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Abstract

It was 3:30 a.m. on the first Sunday in August. Jamie and I had slept maybe three hours. The night before, after his shift at the animal hospital at Washington State University in Pullman, Washington, Jamie drove 350 miles west over the Cascade mountains. He and his German Shepherd mutt, Briar, got to my apartment in Marblemount a little after midnight.Earlier in the week, Jamie's colleague had sent him an e-mail with the subject line “photos of hermaphrodite goat.” According to the GPS coordinates transmitted from the goat's collar, the mountain goat in question was somewhere out in the hills 20 miles due south from my apartment, and we were going to go find her.Jamie and I met a decade earlier on a women's hockey team in Moscow, Idaho, when I was a grad student and he was an undergrad. Jamie was eighteen then, and went by a different name. Both Jamie and I had joined the women's hockey team having never played the sport before. I had grown up roller blading and playing street hockey, and Jamie had played soccer all his life. Both of us were drawn to hockey in hopes that we might meet other butches. The previous summer, the woman I'd been seeing told me that dating me had been an experiment, that she was only into men, and I spent the rest of the summer renting 5 for $5 MadMen DVDs, and lying on the low pile carpet of my apartment, feeling like a cliché. On the ice, Jamie and I were both fast skaters, good puck handlers, and terrible at shooting. We became fast friends.When we met, Jamie was a first-year pre-vet student. But by the time Jamie came to visit me in Marblemount, he was in his final year of vet school. By age twenty-five, he had already earned a degree in wildlife ecology and was about to become a doctor of veterinary medicine. He had served for five summers as the field technician for a bighorn sheep pneumonia project and volunteered as a part of a pygmy rabbit recovery program, a beaver relocation project, and a spotted owl survey team. For his latest wild animal gig, he had volunteered as part of the veterinary team with the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife's multi-million-dollar mountain goat translocation project. The goal of the project was to capture and translocate at least 50% of the more than 700 goats on the Olympic Peninsula, and then lethally remove the remaining goats—those that proved too elusive to capture.According to the National Park Service, the mountain goats on the Olympic Peninsula had overstayed their welcome. Not only were they nonnative to that mountain range—they were introduced in the 1920s by a game hunting franchise before the national park designation—but, because of an increase in recreational tourism to the National Park, the opportunities for goat–human interactions were frequent, and, in 2010, one particularly aggressive goat fatally gored a backpacker. This incident, coupled with the Olympic goat's preference for chomping a special native grass endemic to the Peninsula, had tainted the public perception of the Peninsula goats from majestic wild creatures into controversial political pawns.Meanwhile, in the parts of the Cascade range in Washington state where mountain goats were native, including the White Chuck mountains just south of my house in Marblemount, goat populations were declining due to loss of habitat and overhunting. The state and federal agencies hoped that, instead of lethally removing all the goats on the Olympic peninsula, they could translocate some of them, in effect replacing the severely depleted goat populations throughout the rest of Washington state.In the five summers Jamie spent monitoring the Hells Canyon bighorn sheep on the border between Idaho, Oregon, and Washington, he had used telemetry equipment. Telemetry works basically the same way as line-of-sight radios. Wildlife biologists attach a transmitter via a collar to large mammals like goats and bighorn sheep, and the transmitter emits a specific radio frequency. Then field technicians like Jamie can “track” the animal using a receiver tuned to their frequency. Jamie's field kit included an antenna shaped like the letter H, which, when wielded with skill, could indicate the direction from whence the signal was coming. If the receiver detected a signal, it would emit a regular repeating tone, usually faint, 60 beats per minute. If the animal ceased movement for a specified number of hours, the transmitter sent off a mortality signal, halving the tone frequency to 30 beats per minute.When I'd tracked the Hells Canyon sheep with Jamie a few summers prior, the rhythmic beeping was more a ghost of a sound to my untrained ears, something shrouded with so much doubt that I thought what I was hearing was just my own nostalgia for a sound: the wooden claves from my elementary music class transmitting through hypnosis, conjured by my hyperconcentration on the plastic box resting on the dash of Jamie's truck. But to