by Jim Crumley
Other trees, notably cottonwood and aspen, have also begun to prosper again, more slowly than the willow, but once aspen regenerates in significant numbers, the most beautiful tree of the northern hemisphere brings all the shades of fire, the most audacious tints of the painter’s palette, to the landscape.
Butterflies and moths and other insects arrive with the invigorated and diversifying vegetation, and song-birds not seen there in half a century contemplate the prospects of a new niche to fill. Science argues with itself about the point at which it can assert that a trophic cascade is finally and unarguably in place, but the process has begun, and unless America loses its nerve in the matter of wolves and scraps the Yellowstone Wolf Project that has won the admiration of the watching world, it can only go from strength to strength. This is the power of the wolf. This is how it paints mountains.
But the wolf has made one more impact on the ecology of Yellowstone, one that took the biologists by surprise. It is simply that wolves provide so much food for non-wolves. In Decade of the Wolf, Smith and Ferguson write:
Thus far we’ve observed no less than twelve different species using prey killed by wolves . . . Biologist John Varley has dubbed this phenomenon ‘food for the masses’. ‘In all the planning, all the studies,’ says Varley, ‘the one thing we totally underestimated was how many other mouths the wolves would feed. Beetles and flies and mountain bluebirds – it’s incredible.’
Beetles and flies and bluebirds, and ravens and magpies, black bears and grizzly bears (a grizzly can simply take over an elk carcase that wolves have killed, and often does), coyotes and foxes, golden eagles and bald eagles . . . and what’s left after that lot have had their fill breaks down and seeps back into the soil as nutrients. There is no end to the benevolence of wolves. Yellowstone has taught us that too.
Scattered through the pages of Decade of the Wolf are portraits of individual wolves that have stood out in the eyes and minds and doubtless the hearts of those charged with operating the Yellowstone Wolf Project. There were number 14 and Old Blue, for example, in Chapter One, and then there was 293F in Chapter Three, and it is the life and death of that wolf that I return to now as I consider the potential of Yellowstone to influence the wider world. She was, you may remember, famous for leaving Yellowstone. She was a collared wolf, a two-year-old from the Swan Lake Pack near Mammoth in the north-west corner of Wyoming. One day in January, 2004, she walked off the radar and kept walking. It may have been that she left in search of a mate of her own and a territory of her own. It may have been that her lowly ranking in the pack offered her too few opportunities and she was one of those wolves that have what it takes to be a lone wolf for as long as it takes. Or it may be that she was one of those wolves that I think of as pilgrim wolves because they undertake extraordinary journeys, and at the end of their journey things are not quite the same as they were before. Perhaps she was just looking for a new mountain to paint.
By the spring of 2004, wolves had been reintroduced not only into Wyoming, Montana and Idaho but also into New Mexico and Arizona. It had begun to look as if Colorado was next. Historically, Colorado had been an important state for wolves. As the white man opened up the West in the mid-nineteenth century, estimates of almost 40,000 wolves were being bandied about, although there is no evidence that anyone ever tried to count them. Improbable as the number seems now, the size of the estimate suggests that the settlers were seeing a lot of wolves. A hundred years later there were none. But, by 2004, wolves were on the agenda in Colorado again, Rocky Mountain National Park was considering them as a solution to problematic numbers of elk and a Colorado Wolf Management Plan Working Group had been set up. It all seemed only a matter of time.
Then, on 7 June, a vehicle travelling on Interstate 70 near Idaho Springs struck and killed a wolf. It was 293F and she had travelled alone from northern Yellowstone, the better part of 500 miles. So, imagine you are one of the pro-wolf campaigners in Colorado, battle-weary from too many committee meetings, public hearings and the rest; you sit on the Wolf Management Plan Working Party, endlessly and slowly drafting and redrafting a plan for the distant day when the first reintroduced wolves finally shake off the encumbrances of the bureaucratic process (for all serious conservation endeavour is endless and slow; I often wonder what it is we are so afraid of). Then one day, a day beginning like any other, a wolf turns up dead on your doorstep having travelled 500 miles for the privilege. Coincidence or omen? Nature doing what nature does, or the divine intervention of some God-of-the-Wilds you didn’t know you believed in until that moment? Perhaps you remember Frank Lloyd Wright’s words: ‘I do believe in God but I spell it Nature.’ Is this what he meant?
Science, as represented by 293F’s collar, allows you to retrace elements of her journey, and you assemble bits and pieces of it from what you know or what you guess of her route. She has survived largely on deer, which she has killed alone. Perhaps then, some long quiet evening hour, you marvel at the revealed nature of what it is you are trying to put back. Perhaps, after all, wolves will just walk back into Colorado uninvited in migratory pilgrimage, deftly avoid the trucks on I-70, and take the situation out of your hands.
