Free The Book of Yaak by Rick Bass Page A

another, and another. Three blue grouse, poised to flush. Wide-open country. It would be an easy shot once they flushed and sailed down the mountain—or a seemingly easy shot, which is always the hardest. Too much time to think, and analyze.
    I stepped forward to flush them, but did not shoot: and one by one they flew away, fat and juicy and lucky. It was unthinkable to me to shoot a shotgun on this mountain with any grizzly, but especially that grizzly, on it. It would be like walking into a stranger's house, upon first meeting him or her—say, the friend of a friend—and blasting a hole through the ceiling in the living room. It just wasn't imaginable. The grouse set their wings and glided into the trees, far downslope.
    I once saw a small black bear on this mountain. I came within twenty feet of him as he sat upwind, looking around as if confused; and five or six years ago I saw a grizzly up here as well. Not as big as this one, it was standing on a log looking down at me as I picked berries. My dogs were with me, and one of the two dogs saw the bear about a hundred yards upslope.
    Fortunately, it was the dog that minds best—Homer, not Ann. I whispered to Homer, whose hackles were raised, to leave it and come over to me. And Homer did. Then I called to Ann in a low voice, and she minded, because she did not see or smell the bear, and because Homer had not yet growled.
    I took the dogs by their collars and went downslope, believing at any second the bear would charge. At the bottom of the hill, when I dared look back up, the bear was gone.
    A giant bull elk burst from cover; he must have been bedded down not a hundred yards from where the bear had been feeding. For a moment, I'd thought it was another bear—a giant—and my heart and everything else in me stopped for a second, until I understood it was an elk.
    At the time it had seemed to me to be only coincidence that brought the elk and grizzly so close together.
    Five minutes further down the trail, the dogs and I had come upon a big cow moose. My initial sight of her chocolate-colored hump stopped my heart, and then she raised her head and stared at me in moose innocence. When I got to the 'truck I sat 011 the tailgate and ate every one of the berries I'd picked, half out of nervousness and half out of joy....
    But that grizzly story was not like this one. It was a fine one, but somehow different. I'd had my dogs with me, and I'd left. This time I was alone and following the bear. It may seem foolish, but it was the only time I've ever done that—followed one. It's the only time I've ever felt the urge to do that—almost like an invitation. I can't explain it: only that it was a true gut feeling. It's fine if I don't ever get one like that again.
    1 was standing there lamenting the missed opportunity, the lost grouse—a brace, at least—when I heard an elk bugling in the woods below and to my left—not far from the country I'd been in, had come up through. It was a wild autumnal sound—and I thought with some sadness of the fact that the high pitch of the elk's bugle had evolved out on the prairies, where elk had once lived, because high sounds travel far ther there—but in the last hundred years the elk had been pushed into the mountains, and in the forested mountains their high squeals did not travel very far. It was almost like an empty piece of baggage they'd brought—deep, subsonic sounds traveled better in the woods—and I wondered how long it would be before that beautiful flute music was lost to the world.
    As if changing, even as I listened, the bull, close below me, ended his challenge with a series of deep coughs and grunts. I'd been seeing this bull for several years; he was a trophy, and I'd hunted him, chased him in large circles through the forest, but I had never gotten a good shot at him, and knew somehow that I never would.
    I was thinking about slipping down into those woods and seeing if I