Dawn light, mouse gray in the woods. Gazing north into the trees through the bedroom windows, I can see hours of daylight waiting for me. Time for a recalibration walk. I’ve been living in my head too long.

I’ll wait a few hours, then call my young friend Tyson, a wilderness ranger with the Forest Service. I’ll suggest we hike in to a place like Quaking Aspen Swamp or some other, similar corner of the Three Sisters Wilderness Area. I find it safer these days to have a companion on such walks, and he’s good company. He knows how to say nothing.

I’ve got to get up and check the weather.

As an eight-year-old, growing up in agricultural Southern California, I thought the eastern Mojave Desert wilderness enough for me. It raised the hair on my neck. Years later, I need to walk the extra miles, get clear of any sign of human habitation, the pervasive and intrusive spoor of the mechanized world. But those early days in the Mojave, not so far from the road, fixed something in me, an unquenchable desire to immerse myself in landscapes still owned by their resident animals. A conviction that to attach myself in these places will offer me, yet again, a way to examine what human life—any life—means in an era of cell-phone-triggered bombs and .

In the years since I coursed through creosote flats in the Mojave as a boy, inhaling the tangy aromatics ballooning outward from those bushes after a rain, I’ve been lucky. I’ve —diving under the ice in McMurdo Sound in Antarctica, descending into canyons in the Pilbara, in Western Australia, traveling the north coast of Alaska in a small boat. Such places offer a kind of illumination that can take the darkness out of contemporary life. You can feel the relief, once the tinnitus starts to fade, and you begin to move gracefully down the trail instead of headlong, pausing often now to reconnoiter, the way every other creature does.

I remember the extended pleasure I felt as a temporary resident in those places, the hours of mental clarity and exuberance. The memories always make me want to go out the door again, hopeful of regaining the sense of balance that the persistent closeness of strangers, the screech and mumble of machinery, and the needling presence of advertising threaten, every day, to overturn.

Daily life devours the equanimity that unmanipulated land can restore—if one is patient, hungry, respectful, and willing to be vulnerable.

When Tyson picks up the phone, I tell him I’m wondering about hiking into Wolverine Meadow later this morning, in the Three Sisters—partly out of respect for this indomitable animal, now rumored to be back in the area. Sorry to disappoint, he says, but the road to that trailhead is still snowed in. Why not try the French Pete Creek trail, he says, which takes off at a lower elevation? Hike up the valley until snow stops us, or till high meltwater in the creek shuts us out of the upper valley.

Fine by me, I answer.

It’s raining fitfully now, and showers are forecast for the rest of the day, but it doesn’t occur to me to reconsider. Tyson never brought it up either, of course. It’s spring in the western Cascades.

My house sits about 13 crow-fly miles from the western boundary of the Three Sisters Wilderness, but I haven’t been up French Pete Creek in a while. When Tyson suggested we go, I recalled images from my first hike up there, in 1970. It’s gorgeous, innocent country. As I stage a few necessities in my daypack, I recall the 800-year-old cedars there, remember bull trout, now threatened, in the creek and ripe salmonberries and huckleberries by the trail. I recall spotting an obsidian arrowhead, just the tip, gleaming in the duff.

Mostly, though, I recall the days of protest.

In the , the fight to protect French Pete Creek in Oregon’s Willamette National Forest catalyzed and defined an emerging, nationwide argument about wilderness policy. By 1954, the struggle to keep road building and commercial logging out of this ten-mile-long, 19,000-acre valley—an effort that began in the late 1930s—had developed into what some believe was the country’s first citizens’ campaign to protect a specific wilderness area. The push to include French Pete Creek valley (and two adjacent watersheds, a total of 45,400 acres) in the Three Sisters Wilderness extended through several campaigns, near successes followed each time by defeat. Eventually, however, cut-and-run logging interests, long deferred to by the Forest Service, found themselves facing off in court against a politically astute group of new-line conservationists, social activists, and political progressives, people who rejected the historically more timorous approach of old-line groups like the Friends of the Three Sisters and the Sierra Club.

When the Wilderness Act established protection for the Three Sisters in 1964, the effort to include French Pete was still being contested. It took until 1978, with the passage of the federal , for French Pete (collectively, the drainages of Walker, French Pete, and Rebel creeks) to finally become part of the 281,190-acre Three Sisters Wilderness.

The strategy for preserving French Pete differed fundamentally from earlier conservation efforts. It didn’t rely on arguments that appealed solely to aesthetic values; instead it employed a strategy based on cost-benefit analysis and on evoking a sense of outrage among ordinary citizens over the timber-industry-friendly management of federal lands. In the late sixties and early seventies, this largely ethics-based approach to evaluating undeveloped areas resonated strongly with many advocates for social change in America. The Wilderness Act had stripped the Forest Service of the power it once had to designate wilderness areas, turning it over instead to Congress, where citizens had the right to actively participate in the process. In essence, though the establishment of a new order on federal forestlands would take time, activists striving well into the seventies to protect French Pete broke the back of the timber industry, which had grossly underestimated the strength of its adversaries’ arguments.

