Free Condor by John Nielsen

bush. On the way out, bleeding and screaming, you fail to see the rattlesnake in your path.
    Grizzlies used the chaparral forests as a fortified base of operations. Twisting tunnels covered by canopies of the ten-foot trees connected the dens to the pasturelands and to other dens. Sleeping quarters might have multiple entrances. Some tunnels stopped abruptly. Families of bears used these pathways over and over, to the point that in a few locations, generations of grizzly bears literally walked in the footsteps of their predecessors, creating a succession of paw pits that were sometimes eight to ten inches deep and fourteen to sixteen inches apart. When the grizzlies were destroyed by hunters and ranchers spreading all manner of poisons, black bears moved in to further deepen the age-old ruts. I only know of two people who crawled around in the chaparral tunnels because they liked doing it. One is the late Joseph P. Grinnell, the legendary western ecologist who founded the Museum of Vertebrate Zoology at the University of California at Berkeley. The other is a recluse/artist named Jon Schmitt, who used to explore the tunnels when he was observing condor nests as a volunteer for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. Schmitt is exactly the kind of person you’d expect to be living in there—not too tall, big black beard, extremely soft-spoken, a taxidermist and line artist who draws the birds he sees in the wild. Born at least one hundred years too late, he says, and his friends all agree with the assessment.
    Schmitt crawled through the chaparral for days at a time in the 1980s. He never met a bear or a mountain lion, but he did learn to recognize the sound angry hornets make when a bear eats half of their nest. He says he often thought of grizzly bears while crawling in the ruts they’d created—how it must have felt to be so big and move so gracefully, melting in and out of the tiniest gaps in endless walls of brush. Schmitt’s reveries sometimes got him lost, he once told me, and being lost in the chaparral has certain rewards. Exiting tunnels surrounded by the densest brush, Schmitt emerged intomeadows never mowed down by cattle or even lightly grazed by deer, let alone visited by hikers. The lowest branches on full-size oak trees would rise just a few inches off the ground.
    They were little time warps, Schmitt says, recalling one bit of chaparral landscape so beautiful that he didn’t even want to walk around. “An untouched meadow of native bunch grasses, tightly hemmed and guarded by the densest of chaparral brush,” he said. “I’ve occasionally seen some nice and even extensive beds of bunch grasses in condor country, but they were tiny fragments compared to what I was looking at.”
    He followed a black bear trail to the middle of the untouched meadow, wondering whether it had once been used by Indians, grizzlies, dire wolves, and saber-toothed cats. “I feel my sense of wonder building,” he said. “I closed my eyes and spread this meadow out across the alien foothills of the entire eastern side of the San Joaquin Valley, and then across the whole of the L.A. Basin.”
    He thinks of this imaginary landscape when he sees the condors soaring. After all, they were there. They saw the grass get eaten by the cattle and replaced by the weeds, or recolonized and covered up by more chaparral.
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    Before the arrival of the cattle herds, hundreds of thousands of native Californians subsisted on a diet of nuts, berries, roots, leaves, fish, and not much meat. They killed game from time to time, but did not tend to count on it: those meals were for special occasions.
    The men who ran the missions threw those nuts and berries into the trash, forcing the Indians to eat what they gave them. Indians who did want to eat from these piles were told to change their minds—it was a real “Let them eat steak” atmosphere. Some natives adapted readily to this new diet.