Please, let us get some snow this week.
The chance of anything like it is less than slim; what yesterday was listed as a 35% chance for Wednesday has now dropped to 24%, and that is the largest possibility in the entire long-range forecast now.
The land is nothing but ash and dust; the last lines of remnant snow at the summit of Spoon Mountain have nearly vanished beneath the too-warm sun, only the faintest capillary traces remaining now. Meanwhile, the local ski resort, just up the highway a dozen miles from our home, plans stubbornly to open on Thursday as usual, the entirety of its snow man-made.
To cover 20,000 square feet of land with six inches of man-made snow requires 75,000 gallons of water.
Seventy-five thousand gallons.
In a land that has none.
We crossed over the Río Pueblo this morning. Its flow is reduced to a trickle here and there, the rocks of the riverbed not merely visible but exposed entirely to the open air now. The ditches are dry, the pond empty and overgrown with drought-resistant bindweed. It’s the sort of thing that, like cockroaches or flies, will likely survive every apocalypse.
And still there is no effort made to mitigate, never mind rehabilitate or reclaim.
It’s one of the reasons that Wings makes such an effort to provide a refuge for the wild creatures. The piñon jays returned in number yesterday, multiple clans converging on the sanctuary they know is here. The red-winged blackbirds have been here for two or three weeks now with their own young members, and the crows as well.
And now that the mercury is dropping into the teens and below at night, the elk will begin to move down the mountain in search of sustenance.
The elk having been coming down to our land of a winter semi-regularly for more than a decade now. They came down before that, too, of course — Wings shot the photo above on film back in 2006 or so, from the highway some small way down the road from us — but they kept their distance from any human presence back then, unwilling (and wisely) to trust those whose kind are responsible for the degradation of their habitat (and also for taking their own by force, in season or out of it).
The first time we noticed them here, on this land, was in January of 2010, which tracks our visible, real-time climatic changes with a rather terrible consistency. Some years, they’ve ventured down only in the darkest hours of the night, choosing to remain entirely out of sight, their presence known only by what they leave behind. Elk tracks are a beautiful, delicate affair, cloven in the front and remarkably dainty for the size the animals reach. The mess they tend to make of the hay, or the antler gouges on the aspens? Less delicate by far.
Some years, the herd breaks up into smaller cells, and we’e never known whether the groups that visit are all of them in rotation or only one small branch of the larger community. In such cases, they tend to stage guerrilla raids on the hay barn — or, in one memorably opportunistic instance, on the three bales Wings had in the bed of the truck under the carport, awaiting distribution to the horses. I had ventured out twice into the pitch-black freezing night, once to light the pilot and once to turn it off. My flashlight picked up a gleam, squared: two spots of light at an oblique angle just ahead of where I stood.
I raised the light, and then, amidst a sudden near-silent whisper that was part snuffle and part shuffle, the creature to whom the two glowing orbs belonged took one step back, in a mirror image of the one I was even then taking. It was a bull elk, giant rack of antlers barely visible in the shadow, with a few cows, perhaps some juveniles, behind him. Thinking that we were already in for the night, they had made their way down to the carport, where they had found the bales of hay. I lowered the flashlight, assured them softly that the hay was theirs and they were welcome to it, then retreated indoors.
A similarly small group returned a few times over the course of that winter.
A year or two later, we had a visitation from a yearling (whose story will be told in this space tomorrow), and subsequently, the whole herd at our southern boundary, including a young one with a single curved antler growing straight out of his forehead. There were no Rudolph dynamics at play for him, fortunately; we were able to watch them frolic over the fenceline through Wings’s telescope, and the unicorn elk was clearly fully accepted within the herd. Humanity could learn something from it.
Since that time, we had had several visitations, mostly late enough that we never saw the elk themselves, only their tracks in the snow and the scoremarks made by their antlers in the aspens’ bark.
Until last winter.
The whole herd made its way down to us last winter, probably a result of the damage done to their habitat by the twin evils of climate change and colonial human encroachment. We had had a few visits before mid-January, and then, late in the afternoon of the day that marked my late father’s birth, the entire herd came down . . . in the daylight. The sun was low, of course, and so was the light, but it was there, golden and glowing. And everything from yearlings to cows to young bulls to a couple of old grandfather bulls, antlers big and broken and coats going gray, began to gather: on the far side of the fence, then over and through it, and still they came, until the whole herd was here with us, visible in the light. We stayed upstairs on the deck, watching them through camera lenses, but they knew that we were there, watching us more curiously than timidly by now, and still they came.
On such a day, particularly, it felt like a gift, as though they had gathered to let us know that they understood that we made space and sanctuary for them here, and were acknowledging it.
They returned in the night, and many nights for some weeks thereafter. The last time we saw them, in the east field outside our bedroom window, they arrived before midnight, ready to raid the hay bales and the fresh water, the young bucks already at play. They were still there at two and again at four, mostly lying comfortably and contentedly in the snow, some sound asleep while others stood a gentle watch.
But the real gift occurred at six, when the sun was already rising and our world was already clearly visible in the dawn light: They were still there. A few had left; a few more were in the process of departing; yet some still lay upon the snow, content to rest a few minutes more before wending their way through the climbing line of fencing to vanish into their mountain habitat once more. It was the first time they had spent the whole night, and it was a measure of their sense of safety and security that they felt no need to depart until after the sun was up and shining bright.
It is probably true that, with this unseasonal warmth, greater forage will be available to them upslope longer into the season. What is also true, though, is that there is precious little water, and absent any real change, dehydration will become a real risk soon. Then they must choose: between the simpler dangers of starvation and thirst and the much harder to calculate risks of coming too near to a human population that too often overtly means them ill, and otherwise is mostly careless of their well-being at best.
Fortunately, the hoof clan knows of one refuge, here. For this herd needs sanctuary — a safe space and snow. We cannot guarantee the latter, despite our prayers, but we will always provide the former. The balance of land and ecosystem demand it.
~ Aji
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