That Rattling at the Gates of Yellowstone?
It's grizzlies and sheep and ranchers and coyotes and tourists and bureaucrats and wolves — especially wolves. And the achingly frustrated desire to reconcile all the many beasts.

By Jo Ann Beard

She climbs out of a hole in the ground and sits down. The sun has risen to its pinnacle, and still nobody in sight. He's been out all night again. She trots around in a circle and then sits with her nose in the air, listening. Nothing. The horizon is empty except for two pronghorn, picking their way through a clump of rocks. She stretches out on the knoll above the den and watches them, ears laid back.

Sunlight, green hills, brown washes, a line of mountains. Vivid sky. The sullen pronghorn with their designer stripes and complicated antlers. Same old same old.

Here come the kids, out of the den and up the hill, black noses and pin teeth. She stands and walks a few feet away; they follow, one on top of the other, and try nosing at her stomach. She growls and walks in a circle while they chew on her legs.

Suddenly a black spot appears on the farthest hillside. Two more spots follow. She sits down and lets the pups have their way with her. One takes hold of her cottony ruff and hangs from it; another gnaws on her elbow. She watches the spots turn into dogs and the dogs turn into coyotes and the coyotes turn into wolves. Finally.

The fur around his face is silver stained with red. He trots to her quickly, touches noses, and then turns and regurgitates on the ground in front of his children.

Dinnertime.

Kevin Honness is driving and I'm riding shotgun, trying not to look over my shoulder. In the bed of the pickup is a road-killed mule deer. Its rump and back legs are smashed flat, and its head is turned toward us in an unnatural, heartbreaking manner. Every few minutes the overpowering scent of decomposing flesh wafts through the cab. Honness doesn't seem to notice.

"That's what they eat," he says shortly.

We're on a feeding run, making our way to the center of Yellowstone National Park, where a large enclosure is hidden in the woods. There are hungry wolves waiting for us, a splinter group from one of the seven packs brought here from Canada in 1995 and '96. They were exposed to poor role modeling by an alpha female who was shot for killing sheep, so even though these particular wolves weren't harming livestock, they'll be reacclimated and then rereleased in the park. With any luck, they'll stay out of trouble and escape the fate of their dead mentor.

"Two strikes and she was out," Honness tells me.

Honness is a biologist for the National Park Service, which along with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is overseeing the reintroduction of wolves to Yellowstone. Like many of the scientists and interns involved in the project, he seems to be part of some beautiful master race — big, blond, and healthy. We discuss for a while how lawbreaking wolves are swiftly sentenced and punished, while lawbreaking humans — private citizens who have shot protected wolves — often manage to evade even the mildest punishment. Lawyers get involved, appeals are filed. Some shooters slip through the system altogether and are never caught. The long arm of the law is effectively amputated when it comes to this issue.

Indeed, the reintroduction of the 31 gray wolves from whom this pack descended enraged the citizens around here whose fathers and grandfathers worked so diligently to wipe the species out. They thought the point was to tame the West, not make it more wild. Appeals of the court verdict to reintroduce wolves to Yellowstone were immediately filed, and last winter a U.S. District Court judge responded by reversing the decision. Another round of appeals is expected to take months, and if the current ruling stands, the wolves will have to be removed. And since there's nowhere for them to go — at this point there are more than 100 in the park — removal can only mean what it has meant in the past: They will be tracked down and shot.

The enclosure holding the wolves is 10 feet high, chain-link, with another two feet of canted overhang. Bears and other animals are drawn to the scent of fresh meat, and so an electric fence has been placed around the perimeter. The pen is large and round, surrounded by trees, with several big wooden boxes for shelter. We're dragging the carcass in on a child's plastic sled, and it dawns on me that I'm going into an enclosure with several large hungry carnivores.

The ground around the pen is littered with gnawed bones. The biologists have been leaving out morsels for a young male who escaped but is staying nearby.

"Escaped?" I ask.

"Climbed the chain-link," Honness says, grinning proudly. First the wolf dug his way out — no easy task, since the fence is sunk deep in the ground — and then went back in to make the hole bigger so everyone else could come out and play. They were caught and penned again, the hole secured. Boredom set in quickly, and the wolf went over the top. Now he's a ghost in these woods, eating free food and putting his nose through the fence from time to time, just to say howdy.

