Wild Thoughts from Wild Places, page 20
Then he sprinkles a few drops of sesame oil onto the wok and spreads that with his fingers, like liniment rubbed into an achy shoulder. The wok’s rusty iron takes a dark sheen. He dices the scallions. He dices the celery, the water chestnuts. The bok choy he dismantles leaf by leaf, chopping each leaf into largish patches. There’s no vehement whapping staccato of knife blade against cutting board, since Dr. Thomas isn’t one of those operatic chefs, and we talk ramblingly about other things as he works. Meanwhile, mesmerized by his cookery, hungry but ambivalent, I watch every move. He cuts open the red bell pepper, also the green one, and slices them into julienne strips. He pauses for a sip of his beer. He tosses some sesame oil into a skillet on the other burner—a more generous dosage, I notice, than granted to the wok. He cranks up the heat. And now, with a quick move to the fridge, he brings out the meat: two bowls full of mountain lion.
It’s prime cut, the stuff that a hunter would call backstrap. To a nonhunter with carnivorous proclivities, it would be recognizable as part of a T-bone. To an anatomically savvy zoologist, paraspinal muscle of Felis concolor in the postmortem state. One bowl contains thin-cut medallions. The other, cubes. The lion flesh is pinkish and unappetizing—but not notably less appetizing than raw pork.
The medallions land sizzling in the hot wok. The cubes tumble into the skillet, where Thomas gives them a fast browning and then sets them to a slow, thorough simmer. (Trichinosis, he tells me, is a hazard of undercooked lion. But that doesn’t mean that the meat has to be hot-fried until it’s as sturdy as Vibram.) The air fills with aroma, and not just the aroma of sesame. The bok choy, the scallions, the peppers, the other items are added to one dish or the other. A splash of soy goes into the skillet, a splash of oyster sauce into the wok. A can of pineapple chunks stands opened and ready. A jar of black bean sauce makes its appearance. While my ambivalence holds at an intermediate level, my hunger ascends toward the ceiling on Cantonese steam.
Already I can tell that Don Thomas, a bright and bristly man with whom I’ve had a contentious acquaintance, has proven the first of his points: Whatever arguments might be made against the hunting of mountain lions, inedibility isn’t one of them.
• • •
PERSONAL ethics involves the drawing of lines: I will go as far as this boundary, here, but I will not go beyond. I will defend myself against physical menace but only pacifically. I will fight if attacked but I won’t kill. I will kill if my family is threatened but I won’t aggress. I will squash an earwig in the kitchen but not a beetle in the yard. I will eat plants but not animals. I will eat tuna but not dolphin. I will eat goat but not pig. Fruit but not vegetables. I’m a Jainist, I will harm no living thing—except when I breathe or walk down the street, and then only unintentionally. There’s a fuddling welter of such crisscrossing strictures, each observed by its own faction of conscientious people. We all draw our lines in different places, at different angles, and for different reasons, each line’s position reflecting a mix of individualized factors that include sensibility, emotion, experience, and taste (in both the broad and the narrow senses of that word), as well as sheer righteous logic. Moral philosophy, unfortunately, is not one of the mathematical sciences.
I will let the butcher do all of my killing. I will destroy habitat but not animals. I will eat stir-fried shrimp, stir-fried beef, even stir-fried elk, but not stir-fried lion. Huh? Not every crisp line represents a triumph of ethical clarity.
Don Thomas draws lines of his own. He will hunt but not with a gun. He uses a bow. He will kill lions and bears, which are thought of by most hunters as trophy-only game, but he refuses to waste the meat. He will focus his hunting efforts toward trophy-size animals, and hang trophy-size heads on his walls, but he declines to enter them in the competitive record book. And even within the narrow domain of bow hunting, he draws a line: traditional weaponry only. Thomas eschews the fancy compound bows—with their pulleys, their lighted sight pins, their release aids, their overdraws, their lightweight arrows, and their other high-tech gimmicks—that have made bow hunting vastly easier and more lethal during the past twenty years. Bow hunting is supposed to be much harder than hunting with a rifle, Thomas says. That’s a large part of the point. He uses only long bows and recurves, gracefully simple weapons built by craftsmen he knows, from materials such as maple and elm and glue. This is a preference and a scruple, he admits, of which the significance is purely personal.
