American Wolf

by Nate Blakeslee

  “The plaintiffs’ suggested methodology is just to speculate that the commission will not carry out its own plans,” he argued coolly, gesturing vaguely toward Honnold. “Well, that’s simply unacceptable under the statute, Your Honor. That would be arbitrary and capricious, to ignore the commission’s own plans.”

  Honnold knew Strack was correct. It didn’t matter that the governor of Idaho himself had promised to do everything in his power to drive wolf numbers as low as the state legally could. Strictly speaking, none of that should enter into the judge’s calculus in making his decision about the legality of the delisting rule.

  “So will Idaho maintain greater than fifteen breeding pairs, 150 [wolves]?” Strack summed up. “Well, undoubtedly. We have a management plan that says we will.”

  As the hearing wound down, Molloy queried the representative for Montana’s fish and game department about the legality of partial delisting. The attorney turned philosophical. If Wyoming never came to the table, then what remedy did Idaho and Montana have, he asked the judge, other than to wait indefinitely in a kind of legal purgatory? “It’s sort of like that figure in Greek mythology who is condemned to roll the boulder up the hill but never had the strength to get to the crest,” he said.

  —

  By noon the hearing was over. Molloy gave no hint as to which way he would rule, and everyone would have to wait until late summer to hear his findings. As Honnold gathered his things to leave, Ed Bangs caught his eye. “Maybe I didn’t have enough backup after all,” he said. Honnold smiled, though he knew that neither of them had any idea what the judge was going to do. He had a familiar feeling as he watched Strack and the other attorneys file out of the courtroom, their faces grim. This might have been his last time to stand up and make the case for wolves, but whether he won or lost, it wasn’t likely to be the last time wolves were in court.

  7

  IRON MAN

  Rick McIntyre didn’t attend the court proceedings. Too much was going on at the den, and he couldn’t afford to miss it.

  Two days after the hearing, he stood behind his scope on Bob’s Knob with Laurie at his side, watching 755 mind his offspring. The pups were six weeks old and growing fast, gaining two or three pounds a week. Everything was still new to them, every novel sight or smell a delight. Though it was mid-June, the weather had turned sharply colder, and sudden flurries forced the watchers back to their cars in search of more layers. Snow in summer was something that Laurie was still not quite used to, but the bite in the air had made the pups frisky, and she smiled as she watched one of the pups—at this stage it was hard to tell one from another—screwing up his courage to confront a raven that had landed provocatively nearby. The two-foot-long, jet-black bird was almost as big as the pup and completely unafraid.

  There were always a few ravens near the den, hoping to steal a bit of regurgitated food when the pups were fed. They were ubiquitous in Yellowstone, where they filled the ecological niche occupied by vultures in most other parts of the country. The birds spent a lot of time on the ground, down at a pup’s-eye level, which meant they were among the first creatures in Yellowstone’s broad menagerie that young wolves encountered. The Lamar pups had only recently discovered the fun of chasing them. The ravens hopped lightly away but never went far, which made for a game that could go on for quite some time. It was an early taste of what every adult wolf knew from long and tiresome experience feeding at kills surrounded by hungry ravens: no matter how far you chased them, they always returned.

  These pups had a lot to learn. After fifteen summers in Yellowstone, Rick had a kind of pup primer in his head, a list to tick off as their tiny worlds got bigger and bigger. Pronghorns were too fast to catch, though the pups always tried. Bison were extremely dangerous and best avoided. Coyotes that normally fled from an aggressive pack might turn on a lone wolf, especially if the coyotes had pups in a nearby den. And perhaps the most important lesson of all, strange wolves were not friends.

  One sunny afternoon a Druid finally found the new family. She was a black female yearling, part of the group that had chased O-Six across Little America as she was courting 754 and 755. Rick spotted the solitary traveler at the base of the mountain below the den site, lying in a meadow and chewing on a bone. He could see that she was over the worst of her mange, and her frame had filled out a bit. But she was somewhere she shouldn’t have been; O-Six inevitably picked up her scent and made her way down the mountainside. Rick braced himself for another violent encounter.

