Coues, Brittlebrush, Catclaw
Been a bit since I've posted, mostly because I was on the hunt that I talk about in this essay. I am submitting this as a writing sample for a job today. And though I think it could probably benefit from some more editing, I'm just so ready for somebody to give me something that I'm throwing it out there now. Wish me luck.
Coues (adj.) - From the last name of Dr. Elliot Coues, a US Army surgeon and naturalist that collected and classified the Coues white-tailed deer. This subspecies of white-tailed deer lives exclusively in the southwestern United States.
Brittlebrush (n.) - A common desert shrub, Encelia farinosa.
Catclaw (n.) - An acacia tree with cat-claw-shaped thorns, Acacia greggii.
Four days ago, I am sitting on volcanic soil in the desert hills between the Winchester and Galiuro Mountains, leaning against a yucca plant. Below me stretches rolling country interspersed with sporadic rocky ridges, stretching to the feet of the ranges, where the vegetation finally changes with the elevation, shading in a steady gradient from the saffron grass and lime mesquite foliage into the deeper greens of juniper and oak at higher elevation. We are looking for an animal which my father and his hunting partner have killed increasingly fewer of in recent years, Coues white-tailed deer. This is no accident. In 2013, 1340 permits across four hunts were issued for the region in which my father and his two friends had tags, Unit 32 (2013-14 Regs.). Official whitetail population statistics reported 33 bucks and a total population of 289 (Hunt Arizona 2012). Even discounting that deer populations are pressured out of this ecosystem by cattle grazing, and the declining rate of fawns per one hundred does, this does not bode well for hunter success. We glass through binoculars from before dawn until ten in the morning. By now the deer are no longer browsing and will be bedding beneath large trees for the heat of the day. Given that we haven't seen any this morning, anyway, we judge it best to return to camp and process the small spike that one of the three hunters in camp killed the afternoon before.
That day, when we come upon the deer lying dead on the hillside, I am having a hard time justifying its death. This is not because I am opposed to big game hunting. In the absence of natural predators, extirpated by white settlers through the decades of migration, the waves of hunters that drown these hills each autumn are necessary to manage the population of grazers. Yet when we get into the guts of the animal, spilling the steaming spleen onto the sand and skinning the animal to be cut and put into ice chests, I can't help but wonder at our tremendous waste.
The energy flows just to make this hunt possible are astonishing. There are three vehicles, each taking two tanks of gas to drive from Tucson, around the hillsides near the Muleshoe Ranch, and back. Each consumes more gasoline than usual because they are loaded with a week's worth of camping equipment. There is the energy to make the ice in the ice chests. The propane for the stove and lantern. All extracted and hauled from hundreds or thousands of miles away. And I wonder at the contrast between our predation (because at least we are meat, not trophy, hunters) and that of the pumas or the wolves that might kill these deer if we had not so viciously culled their numbers. There is no energy cost to transport them here. They live here. They don't freeze and preserve the meat. They eat it in a couple of days before it spoils. Further, this is a young deer. It was most likely born last year, and it is strong. Wolves or pumas likely wouldn't have killed it until it were older or frailer, so our killing a healthy breeding buck is a disservice to the deer population at large. Early white hunters would be elated by current predator populations in Western public lands states. But of course, they didn't imagine the ecological disaster that their settlement was to create. Aldo Leopold, who was later to become a vehement defender of wildlife and not just wild lands, initially came with this same mindset. All large grazers were game. Cougars, wolves, coyotes, any competitor to human consumption of this game, and of cattle, too, were to be exterminated. Yet when Leopold had a lucid look at the West, after he'd spent enough time away from Yale and the East to realize that we needed native models of environmental management, his view changed drastically. In his essay, "Thinking Like a Mountain," he writes about killing a wolf and her cubs in the Gila Wilderness. "I thought that because fewer wolves meant more deer, no wolves would mean a hunter's paradise, but after seeing the green fire [in the mother wolf's eyes] die, I sensed that neither the wolf nor the mountain agreed with such a view. Since then I have lived to see state after state extirpate its wolves. I have watched the face of many a newly wolfless mountain, and seen the south-facing slopes wrinkle with a maze of new deer trails. I have seen every edible bush and seedling browsed, first to anaemic desuetude, and then to death…I now suspect that just as a deer herd lives in mortal fear of its wolves, so does a mountain live in mortal fear of its deer."
