Turnbull spotted Louie Cary at the bar holding court, as usual. Crandall didn’t have a mayor, but Louie was the closest thing to it. He was a small man with narrow cheeks, kind blue eyes, and a thick shock of gray hair, which he habitually combed forward with his fingernails when he was deep in conversation and a word wouldn’t come to him. Louie and his wife, Shelley, ran a guest ranch and hunting outfitting service in the shadow of Hunter Peak, about a half-mile up the Clark’s Fork from the store, which his family had once owned as well. His grandfather bought the ranch in 1939 to run cattle, and his mother and father converted the property in the 1950s, renovating an old log building raised by one of the valley’s original homesteaders and gradually adding cabins and a rustic two-story lodge with a dozen cozy rooms.
For decades, the Cary family had maintained a pair of hunting camps along Crandall Creek: one high up near the headwaters, not too far from the national park boundary, and another lower down. They took clients into the backcountry all fall and winter for a week at a time, heading up the mountain with a string of horses carrying cooks, guides, and horse wranglers. Louie grew up wrangling horses for the crew and later guiding hunts himself. At the camps were tents for everyone and a makeshift kitchen. At dawn, Louie and his dad led the hunters into the timber around the camp in search of an elk. If a client managed to bring one down, Louie dressed it on the spot, gutting and quartering the huge beast and lugging the meat back down the mountain to be cut up and put on ice. The trophy went to the taxidermist.
Outfitting hunters had long been among the most reliable trades in Crandall and the neighboring basin to the east, known as Sunlight; Turnbull’s uncle Wayne had been a guide there for years. Like all of Crandall’s outfitters, the Carys catered to out-of-town hunters, those who needed someone to help them find an elk. The area was widely known as one of the best elk-hunting spots in Wyoming, if not the nation, and clients came from all over the country. Some had saved up for the opportunity of a lifetime, but most were well heeled; the going rate for a guided elk hunt was five thousand dollars.
In the old days, there had been so many elk up Crandall Creek that clients almost never came back without a quality bull trophy. Louie’s dad would put out some salt not far from the camp to encourage the elk—usually a bull and his harem of cows—to gather and linger. Then one of the guides would mimic the warbling mating call of another male—bugling, as it was known—to draw the bull away from the harem, and the client would be invited to take his shot. After a day or two, another bull would find the harem, and the guides would repeat the process for the next client.
Rarely did they have to go into the heavy timber to get a bull. The guides would simply set up on an open ridge with the call and wait for the bull to come out. It was a good way to make a living, and at one time there were nine or ten outfitters working in Crandall and Sunlight. Louie’s only son grew up wrangling and guiding, just as he had.
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Turnbull enjoyed Louie’s stories about the old days, though he was careful not to get him started on the Nez Percé—who famously trekked through the Absarokas in the fall of 1877 with the U.S. Cavalry in hot pursuit—unless he had a solid hour to spare. These days talk at the store inevitably came around to wolves. Louie was among the first in Crandall to spot a wolf wandering over from Yellowstone, and his initial impression was not a positive one. It was the winter of 1997, and he was up Crandall Creek with a couple of clients on an elk hunt. One of them had just shot a bull, and Louie was about to begin field-dressing him. In the meantime, he told the hunters to head up over the next ridge, where he thought he’d seen a second bull. They returned almost immediately, gushing with excitement. They’d seen a wolf, a big black male, just up the trail. Whatever you do, don’t shoot it, Louie thought. He didn’t need that kind of trouble.
But somebody already had. When Louie picked up the wolf’s trail in the snow, he could see that he was limping badly and trailing blood. As the trio made their way down the mountain on horseback, he spotted the injured wolf from time to time through the trees. When Louie got back to the lodge, he heard the news: two collared Yellowstone wolves had been illegally shot that morning, a pair of males from the park’s Druid Peak Pack. One was dead already. The black he had spotted in the backcountry—the pack’s alpha male, it turned out—was now holed up in a gorge on Hoodoo Creek. Officials from Fish and Wildlife had already called the lodge, looking for the guilty party.
