Trophic Cascade: Restoring My Connection to the Natural World
Phoebe McIlwain Bright
This piece was submitted as part of our Her Words on the World digital series, a partnership with Hedgebrook Women’s Writers Retreat to showcase the work of six talented women writers whose work explores nature and the environment. Visit our exhibit page to learn about the authors.
Our skis press through the snow. It’s dry and light, fluffy like bird down. I push each leg forward and sniff: cold, damp, a taste like high-iron water against the inside of my teeth — a smell I associate not with the first flakes but with old snow, present for months. Above us, washed-out clouds, like climate-dried bones, clutter the sky. They don’t have the bruised moodiness of rain. They have, it would seem, no color at all. Where they stretch to meet the snowy ridgeline, it’s no longer possible to tell earth from sky.
It’s late December in Yellowstone National Park, and there’s three feet of snow on the ground. Sagebrush is still visible in windier areas, where the snow’s blown thin, identifying earth as earth. Copper trunks of Douglas fir press against the bowl of the sky. In a meadow to the northwest, twenty bison mill around, seeking the last low patches of vegetation.
I’m skiing with three friends, and all of us carry bear spray, a well-worn habit in the country of large predators — which used to be this whole continent. Bears typically hibernate this time of year, but winters are warmer now. The entire ecosystem feels it.
~
As a kid, I wasn’t a joiner. I don’t think a teacher ever noted a drop of team spirit in me. I rarely, if ever, felt part of something larger, and for their own reasons, my family didn’t truck with emotional thinking.
As an adult though, I’ve been learning that I am connected, whether I want to be or not — to an ecosystem.
That this awareness must be learned is no doubt because I’m descended from colonists, people who chose to wall themselves off from the natural world, pretend they weren’t a part of such things, in order to justify exploitation.
Learning that I’m part of an ecosystem is not just the intellectualized hoarding of facts. It’s not just pointing out the wind-warped Douglas firs, so different from their staggeringly tall cousins in the Cascade Range, or talking about how the day wasn’t cold enough for the snow to be loud and creaky. Instead, it swished, stayed mostly silent.
Being part of something means feeling that connection, physically and emotionally. A felt form of “ground truthing,” the term biologists use to describe boots-on-the-ground observations, not just inferences from expected patterns or a map.
It’s a way of understanding how my story is plaited into the stories of the non-human life around me. After all, sitting with feeling, not channeling it into something more convenient and manageable, has been a learned process for me.
~
An ecosystem is a community of organisms who interact with each other and their surroundings. The famous example in Yellowstone is how the 1995 reintroduction of wolves forced the elk to stop spending so much time by rivers, overgrazing the vegetation. As the elk had to keep moving, plants along waterways regrew. Aspen and willow stabilized riverbanks. This re-established habitat for insects and in time, birds and beavers, who then fed foxes. Even pronghorn antelope rebounded. In a process known as a trophic cascade, the wolves re-tuned the ecosystem and nutrient cycles, from tiny invertebrates to the flow of mighty rivers.
As a modern human, and especially an American, I interact with my ecosystem in many harmful, unconsidered ways. My whole life leads toward these warmer winters, whether I look at it or not. But like joining, the more I engage with this nature connection, the more it becomes a gift and not a burden. I gather berries and mushrooms. I hunt. I sit and watch.
When I shoot a young buck in the dregs of fall, I keep one bear spray on my belt and another within reach, propped up in a snowdrift. The stomach and intestines I’ll leave on the churned-up snow will give strength to a coyote, one predator tagging out another.
When I hunt or hike alone through grizzly country, I have to pay attention in a different way, noting every sound, scanning dense brush. A third my normal distance, and I’m exhausted, eyelids tapping closed against my will. Learning to see insists on effort and ushers in joy. Always a journey, never an arrival.
As we ski, I spot elk tracks, notice where the animal sauntered, where he picked up the pace. I see how he avoids gullies deep with drifted snow. Instead, he prefers an open lane, like me. You can break this shared approach down to biological minutiae, the energy-conserving preference for the easiest route, and be correct. Yet that no longer depletes my sense of kinship. Both of us following the same impulse shows our shared evolutionary lineage.