Driving up to French Pete that day to meet Tyson, I could look back on those days of protest and feel some measure of satisfaction. On November 18, 1969, I stood in front of Willamette National Forest headquarters in Eugene with a crowd of about 1,500 protesters, denouncing with them the Forest Service’s defiant, ongoing effort to open French Pete to logging. The demonstration was not a reiteration of Mobilization Day, the Vietnam moratorium protest that had taken place in Washington, D.C., just three days prior, but the Eugene crowd was animated by similar convictions, among them a belief that theirs was a just cause of national importance. They also believed that if the federal government succeeded in handing French Pete over to the logging industry, the country’s fundamental integrity likewise would be called into question.

The industry, of course, never got the timber in French Pete, but the fight against corporate greed, ethical compromise, special-interest land management, and excessive development hasn’t ended. We enlighten each other; we heal our wounds; and the young take to the walls yet again—with great courage, great effort, great faith. Then, for a few more years, we feel blessed.

Walking up French Pete Creek with Tyson, I’m staggered by beauty on every side. Hundreds of small deer’s-head orchids are blooming lavender and fuchsia in a jungle of green hues on the forest floor: thimbleberry thickets, tussocks of sword ferns in their fiddlehead stage, salal and Oregon grape, woodland strawberries, vanilla leaf, nodding stems of Solomon’s seal, tuffets of bear grass. We’ve not walked 100 yards and already I’ve lost the desire to go on. I’d be fine here for a week. Gentle rain, light winds, errant shafts of sunlight piercing the forest canopy where fires crown, and the crash and roar of the bounding creek, all coming at once, so occupy the ear and eye that my bare hands, with their sensitivity to temperature, to the texture of tree bark and the strike of rain, bring me information for which there is hardly room. But I bend down to palpate the difference between the serrated edges of leathery Oregon grape leaves and the waxy, ovate foliage of salal. I reach out to feel the prickling needles of spring growth on yew branchlets and the supple, spatulate leaves of Indian plum.

I sense wild ginger and bleeding heart are close by but can’t spot them.

The white blossoms of trillium, a kind of lily, have by now darkened to shades of magenta and are melting like colored tissue in the rain. We’re still weeks from hawthorn blossoms, blue huckleberry fruit, pale pink trumpets blaring in the rhododendron thickets, nuts bedded in spiny bracts on the chinkapins, native blackberries ripening along with yellow-orange salmonberries. Tyson, in a phrase new to me, refers to the red, black, and yellow flares on some individual Oregon grape leaves, vivid before us now in the wet, as “Rasta colors.”

We examine the flank of a rotting red cedar, gutted by a black bear. We pause where an elk trail crosses ours—several animals, the hoofprints maybe an hour old. Everywhere we look we see fresh animal sign—where deer have snipped tree buds; where gray squirrels have torn the seeds from hundreds of Douglas fir cones, leaving the protective cone scales in heaps; where tailed frogs have left their toe impressions in the soft mud of a rain puddle, sheltered from wind and the pelt of rain.

The bear grass is far from sending its plumed stalk up into blue summer skies canopied over the clearings in summer, but dogwoods are already in chalk white blossom. Bull trout are savaging insect larvae in the creek, devouring them out of earshot; turkey vultures are circling out of sight somewhere above, hoping for a glimpse of a carcass, a half-finished cougar kill, a gray fox dead of a heart attack.

Sheets of mist slipping sideways on bursts of wind roil ten thousand infant leaves on vine maples against a chiaroscuro sky, an Impressionist furze and yet one more shade of green, this a pale one, leaning to yellow. When sunlight strikes them, the sheen of their wetness makes them seem lit from within. In the understory are still other greens: jade and celery, apple and shamrock, the celadons and malachites. In the canopy above, bottle and deep blue-greens, the greens of emeralds.

I can find these same hues at my home, where spring wildflowers are rioting this afternoon, where tree frogs croak at dusk, and where from the kitchen I’ve watched bobcat, mink, and others pass on their indecipherable errands. So the question arises: Why make this effort to hike the French Pete trail, which this afternoon so bewitches me? It’s because even in my home forest, only lightly disturbed by man, I cannot feel as sharply, mile after mile, the intensity of untrammeled, the extent of undeveloped, the amplitude of natural, the starkness of solitude, the classic goals of wilderness management. On this trail, I feel more acutely the defeat of my culture’s manic appetite for raw materials, its yearning for profit, its impatient refutation of numinous life outside the human. It’s here that I feel, instantly and relentlessly, the uncomplicated air pushing against my skin, and know, as the late poet John Haines once wrote, that we are “the guests of a barely understandable host.”

