Sometimes we're privy to extraordinary encounters in the world around us--things that have nothing to do with our presence, that go on, and have gone on for eons, without the slightest contribution from our own egotistical species. These windows on alien societies are probably all around us, and yet we pay so little attention, the chance to witness them can seem rare. I'll leave the debate over whether we should even be in some of these places to the masterful hand of David Quammen (National Geographic, January 2009), and just share what I saw on a day in late August in the mountains of northern New Mexico.
As the mountains began to envelope the bowl in shadow, the stage was set for a battle between the boys in the valley.
Before I reached the lip of the Caldera, the squeaking honks reverberated through the aspens and conifers. I wound my way down the switchbacks to find the golden grass basking in the last rays of evening sun. The trail opened at the edge of the Valles Caldera, and I surveyed the basin with my binoculars to find two bands of elk grazing. A bull stood watch over the herd closest to me.
Cresting one of the undulations of the mountainside I’d just descended, there lay my gift—another bull, this one perturbed and ornery, all by himself. He paced back and forth, tossed his head, and slid on his shoulders through the wet grass. I walked for another few minutes, losing him behind a copse of trees, then finding him again. Finally, he trundled out from behind the blind, tossing his chin in the air and bugling.
His coat was slick, and I didn’t see the white butt that usually makes the elk so easy to see from far away. I’d soon learn why.
Among the harem closest to this bachelor, the first bull I’d seen trumpeted back. The rutter charged around, confused, it seemed, but found his prop. Elbow deep in a muddy stream carving its way through the caldera, he stomped and pitched a noisy, honking fit. The tines of his antlers soon dripped with mud he flung in all directions.
The bull with the harem raised his head from his vittles periodically to respond with a warning squawk, but never looked concerned. The youngster eventually quit his tantrum and cut a generous swath, giving his immediate adversary wide berth.
He turned east a few times to check me out. I stared back through the binoculars, but a hawk cruising for dinner stole my attention. Dropping from the sky in what seemed a few half-hearted plunges, he finally came up with some little meal.
Deciding quickly that I was no threat, the bull I’d been watching bugled occasionally, still getting an apathetic retort from the other bull, which was now behind him. After about a half hour, the bachelor turned and kangaroo-like pogo-ed his half-ton heft to the northwest toward a larger band of some two dozen cows and calves, but no visible protector.
His bouncing slowed to a trot as the perturbed cows at the rear of the harem slipped out of a gully. Then, a bull appeared. Now at a lope, the adolescent charged the big male.
The battle lasted only a few clicks of my camera, but I heard the clatter from where I sat, hundreds of yards away. I fired off my last few frames of film, and then watched as the dominant male ran off his challenger. He also took the occasion to run off an even younger bull that was still clinging to his mother’s side in the band.
The challenger sulked toward the forest at the south rim of the caldera and disappeared after a few more verbal challenges to entrenched males in the valley. Order restored, the edge of the massive shadows lowered the curtain on the extraordinary stage that is the Valles Caldera.