When hunting, Thomas takes only short-range shots (no more than thirty yards, generally much less) that demand fastidious stalking and raise the likelihood that a hit will be a kill. In autumn he hunts deer, elk, and antelope. Sometimes he goes to Alaska and kills a caribou or a moose. In the depth of winter, with deer season closed and snow piling up in the coulees, he hunts mountain lion. Because lion hunting is impracticable without dogs, he has trained up a good hound. Although he trees a few lions each year and has been at it for almost a decade, he has killed only one. The taxidermed hide of that lion stands in his living room, a handsome but stiff effigy of a splendid animal. Its flesh has long since been eaten. At some point in the future, he says, maybe he’ll kill another. In the meantime he will continue enjoying the hunt as a process not dependent on its result. All of these facts are fundamental to Don Thomas’s sense of identity. And there’s another fact, somewhat more ancillary: He earns his living by practicing medicine in a small town in central Montana.
Thomas is a complicated fellow, not easily captured within categories. As an undergraduate at Berkeley in the late sixties, he was in tune with the zeitgeist, wearing his hair long, protesting the war. Asked if he was a hippie freak in those years, he laughs mildly and answers yes. He missed Woodstock but went to Altamont, tasting the sour dregs of the era. He had majored in English at Berkeley and felt a hankering to write, but then he shifted toward medicine instead. Medicine was a family tradition—his grandfather had been a country doctor in Texas, his father was a distinguished medical researcher who would eventually win a Nobel Prize. After medical school, Don spent two years with the Indian Health Service on a reservation in central Montana, where he felt the reawakening of an old childhood interest: bow hunting. Some of his hunting pals at that time were Indians, but unlike him they felt no inclination toward bow and arrows. He killed his first deer with a bow in 1977, not long after having settled in the town where he lives today.
Also in 1977, he got his first look at the footprints of a mountain lion. “And that was almost like seeing an abominable snowman track,” he recalls. The species was so rare—or at least it seemed to be, after decades of persecution—that many ranchers and most town folk lived their lives without ever seeing one.
During the early 1980s Thomas was in Alaska, doing some medicine, some commercial fishing, some bush flying, and a lot of bow hunting. He returned to Montana in 1986 and had another life-changing experience. Hiking in the mountains that summer, as he recounts, “I came over a rise and saw a mountain lion, about fifty yards in front of me.” It was his first glimpse of Felis concolor in the wild. He was downwind, the lion didn’t notice him, and for half an hour he watched the animal working its way along a rimrock. “That was one of the most powerful experiences I’ve ever had with an animal in the outdoors.” This wasn’t Yellowstone, or a zoo, this was practically his backyard. “Something clicked,” Thomas says. “I knew that I somehow had to interact with these animals.”
His interactions took the form of hunting, and though that leap of logic may seem perverse and paradoxical, I can’t dismiss it as nonsense, because I remember a similar weird logic in my own feelings about trout. When I first became familiar with wild trout in mountain rivers, they seemed so exquisitely gorgeous, so thrilling, so magically animate, that I wanted to interact—yes, exactly the right word, vague but candid—with them somehow. I wanted to participate in the darting, lambent dynamics of their lives within their environment. Call me doltish and brutal, but I conducted my interactions with a fly rod, stalking the fish, studying their habits, fooling them with devious little baits that I concocted from steel and feather and thread, playing them on a light leader, catching them, and in most cases releasing them, but sometimes killing them and eating their flesh. The trout, of course, never reciprocated my appreciation. They had no desire whatsoever to interact with me. But trout are predators too. If they didn’t kill and eat insects, small crustaceans, and one another, they wouldn’t be susceptible to predation by fly fishermen. That fact is not offered here as an ethical justification for sport fishing. It’s just part of the ecological context, worth keeping in mind.