The path we follow will eventually arrive at a creek crossing, and we will have to make a decision about whether I can cross. I’m older than when I first walked here. Arthritis now cramps my hips and lower spine, and my sense of balance is failing. I can’t anymore bolt, quick as a goat, over stretches of exposed river rock or run gracefully across chaotic terrain. I have to take my time. This does not embarrass me or make me feel inferior to the task. Like every animal in these woods, I’m adapting. I’m playing the cards I’ve been dealt and not wondering who took the cards I once held.

The year the Wilderness Act went into effect, I was a 19-year-old wrangling horses on pack trips into the Teton Wilderness in Wyoming. All these years later, I’m still glad to be stunned, stopping to slide my fingers down the sidewalls of an elk’s hoofprint, edging head and shoulders out into the currents of air tumbling over the creek to inhale the ozone. French Pete Creek is, I need to say, an ordinary kind of western Oregon valley. No scenic vistas, no charismatic megafauna—the wolves and grizzlies are gone. No spectacular groves of old growth, though there are some very old, fire-scarred Douglas firs scattered about, and the ancient cedars are here. No towering waterfalls to gawk at, though the creek is a nearly unbroken run of cascading, pellucid water, cavitating wildly around basalt boulders, a cacophony without letup.

To step in here, to sense the canopy closing over you a hundred feet above, the finger-laced crowns of hemlocks, firs and cedars, black cottonwood and big-leaf maple, to feel that fluid life force, thundering over the creek bed like horses crashing a chute, vibrating in your thighs, to look down at a trail that shows no sign of hard use, to absent yourself for a day from landscapes vulgarized by billboards, to run your arms into the duff beyond your wrists and then plunge them deep in the fulminating creek, is to open yourself to what 13th-century architects wanted to happen to you when you entered Chartres or Notre Dame.Ěý

Before we reach the river crossing, Tyson and I descend from the trail toward the creek to dismantle a fire pit where someone once camped, perhaps several years ago, to judge from the thickness of a pelt of moss the color of absinthe that has established itself over the ashes. “No fires within 100 feet of the trail,” the regulations say.

We scatter river cobbles and the half-burned stobs of wood, dust the ground with maple leaves, and go on up the trail. The medallion of brilliant moss gleams back there like a winter moon but looks like it belongs.

Like us, I suppose.

Ěý

Barry Lopez is the author of the National Book Award–winning Arctic Dreams, the National Book Award finalist Of Wolves and Men, and, most recently, the short-story collection şÚÁĎłÔąĎÍř.

A Short Legislative History of America's Wildlands

—Matt Skenazy

1964: During the Johnson administration, Congress passes the Wilderness Act, designating 9.1 million acres in 13 states.Ěý

1970: Florida’s Pelican Island Wilderness becomes the nation’s smallest, at just 5.5 acres.Ěý

1972: Scapegoat Wilderness in Montana becomes the first designated area proposed by citizens.Ěý

1978: The Endangered American Wilderness Act adds 1.3 million acres to the system. Ěý

1980: The Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act adds 56 million acres, the most in a single year.Ěý

1981: Jimmy Carter leaves office after designating 66.3 million acres, more than any other president.Ěý

1983: The first BLM wilderness unit is designated. Now four agencies—the BLM, Fish and Wildlife, the Forest Service, and the National Park Service—maintain U.S. wilderness.

1984: Some 175 areas are designated, the most in a single year.Ěý

1989: President Ronald Reagan leaves office after designating a record 215 new areas.

1990: Five new areas bring Alaska’s total to 57.5 million acres, the most in the union. Six states—Connecticut, Delaware, Iowa, Kansas, Maryland, and Rhode Island—have none.Ěý

2001: President Bill Clinton’s Roadless Rule prohibits logging and development in much of the country’s wildest places. More than a decade of litigation follows.Ěý

2005: El Toro Wilderness, in Puerto Rico, becomes the first area in a U.S. territory.Ěý

2008: President George W. Bush leaves office with 2.5 million acres to his credit.

2012: The 112th Congress actually takes away 222 wilderness acres.

2013: The U.S. district court in Washington, D.C., ends challenges to the Roadless Rule.Ěý

2014: Michigan’s Sleeping Bear Dunes brings the total to 109.5 million acres—5 percent of the U.S. As of July, Barack Obama has designated 2.1 million acres.

The post The Case for Going Uncivilized appeared first on şÚÁĎłÔąĎÍř Online.

