Word: elk
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...hell out of us. But they no longer roam in Yellowstone National Park, except as rare transients, prowling south from Canada. The last resident wolves in the big park were exterminated by Government hunters by the late 1920s. That was a time when animals were thought to be good (elk and bison, for instance) or bad. Wolves had been pursued in the West as if they were not merely bad, but evil. Cattlemen lost entire herds to harsh winters, then spent enormous, irrationally large sums of money taking vengeance on wolves. Barry Lopez, in his haunting book Of Wolves...
...notion; the idea is like reintroducing smallpox. But to wolf partisans, the bedrock argument is a brooding, circular truth: without wolves, there are no wolves. These complex, mysterious animals are their own justification. Beyond that, biologists see predators as balance wheels in ecosystems. No wolves mean too many elk, which is what Yellowstone has now, starving by the thousands in winter die-offs...
Riders love the journey for what they can dream as well as for what they can see: the elk, which roam the Rockies ("Is that a reindeer?"); the prairie towns, which resemble those in a grainy old movie; the vanilla flatlands; the rolling farms. "More than anything else I can imagine, it makes you appreciate the size and grandeur of the country," says Geraldine Stevenson, 71, a retired schoolteacher from Saskatchewan who has ridden the Canadian many times. "It seems we're always being nibbled at here and there. We're losing our identity, and trains are a part...
...Atlanta-based businessman denies any such intentions. He told a Bozeman town meeting last week that he would sell rights to hunt elk on his property and plans to replace the ranch's 3,000 head of cattle with buffalo, which produce low-cholesterol meat. But Turner refuses to allow campers to cross his land. Says he: "I bought the place because I wanted to get away from people. We live in an increasingly overcrowded world, and I'm becoming a hermit...
Though the fiery summer of 1988 scared away tourists, it had relatively little impact on Yellowstone's animals, compared with the normal rigors of winter. The fires killed only 335 of the 31,000-member elk herd. But a harsh winter eliminated almost 5,000 more, and their carcasses lie in various states of decomposition throughout the park...