  O-Six stalked through the brush and long grass until the intruder was in range, then ran to confront her, tail held high. The Druid female froze. She was face-to-face with the wolf that had killed White Line, her pack leader, only a few months before. The yearling was no match for O-Six—certainly not with 754 and 755 only a few hundred yards away—but it was too late to run.

  O-Six, it turned out, wasn’t interested in another fight. As Rick looked on in wonder, she merely sniffed the visitor and allowed her to move on, following her to the east until she was sure that the den wasn’t her destination. The lone female wasn’t a harbinger of any coming Druid revenge, and O-Six seemed to know it. The truth was that there were no more Druids now, only a few scattered wolves without a pack or a home.

  Rick was grateful on behalf of the Druid female, but more than that, he was gratified to see the kind of leader O-Six had become. Good alphas, he felt, modeled wisdom and mercy, as 21 had done. Wolves who rose through the ranks merely because they were the largest or—like the cruel Druid alpha female known as 40—the most ruthless often failed to thrive once they got to the top, and their packs suffered commensurately. O-Six could be fierce, to be sure, but Rick was glad to see that she was no 40.

  Rick knew that in the field of wildlife biology, imputing human characteristics to a creature that it doesn’t really have—anthropomorphizing, as the habit is known—is considered a cardinal sin and a hallmark of amateurism. Doug Smith sometimes told people that his wolves weren’t Rick’s wolves, by which he meant that he was interested in science, not in stories. But wolves, Rick felt, were more like humans than they were given credit for, in their tribal ways and territoriality; in their tendency to mate for life; and in the way male wolves provided food and care for their offspring, so unusual in the animal world. He loved to quote the early-twentieth-century English philosopher Carveth Read: “Man, in character, is more like a wolf…than he is any other animal.”

  When human civilization was still built on hunting rather than agriculture, this notion was considered conventional wisdom. In Of Wolves and Men, Barry Lopez recounts the story of an ethnographer posing a riddle to an elder among the Nunamiut, a tribe in northern Alaska. At the end of his life, the researcher asked, who knows more about life in Alaska—how to escape a blizzard, how to find caribou, how to survive on such a harsh landscape—a wolf or a man? “The same,” the elder replied. “They know the same.”

  —

  In the weeks that followed, the pups began to wander out of the bowl, exploring the mountainside in groups of two and three. The adults never let them get too far before rounding them up with a howl or a short pursuit. Bears were still wandering through the den area with alarming frequency, and the adults had to be vigilant. By now, O-Six had resumed hunting regularly, as one of the brothers—usually 754—watched the pups. She had lost a little weight from her months in the den, but if anything, her lean frame had made her faster than ever.

  One morning a crowd on Bob’s Knob watched her chase a cow elk and her calf down from the trees east of the den site and into the creek drainage below. The cow was headed for the safety of one of the stream’s deeper pools, but O-Six managed to get between the calf and its mother just as the pair was approaching the water. The cow was forced to double back, and O-Six soon had her by the throat, bringing her down at the water’s edge. But the chase wasn’t over. As the visitors looked on, the wolf left the cow where she lay and headed back up the bank to track down the calf. In the space
of ten minutes, O-Six had killed them both, barely a hundred yards from the crowds above.

  It was not a pleasant thing to watch. Rick always recorded every kill he witnessed in great detail; they were of particular interest to Doug Smith and his fellow researchers, with whom Rick regularly shared his notes. In her own nightly report, Laurie was more reticent. She didn’t elide such moments, but she didn’t dwell on them, either. Like Rick, she considered herself an emissary for wolves to the general public, and to her, moments like this—in which the savage side of life in Yellowstone became impossible to ignore—were fraught. More than anything, what wolf advocates fought against was the long-held notion that wolves were nothing more than killing machines. They were so much more, as the wolves of Yellowstone had demonstrated time and again to anyone willing to pay attention. But it was also true that they were among the most effective predators the earth had ever seen.