I slow the car, downshifting from fourth to third, with the melancholic notes of Bach’s sixth cello suite in my ears—a recording of Casals from 1936—and turn east, away from a volcanic ridge of black basalt. On this cool California evening, the land in the marshy valley beyond is submerged in gray light, while the far hills are yet touched by a sunset glow. To the south, out the window, Venus glistens, a white diamond at the horizon’s dark lapis edge. A few feet to my left is lake water—skittish mallards and coots bolt from the cover of bulrushes and pound the air furiously to put distance between us. I am chagrined, and slow down. I have been driving like this for hours—slowed by snow in the mountains behind me, listening to the cello suites—driving hard to get here before sunset.

I shut the tape off. In the waning light I can clearly see marsh hawks swooping over oat and barley fields to the south. Last hunts of the day. The eastern sky is beginning to blush, a rose afterglow. I roll the window down. The car fills with the sounds of birds—the nasalized complaints of several hundred mallards, pintails and canvasbacks, the slap-water whirr of their half-hearted takeoffs. But underneath this sound something else is expanding, distant French horns and kettledrums.

Up ahead, on the narrow dirt causeway, I spot Frans’s car. He is here for the same reason I am. I pull up quietly and he emerges from his front seat, which he has made into a kind of photographic blind. We hug and exchange quiet words of greeting, and then turn to look at the white birds. Behind us the dark waters of Tule Lake, rippled by a faint wind, stretch off north, broken only by occasional islands of hardstem bulrush. Before us, working methodically through a field of two-row barley, the uninterrupted inquiry of their high-pitched voices lifting the night, are twenty-five thousand snow geese come down from the Siberian and Canadian Arctic. Grazing, but alert and wary in this last light.

Frans motions wordlessly to his left; I scan that far eastern edge of Tule Lake with field glasses. One hundred thousand lesser snow geese and Ross’s geese float quietly on riffles, a white crease between the dark water and the darkening hills.

The Staging of white geese at Tule Lake in northern California in November is one of the most imposing—and dependable—wildlife spec­tacles in the world. At first one thinks of it only as a phenomenon of numbers—it’s been possible in recent years to see as many as three hundred thousand geese here at one time. What a visitor finds as startling, however, is the great synchronicity of their movements: long skeins of white unfurl brilliantly against blue skies and dark cumulonimbus thun­derheads, birds riding the towering wash of winds with balletic grace, with a booming noise like rattled sheets of corrugated tin, with a furious and unmitigated energy. It is the life of them that takes such hold of you.

I have spent enough time with large predators to know the human predilection to overlook authority and mystery in the lives of small, gregarious animals like the goose, but its qualities are finally as subtle, its way of making a living as admirable and attractive, as the grizzly bear’s.

Geese are traditional, one could even say conservative, animals. They tend to stick to the same nesting grounds and wintering areas, to the same migration routes, year after year. Males and females have identical plumage. They usually mate for life, and both sexes care for the young. In all these ways, as well as in being more at ease on land, geese differ from ducks. They differ from swans in having proportionately longer legs and shorter necks. In size they fall somewhere between the two. A mature male lesser snow goose (Chen caerulescens), for example, might weigh six pounds, measure thirty inches from bill to tail, and have a wingspan of three feet. A mature female would be slightly smaller and lighter by perhaps half a pound.

Taxonomists divide the geese of the Northern Hemisphere into two groups, “gray” and “black,” according to the color of their bills, feet, and legs. Among black geese like Canada geese and brandt they’re dark. Snow geese, with rose-pink feet and legs and pink bills, are grouped with the gray geese, among whom these appendages are often brightly colored. Snow geese also commonly have rust-speckled faces, from feeding in iron-­rich soils.

Before it was changed in 1971, the snow goose’s scientific name, Chen hyperborea, reflected its high-arctic breeding heritage. The greater snow goose (C. c. atlantica)—alarger but far less numerous race of snow goose—breeds in northwestern Greenland and on adjacent Ellesmere, Devon, and Axel Heiburg islands. The lesser snow goose breeds sightly farther south, on Baffin and Southampton islands, the east coast of Hudson Bay, and on Banks Island to the west and Wrangel Island in Siberia. (Many people are attracted to the snow goose precisely because of its association with these little-known regions.)

There are two color phases, finally, of the lesser snow goose, blue and white. The combined population of about 1.5 million, the largest of any goose in the world, is divided into an eastern, mostly blue-phase population that winters in Texas and Louisiana, and a white-phase population that winters in California. (It is the latter birds that pass through Tule Lake.)

