As Grimaud’s work reveals, there is fierce intimacy and tender tension in our musical resonance with wolves. Sympathy. A symphony. We may only hope that the howling of the wild wolf is not simply the tragic anthem of our nation. When we listen and join in their gorgeous chorus, we explore a soundscape that is unsettled, wild, and wide open. A territory, a meeting place, maybe even a reunion. Ensemble.
part five
WOLVES RETURN
13. OR7: A WOLF CALLED JOURNEY
A wolf surviving alone is unusual. Without family, he must hunt much smaller prey and search for other wolves who might either accept or kill him as he attempts to belong again. Even more rare is a solitary wolf who travels twelve hundred miles to find new territory. This is the story of OR7, a wolf called “Journey,” who became the first wild wolf returning to California in almost one hundred years and captivated our imaginations and respect in his epic trek.
At any given time in wild wolf populations only 20 percent are alone—and not for long. Without a family, there are so many dangers, not the least of which is the fact that in the West 10 percent of wolves are killed by poachers every year. If a wolf alone faces increased risk, why do wolves disperse? Some wolves leave their families to find mates, others are forced out by family politics, and still others grow weary of life as the omega wolf—the lowest-ranking member—and look for higher status with another group. Any of these realities may have prompted OR7 to strike out from his Inmaha family in sparsely populated Wallowa County, Oregon.
OR7 was born in the spring of 2009, his stud name showing that he was the seventh wolf to be radio collared in Oregon. His parents were the successful breeding pair of mother, Sophie (B300), and father, OR4. Wolves mate for life, and these impressive parents raised an unusually large family of sixteen members.
His father, OR4, a powerful alpha male, was considered to be a very tough but good father. OR4 was the largest wolf collared in Oregon, weighing in at 110 to 115 pounds. His howl was as resonant as a canine Pavarotti. Robust and charcoal black, OR4 was so tenacious a survivor that he “escaped kill orders and poachers. He endured at least 4 collarings and he beat the odds,” writes Oregon Wild blogger Rob Klavins. “There aren’t many ten-year-old wolves out there.”
With such a long-lived and mighty patriarch, a son might do well to disappear if he ever wanted to breed and find a mate and found a family of his own. Our human stories—from Greek myths to Star Wars—are full of father-son struggles. Perhaps the same tensions drove OR7 to seek out his own destiny. But nobody could fathom just how far OR7 would wander to find his own territory. There was really no need for OR7 to travel over a thousand miles—or even leave Oregon. In 2011 there were only twenty-nine wolves in the state. These were descended from the few wolves migrating down from central Idaho, where wolves were reintroduced in 1995, through the Cascade Mountains and into far northeastern Oregon on the border of Washington and Idaho. But the westward movement of wolves mirrors that of our human pioneer migrations. So like Lewis and Clark and the hordes of settlers who followed, the wolves traveled west.
“There were rumors of wolves in the west—a paw print on Mount Hood there, a sighting on Santiam Pass there,” writes Zach Urness in his fascinating series, “When the Wolves Return to Western Oregon.” When I covered the 1997 Olympic Wolf Summit in Washington for the Seattle Times there were already wolves repopulating the Cascade Mountains on their own, venturing down from Canada. The West was much more welcoming to the return of wolves than the Rockies and the Great Lakes. At the Wolf Summit Washington congressman Norm Dicks had declared, “We have the opportunity to correct a historic mistake.” Dicks pointed out that the total cost to taxpayers of all previous wolf reintroduction had only been a nickel per person. Wildlife officials in the West paved the way for returning wolves. But not everyone was excited about wild wolves returning on their own.
OR7’s family lived in the heart of hostile cattle country. Wallawa County cattle ranches make up a third of the local economy. “There are nearly 30,000 beef cattle and almost 20,000 dairy cows in the county,” notes an excellent article, “What One Wolf’s Extraordinary Journey Means for the Future of Wildlife in America.” Even though 70 percent of Oregon residents support wolf recovery, those wolves “known to have ventured across the Snake River beginning in the late ’90s were shipped back, shot, or run over by cars.” These cattle ranchers graze on public lands and have received almost $2 million in livestock subsidies since 1995. “I think we’re at a tipping point on ranching,” says Jon Marvel, who founded the Western Watersheds Project. “It’s sustained by hobbyists, corporations, and politicians mired in the past. Absent government subsidies, cattle and sheep ranching in the arid West would have ended long ago.” Growing up in such a ranch-heavy, hostile land, OR4’s family of wolves still somehow thrived. And they also killed some cattle, one each month during its first two years, and six cattle killed in one month in 2010.