Two of the adults have darted into their boxes and are cowering; a female with pups is also out of view in another box. Two large males are running, great frantic strides, back and forth along the fence line at the rear of the enclosure. That's their comfort zone, as far from the gate, and us, as they can possibly get. From the moment we approach the pen until the moment it disappears behind us, the wolves never stop running.

"Stress behavior," Honness tells me. Evolution and experience have taught them that any encounter with a human is a bad one and that running is the only way to avoid death. So they run, out of blind instinct, even though there's nowhere to go.

We drag the deer to the center of the pen, and Honness leaves to fill the water buckets. When the gate shuts behind him, the two wolves begin loping in a wide circle on the worn groove next to the fence. Around and around and around, energetic and terrified. If I move from my spot next to the deer, they dissolve and then reappear again, going the other direction. Their fear is so enormous and so palpable that compassion doesn't allow lingering. Honness drags the buckets inside, and we excuse ourselves.

Only when we're back in the front seat of the pickup can I begin to realize how magnificent the wolves were. Tall and long-legged, huge paws pounding the dirt, silver-gray fur threaded with black. Agile, springing over the rocks and vegetation in their pen without breaking stride. The strangely golden, terrified eyes.

In the not too distant past, one of the most entertaining ways to kill a wolf was to hamstring it and then throw it to a pack of dogs to be torn apart. Also popular was pouring gasoline into a den with a mother and pups and tossing in a lighted match. Even now, in Canada, people chase them with snowmobiles until their hearts burst.

One of the reasons wolves can be held in pens for significant periods of time is that, unlike other mammals, they do not get accustomed to humans. Despite the fact that they've been transported here twice in their short lives, and despite the fact that humans bring them meat every few days, these wolves know we are not to be trusted. They retain their fear and loathing; they continue running, running, running.

This is a measure of their great intelligence.

The radio is nothing but static. In this landscape, you'd think the radio waves would be as unconfined as the wandering herds of cattle, but that's not the case. There doesn't appear to be a speed limit either; those who have homes on the range like their freedom, and apparently the government doesn't want to press the point. A song breaks through the static for a stanza or two, something twangy and despondent about how you can trust your horse better than you can trust your gal. Certain things are the same whether you're in New York or here in Montana.

I'm driving through an immense valley, mountains hunched at either side. The sky is big and startling, the kind of glorious blue that inspires feelings of unworthiness and inertia. Through this landscape run fleet herds of elk and mule deer, solitary lumbering bears, gangly mossy-antlered moose, and the occasional shy mountain lion. Along the edges, packs of coyotes stay mostly invisible, taking their dinner where they find it and trying to stay out of the crosshairs. Seventy-six thousand of them are killed each year by the government, acting at the behest of ranchers, who themselves, along with hunters, take out another 350,000. During the day the coyotes are understandably skittish, blending in with their surroundings, eating mice along the banks of streams, and chasing down whatever is small and confused. But under cover of night whole packs vent their woes in hysterical cacophonous barking. Their fiercest predator is forced to listen from his living room.

If you're a certain kind of hunter, shooting coyotes is good fun. First they jump, and then they fall over limp. Sometimes they yelp. If you have nothing else to do and know where to look, you can have a fairly busy afternoon. Say you get lucky and spot a big one, like hunter Darwin Emmett did last spring; it's twice the size of most coyotes, and it's white. It's also wearing a collar, which you don't see much out here. Almost might say it was a wolf, except you're on a coyote hunt.

You notice they all jump the same, though, white or gray. And then fall over limp like that.

Dead, she's just a carcass wearing a radio collar, but alive she was a special case, an older female easy to identify because of her white fur. She was the grandmotherly type who took responsibility for the pups when the parents needed some time to themselves. She liked to sit on a distant hill and howl to herself, and she had a lone-wolf tendency to pack her bags and disappear, returning a few days later.

To the people who track the wolves by their radio collars, hearing the mortality signal is like getting a phone call from the morgue in the middle of the night. Since reintroduction began in 1995, 24 wolves have been shot; 10 legally by the U.S. Department of Agriculture Wildlife Services for livestock predation, and seven by humans who like dead wolves better than live ones. Two of those shooters, including Emmett, have been charged with violating the Endangered Species Act; five are still at large.

You hide your grin, turn yourself in to the authorities, and accept your fine. Which would've been worth it, except you didn't get to keep the hide. Well, you learned your lesson this time. There's a name for it out here.