The great numbers of these highly gregarious birds can be misleading. First, we were not certain until quite recently where snow geese were nesting or how large their breeding colonies were. The scope of the problem is suggested by the experience of a Canadian biologist, Angus Gavin. In 1941 he stumbled on what he thought was a breeding colony of lesser snow geese, on the delta of the McConnell River on the east coast of Hudson Bay—14,000 birds. In 1961 there were still only about 35,000 birds there. But a 1968 survey showed 100,000 birds and in 1973 there were 520,000. Second, populations of arctic-breeding species like the snow goose are subject to extreme annual fluctuations, a boom-and-­bust cycle tied to the unpredictable weather patterns typical of arctic ecosystems. After a series of prolonged winters, for example, when per­sistent spring snow kept birds from nesting, the Wrangel Island population of snow geese fell from 400,000 birds in 1965 to fewer than 50,000 in 1975. (By the summer of 1981 it was back up to 170,000.)

The numbers in which we see them on their wintering grounds are large enough to be comforting—it is hard at first to imagine what would threaten such flocks. Snow geese, however, face a variety of problems. The most serious is a striking loss of winter habitat. In 1900 western snow geese had more than 6,200 square miles of winter habitat available to them on California’s Sacramento and San Joaquin rivers. Today, 90 percent of this has been absorbed by agricultural, industrial, and urban expansion. This means 90 percent of the land in central California that snow geese once depended on for food and shelter is gone. Hunters in California kill about twenty percent of the population each year and leave another four to five percent crippled to die of starvation and injuries. (An additional two to three percent dies each year of lead poisoning, from ingesting spent shot.) An unknown number are also killed by high-­tension wires. In the future, geese will likely face a significant threat on their arctic breeding grounds from oil and gas exploration.

The birds also suffer from the same kinds of diseases, traumatic ac­cidents, and natural disasters that threaten all organisms. Females, for example, fiercely devoted to the potential in their egg clutches, may choose to die of exposure on their nests rather than to abandon them in an unseasonable storm.

In light of all this, it is ironic that the one place on earth a person might see these geese in numbers large enough to cover half the sky is, itself, a potential threat to their existence.

The land now called Tule Lake National Wildlife Refuge lies in a volcanic basin, part of which was once an extensive, 2,700-square-mile marshland. In 1905 the federal government began draining the area to create irrigated croplands. Marshland habitat and bird populations shrank. By 1981 only 56 square miles of wetland, two percent of the original area, was left for waterfowl. In spite of this reduction, the area, incredibly, remains an ideal spot for migratory waterfowl. On nearly any given day in the fall a visitor to the Klamath Basin might see more than a million birds—mallards, gadwalls, pintails, lesser scaups, goldeneyes, cinnamon teals, northern shovelers, redheads, canvasbacks, ruddy ducks; plus western and cackling Canada geese, white-fronted geese, Ross’s geese, lesser snow geese, and whistling swans. (More than 250 species of bird have been seen on or near the refuge and more than 170 nest here.)

The safety of these populations is in the hands of a resident federal manager and his staff, who must effectively balance the birds’ livelihood with the demands of local farmers, who use Tule Lake’s water to irrigate adjacent fields of malt barley and winter potatoes, and waterfowl hunters, some of whom come from hundreds of miles away. And there is another problem. Although the Klamath Basin is the greatest concentration point for migratory waterfowl in North America, caring well for birds here is no guarantee they will fare well elsewhere along the flyway. And a geographic concentration like this merely increases the chance of catas­trophe if epidemic disease should strike.

The first time I visited Tule Lake I arrived early on a fall afternoon. When I asked where the snow geese were congregated I was directed to an area called the English Channel, several miles out on the refuge road. I sat there for three hours, studying the birds’ landings and takeoffs, how they behaved toward each other on the water, how they shot the skies overhead. I tried to unravel and to parse the dazzling synchronicity of their movements. I am always struck anew in these moments, in observing such detail, by the way in which an animal slowly reveals itself.

Before the sun went down, I drove off to see more of the snow goose’s landscape, what other animals there might be on the refuge, how the land changed at a distance from the water. I found the serpentine great blue heron, vivacious and melodious flocks of red-winged blackbirds, and that small, fierce hunter, the kestrel. Muskrats bolted across the road. At the southern end of the refuge, where cattails and bulrushes give way to rabbit brush and sage on a volcanic plain, I came upon mule deer, three does and four fawns standing still and tense in a meandering fog.

I found a room that evening in the small town of Tulelake. There’d not been, that I could recall, a moment of silence all day from these most loquacious of geese. I wondered if they were mum in the middle of the night, how quiet they were at dawn. I set the alarm for 3 a.m.

The streets of Tulelake are desolate at that hour. In that odd stillness—the stillness of moonlit horses standing asleep in fields—I drove out into the countryside, toward the refuge. It was a ride long enough to hear the first two movements of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony. I drove in a light rain, past white farmhouses framed by ornamental birches and weeping willows. In the 1860s this land was taken by force from the Modoc Indians; in the 1940s the government built a Japanese internment camp here. At this hour, however, nearly every landscape has a pervasive innocence. I passed the refuge headquarters—low shiplapped buildings, white against a dark ridge of basalt, facing a road lined with Russian olives. I drove past stout, slowly dying willows of undetermined age, trees that mark the old shoreline of Tule Lake, where it was before the reclamation project began.

