The Last Wolf

by Jim Crumley

  Lieutenant Charles Nordstrom who was present, remembered the words and passed them on, until in time they were honed into an American aphorism: The only good Indian is a dead Indian.

  There is a curious parallel between Scotland and the United States of America in that subjugation of the human natives and the wolves seemed to go hand in hand, as if there were some unspoken recognition among their distant governments that the people might draw inexplicable sustenance from the presence of wolves in their midst. Many readers may well find that notion preposterous, but consider the quote from Smith and Ferguson at the beginning of this chapter: ‘Seeing a wolf in the wild can feel like one of the final frontiers of nature – a frontier than can never be possessed.’ Nothing was more intolerable to the London government of the eighteenth century or the Washington government of the nineteenth century than the idea of a frontier that can never be possessed.

  Be that as it may, as the twentieth century struggled with its conscience through the pre- and post-war years, the pioneers of wolf conservation began to find a market for their ideas and their books. Aldo Leopold’s now famous Road to Damascus moment in A Sand County Almanac was beginning to burn into the American folk-mind. He was young, he said, and ‘full of trigger-itch’. ‘A pile of wolves’ that turned out to be cubs welcoming the return of an adult, appeared below the rimrock where he was sitting having lunch:

  In those days we had never heard of passing up a chance to kill a wolf. In a second we were pumping lead into the pack, but with more excitement than accuracy . . . when our rifles were empty, the old wolf was down, and a pup was dragging a leg into impassable slide-rocks. We reached the old wolf in time to watch a fierce green fire dying in her eyes. I realized then, and have known ever since, that there was something new to me in those eyes – something known only to her and to the mountain . . . I thought that because fewer wolves meant more deer, that no wolves would mean hunters’ paradise. But after seeing the green fire die, I sensed that neither the wolf nor the mountain agreed with such a view.

  Leopold’s remarkable book, arguably the single greatest piece of nature writing ever, was published in 1949, the year after he died in a fire, and at a time when he was an adviser to the United Nations on conservation. How much healthier our wild landscapes might have been had he lived – and had the United Nations listened – is an idle speculation, but he had come to understand the place of the wolf in nature’s hierarchy, and the necessity of its presence for the wilderness to be in good heart. The American architect Frank Lloyd Wright said that he did believe in God, but he spelled it Nature. If you hold with that illuminating idea, then you could do worse than have A Sand County Almanac for your bible.

  Five years before its publication, Adolph Murie, the first serious wolf biologist, had published The Wolves of Mount McKinley, a ground-breaking work now regarded as a classic, not least because it was produced in a climate of wolf-hatred when pressure was being exerted by hunters to kill wolves inside the Mount McKinley National Park (now Denali) in Alaska. And some just went in and killed every pup in every den they could find anyway.

  Nor was it just an American problem. This was how bad things had got:

  In 1968 . . . the grey wolf had just been listed as an endangered species in the lower forty-eight states; the Soviet Union had declared war on wolves; poisoning was still widespread across Canada; and the purity of the red wolf, which inhabits the south-eastern United States, was rapidly being eroded by an influx of coyote genes.

  Between public hatred and government extermination, wolves had disappeared from one-third to one-half of their former range, which originally included almost all the landmass of the Northern Hemisphere above twenty degrees latitude (which runs through Mexico City and Bombay, India). They were gone from much of western Europe and the more populated areas of Asia as well as from Mexico and the contiguous United States. If the wolf had any friends, it wasn’t clear who they were.

  So wrote another front-line wolf biologist, L. David Mech, in his foreword to a book called Wolf Wars by yet another, Hank Fischer. The book is the story of the plan to restore wolves to Yellowstone National Park, which straddles the northern US states of Wyoming, Montana and Idaho. It was a long and bloody campaign, arguably the most divisive in the troubled history of wildlife conservation anywhere in the world. Fischer’s book was published in 1995, the year the first Canadian wolves were finally released in Yellowstone, but even at that defining moment the wolf wars were far from over. Fischer wrote:

  No one declared a truce in the wolf wars after wolves returned to Yellowstone Park and central Idaho. In fact, the battle cries grew shriller than ever. The Wyoming legislature, dominated by agricultural interests, welcomed wolves with a $500 bounty for anyone who managed to shoot one straying outside park boundaries. The governor vetoed the bounty but not the sentiment behind it. Montana’s legislature responded with a resolution calling for the government to stock New York’s Central Park with wolves. Idaho’s new governor threatened to call out the National Guard to drive wolves from his state.

