Once wolves were returned to the Northern Rockies, the pressure on the agency to begin killing them was almost immediate. Shortly after reintroduction, the owner of a ranch known as the Diamond G filed suit against U.S. Fish and Wildlife, citing cattle losses on the seventy thousand acres his stock grazed in the Dunoir Valley, a remote drainage deep in the Shoshone National Forest, about thirty miles south of Crandall. The ranch managers, Jon and Debbie Robinett, told reporters wolves first began appearing on the ranch about a year after they were returned to Yellowstone.
Like every other rancher in Wyoming—at least, those under the age of eighty or so—they had no experience with wolves. That spring they lost sixty-one calves. It was difficult to say how many of those had been killed by wolves and how many were taken by other predators. Nevertheless, a pro-wolf group called Defenders of Wildlife, determined to establish goodwill for the reintroduction program, compensated the ranch for the calves from a private fund raised solely for that purpose.
The money helped offset the increased losses, but life on the ranch never felt the same. One night as Debbie was taking her Great Pyrenees, Booger, from the ranch house out to his bed in the barn, a group of wolves appeared out of nowhere. They showed no interest in her, but several of them immediately attacked the dog. Debbie ran to her jeep, jumped in, and flashed the lights and honked the horn. The wolves disappeared, driven off by the commotion. She found Booger the next day, miraculously alive, though covered with bite wounds. “It’s very personal to me,” Debbie told the Associated Press, speaking of wolves. “I want them eliminated.”
Wolves might have been a novel sight on the Diamond G in the 1990s, but the contest Debbie described—dog and shepherd versus wolf, with livestock as the stakes—was as timeless as any in recorded history. Wolves were once the most widely distributed land mammal on earth, and every early pastoral civilization in the northern hemisphere outside of Africa competed with them for land on which to run livestock—and for the livestock themselves. Wolves very rarely attacked people, but a single wolf could ruin a shepherd’s livelihood if he developed a taste for cattle, sheep, or goats. For centuries, wolves dominated rural conversation as the weather does today, a legacy reflected in the dozens of wolf metaphors that still color languages around the world, in most cases long after any living memory of seeing a wolf on the landscape remains.
Everywhere human civilization flourished, wolves were routed, until Homo sapiens, not Canis lupus, became the most widely spread species. Ironically, the dog—a domesticated wolf—became the first line of defense against depredating wolves, which grew more common as wild prey populations declined under pressure from human hunting and loss of habitat. Romans sometimes referred to dawn as inter lupum et canum: “between the wolf and the dog.” Dogs ruled the day, and wolves owned the night. Humanity’s most beloved animal and its most despised were essentially the same creature, but the wolf’s threat to the shepherd’s livelihood poisoned relations between men and wolves, and the wolf’s reputation never recovered. In Western culture, the wolf became an embodiment of wickedness, from the Middle Ages, when the werewolf myth first appeared, to Grimm’s fairy tales in the early nineteenth century. Early Christians—“the flock,” as believers were called—saw themselves represented in the sheep; their shepherd was God. The wolf that preyed upon the flock was the devil himself.
And now the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service had brought the devil back to the Northern Rockies. The wolves frequenting the Diamond G weren’t eliminated, but Animal Damage Control, in keeping with the bargain made with ranchers prior to reintroduction, shot several of them. In the years that followed, Fish and Wildlife received a steady stream of complaints from ranchers, especially as wolves expanded their territory even further. Losses in Crandall had been minor, though the numbers were trending in the wrong direction, as far as the local ranchers were concerned. They didn’t relish learning how to deal with a predator their own ancestors had so decisively defeated long ago.
—
Even before the return of wolves, Crandall had the feel of a world apart, a place that modernity had passed by. Turnbull had never used Google, never sent an e-mail; he was, as he put it, “computer illiterate.” His cabin had no landline, and he was too far from the nearest tower to have much luck receiving calls on his cell phone, either, even with a signal booster and a rooftop antenna. He’d never been to a big city (Wyoming, with a total population under 600,000, didn’t have any) and rarely ever encountered anyone who didn’t look like him; he liked to tell people from out of town that he’d seen far more grizzlies in his life than he had ethnic or racial minorities.