The music is low, barely audible, but the enthusiasm in some of the strong passages reminds me of geese. I turn the tape off and drive a narrow, cratered road out into the refuge, feeling the car slipping sideways in the mud. Past rafts of sleeping ducks. The first geese I see surge past just overhead like white butterflies, brushing the penumbral dimness above the car’s headlights. I open the window and feel the sudden assault of their voices, the dunning power of their wings hammering the air, a rush of cold wind and rain through the window. In a moment I am outside, standing in the roar. I find a comfortable, protected place in the bulrushes and wait in my parka until dawn, listening.

Their collective voice, like the cries of athletic young men at a distance, is unabated. In the darkness it is nearly all there is of them, but for an occasional and eerie passage overhead. I try to listen closely: a barking of high-voiced dogs, like terriers, the squealing of shoats. By an accident of harmonics the din rises and falls like the cheering of a crowd in a vast stadium. Whoops and shouts; startled voices of outrage, of shock.

These are not the only voices. Cackling geese pass over in the dark, their cries more tentative. Coyotes yip. Nearby some creature screeches, perhaps a mouse in the talons of a great horned owl, whose skipping hoots I have heard earlier.

A gibbous moon shines occasionally through a wind-driven overcast. Toward dawn the geese’s voices fall off suddenly for a few moments. The silence seems primordial. The black sky in the east now shows blood red through scalloped shelves of cloud. It broadens into an orange flare that fades to rose and finally to the grays of dawn. The voices begin again.

I drive back into Tulelake and eat breakfast amid a throng of hunters crowding the tables of a small café, steaming the windows with their raucous conversation.

Bob Fields, the refuge manager, has agreed to take me on a tour in the afternoon. I decide to spend the morning at the refuge headquarters, reading scientific reports and speaking with biologist Ed O’Neill about the early history of Tule Lake.

O’Neill talks first about the sine qua non, a suitable expanse of water. In the American West the ownership of surface water confers the kind of political and economic power that comes elsewhere with oil wells and banks. Water is a commodity; it is expensive to maintain and its owners seek to invest the limited supply profitably. A hunting club that keeps private marshland for geese and ducks, for example, will do so only as long as they feel their hunting success warrants it. If the season is shortened or the bag limit reduced by the state—the most common ways to conserve dwindling waterfowl populations—they might find hunting no longer satisfying and sell the marsh to farmers, who will turn it into cropland. Real-estate speculators and other landowners with substantial surface-water rights rarely give the birds that depend on their lands a second thought when they’re preparing to sell. As O’Neill puts it, “You can’t outweigh a stack of silver dollars with a duck.”

The plight of western waterfowl is made clearer by an anomaly. In the eastern United States, a natural abundance of water and the closure of many tracts of private land to hunting provide birds with a strong measure of protection. In the West, bird populations are much larger, but water is scarcer and refuge lands, because they are largely public, remain open to hunting.

By carefully adjusting the length of the hunting season and the bag limits each year, and by planting food for the birds, refuge managers try to maintain large bird populations, in part to keep private hunting clubs along the flyway enthusiastic about continuing to provide additional hab­itat for the birds. Without the help of private individuals, including conservation groups that own wetlands, the federal and state refuge systems simply cannot provide for the birds. (This is especially true now. The Reagan administration has proved more hostile to the preservation of federal refuges and their denizens than any American administration since the turn of the century.)

Some birds, the snow goose among them, have adapted to shortages of food and land. Deprived of the rootstocks of bulrushes and marsh grasses, snow geese in the West have switched to gleaning agricultural wastes and cropping winter wheat, a practice that has spread to the Midwest, where snow geese now feed increasingly on rice and corn. A second adjustment snow geese have made is to linger on their fall mi­grations and to winter over farther north. That way fewer birds end up for a shorter period of time on traditional wintering grounds, where food is scarcer each year.

As we spoke, O’Neill kept glancing out the window. He told me about having seen as many as 300,000 white geese there in years past. With the loss of habitat and birds spreading out now to winter along the flyway, such aggregations, he says, may never be seen again. He points out, too, looking dismayed and vaguely bitter, that these huge flocks have not been conserved for the viewer who does not hunt, for the tourist who comes to Tule Lake to see something he has only dreamed of.

We preserve them, principally, to hunt them.

