Suzanne adjusted the scope for her eyes and focused on the alpha female. That charcoal, massive wolf now raised her head. Intently, she scented the air, keenly focused in our direction.
“She’s assessing our danger to her pack,” McIntyre whispered.
Suzanne let out a long, soft whistle. “Wolves look right through you, don’t they?” she whispered as the female’s mate jumped up to join her in studying our hillside.
None of us moved a muscle. We did not want to startle the wolves and lose them to the forest. I no longer had the technological intimacy of the telescope, and without the artificial eyes, I could feel more directly their fixed gaze—as if a laser beam of heat and light shot into my body. Wolves are also watching us, I realized. The female and male pair sniffed, analyzing our human scents, our distance, our intent. We were all locked in the unsettling intimacy of equal predators.
AS WE KEPT OUR SCOPES FIXED on the Crystal Creek pack’s après-picnic nap, McIntyre told us about the other original packs here in Yellowstone—the Soda Butte and the Rose Creek packs. The Soda Buttes were four adults and a pup; the Rose Creeks were two adults and one pup. These fourteen Alberta wolves would be the first wolves to reclaim territory and to give birth in Yellowstone in almost a century.
“The Rose Creeks are up north of the Crystal Creek pack,” McIntyre explained. “The alpha male, Number 10, was really special. In the acclimation pen he immediately bonded with an unfamiliar adult female, Number 9, and her yearling daughter. When the biologists opened that pen to set the wolves free, Number 10 quickly left. But the two females were afraid to venture out. Number 10 was so calm and committed to his mate that he patiently waited several days for her.” McIntyre grinned. “Finally she followed him out of the pen. Together they explored their new home. A month later, just as his mate was about to give birth, Number 10 went out hunting for her” McIntyre said.
Number 10 was the largest and most confident of all the reintroduced Yellowstone wolves. Biologists respected and admired him because he showed no fear when they ventured near his acclimation pen. Douglas Smith noted that the large dark-gray wolf possessed a “startling, muscular show of authority… Number 10 wasn’t just free. He was back in charge.” Once established as the alpha male in the three-member Rose Creek family, Number 10 was loyal, nurturing, and self-assured. He was often seen silhouetted in full view of people along a mountain ridge, howling for his family.
That’s how a Red Lodge, Montana, bear hunter, Chad Kirch McKittrick, first spotted Number 10. McKittrick and a buddy, Dusty Steinmasel, were having a morning beer and trying to extract McKittrick’s pickup from where it had gotten stuck in the mud. Thomas McNamee recounts what happened in an Outside magazine article.
“That’s a wolf, Dusty,” he says. “I’m going to shoot it.”
“Are you sure?” Steinmasel says. “It might be a dog.”
“No,” McKittrick says, “it’s a wolf.”
“Chad, no,” Steinmasel pleads. “What if it’s somebody’s dog?”
“Yeah, right,” McKittrick says. He takes aim…
Dusty Steinmasel sees the wolf spin around, bite at the wound high on his back, fall, kick his legs twice, and then lie still.
“Why?” he cries out.
The men face a decision. The wolf’s radio collar is still transmitting, and the federal authorities are always monitoring. After stringing the wolf up to skin him, they strip Number 10 of his radio collar. McKittrick decides he wants to keep the wolf skull, so he stows the head and hides it in a garbage bag bound for home. Steinmasel is still arguing that they report the wolf kill to the authorities, but McKittrick decides to go bear hunting. Feeling guilty and ambivalent, Steinmasel throws the radio collar in a creek. He wonders whether it is still transmitting. “He wants Chad McKittrick to be caught,” writes McNamee. “He wants to be caught himself.”
Steinmasel and McKittrick do not know that Number 10’s radio collar is now transmitting in mortality mode and the Fish and Wildlife Service (USFW) is already trying to find it. Meanwhile Number 10’s mate, Number 9, who was also radio collared, has gone into her den to prepare to give birth to the first native-born Yellowstone wolves in six decades. She doesn’t know her mate will never return to her to help raise their pups. Without Number 10 the family will be in jeopardy. With no father to hunt and regurgitate the meat for his mate, would she have enough strength and nourishment to nurse her pups? Wolf biologist and Montana project leader for USFW Joe Fontaine begins to bring roadkill to Number 9’s den in the hope she will not be frightened and abandon her pups.