Louie had a pretty good idea who might have pulled the trigger, but it wasn’t one of his clients, and he kept his mouth shut. The stakes were high. Everybody in Crandall had heard the story of Chad McKittrick, the hell-raiser up in Red Lodge who had gone to jail for shooting a Yellowstone wolf. “Shoot, shovel, and shut up” was a mantra you often heard east of the park, but McKittrick seemed to have forgotten the last part, blabbing to whoever would listen about what he’d done. This time nobody seemed to be talking. Weeks later Louie got a call from the clients, who were back home in Nebraska. It seemed that Fish and Wildlife wanted to ask them some questions, too. Would they have to come back to Wyoming to testify, they wanted to know, just because a wolf got shot? Louie couldn’t guarantee they wouldn’t. Fish and Wildlife never came right out and accused Louie or one of his clients of shooting the wolves, but he wasn’t especially cooperative with the investigators, and he was on their bad side for a long time.
Trouble with the federal government was something he didn’t need. His hunting camps were on national forest land, a privilege for which he paid an annual fee, and Fish and Wildlife issued his big game outfitter’s license. Doing business with the government meant keeping track of a million rules—you had to have the proper amount of the proper kind of insurance, you had to use your camps a certain number of days every winter or risk losing them—and the regulations always seemed to be changing. Yellowstone was even worse. He and his friends called it “the iron curtain” because of all the rules in the park—which fish you could keep, which you had to release, which lures you could use, what kind of hook—and the zeal with which they were enforced. It was against the rules even to drive through the park with harvested game in the back of your truck, unless it was covered. Visitors didn’t want to see dead elk.
Louie had been fighting the government over wolves for a long time. In the early 1990s, he’d represented Crandall on an ad hoc committee formed to oppose wolf reintroduction. Every elk killed by wolves in the summer in Yellowstone, they knew, was one fewer that would be coming down into Crandall in the winter. They’d found a video of wolves demolishing a dairy cow and sent it to a couple of dozen members of Congress. He wondered how many of them had had the stomach to watch the whole thing.
Louie had never lost an animal to a wolf, but he’d seen the aftermath on other people’s ranches: calves so thoroughly shredded that they looked like they’d swallowed dynamite, the snow covered in blood. Wolves and sheep were a particularly disastrous combination; stripped of their natural defenses against predators after centuries of domestication, sheep were known for making no attempt to escape when wolves came calling, and the result could be widespread carnage.
Louie and his fellow committee members had made the best case they could; they had even hired a lobbyist. But it all came to nothing. Most of the land in the Northern Rockies belonged to the federal government, and the feds were going to do what the feds were going to do.
The result hadn’t surprised anyone. Every year since reintroduction, they’d seen more wolves and fewer elk, as Louie had known they would. In the last count taken before wolves were reintroduced in 1995, over nineteen thousand elk were roaming Yellowstone’s Northern Range. By 2010, that number had plummeted to six thousand, roughly what it had been back in the 1960s, before rangers stopped culling the park’s herds. Game officials in Montana and Wyoming insisted the drop wasn’t entirely due to wolves. Some of the decline was caused by increased hunting in Montana prior to reintroduction, where state biologists had become alarmed at the size of the herd and th
e amount of damage the elk were doing to the habitat. Regulators had upped the take by extending the elk season and issuing more permits, both popular decisions at the time. A stubborn drought had also taken its toll, they said, as had habitat lost to development. Though still sparsely populated, the Greater Yellowstone area had become one of the fastest-growing regions in the country.
Still, you couldn’t deny the impact of the wolves. The problem wasn’t just that there were fewer elk. The ones that remained were harder to kill. Prior to reintroduction, generation after generation of elk had lived an essentially predator-free existence, outside the fall hunting season. They had gradually begun to act less and less like wild animals and more like cattle, congregating in large numbers in exposed valleys, moving wherever the forage was best, and feeding at their leisure. Now, after fifteen years of being chased by wolves, the elk in Crandall were much warier. They tended to spend more time in the trees at higher elevations; they were less likely to gather in large numbers. Local hunters like Turnbull who had time to spend in the woods could still get one, if they had the patience and the backcountry skills. Weekend warriors had less luck.
