Or she used to think that. But now she’s becoming less and less interested in her science and more tolerant of mystery.
She hasn’t learned it—mystery—from me. I think she has learned it from the deer, and the woods.
And I—for the first time—want to know a few answers, a little science, a little precision. Like, What is going on? Where is it all going to end?
What are our lives going to be like, from here on out? I’d like a little direction for once, a little glow at the end of the tunnel.
…
So many things can end a deer’s existence. Not just predation, but also starvation, malnutrition, liver flukes, worms. Smaller things, a series of events that lead to a gradual deterioration in the deer’s well-being—a series of mistakes, or harshnesses of nature, are generally what leads to the end of the line. But it’s all part of a flow. I see that, living up here in the mountains. I see it in the ways of deer, and in the ways of the seasons, and I see it in us, too. It’s neither good nor bad: it just is.
…
Martha’s doctorate work included studies about the nutrition a deer needs when the going gets really rough. She would measure cell wall content of forbs as a percentage of dry matter; would measure lignocellulose content, and the nitrogen in dead vegetation in winter, and she would formulate digestibility factors for the deer. The rains of fall and snows of winter degrade the cell walls and leach nitrogen from the plant tissues. I like to think of it as the land taking back those elements that it had loaned to the deer for the summer, for the joy of that quick life. Martha’s old technical papers tend to express it a bit more dryly:
“Calcium has a large role in blood clotting as well as maintaining neuromuscular excitabilities and in the acid-base equilibrium of the body. Dietary calcium at a level of 0.40% of dietary dry matter in the presence of 0.25–0.28% phosphorus is adequate for postweaning fawns. Chlorine occurs in body fluids, where it helps regulate osmotic pressure and maintain tissue pH levels...”
But in the long run, I want to know about the mystery of it, not the fucking pH of it. Now I want to know about the roadless areas.
…
She used to do autopsies on winter-killed deer that people would bring in to the university. For some deer the causes of death were obvious: the brittle bones of selenium deficiency, or the puncture marks in the neck from coyotes’ teeth. But for others, so many others, there appeared to be no reason for dying. They had just stopped living. It was as if there were something out there that could not be measured: a thing they needed but had run out of.
I remember the year when Martha said she didn’t love me anymore. The baby was seven. The baby is a genius, we think. We knew it even then. She learned to read by the time she was three, and she could also tell the difference between a buck track and a doe track. She’s an utter joy to be around. She, as much as the beautiful landscape around us, reminds us to love one another. But that year when Martha flat-out told me she didn’t love me anymore—that was a tough one.
You can’t manufacture love: you can’t build it back up, like a fire. You start out with a certain amount, and then hope it is strong enough and lasting enough to sustain itself against the hard winters, and the assault of time. And it changes; it fluctuates—it gets either stronger or weaker. And sometimes all of the center can just go out. That core, that base, can just get cold, and stay cold, for too long. It’s one of the dangers.
It got right down to the very end. I was going to leave. It was as if my guts were open: as if ravens and eagles were already feeding on my heart. Still, I was going to let her—them—go. Off to that new direction in life that would not include me anymore.
But we muscled through it; somehow we got back into love, or were perhaps carried back into it, unconscious, on a sled, as if pulled through the night by some higher being. The spring came, and we were still alive, and when the woods and meadows turned green again, we started to love each other again.
A harsh winter like that one never came back. Or has not, yet.
…
Martha and I went on a field trip once, up the North Fork of the Whiteflesh River in northern Montana: right where the country crosses over into Canada. It was for a wolf study project that Martha’s class was doing. We were supposed to follow a thirteen-mile transect due north and count how many moose, how many deer, how many elk. We were supposed to howl every 400 meters and count the wolves that responded.
It was on Thanksgiving Day. It had snowed hard the day before, two feet, and then dropped to twenty below.
We had to cross the river naked: holding our clothes over our head to keep them dry, and then build a warming fire on the other side of the river. It was madness and euphoria.
It was so beautiful. The salmon sky, snow clouds between us and the sun, cast a pearly reddish-goldish light, as if we were in some new stage of heaven. All day long there was a light on our faces almost like firelight. The snow was frozen hard in places, so that we could walk across it like concrete for two or three steps, but then we’d hit a soft or weak spot that our feet would punch through, and we’d collapse up to our waists. It was exhausting work. But we