Wolf 293F has assured herself a place among nature’s immortals in the Rocky Mountains. She also became the reason for a book. Comeback Wolves – Western Writers Welcome the Wolf Home (2005) is an anthology in which, to quote its own publicity, ‘50 authors, ecologists, journalists, poets, activists and biologists gather their voices together in protest, praise, hope, and perseverance, all in order to raise awareness of the issues, past and present, surrounding wolves’. Such is the strength of America’s enviably accomplished nature writing tradition.
I quote from Hal Clifford’s essay in Chapter Three, but surely the most poignant page in the book is the dedication – For Wolf 293F. It is a wonderful excuse for such a book, and it is a very good book. And if there are 50 people in and around Colorado who can produce such thoughtful and diverse responses to the life (and one death) of wolves and have the whole thing published in one year, then I would urge every lone wolf in the American West looking for a place to settle to look no further than Colorado. Take care crossing I-70, but know you will be among friends.
Two of those friends will be George Sibley and SueEllen Campbell. Sibley teaches journalism at Western State College of Colorado and Campbell teaches nature and environmental literature at Colorado State University (I await, as yet in vain, the day a Scottish university launches a degree course in nature and environmental literature!). Both are represented in Comeback Wolves, and their contributions made an impact on me for very different reasons.
Sibley’s essay, slyly titled Never Cry 293F, is moving and funny and thought-provoking, not least in his unique take on the collars that science fits to many wolves. (Yellowstone, I was pleased to read, has guidelines for wolf-collaring, no more than 50 per cent of any one pack, and the wolf project declines to use ear tags. The reason is that many visitors like to see wild wolves looking wild. ‘While we continue to place a high priority on gathering scientific information,’ writes Doug Smith, ‘so too do we need to be concerned about preserving the aesthetics of wild nature.’) Sibley writes:
My hope – a somewhat ridiculous hope, but those are the only serious hopes – is that somehow the wolves, consciously or unconsciously, will start adapting their capacity for intuitive communication to their radio frequencies, and will start broadcasting something that will help us know . . . something we need to know but so clearly don’t. Yes, it is a long shot, but let’s face it: our electronic extensions may be more sensitive than our natural ones these days, and we certainly spend more time and money transcribing and interpreting digital signals then anything else. If there were something coming through the wolf’s collar, actually from the wolf, we might find it electronically where we no longer can empathetically.
He wondered about 293F, and whether her collar might answer some of his questions.
It’d be useful to know
what she thought when she left the Swan Lake pack, her family, her world. Was she asked or told to leave because the pack had outsized its territory? Do wolves actually have a sense of what they need to do to keep things in balance – even, or especially, to the extent of keeping themselves in balance? And even if they know that kind of thing, what were the feelings of the rest of the pack as they watched her leave, however necessary they knew it was? They are mammals like us; they don’t just know things, they feel.
And why would I say we need that kind of knowledge from wolves? Because it is so clear that we are far, far out of touch with any balanced relationship with the universe, and maybe wolves are better at that than we are. Why else would we be inviting back fellow large predators that we’d earlier killed off, if not for some kind of consultation?
SueEllen Campbell’s essay is a series of episodes covering several years. One, datelined Fairbanks, Alaska, stopped me in my tracks. She and a friend were teaching at a summer course on the University of Alaska campus:
We’ve read an essay about wolf trapping by local writer Sherry Simpson, and today she is visiting our class. Her essay is terrific – thoughtful, troubling, provocative, and complicated – but what really gets our attention is the wolfskin she’s brought.
And why did that stop me in my tracks? Because I know that wolfskin. In fact, I know Sherry Simpson. I know that she keeps the wolfskin on the back of a rocking chair. I met her on the same university campus three years before SueEllen Campbell did while I was researching another BBC radio programme. Her essay was shown to me by another Alaskan writer, Nancy Lord, who advised my producer and me to make the time to interview her. We did. I wrote something of the result in a book called Brother Nature (2007.) She had told me she kept the wolfskin on the rocking chair and that she like to touch it and think about it. I asked her what it made her think. She said, ‘It makes me think I could see more wolves in the wild. It’s such an incredibly difficult thing to do. It makes me question my own values about things. I’m willing to eat things I didn’t kill. I’m willing to wear fur I didn’t trap myself, so it makes me wonder where I do stand on a lot of these issues. It’s a great reminder of how there aren’t really borders here but membranes, and you can cross back and forward between them all the time. That’s what wilderness is here. I can live in a city and yet I can somehow cross through that membrane and be in wilderness just like that, and that’s important to me.’
I made a symbol of her wolfskin. It became my shorthand for Alaska. Every time I fingered it in my mind I would startle at its hidden energy. I would question it and long to know more about it, long to feel on my face that keen northwesterly bearing scents and senses of that land where there are no borders, only membranes to pass through at will between the rocking chair and the wilderness.