Jamie, the sound was as certain and reassuring as a heartbeat.The Hells Canyon sheep had been decimated by pneumonia in the early 2000s, and it had been Jamie's job to track the comeback of each generation of new lambs. During those five summers with the Hells Canyon sheep, he'd lost the state's $1,000 binoculars, left a broken-down four-wheeler on the side of a dried-up riverbed deep in some untracked canyon, and shredded two pairs of full-leather hiking boots. But as much as a day of fieldwork for Jamie predictably involved some hapless turns of adventure, Jamie was good at finding sheep. He knew every lambing cave and daybed spot in over a hundred square miles of canyons and gulches along the Snake and Grand Ronde rivers. He filled notebook after notebook with handwritten spreadsheets of the 110 different ewe frequencies for the five different herds he tracked, the color codes of their collars and ear tags, and whether he'd heard them or seen them that day, with or without a lamb. “Each day is like a game,” he said. “Find all the sheep.”Marblemount, population 200, is two hours northeast of Seattle. It's a gateway town to the North Cascades National Park, known only by mountaineers and motorcyclists who drive highway 20, the single paved road through the park, during the eight months of the year when the road is open. The town has a post office, two gas stations, one with an attached hardware store, two diners, a Korean–American greasy spoon, a community hall, a fish hatchery, a wilderness ranger station, a KOA-type campground with a basement bar that has Bud Light on tap and a minifridge full of Mike's Hard Lemonades, and a roadside miniature chapel big enough for two adults to stand hunched over inside, popularized by Pinterest. I moved to Marblemount for a job at an environmental education nonprofit inside the park. My apartment was in the converted hayloft of an old goat barn. The eaves hung lower than the windows. My view was of the juncos and Steller's jays eating sunflower seeds I'd scattered for them in the driveway and the falling-down outbuildings on the neighbor's property, their newly erected No Trespassing signs aimed at my dog and me.From Idaho, Jamie had driven six and a half hours to get to Marblemount, a distance he'd become accustomed to driving for a day's worth of field work. The next morning, after our three hours of sleep, I stumbled through a zombie memorized routine: feed the dogs, make coffee, take the dogs out, careful on the stairs not to wake up the park rangers living downstairs, scarf some cold leftovers from the pan on the stovetop. Jamie futzed with his gear, going through mental checklists, unpacking and repacking his backpack. Outside, it was already dimly lit. We tossed our gear in the bed of his truck and loaded up, Briar curled on the bench seat between us. Briar went everywhere Jamie went, his good-natured, prescient field assistant.A month earlier, in July, 76 goats were netted, sedated, blindfolded, hobbled, and then plucked off the sides of mountains across the Olympic peninsula, flown in slings dangling beneath helicopters to one of two staging areas, where they were attended to by a fleet of veterinarians and biologists, including Jamie, then loaded into refrigerated trucks, ferried across the Salish Sea, and unloaded into one of six staging areas in the North and Central Cascades, including one remote spot near White Chuck mountain, just south of my house in Marblemount.Apparently one of the goats translocated to White Chuck, while being assessed for disease before being released, was found to have a scrotum and the body size of a smallish billy, but with a vulva, protruding clitoris, and enlarged mammary tissue and nipples. Jamie said, in his e-mail to me, “the scrotum had something in it, could be testes, could be ovatestes, or something else.” The goat had other irregularities inconsistent with either sex: an allegedly bovine-like head, a tube-shaped body, and both her horns had crumbled off, leaving Princess-Leia-looking nubs.The biologist who had emailed Jamie dubbed the goat “Herman,” a name that initially made me bristle. Jamie and I had both been on the butt end of similar playground taunts. But calling Herman “Four Eighty,” the last three digits of her radio frequency, felt sterile, impersonal, and using any other pronouns besides “she” felt like we were trying to downplay what she had come to represent for Jamie and me: an imprecisely sexed mammal that, like us, contained a scrambled iteration of the feminine. The name Herman stuck.Mountain goats are less sexually dimorphic than humans. Truly, the physical differences are hardly perceptible to the nonspecialist. Both billies and nannies have thick white fur and grow beards. And both billies and nannies display aggressive, dominant behaviors toward each other, more so than any other ungulate. Adult billies are somewhat larger than nannies, with a boxer-like build. And both billies and nannies have horns, but billies’ horns tend to be thicker and more curved. In the field, the best way to tell whether the goat you are standing eyeball to square-pupiled eyeball with is a male or female is to see whether there are any kids around. Billies and nannies don't typically commingle except for during the rut in November. Billies hang out in small bachelor gangs, whereas nannies and kids travel in larger nursery groups.As we pulled out of my driveway, I wondered aloud to Jamie which group Herman spent most of her time with: whether she fit in; whether she thought about it. Goats are a highly social species. They are rarely spotted alone.Two years after we met, Jamie had top surgery. I had finished grad school and moved from Idaho to rural eastern Washington for a teaching job at a community college. The day I moved into my rental house in Ephrata, my elderly neighbor came over with a paper plate of cookies his wife had made to welcome me to the neighborhood. When I told him I'd be teaching English at the college, he started in on a rant about how he hoped I wouldn't be teaching any Hispanic kids. How he hated that he had to select “English” or “Spanish” at the ATM nowadays. It was 2015. I stood there stunned, then thanked him for the cookies. I spent that whole first year with the curtains drawn all hours of the day and night. My girlfriend at the time lived in Seattle and worked two jobs, so I mostly spent weekends in the city with her, but on occasion she spent the weekend at my place. We grocery shopped together where one of my students worked as a cashier. We went to the movies and held hands in the last row. We split an ice cream cone under the honey locust tree in the backyard of a drive-in diner on main street. But I was careful not to touch her in my yard. The neighbor, this single interaction, ballooned huge in my mind.A month after Jamie's surgery, I called him. He said, “The best part of having a flat chest is running!” California quail toddled in a single-file line across my driveway, their plumes bobbing. I had been half-heartedly binding with double-decker sports bras since college. I loved the way, if I hunched my shoulders forward, a starched dress shirt or a crisp, zipped-up raincoat would fall flat across my chest, but I also loved the feel of my breasts touching my girlfriend's breasts when we were naked together under the sheets, the way their soft undersides were hypersensitive to her touch. I knew my own experience of gender inexactitude differed from Jamie's in not only kind, but degree. For me, tomboying was subversive. For Jamie, it was the only way he knew how to live.Eight years passed. I traded in one rural place for another. Jamie started playing hockey on the men's team instead of the women's.At 4 a.m., we headed into town to fill up at the Shell station. In addition to transmitting a radio signal, Herman's collar was also set to transmit a GPS signal once every four days. Her most recent coordinates pinpointed her to the side of a mountain about twenty miles as the crow flies from my house: about an hour's drive over a labyrinth of Forest Service roads.Fog was condensing, rising with the rising temperature up and out of the valley floor. Marblemount gets about 70 inches of rain per year, more than double that of Seattle, and the houses all have metal roofs, their front yards pocked with buttercup and lined with sword fern. Briar stood up on all fours, wobbly on the seat between us, and growled at a man riding his bike drunkenly down the middle of Ranger Station Road with what appeared to be an entire bedroll—mattress, sleeping bag, sheets, and pillow—balanced precariously on his head. “It's okay, Briar,” Jamie comforted.We pulled into the Shell station and immediately Jamie announced he had a flat. This was a running joke between us. Never could Jamie do a day of field work without having to change at least one flat. We jacked up the truck and started in on the lug nuts and got four of them off, but the fifth—there is always the fifth—wouldn't budge. Jamie, at 5’10” and 150lbs, was stronger, and the more experienced flat changer of us.I wandered into the Shell station and bought strawberry sugar wafers and sour cream and onion chips. The clerk nodded at me in recognition.Back in the parking lot, Jamie beamed. “I jumped up and down on the tire iron and got the lug nut loose.” We moved our mountain bikes and gear out of the bed, so we could get the spare out, and, with the confidence of seasoned mechanics, tightened down the five bolts and lowered the jack. The spare was flat.About this time, an acquaintance of mine wandered into the gas station lot. I said to my friend, “This is Jamie,” as if that were some kind of explanation for why it was not even 6 a.m. and both of us were already filthy. My friend gave Jamie a long, silent once-over, trying to figure out whether he was a freckled teenage farmboy or some kind of butch who had perfected the art of drag, the kind of look Jamie was used to getting but I wasn't used