ALL WHO WANDER

The Wild Watches With Golden Eyes the Choices We Make

BALANCED ATOP A slab-muscled mule in the bottom of Aravaipa Canyon, biologist Stan Cunningham pulled the radio tracker out of his saddlebag and listened for the lion. I sat quietly on Red, the mule Stan loaned me so I could tag along as he tracked a radio-collared mountain lion with a sweet tooth for calves.

His receiver beeped . . . beeped . . . beeped as he swung it slowly in an arc. When he was pointed up the insanely steep, cholla-studded slope on our right, the receiver accelerated to a breathless beepbeepbeep. Stan looked back at me dubiously, trying to picture me riding Red up that 40-degree hillside toward the waiting mountain lion. You see, he'd spent a year treeing, darting and radio-collaring mountain lions, then trailed them around collecting their scat to figure out how many calves they were eating. So perhaps he had lost track of what one could reasonably expect of a writer.

If I were a sensible person, I would have wished Stan well, promised to meet him back at the research trailer and meandered down along the stream. But I was eager to earn my cowboy credentials and dying to see a mountain lion.

The hungry, elusive mountain lions of Aravaipa Canyon pose one of those tough tradeoffs that plague the management of the vast stretches of public land in the West. The government doles out grazing permits on some 260 million acres of federal land in 17 Western states, plus at least 8 million acres of state land in Arizona. Nationally, 26,000 ranchers graze an estimated 3 million cows on Forest Service and federal Bureau of Land Management (BLM) land, but grazing fees are set so low that the government spends $126 million a year more on the program than it collects in fees. Part of the reason the federal government loses money on grazing leases is that federal hunters go after any lions, bears, coyotes or other predators that kill livestock.

Conservationists and ranchers have been arguing about the inevitable tradeoff between cows and mountain lions for years, with the government rangeland managers caught somewhere in the middle. Conservationists complain that grazing damages the fragile riparian areas on which wildlife depend and that recent rule changes will both reduce rangeland protection and public input. Ranchers counter that their operations both prevent the fragmentation of public lands and support hard-pressed rural communities.

As for me, I just wanted to see a mountain lion.

So when Stan wheeled his mule and charged up that impossible slope, I held my peace and sat my seat as Red lurched after him, nimble as a mountain goat. I sustained a John Wayne pose for two lurches, before grabbing the saddle horn like it was my last tooth. Red surged up the hill over the rocks, through the cholla, past the yucca, into the catclaw, a tsunami of mule muscle carrying me along like a broken rowboat.

As it turns out, Stan's study did demonstrate that calves constituted about one-third of the diet of the lions of Aravaipa Canyon. Some might argue that means we should continue our long war with the lions. Except lion biologists have also made several other unsettling observations. Lions fiercely defend their territory from other lions. So if a hunter kills a dominant lion, two or three younger lions will quickly move in from nearby territories. Such younger and less-experienced lions are more likely to kill calves. So hunting the lions can actually make the problem worse.

On the other hand, other studies have demonstrated that ranchers can reduce their predator losses by corralling pregnant cows and keeping newborn calves safe from predators until they get bigger. Therefore, in lion country, public-lands ranchers may have to adjust their normal cow-calf operations.

So that harrowing day chasing the beep of the lion's signal up that hellacious hill reaffirmed my suspicion of either/or answers and reawakened my appreciation for the bloody balance of nature. But the single strongest argument for keeping the lions and corralling the calves awaited me atop the hill.

I arrived at the top in an exultation of fear, my life having kinescoped before my eyes three times on the way up. I reached the top of that jagged summit more thoroughly alive than I'd been in 20 years. Completely unperturbed, Stan moved the receiver in an arc until he pinpointed the cougar, hidden in a jumble of boulders across the way.

I studied that pile of boulders like a witch doctor with a bowl of bones, but glimpsed not a tawny trace of the lion. Still, I could feel him watching me, with those impersonal, predatory, golden eyes. And for the inarticulate surge of a moment I understood him and the wind and my own place in the wide, wild world.

And I would not give up that moment for hamburger.