These losses are highly overshadowed by the fact that in Oregon “55,000 of the state’s more than 1.3 million cattle die annually from almost everything except wolves, and that the elements kill far more cattle than wolves do. Cattle rustlers have stolen 1,200 head a year over the past several years.” According to USDA statistics, all predators—such as coyotes, mountains lions, birds of prey, and even dogs—accounted for a total of 4.3 percent of livestock losses. Yet wolves are much more highly visible scapegoats than cattle rustlers or domestic dogs, and there was continual tension between ranchers and the Inmaha pack as they shared public lands. Wildlife officials were killing neighboring wolf families for attacking livestock, so OR7’s family was often in the crosshairs.
In September of 2011, when OR7 was two years old, he left his family and headed west. His timing was fortunate—days after OR7 exited, Oregon state officials issued an order to kill his father, OR4, and one of OR7’s siblings for preying on livestock. That kill order was put on hold by a lawsuit from Oregon Wild. But OR7’s brother, OR9, had been illegally shot in 2010 when he was the first of the family to disperse, and his sister, OR5, would be killed by a trapper on the last day of Oregon’s wolf hunt season in 2013. Had OR7 stayed with his family, he might have met the same fate.
Few people have ever actually seen OR7 except in images captured from remote cameras. The most famous photo shows a black and tawny wolf, ears perked, tail low, as he walks down a mountain trail. He seems to be directly peering into the camera, his dark eyes focused, muzzle bright with sunlight. We recognize—from deciphering expressions in domestic dogs—that there is no alarm in this wolf’s expression. Only intense curiosity, awareness. Does OR7 hear the camera clicking as he strolls by? Is that why he turns to stare straight at anyone watching? The caption reads: “The westernmost wolf in the lower 48 states, a lone pioneer wandering hundreds of miles west of any known wolf pack.”
Because OR7 wore a radio collar, researchers could closely follow his travel. Schoolchildren began to track OR7’s trek online and on big, multicolor maps in their classrooms. The risks for a wolf alone on such a long trip were daunting. Without his family, OR7 was vulnerable to mountain lions and bears—or even another territorial wolf. A solitary wolf cannot take down a seven-hundred-pound elk. Hunting alone, OR7 would have to find smaller prey to survive. And always the threat of poaching. With his radio collar OR7 literally had a target on his back for illegal hunters—some of whom bragged on social media that they were gunning for him. Somehow OR7 stayed out of sight as he roamed the wilderness searching for a mate.
On his journey OR7 trotted along the Wallowa Mountains, down through Eastern Oregon near Bend and Burns—very near where the last Oregon wolf had been killed in 1946 by a bounty hunter. Still traveling south, OR7 circled Crater Lake and raced past the mighty Klamath Falls at the very southern tip of Oregon. Then OR7 took a sharp turn to the west into the Cascade Mountains. Here he set his first record: the first known wolf in Western Oregon in sixty years. By this point OR7 was becoming a conservation icon, even a canine cel
ebrity. Oregon’s Statesman Journal called OR7 “A folk hero.”
A rare sighting of OR7 in Lake Almanor, Oregon, was reported by an ex-Iditarod racer, Liz Parrish, of Crystalloid Lodge. She said a wild wolf was drawn to the plaintive howling of her sled dogs. When Parrish investigated her sled dogs’ chorus of urgent howls, she was shocked to see a wild wolf standing in her driveway. She and OR7 just stared at each other for a long time. Parrish was struck at how “un-dog-like” OR7 was and how much bigger he was than even her muscled sled dogs. Without a camera or cell phone, Parrish couldn’t document the sighting. But another rural resident who also spotted OR7 told journalists that “our forest is healthier simply by his presence.” There were a few more signs nearby. In one a neighbor went to feed his yard dogs who were howling for supper. Suddenly there was an answering howl from the north, full bodied and resonant. Not a dog. A wolf. Was it OR7? Or had other wolves without radio collars followed his trailblazing scents into Oregon? A wild wolf howling in answer to dogs is not a good sign, especially for the wolf. Perhaps OR7 was venturing way too close to people.
