Glacier CIS

I smelled it before I saw it. It wasn’t exactly rotten. Sorta like a steak left out on a counter for awhile.

But then we came over a snowbank and there it was — or what was left of it. My skills identifying skulls picked clean of all flesh is a bit lacking. It was either an elk or a small moose. I suspect the former, but I can’t say for sure.

Most of the time when you find something like this there’s more clues around — namely feet, or antlers, But all there was was a skull and part of the backbone and ribs.

From the looks of things it probably had been killed a several days prior. We found the wolf tracks to the north of the carcass. A path was worn back and forth to the snow. Looks like they hauled away chunks and probably ate them on higher, flatter, ground.

We made a few circles looking for feet or hair, but came up empty. An inch of fresh snow didn’t help. But plenty of critters beside the wolves had been here. Raven tracks in the snow. Coyote. Fox. Everyone got a little something. The rib bones had been chewed on or were missing entirely.

Nothing went to waste. Eventually, the mice and other rodents will even chew the skull to nothing. That’s how it works in Glacier. Death is more than just a great big circle. It’s circles within circles. Webs within webs. It looks simple on the surface, but the closer you look, the more complex it gets. Take the victim. Was it sick before the attack? Was it driven down the hillside into the stream? Did it die here or was it killed somewhere else and then dragged here? Was it killed at all? Could have just been a scavenge.

Call it Glacier Park Crime Scene Investigation. It’s fun in the winter, downright dangerous the rest of the year. I give carcasses wide berths when the bears are awake. A critter this big is a bear magnet. Run into a griz on a carcass and you might end up with two — the second being yours.

Over the years I’ve run into plenty of kills. It’s always an interesting exercise to try to figure out what happened.

The most exciting was a wolverine still eating a very rotten mountain goat on the flanks on Piegan Mountain years ago. Wasn’t much mystery to that one, but still super fun.

Chris Peterson is the editor of the Hungry Horse News.