A hawk took a pika in front of the cabins
Big had a rocking chair on the porch outside the dining hall at Roosevelt. Little had the one beside it. The porch looks out at a low pile of rock and sage between the building and the cabins. We were waiting on a table and they were doing what you do in a rocking chair, which is nothing, at speed.
A hawk came down into the rocks and did not come back up empty. It had a pika. The pika was alive when the hawk took it and it was not alive long after that. The hawk stayed down on the rock a while with its wings half open and its back to the porch. Then it lifted off and carried the pika away over the cabin roofs.
Big watched all of it. Little got out of her chair to see better and was still standing there after the hawk was gone.
It was a hawk we could not name. We had no glass on it and it was in front of us for less than a minute. I am not going to put a name on a bird I could not identify.
The pika I am sure of. They are relatives of the rabbit. They do not hibernate, so they spend the short summer cutting vegetation and stacking it in the rocks to dry, and NPS calls the piles haystacks. A high whistle off a talus slope is usually the first sign there are any there at all. This one had been working a rock pile fifty feet from a building where people eat pot roast.
After dinner Big carried an armload of sticks out to the grass by one of the cabins. Little arranged them. They built a small square thing about the size of a dinner plate, and set a rock on top of it, and came back. Nobody suggested it.
Whatever hay that pika cut this summer is still up in those rocks.
We had come in two days before, under the Roosevelt Arch at Gardiner, which carries “for the benefit and enjoyment of the people” across the top in letters you can read from the back seat. The line comes out of the act Congress passed in 1872, the one that made this the first national park in the world. The ground it set aside was not empty when it was set aside. NPS counts twenty-seven tribes with ancestral connections to this country, the Crow, the Eastern Shoshone, the Shoshone-Bannock, the Nez Perce and the Blackfeet among them. We camped at Mammoth first, then moved to Canyon.
Erika set the schedule and the schedule was the whole trick. We were in Lamar or Hayden before nine in the morning or between four and six in the afternoon, and we were somewhere else the rest of the day. It meant getting up in the dark. On the second morning a man with a spotting scope the size of a fire hydrant let each of us take a turn at his eyepiece, and there were wolves on the far slope, four of them, moving along a line of dark timber at a distance where they were gray shapes and nothing more. Borrowed glass. He did not want anything for it.
The bison did not require any of that. There is nothing to identify. It is exactly the animal it looks like. We were parked at a pullout in Lamar, sitting in the van with the doors open, when a herd came out of the sage and crossed the road, and then came through the lot. Not past the lot. Through it, between the vehicles, close enough that we pulled the doors shut and sat still and quit talking. Cows, calves, a bull who took his time. The next day, in the same valley, with a microphone running, a second herd did it again. The recording is mostly hooves and four people not saying anything.
Little was keeping a record of her own. Her notebook is geysers, page after page, and she has Grand Prismatic in it drawn from the outside in, orange first, then yellow, then green, then the blue in the middle. We had stood over the spring that afternoon with the steam coming off it sideways in the wind and the runoff channels going out from the rim in colors that do not belong to water.
Big spent an afternoon getting into the lodgepole that grew back after the 1988 fires, which affected 36 percent of the park. The regrowth comes in so thick you turn sideways and go through a shoulder at a time. Every trunk is the same age and the same diameter. He went in ahead of me and after ten feet I could not pick him out of the trunks.
We drove out through West Yellowstone this morning, trying to name what this country does. Half of it is home on the range: grass, river, cattle-colored animals in the middle distance. Then the ground starts steaming through the sage and the water in the pools is a color water is not supposed to be and you are on some primordial alien planet that has not finished cooling. It goes from the one to the other and back again inside a day’s drive.
The notebook is on Little’s lap. Big has the window. Erika has the map. I am driving, and the road south is Teton by dark.
Where this happened: Yellowstone National Park