In broad daylight I was able to confirm something I’d read about the constant, loud din of their voices: relatively few birds are actually vocalizing at any one time, perhaps only one in thirty. Biologists speculate that snow geese recognize each other’s voices and that family units of three or four maintain contact in these vast aggregations by calling out to one another. What sounds like mindless chaos to the human ear, then, may actually be a complex pattern of solicitous cries, discretely distinguished by snow geese.

Another sound that is easier to decipher in daylight is the rising squall that signals they are leaving the water. It’s like the sustained hammering of a waterfall or a wind booming in the full crowns of large trees.

One wonders, watching the geese fly off in flocks of a hundred or a thousand, if they would be quite so arresting without their stunning whiteness. When they fly with the sun behind them, the opaque white of their bodies, the white of water-polished seashells, is set off against grayer whites in their tail feathers and in their translucent, black-tipped wings. Up close these are the dense, impeccable whites of an arctic fox. Against the grays and blues of a storm-laden sky, the whiteness has a surreal glow, a brilliance without shadow.

I remember watching a large flock rise one morning from a plowed field about a mile distant. I had been watching clouds, the soft, buoyant, wind-blown edges of immaculate cumulus. The birds rose against much darker clouds to the east. There was something vaguely ominous in this apparition, as if the earth had opened and poured them forth, like a wind, a blizzard, which unfurled across the horizon above the dark soil, becoming wider and higher in the sky than my field of vision could encompass, great swirling currents of birds in a rattling of wings, one fluid recurved sweep of 10,000 passing through the open spaces in another, counterflying flock, while beyond them lattice after lattice passed like sliding walls, until in the whole sky you lost your depth of field and felt as though you were looking up from the floor of the ocean through shoals of fish.

At rest on the water the geese drank and slept and bathed and preened. They reminded me in their ablutions of the field notes of a Hudson’s Bay trader, George Barnston. He wrote of watching flocks of snow geese gathering on James Bay in 1862, in preparation for their annual 2,000-­mile, nonstop 32-hour flight to the Louisiana coast. They finally left off feeding, he wrote, to smooth and dress their feathers with oil, like athletes, biding their time for a north wind. When it came they were gone, hundreds of thousands of them, leaving a coast once “widely resonant with their petulant and incessant calls” suddenly as “silent as the grave—a deserted, barren, and frozen shore.”

Barnston was struck by the way snow geese did things together. No other waterfowl are as gregarious; certainly no other large bird flies as skillfully in such tight aggregations. This quality—the individual act beau­tifully integrated within the larger movement of the flock—is provocative. One afternoon I studied individual birds for hours as they landed and took off. I never once saw a bird on the water move over to accommodate a bird that was landing; nor a bird ever disturbed by another taking off, no matter how tightly they were bunched. In no flight overhead, did I see two birds so much as brush wing tips. Certainly they must; but for the most part they are flawlessly adroit. A flock settles gently on the water like wiffling leaves; birds explode vertically with compact and furious wingbeats and then stretch out full length, airborne, rank on rank, as if the whole flock had been cleanly wedged from the surface of the water. Several thousands bank smoothly against a head wind, as precisely as though they were feathers in the wing of a single bird.

It was while I sat immersed in these details that Bob Fields walked up. After a long skyward stare he said, “I’ve been here for seven years. I never get tired of watching them.”

We left in his small truck to drive the narrow causeways of Tule Lake and the five adjacent federal refuges. Fields joined the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service in 1958, at the age of twenty-two. His background is in range biology and plant ecology as well as waterfowl management. Before he came to Tule Lake in 1974, to manage the Klamath Basin refuges, he worked on the National Bison Range in Montana and on the Charles Sheldon Antelope Range in Nevada.

In 1975 a group of visitors who would profoundly affect Fields arrived at Tule Lake. They were Eskimos, from the Yukon-Kuskokwim delta of Alaska. They had come to see how the geese populations, which they depend on for food, were being managed. In the few days they were together, Fields came to understand that the Eskimos were appalled by the waste they saw at Tule Lake, by the number of birds hunters left crippled and unretrieved, and were surprised that hunters took only the breast meat and threw the rest of the bird away. On the other hand, the aggregations of geese they saw were so extensive they believed someone was fooling them—surely, they thought, so many birds could never be found in one place.

The experience with the Eskimos—Fields traveled north to see the Yukon-Kuskokwim country and the Eskimos returned to Tule Lake in 1977—focused his career as had no other event. In discussions with the Eskimos he found himself talking with a kind of hunter he rarely en­countered anymore—humble men with a respect for the birds and a sense of responsibility toward them. That the Eskimos were dumbstruck at the number of birds led him to a more sobering thought: If he failed here as a refuge manager, his failure would run the length of the continent.

