When the wolves were finally located, 7 hadn’t gone far, but it seemed that the alphas had traveled out of the park once more, forty miles northeast, to where the Absarokas end and Montana’s central plains begin, near a town called Red Lodge. The signal from 9’s collar suggested she was in a reasonably accessible spot on the side of a peak known as Mount Maurice. But 10’s transmitter was beeping twice as fast as normal—mortality mode.
When Smith and his team hiked to 9’s last known location, they discovered that she had denned—nothing more than a hastily dug depression in the earth—and apparently given birth, though she and the pups were nowhere to be found. It was as disastrous a turn of events as Smith could have imagined, but he wasn’t easily deterred. Tall, lean, and handsome, with a thick head of unruly brown hair and a handlebar mustache, he was not just a wildlife biologist but a mountain man as well—someone who could design a study and turn out a well-written paper, yet was equally in his element hunting elk or hanging out the side of a helicopter buzzing just over the treetops with a tranquilizer gun in his hands.
Smith called in Carter Niemeyer, the best tracker he knew, to lead the search for the pups. Niemeyer was very familiar with 9 and 10; he was the one who had brought them down from Canada in the first place. Prior to joining the Yellowstone Wolf Project, as the reintroduction effort was known, he’d spent his career as a government trapper killing “nuisance” animals for farmers and ranchers, and as a professional taxidermist. He had been a curious hire for a program designed to bring predators back to the landscape, but Fish and Wildlife had needed someone who could gain the trust of the local trappers in the remote backcountry of western Alberta. Niemeyer, who had skinned thousands of coyotes in his lifetime—along with the occasional wolf—was the man for the job.
Not that it was easy. Suspicious of anyone who wanted a live wolf, the trappers challenged Niemeyer, then forty-eight years old and an imposing six foot five, to prove his backwoods credentials. He found himself on the floor of a trapper’s cabin on the edge of the woods, knife in hand, as he and one of the locals, both drunk on homemade chokecherry wine, raced to see who could skin a freshly killed wolf the fastest. Niemeyer won the contest and came back with the wolves the project needed.
Now, scrambling across the side of Mount Maurice, grunting like a mother wolf looking for her pups, Niemeyer at last heard the whimpering and squeaks he was seeking, deep under a pile of talus. The search party pulled eight puppies out of the rocks and returned them, along with their mother, to the park, where they became known as the Rose Creek Pack.
As his collar indicated, 10 was indeed dead. He had been shot by a local man named Chad McKittrick, who, after being arrested and charged with a federal offense for shooting an endangered animal, claimed he had thought he was shooting a feral dog. It wasn’t the perfect crime; a friend of McKittrick’s had disposed of 10’s collar in a culvert filled with spring runoff, not realizing that it was, of course, perfectly waterproof and still transmitting. The defendant was anything but repentant; while out on bail, he rode his horse down the middle of Red Lodge in the annual Fourth of July parade wearing a T-shirt that read NORTHERN ROCKIES WOLF REDUCTION PROJECT.
McKittrick’s defiance made him a bit of a local hero to some. When a federal judge sentenced him to six months in prison, it only reinforced what many in the area thought about wolf reintroduction and about the federal government in general: overreaching bureaucrats in Washington had rammed wolves down their throats, and people weren’t going to just stand by and do nothing.
—
In the years that followed reintroduction, the project spawned a great many papers in academic journals, though Rick himself had never written one. Born and raised in rural Massachusetts, he had joined the Park Service shortly after graduating from college with a degree in forestry—but he was an interpretive ranger by training, not a biologist. That meant he’d spent his thirty-year career talking to park visitors and helping them understand what they were seeing. He’d started work as a seasonal ranger in 1976, spending most winters in west Texas at Big Bend National Park and summers in Denali National Park in Alaska.
Life as a seasonal ranger meant being satisfied with less. You couldn’t have much in the way of possessions, since you had no permanent residence; nor could you make commitments or form long-term relationships. Not that there were many people around to get close to anyway—both parks operated with minimal staff. Even getting news from the Lower 48 was difficult in Denali, which covered two million acres but was serviced by only one road. Rick lived by himself in the basement of the visitor center, sixty-six miles from the nearest highway. It wasn’t for everyone, but it suited Rick’s temperament perfectly; he had always preferred his own company.