The wolf enables all that, yet that is a by-product of its life, a casual but priceless consequence of the way it goes about its daily business, the business of just being a wolf. Tonight, sitting at my desk by the window that faces west into a Highland glen as early spring darkness begins to fall and the voice of the first snipe of spring sounds beyond the window, a turned page in a book written several thousand miles away has confronted me with the 12-year-old memory of a conversation I return to in my mind almost every time I think or write about wolves, and the name of the person with whom I spoke. And the book just happened to be a memorial to a wolf that travelled 500 miles alone and died, and in her dying, achieved the remarkable beginning of – what was your phrase, Mr Sibley? – some kind of consultation. If a wolf howl drifts in through this open window some spring evening as darkness falls and the first snipe calls, you will know the consultation has borne astounding fruit.
CHAPTER 13
A Dance with the Moon
SHE HAD FOLLOWED the horse and its rider softly and at some distance as far as the edge of the wood. There she sat on a small rise studded with rocks and self-seeded pines a few inches high. She put her nose to the wind and stared out at the blue-black dusk that came in waves and lay in a miles-wide stillness all across the wild sprawl of the Moor. Its sky was blue-white and all but cloudless and first stars hung there.
She questioned herself about horse and rider: about their unhurried presence so far out on the Moor, the easy bond between them, their complementary movements like the limbs of a single creature. Her eyes followed them until they faded into the dusk, blue-black themselves, as if the landscape had reclaimed something of its own, as if they belonged to each other and to that place, like wolves belonged to the pack and to the territory of the pack.
The shoulder of a mountain to the south was suddenly wreathed in gold, the first trappings of brightening moonlight. Her head swung towards it and stared. The moon heaved slowly clear of the mountain and stood above it, a fat oval. Its presence galvanised her. She flipped onto her back and writhed and squirmed like an otter in seaweed; she paused with legs raised and bent and splayed; she flipped onto her belly, tongue unfurled, ears cocked, eyes searching; she sprang to her feet; she snapped and chased at an imaginary quarry running in tight circles and figures of eight, leaning into every curve; she pounced on a piece of pine bark a foot long and snatched it in her jaws; she threw it ten feet in the air with a jerk of her head and ran and leaped to catch it; she threw it again and danced after it on two legs; she threw it again and let it fall to earth, watching as it fell and landed six feet away. The instant it hit the ground she leaped and crunched both front paws down on it, shattering the pine bark into a dozen scraps. Then she turned her back on it.
Black eyes watched her, the eyes of a mesmerised stoat. The more she cavorted the more the stoat was emboldened by curiosity. It advanced from the shelter of rocks in small ripples, then an abrupt two-foot stance, then more ripples. In a precise repetition of the leap that shattered the pine bark she broke the back of the stoat; then she ate it. Then she turned and walked back into the trees.
She stepped into a shallow river where the moonlight enlivened the ripples over a bank of shingle. Halfway across she stopped dead and stared side-headed down at her front legs, ears cocked, entranced by the moonlight on the water and the patterns that broke and glittered round her legs then reformed and resumed their skittish jig with the moon. She turned her head from one side to the other. It was as if she were seeing something utterly new to her. It consumed her every sense and nerve-end, and for long moments only her head moved. Twice she lowered it to look back between her legs at the water’s advance; twice she looked directly at the moon, establishing in her mind the source of the sorcery. Then she began to race around in the shallows, snatching at the ripples with her jaws as if the lit crests of water were sinuous creatures she might catch. The game took over her life for perhaps ten minutes more, then she charged through deeper water like a bear chasing a salmon, then crashed ashore. She shook herself mightily, sending cascades of moon-bright droplets into the air, and in the process she invented another game. So she raced back into the water, charged ashore again, shook herself again, and this time she stopped abruptly to consider the effect of the moon on the airborne droplets. Three times more she repeated the madness, then she tired of it, and after a particularly hefty shake of her fur she raised her muzzle, tested the wind and vanished among the trees, a soundless darkening shadow among soundless darkening shadows.
CHAPTER 14
The Absence of Wolves
There is something in my character that craves old simplicities, that goes looking for elemental things, that wonders how much my species has lost in its relationship with nature’s other tribes, and how much of what is lost can be retrieved. When I go alone among mountains, among all wild places, I feel as if I am trying to repair an old and broken connection, like a bridge between landscapes. We broke it when we exterminated the wolf.
Again and again, walking the wolf-less mountains, I feel their absence, or rather I feel the distant and elusive nature of their presence, for no landscape that has sustained wolves ever loses completely the impr
int of their reign.
– Jim Crumley, Brother Nature (2007)
BEN VORLICH, Perthshire, the summit on an afternoon of early July some old summer or other, and either the day before or the day after my birthday, I forget which. I also forget which birthday. I remember the ptarmigan and the deer, though. The day had settled warm and still after night-into-morning rain. Banks of thin and listless blue-grey cloud, tending to white at the edges, clung to the ridges and blurred the rims of the corries, softened and paled their hard shadows. The sun’s ambition for that day was to banish all mountain cloud and grow hot, but two hours past midday the frail cloud still clung.