In the years following, Fields gained a reputation as a man who cared passionately for the health and welfare of waterfowl populations. He tailored, with the help of assistant refuge manager Homer McCollum, a model hunting program at Tule Lake, but he is candid in expressing his distaste for a type of hunter he still meets too frequently—belligerent, careless people for whom hunting is simply violent recreation; people who trench and rut the refuge’s roads, in oversize four-wheel-drive ve­hicles, who are ignorant of hunting laws or who delight in breaking them as part of a “game” they play with refuge personnel.

At one point in our afternoon drive, Fields and I were watching a flock of geese feeding in a field of oats and barley on the eastern edge of the refuge. We watched in silence for a long time. I said something about the way birds can calm you, how the graceful way they define the sky can draw irritation right out of you. He looked over at me and smiled and nodded. A while later, still watching the birds, he said, “I have known all along there was more to it than managing the birds so they could be killed by some macho hunter.” It was the Eskimos who gave him a sense of how a hunter should behave, and their awe that rekindled his own desire to see the birds preserved.

As we drove back across the refuge, Fields spoke about the changes that had occurred in the Klamath Basin since the federal reclamation project began in 1905. Most of the native grasses—blue bench wheat grass, Great Basin wild rye—are gone. A visitor notices foreign plants in their place, like cheatgrass. And introduced species like the ring-necked pheasant and the muskrat, which bores holes in the refuge dikes and disrupts the pattern of drainage. And the intrusion of high-tension power lines, which endanger the birds and which Fields has no budget to bury. And the presence of huge pumps that circulate water from Tule Lake to farmers in the valley, back and forth, back and forth, before pumping it west to Lower Klamath Refuge.

It is over these evolving, occasionally uneasy relationships between recent immigrants and the original inhabitants that Fields keeps watch. I say good-bye to him at his office, to the world of bird poachers, lead poisoning, and politically powerful hunting and agricultural lobbies he deals with every day. When I shake his hand I find myself wanting to thank him for the depth with which he cares for the birds, and for the intelligence that allows him to disparage not hunting itself but the lethal acts of irresponsible and thoughtless people.

I still have a few hours before I meet Frans for dinner. I decide to drive out to the east of the refuge, to a low escarpment which bears the carvings of Indians who lived in this valley before white men arrived. I pass by open fields where horses and beef cattle graze and cowbirds flock after seeds. Red-tailed hawks are perched on telephone poles, watching for field rodents. A light rain has turned to snow.

The brooding face of the escarpment has a prehistoric quality. It is secured behind a chain link fence topped with barbed wire, but the evidence of vandals who have broken past it to knock off souvenir petroglyphs is everywhere. The castings of barn owls, nesting in stone pockets above, are spread over the ground. I open some of them to see what the owls have been eating. Meadow voles. Deer mice.

The valley before me has darkened. I know somewhere out there, too far away to see now, long scarves of snow geese are riding and banking against these rising winds, and that they are aware of the snow. In a few weeks Tule Lake will be frozen and they will be gone. I turn back to the wall of petroglyphs. The carvings relate, apparently, to the movement of animals through this land hundreds of years ago. The people who made them made their clothing and shelters, even their cooking containers, from the lake’s tule reeds. When the first white man arrived—Peter Ogden, in 1826—he found them wearing blankets of duck and goose feathers. In the years since, the complex interrelationships of the Modoc with this land, largely unrecorded to begin with, have disappeared. The land itself has been turned to agriculture, with a portion set aside for certain species of birds that have passed through this valley for no one knows how many centuries. The hunters have become farmers, the farmers landowners. Their sons have gone to the cities and become businessmen, and the sons of these men have returned with guns, to take advantage of an old urge, to hunt. But more than a few come back with a poor knowledge of the birds, the land, the reason for killing. It is by now a familiar story, for, which birds pay with their lives.

The old argument, that geese must be killed for their own good, to manage the size of their populations, founders on two points. Snow goose populations rise and fall precipitously because of their arctic breeding pattern. No group of hunters can “fine-tune” such a basic element of their ecology. Second, the artificial control of their numbers only augments efforts to continue draining wetlands.

We must search in our way of life, I think, for substantially more here than economic expansion and continued good hunting. We need to look for a set of relationships similar to the ones Fields admired among the Eskimos. We grasp what is beautiful in a flight of snow geese rising against an overcast sky as easily as we grasp the beauty in a cello suite; and intuit, I believe, that if we allow these things to be destroyed or degraded for economic or frivolous reasons we will become deeply and strangely impoverished.

I had seen little of my friend Frans in three days. At dinner he said he wanted to tell me of the Oostvaardersplassen in Holland. It has become a major stopover for waterfowl in northern Europe, a marsh that didn’t even exist ten years ago. Birds hardly anyone has seen in Holland since the time of Napoleon are there now. Peregrine falcons, snowy egrets, and European sea eagles have returned.

I drive away from the escarpment holding tenaciously to this image of reparation.

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