The USFW, Defenders of Wildlife, and National Audubon Society offer rewards for information on the wolf killer. Meanwhile Fontaine keeps radio track of Number 9’s movements. One early May day he discovers a small snow-bed dug out under a spruce. Inside is a whimpering litter of eight newborn wolf pups. Nearby someone finds and reports a huge, headless wolf carcass skinned and tangled in bailing twine—Number 9 has dug her den next to the dead body of her mate. Later the biologists determine that the same day Number 10 was killed his mate gave birth to his pups. If there is any hope that Number 9 and her eight pups will survive, the Yellowstone biologists decide, she and her pups must be captured and restored to their acclimation pens for later release.
McKittrick and Steinmasel are also captured and confess to the killing, though McKittrick claims he thought he was shooting a feral dog. Locally McKittrick has many admirers who consider his wolf killing a heroic act and buy him beers, asking for autographs. Some even urge him to run for governor. But McKittrick is deteriorating into drunken and bizarre binges. Although a judge has admonished McKittrick to forego firearms and to stay close to home, “he is seen shooting into the air, often wearing a black cowboy hat and no shirt.” A Montana jury of his peers finds McKittrick guilty of killing Number 10. He will serve three months in a detention center, six months in prison, and a year of supervised release. When he again has an income, McKittrick will be fined $10,000 to cover the costs of capturing, monitoring, and releasing Number 10.
Wolf biologist Douglas Smith eulogized Number 10 in his remarkable book Decade of the Wolf:
He remains in many ways an ideal icon of this reintroduction: both a symbol of the extraordinary strength of wolves—their ability to thrive if given half a chance—and at the same time, a reminder of how frail such vitality can be in the face of humans who would wipe them from the earth.
Number 9 and 10’s first litter of pups thrived in the acclimation pen. And another male wolf, Number 8, a yearling from the Crystal Creek pack, often came to visit outside the pen, befriending the pups and their mother. By the time Number 9 and her eight pups were ready for release, they had a young but devoted Number 8 waiting to claim them as his new family.
Rick McIntyre sent me a photo that shows not only a legacy of Number 10’s power but also the way these wolves are changing the world—and us. Standing against the backdrop of a snow-encircled mountain, biologist Joe Fontaine proudly holds up a three-week-old, five-pound wolf pup from the first litter born in Yellowstone—the offspring of Number 9 and Number 10. Golden fur, intense but tiny black eyes looking straight out at the camera, the pup’s little paws clutching Fontaine’s fingers. Joe Fontaine is well known for his expertise in the maternal call of wolf parent to pups. The newborns recognized him and often responded to his calls. The proud expression of this young and bearded biologist could be that of any Montana trapper or hunter showing off his trophy of the wild. But there is no carcass draped over this man’s shoulders, no rifle or metal trap to advertise his hunting prowess. Instead, Fontaine is faintly smiling as he protectively lifts up the pup for all the world to see. Like a proud father.
Fontaine wrote that when he discovered Number 9’s den, “I wanted to yell to the whole world that Number 9 had produced the first litter of wolf pups in the Yellowstone ecosystem in sixty years, but there was only me, the pups, and the silence of the forest.” Giving credit to all those who had helped return wolves t
o this national park, Fontaine concluded, “I felt humble and proud to be a part of that team, a team that has just won a championship game in wildlife management.”
ON THAT HILLSIDE IN 1995 we did not yet know the fate of Number 9 and 10’s pups, but we hoped they would thrive and survive to parent more generations.
“Oh, man, this is just awesome!” the burly man next to me whispered. “Check out the mom and her pups.”
We all swung our telescopes toward F5 and two pups who were now jumping on her. She simply rolled over, exposing her belly not to nurse but just to allow them to play at being alpha. We couldn’t know that one of these yearling males would soon step up to be the young father to Number 9 and 10’s pups. There was a murmur among our small group of wolf watchers as F5 finally leapt up and, with one giant but gentle paw, subdued her usurper pups. Then the whole family bounded off again across the river, their splashes rising like little geysers in the chill air.
