Bear Island

I squeeze though the rotting stile, the dog went under the peeled pine rail. Back on the lead and we walk the gravelled track. Barbed wire on our right and infinite flat blonde grass on the left. Dotted with black cows, their faces swivel not to me but towards my small predatory companion.

Eagle Creek makes it last half-hearted tumbles just past the fence as it heads to the disciplining edge of our track. And there it meets the track and straightens amongst the cow ravaged willow clumps, fractured, splintered, battered and stomped. 

There amongst the broken willow are the last sentries mother and calf. Black faces with white etchings like brackets outlining their visages parenthetically. They stare with that calm domesticated look, wildness bred out of even their countenance. Standing stubbornly defying passage until I wave my sticks and say in a husky lisp ‘Sissck! Sissick! they start moving and with some more encouragement they trot off alarmed toward the vast grass plain where the others watch the drama. 

Yesterday they halted our walk as one mother stood in the track dead-center and moved towards us protecting her calf or perhaps not wanting to be parted from the cool shade and water on a hot early October afternoon. We retreated only to try today more emboldened by cool wet weather to disperse the mob. 

Now we had breached the last guard, our march to Bear Island could continue. This long causeway moated on either side marked our journey to a Mont San Michel of aspen aflame in early autumn greens, yellows, oranges, and reds. This fortress of basalt forest-gilded lying in a sea of bullrush, tall marsh grass, sedge, and reed. 

For we were on this immense grassy calderic platter. Mountains defined the distant edges and the great grassy sea the flat surface with the magma dome in the center, Bear Island. 

Down the moats were ducks, Mallards mostly as they rose in small flocks of five or eight. Our nearness not so great as to allow identification except by form on the wing. These cautious prey had sense of the reach of shotgun. But for one or two stragglers who might have been shot on the wing from where we walked. 

Soon the gravel track transitioned to thatched path of dense tall grasses. The dog unable to see but straight down the path. The yearning to pounce the thicket at every rustle and stirring, kept short on the lead. 

The sky was a mass of meteorological confusion, skeins of rain from purple cloud pregnant with moisture, the winds driving cloud ahead of its draping rainfall. Sunlight bursting unexpectedly warm on wind blushed skin casting theatrical lighting of yellows on distant mountain-sides. Thick white thunderheads billowing over distant peaks. All around a constantly changing colusion of clouded confusion. 

Finally we find the edge of the island and a giant beaver lodge gatehouse-like sits at the end of the causeway. Flattened tracks of grass lead into the aspen thickets, beaver slides. All about chiselled stumps and gnawed bark of white aspen trunks. 

We walk the shore of this island where grasses whisper in the wind and lap up to the rocky beach. Thick stands of vibrant aspen carpet the hill above and hide the tops. A raven chortles up there somewhere and the ubiquitous American robins burst out ahead of us. 

The grassy sea around us is pockmarked with pools, channels, and ponds to which we can only imagine from some small glimpses. 

We halt at some strange sound. A wildcat? The whine and groan of a tree leaning against another, the wind bowing some sad notes? No there it is again, the bugling of bull elk, calling their harem and also any rivals. A haunting high pitched wavering whistle ending in an elongated honk.  

This and the darkening sky over the hill signals we should return. Could be heavier rain so donning my rain jacket we walk the two miles back to the truck. We return tired. The defeated sentries have fled the track and stare at us dumbly from the fields as we make our way back. 

We have visited a small part of a huge otherworld. One where if you can’t fly or float may as well be on another planet. An inaccessible alien world perfect home to its denizens. Where the secret lives and struggles happen with little human notice or care. The eagle, harrier, raven, lark, wren, blackbird. Duck, coot, swan, and crane. Coyote, fox. Elk, deer, moose.