Don Thomas, after his audience with that first cat, became a lion hunter of much the same sort and much the same motivation as me the fisherman. He taught himself some of the requisite skills, and he learned a great deal more at the elbow of a friend called Rosie—full name, John Roseland—who has hunted lions in central Montana for twenty years. Rosie is an amiable fortyish fellow, a seasonal firefighter with long hair and a wrestler’s build, who does his own taxidermy and sometimes takes his white toy poodle, as well as his hounds, into the field on a hunt. By Thomas’s testimony, Rosie Roseland has forgotten more about mountain lions than most big-mammal biologists will ever know. Thomas and Rosie and just a few other friends now constitute the fellowship of serious lion hunters in their area. They all use traditional archery. Sometimes they practice catch-and-release lion hunting. Sometimes they kill an animal and eat it. If they do kill, the hide is salvaged also and becomes a mounted specimen, though that’s not the ultimate object of the process. Rosie has two in his trophy room, including one magnificent tom that went almost 170 pounds, plus another hide now being tanned. The hide in tanning once wrapped the body of a lion that Rosie killed this past December, with Thomas as partner to the chase. They shared the meat. That’s the animal whose backstrap is presently featured on Thomas’s stove, and Rosie, in recognition of his kill shot as well as for other reasons, has joined us tonight for dinner.
During my own fishing years, I never took a trout to a taxidermist. But I can’t offer that as any consolation to the animals I ate. Nor would I argue for any absolute ethical distinction between the killing of a mountain lion and the killing of a trout. If warm blood and fur and mammary glands are enough to set the lion into an exalted category, then we’re just back to the old anthropocentric standard of value that has justified such man-against-nature havoc on this planet. In my opinion, the real distinction to be drawn between Felis concolor and Oncorhynchus clarki, if any, is ecological. Is the native trout common within its ecosystem? If so, then perhaps we can afford to eat it. Is the native lion rare? If so, then perhaps we shouldn’t eat it. But even the answers to those conditional questions, as it turns out, are far from simple.
Don Thomas and I have corresponded for a year, in guarded but not uncongenial tones, since he found himself infuriated by something I wrote. It was an essay about the ecological limits faced by large-bodied predators, such as mountain lions, and it contained, in addition to my efforts at scientific explication, some shoot-from-the-hip sarcasm on the subject of lion hunting. To wit: If mountain lions in the northern Rockies are as rare as they seem to be, maybe the state fish-and-game laws shouldn’t allow hundreds each year to be “shot for the sheer hell of it and converted to rec-room adornments.” I also mentioned that, after many years in Montana, I’d never seen one of these animals in the wild. The essay was reprinted by a conservation organization to which Thomas belongs. The organization heard from him, promptly and caustically. One part of the message, as relayed onward to me, was essentially this: If that ignorant yuppie wants to learn something about mountain lions, he ought to look over a lion hunter’s shoulder.
Although I’m too old, insufficiently professional, and not quite urban enough to be a yuppie, the shoe otherwise fit, so I thought I’d wear it. I wrote to Dr. Thomas: Yes, thanks, when do we leave? He wrote back, quite affably, and we made plans to go tracking with his dog.
• • •
THE MOUNTAIN lion, aka cougar, aka puma and panther, was once the most widely distributed land mammal in the Americas, ranging from the Canadian Yukon to the southern tip of mainland Chile. It has long since been exterminated almost everywhere in the eastern U.S. (though a tiny population holds on in southern Florida, and there are occasional reports of a lion-like apparition in New England). In the West it has fared better, not for lack of enemies but most likely because the conditions of habitat and the sparseness of human settlement permitted its survival.
From the pioneer days until just thirty years ago, mountain lions in the western states were slaughtered remorselessly, to the point of eradication in some parts of their range and severe reduction in most others. Stockmen hated them, and bounty hunters were paid to shoot as many as possible. During the first three-quarters of this century, the documented tally alone came to 66,665 dead lions. But several factors seem to have saved the western populations from being killed off entirely. Mountain lions are elusive enough, under most circumstances, to avoid contact with humans. They have a relatively high rate of reproduction. Their food supply—mainly mule deer and whitetails—has cycled upward to the point of abundance. The payment of bounties was finally ended. The indiscriminate poisoning of predators with Compound 1080 was curtailed. In 1965, Colorado became the first state to reclassify the lion as a game animal. Other states followed, including Montana in 1971. One effect of this last factor, the change from varmint status to game-animal status, was that it gave hunters a stake in the conservation of Felis concolor.