to witnessing. Jamie wore a faded orange rain jacket, his name written in sharpie on a piece of duct tape across the back of his shoulders, black hiking pants, his red hair cut short, poking out beneath a worn black baseball cap with the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife logo on it. I was wearing a gray wilderness medicine t-shirt with holes in the armpits, my long hair in a ponytail under a sun-faded baseball cap. Jamie summarized our morning mishaps for my friend, then we filled the spare up with the gas station's air pump and were on our way.Jamie DJ'ed while he drove, windows down for Briar, Alan Jackson singing, “Just a dirt road with trash on each side / But I was Mario Andretti / When Daddy let me drive.” Big leaf maples, their branches thick as thighs and covered in florescent moss, drooped over the highway, leaves the size of two human hands splayed wide. We were happy in this moment, neither of us having to hide our love for country music from the liberalqueervotingbloc or trying to navigate “professional dress” in one of two ill-fitting genders for our desk jobs.What does it mean to carry a topographical map inside you? For a mountain goat, it means you know which way to find the best forage, which way to find shelter, where morning sun warms rock, where to travel when it is time for the rut, where the watering hole is, and when it dries up. Some wildlife biologists speculate that ungulates have maps of their home ranges imprinted in their DNA, passed from parent to offspring. What then does an animal do when slung off the side of a mountain and translocated a hundred miles away, to an entirely different mountain range? A year from now, when the WDFW annual report on the project comes out, scientists will wonder about this lack of home range familiarity as a potential reason for why some translocated goats died not from capture myopathy, the sudden death from stress after capture or tranquilization, but six or eight months after they'd been transferred.At the time, though, the goats were all mere weeks post-transfer. Jamie and I could only hope for Herman and the rest of the goats’ survival. We had studied the aerial images of the ten-by-ten-mile radius around Herman's most recent GPS point, overlain it with topo lines, knew the way the geology bent itself around the confluence of the Skagit and the Sauk rivers, saw the truck moving south along the highway in our minds’ eye like the tiny red arrow we have come to associate with our first-person concept of self, Herman somewhere out in the hills to our east, going through her own morning routine in this new strange place.Halfway to our destination, Jamie announced that he forgot to get AA batteries for the receiver, so we passed the Forest Service road where we were supposed to turn off and drove an extra five miles to stop at another Shell station.In the parking lot, Jamie pulled out the receiver from the pile of camping gear and toolkits and optics equipment in the back seat, replaced the batteries and turned it on only to realize his colleague hadn't put the coaxial cable back in the telemetry kit, the cable that connects the antenna to the receiver. All hope of finding Herman blanched from Jamie's face.For whatever reason, I had imagined our day tracking Herman would be similar to tracking the Hells Canyon sheep. But finding goats is nothing like finding desert sheep. Both are agile mountain climbers known for traversing knife-edge precipices and their nonchalant confidence for finding footholds on rock faces while running at high speeds. But desert bighorns preferred dry, open terrain with skeletal, rattly shrubs and sparse trees, whereas goats have long been associated with subalpine habitat. In Washington, the subalpine is timber country. Forest fire suppression has led to the intrusion of conifers at higher elevations across the state. The biggest employer in the northeast corner of the county is the Hampton lumber mill, producer of 290 million board-feet of hemlock and Douglas fir per year. The forests here are not the open, dry, ponderosa forests of eastern Washington and Oregon and California. They are dense and dark monocrop forests, full of trees all the same age.The Olympic goats in particular had become accustomed to cliffy, wet, Douglas fir and western red cedar forests on peaks that retained their snow year-round. Jamie said without the coax cable, we would be able to track Herman as goats were tracked a hundred years ago, with long, bushy walks to ridgelines with known lines of sight to favorite goat sunbathing spots.Except, I reminded him, in this case, Herman just got here a week ago, and we don't know any of her sunbathing spots.I grew up big-breasted and bookish on a suburban inland lake in Michigan. In the summers, I lived in a bikini. My mom taught me to shave my armpits and legs when I was 12, but I was a reluctant adopter of the practice. This was the early 2000s. I listened to Jars of Clay on my Walkman while