Wolf

by Asta Bowen

  In time, all the pups adjusted to their milk-less diet as Blackfeet had, and slowly began to put on weight. Few wolves could have brought back enough food to keep six pups alive, but few wolves were Greatfoot. The many deer in the Ninemile, and in the forests stretching in many directions, made it possible. With Marta, survival would have been easy. Without her, it was a daily struggle.

  In the time after his mate disappeared, Greatfoot ran on instinct: travel, hunt, feed; travel, hunt, feed. Sleep, and begin again. As the pups grew, he moved from one rendezvous site to the next. At first he had to carry them one by one, making six trips to complete the move; later they were able to run along on their own, a ragtag band led by Silver. At the new place, they were usually greeted by a fresh kill their father had made.

  The pups had learned the game of follow the leader before they ever left the den, and from Greatfoot they slowly gathered their first wolf ways. Watching him, their instincts took shape. They learned the faces and postures of wolf language; they learned to chase and hide, and to track and hunt small animals. They learned the many howls: the hungry howl, the lonesome howl, the hunting howl, the feasting howl. They learned the howl that called their father, and the howl he used to call them.

  And they learned to avoid things human. Following Greatfoot, they hid from the sound of cars and sidestepped the tracks of horses. They learned how to slip through a herd of cattle without causing a stir, and they learned to keep their distance from the people and dogs of the Ninemile.

  One human scent was hard to avoid. This one did not stay to the valley bottom, but walked the paths the wolves walked. From one rendezvous to the next, and sometimes in between, the scent came before or followed after them. No person ever appeared with it, though sometimes in the quiet, the pack could hear the rumble of a truck driving slowly along the logging roads. When it brought no threat, Greatfoot no longer ran from the sound, and neither did the pups.

  By the end of summer, the young wolves were ready to go along on short hunts. The hunt was the heart of wolf ways, and when the pack had learned it, Greatfoot would no longer have to hunt alone. But first, he had to teach them stealth. To a pack of six young wolves, everything was a game, the noisier the better. On their first hunt Blackfeet picked up Greatfoot’s silence, but the others were too excited. Greatfoot had to sprint ahead, leaving the noise behind, to get near any deer.

  After several tries he finally felled an old buck. Blackfeet was close enough to see how the strike was made, and by the time the deer was on the ground, the swarm of five had caught up. Though they didn’t see the attack, they had the feel for the chase, and they quickly understood what to do next. After Greatfoot ripped open the belly of the deer, the pack leaped around him. The pups still didn’t have the right teeth for tearing hide or breaking bones, but with Greatfoot’s help, they got a share of meat. Soon the area was littered with small debris: parts of bone, fur, strips of meat and even fat were scattered around. This would be their new rendezvous.

  Even after the pups began to tag along on short hunts, Greatfoot still traveled alone to get most of their food. He would leave the pack together at a rendezvous site and hunt through the night. Often he traveled great distances, returning by morning with a belly full of fresh meat.

  On the night when the first frost collected in the Ninemile, Greatfoot was away on a hunt. The pups wakened to find the ground glittering in sunlight. Silver rose first, shaking sparkles from her coat, and raced around the rendezvous site to get warm. This roused the others, and soon the litter was up and exploring the frosty clearing. They amused themselves with scraps from the earlier kill, played raven tag with the birds hovering around, and waited for Greatfoot to return with their food.

  Midday came, and Greatfoot had not arrived. By early afternoon Blackfeet was chasing rabbits, and his brothers and sisters were picking at the carcass along with the ravens. Silver left the rendezvous site and wandered into the forest. She howled once and stood for a moment, listening, then went sniffing for food caches and hunting in a halfhearted way.

  By nightfall Greatfoot had still not returned, and the pups began to sing. They sang the hungry song and the calling song; they sang the lonely song and the cold song. There was no answer. They went to sleep as they had wakened, frosted and curled against one another for warmth.