~
At a county meeting about wolves, an audience of two hundred grills the Fish, Wildlife, and Parks employees. One old-timer calls out, “I’ll just say it. The P-word. Poison!”
Some anti-wolfers don’t care how it sounds when they complain that the racks of the elk they hunt aren’t as big as they were before wolves returned, since it’s harder to run through snow with heavy antlers. They bristle at being told they were hunting in an artificial environment.
Others just want any elk to shoot. Hundreds of pounds of meat — unprocessed, chemical-free — can no longer be counted on each fall.
When the ecosystem changes drastically, it’s hard for any species.
~
At the end of the ski, we stop at an overlook busy with people. In the distance, three wolves have bedded down on top of a hill. Their black hair looks almost as long as a yak’s. Someone tells us they’re members of the Junction Butte pack.
It’s the first time I’ve seen wolves in the wild. It doesn’t feel like what I think of as wild, standing here with ten other people, by the side of a road. But I’m grateful and know that this is another step for me in connecting to my ecosystem. Just as I don’t want a single encounter of another culture or person, I don’t want a single view of another species.
This will always be my first encounter with wolves, small and warm in my pocket like a glacier-smoothed pebble.
~
Two days later, a person I know, somewhere between friend and acquaintance, kills two wolves. He’d gone out to hunt coyotes that morning in a place he will tell people was the Madison Valley, when he spotted fresh wolf tracks in the snow.
That evening, an hour before sundown, he ran a set — making calls of a wounded cottontail rabbit — and brought wolves to the ridgeline, then down into his drainage. He got eyes on a silver female, who he shot.
Wolves sleeping in Yellowstone (Public Domain image accessed via Hippopx.com)
Montana allows five wolf tags per person, so after taking the first wolf, he hiked up to the ridge, daylight trickling away. He could see snippets of movement through the trees. A high-to-low howl sounded behind him, a warning. He waited. When a big, gray male, likely the alpha, showed himself, this man killed a second wolf.
Night fell. A nearly-full moon hung just above the peaks. He dragged the wolves down to the truck, working quickly under the cries of the pack.
When I hear the story later that night, I think of how culling wolves correlates with more attacks on livestock, an easier prey for a small pack.
I go out to the truck anyway, get told about how thick the undercoat is because of the time of year. Under a flashlight, the two silvery-white bodies look roughly the same size as his dog. Not a hundred and fifty pounds, like he claimed, and which I will later learn is unlikely.
Wolves do kill people. In World War I, German and Russian soldiers fighting in the Kovno-Wilna-Minsk district declared a brief ceasefire because a pack of wolves was ravaging the battlefield wounded.
But they’re like us, or we’re like them, in that they’re not simply killers. They’re also capable of empathy, of giving gentle attention and encouragement to the wolf at the bottom of the social ladder. The intelligence of both our species grew out of living in social groups.
This man, who is newly a father, talks excitedly about the need to keep wolves scared of people. He speaks about evolution and dominance, although Darwin emphasized cooperation over competition. I realize I’m listening to someone use words to try to sever connection.
Yet it’s like the effort I used to put into insisting I wasn’t joined with anything. You can try to bypass community, invent belabored explanations, but it still exists. It hasn’t gone anywhere. You’re just choosing not to see it.
Blood from the wolves has frozen in the grooves of his truck bed, garishly red. As he closes the gate of the pickup and chuckles at his dog who won’t go near the truck, I look up at the cold, Montana night and think of the confusion and fear in the pack tonight — the maw of winter and uncertainty of pup-making come spring.
I see a crack in my ecosystem that I can’t look away from. I take a deep breath and pick my words carefully, so many hopes opening to scatter like seed pods.
Phoebe McIlwain Bright holds an MFA from the University of Oregon. She lives in Montana, where she enjoys “picking thimbleberries, gathering morels, and watching ouzels pop out of rivers in surprising places.” Read our Q&A with Phoebe here.
Banner image by Phoebe McIlwain Bright