Order Carnivora

Note: I still want to edit this one so that it feels more like a poem and less like a lesson. Hmmm. Unsure how to do this

Order Carnivora. Caro, flesh, +
vorare, to devour. From the
house cat to the walrus
to the grizzly—ursus horribilis—
“once found through the lower 48,
now confined to wilderness
areas.” I am glad I will
not run into one, yet still
feel bad we permanently attached
“horribilis” to their names
(and of course also hunted them
nearly to extinction.)

I had a teacher once
who liked to go to northern Canada
and hide in a wooden shelter and
watch the grizzlies eat and
poop and walk around and
sometimes charge at each other.

It always seemed like courting
disaster to me—but I admired
his pursuit of nature in the
raw, not sliced into islands
of habitat, or scrambled
by repatriation programs that
required airlifting huge,
stunned mammals to some
godforsaken place in North
Dakota where they would
be continually watched and
encouraged to have sex,
not for pleasure, just to
reproduce the species.

And even though Jim experienced
nature in the raw, most bears
don’t. Most are stuck in a
3,500 square mile museum
where people can go
and ogle them from the road,
where they get shot if they cross
the imaginary lines
we’ve drawn. Their park
is part refuge and part cage.

In the Absarokas, though,
you are on their turf.
Greg told us:
Walk loudly,
stay in the light of day,
sing when you’re going into
dark stands of whitebark pine.
Pay attention in scree fields,
that’s where they come
to turn over the flat stones
and lick up moths by the thousands.
If you’re walking down a trail
And you smell a fresh kill,
just turn around.

I weigh my caution
my soft body
my first time thinking
like prey
against the tyranny
of roads and ranches.
In the currency
of species survival,
What is one sheep gone?
One cow?

We’ve been taught: human life
is the most sacred thing there is.
The lives we guard with barbed-wire
fences, second only to our own.
We have to protect them from
the bears of our childhood nightmares,
with weapons if need be.

But the thing is: in the wilderness,
you don’t carry guns.
We make our own rules in our domain:
our houses, ranches, towns.

In the wilderness I learned
to tread lightly on the earth,
knowing we are light and fragile things—
beings made of air
compared to grizzlies’ bulk,
their momentum,
the 1800 pounds of pressure
per square inch
held between their jaws.