  Greatfoot did not return the next morning, or the one after that. The pups stayed close to the rendezvous site, and as the sun dragged across the sky, they played less and slept more. They picked the deer carcass clean and chased rabbits into the forest. Except for Blackfeet, they did not try to hunt without Greatfoot. Stomachs grumbling, they howled for him at dawn and dark. Then, on the evening of the third day, their call was answered.

  It was not their father’s voice, but it was a kind of wolf call, and the pups raced toward it. They left the rendezvous site and streaked through the trees, following the howl to the edge of the valley. They reached a logging road and the howl trailed off, but by then Silver had picked up the scent of food. They followed her off the road and into an unused cattle pasture. Just out of sight of the road, whole and untouched, lay a dead deer.

  Greatfoot was nowhere to be seen. Sniffing ecstatically at the deer’s mouth and belly, the pups were too hungry to notice that his scent was missing, too. In its place was a trace of human scent: the familiar smell of the person they no longer bothered to run from. The pups ignored it, crowding around the carcass. There were no openings in the hide, and Greatfoot was not there to show them where to begin. Silver tugged hopefully at a leg, which sprang back stiffly and did not give. Tenino bit at the bile-covered tongue, but it was tough and firmly attached. Timber and Camas tried to chew through the fur, but it was too thick for their new teeth. Blackfeet stood apart, cocked his head, and whined; while the others clustered in confusion around the deer, he watched.

  Unable to get at the meat, the young wolves returned hungry to the rendezvous site. Still Greatfoot did not appear, and Tenino grew anxious. She raced around the rendezvous site, howling and whining, and chewed nervously at her paws. That night, as the other pack members rested, she stayed awake. She paced back and forth in the cooling air, stopping near her sleeping packmates and sniffing at the last scent marks, now days old, left by their father.

  In the stillness, she heard a familiar rumble in the distance. She pricked her ears toward the sound and heard the quiet scrape of rubber tires on the logging road, in the direction of the deer they had found. The sound stopped, and the valley was silent again.

  Standing next to Silver, Tenino sighed and lay down. Resting her chin on Silver’s shoulders, the black wolf finally closed her eyes and accepted sleep. None of the wolves heard the distant rumble or scrape as the pickup truck started again, moving quietly off into the night.

  Foryty-Nine

  The Gift

  The next morning, the wolves went out to investigate the deer carcass. It lay in the same position, but the belly had been sliced neatly open.

  Ravens had gotten there first and were plucking at the entrails when the pack arrived. The wolves chased off the ravens and dove ferociously for the insides. They started with the organs that were easiest to chew, but when the cavity was empty they still were not full. Timber and Camas had the best teeth, and they attacked the hide as they had seen Greatfoot do, pulling it back to expose the meat underneath.

  Unlike other kills, this deer didn’t move much when they pulled at it. One leg was chained to the ground and held firm when they tugged and tore at the carcass. Blackfeet sniffed nervously at the chain, but soon gave in to the smell of fresh meat. They feasted in wolf style, Silver fighting Camas for the best pieces, and Chinook taking tidbits lost in the others’ contest. Their meal lasted all morning, and when the sun was high and they were finally full, the deer carcass was mostly bones.

  The wolves rested and cleaned themselves. Silver and Chinook napped, Blackfeet and Camas chewed on leg bones, and Tenino and Timber played raven tag with the birds. It was an ordi
nary scene, except for one thing: this pack had no leader.

  No matter how long the pups waited or how often they called, they could not bring Greatfoot back because he had been killed on his last hunt. The freeway he crossed to and from the Idaho forest ran fast with cars and trucks, and he often had to wait for an opening in the traffic. The last time Greatfoot was crossing the highway back from the hunt, heavy with food for the pups, a pair of headlights came at him unexpectedly. Meat-drunk and tired, the wolf could not move out of the way quickly enough; the driver swerved, but not soon enough.

  For the orphaned pack, the gift of food came just in time. Revived, they returned to the rendezvous site and took up their routine of playing, fighting, and hunting. Throughout that day and night the pups continued to call for Greatfoot, but he did not appear. After dark, the blue truck cruised slowly along the road behind their rendezvous site, then disappeared into the night. Later, in the distance, the wolves received another answer to their calls: a wolflike howl, deep and warm, but again it was not their father’s. Last time, this song had brought food. The pups howled to it, and it howled back.

