Michael Engelhard is the editor of the book, Wild Moments: Adventures with Animals of the North, (University of Alaska Press) an anthology written largely by Alaskan authors who grapple with the desires and dilemmas, concerns and choices that spring from our tangling with the untamed. In this essay, "Marooned," Engelhard writes about an encounter he and a group of students had with a marooned mountain goat.
Marooned
The students recline in a half-circle in camp chairs facing the scalloped bay, afraid to miss out on the scenery. By week three of this thirty-day "ed-venture," companionship, paddling skills, and new landscapes have begun to fill any void TV or video games may have caused. Our surroundings help translate the course curriculum-Politics and Ecology of the Tongass National Forest-into realities that will become deeply ingrained, as memories. Luckily, no clearcuts dissect today's view. Hills dark with cedar, hemlock, and Sitka spruce wrap around the bases of sudden massifs. Peaks throng above the tree line and higher still, barbed vanes of cirrus. Along the shore's scrawl a dozen sea kayaks lie where we landed, beached like crayon-colored pilot whales. Gulls shriek in a winged blizzard near the high water mark, pecking at dead things between the rocks. The tide carries notes of kelp, brine, mudflats, and decay-creation's inimitable perfume-while less than ten miles from us the hemisphere's southernmost tidal glacier dips its crystal tongue into the fjord. Mediterranean afternoons too rarely grace Alaska's Inside Passage; before we even pitch tents we take advantage of this one, teaching a lesson on glacial morphology. Lulled by the warmth and my co-instructor's voice, my concentration keeps slipping. A different form of attentiveness takes over as I scan the beach for bears on the prowl.
Some bright, medium-size animal does register in my field of vision, on an island afloat in the bay. Pacing from one end to the other, it appears to be testing the perimeter of its confinement. Could it be a wolf? I reach for my field glasses, tense enough to alert the group.
A head too small, and angular as slab marble, offsets a boulder-shaped body. Shag fluffs the creature's fore- and hindquarters into ridiculous bloomers. A mountain goat. At sea level. The incoming tide has barred its retreat, stranding it like an ice chest washed off some tour boat or a bergy bit gone astray. At first glance it could be a billy or nanny. Both sexes sport jet black spikes, which local Tlingit Indians carve into potlatch spoons-curved, functional, keratin art. According to our guidebooks, adult male goats are the ones most likely to go gallivanting, from alpine reaches down crenellated ridges and into the shelter of conifers, lured by any ungulate tough's Promised Land: salt licks, or deep meadows to browse and populate. Elusive as well as exclusive, the white ghost of the Coast Range was not described scientifically until 1900 and claims a genus all to itself. Earlier encounters with body parts had caused misunderstandings; on his journey along this rugged littoral, Captain Cook traded for mountain goat hides, attributing them to "glacier" bears. (6)
The students are standing now, firn lines and medial moraines temporarily consigned to their minds' garrets. Our intern Neil sprints to his kayak, slides into the cockpit, and, pushing with the palms of his hands, seal-launches from the beach.
"What are you going to do?" someone shouts. "Drape it across your bow?"
"Don't know," he replies. "Just taking a closer look, I guess."
Why not leave it be? I wonder. What feeds this need for proximity, this urge to interfere? We nurse oil-slicked otters and eagles back to health. We radio-collar caribou to understand timeless but timed wanderings. We keep bears in cages, to edify, engage, enchant, entertain. We make room for wolves where we used to poison them and, just as absurdly, install mountain goats in Nevada and Colorado where trophy hunters can chase them. Regardless of its motivation, the reaching-out of a species that exiled itself behind barriers of artifice can be a bleak and beautiful thing. I only hope nobody will suffer injury or indignity on this occasion.
While Neil disembarks on the low-slung island, the goat gallops up and over a rise. Neil walks to the top, neoprene skirted, paddle in hand, to see what we have already seen from shore: the goat churning toward an outcrop nearby, muzzle pointed skyward, cutting a wake like a chunky retriever.
By the time Neil has inserted himself in the kayak again, the billy has climbed its miniature Ararat, which soon will submerge. Against the sea's backdrop, the animal seems out of its element but still more of this place than we, Goretex-clad Argonauts from afar. Possessed of a mineral quality, a poise and resilience older than flesh, it stands riveted to rock-an extension of sweeping summits, hewn from Le Conte Glacier's trunk, hefty and blunt as winter itself. Its stubborn form embodies the land's pluck and fiber. Like snowfields crisp in the distance or the void on explorers' charts, the goat not only invites speculation but even more so the projection of desires. I would trade with this bearded recluse in an instant. I'd travel unburdened by gear. I'd grow hairy and hunchbacked and rank. I'd become agile enough to dodge grizzlies and wolves, fearless enough to bed down on vertiginous ledges-and smart enough to avoid our kind.
With a lapse into pastoral metaphor excusable in a Scotsman, wilderness sage John Muir compared this breed to others of "nature's cattle," considering none better fed or protected from the cold. But he also acknowledged the grit in their existence. During a sledding trip above Glacier Bay, on the ice flow that still bears his name, he found bones cast about in an ancient blood ritual. Their configuration spelled out the death of a frail or sick or unlucky one. Presumably, wolves had caught up with a wild goat two miles from safer ground, where breakneck terrain matched with ballerina grace would have given it the advantage. Despite their famed surefootedness, missteps occur, and the abyss claims its share of mountain goats every year. Loose rocks and avalanches strike down others. Inexperienced kid goats may fall to the talons of golden eagles, which hunt alone or pair up to corner them. Current logging practices in the Tongass-stripping its slopes of cover and feed-further skew the odds against survival in the margins.
Pulling away from these sobering thoughts, I watch Neil bump the outcrop with the bow of his kayak. He waves a paddle blade in the animal's face. What is he doing? Trying to save a goat by making it dive? It's unlikely to drown, even if it gets flooded out. But Neil might yet discover the flipside of hands-on approaches to learning.
If the goat chooses to answer intrusion with uncivil disobedience, our rookie instructor will have a hard time explaining hoof marks on his kayak deck back at the warehouse.
Clearly annoyed with being crowded, the billy indeed takes him on, defending its quickly shrinking domain. It jerks horn daggers into Neil's direction, hooking the air, unwilling to yield as much as an inch.
On shore, the students holler and cheer-for whom, I cannot tell.
Eventually, the goat's aversion to humans overcomes any fear of riptides, reefs, or the unfamiliar. Shoulders tucked in like a boxer, it pivots and leaps high and wide, charging its twin in the burnished sea. Before long we lose sight of it as it dog-paddles across the bay, to be culled from the gene pool or to sire a feisty clan somewhere in the high country.
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(6) Mountain goats look like albinos only after they shed their old ivory winter coat. A winter skin could indeed be confused with that of a black bear subspecies whose pelage is honey-blond: British Columbia's Kermode bear. Southeast Alaska's glacier or "blue" bear on the other hand is colored slate grey. (We thus have a case of twice-mistaken identity here.)
Michael Engelhard moved to Alaska at the age of thirty. He is an experienced wilderness guide and freelance writer. He splits his time between the Colorado Plateau and Alaska.