By winter OR7 was five hundred miles from his home and family. Everything was against him, especially the season. In his wanderings the two-year-old OR7 had found no mate; now the mountain snow was deepening. The life expectancy for any wolf without his pack is only five years. Even though OR7 was hailed as a “one-wolf eco-tourist attraction” and his search followed by hopeful thousands, he seemed doomed. Some conservationists were hopeful about his chances: “That he appeared hopelessly lost mattered less than that he navigated a patchwork quilt of relatively intact lands coveted as natural migration corridors for recovering predators, from wolverines to lynx and now to wolves.”
Three months after he began his trip OR7 crossed the California state line in late December of 2011. This crossing meant nothing to him because wolves have no knowledge of all our closely guarded borders. Of course, OR7 didn’t recognize his precedent-setting feat. But it was international news. OR7 was the first wild wolf to roam California since 1924—almost one hundred years since any of his kind claimed this territory. Amaroq Weiss was among many conservationists who greeted OR7’s arrival with delight. “California laid a welcome mat for this wolf,” she says. “It was wonderful, breathtaking, endearing—kind of like the moment you’ve been waiting for your whole life—to see a state welcome a wolf. And OR7 deserves it.”
Even the USDA’s blog ran the headline, “California Welcomes Wild Wolf for First Time in 87 Years.” By migrating to the Pacific Coast, OR7 may have saved his own life: he chose a homeland where wolves are federally listed as endangered, protected under the Endangered Species Act, and so allowed to thrive. “Being an apex predator in a landscape that hasn’t had one for a pretty long time—he’s got it pretty good right now,” Oregon Wild’s Steve Pedery said. California conservation groups immediately asked the Fish and Wildlife Service to also place gray wolves on its state endangered list. California wildlife officials began work on a state wolf-conservation plan.
Amidst the celebrations Oregon Wild called a contest for the public to name this wayfaring wolf. Their intent: “to make OR7 too famous to kill.” After all, some people in northern California weren’t overjoyed to see a wild wolf return. In Siskiyou County, later one of OR7’s favorite haunts, a supervisor declared that she would like to see all wolves “shot on sight.” Two children won the naming contest. Their perfect name for OR7—Journey. He was earning his name. All that winter OR7 kept searching for a mate, vagabonding between northern California and southern Oregon, zigzagging up mountain trails and through thick old-growth forests. Wolf tracks were discovered, and his howls were heard again answering ranch dogs. But there was no hint that OR7 might no longer be alone.
I IMAGINE OR7’s howls might have been the loneliest sound in the world. After all, he’d been without family or mate or even companion for well over a year. OR7 was following the archetypal “hero’s journey,” the pattern outlined by Joseph Campbell. OR7’s odyssey follows the stages that we recognize: leaving the ordinary world for a solo adventure, facing tests of endurance and strength, surviving setbacks and life-and-death ordeals that challenge the hero to evolve, finding allies along the way. Eventually the hero must earn a reward and return to share his knowledge with “the ordinary world” he once left. But would OR7 ever really accomplish such a journey? Even with throngs of people rooting for him and identifying with him, the journey was still all up to OR7 to achieve. Joseph Campbell wrote, “You enter the forest at the darkest point where there is no path.… If you follow someone else’s way, you are not going to realize your potential.”
By the early spring of 2012 OR7 had officially logged his one thousand miles; the Los Angeles Times claimed his monumental trek was more like three thousand miles. But the Times, like most biologists, still predicted that OR7 was “unlikely to find a mate here.” That summer of 2012 OR7 spent his days wandering Mount Lassen’s High Sierra mountain meadows on the Plumas National Forest. I like to imagine this first wolf to return to California in my native forest. He strolls through coast Douglas fir or Ponderosa pines, hunting the many lean and fleet deer that also nourished my young muscles, blood, and bones. When I heard news of Journey’s return, I wanted to take a road trip back to my birthplace to see if I could be one of the lucky ones to discover even one wolf track, a signpost of his odyssey.