Shoot, shovel, and shut up.

The border collie runs a few feet in a burst of speed and then halts and crouches, eyes on the herd. Runs again, crouches again. The sheep have seen this act a number of times and aren't particularly impressed with it, but I sure am. My love for animals, especially dogs, is as big and sentimental as the sky, but I'm keeping it under wraps for now.

"Nice dog," I say.

"He's wonderful," my companion replies. She takes off her reflective shades for a moment. Her eyes are pale and thoughtful; she has the casual self-assurance of a woman who has both very blond hair and very impressive biceps.

Becky Weed is a Montana sheep rancher living near the northern edge of Yellowstone. In addition to the border collie, she keeps a llama, which serves as a sort of guard dog for her sheep. Llamas are territorial creatures, and a male will consider a flock of sheep to be his harem.

She gestures toward the llama, standing near a cluster of ewes, gazing into the distance with large, Disney eyes. He's working on a big mouthful of grass. "He'll hold off coyotes just by lifting a front hoof in a threatening manner," she says. "No problem." In the four years since the llama took over, there hasn't been a single case of coyote or wolf predation on Weed's sheep.

"Of course, he wasn't much good against the bear that came down out of those hills." She points; I squint. "He ate four of my sheep."

Grizzly bear?

"Black bear. They like a bit of mutton when they can get it."

Off in a far corner of the pasture is a gray mound that could be either a rock or a dead lamb. We're strolling out to see which it is. As we near a group of sheep, they reluctantly trot out of our way, the lambs galloping past on spindly legs. The llama repositions himself so he can keep an eye on us.

"Uh-oh," Weed says under her breath. Up close the gray mound is definitely not a rock; it looks like a stuffed animal left out in the rain too long. A dead lamb on its side, eyes open, throat intact.

Weed crouches down and turns it over, inspects it carefully, and then notes that it isn't the one she thought it would be. She doesn't know what happened, but she also isn't surprised.

Weather, disease, and birthing problems account for most of the losses around here. Predators really aren't the problem. But many ranchers in the Greater Yellowstone region don't see it that way, particularly when it comes to wolves. They inherit the philosophy of their forefathers: Wolves are a threat to livestock, not to mention to the elk, deer, and antelope that ranchers and other hunters like to shoot. For decades this philosophy was federal policy, and government agents, along with ranchers and various potshot good old boys, systematically slaughtered every native wolf they could find. Until, by 1930, there were none.

Weed sighs, takes the lamb by a hind leg, and drags it behind her as we walk back toward the barn. Her husband, Dave Tyler, opens the gate for us, and we pass through. He's been elbow-deep in a tractor engine. Becky nods toward her cargo.

"Dead lamb," she tells him.

He gives her a sympathetic look but doesn't even glance at the lamb. These people save their empathy for the living. Tyler, an engineer by training and a former academic, works in town during the day and helps Weed run the ranch in the evenings and on weekends.

"He supports me in this," she says, moving her arm in a gesture that encompasses the sheep, the various outbuildings, the broken tractor, the surrounding countryside, the endless Montana sky. "It's a bitter pill for me to swallow," she adds drily. "But you need a job to support a job nowadays, if you're a rancher."

In fact, Weed blames the ranchers' collective rage against the wolves on the economic conditions they're all facing. "Ranchers are frustrated as all get-out," she says. "Some of them are reacting to it by looking for something tangible to wrap their arms — or their gun sights — around."

But not all of them. Weed is a member of the Grower's Wool Cooperative, an organization of sheep ranchers who believe in treading as lightly as possible on the ecosystem. Members use nonlethal means of controlling predators and market their goods under a predator-friendly label.

Tyler has gone back to his engine; Weed has a feeding bottle in her hand and is trying to coax a runty lamb to come forward and drink from it. The border collie has found a spot under the tailgate of a parked truck and is watching the proceedings in a friendly manner. The ranch looks pristine and romantic in the late-afternoon light — fading clapboard house, red barn, emerald fields, ruminating sheep, the dreamy-eyed llama standing silent and expressionless, like a Secret Service agent.

"It's funny, isn't it?" I say. "All these he-man ranchers afraid of the wolves."

Weed steps back from the lamb and pushes her sunglasses up. Those blue eyes again, the same color as what's above us.

