Yaak Magic by Jim Fergus "It is said that the Yaak Valley is a place of magic, and where there is magic must also lurk its evil twin, black magic..." Ruffed grouse. "I love the symphony and magic of the deep woods best...It is dark here and rains a lot and the trees are big and there are mysterious assemblages of animals, groupings and relationships found nowhere else in the world. It is my home..." Rick Bass, The Book Of Yaak My friend Guy de la Valdene and I had been hunting chukars on the breaks of the Grande Ronde River in eastern Washington State late one September. It was country of enormous grandeur, of vast benches above winding canyons, shadowed hills rising to mountains, deep canyons falling away forever to the river below. Where we hunted up high, it was the kind of big, open country that gave you a kind of pit-in-the-stomach thrill, nearly a queasiness. We each had our own vehicle and had driven in tandem straight from Washington -- where it was hot, dry and bright -- to Montana's Yaak Valley in the far northwest corner of the state, hard against the Canadian border. The Yaak has the distinct feel of a Pacific Northwest rainforest, a feeling reinforced by the fact that a cold front with rain and fog and low dark clouds had settled in over the lush, dark-timbered woods. We had come to visit and bird hunt with the writer Rick Bass. Sometimes going too quickly from one country to another can be unsettling, as if the afterimage of the country you have just left behind is still burned upon your mind's eye, and the new country seems somehow alien and inhospitable, or worse, malevolent. At the same time, for those of us sensitive to country (and most hunters are), certain topographies and climates can serve as triggers to the imagination and memory. In this manner a deep sense of dread had fallen upon Guy as pervasively as the black storm clouds that hung over the woods of the Yaak. "I don't think I can stay here long," he said to me shortly after we arrived. "I don't like this country; it makes me uneasy." The mountains hereabouts did seem a bit close, tightly set and heavily forested (that is, where they have not been scalped on top in vast bleak tracks of clearcuts). In fact, it was hard to see why they even called this a valley, and I, too, found it a bit claustrophobic at first, especially with the low sky closing in from above. "Well, it is a little gloomy," I admitted. "But you can't leave yet. We have a date to hunt with Bass tomorrow." "I'll see how I feel in the morning," Guy said. "But I may have to get out of these woods." "Maybe it'll clear up tomorrow," I said. "A little sun could make all the difference in the world." But it didn't clear up, and the next morning's late dawn was even gloomier -- colder and darker and still drizzling steadily. Guy was staying in a bed-and-breakfast on the edge of the tiny town of Yaak, little more than a crossroads, with a couple of bars on either side of the street and a mercantile; I was camped out back in the Airstream. First thing that morning he knocked on my door. "I'm leaving," he announced. "Are you coming?" "Gee," I said, indecisively, "I don't know, I came all the way up here to hunt with Bass. I made a date with him. I just don't feel that I should leave." "That's all right," Guy said, "but I really have to go." It is said that the Yaak Valley is a place of magic, and where there is magic must also lurk its evil twin, black magic, and perhaps this is what had so affected de la Valdene for I had never seen him spooked like that, almost frightened, and he is one of the most courageous men I know. "I hate for us to split up now," I said. "It's only for one day. We can both leave tomorrow." "No, I have to leave right now," Guy said. "This country reminds me too much of Switzerland." He hesitated, and added almost apologetically, "It looks just like the place in Switzerland where my father died." I understood; certain country holds our ghosts, and sometimes you just have to get in the car and drive a couple of hundred miles to escape them. So Guy and I said our goodbyes. I was sorry to see him go, and right after he left, as the dark clouds descended even further upon the forest and the rain ticked steadily against the aluminum shell of the Airstream, I wished that I had gone with him; I envied him the big open plains of eastern Montana toward which he was headed. I turned the furnace up higher and poured another cup of coffee. The rain had abated to a drizzle by the time Rick Bass met me at the Airstream for our hunt. The Yaak is Bass's home country and anyone familiar with his work will know how much he loves it. Just as the country filled Guy with apprehension, so it fills Bass with wonder, reverence and joy. And the same sense of mystery and import that seems palpable in the damp, dark woods and mountains of the Yaak, inhabits Bass's fiction, where magical occurrences become almost commonplace, where characters, both human and animal, are frequently capable of feats of strength and endurance only possible in a magical land. Bass is a quiet, shy, watchful, intensely polite man with large, expressive, almost alarmingly bright blue eyes -- eyes that own an innate, animal-like alertness. He had his German shorthair, Colter, with him, and we all loaded up in my vehicle and headed for the first covert of the day. There was still plenty of green in the woods, but the aspens and cottonwoods were beginning to turn various shades of yellow, orange