In the years since I wrote the essay that angered Don Thomas, prevailing wisdom on the population status of mountain lions in the northern Rockies has changed. Possibly their actual status has changed within those few years too, though the current trend goes back several decades. And my own awareness of the particulars, which was shallow before (partly because my argument was focused elsewhere, partly for less valid reasons), has deepened at least slightly. This is not a retraction, then, but it is an admission of incompleteness. Most biologists now seem to agree that populations of Felis concolor in the northern Rockies have increased dramatically within the last thirty years. A pleasant surprise, running counter to most other trends in the struggle to conserve jeopardized species: We’ve got more lions than we used to, it seems. The kill rate attributable to sport hunters is probably no direct threat to the demographic health of the species.
Other things are. Some stockmen continue to argue for government-funded eradication of mountain lions. And home-in-the-country fever continues to afflict more and more people, especially the recent arrivals from faraway cities, who imagine that a cabin on forty acres in the foothills, a Jeep Cherokee, a pair of hand-tooled boots, and a dip of Skoal will give them some sort of spiritual rebirth. This home-in-the-country fever is probably destroying as much wild landscape, as much lion habitat, as any other factor. It’s more permanent than clearcutting, it’s more heedless than Compound 1080, and it’s very damn hard to control. It’s turning Montana, for one instance, into a cross between Walden Pond and Levittown.
Accidental encounters between humans and lions are also increasing, and a few of those encounters have yielded human fatalities. This sort of conflict will bring the lion new trouble. As Felis concolor becomes more numerous, more constricted by human encroachment on its habitat, and possibly (for reasons still unclear) less shy, it will risk triggering a campaign of retributive control. Don Thomas has noticed intimations of that in his own community. “People are just talking about it now. But the first time a lion does something here—whacks a kid, or whatever it happens to be—there’s gonna be a tremendous amount of pressure brought to bear to reduce the mountain lion population.” He hopes it doesn’t happen. He takes joy in knowing that the woods are full of lions.
One morning last winter he tracked a female and her three yearlings in a coulee within walking distance of his house. After treeing them with his dog, he took a few photos and then let them be. It wasn’t the day for a kill. When word leaked into town that Dr. Thomas had had four lions at bay—virtually in the suburbs, for Christ’s sake—and had intentionally allowed them to escape, some of the good citizens were unhappy.
Some were merely puzzled. Is this guy Thomas a lion killer, or isn’t he? This answer to that one is yes.
• • •
IN THE depth of winter, with deer season closed and snow piling up in the coulees, Don Thomas and I spend two days together, looking for mountain lions and common ground. We leave town each morning before dawn and drive far into the mountains with his Bluetick hound, Drive, in the back of the pickup. Each day we cover a long stretch of deserted roads, fighting through drifts, scanning the borrow pit and the shoulder for fresh tracks. We hike and we ski through some lovely country. We investigate a handful of his favorite spots—places where, as he knows from experience, a lion is likely to cross—while Drive, his nose high and his nostrils flared, reads the aromatic braille of the breezes. The wind is up, with another blizzard reportedly on its way. The air is just cold enough to focus a person’s brain. Lunch freezes in my pack, and so does the canteen. As we ski, hike, and drive, we also talk.
Don mentions certain cases of “bad logging” that are ravaging habitat in these mountains, and of “bad mining” that are leaving heavy metals in some of the streams. At another moment, he adds that “one of the biggest impending tragedies” in the struggle waged by conservation organizations, to his mind, “is the polarization between the hunting and non-hunting factions of those groups.” This polarization divides resources, it divides people, it wastes time and money, he says. Until hunting and non-hunting conservationists can find the pragmatic wisdom to accommodate each other within the larger fold, “the developers and the miners and the loggers have gotta be laughing all the way to the bank.” We also discuss home-in-the-country fever, about which he shares my concern. To both of us it seems maddeningly obvious that, if everyone who purports to cherish wild landscape decides that he or she must own and live on a chunk of it, there won’t be any more wild landscape. But how do you tackle that problem, when the new home-in-the-country developments are full of well-meaning people—conscientious hunters, ethical vegetarians, Sierra Club members—some of whom you personally know and love? Don has no answer, nor do I. In two days of searching, we don’t see a single lion, either. But he has convinced me that they are here to be found. Maybe the hard answers are too.