Several of these people on the Yellowstone hillside with me had come from far away to see their first wild wolves. Others were, like McIntyre, regulars who watched wolves daily, memorizing their stories and following certain wolves like rock stars. Because so many millions of people would witness wolves in the wild over the next twenty years—4.1 million in 2015 alone—certain wolves emerged as major characters in long-running narratives. Their intense family bonds and power struggles echo our human societies. New York Times science writer William K. Stevens noted that wolves “are as various in their personalities as dogs, their lineal descendants—and as humans. Their social life within the pack is a mixture of dominance and what people would call affection.”
McIntyre echoed this when he told us, “There are no two species so similar in behavior as wolves and human beings.” He would later tell a reporter, “Certain wolves I’ve known—they were better at being a wolf than I’ve been at being a person.”
These first fourteen wolves introduced to Yellowstone from Canada would go on to endlessly enthrall watchers and storytellers. Longtime and respected wolf advocates such as Laurie Lyman have kept daily wolf journals and blogs, like her Yellowstone Reports, which are read by many devoted readers. What are we following so obsessively when we watch wolves? We watch the wolf families’ territorial struggles, their passions, and tragic losses. Most wolves in the wild die violently, rarely of old age. Anyone who has ardently tuned in to Game of Thrones has only to watch these Yellowstone wolves to see mirrored our same human struggle for power, dominance, and alliance acted out every day in the wild. In fact, the author of the wildly popular Game of Thrones series, George R. R. Martin, is a loyal wolf advocate. In 2015 Martin sponsored a contest to benefit a New Mexico wolf sanctuary, “offering two donors the chance to be written into (and then killed off!) in the Winds of Winter, marks his forthcoming book.
One of the most riveting characters among the Yellowstone wolf families was the lean and charcoal-colored Number 42, also called the Yellowstone Cinderella. Hers is a saga of jealousy, competition, and a violent sibling rivalry that mirrors our most enduring stories. Among wolves, as with humans, competition between siblings for parental attention, food, and rank begins at birth. In Yellowstone the Druids, another group of the original Canadian wolves, were perhaps the most closely watched wolf family in the world. In 1996 the Druids’ matriarch, Number 40, was so fierce and dominant that she even deposed her own mother, Number 39—who was then forced to flee her family. Wandering alone outside the park boundaries, Number 39 was mistaken for a coyote and shot. Between 1997 and 2000 Number 40 then reigned over her subordinate sister, Number 42, with an “iron-pawed leadership.” More tyrant than sibling, Number 40 took every opportunity to thrash, harass, and humiliate her sister. Dubbed “Cinderella” for her forbearance of such mistreatment, Number 42 never fought back—not even when her temperamental alpha sister repeatedly trounced her. But she, a fan favorite of wolf watchers, sensibly created benign alliances with other female wolves in the family, including two older sisters, Numbers 103 and 105.
When Cinderella tried to make her own nearby den, Number 40 tracked her down and viciously attacked her. Again, Cinderella did not defend herself; instead, she simply submitted to the brutal dominance display, passively lying down for the beating. She abandoned her den. Biologists wondered whether the tyrannical Number 40 had actually killed Cinderella’s new litter or if Cinderella’s denning was a “pseudo-pregnancy.” If Cinderella did, indeed, have pups, none of them survived. Douglas Smith, in his “Portrait of Wolf Number 42,” notes that the “foul-tempered” Number 40 ruled her siblings with absolute authority. But when Number 40 gave birth to her own pups, the wolf received no help from her siblings; instead, the oppressive matriarch had to depend upon her mate, “the fine, alpha male, a wolf long on patience, Number 21.”
As in human families, eventually there is often a come-uppance for sibling cruelty. It’s what we wait for in our stories—that moment when a righteous justice prevails and the tyrant is deposed. We long for the underdog to rise up and defeat the bully. We cheer when a dictator’s massive statues are toppled by a people’s revolt. We find hope when an autocrat is finally imprisoned in the same way he or she has condemned so many others.