As the elk numbers in Crandall came down, the Wyoming Game and Fish Department issued fewer and fewer licenses, until finally there were no more than twenty for nonresident hunters in any given season. Between the guides, the cooks, the wranglers, the horses, the insurance, and the fees, it cost around $25,000 per year to run a camp. With nine outfitters splitting twenty clients, nobody was making any money, and one by one they closed up shop. These days there were just three working operations. As a business, big game hunting was all but dead in Crandall, and it wasn’t coming back.
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Turnbull felt bad for the outfitters who’d gone out of business, though the truth was that he’d also come to resent them a bit, or at least the clients they brought in. In 2003 a popular magazine had listed Crandall and Sunlight among the state’s top elk-hunting spots, and ever since then the number of out-of-towners seeking permits there had climbed steadily, all while elk numbers continued to drop. Setting aside a certain number of tags every year for hunters from out of state didn’t help Turnbull’s odds in the annual lottery. The locals complained about the number of nonresident hunters, but Wyoming Game and Fish could charge ten times more for out-of-state permits. Like most state game agencies, the lion’s share of the department’s budget came from fees paid by hunters and fishermen, so the incentive to keep them coming in was considerable. Turnbull had never failed to draw a tag, but his friends had occasionally come up empty. He knew it was just a matter of time before he was shut out, too.
Turnbull hadn’t lost his living to the wolves, but he felt like he had lost something else, something harder to define. Crandall without elk just wasn’t Crandall. He had once been one of those hunters who shot the elk closest to the road every season, but now he liked to get out into the woods, to stalk animals, to make a study of their habits. He hunted sometimes with friends or his uncle Wayne, but more often alone, which he preferred. He was a “dawn means dawn” kind of hunter, and not many of his friends were as serious as he was.
He had been that way for a long time. In high school, he once stood up his homecoming date to go hunting with friends. Now he was divorced, with an ex-wife and an adult daughter who lived in rural British Columbia. He had been seeing the same woman for nineteen years, though they had never married. She hunted, too, though not like he did.
Turnbull was what some people might call downwardly mobile. He’d been a trucker, then cashed out and bought a gas station in Cody, which he’d run for a while more or less by himself, until the EPA told him he needed to replace his underground gasoline storage tanks. No leak had been detected, but the federal government had embarked on a nationwide program to eliminate groundwater contamination by forcing gas stations to upgrade their tanks. It was going to cost $160,000 to dig out the old ones and install replacements. With the slim margins he earned on the station, he’d never repay the loan, so he walked away.
Later he’d owned some pool tables and jukeboxes, which he placed in bars around Cody. He’d spent his share of time replacing felt and tinkering with finicky gadgets. That endeavor had started to go south when new Internet-connected jukeboxes became popular; they were more expensive and brought in less money, but customers liked them, so the bars wanted them, too. He hadn’t been sorry to see that venture come to an end; it was keeping him in town too much, away from the cabin, away from the woods, away from the hunt. Now he never left Crandall if he could help it, aside from a monthly trip to the Walmart in Cody for groceries, and the odd jobs he found left him mostly free to do what he loved.
—
In the rest of America, hunting was dying. Rates of participation had been declining for decades—only 6 percent of Americans still hunted. But in the Northern Rockies, it remained integral to the culture—Montana had the highest number of hunters per capita, and Wyoming wasn’t far behind. Women hunted, kids hunted, even wildlife biologists hunted. For some, it was less a sport than a means of supplementing the family food budget. Butchering a five-hundred-pound elk yielded upward of 250 pounds of meat for the freezer, enough to last an average family nearly a year, all for the price of a fifty-dollar hunting permit. When the Yellowstone elk herd was nineteen thousand strong, the animals were so plentiful in the woods adjacent to the park that for most subsistence hunters the driving principle was not fair chase but convenience. The elk closest to the road—and to the back of the pickup, where the carcass had to be lugged—was the right elk. Not every animal shot in the Northern Rockies ended up in a hunter’s freezer—many, if not most, bulls were taken purely for the trophy mount—but enough did that the precipitous decline in elk numbers meant at least some families were buying a lot more hamburger than they used to.