By the early 1990s, when Yellowstone’s reintroduction plan was beginning to take shape, Rick had already spent countless hours watching wolves in Denali. He’d seen his first wolf deep in the park’s roadless backcountry and become obsessed, spending all his free time watching and photographing them. In 1993 he published a book of his wolf photos, pairing them with essays he had written about the prospects for wolf reintroduction at various national parks. He was following the progress of the Yellowstone project from afar, as it slowly moved through the federal bureaucracy. After the park had gone nearly seventy years without wolves, Rick knew that Yellowstone’s naturalist division didn’t have any interpretive rangers with relevant experience. He convinced Yellowstone’s brass that he should be their first-ever wolf interpreter, and after fifteen seasons in Denali, Yellowstone became his new summer home.
Rick arrived in May 1994, less than a year before the first wolves were scheduled to be released, and found a community deeply divided about the wisdom of reintroduction. Over time he came to know which gas stations, restaurants, motels, and curio shops were run by pro-wolf proprietors, and which were anti-wolf. The downstairs gift shop at the airport in Bozeman, Montana, where most Yellowstone visitors landed, stocked all things wolf—stuffed animals, knickknacks, calendars, posters—while the upstairs shop near the gates had nothing. A wolf-loving friend of Rick’s had once asked the woman at the upstairs counter why. After some hedging, she finally put her cards on the table. “Because we don’t like wolves, that’s why,” she said.
In some cases, entire communities were considered to be on one side or the other. Rick rarely drove into the mountains just east of the park, for example, even though he knew Yellowstone wolves often ranged as far as Crandall. He knew Crandall was elk-hunting and cattle-ranching country, and wolves weren’t popular there. Rick’s yellow SUV with its telltale antenna was easy to spot, and he worried that locals might follow his movements in hopes of getting a shot at a wolf. In its early years, the project had lost at least three wolves to poachers in Crandall; it had become known as a place where Yellowstone wolves ventured and did not return.
Rick himself lived in a cabin about twenty miles northwest of Crandall, in the tiny mountain town of Silver Gate. The town was just outside the park’s northeast entrance, the one least used by tourists. In the summer, it had perhaps twenty-five full-time residents. Most of them headed for lower elevations before the onset of winter, which began in mid-October and lasted at least five months.
Rick had seen his share of snow in New England, but winter in Silver Gate was different. Situated in a narrow valley at seventy-five hundred feet, the town averaged about seventeen feet of snow per year, and it wasn’t unusual for Rick to wake up to temperatures of thirty below. He never quite got used to it, but he had learned to make accommodations. Each of his gloves had a pocket near the wrist that held a nine-volt battery, which powered tiny electric filaments to warm his fingers and stave off frostbite. He flattened the snow in front of his cabin with his SUV on a daily basis, lest so much accumulate that he couldn’t get out at all. Plows kept the road westbound from Silver Gate into the park open, but the road eastbound was closed beyond the neighboring hamlet of Cooke City. Silver Gate in winter was the kind of place
you really had to want to be.
If you loved wolves, though, nowhere else even compared. When wolves were first brought back to the park, the leaders of the Wolf Project chose a broad river valley in the northeast section of the park called the Lamar Valley as one of their release points. The valley was almost always filled with elk, making it prime wolf habitat. It was also relatively treeless, offering researchers a good chance to observe wolves hunting prey on open land, something that had rarely been seen in the wild.
The Lamar Valley had a road running through the middle of it and was popular with park visitors, and researchers figured the wolves might quickly disappear into the park’s vast interior, where regular observation would require a lengthy horseback ride or, more likely, a plane. Some of the wolves did leave the valley, but to everyone’s delight, a few stayed put. They didn’t seem to mind the road or the people. And Yellowstone’s wolves multiplied just as fast as Smith and his team had hoped they would. By the winter of 2003, the 15 wolves released in 1995, along with an additional 17 introduced a year later, had become a population of 174, divided into fourteen packs spread throughout the park.
