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Tip o' the Day

It is said -- and I believe it true -- dogs will seldom bark at their image in a mirror. The reason is because their first sensory reliance is on their nose; there's no dog there. Let a dog outside of a morning and watch him make his rounds. He's not staring about, as is his master. Nope, his nose is near the ground. Trot by the lilac bush and he may pause long enough to raise a leg where that isufferable mutt next door peed at midnight, then he's on his way. Why did he stop and sniff so earnestly at that particular spot in the lawn? Obviously the brain is registering something, but what?

Nature works pretty much the same way in the wild world. It's truth one should entertain if one wishes to interact with God's wild creatures.

True, pronghorn antelope and mountain goats depend on eyesight for safety. But deer and elk place more stock in their ears than eyes. And with them, the most positive indicator is the nose. So it is with wild canines: foxes, coyotes, wolves. And so it is with bears.

The point of this is if you're looking for wildlife and wish to sit and watch a meadow, open hillside, or forest glade, you should not expose the site to your scent, either through wind-drift, or by ambling around the place before deciding to sit and watch. I'll give an example:

There's this rolling 100-acre opening -- where Jane and I have spotted grizzly bears in the spring. We love to sneak up on the meadow, take a position at the forest edge, and simply sit and watch. Willow brush and swamp fills half the opening, with a tiny stream slicing the meadow in two. The meadow's edge has a couple of classic bear rub trees, and there's a low forested ridge jutting a little into the meadow. The ridge is a prime place for daybeds for bears.

For a while after discovering the place, it was Jane's and my practice to circle the meadow, looking for recent bear sign (scat, ground squirrel digs, cropped grass and forbs, tracks in the creekside mud). Then, after examining the rub trees for bear hair, we would retreat to the forest edge, set up a spotting scope, and watch.

One time, we did our usual routine, circled the meadow, then crossed it about 150 feet from the edge of the impenetrable brush-filled swamp. An hour later, Jane hissed and pointed. I glanced up from the book I was reading; a grizzly bear grazed from the brush field out into the meadow. The bear's route angled toward us! Jane had the binoculars, my eye was glued to the spotting scope. Closer and closer the bear fed, up to the edge of the tiny creek, perhaps a hundred feet away.

Then the bear stopped as if it butted into a brick wall! She sniffed the ground, then turned for the willows. "She smells where we walked," I whispered. The bear glanced back over her shoulder, then returned to our scent trail for a second opinion. That was when she made a bee-line for the willows.

Testimonial on the way to a five star (*****) amazon.com rating:

"My Best Work is Done at the Office is pure Roland Cheek, that is, a rollicking blend of wit, wisdom, and adventure in the Northern Rocky Mountain country and written down in his newspaper articles for more than two decades. This highly recommended compendium showcasing some of the best of his writing is a "must" for all his fans and will serve to introduce to new generations of readers one of the country's truly masterful, witty, and memorable western storytellers."

Rural Montana Magazine says this of Chocolate Legs, an entire book about a single grizzly bear:

"In the wonderful, descriptive way Cheek aficionados have come to expect, he brings the bears and other wilderness denizens to life in the reader's imagination. The book is not a documentary. Neither is it a novel. Cheek has simply filled in the blanks with plausible storylines. The animals and events he describes arise from knowledge gained during a life in the mountains observing nature in general, but with concentration on elk and bears."

A CASE FOR MODERN CONTENTMENT

Many of us, I suspect, given the choice, would choose to dwell in another age: mountain men, say, or Oregon pioneers, or gold panners in an 1849 California stream. Perhaps we'd prefer to ride with conquistadors, or join the crusades, or captain clipper ships around the horn.

But isn't it likely that an equal number of us would choose today over another era? Only, given our druthers, wouldn't we choose to be something else, someplace else? A professional actress on broadway stage? A missionary to Laplanders in Finland? A treasure hunter diving off Jamaica?

Though sometimes thwarted, all too often frustrated, most of us go on living our lives the best we can. Seldom do we stick out our necks or take a stand. By blending with the crowd we escape commitments to serve on schoolboards or city councils or volunteer fire departments. Why should we teach a Sunday School class, or lead a group of Girl Scouts? Help coach a Little League team? No thanks.

The real question that should be in each of our minds, however, is just where we would fit during any era of our choice -- present, past, or future? No matter the era, daily grinds are still daily grinds. They had to drive in the oxen every morning, hitch them to the wagons, then plod from daylight to dark into the setting sun. Forget Indians, there's firewood to bring in, water to fetch. Cholera stalked the wagon trains of those pioneers, too -- nine-tenths of all deaths along the Oregon Trail came from infectious diseases.

