Fauna

The only creature I run into regularly while camping is one or another kind of mosquito. The weather had been dryish in Jasper NP, so there weren’t that many there. Things had been even drier at Theodore Roosevelt NP, and we encountered only a very few hardy mosquitoes who managed to survive wrigglerhood in the risk-of-wildfire badlands this summer.

The plains near Regina, Saskatchewan, were another story. On the evening of July 3, we found a private campground a few miles east of Regina for a reasonable C$14. The place was sparse with people, probably since the Canada Day long weekend was winding down, but well populated with blood-drinking vermin. Their main diet likely came from the livestock on the surrounding ranches, but they weren’t above snacking on human beings. Once a cloud of them followed me, so I had to zig-zag back to our camp to lose them. Others buzzed intensely around the tent door until I sprayed it with Off.

Prairie-dog town hardly describes the colonies we saw next to the single road in the South Unit of TR NP. A couple of prairie-dog cities is more like it, with suburban prairie-dog sprawl thrown in. The more you looked, the more of them you saw, and the more holes in the ground you saw. I understand that some prairie dogs act as guards for the colonies, and I believe it too. One little fellow eyed us pretty closely the entire time we were admiring his hometown.

Elsewhere in TR NP we came across the small group of wild horses which, contrary to popular image of creatures spirited and running free as the wind, looked pretty much like any saddle- and bridle-less horses eating grass. The difference, I guess, would be in what they do when people come near. We didn’t get near enough to test this, but I suspect that they would behave like most wild animals and get the hell away from people.

On the morning of July 13, we took in a ranger presentation about buffalo, near our campsite (at the amphitheater, as park literature called it—a collection of benches facing a table). Fairly interesting, especially right at the end, when a bull bison wandered by, as if on cue. He showed no interest in us.

We saw buffalo elsewhere in the park from time to time, mostly lounging around on hillsides. That’s the life. No Indian nor white hunters to worry about, though the ranger did say that every few years the Park Service culls the herds of its older and more infirm members, taking the part of buffalo predators that no longer roam the park. So it’s the life of Logan, sort of.

And I don’t care what zoologists and park rangers say. I plan to use American bison and buffalo interchangeably. Those creatures are buffalo, and they can share the name with bovines in Asia and Africa without confusion. The U.S. minted buffalo, not bison, nickels from 1913 to 1938, and it’s buffalo soldiers, buffalo wings, and Buffalo, NY.

Back in Jasper NP, we saw a lot of elk. We stayed in a campground called Wapiti, which I’ve read means “elk” in Shawnee, and that was a fitting name, because they wandered through every day we were there, sometimes picturesquely (to us) next to the fast-flowing Whistlers Creek.

In Kootenay NP on July 6, we stopped for a walk to the Paint Pots, where iron-rich springs bubble up through small pools, coloring the surrounding ground a Georgia orange, or, as the guide signs call it, ochre. Apparently both Indians and white men used the pigmentation in pre-park days, with some of the latter’s mining tools still littering the site. At the end of the trail, a couple of near-circular pools were a remarkably gaudy green, because of certain other minerals within (I forget what).

On the return, Yuriko and Lilly went ahead of Ann and I, because Ann’s easily distracted, and because Lilly wanted to go back to a riverside and throw rocks. En route, Ann and I sat on a bench facing a stretch of pools and ochre ground. Behind us were some woods.

Ann was standing on the bench looking back into the woods when she said, “Bear. Bear. Look!”

I looked, and about 100 feet away was a black bear, standing up and looking at us. About a second later, he turned away and disappeared.