As anticipated, scores of others had left Yellowstone to colonize the surrounding mountains, including Grand Teton National Park to the south and protected wilderness and national forest land in eastern Idaho and southwestern Montana, areas that had been wolf-free for decades. As part of the same project, wolves had also been returned to a wilderness area in central Idaho, and that population was flourishing and dispersing as well. Wolves dispersing south from Canada, meanwhile, had recolonized a wide swath of northwestern Montana, centered around Glacier National Park. Now, just fourteen years after the first pens were opened in the Lamar Valley, the wolf population in the Northern Rockies had grown to over seventeen hundred animals.
Catching a glimpse of a wolf in the wild anywhere else, even for a biologist engaged in full-time fieldwork, was rare, but in Yellowstone the possibilities for groundbreaking research were endless. Rick had once hosted a visiting researcher from Wisconsin who studied wolves in the thick forests of the Upper Midwest, the one area in the Lower 48 where gray wolves were never fully extirpated. His method was essentially the same as Rick’s: following radio-collared wolves all day using telemetry and trying to observe them through a spotting scope. After a week of amazing viewing in the Lamar Valley, Rick asked his excited visitor how often he saw wolves back home. The researcher thought for a moment. “Last year I saw wolves maybe five or six days,” he said. The rest of his time was filled with following tracks and collecting scat. Things weren’t like that in Yellowstone. It had been almost nine years since a day had passed without someone spotting a wolf somewhere in the park. Yellowstone was a wolf-watching mecca.
—
As Rick watched O-Six and her companions eat, their muzzles bright red in his scope, he noticed a pair of skittish coyotes eyeing the carcass warily. The coyotes were less than half the size of the wolves and not nearly as fast. But they were hungry, and one of them eventually edged closer to the feeding wolves. The male wolf leaped to his feet and lunged at the coyote, which ran tuck-tailed and panicked across the snow. When he was satisfied it would not return, the wolf made his way back to his meal.
Rick made a note of it on his recorder and went back to watching. His field notes, which he typed up on his computer in his cabin every evening, were nothing if not meticulous. Each day’s report began with a summary of the weather, followed by brief descriptions of behavior observed throughout the day, each labeled with the time of day and the exact duration. He considered his research to be in the tradition of the great naturalist Adolph Murie, the first biologist to undertake a steady observation of wolf behavior in the wild. Murie carefully documented the activities of a Denali pack for two consecutive denning seasons and reported his findings in a 1944 book that was now considered a classic. During the fifteen summers Rick spent in Denali as a seasonal ranger, he came to know the descendants of the same pack that had been watched by Murie decades before.
Rick, who had once gone 891 consecutive days with at least one wolf sighting, had in essence turned his life into a field study. He had more than eight thousand single-spaced pages of notes—his life’s work—saved on his computer. He had never printed out the entire thing; his ancient printer likely wouldn’t survive the task. But he did have a couple of years’ worth of notes compiled in red three-ring binders that he sometimes got out to show visitors. When he had enough notes, he would start his own book, about Yellowstone’s wolves.
—
Suddenly all three wolves bolted from the elk carcass, O-Six sprinting across the snow as though she were a spooked coyote herself. Rick scanned the landscape with his scope and spotted five black wolves approaching from the north.
It was the Druids.
The carcass was on the west end of Little America, which was more or less Agate territory, but the Druid Peak Pack made regular forays into the area from their stronghold, the Lamar Valley, five miles to the east. Now the Druids had arrived in force, and O-Six had to surrender her prize—which would have lasted the three wolves a couple of days at least—after only an hour of feeding. Rick recognized the white muzzle of the Druid alpha male, known as 480, along with White Line, the uncollared alpha female. Eventually the entire pack came in to feed: Black Bar, Dull Bar, Thin Female, Triangle Blaze, 691, and 690.
