The Book of Yaak by Rick Bass Page A

scientist any longer. I want to consume—to devour—unmeasured things; to wallow in the rich overflow. To see it, or taste it, if not measure it.
    A thing in my blood tells me that there are things in the world that, if touched and measured, disappear.
    I do not mean to speak against science, or even to argue that we have too much of it. I mean only to suggest that we do not have enough art and wilderness. I think that magic is becoming rarer every day—rarer than timber, oil, or steel, and as a glutton, I want the rare things, the delicious things.
    I want as much luck and grace as I can hold. Not measure, but hold.

Antlers
    I T TOOK ONE HUNDRED and sixty thousand letters, it is estimated, to return wolves to Yellowstone and Idaho: to capture and transport wild wolves from Canada back into what remains of our own forests. Will it take two hundred thousand letters—or a quarter million, or a million—to protect the last roadless areas in the Yaak? How thrilled I would be if I knew that's all it would take; I would write each one of them myself, and be done with it.
    But when the last roadless areas of Yaak are roaded, and clearcut—if that happens; if we allow the encroachment, the steady gnawing, to keep happening—where then will we get our wilderness, our old forests? Can you fit one on a helicopter as you can a wolf, and bring it in from Canada? Our ability to achieve the quick fix, purchasing a wolf or grizzly as if off the shelf, slapping a radio collar on it, and then turning it loose on our side of the border—those days are coming to a screeching stop. Right now, we're still in the mindset of being able to plug holes. But when the big wild forests are gone—when nothing but a hole remains—what will fill us, and where will we shop?

    A day for cooking. I know I should be spending time in these pages chronicling the last days of the wild creatures, here at the edge of the century, in this land of giants—but it seems a day to pause.
    Nearly everything is frozen—the snow continuing to pour down for the eighth day in a row—- and there is a silence, a profound resting, all throughout the woods.
    It is a time for death, too. This is the week, according to my journals, when, on walks through the woods, you begin to find more deer carcasses, the leavings of lions and coyotes, and of the winter itself—the absence of one thing, food, and of another thing, warmth.
    This is the week, too, when the deer begin to lose their antlers—the antlers falling off and tumbling to the ground, first one side, so the deer is lopsided, but soon thereafter, the other, balancing back out. The trails the deer travel are packed down icy-smooth through the snow, and antlers line either sides of these trails like decorations in a rock garden, or like markers. In the summer after the snow is gone you can still come across these trails, the edges of them strewn with antler residue. The antlers will still be relatively untouched, except for having been gnawed upon by the squirrels and porcupines, who savor the phosphorous and calcium and other minerals held in the antlers.
    The bucks no longer need their antlers for establishing and guarding their territory against other bucks, nor for establishing dominance. Survival is all that matters now—not procreation. The does have already been bred and are carrying the next season's life in them, and though the antlers might still be useful in defending against predators, flight is still the best defense a deer has. The extra energy used in carrying those antlers around is simply not worth it, so questionable is survival in winter: so fine the line, the balance of accounting between calories consumed and calories expended. So the bucks jettison their debt; the richness of the antlers, the extravagance of them, cannot be sustained.
    It's possible, too, that the antlers are a liability in another way; it's possible that the predators know that