So, how about the life of mountain men, the free trappers? Yeah, I guess they were free all right -- if you like wading in ice cold streams, fearing for their scalps, dwelling always amid dirt and squalor, sometimes going for months on end without talking to another person. As for finding gold? 99-percent of all Forty-Niners took up another notch on their belt and fled broke and beaten for the East. Conquistadors? Crusaders? Cruel, terrible men who died horribly far from hearth and home.

As for present-day? If you wish something else, there's nothing keeping you from trying for the gold ring except fear. You'll never get to the broadway stage by cowering in Columbia Falls, Montana. Or learn to dive while dwelling in the middle of the Sahara Desert. But if you truly do wish to dive, act, or serve as a Lapland missionary, your odds of success will increase dramatically if you pursue a modicum of preparation: learn from others, pursue educational instruction, read as much as possible. Still your odds are slender, but a few slip through the barricades to eventual success. It may be you.

During every age, many have escaped what they perceive as a humdrum existence through the military. Its an option that always exists, always provides opportunity outside ordinary life. "Join the Navy and see the world!" was a catchy recruiting phrase that almost -- but not quite -- brought me before the mast. The military does, of course, offer honorable options to life as we know it growing up. I have many friends who've made it a career and their retirement is at least adequate. But somehow they seem a little detached from society in often meaningless ways: sometimes too used to command or to being commanded to successfully enter the consensus processes of modern community living.

The Church offers comfort to many folks, but sometimes religious life is even more rigid than corporate life, or military life. Can God sometimes be used as a crutch for our unwillingness to accept responsibility for our own actions?

So where do we take comfort in our daily lives? Government? Prosperity? Freedom? We do enjoy more freedom than perhaps any people, ever, anywhere. Our government is more stable, more answerable to its people than most of those around us. We, as Americans, are certainly more prosperous than any previous generation of our forebears. Couple all our advantages -- a stable responsive system to govern us; relatively high prosperity; and freedom of speech, press, assembly, and religion -- what else d+

o we need?

Well, perhaps we need the intelligence to cherish and protect our way of life; the knowledge that a canoe can easily sink if we overload it with debt; the wisdom to be grateful for what we have instead of always wanting more.

Be kind enough to reread the above paragraph, please. Three words should leap out at you: intelligence, knowledge, wisdom. Those are the words that keep us from turning into a mob whipped into a frenzy by unscrupulous leaders, always demanding more . . . and more . . . and more. Wisdom, knowledge, intelligence -- and any similar phrase -- are advances that can only come through education. And isn't education more important, even, than a stable government and a prosperous society? And can we hope to maintain freedom without the kinds of support supplied by an educated populace?

I'm making a case for contentment, I guess. Though I sometimes daydream about turning back to the pages of Western exploration, I know in my heart that my generation has it better than the one before. And I'll bet the next generation will have it even better because they're already better educated, smarter, less naive. Still, is good government, prosperity, relative individual freedom, and education enough?

Not for me it isn't! Along with all the above, I need a milieu that offers succor and sanctuary away from those pressures of modern living. It has been my great good fortune to find that milieu in quiet trails, in wilderness, along the banks of a remote stream, atop a mountain peak. I'm sure others can find satisfactory sanctuary in a city park, on a golf course, or while leisurely driving backroads. But for me, a nation without Wildernesses, Wild Rivers, National Parks, Wildlife Refuges, and National Seashores would make good governance, prosperity, and so-called freedom oxymoronic.

Fortunately we have all the above, and more. We believe in retaining sufficient vestiges of our national splendors to provide recovery places for those suffering from the neural tensions of a hectic world. Those places are available to all our people, whether soldier or statesman, professor or student, stockbroker or housewife, laborer or (even) journalist. In the final analysis, that's why I'm content, after lo these many decades, to remain happy where I am, who I am, why I am.

Roland Cheek wrote a syndicated outdoors column (Wild Trails and Tall Tales) for 21 years. The column was carried in 17 daily and weekly newspapers in two states. In addition, he scripted and broadcast a daily radio show (Trails to Outdoor Adventure) that aired on 75 stations from the Atlantic seaboard to the Pacific Ocean. He's also written upwards of 200 magazine articles and 12 fiction and nonfiction books. For more on Roland, visit:

www.rolandcheek.com

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