Velvet Season

to see and be seen, along the yellowstone river

In August, Luca and I visited Yellowstone. We stayed in a pale yellow hotel overlooking Yellowstone Lake. It was a gummy, creamy shade of yellow, the type that I think would look good on a schoolgirl’s tin lunchbox. At the back entrance, overlooking the lake, the hotel had white columns with little scroll-like spirals at their tops that gave the impression of regality. But aside from the columns, there was nothing particularly regal about the hotel. It looked much like an East Coast beach club where mothers would go with their grown-up sons to eat lobster rolls. There was a white trim along the roofline and around the windows, a low brown roof, and a sunroom that jutted out into a hexagonal shape in the back. Also in the back was a porch with a line of rocking chairs where, in the evenings, Luca and I sat and looked out onto the lake. On our first evening, we sat and ate slices of salami and prosciutto that we had bought in Montana hours earlier, after our flight had landed, and had left to get warm in the backseat of our rental car on the drive over. Often, when the sun went down and the air cooled, the lake attracted mosquitoes and swarms of midges that flew in dense clouds around the porch. Many of them flew into Luca, who tends to attract flying bugs, and he waved his hands above his head so as to shoo them away.

In the mornings while we were in Yellowstone, Luca woke me up early, around 4am, to drive our rental car to Lamar Valley, where the animals would be waking up for breakfast. The animals, we had read, were most active in the early mornings and at sundown. In the hours between, it was too hot for them to search for their next meal and so they preferred instead to rest. It was chilly in the mornings, cold in a way that felt fresh, like we were vegetables run under sink water. For much of the drive, the sky was dark, thin slices of light gradually sliding onto the road. Above the road was a cloud of morning fog, floating over the asphalt like a convening family of ghosts. It seemed to me that if we drove fast enough through the fog, the cloud would puff violently outward, plumes of grey knocking into each other, ghosts merging together, leaving a temporary blank space where the car had once zipped through, before eventually, after the car was long gone, rearranging themselves to close the gap. But when the car did drive through, I saw no violent puffing outward. Nothing, it seemed, changed from our having been there. The blank space, if there ever was any at all, must have been so temporary, so quickly filled by the ghosts, that it was invisible to us.

On one such morning, we were driving on Grand Loop Road along the Yellowstone River from our hotel to Lamar Valley, when we encountered an elk. The encounter lasted for less than a minute. There was a bustle of movement to our left. The elk was hustling down the embankment off the side of the road, toward the river just beneath it. He was a young male with pronged antlers, soft, covered in a velvet that we later learned was moving blood to his growing antler bone. Later in the summer or in the early fall, once the antlers became full-grown, the blood flow would stop and the elk would shed his velvet covering, rubbing himself against trees and brush so as to rid himself of his dead tissue. Sometimes, if an elk is unsuccessful in ridding himself of all his velvet, he leaves pieces of it to hang limply from his antlers, which, at that point, are stained red with residual blood, and he looks as if he just rammed headfirst into another animal and it bled open all over him. I wondered if, later in the summer, people would see scraps of velvet laying around the park, empty molds of what used to be antler covers, dried networks of capillaries that once carried blood, like a snake’s skin shriveled up after the snake molts away.

When we saw him, the elk’s face was stiff with muscles, like if you touched it, it would be hard. His legs were thin but strong, his body lean with fur stuck tight to his muscles. For a moment, we looked at each other. His eyes were the size of ping pong balls, so uniformly dark that they looked like black liquid, like a bottomless pool of tar. His ears were large and perked up beside his antlers. Each ear was about half the length of his face, lined with tufts of beige fur on the insides. Large and upright, his ears gave the impression of youth and the earnestness that often comes with youth. We knew, then, that he had seen us and he must have known that we had seen him. The look lasted only for an instant and then he was off, further down the embankment to the river, likely to have a drink of water, cold before the sun came out. Luca and I, both stunned, talked for a short while about parking the car and walking down to the river after him. We decided that probably we should not bother him, that he was likely long gone and he would not like for us to follow him, although we wanted to.

To see a wild animal in his wild habitat feels like a discovery, like solving a game of ‘I Spy,’ picking out the bushel of fur and tracking it from many meters away as it shuffles along, through bushes and flowers, before finally emerging into open grass, where whiskers and a head and a long orange tail become visible for just a moment before he slinks behind the next crowd of bushes. To see and be seen by a wild animal feels much different, sort of like seeing a human, one that you do not know but wish to know. The look is not inviting, nor is it scary, nor scared. It reminds me of the look of an old woman I once met a long time ago, an Orthodox nun in a monastery on a Greek island, silent behind a black robe, standing just beyond the monastery’s entrance, holding out a woven basket of bread. Her hands were worn, crinkled up into her knuckles, like if I touched them, they would feel like my grandmother’s. I wanted for her to take me to an empty pew in an empty church and tell me, for many hours until the sun went down and then rose again, about why she had become a nun. Hers was a life I did not know, but that people I knew said was good, honorable and simple. The family behind me reached into the basket of bread, their young children brushing up against my leg, as if to nudge me along, and the nun said nothing to neither me nor them.