  Conservation – principally in the shape of Defenders of Wildlife and the Sierra Club – had taken on the huge American agriculture industry and, suddenly, the White House; for in 1994, Congress went Republican after 40 years of Democrat domination, an era during which the Nixon administration had passed the Endangered Species Act and the wolf had been the first species to be listed. Fischer was the Northern Rockies field representative for Defenders of Wildlife from 1978 onwards. He developed the Wolf Compensation Fund and served on Congress’s Wolf Management Committee. His persuasive testimony before Congress, in court, and at endless public hearings, became a powerful ally for the wolves’ cause. He was a spectator among the huge crowds that gathered at the Roosevelt Arch to welcome the motorcade of government vehicles bringing the first wolves into Yellowstone.

  It was a watershed. Conservationists all across the northern hemisphere celebrated and reasoned that if you could put wolves, of all things, back into the United States, anything was possible anywhere. Yellowstone shone its light into many murky corners of the world, and it still does. But in 1995, Fischer was not so sure. He had fought the wolf wars from the beginning and bore the scars. His book concludes on an almost weary note:

  Although historians may view Yellowstone Park wolf restoration as an important conservation milestone, it’s not a particularly good model for endangered species recovery. The process took too long, was unnecessarily divisive, and cost too much. The United States has hundreds of imperilled wildlife species in need of help. Unless we adopt new tactics, our nation’s efforts to conserve endangered species will fail.

  His solution is to find a process that unifies rather than divides; political, industrial and conservation leaders who promote co-operation rather than confrontation, and whose organisations are hell-bent on finding answers. He quotes the biologist Paul Errington, perhaps the best-known 27 words out of the millions that comprise the copious literature of wolves: ‘Of all the native biological constituents of a northern wilderness scene, I should say that the wolves present the greatest test of human wisdom and good intentions.’ To which Fischer adds his last word: ‘Bringing wolves back to Yellowstone Park certainly shows our nation’s good intentions. But the test of our wisdom will be whether we allow them to flourish.’

  Well, by the end of 2007, Yellowstone had 11 different wolf packs ranging in size from four wolves to 22, and a total of at least 171 compared to the peak figure of 174 in 2003. And 2007 was the first year since reintroduction that no new packs were formed, suggesting that the national park, with its superabundance of grazing animals including elk, moose, bison and deer, has all the wolves – or at least all the wolf territories – that it can handle. But in 2008, although the number of wolves had dropped to 124, there were 12 packs. One way or another, that sounds like flourishing to me.

  A companion reintroduction in central Idaho, west of Yellowstone, a certain amount of dispersal that is inevitable giv
en the wolf’s propensity for travel, a slightly more relaxed attitude to the wolf thanks to Yellowstone’s high profile and impressive public relations efforts on behalf of wolves, and the cross-border movement of Canadian wolves – all those factors have established a population of around 1,500 wolves in the three states of Idaho, Montana and Wyoming. A few have crossed into Oregon. That too sounds like flourishing.

  Whether wisdom will continue to hold sway, time will tell. But what seems from this distance like a grotesque numbers game has begun, so that some critics of wolf reintroduction from the farming and hunting lobby say the numbers in the north-west Rockies states could be as low as 300 and still sustain a viable wolf population while the more optimistic scientists have argued for 2,000, and hunters have claimed that elk populations are declining due to wolves in a year in which they shot more than 22,000 elk in Wyoming alone. That kind of statistical feeding frenzy makes me squirm, but that may be simply because there is nothing in Europe to compare it with.