  The next morning, when the wolves went to pick over their deer bones, they found more than ravens. In place of the bones was another freshly killed deer.

  The scene repeated itself for weeks. Every few days, the bones of the last kill would disappear and a new one would appear in its place. The pack called back and forth with the distant voice, but never saw or smelled another wolf. The blue pickup came and went, and traces of human scent appeared with the kills, but no person ever came near enough to be seen or heard.

  When fall settled over the Ninemile, the young wolves tried to learn wolf ways on their own. As they grew stronger and bigger, like Blackfeet they learned to chase and hunt their share of small animals. They grew adept at hunting rabbits alone and sometimes tracked a deer in twos and threes, but without Greatfoot, their learning was slow and haphazard.

  Hunting season came to the Ninemile, bringing an explosion of gunfire and traffic that sent the wolves scrambling for shelter. At night when the blasts ended and the traffic trickled away, the pack moved cautiously about. Silver was first to discover the gut piles left by hunters. She howled with surprise, and her brothers and sisters came running. They gobbled up the vitals, licked their chops, and exchanged happy, sloppy wolf kisses.

  Throughout hunting season, every few mornings the wolves discovered a new carcass at the usual place. Rabbits and hunters’ leavings filled the gaps in their growing bellies, but it was the gift of the deer that sustained them. Physically the pack grew strong, but the pups were still too young to be without a leader. They had wolf bodies and wolf instinct, but without wolf elders, they could not learn true wolf ways.

  The pack survived in its own ways. Hunger taught them to hunt, and the meals of deer kept their taste for wild meat. A kind of order developed among the pups, with Silver at one end and Chinook at the other. As the weather grew cold, their hunger grew with it, and soon they were tracking and chasing deer as a pack.

  Sometimes they saw the blue truck, but only when it was parked silently on the road; more often they heard it moving through the night, going to and from the pasture where they found the deer. They stopped calling for Greatfoot, but whenever the mysterious howls sounded across the valley, the orphaned pack answered. It was not their father’s song, but to them it meant survival.

  Fifty

  The Man

  One night in the middle of hunting season, the call seemed to come from closer than usual. Silver’s ears went up, and instead of singing with the rest of the pack, she ran to the edge of the rendezvous site. When Blackfeet slipped around her into the woods she followed, and the gray and black wolves crept cautiously toward the sound. The others finished their howl one by one and joined the line slipping through the woods. When the voice was silent, the wolves stopped and called. The howls kept coming from the same place. They were getting closer.

  The pack of youngsters crept stealthily toward the sound, which came from somewhere beyond the chained deer carcass. They could not see or smell a wolf anywhere in the darkness, just a hint of the human scent they already knew. The voice seemed to be coming from behind a hillock, and the young pack fanned out as it had once done on hunts with Greatfoot, closing in on the rise from all sides.

  The closer they got, the slower they crept. Still the calls came.

  All six reached the hillock at the same time. One last call sounded from behind it, but this time, they did not answer. They peered over the rise, and what they saw was not a wolf at all.

  Crouched in the cold, damp grass behind the rise was a man. Breath steaming, hands cupped around his mouth for the next howl, he saw the faces surrounding him and slowly lowered his hands. The wolves looked at the man. The man looked at the wolves.

  Seven hearts pounded in seven chests, and seven pairs of eyes grew wide. This was not a stranger, not their leader, not any wolf at all—and neither was it their enemy. This was one who had called to them, who had fed them, who had watched over them when first Marta, then Greatfoot, disappeared.

  For one moment, wolf eyes and human eyes met. Then six tails turned with a bound, a leap, a scramble and a flash, and were gone. When the man finally stood in the darkness, he could see only one black and one gray shape. Well out of reach and almost out of sight, Blackfeet and Silver had stopped and turned, pausing to look back at him.

  The man howled again. As his tones dissolved into the night the two wolves stood, still watching, still silent. The man held his breath and did not move. First Silver and then Blackfeet gathered their feet and raced off into the blackness. A faint tatter on fallen leaves, and all was silent. The man listened, then let out his breath and turned toward the blue truck waiting on the road.