But even Crandall was changing. For the last thirty years at least—ever since A River Runs Through It was published—people all over the country had been buying vacation homes in the mountains around Yellowstone, looking to secure their own little piece of heaven. Or not so little. Entire ranches were snapped up, sometimes at outrageous prices. Other times, large spreads were subdivided into ranchettes. High prices accelerated the trend: the more valuable the land became, the less likely the large ranches were to pass intact from one generation to the next. Estate taxes, along with the tremendous incentive to sell, took their toll. The new owners usually kept a few cattle, so they could also keep the generous tax exemption bestowed upon agricultural land, but few of them had any real interest in ranching.
Most of the big ranches in Crandall and Sunlight were still held by traditional cattlemen, unlike the river valleys farther south—such as the prestigious South Fork of the Shoshone, where a five-hundred-acre section of Buffalo Bill’s dude ranch, once hunted by Teddy Roosevelt, among other early-twentieth-century celebrities and swells, sold for $3.8 million. But Crandall and Sunlight both had their share of new million-dollar houses owned by vanity ranchers who didn’t know an Angus from a Holstein, or a mule deer from an elk. There was the billionaire who cleared a piece of meadow long enough to land a Learjet near his vacation house, for example. Turnbull hadn’t even known such a thing was possible. Then there was the private equity fund manager who bought the Switchback Ranch, an 8,200-acre spread situated high above the Sunlight Basin, on a bench so isolated that it could be reached only by a rugged trail barely manageable by an ATV. The new owner didn’t seem to mind. He came and went by helicopter, as did all his supplies. Every spring he ferried thousands of pounds of freight—diesel, food, seed to feed the cattle he ran—over the river from a knoll near the highway. Turnbull couldn’t even begin to guess what that might cost.
He’d heard some grumbling about the sight of his cabin, which was not the most beautiful structure in Crandall, ruining someone’s perfect view of paradise, but he couldn’t care less what they thought. As long as he could still get an elk, he wasn’t going anywhere.
—
For outfitters like Louie, fewer working ranches meant good horses were getting harder to find. Ranch owners traditionally sold off their horses when they reached the age of six or seven years, to force their cowboys to switch to younger animals that needed gentling. That provided local outfitters with a steady stream of horses available for purchase that were calm and predictable—perfect for inexperienced riders. Now there just weren’t as many for sale. Louie and his son Casey found themselves holding on to the stock they had for longer and longer, which meant spending more time and money caring for horses with bad knees. Even so, they were increasingly forced to head up the mountain with young and inexperienced horses, which raised the chances of an accident. Panicked horses had been known to throw riders off the side of the mountain or to fall to their deaths themselves.
On one of Casey’s final trips up the mountain, he guided a pair of clients on an archery elk hunt. One of them shot a bull, and Casey began to dress him. It was late in the day, and the temperature was dropping. The hunters mounted up to head back to camp, but the smell of fresh blood spooked one of the young horses, and it began galloping down the trail with the client on its back.
“Bail out!”
Casey yelled at the man.
The client had the presence of mind to leap to the ground before the horse had gone too far, but he fell awkwardly, and the quiver of arrows on his shoulder wound up beneath him as he landed. When he rolled over, Casey saw a broken arrow shaft sticking out of the man’s thigh, its razor-sharp head buried deep in the muscle. They were five miles from camp, and another five from the nearest road. The client pulled the arrow out himself, but he was bleeding badly and couldn’t ride. Casey put a tourniquet on the wound, built a fire for the two men, and raced back down the trail on his own horse to get sleeping bags and food, in case the injured man had to spend the night where he lay. When he got within range, he called his mother, who was in camp cooking dinner, on his two-way radio. She found a satellite phone in the client’s gear and walked out into a clearing to call the hospital in Cody, which sent a helicopter. Afraid the injured client would sue, Casey didn’t charge either man for the hunt.