  The decision of the Fish and Wildlife Service in 2008 to ‘delist’ wolves in the northern Rockies under the Endangered Species Act, and hand over wolf-management to the three states who found the original introduction scheme too politically hot to handle, made my eyebrows rise, but it was upheld in 2009 by US Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar, with the conspicuous proviso that the wolf would remain listed in Wyoming because its law and management plans were not strong enough. But management of wolves will be turned over to state agencies in Montana and Idaho and parts of Washington, Oregon and Utah, plus the Great Lakes states of Michigan, Minnesota and Wisconsin.

  My vote doesn’t count in the United States of America, but I have always believed that you protect the strongholds with all the resources you can muster, on the simple principle that however a particular species fares furth of the strongholds there is always scope for subsequent expansion out from the strongholds if they are in good heart and good health. Delisting obviously reduces protection outside the national parks, and one newspaper report that came my way noted that between March and May 2008, the number of wolves killed by people in Wyoming, Montana and Idaho rose sharply to a total of around 70. One official at the Natural Resources Defense Council responded to the revelation thus: ‘There’s much greater public appreciation of the role of top carnivores. On the other hand, the myth of Little Red Riding Hood just won’t die. It’s amazing the pockets of fear and irrationality that still pervade the wolf debate.’

  For all that, Yellowstone is a beacon. It is America’s and the world’s first national park, and celebrated as ‘America’s best idea’. (It was, of course, the idea of the emigrant Scot John Muir, which rather makes you wonder in a Leopold-at-the-UN kind of way the influences he might have brought to bear on the wild landscapes of Scotland had his father not decided to emigrate in 1849.) It is also a place of such sensation-rich beauty and tremendousness that whenever television casts its eye over it, as the BBC did in three memorable hour-long documentaries in the early spring of 2009, matter-of-factly giving the wolves their place amid tumultuous landscapes, the cause of wild wolves leaps effortlessly into the hearts and minds of millions on my side of the Atlantic Ocean. You watch, you are seduced, and the task of reintroducing wolves into your own country simply becomes an endeavour of the most self-evident wisdom. How could any clear-thinking person ever imagine that our mountains, forests, lochs, rivers and moors could ever be complete as long as the wolf is absent? And regardless of what new wolf wars may or may not lie ahead on the map of American domestic politics, Yellowstone has already done that, and people all across the northern hemisphere who crave a closer walk with wildness and wilderness are grateful.

  It is one thing to watch the films. It is, of course, another to make the effort to meet wildness head-on. Doug Smith, leader of the Yellowstone Wolf Project, voiced his concerns in his remarkable account of the first ten years of wolf reintroduction, Decade of the Wolf:

  The vast majority of what people experience of nature these days, after all, comes from television. Entertaining, and even educational, as it may be, television flattens wildlife watching – purging the physical discomforts, removing all the time normally spent waiting for something to happen. Every inconvenience is left behind on the cutting room floor. The result is often a kind of tepid album of greatest hits, a non-stop string of events that even most of us working in the field see only a handful of times in our lives. While it’s true that wolves show themselves frequently at Yellowstone, their appearance is nonetheless still in the context of the larger wild preserve – uncut, unedited. A person has to at least be willing to make direct contact with nature, to experience an unfolding of life that goes far beyond the animal he’s come to see. In that sense wolf watching in Yellowstone is an experience of nature much as it has always been . . . As best-selling nineteenth-century author Henry George pointed out, the wild preserves of the West are critical, even for those who never set eyes on them. The mere thought of them, he suggested, tends to engender ‘a consciousness of freedom’. To that end, the memory of wolves running like the wind through the Lamar Valley, or sliding down snowfields in fits of play, or even sleeping away a summer afternoon in the tall grass, can be a remarkable touchstone to that which makes our lives and our culture just a little more fascinating, a little more rich with wonder.