  As he took the first step away from the hillock, the call came from behind him. Blackfeet. Then Silver. Then Tenino and Timber and Camas and Chinook. The pack sang, from where each stood in the forest, breath rising into the frosted air. Wolves were home in the Ninemile.

  Epilogue

  The wolf I call Marta did live, much in the manner recorded here. Most of what is known about her life comes from records kept by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and used in the federal wolf recovery effort. The major events of this story and many of the details about the animals came directly from those records. The day-to-day details that cannot be known were filled in from studies and stories of wolf behavior and ecology.

  As the documents show, the Pleasant Valley pack had formed in northwest Montana by the spring of 1989. That April the alpha male, whom I call Calef, was killed by a sheep rancher who mistook him for a dog. In the next months the remaining wolves were suspected of cattle deaths in the area, though other causes were later found. Nonetheless, the decision was made to relocate the pack. Except for one black pup who avoided capture, the wolves were trapped, darted, kenneled, then held in the Ashley Creek Animal Clinic in Kalispell while awaiting transport to a site in the Bob Marshall Wilderness complex. In an eleventh-hour decision after the wolves were already sedated, Governor Stan Stephens halted the transfer, and the destination was changed to Nyack Creek in Glacier Park.

  After relocation, Marta’s radio collar allowed biologists to follow her travels through the Swan and Mission mountains. She met the male I call Greatfoot that winter, and the first Ninemile pups were born in the spring of 1990. Marta disappeared over Memorial Day, not long after the litter was born. After weeks of searching by authorities, a fisherman discovered Marta’s collar, transmitter smashed, in Kennedy Creek. Her body was never found.

  As Marta lived, so did her packmates. All the wolves named in this book were real animals identified by recovery biologists. Annie and Sula both died of starvation in Glacier Park, and Oldtooth, disabled by his foot injury, was caught preying on livestock and euthanized. Greatfoot raised the six Ninemile pups successfully over the summer, but three months after Marta’s death, on Labor Day weekend, he was hit by a car while cros
sing the freeway west of Missoula. Wildlife biologist Mike Jimenez, who had been monitoring the pack, fed the orphaned pups with roadkill; his face-to-face encounter with the young wolves is recorded in the last chapter of the book.

  After Thanksgiving, Mike discontinued the feeding in hopes that the pups would learn to hunt for themselves. They did. Even so, the young Ninemile pack did not fare well after the deaths of its leaders. Pikuni separated from the pack first, and Silver soon after. The remaining four were found killing livestock on the far side of Reservation Divide and, in the spring of 1991, were captured for relocation to Glacier Park. Camas came out of the drug early and escaped, but Tenino, Chinook, and Timber were released in Glacier and traveled together for a time before splitting up.

  Eventually, Chinook was shot and killed for attacking cattle near Dixon; Timber was killed illegally and found in a lake near Bigfork; Tenino remained on the east side of the Continental Divide but was captured there after killing two lambs and sent to Wolf Haven in Washington State.

  Of the other wolves, they or their offspring may still be at large. Rann’s fate remains, happily, unknown; for a time there were reports in Pleasant Valley of a smaller black wolf traveling with a larger gray wolf, so perhaps he found a friend and mentor. Silver, Pikuni, and Camas are likewise unaccounted for. I like to think they are free somewhere, perhaps in the Ninemile, perhaps in Idaho, or perhaps in one of the other valleys newly inhabited by wolf packs.

  Though the deaths of so many wolves make this story tragic, for their species it ends with hope. Marta did for the Ninemile Valley what the federal government has done in Yellowstone National Park: return wolves to the habitat from which they were removed, often forcibly and by extreme measures, during the last hundred years. The return of the wolf is a natural process that takes place as a population outgrows its territory, and individuals disperse to new and sometimes distant places; wildlife biologist Diane Boyd has studied the process in detail. Natural wolf recovery depends on the tenacity of these pioneer wolves and the tolerance of humans in areas where they settle.