Winter and Death

It was one of those off-Reecer Creek meetings of the Reecer Creek Rod, Gun, Working Dog & Outdoor Think Tank Benevolent Association.  The subject on the floor was the bitter cold, the winter looming and how the wild critters of Paradise will manage this year.  Although NOAA and the National Weather Service models are calling for a close to average winter for us, homeys are quite aware that anything can happen short term.  Thus, the questions posed about our wildlife—and maybe a concern or two about how we humans deal with winter.

As is usual in these conversations, the first subject up was survival of the youngest—the deer fawns and elk calves.  In a given hard winter, the youngest are the first to go, and the sight of a struggling youngster always pulls at the heart strings.  Of course, this is pretty much as nature designed it.  Watch wildlife in a feeding area during one of those winters and you will see does and cows actually driving calves and fawns off food.  Think about it: if the females die, how will the herd recover?  The very old are the next to go.  And how many males do you need?

Winter is the limiting season for wildlife: the time when habitat is most limited and wild critters are most at risk.  Once a deer or elk has lost 30% of its total body weight, it is generally doomed, even if it receives food, or spring comes.  In any given winter across the colder regions of the planet, it’s not uncommon for ten or twenty percent of big game herds to starve, and die.  It can be hard to watch, and makes for dramatic headlines.

A couple of us flashed back to the hard winter of ’96 and ’97, and that headline: “Sad plight of the orphaned elk calf.”  Of course, elk calves are expected to be on their own by winter, so the fact that the calf wasn’t with other elk (which it would have normally been) did not make it “orphaned.”  It did make an interesting headline, and fodder for a community wide conversation.

Mostly bones and a distended stomach (a clear indication of starvation or inability to digest food), it took up residence on the patio deck of a home off Hanson Road, and the homeowner called 911.  As we recalled the story, dispatchers had recorded the call as “an attack by a bull elk in the Manastash area west of Ellensburg.”

Responding officers threw snowballs and fired shots into the air to scare off the calf, to no avail.  Yelling and threats of arrest were equally ineffective.  Eventually, Fish and Wildlife responded.  The calf already had two hooves in the Spirit World, and was put down with a clean shot.  Sad, but likely in keeping with the natural order of winter.

As the calf drama unfolded, Morris Uebelacker and I were introducing some of our students to a film study of Cree Indian winter life in the boreal forests of northern Quebec.

The video detailed the lives of three Cree families who shared one family’s hunting territory (territories are “rested” for a year or two so that game stocks are not depleted) over a long winter.  The sixteen members of the three hunter‑gatherer families shared one cabin for the entire time.  They ate a lot of beavers and snowshoes (hares, not the footwear) along with a couple bears, some fish and birds.  Viewers saw ceremonies of respect, skinning and cooking, as well as the organization enabling the three families to thrive in close quarters.

Near the end of the story, as spring finally approached, the men killed four moose cows.  Unborn fetuses were laid out in ceremony and given a last meal from their mothers, who would now sustain the Crees. The story was told in a straightforward way, without the “romance of the hunter‑gatherer way of life” stuff the students expected.  We figured the students might have adverse reactions to seeing creature after creature being reduced to food and cash‑crop hides or furs, but their responses were as straightforward as the story itself.

One vegetarian in the group did express some revulsion over the killing and eating of so many creatures, but an understanding of why.  Other responses fell roughly into three categories.  Several were surprised at the “modern” tools used by the Crees, given the very primitive on‑foot food gathering necessary to survival for the three families.  Probably second was an amazement that three families could live so happily and peacefully for seven or eight months in a one‑room cabin.  Last was surprise that these people, living in such harsh conditions, so close to the edge of food supplies the forest had to provide, were so well‑adjusted in this day and age.  While only one student wanted to go live with the Crees, most felt that there were things we, as humans, could learn and understand about living more in balance with earth and each other.

For our class, the whole experience—the close-up elk calf drama and far away Cree survival—was surprisingly unromantic, but real.

Down through time, winter has been the season of death for all living beings.  For wildlife, for the Cree people and other hunter‑gatherers, winter is the hard season.  Of course, we advanced, modern‑living humans have insulated ourselves from all that.

Or have we?