and red. The snow berries were white upon the bush, and the berries on the kinnikinnick a deep red. There were larch trees and alder, fir and spruce -- a diversity and lushness to which I was unaccustomed. And there was a strange stillness about the forest, the earth lying somber under its shroud of clouds. I liked hunting with Bass right off. He's a walker, a careful, attentive hunter who seems to absorb the land as he moves through it. And he knows his country. Sweetz and Colter worked well together, too, Colter ranging a good deal farther out, Sweetz working close. "Do you ever get lost in the woods around here?" I asked Rick, because it struck me immediately that this was the kind of country in which I'd have been instantly and hopelessly lost if hunting alone. To be honest, I'm a little afraid of the deep woods. "Oh sure," he said. He paused, and seemed to consider the question. "Sometimes I get so lost," he added, "that I don't know where I am." It was a classic Bass remark, slightly off-center, but right on the money and, though I had to think about it for a moment, I knew just what he meant: there's lost, and then there's lost. Just then Sweetz got birdy -- nose to the ground, snuffling, tail wagging stiffly -- and suddenly she put up a ruffed grouse. I mounted my gun and fired. The grouse vanished in the woods. "I sure shot hell out of that tree," I said of the tree that stood between me and the unscathed bird. We hunted on. Every now and then I would look over at Bass as we walked through a covert. He was always smiling to himself, as if in pure conscious joy at being alive at this moment, to be right here in the country that he loved so, doing what we were doing, a smile of pleasure and gratitude that couldn't help but make the visitor feel good about things. Those who know Rick Bass's work will also know of his legendary efforts to preserve the wildness of the Yaak Valley. A one-man crusader and activist, he has taken on the logging companies, lobbied state and federal politicians, and written hundreds of impassioned letters, editorials, magazine pieces and a book (The Book of the Yaak) to rally support for the Yaak. He brings to his preservation efforts a conviction that is nearly religious, evangelical -- a quality that one finds in his use of language, too, in his voice. Indeed, I know of no other writer whose spoken voice is so similar to and inseparable from his written voice. "Look at that aspen tree," he will say of a particularly vibrantly colored tree, as if he's never seen one before. "It's almost nourishing, like a meal." We hunted on, working out each of Bass's coverts, and then going back to the vehicle to drive through the woods to another. Sweetz and Colter were hunting well and put up several birds for us. At one point, Sweetz flushed a spruce grouse but it only fluttered up to the nearest tree branch, allowing me to walk over and look it right in its red eye. Spruce grouse is one of the handful of American upland game bird species that Sweetz has not retrieved in her career, but, of course, we don't shoot birds out of trees. We hunted on. The mizzling rain continued. "Look at that," Bass said of a bank of thick clouds drifting over the mountainside. "It's so beautiful." It was as if he was seeing the country for the first time, seeing it through the eyes of his visitor. He told me a story about a mountain lion chasing his dog, his own sense of fear, anger and exhilaration in witnessing the scene. He told me bear stories and wolf stories. This is clearly a man who spends a great deal of his time in the woods, and pays attention to every detail. It's an odd thing, but I remember how well Sweetz and Colter hunted that day; I remember very clearly the grouse they pointed or flushed as the case might be; can even picture in my mind's eye exactly how each bird flew through the heavy cover. I remember the country and the weather, remember sitting in the steamy Suburban in between coverts as the rain fell outside and filling our coffee cups from a Thermos. "Doesn't that smell great?" Bass said. All of this I remember, but I can't remember if we killed any birds. I don't think we did, but I don't know for sure. But I do remember that we had one of those rare perfect days when the dogs were brilliant and the country revealed just enough of itself to keep things endlessly interesting. And I remember this: we were driving out on the highway after hunting our final covert of the day, headed for the tavern in town (both taverns, actually, as Bass can hardly patronize one without also crossing the street to have a beer in the other.) We were driving through the forest and I turned to say something to Rick, and in that split second before I turned my eyes back to the road, a deer had materialized directly in front of the vehicle. There it stood, a doe, ears pricked forward, staring at us in frozen silhouette as we bore down upon it. I slammed on the brakes and the truck came to an immediate halt. I don't mean that it screeched to a stop, I mean, it just stopped, right there, dead in its tracks. The doe bounded across the road and disappeared into the forest. "I was certain that you were going to hit that deer," Bass said. "I've never seen a vehicle come to a stop like that." "Yeah, well, I just had the brake pads replaced," I answered lamely. But we both knew that new brake pads had nothing to do with it. It was simple case of Yaak magic. Copyright (c) 1998 Jim Fergus. All rights reserved.