"Hey," she tells me, grinning. "The West wasn't won by people who emulated their grandmothers."

The rendezvous point is in a remote corner of the park, under a big mercury-vapor lamp that makes a high-pitched, insanity-producing buzz. I turn the heat on full-blast and watch as the valley gradually comes into focus, light seeping in from the eastern edges.

A green car pulls alongside me and someone calls out my name in a soft, southern drawl. Deb Lineweaver and Jason Wilson, my guides. For most of the year they're out here nearly every morning with tracking equipment, sometimes officially and sometimes just because this is where their friends are — the Druid wolf pack. Lineweaver and I talk quietly as the landscape turns gray-green and then gold-green. Wilson peers through binoculars across the floor of the valley, pivoting slowly, making a wide visual sweep.

"Red-tailed hawk," he says, to himself.

This whole valley and the hills beyond serve as territory for the Druid pack, named for the peak off in the distance. Wilson and Lineweaver and a squad of other Yellowstone biologists spend their days monitoring the wolves and their activities, watching from a respectful distance as they establish their families in this new, vast, and — for now — relatively safe territory. As it grows lighter, our viewing spot is filling up. Cars crunch over the ground and doors open and close with soft thunks; scopes are set up, binoculars are peered through. Low exchanges of information and the occasional cough. There are some wolf project staffers, a filmmaker, a man who has compiled a definitive text on the persecution of the wolves, and two campers who have found their way here and are accepted because of their knowledge and general air of awe and respect. Everyone is wearing warm, fashionable clothing; I'm wearing the entire contents of my suitcase and a hat that makes my head look like a big purple thumb. Lineweaver introduces me to everyone; they look warily at my hat.

The campers suddenly spot a grizzly bear and two cubs in a stand of trees a quarter of a mile away. Someone else spots a black bear in the same grove, meandering in a lazy zigzag toward the grizzly and her cubs. We settle in to watch the coming confrontation.

The mother grizzly is like a big brown plush sofa that the kids are climbing on. She bats off a cub, and he rolls over and sits for a moment on his haunches and then, in one fluid movement, reclines onto his back like he's made of water.

The black bear is minding his own business, nosing along the ground, sorting through the wildflowers to find clover, walking into the trees, walking back out again. He's like a daydreaming kid, an hour late for school, dragging a stick along a fence.

He's going to get into trouble very soon. The principal smells him.

The grizzly cranes her head toward the narrow band of trees that separates her from the black bear and rises up on hind legs to get a better view. The cubs are frozen in place, but clearly interested. She's at her full height, imperious and filled with murderous indignation. A quarter-mile away, I can feel myself edging backward toward the car.

The black bear makes a sudden right-hand turn and heads up the hill at a gallop, out of her range. There's clover all over the place; no need to eat hers. The grizzly stands motionless until he's gone and then lowers herself, gathers the children, and bustles them off in the opposite direction.

Well, that was fun. The cheerfulness of the situation has everyone in a good mood. Binoculars are again sweeping the landscape, and within five minutes Wilson sees wolves.

Two black dots: Number 42, an older female, and Number 104, a young male. I'm watching the dots as they move, and then I'm looking through the scope.

There they are.

The female is standing against a pile of rocks, nose in the air, silently howling. Her ears are flattened against her head. The male is a big puppy, and he's found himself a piece of hide that he's carrying like a beloved scrap of blanket.

I am excited to the point of embarrassment; I'm living up to my hat. Lineweaver understands what it is to see them for the first time in the wild, in all their distant, three-dimensional glory. She is visibly moved, even though she does this nearly every day.

The female moves out of range, behind the rocks, and is gone. The yearling stretches out on the ground with his back to us and begins to gnaw at his piece of hide. A raven flies in and stands next to him, eyeballing the desiccated prize.

He chews, he gets up, he carries his hide six feet away, he stretches out again. Chews. Gets up, squats, pees, carries his hide 20 feet away, stretches out. Chews. The raven walks slowly after him, monitoring.

An hour passes.

Finally the wolf stands and takes off at a slow trot across the valley, toward us. He crosses a stream and bolts up the other side, spraying water as he goes. A collective breath is held as he crosses the road 50 yards to the west, and then he's a black shape against the hillside behind us, moving toward the den and his equivalent of morning coffee.

The movie is over. The lights go up, and we stare at one another, blinking.