All that summer of 2012, through another rough winter, and into the spring of 2013, OR7 rambled between California and Oregon. The only way we could follow OR7 was his radio collar, and that was due to die out. What would happen if we lost track of this now-beloved wolf? Or if after all this wolf had survived, a hunter poached him? If so, OR7’s legacy would die, solitary forever. The biologists decided to simply let the wolf’s radio-collar batteries fade and give up following him. But then, in May of 2014, a startling discovery—OR7 was captured on camera for the very first time. And he was not alone! When the wildlife officials stopped to check their remote camera’s memory cards, they clearly saw OR7 and another wolf photographed within one hour of each other. Had OR7 at last found his lifelong mate?
The mysterious other wolf was slender, black, and squatted when she urinated. It was mating season, and if there were pups, they would leave their den soon. As the wildlife officials waited hopefully for any sign of pups, they admitted that as OR7’s travels grew more erratic, they had “always felt it was a real long shot that a female wolf would find him.” Many in Oregon and the West celebrated this reunion and union. Oregon, like California, was much more open to wolves returning than other states were. In fact, both Republican and Democrat gubernatorial candidates supported wolf reintroduction. Even an ex-president of the Oregon Cattlemen’s Association, Bill Hoyt, noted that he’d “be inclined to compromise with the environmental lobby on a management strategy that only targets wolves that—unlike OR7—have a history of going after livestock.”
Wildlife officials gathered scat and determined from DNA tests that this new female wolf was from a wolf family that OR7 must have encountered from northeastern Oregon. We don’t know OR7’s mate’s heroine journey because she wore no radio collar. It may have been even more dangerous when she dispersed from her original family. All we know is that she chose to follow and bond with Journey. Now the pair traveled together, as the Los Angeles Times’s headline wryly declared, “OR7, the Wandering Wolf, Looks for Love in All the Right Places.” Like our human comedies, which usually end in marriage ceremonies, OR7’s mating was greeted with wild applause—and much hope for wolf pups.
OR7 and his sleek, ebony mate were followed even more closely as they roamed a little north again up into Oregon. Biologists there announced in June of 2014 that three pups were with them. Grainy black-and-white photos showed at least one pup racing past remote cameras. Gray like his father, etched with charcoal highlights like his mother, the pup is moving so fast that you can see the slight blur of motion around furry ears and paws. In another black-and-white image we catch on
ly a side view of the pup, ears forward, unafraid, as he ventures onto a gravel road. One can’t help but worry about the pups’ visibility in such an open space. But another blurry black-and-white photo shows OR7 gazing out, tail raised, staring right into the camera, so we know the parents are nearby.
One color photo from the Oregonian’s proud announcement of OR7s pups and their photo gallery quickly went viral. All but hidden behind dead wood and bright green branches, two of the tiny pups gaze out at their new world. They are side-by-side, in shadow, but even so, curiosity and even perhaps a sense of wonder can be seen in their attentive faces. We recognize that expectant and wide-open expression in any species. Their birth is historic—the first known wolf pups born in the Oregon Cascades since the mid-1940s. There was jubilation among wolf advocates but a cautionary note and reminder from Oregon’s congressman Peter DeFazio. “As we celebrate OR7 and his new family, the US Fish and Wildlife Service is threatening to disregard science and take the gray wolf off the Endangered Species List. If the service delists the gray wolf, states could declare open season on gray wolves like OR7 and his mate, and these new pups.”
When OR7 at last found his mate and they began their new family, the news enlivened their popularity with a by now international audience. For three years OR7’s journey existed only in our imaginations and as colorful pins tracked on classrooms’ or biologists’ maps. Suddenly this wolf called Journey and his family were fully revealed for us—who are such a highly visual species—to see and witness and watch, mesmerized. Wolf paparazzi had to be kept clueless as to where the family was defining their territory, lest too much love would lead to their destruction by antiwolf poachers. By now OR7s radio collar, first fitted in 2009, was ready to fade out. These collars are meant to last only three years, and this one had diligently radioed its signal for almost five. Biologists finally decided not to replace the battery in OR7’s radio collar that had been broadcasting his position every six hours.
Wolf Nation Page 20