Free The Book of Yaak by Rick Bass Page B

could sneak up close enough to get a look at him, when I heard the deep coughs and grunts of another bull answering him, moving in on him: or what I thought at first was another bull.
    I wondered for a couple of seconds why the other bull wasn't answering with its own high bugle, why it was just coughing and grunting—a much deeper cough than I'd ever heard from an elk before—and I then felt the blood drain from my face and upper body as I realized that it was the giant bear—that that bear was hunting the giant elk—was trying to lure it in for a fight.
    It was a sound from ten million years ago, a sound from the Pleistocene: a sound from the center of the earth. It took my blood to a place my blood had never been before—old memories, old fears, that did something to my blood, something massive.
    It wasn't true
terror
that I felt. I don't know what it was. I didn't panic. But it took no huge leap of logic for me to intuit that if my
blood
was frightened, or even made uncomfortable, then maybe I should be, too—and I left, went down the hill, staying downwind of the sounds: and above me, the two giants kept calling, and I wondered how it would turn out, and whether the grizzly was serious about stalking the bull, or only playing, only curious, as I'd been, when I'd first considered trying to sneak in on the bull.
    Later that year, after the bears were asleep, near the end of elk hunting season, I was up there again, and I saw the giant bull running through the trees below me, and was glad he escaped: and I wondered if he'd known, that day he'd been bugling and coughing, that he'd been calling to a grizzly and if he, like the grizzly, had just been messing around. It was impossible to know.

    That had been October second, when I'd seen those snowshoe-sized tracks. The next morning I worked hard in the office, knowing that later in the afternoon I would be going back out into the woods again, and hungry for grouse. It was a lovely cycle that I tried to fit myself into every October, to work hard through the morning and early afternoon, but then to end the day walking, bird hunting. I didn't need a lot—even two or three hours was enough, as long as I could do it every day—as long as I could count on the regularity, the stability of it. In this respect science is very much like art: you have to do it every day, to stay in the rhythm of it. To stay sharp. To stay strong. And yet: this is good only to a certain point. Beyond that point, the overflow, the excess—the part beyond our knowledge or abilities—almost always comes into play. Call it luck, or grace—the "surprise" discoveries, which have been so critical to science's advancement.... What is this magic overflow factor that the universe has been blessed with? Is the quantity of it constant? Is it diminishing? Is it our duty to safeguard those places where we sense it may be richest—where it might even originate?

    The next day I went out to hunt grouse again and also do some scouting for the upcoming elk season. There was a big patch of country to the north of me that had not had roads built through it, though it was bordered and ringed by them. I parked along one of those gravel roads and started up into the woods. Right away I saw a ruffed grouse, but it was too young and would not flush; it only stood on a log and fanned its feathers at me. I tried to make it flush, but it only hopped and half-flew into a cedar jungle, so I had to let it go. 1 pushed on up the mountain, hoping for a wild flush from a mature bird.
    An hour later, 1 was a couple of miles up the mountain, but I did not have plans for the top. I wanted to stay lower, looking for ruffed grouse, rather than blues.
    The sun was orange over Buckhorn Ridge. I was working along a deer trail, noting old elk signs. Hie trail followed a shelf along the mountain, a southern exposure, with aspens above and below me. I was going to cross it and then go into some big