  O-Six, as Laurie frequently pointed out to her readers, was rarely “cuddly.” But that wasn’t why she and so many other watchers had come to admire her. It was her stunning blend of confidence and competence that inspired them, her indomitable will, her ability to bend a harsh landscape to her own ends, to do what needed to be done to provide for herself and her family every day, without fail. Seeing her in action was like watching a gifted athlete, like the star shortstop who effortlessly turns every double play, no matter how improbable it seems. Fans know they are supposed to appreciate the overachieving striver who improves through constant practice, the type celebrated in a million Horatio Alger stories. But nobody has to be told to love the natural, for whom excellence seems to be a birthright.

  —

  The family fed on the pair of carcasses, miraculously unmolested by bears, for three straight days. With hundreds of pounds of fresh meat just a short jaunt from the den, O-Six was in almost constant motion, gorging herself at streamside and then making her way, belly wide and low, back up through the long grass to feed the pups at the den high above. By the third day, all three adults were meat-drunk, O-Six most of all. When the pups tailed after her as she set out at dawn, a would-be hunting expedition turned into a playful romp that ranged all the way down to the creek. Now three months old and weighing around thirty pounds, they had become strong runners, though O-Six was still much faster, a fact she demonstrated again and again as the pack made its way leaping and rolling down the grassy hillside.

  The pups’ personalities were beginning to emerge. The one the watchers had begun calling Dark Gray Male was the most adventurous. The other male pup had a lighter gray coat and was more tentative, and Laurie had named him Shy Male. There was one in every litter, and Laurie tended to worry about them more than the others. The two female pups were both gray and somewhat difficult to tell apart, though one was slightly bigger and bolder. The smaller stayed close to her mother whenever possible. At the creek, the pups tumbled off the bank and into the stream, delighted by the icy water.

  O-Six soon spotted a bull elk grazing by himself in a meadow high above the family, near the den, and began stalking her way uphill as the pups looked on. The bull raised his head, his healthy rack pointing skyward. When he trotted into a stand of nearby trees, O-Six broke into a run. Three of the pups readily joined in, along with 754. Shy Male held back, watched over by 755. The excitement didn’t last long; O-Six had merely wanted to test the big bull, and he’d shown no weakness. As first hunts go, it wasn’t much of an education for the pups. From O-Six’s perspective, however, it was a promise of things to come: it had been a long while since she’d had a line of wolves running behind her on a hunt.

  When it turned cold, it would be time to leave the den and hunt the full range of the pack’s territory—the extent of which she had yet to fully explore. She would be mobile again, in a way she hadn’t been since the previous winter’s trials. Even with the Druids gone, there would be dangers, but she wouldn’t be facing them alone. As her pack moved by fits and starts back up the mountainside, she could see all six of them spread out before her: 755, now a willing hunter and equal partner; 754, formidable in size if not in disposition; and the four pups, still gawky and naïve but growing fast. In just a few more months, they would be almost as big as her, their milk teeth replaced by unbreakable daggers, their legs long, their lungs virtually inexhaustible.

  This winter things would be different.

  —

  Rick religiously recorded every detail of the Lamars’ first litter in his journal. It was wonderful viewing, though nothing he hadn’t seen before at one time or another in the park. This was his fifteenth summer in Yellowstone, which meant he’d been there for fifteen generations of pups, plus another dozen or so from his summers in Denali. The circumstances weren’t always so idyllic: he’d witnessed entire litters lost to disease, pups killed by mountain lions or bears, dens raided by marauding enemy packs. Starvation, usually following an injury or death in the pack’s alpha pair, was the worst to witness.

  To the more dedicated watchers who returned time and again, Rick was a guru. He seemed to know every last detail about every wolf he spotted: their lineage, their life history, their quirks and habits. Part of his appeal was his presentation. His soothing, mellow voice was easy to listen to, and his flat affect was almost mesmerizing, especially in the bucolic roadside settings of Yellowstone.

