“I guess so,” Mary said.
So they met at Hauptbahnhof just before the 6 AM departure to Chur, and an hour later, after eating breakfast on the train, sitting silently next to each other, uncomfortably aware perhaps that they had never done anything like this before, they got off and switched to the narrow-gauge train that headed upvalley to the Vorderrhein. This was a much slower train, but they didn’t stay on it long, getting off and taking a waiting bus up to Flims. A cable car from the station there lofted them high up into a big south-facing basin, elevation about 2,000 meters where they got left off. It was 8:30 AM and they were in the Alps. Mary had told her bodyguards in advance to leave them once they got on the trail, and they did; as so often, there was a little restaurant at the cable car’s upper station, and they would wait there.
She and Frank found themselves hiking up into a big indentation in the Alpine range that formed the northern sidewall of the Rhine River’s uppermost headwaters. Near the end of the last ice age, after the ice had melted out of this part of the valley, a massive landslide, one of the biggest ever known to have occurred, had slumped down this south-facing wall. The entire village of Flims rested on the flat top of the remains of this landslide. Above it the green alps filled overlapping stacked bowls of rock, rising more and more steeply to the Tschingelhörner ridge, a wall of steep gray crags with a horizontal crack running through it. This crack was so deep that it had created a gap in the range, a giant window of sorts through which one could see a big patch of sky, well under the gray crags above. Yet another strange Alpine feature resulting from millions of years of ice on rock.
Trails ran up the green alps under the crags. Mary and Frank ascended one that led them westward, away from ski lifts and farms and other human sites, toward wilder territory, what in the Alps passed for wilderness. The wild creatures of the Alps couldn’t afford to be too picky, Frank told her as they hiked, when it came to hanging out near people; if you weren’t on sheer vertical rock, people were going to be passing by pretty often.
Though it looked like a gentle upward slope, this was partly because the gray cliffs ahead and above were so steep. In fact their ascent was quite a slog of a climb. By the time they got up into one of the highest bowl meadows, floored with a rumpled carpet of short grass, studded with rocks and spangled with alpine flowers, they were tired and hungry, and the sun was well overhead. They sat on a low boulder and ate.
The meadow was littered with big fallen chunks of the ridge above, gray boulders that had detached and crashed down and rolled onto the meadow; or perhaps they were erratics, conveyed by the ice of a long-departed glacier and dropped there when the ice melted. As they sat on their low rock, eating their bahnhof sandwiches and drinking from water bottles, they were rewarded for their silence by a first sighting of alpine creatures: in this case, marmots.
These were fat gray things, like groundhogs or maybe badgers; Mary didn’t have much basis for comparison. The color of their fur no doubt made predators take them for rocks, including the hawks soaring overhead. Perhaps because of these overseers, the marmots seemed to have a tendency to stay still; except when moving from one spot to another, they were as motionless as the rocks they were on. They spoke to each other by way of high staccato whistles. As Mary and Frank listened, it became clear that this must be a language much like any other.
“Down in Flims they speak Romantsch,” Frank mentioned.
The marmots did not mind them talking, Mary saw.
Frank saw this too, and went on. They had heard a little Romantsch in the bus on their ride up from the train station to Flims, he said. It was like Italian and German put in a blender, they agreed. They shared their pleasure in the story of how Romantsch had become one of Switzerland’s four national languages, by way of a rebuke to Hitler. Thus the national myth, and they were both inclined to believe it.
The sun beat on the meadow, causing it to shimmer. It was warm in the sun. The marmots got comfortable with them sitting nearby, even though they had apparently occupied a marmot outpost; piles of little dry turds were clustered in the cracks on the top of their boulder. Herbivores, by the looks of it.
Frank and Mary sat there like big marmots. They didn’t say much. Mary thought it a little dull. Then one of the younger marmots, judging by size and fineness of fur, ambled their way, unconcerned by their proximity. It stopped, reached out a forepaw, pulled all the grass stalks within its reach toward its face. This created a small cluster of tiny grass seeds clutched inside its forearm, which it then munched off the top of the stalks. It only took a few bites. When that gathering and eating was done, it let the topless grass blades spring back into position and moved on. Did it again. Then again.
Seeing this, then looking around the meadow at the level of the grasstops, Mary suddenly realized that the little beast’s source of food was almost infinite. At least now, when the grass was seeding. Probably it was the same for all the alpine herbivores.
Frank agreed when she mentioned this. The marmots would eat all day every day, until they were fat enough to get through the coming winter. They hibernated through the winter like little bears, tucked in holes under the snow and living off