But today the situation is even more complicated. Another import, cattle, on which neither humans nor other predators are permitted to prey in the wild, has done the work of denuding the slopes that deer unchecked by wolves and pumas would have done in their absence. On this most recent hunting trip I carefully documented areas where cattle had recently grazed and by contrast where they had not. The difference was astounding. Tree populations were similar in both places, but the diversity of ground covering plants couldn't have been more different. On hillsides free of cattle for some time, I counted six species of grasses, along with brittlebrush shrubs and cacti and seedling hardwoods. Where cattle had recently grazed, most of the ground was bare brown dirt, sprouting mesquites or catclaw, and the only ground covering plant, in sparse patches, was a yellowed grass with spiny seeds. Eastern models of settlement and resource exploitation, codified in the Homestead Act, the Desert Lands Act, the Newlands Act [forming the Bureau of Reclamation], ad nauseum, made it very easy for ranches and then stock farms to reap immense profit from these lands. So, too, did the pioneer mindset toward the West, the idea of "Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way." Yet they also led to astonishing mismanagement, as in the case of the 125% allocated Colorado River, dry in the sands of its delta before it ever reaches the sea, precisely because they were ideas and policies developed elsewhere. No native would ever propose to divert immense amounts of that river to irrigate the California desert. Emigrants from the East looked upon the West as, in Wallace Stegner's words, "The Garden of the World." But the defining feature of the West, no matter what real estate speculators duped generations of settlers into believing (and still do) is aridity, not well-watered foliage. Blossoming exists, and is spectacular, but it is as sparse as it is isolated, as in the Sky Islands of Arizona. Accordingly, the settlers who actually became rich off of the land were few and far between.
Criticisms of this exploitation are not novel. John Wesley Powell, who advocated in Report on the Lands of the Arid Region in 1978 for 80 acre irrigable agrarian homesteads and 2,560 acre ranches, would have had a much lower population density than we see today. Mary Austin wondered in The Land of Little Rain if it were not "better to be bitten by the little horned snake of the desert that goes sidewise and strikes without coiling, than by the tradition of the lost mine" and said of humans blundering in the Western woods that "no wild thing leaves a like disfigurement on the forest floor." And of course Edward Abbey, Earth First!er, park ranger, and author of vehement environmental polemics, made the daydream of dynamiting the Glen Canyon Dam seem not just logical but fun.
And yet, many of the West's best known authors and advocates: Powell and Austin, Abbey and Van Dyke, Leopold and Zwinger, were all migrants from east of the 98th meridian. They came and had to recant aesthetic standards and policy traditions learned in another environment entirely. As earlier indicated with Leopold, for some this was a drastic change of direction. For others, it was as simple as adapting to a new standard of beauty, following Stegner's famous admonition that "You have to get over the color green; you have to quit associating beauty with gardens and lawns; you have to get used to an inhuman scale; you have to understand geological time." But the difference is merely one of scale. All of them, regardless of the ease of reform, were non-natives. As such, whether they liked it or not, they carried Eastern prejudices, unconscious preferences for wetter lands formed as infants, and though they may have later regretted it, to some extent they created the same destruction that they criticized cattle ranchers, river dammers, and mining operations for wreaking. I realize that this is a stringent standard to apply even to allies in the battle for the West. But I apply it because I am convinced that if the West is ever to sustain human civilization, our population must recognize that "the land will not be lived in except in its own fashion." And while, as Mary Austin demonstrated in the quote that I just used, people from elsewhere may develop deep insight about the character of the place, those best equipped from birth to do so are native dwellers. I never had to "get over the color green" to find the desert beautiful. Buffs and sandstone reds, tans and even the green of palo verde always struck me as more beautiful than the colors in a Manet. I learned which plants to eat and which to leave be almost as soon as I could perambulate the arroyos here. And, perhaps most importantly, I do not prefer it anywhere else. But the West, most specifically the Sonoran desert, into which I was born is not as it once was. Much as I may love it, I can only know the desert before European settlement through the stories of the cultures first here. In that light, I am glad of programs like the reintroduction of the Mexican gray wolf. I will not see the West as it was, but perhaps, participating in such programs, I will live to see healthier populations of the flora and fauna that our activities until now have prevented from flourishing. It is high time, I think, to see greater numbers of our native species, both the grazers that we may eat, and the predators that check them when we don't. Yesterday, I am sitting in my house reading when I hear a frantic clucking erupt in the chicken coop out back. I rush outside. At the coop, I find no sign of struggle, and no feathers on the ground in great enough concentration to have been ripped off. Sure enough, though, I count only four chickens. This morning there were five. I search all over the yard and out front in case the bird got out, but see nothing. Behind the back fence, in the floodplain between our property and the arroyo, I finally find a sign that corroborates the suspicion I have held since I heard the first burst of distress. A light brown feather, then another, and finally a collage of them spread over the brittlebrush. Ten feet away, under an immense mesquite, I find a bobcat chewing through the chicken's chest cavity. When my mother returns home, she is livid. I go out a second time to see the bobcat again, because it quickly loped away when I first approached. She asks if I am going to shoot it, and I simply laugh, and say no. The truth is, I am happy that the wild cat found and killed our poultry. It may be a small act of subterfuge, but to me it is symbolic. It lends me hope that native creatures, both human and not, will always find a sustainable way to live here.