Puff of smoke

You know, I can’t blame smokers. Really. I smoked 20 something years ago. Not a lot, mind you, maybe no more than a pack a week at the most, and most of them I didn’t buy myself. Yeah, I was one of those smokers. A bum. A drool. A leech. An amateur.

Then I switched to chew and chewed that for a number of years and that I did buy myself and became a different sort of bum, drool and leech. The smell of the stuff, once you’re hooked will turn you that way. I chewed so much it made my joints hurt and that’s when I quit, just stopped and never looked back.

It’s been a long time now. Maybe 10 years, even. But every once in awhile I want another dip, you know just for old time’s sake. Especially if I’m around a lot of other people and they’re all chewing or dipping, which isn’t very often anymore.

But this isn’t about smoking or dipping or chewing.

It’s about monsters and it starts in the woods of Glacier National Park on a cold dreary Sunday afternoon not too long ago.

The monster was a giant bull elk somewhere in the trees bugling over and over again, in love and loving every minute of it. I was the photographer on the trail and patient. I could hear the bull who was real close in the woods, but like I said it was dark and dreary and Sunday and the light sucked in there, in the woods.

I needed my monster in a more pleasant light. A place where I could take his picture and he wouldn’t be just a mass of hide and bone and blurry fur.

So I waited and waited and waited some more and then I saw some cows and they spooked at the sight of me, not a lot mind you, just a little in fact, moving back into the trees.

But they were on one side of the trail and the bull was on the other and I knew, knowing all too well the calls of love, that they would soon meet.

See, the trail, with its more open view, afforded that stop or so of light that I so desparately needed, the difference between a blurry photo and a memorable one.

So with the cows spooked I moved on. Went to a different place for a bit, knowing that if luck prevailed, in an hour or so my bull and cows would meet.

On the way back things fell into place nicely. Better than I could have imagined, really. The cows and the bulls had met and the cows didn’t seem to mind me. In fact, they saw me right off the bat, coming down the trail. They looked, but were not wary. They browsed and I stopped because the monster, this giant bull elk, was walking straight toward me through the woods, his giant rack gleaming, a basket of brush in the middle from where he’d thrashed a bush to death.

He came closer and closer and closer — bugling all the way. Patient and still as I could be, I waited. One, two, three steps and he’d be out in the open in the best of the light and I’d have my picture. (And yeah, sure, I thought, ‘What if he keeps coming and bowls you over,’ and I replied, ‘People will at least remember how I died.’)

Like I said, he needed one, two, three steps at the most to make a glorious picture.

And then it happened. The cows snorted. Some deer, that I never even saw, snorted. And the big gigantic glorious beautiful bull turned around, almost in mid-stride and ran away.

My picture. My glorious picture, gone.

I am not making this up.

Surely there was a grizzly bear approaching, I thought.

I walked carefully down the trail. Made some noise. And then I caught it. Just a faint, faint whiff.

Cigarette smoke. A man and a woman, were down the trail, too far away to make out really. But he was smoking a cigarette.

Out! Out! Brief candle!

The elk could handle the glimpse of people. But the smell of smoke, no way.

I have yet to see or hear the bull again since that day. Haven’t even had a glimpse of the cows.

They might as well have been a wisp of smoke. A sweetness in the distance, reminding you of an old addiction that’s never completely forgotten.

Chris Peterson is the photographer for the Hungry Horse News.