used to be grass. Until we saw the wolves hunting, I had never actually observed a trophic cascade in action. This experience eventually inspired me to pursue my current research on how wolves reshape ecosystems and write a book about similar ecological cascades in all sorts of places — what I have come to regard as landscapes of hope.