  The Yellowstone wolves are the most watched in the world. Wolf-watching ‘hotspots’ have emerged along the road through the Lamar Valley, and the sheer number of visitors resulted in the Wolf Road Management Project with four objectives – human safety, wolf safety, visitor enjoyment and wolf monitoring and research. In the 117 days of the project from May–September in 2007, wolves were seen every day. The project team helped 32,600 people to see wolves, by far the highest number in the eight years of the project, but an independent research team from the University of Montana estimated the number of people actually seeing wolves was almost ten times that figure – 310,046. So watching wolves is not only public relations par excellence for the cause of wolves in general and wolf reintroduction in particular, it is also a major tourist attraction. The world beats a path to Yellowstone to see wolves, spends its money when it gets there, and spreads the gospel when it goes home again.

  Northern hemisphere wilderness needs Yellowstone as never before, not just for its public relations value in the cause of the wolf, but also because it has created a unique opportunity to study the wolf. Because there were no wolves there for 70 years before 1995, the land had suffered the effects of that absence. Leopold had articulated the nature of the problem that the Yellow-stone Project would inherit more 55 years later:

  I have lived to see state after state extirpate its wolves. I have watched the face of many a newly wolfless mountain, and seen the south-facing slopes wrinkle with a maze of new deer trails. I have seen every edible bush and seedling browsed, first to anaemic desuetude, and then to death. I have seen every edible tree defoliated to the height of a saddlehorn. Such a mountain looks as if someone had given God new pruning shears, and forbidden Him all other exercise. In the end the starved bones of the hoped-for deer herd, dead of its own too-much, bleach with the bones of the dead sage, or moulder under the high-lined junipers.

  I now suspect that just as a deer herd lives in mortal fear of its wolves, so does a mountain live in mortal fear of its deer. And perhaps with better cause, for while a buck pulled down by wolves can be replaced in two or three years, a range pulled down by too many deer may fail of replacement in as many decades.

  After seven such decades, Yellowstone’s mountain landscape knew all about that mortal fear. But one thing missing from Leopold’s telling assessment of the problem was any experience of what would prove to be the solution – putting back the wolves. Almost from the moment the first wolves arrived, the staff of the Yellowstone Project became eye-witnesses to the unfolding effects of the wolf as a primary influence of biological change, change with an enormous reach down through the many-layered depths of the food chain
to the very mountain grasses themselves. The very presence of wolves on the ground inevitably has a profound effect on prey species, but here was the chance to watch what happened as if it were a demonstration of the very forces that had shaped Yellowstone long before the white man came. The crucial change came in the behaviour of the huge elk herds. (Of 323 wolf kills detected by project staff in 2007, for example, 272 were elk.2) They began to abandon, or at least linger less long, in favourite grazing areas with no wide view. It had suddenly become important to see the surrounding land to avoid surprise attacks by wolves. What was happening was that the elk were remembering how to behave like elk again after so many sedentary years. As the northern part of Yellowstone gradually filled up with wolf pack territories, the elk were compelled to resume a life that is more or less constantly on the move. At a stroke, grazing pressures began to ease, and at a stroke, nature rushed in to fill the vacancy, unleashing all the diversity in its repertoire.

  Willow was the first beneficiary, as willow so often is after ecological upheaval. Its recovery was swift – within the first three years – and decisive. That other great manipulator of the natural environment, the beaver, followed the willow. A beaver reintroduction scheme just outside the national park assisted a process that would have begun anyway, and beavers migrated into the park, lured by the abundance of willow. In the first decade of the Yellowstone Wolf Project, the solitary beaver colony in the north of the national park had become nine beaver colonies. What had begun was a process which, at its most spectacular, is called a trophic cascade, when a fundamental ecological change literally cascades right down the food chain from the top predators to the lowliest plants. Beavers build ponds, expand – or even create – wetland, a habitat that offers new homes for mammals as large as a moose and as small as a vole, for amphibians and reptiles, insects and wildfowl and songbirds, acquatic plants, grasses and flowers. These, added to the flowers that have begun to thicken again in regenerating grassland, are the first brushstrokes. The presence of wolves has begun to paint the mountains in new colours. The change is patchy at first, but once it begins, its progress is undeniable.