Marooned

Michael Engelhard is the editor of the book, Wild Moments: Adventures with Animals of the North, (University of Alaska Press) an anthology written largely by Alaskan authors who grapple with the desires and dilemmas, concerns and choices that spring from our tangling with the untamed. In this essay, "Marooned," Engelhard writes about an encounter he and a group of students had with a marooned mountain goat.

Marooned

The students recline in a half-circle in camp chairs facing the scalloped bay, afraid to miss out on the scenery. By week three of this thirty-day "ed-venture," companionship, paddling skills, and new landscapes have begun to fill any void TV or video games may have caused. Our surroundings help translate the course curriculum-Politics and Ecology of the Tongass National Forest-into realities that will become deeply ingrained, as memories. Luckily, no clearcuts dissect today's view. Hills dark with cedar, hemlock, and Sitka spruce wrap around the bases of sudden massifs. Peaks throng above the tree line and higher still, barbed vanes of cirrus. Along the shore's scrawl a dozen sea kayaks lie where we landed, beached like crayon-colored pilot whales. Gulls shriek in a winged blizzard near the high water mark, pecking at dead things between the rocks. The tide carries notes of kelp, brine, mudflats, and decay-creation's inimitable perfume-while less than ten miles from us the hemisphere's southernmost tidal glacier dips its crystal tongue into the fjord. Mediterranean afternoons too rarely grace Alaska's Inside Passage; before we even pitch tents we take advantage of this one, teaching a lesson on glacial morphology. Lulled by the warmth and my co-instructor's voice, my concentration keeps slipping. A different form of attentiveness takes over as I scan the beach for bears on the prowl.

Some bright, medium-size animal does register in my field of vision, on an island afloat in the bay. Pacing from one end to the other, it appears to be testing the perimeter of its confinement. Could it be a wolf? I reach for my field glasses, tense enough to alert the group.

A head too small, and angular as slab marble, offsets a boulder-shaped body. Shag fluffs the creature's fore- and hindquarters into ridiculous bloomers. A mountain goat. At sea level. The incoming tide has barred its retreat, stranding it like an ice chest washed off some tour boat or a bergy bit gone astray. At first glance it could be a billy or nanny. Both sexes sport jet black spikes, which local Tlingit Indians carve into potlatch spoons-curved, functional, keratin art. According to our guidebooks, adult male goats are the ones most likely to go gallivanting, from alpine reaches down crenellated ridges and into the shelter of conifers, lured by any ungulate tough's Promised Land: salt licks, or deep meadows to browse and populate. Elusive as well as exclusive, the white ghost of the Coast Range was not described scientifically until 1900 and claims a genus all to itself. Earlier encounters with body parts had caused misunderstandings; on his journey along this rugged littoral, Captain Cook traded for mountain goat hides, attributing them to "glacier" bears. (6)

The students are standing now, firn lines and medial moraines temporarily consigned to their minds' garrets. Our intern Neil sprints to his kayak, slides into the cockpit, and, pushing with the palms of his hands, seal-launches from the beach.

"What are you going to do?" someone shouts. "Drape it across your bow?"

"Don't know," he replies. "Just taking a closer look, I guess."