Even for those who didn’t need the meat or didn’t hunt at all, the size and health of the elk herd was a matter of concern, something to talk about at the grocery store or at church, like hay prices or the performance of the local high school football team. The familiar sound of bugling bulls meant another autumn had come; arches made from elk antler sheds marked the entrance to many mountain towns—Afton, Wyoming, was said to have the world’s longest, extending all the way across Highway 89. Elk inspired people; they were a symbol of everything that was special about living here.
These days everything seemed to be conspiring against elk and the people who hunted them. The cattle, for example, competed with elk for the best forage. Cattlemen and hunting guides had made common cause against the wolf, but the truth was that they were far from natural allies. There were maybe eight or ten cattle operations in Crandall and Sunlight, almost all of them enormous and well capitalized. Most of the rangeland was unfenced acreage owned by the National Forest Service, which leased huge sections to cattlemen every summer, just as it had for decades on public lands throughout the Northern Rockies. The cattle were brought up into the mountains every spring when the snows melted and the acres and acres of lush green grass came back, then were hauled out in mid-October, before winter really set in.
In the old days, it seemed to Louie, the cattlemen ran their cows higher in the mountains in the spring and summer. They wouldn’t bring them down into the valleys, alongside the river and the road, until the first snows came in September. That meant there was still good forage left in the low-lying areas when the cattle were rounded up and hauled off to their winter range, and the elk started coming down into Crandall from Yellowstone, looking for something to eat. Now the Forest Service let the cattlemen run their cows right along the road all summer, taking the best grass for themselves. With the grass gone, the elk had no reason to linger in Crandall. The outfitters had complained about it, but the cattlemen had “more politics,” as Louie put it.
The ranchers, meanwhile, begrudged the elk for the grass they ate in the summer, especially when the big beasts left national forest land and came onto private ranches to graze on well-watered alfalf
a. A tycoon named Earl Holding, the owner of Sinclair Oil, controlled most of the best leases in Crandall and Sunlight. Holding was the richest of the lot, but almost all the ranchers in the area were wealthy, and they weren’t afraid to let everybody know it. Louie had seen drivers stop their trucks on the Chief Joseph Highway, unload their cattle right into the road, and then simply drive off, without even shutting anybody’s gate, which was the neighborly thing to do. People would step out of their houses in the morning and find a dozen cows in their yard.
The smart heifers stayed out of the road, but everyone was expected to drive around the dumb ones. Every now and then a visitor on his way to Yellowstone would plow into a black Angus beef at night, and you’d see a game department truck out the next day, hauling off the remains before the road was full of grizzlies looking for an easy meal.
—
Crandall’s ranchers were used to losing calves to grizzlies, not to mention mountain lions and coyotes. When you ran cattle on national forest land, or adjacent to it, it was just the cost of doing business. But now they were dealing with wolves as well. Dispersing Yellowstone wolves had established a resident pack in Crandall by 1999, and though they mostly preyed on the area’s abundant elk, from time to time they killed a calf or a cow.
Unlike Louie and his fellow guides, however, the ranchers could do something about it. For decades, cattlemen with leases in Greater Yellowstone had relied on Animal Damage Control, a federal agency that employs professional trappers and hunters in every western state to remove “problem” wildlife. The agency, a division of the U.S. Department of Agriculture, kills tens of thousands of predators annually—mostly coyotes but also bobcats, mountain lions, black bears, foxes, and red-tailed hawks, among others—to protect cattle and sheep grazing on both public and private lands.
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