  His reputation had grown beyond the park as well. The yellow Nissan Xterra he drove had been donated to the Park Service specifically for his use, after a Nissan employee became a regular visitor and wolf-watcher. So had his spotting scope, a top-of-the-line model from Swarovski, the high-end Austrian manufacturer, which sold for thousands of dollars.

  Doug McLaughlin had set that up. As word spread about Yellowstone’s wolves, he sold more and more scopes until finally he was among the top Swarovski salesmen in the country. One day Doug called his contact at the company and pointed out that Rick McIntyre, the man who had seen more wolves than anyone else on the planet and who spent his days engaging countless eco-tourists—and would-be Swarovski customers—was using a run-of-the-mill Bushnell. It was a question of marketing: if Swarovski was the Nike of spotting scopes, then why wasn’t the Michael Jordan of wolf-watching using one? The company arranged for Rick to get a new scope and extended an open-ended offer to send him the latest models when they were released.

  Rick was happy to have the scope, but he had never taken the company up on that upgrade. He liked the one he had. As a rule, he wasn’t big on change. His daily diet, for example, almost never varied. Frozen blueberry bagels and Diet Pepsi featured prominently. His spaghetti recipe was once featured in a celebrity cookbook, the sales of which benefited wolf research. Rick’s dish, which he made with a modest amount of ground bison meat and Ragú sauce, was considerably simpler than Linda McCartney’s recipe for aubergine caponata, which appeared on the opposite page. But then again, it had to be: he ate it almost every night. Laurie and Doug did most of Rick’s shopping for him, since he rarely made it into a town big enough to have a real grocery store. Laurie had gradually been introducing some vegetables into his diet.

  Rick had come to depend on Laurie in more ways than one. Even as he grew more adept at talking to visitors, he remained a little rough around the edges. One day after he abruptly cut someone off midquestion, Laurie approached him. “Rick, you just can’t talk to people that way,” she said. He was chagrined and grateful to her for pulling him aside. He started seeking Laurie’s advice whenever social situations turned sour.

  Rick had long compared Doug Smith to 21, his favorite wolf; eventually he began telling people that of all the women he’d met, Laurie was the most like 42, 21’s longtime mate. Of course, Laurie already had a mate of her own (and so did Smith, for that matter), but she understood what he meant.

  As for Rick, his own relationships never seemed to go anywhere. He had dated a woman, a wolf-watcher who came to the park frequently, a few years after he moved to Silver Gate permanently. One morning she suggested the two of them go to Bozem
an to see the new Johnny Cash movie. Rick was amenable, though he was thinking, Provided we see a wolf before it’s time to start driving to Bozeman. Rick happened to be in the midst of his longest streak of wolf sightings, a stretch that eventually extended to 891 consecutive days. That morning the wolves had proved difficult to find, and as the day wore on without a sighting, he became more and more anxious. He finally decided he was going to have to tell her he couldn’t go—when a friend suddenly got a wolf in his scope and hurriedly called Rick over. Disaster was averted for the time being, but the relationship eventually withered. The wolves always came first. They were his family.

  The more Rick learned about Yellowstone’s wolves, the more responsibility he felt to tell their story. He had come to think of his writing project as not just a single book but a series of books, covering everything from the rise of the Druids to the arrival of O-Six.

  But when was the first book going to appear? It had been fifteen years since he’d published anything. He had a mountain of material from his daily observations in the park, enough for an entire shelf of books. His journal contained thirteen years’ worth of notes on the Druids alone, and the story was fantastic. And yet he hadn’t begun writing any of it.

  He worried that he couldn’t meet the high standard he had set for himself—to become the next Ernest Thompson Seton—but something else was holding him back, too. Once the first book was finished, he’d have to promote it, which meant he’d have to leave Yellowstone and go back out into the world. He’d have to stop spending time with the wolves and become their emissary, just as Jane Goodall had done when she tore herself away from her beloved chimps to begin her own writing and speaking career, championing their cause everywhere she went. Instead of quiet mornings in the park, there would be airports and traffic and hotels. After fifteen years in the same place, doing the same thing day after day, it was all a little hard to imagine.