mowing the lawn and had an unironic adoration for the movie Blue Crush. If I had any unclouded sense of identity as a teenager, it was that I was a surfer girl tomboy born in a landlocked state. In high school, I bought acid-washed boy jeans from Old Navy, Old Spice body wash in its ginormous red bottle, and started wearing sweatbands on my wrists like the tennis player I was not.I moved west, first to Colorado, then to Idaho, then to Washington, out of some sort of fantasy that I could live in solitude in the mountains with calloused hands and a suntan, like Sam Gribley from My Side of the Mountain. I learned to read topo maps. How to orient the land, its folds and shadows as it fanned out in front of me, to the two-dimensional representation on paper. To pinpoint, by the shape of creek drainages and ridgelines, precisely my current location.My vocabulary shifted. I learned mud season, cattleguard, dispersed camping. Switchback, clear cut, fireweed. Cliff band, couloir, confluence, butte. Reservoir, cairn, draw, eddy. That ponderosas smelled like vanilla, and Steller's jays mimicked the calls of red-tailed hawks.Upon realizing our prospects for finding Herman without the coax cable were slim, we got serious about telemetry. Jamie was distraught. “What is a coax cable?” I asked him. He started to explain how radio waves work, how antennas work, how he connects the antenna to the receiver. “No,” I interrupted, “I mean what does its plug look like? The male end,” I said, smirking. Jamie handed me the receiver, and I took a washed-out photo of the outlet and texted it around to everyone I knew who lived upriver. “Do you have a coax cable that would fit in this port?”We turned around and drove an hour east, past my house in Marblemount, past the Visitor Center, which didn't open until 9 a.m., to my office and rummaged through a plastic bin of projector cables and other audio video equipment my coworker had pulled out of storage for me. Nothing.I began to be miserable company. I was anxious about Jamie having driven so far for nothing. We'd been up for what felt like half a day, and hadn't even begun to look for Herman.We didn't really have a backup plan, but there was no sense in driving deeper into the Park. The nearest town east of the Park was over an hour and a half away from my office, and the nearest town with anything bigger than a gift shop was three hours in that direction. So we tipped the nose of the truck west and retraced our steps again. Back to the Visitor Center, which was now open. Inside, I explained our predicament to a coworker, and we were ushered into the A/V room at the back of the Visitor Center's auditorium. Eighty or so plush folding chairs sat empty, while a monotonous seven-minute video about the history of the North Cascades played on repeat. “Take anything you want from in here,” she said to us, “it's all getting boxed up and put into storage at the end of the season anyway.” Jamie started pulling out all the black boxes, receivers, and turning them around, studying the rat's nest of cables with the eye of a surgeon.I had given up. Nothing made in the last twenty years was going to fit in Jamie's ancient receiver, and, by the look of the auditorium's A/V room, everything in there was too modern. I wandered around the Visitor Center's museum, pausing in front of a three-dimensional interactive map of the North Cascades with buttons you could press that light up tiny lightbulbs embedded in the molded rubber, teaching the names of each peak.“Hey,” Jamie was six inches away, whispering at the back of my head, “I found one that will work!” He was grinning in triumph.I followed him back to the A/V room. He had unhooked one end of the coax cable, and it was plugged into his receiver, but the other end was tangled in what looked like a spinal column of zip-tied cords. I thought for a minute about not wanting to mess up their set-up too much, that maybe we'd be able to thread it through if we could loosen the bundle a bit. I started following the cable from the end Jamie had pulled out, but all the cables were wrapped in the same uniform black plastic sheathing, and the bundle was too tightly zip-tied. Jamie asked me to get a pair of scissors, and, when I brought them back, he started snipping zip ties while I held my cell phone flashlight on the nerve bundle. “Just like doing surgery,” he said, triumphant. The cable was nearly six feet long, three times what was typical for field work, and wiggled in the port, but Jamie was convinced it would work.We thanked the Park employees and practically ran back to the truck. Upon our return, Briar stood up, spun once, and then lay back down, switching sides for the hour-and-a-half nap back to Herman.Driving, Jamie and I passed Sauk Suiattle's Last Chance Casino and Bingo. The parking lot was empty. Jamie said, “Hey, look at their logo.” It was a formline drawing of a mountain goat standing on top of a green mountain.There are more mountain goat stuffies sold annually