The guy behind the desk at my motel is about 18 and also works as a hunting guide. He's willing to offer an opinion on the wolves.

"They kill all the elk," he tells me. He then says that the wolves were coming down from Canada on their own anyway, so why the reintroduction?

Has he ever seen one that came down from Canada?

"Oh," he says knowingly. "They're out there, believe me."

Ever seen one of the Yellowstone wolves?

He has, a group of them, standing in the snow as he and some hunters passed by. The wolves just stood there watching the men with their guns. Didn't move a muscle, but watched, you know?

Think any of those guys wanted to shoot one of them?

He looks away. "Not me," he says. "But some guys do."

Shoot them, or want to shoot them?

He looks away again. "Both," he says.

Off in the distance is an outcrop, a balding dome of land in the center of a broad valley. Between us and the knob is a long stand of evergreens. We have to walk past the trees on our way to the viewing post. Backpackers and day hikers stay clear of this area because it's a playground for the sometimes clover-picking and sometimes highly cantankerous grizzly bear. So I'm getting a talking-to before we begin.

"If we see a bear, do nothing," Wilson says.

"Nothing," Lineweaver reiterates. "We will deal with it. You do nothing."

Twenty paces into the hike, Wilson stops abruptly.

"Do not run, no matter what," he says.

"Sometimes they'll charge," Lineweaver says. "Just to test you. If you run, you fail the test."

OK. No running.

We walk. The trees are approaching.

Suddenly I remember: There's a granola bar in my backpack!

"You're fine," Lineweaver says calmly. "If we announce ourselves, the bears will gladly get out of our way."

I immediately start singing, Beatles songs. Wilson and Lineweaver politely join in for a few bars.

We pass through the trees and climb the outcrop. Up here the valley is as vast as the sky. Tiny herds of elk, bison, and pronghorn are visible all over the range. This is what they mean by immense. It's too panoramic for me; all the vanishing points are off the paper. I have to narrow my gaze before vertigo sets in. Lineweaver points out the distant grass knoll that hides the den of the Leopold pack, named by Yellowstone biologists for the naturalist Aldo Leopold. I focus in with my scope while she slowly adjusts a radio antenna and writes down coordinates in a notebook.

The radio tracking indicates that the female is in the den and the rest of the pack is out of range. Lineweaver says they should be returning from the hunt any time now.

Nothing. Every half-hour Lineweaver or Wilson zeros in on the denned female's frequency and we listen to her beeping, like a faint, sturdy heartbeat. The rest of the time we stare into our scopes, doing slow sweeps, and talk about the critters they've seen from this spot: A pronghorn that gave birth to a stillborn fawn during a thunderstorm, so bereft that she stood over the body for days until it turned into a dry mound of parchment hide and twig-size bones. The other female pronghorn stood near her, offering their version of support — grazing, mainly — the way women do in times of crisis and loss.

An elk cow that placed her newborn calf in a safe spot and then wandered farther and farther afield, chewing grass, until she couldn't find it again. "The herd was ready to move on and she was frantic," Lineweaver says. We've got our glasses trained on the knoll, even though by now it's doubtful that anything will happen, wolfwise. It's too close to midday, and they're all napping — the homebodies in the den, the hunters on a hillside somewhere out of range.

"So the mother was tearing around and not finding the calf," Lineweaver continues. "We knew right where it was, curled in the weeds. Eventually she decided to follow the herd." Oh, dear. An abandoned baby wouldn't last long around these parts. But then neither would its mother, without the protection of the herd.

"That one was hard for Deb to take," Wilson says.

But there are other stories, too. Of the wolf greeting ritual, a finely choreographed dance of submission, domination, celebration, filial love, and general canine goofiness. Of the quartets of howlers, standing side by side, noses in the air, berating the moon. Or of a young female, desperate to play, that carried a stick to a nervous bison cow, dropped it, went down on her elbows, hindquarters in the air, and begged for a game.

The bison cow, as you can imagine, wasn't up for it.

Ben Cunningham's property is just outside the park's northern entrance. He has a wife, three children, and various cows and horses. Their place sits right on the migration route for the Yellowstone herds.

"I love to look out my window and see a big herd of elk," he tells me. His family owned a 6,000-acre spread until just recently, and he and his wife are hunting outfitters as well. You know what that means.