Rick was happy to see them. He had spent more time watching the Druids, one of the original packs brought down from Canada, than any other pack. Everyone had. Ensconced in the sparsely wooded Lamar Valley since the early days of reintroduction, the Druids were the easiest pack to spot for researchers and park visitors alike, making them the face of the reintroduction program for over a decade. And there were lots of them. In their heyday, the Druids had numbered thirty-seven wolves, one of the largest packs ever recorded anywhere in the world.
As the stars of the show, the Druids did not disappoint: defending the valley against invading packs, running down countless elk, raising litter after litter in their den on Druid Peak, all within view of an audience of visitors that grew bigger every year. Rick began taking notes on the pack when they were first brought to the park, and he never stopped.
Rick leaned into his scope and hunched his shoulders against the biting wind. O-Six was now long gone, but he zeroed in on the carcass, and his scope was soon filled with familiar faces. Every wolf in the pack was like an old friend, just as their parents had once been, and their parents’ parents. Watching from the roadside in the Lamar Valley, he’d seen generation after generation of Druid pups leave the den, follow adults on the hunt, find their place in the pack, learn how to be wolves. As always, he found himself absorbed by the tableaux on the other side of his eyepiece, drawn into the world where nothing mattered but the welfare of the pack. He was hungry, his feet were freezing, and he was more than a little worried that O-Six wouldn’t survive the winter. But at least there were wolves in his scope.
2
IN THE VALLEY OF THE DRUIDS
Rick had been tracking O-Six for only a short time, but he knew her lineage well. Her grandmother had been one of the park’s most celebrated wolves, the Druid alpha female known as 42, which made her a descendant of Yellowstone’s canine royalty. Over the years, at least a half-dozen of 42’s female pups had become alphas in their own right, in packs spread across the park. Rick had seen them all come of age, each rising to the top in her own time and place, and he saw the same potential in O-Six, despite the perilous circumstances in which she currently found herself.
O-Six’s story began where all good Yellowstone wolf stories began: in the Lamar Valley. The Druid Peak Pack had held the territory for so long that it was hard to imagine one without the other. But for those longtime observers, like Rick, who could remember the pack’s beginnings, nothing about their rise had seemed inevitable.
The Druids were among the second group of wolves brought to the park from Canada, in 1996. The original pack consist
ed of a large gray male, known as 38, his mate, and three yearling daughters. When they were released into the Lamar Valley, it was already home to the Crystal Creek Pack, which had been introduced to the valley the year before and had never strayed far. The park had millions of acres of unoccupied habitat, and the hope was that the newcomers would roam until they eventually found their place alongside the handful of other packs that had established themselves in the Northern Range, the fifty-seven-mile-long mountainous stretch between Gardiner, near the park’s northwest entrance, and Silver Gate.
But the Druid alphas preferred to stay in the valley and fight. One morning in May, scarcely three weeks after the Druids had been released from their acclimation pen, project biologists detected a mortality signal from the collar of the Crystal alpha male. Nobody witnessed the battle, but the dead wolf’s bloodied carcass told the tale well enough—the Druids had killed him. The Crystal pups were missing as well, presumably killed or scattered. The alpha female, injured and desperate, retreated into the park’s interior with what remained of her pack.
Another conflict soon followed. Exploring the western edge of their new territory, the Druids encountered the Rose Creek wolves. Once again the bold new pack attacked. This time Rick was present for the melee, and he watched as the Rose Creek alpha male defeated 38 in single combat, driving the Druid alpha and his pack back into the Lamar Valley. The Druids had emerged unscathed, however, and managed to kill a Rose Creek yearling in the process.
The Druids’ early battles, the first territorial conflicts witnessed since reintroduction, made Rick and his colleagues see Yellowstone’s landscape in a new light. From a wolf’s perspective, the Lamar Valley was a territory worth fighting for.
Doug Smith had assumed there would be a certain amount of friction as the newly introduced wolves sorted out their various territories, but actually witnessing the conflicts—thrilling to see but chastening in their sudden violence—was more than project biologists could have hoped for. Although it was hard to lose wolves they had invested so much time and money into relocating, the conflicts served to divide Yellowstone’s untapped wolf habitat into discrete units, each big enough to support one pack. Wolves fighting other wolves was part of the natural order of things.
American Wolf Page 3