in National Park gift shops across the mountainous West than there are actual mountain goats. The mountain goat is a symbol of everything the modern human is not: hardy, discreet, discerning in its choice of habitat and diet. What this says of the psychology we are passing down to our children, I do not know.Each summer, mountain goats shed their extra winter fur, leaving their wool in snags on tree branches. The shed wool is a highly coveted treasure. Natives along the northwest coast from Oregon to Alaska have, for hundreds of generations, collected shed goat wool to weave into blankets. The collection is more than just foraging out of necessity, for warmth. The practice is associated with being agile enough to move in timber country, to travel from the valley floor to ridgelines, and to have the knowledge to know which ridgeline stands of trees goats hang out in in early summer. Nowadays, it is a point of pride to have experience gathering goat wool, to know the whereabouts of the local goat herds and to know where to find them from season to season. As the goat population across the North Cascades has dwindled, so too has the cultural tradition of collecting their wool.As we drove, I asked Jamie if he knew to what extent this expensive translocation project had marketed itself as making reparations. It was a scientifically backed attempt to reinstate viable herds where they had all but died off, sure, but was it also a bona fide gesture of good faith on the part of the state to the tribes? I wanted the goats to be reintroduced for the obvious reason: that they have an inherent right to exist in what was once their native habitat. But that reason alone doesn't have any legal teeth in the United States, at least not yet, and certainly wouldn't be enough to legitimize a multi-million-dollar conservation effort. Wildlife conservation decisions are still predicated on resource management priorities. In this case, the goats have to be valuable to humans based on a value system invented by humans. In the past those resource management funding decisions were based on hunting and logging priorities: which species proved themselves to be kingpins in a precarious predator–prey interdependent system or in protecting plant species diversification. The way I saw it, goats were minor actors in any predator–prey dynamics in the Cascades and were negligible to preserving the health of loggable forest land. They were being protected for their cultural significance, putting the mountains back to the way they used to be, making sure there was shed fur left to collect for future generations. “But isn't this just the latest of wildlife's commodifications?” I asked Jamie.I imagined Herman and all the other translocated goats walking around as a kind of living museum exhibit, nibbling at sedges and shedding their winter coats each summer, leaving snags of themselves in the bushes, waiting to be collected. Sure, I was happy at the unintended scientific discovery of an intersex mountain goat as a result of the absurd lengths we humans had gone to to reintroduce these goats, but I saw bit of irony in the inflated self-importance we humans had assumed in the goat's survival in these mountains. In my idealized fantasy of what it meant to travel in the so-called wilderness of the North Cascades, the plopping of goat transplants into these mountains felt a little like a cheapening to me, like a campy reenactment of an era gone by. Only later did I begin to think that we, too, are each living museum exhibits, performing the generalized cliché of human male or human female, evidenced by all the ways we round ourselves up to one assumed gender or the other through a lifetime of sculpting and plucking.Among humans, what counts medically as “intersex” is not agreed upon. This lack of consensus is in part because of stigmatization, because parents want their babies to come out cleanly in one camp or the other, and because so-called “corrective” surgeries on newborns, where parent consent is given in lieu of patient consent, are rarely medically necessary and often result in involuntary sterilization or loss of sexual sensation. As such, these surgeries are controversial. In 2016, Malta became the first country to pass legislation making medical interventions to intersex infants illegal, and Uruguay, Portugal, and Austria soon after followed suit.For his whole career, Jamie has worked with state-agency wildlife professionals, most of whom are men, and many from rural upbringings. He conjectures about the jokes made at Herman's expense at Hurricane Ridge the day she was discovered and loaded into a truck with 16 other goats bound for the North Cascades. But for scientists, having an anomalous data point is something to which they are well accustomed. In the 2018 WDFW annual progress report, there are two columns: male and female. In 2019, there are three: male, female, and intersex.As we drove, Jamie described the intake process for each sedated mountain