Not long afterward Casey told his dad he’d had enough. For the amount of money the outfitting business was bringing in, the hassle just wasn’t worth it. The Forest Service bureaucracy, the insurance companies, the cattlemen, and now the wolves—it was too much. The family still had the guest ranch, which brought in some revenue, but Shelley and Louie didn’t really need Casey to help run it, and he wasn’t the type to freeload. He decided to try farming instead. Louie helped set him up on a piece of land the family owned near Powell, Wyoming, about a hundred miles east, out in the arid Bighorn Basin, and Casey, his wife, and their young daughter moved away for good.
It had been a couple of years since they’d left. Now his life was about seed and diesel and irrigation pipe. Once, alone in the Crandall backcountry, he’d shot a charging grizzly with a pistol to save his own life. These days he rode a tractor, cutting and baling alfalfa to sell to the local cattlemen, exposed to nothing more dangerous than sunburn and diesel fumes. Louie and Shelley learned to be satisfied with phone calls and weekend visits as their granddaughter grew up without them.
Casey wasn’t happy, either, but he was committed to making a go of it. Since he’d left, Louie hadn’t brought many clients up the mountain, and the Forest Service had recently informed him that his big game outfitter license had been suspended for lack of use. He still paid the fees to keep his camps, though he wasn’t sure when he’d use them again. He was getting close to seventy, and it was hard to say if anyone would take over the business that had been in his family for generations when he was gone.
—
Turnbull’s uncle Wayne had long since given up on guiding, though the two continued to hunt together in Crandall from time to time. Wayne wound up driving a delivery truck through the same mountains where he once guided elk-hunters.
One afternoon at the Painter Outpost, Turnbull overheard a tourist talking to his son about wolves. It seemed the pair had been in Yellowstone and had seen a pack take down an elk calf. “That was something special,” Turnbull heard the man tell his son. “We were pretty lucky to be there.”
Turnbull couldn’t contain himself. “You weren’t lucky!” he shouted angrily, as the man listened in stunned silence. He found calves ripped apart by wolves every spring, Turnbull told him.
Wolves weren’t special, not in Crandall. Wolves were killers.
5
THE KING OF CURRUMPAW
The den was in a wide, grassy bowl on the side of the Buffalo Plateau, a flat-topped mountain that formed the northern boundary of Little America, about a mile west of Lamar Canyon. Slough Creek skirted the base of the mountain, collecting snowmelt from a series of shallow, zigzagging drainages that dropped down from the summit. The most prominent of these was so thoroughly carpeted with long grass that it looked like a verdant river cascading down from the den site to the wide, marshy flats of the creek below. The west side of the bowl was cozy and shady, thanks to a small copse of Engelmann spruce and a few aspen. The rest was open to the sky. It was backed by a steep hillside of loose brown earth, dotted with rocks and patches of sage.
The den itself was a hole dug into the side of the slope, about fifteen feet up the hillside. For a wolf, it was a couple of bounds almost straight up from the thick brush below. A narrow tunnel extended from the den’s muddy, two-foot-wide mouth back into the hill, where a larger chamber had been hollowed out.
It was a beautiful morning in May 2010, and spring had finally reached the Northern Range. The southern side of the mountain was greening up wonderfully, though snow still clung to the higher reaches. A grizzly sow and two yearling cubs had been working their way across the side of the mountain since dawn. Now they were in the bowl, grazing on the long grass below the den entrance.
One of the yearlings noticed the fresh dirt below the tunnel and began nosing its way up the slope. Attracted by the den’s earthy smell—fresh scat, mixed with the lingering scent of O-Six’s latest meal—it poked its nose inside. O-Six launched herself from the depths of the tunnel and hit the cub straight on, sending it tumbling down the hillside and into the sage below. A smaller cub she might have killed outright, but this was a yearling, roughly her own size. Even so, the stunned cub was in full retreat, with one hundred pounds of angry snapping wolf pursuing it. The sow was on them in seconds, lunging and slashing at O-Six with her three-inch claws, as the cub scrambled to safety. O-Six retreated toward the den, her lips pulled back to show her teeth, while the grizzly licked her startled cub and the second yearling hovered nearby.