"The elk and other game is where our bread gets buttered," he says and then pauses. "I want to be the predator, and I don't need any competition."

Well, that's honest.

Cunningham has an open, friendly face, wire-rim spectacles, and a handsome mustache. He's good with mules and works for the Park Service from time to time, hauling loads. He actually drove the team that delivered the first wolves to Yellowstone in 1995.

"I'd be lying if I said I wasn't moved by that," he says. "It was a great thing." The mules weren't too keen on it, though, traipsing through deep snow with the scent of wolf at their heels.

Cunningham is worried about the ultimate effect reintroduction will have on his community outside Yellowstone's boundaries. All may be well right now, but he doesn't believe it will end well. He fears that the wolves are multiplying too quickly and that they'll have to be eradicated again because of it. He doesn't believe the wildlife can support them.

"They're hunting machines, and they travel over great distances," he says. "A pack of 15 or more is a lot of mouths to feed." The herds of elk migrate out of the park, and so will the wolves, following their food source. Not only will they kill the game before the hunters get to it, but they'll be outside park boundaries and on livestock range.

And don't try to console him with the compensation program set up for ranchers who lose stock to wolf predation.

"Try putting a price on a 4-H sheep or calf that your kid raised," he says. "Or a border collie." I don't like the sound of that. A border collie?

"One of last winter's wolf kills was a dog, and it went uncompensated. It wasn't classified as livestock. Plus, it was a child's pet, and how do you compensate that?"

Last year there were wolves on Cunningham's property, just traveling through. He watched them cross his land. "I can't say as they were doing any harm," he admits. "It was a pair, not a whole pack."

A pair of wolves walking along a river bottom is a beautiful sight. That sort of thing is one of the reasons he loves this place. And it's great to drive through Yellowstone Park and see a buffalo or a grizzly in a meadow. But the park is small, and the surrounding valleys are filling up.

"We need to grow up and realize that this all needs to be managed very carefully," he says. "But it can't be natural, because we're not natural anymore. This area, Paradise Valley, is full of 20-acre parcels now. For a wolf to travel through here without having someone's dog yapping at it is impossible."

But in terms of managing the wolves, aren't the biologists trying to do just that? Haven't the few marauders been dispatched with a stern brow and real bullets? And isn't the whole point of the reintroduction program to establish the wolves as an integral part of a healthy, self-sustaining ecosystem?

Cunningham smiles agreeably. "Of course, what's a problem to me isn't necessarily a problem to a wolf biologist."

And what's a problem to me is the border collie, eaten like a bonbon.

We all have our blind spots.

It's my last chance for viewing, dawn shift. The spotters are in their usual places, treading quietly and speaking softly. There's a kill about a mile out, an elk, just this side of a line of trees. Two males and a female were seen a few moments ago, heading back to the den with distended stomachs. Another male is making his way across the valley right now at a genial trot, with what looks like a cigar in his mouth.

"He's bringing a bone for the pups to chew on," Deb Lineweaver says. She's working the radio equipment, making notes. There's one more wolf in the vicinity, a silver female that was standing against some rocks beyond the kill. No one's seen her for a while, but radio tracking says she's still over there. I train my binoculars on the outcropping, but it's just rock and sky.

I'm going to miss my plane if something doesn't happen soon. She's there — we can hear her, beeping steadily — and yet she's not there. Jason Wilson is checking his watch, worried that I'll wait too long.

"You'll see them again," Lineweaver says quietly. "They'll be here when you come back." This may or may not be true, and we both know it. I stand silent, binoculars still in place.

Sky and rock. A hawk circling. A sweep of the ground and there's the carcass, rib bones rising out of the matted grass.

Of course she's there. On the lee side of the rock with her face to the warm sun. The valley is filling with light, and she's tempted for a moment to curl up here on the hillside, nose tucked to tail, the way she likes to sleep after a good meal.

It's lonely, though, and she doesn't care for that. Back at the den are the pups and another younger beta female who likes to sleep near her whenever she can.

Yawn. She doesn't even see the elk moving below her. What she sees is the expanse of her habitat, the plains unfolding and the shoulders of the peak hunched in the clouds. Her nose tells her rain is coming. That decides it.

She moves from behind the shelter of the rock and comes into focus.

Jo Ann Beard is the author of The Boys of My Youth, a collection of essays.

Photograph by Sue Bennett