When Cinderella finally did give birth to her own pups, she was attended by her many allies, including the loyal sisters Numbers 103 and 105. They brought Cinderella much-needed food to sustain her in nursing the newborns. The matriarch, Number 40, also had another litter of pups nearby. After about five weeks a mother wolf will wean her pups, but until then she is often confined to the den. One day, when her pups were about six weeks old, Cinderella, with her clan of female allies, ventured out for her first foray after motherhood. Unfortunately Cinderella and Number 105 were discovered by Number 40, the cruel matriarch, and tromped upon, as usual. Then Number 40 headed straight for Cinderella’s den and her vulnerable pups. As night fell, the Yellowstone biologists dreaded that the Druid matriarch would, true to her almost mythical jealousy, kill all of Cinderella’s newborns.
It was an anxious night. But the chill morning brought an unexpected discovery. The long-ruling Number 40 was found bloody and barely able to stand, her jugular vein ruptured, the bite wounds on the back of her neck so deep that biologist Douglas Smith said he “could bury my index finger all the way to the knuckle.” At first the biologists believed Number 40 had been horribly wounded by a car. Because it was assumed to be a human-caused injury, an “unnatural event,” biologists decided to intervene and tend to her wound. But as Number 40, the once-mighty and malicious matriarch, was lifted into the back of a pickup truck, she drew her last breath.
Biologists then pieced together what must have happened that night when Number 40 raced to Cinderella’s den, perhaps intent on murder and infanticide. Cinderella’s long and faithful alliance with the two supportive sisters, Numbers 103 and 105, proved to be a despot’s undoing. “For Number 40, allies were in short supply,” Doug Smith commented. “It was payback time.” This revolt against an authoritarian Number 40 was “the first time in the scientific record that an alpha wolf has been killed by her own subordinates.” Ding dong, the witch is dead. The endlessly dominated but enduring Cinderella, Number 42, rose to alpha female in the Druid family. A time of benevolence and peace within the family assured that by 2001 there were three more litters born, and the Druids became the largest Yellowstone wolf pack ever documented.
TO BALANCE THE MURDEROUS TALES of sibling rivalry we hear stories of wolf family loyalty, sibling cooperation, and survival.
The same alpha male, wolf Number 21, who brought food for his cruel matriarch, Number 40, upon her death took his place as the mate and coleader with Cinderella of the Druid pack. Together Cinderella and Number 21 raised Number 40’s motherless pups as their own. Rick McIntyre lauded Number 21 as a true peer with Cinderella in generously leading their thriving family. It’s not about dominance, McIntyre pointed out. The true alpha male demonstrates a “quiet confidence and self-assurance.… You know what�
��s best for your pack. You lead by example.… You have a calming effect.”
McIntyre pointed out in a New York Times interview that he has rarely seen an alpha male “act aggressively toward the pack’s other members, including mate, offspring, or siblings.” Number 21’s strength was equaled by his kindness, especially toward newborn pups. Number 21 and Number 42 were benevolent toward and fierce in defense of their Druid family. Under their leadership of the Druid dynasty there was almost half a decade of peace and prosperity.
But in 2004 the Druids would face off with another original pack, the Crystal Creeks—the very same pack we watched in 1995 from the Lamar Valley hillside. The Crystal Creek family would become the Mollies. Though smaller, this family would take on the Druid family in a boundary dispute. And prevail. Cinderella would die—not as she had lived, in relative peace and nonviolence, but in a battle with a rival family for territory. When biologist Douglas Smith told regular wolf watchers that Cinderella—their beloved and gentle matriarch—had died, many wept. With her passing, none of the original founder wolves restored to Yellowstone were left. But their descendants lived on to delight and mesmerize many millions of Park visitors.
In 1995, as we perched on that cold hillside, focusing our telescopes on the Crystal Creek family, I realized even then that it was an honor and an initiation to be witness to these founder wolves in Yellowstone. One day that I’ll always remember is watching the Crystal Creek pack raise their heads in harmony and begin to sing together—eerie and intricate harmonies that echoed between mountains, a ricochet of high-pitched howls that rose and then fell into a throaty elegy. Wolves can hear each other’s howls from as far away as nine miles in the open spaces and over six miles in dense forests. From our Lamar Valley hillside, a mile away, we could easily hear the wolf chorus. The howls faded, only to begin again with one yip or long withheld treble notes. At the last, the wolf music was joined and anchored by a long moan.
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