The sow didn’t advance on O-Six, but she didn’t seem to want to leave, either. Inside the den were four pups, barely two weeks old and completely defenseless. If the bears decided to dig up the hillside to get to them, O-Six could do little about it. The sow was half the size of a mature male grizzly but still capable of killing a careless wolf in an instant with a single swat of her mammoth paw. O-Six had harassed her share of bears over the years, usually when she returned to a kill and found unwelcome visitors. But if it came to actually attacking a mature bear, she would have no hope of killing it and would likely die in the process. O-Six began bark-howling, a high-pitched staccato cry that sounded like a coyote’s alarm call, but her mate, 755, and his brother, 754, were away hunting, most likely miles to the west. There was no reply.
This sow wasn’t the first bear to wander through the den area. Grizzly numbers had been surging the last few years, and the park was full of them. They were constantly on the move in the spring, grazing like cattle on grasses and tender forbs, always with an eye out for hidden elk calves, hunkered down where their foraging mothers had left them. Grizzlies rarely took an adult elk, but they were capable of startling bursts of speed—more than enough to overtake a fleeing calf.
In the preceding weeks, O-Six had been forced to confront a seemingly endless parade of grizzlies and black bears, keeping them moving until they were a safe distance from the den. Like a mother elk, she was intent on keeping her pups hidden for as long as possible. Some of the intruders had left more willingly than others, but thus far none had seemed to take an interest in the den. This time was different, and O-Six now found herself confronting an enemy she couldn’t defeat but couldn’t run from, either.
—
Up until the bears came, the den site had seemed perfect. O-Six’s instinct about the weakness of the Druids had been correct. Lacking an alpha male, the pack wasn’t denning at all. This made them mobile and, in theory, more dangerous to neighboring packs. Yet none of the handful of remaining Druids had visited the site; they had essentially ceded the Slough Creek drainage to O-Six and her two males, along with neighboring Lamar Canyon.
In fact, everything west of the canyon and north of Specimen Ridge was potentially hers, as far as the Lamar’s confluence with the Yellowstone River some four miles from the den. O-Six’s own natal pack, the Agates, held the land to the south along the banks of the Yellowstone and made regular forays into Little America to hunt. There had been a few skirmishes; a couple of months before O-Six dug her den, 755 and 754 had been ru
n off a bison carcass by a group of Agates. But they were unlikely to cause serious trouble as long as O-Six’s mother still controlled the pack.
The pack to the west, the Blacktails, were more of a concern. They hunted regularly in the western portion of Little America and would be unlikely to give up the area without a fight. The Blacktails weren’t an especially large or aggressive pack; still, to defend her land, O-Six needed more wolves. By fall, her pups would be almost fully grown, and her pack of three would be a fully mobile pack of seven—if they survived.
O-Six couldn’t nurse the pups, defend the den, and hunt all by herself. She’d been in the den for weeks now, which meant that 754 and 755 had been forced to hunt on their own. The results had been mixed. Without O-Six to lead them, their forays often seemed directionless. Help seemed to arrive one morning in the form of two yearlings, a black and a gray, who unexpectedly joined the brothers on a hunt a few miles west of the den. It was the time of year when young wolves tended to roam alone, and 754 and 755 seemed to know this pair, who might have even been from the brothers’ natal pack. The four managed to bring down an elk together and shared it amicably. One of the yearlings even accompanied 754 back to the den, but—suddenly unsure of his welcome in the presence of the formidable O-Six—didn’t stay. The new arrivals soon moved on, and the brothers were left to their own devices once more.
They hadn’t always been able to keep the few elk they did manage to bring down; grizzlies had driven them away from their kills more than once. Just two weeks earlier, the duo had been lucky enough to find a bison carcass in Slough Creek. It was a free meal, most likely winterkill, as animals who succumbed to the cold were known. Before they could drag it from the water, however, two grizzlies came in to feed. Wading in up to his neck in the swollen creek, the larger of the two took control of the carcass, while the smaller lingered nearby and waited his turn.
American Wolf Page 9