American Wolf

by Nate Blakeslee

  Reid was more than eager to help. He’d promised to steer plenty of campaign cash Tester’s way, and observers were predicting his next race would be the most expensive in Montana’s history. But money might not be enough, especially if Rehberg outmaneuvered him on the wolf issue. If Democrats were going to keep a toehold on power in Congress—if Obamacare was going to live past its infancy—wolves needed to start dying in Montana, in large numbers, and soon.

  If he could find a way to reverse Molloy’s ruling, Tester asked Phillips, should he do it?

  Phillips was a pragmatist. He didn’t think wolves should be hunted near Yellowstone—he felt it wasn’t fair chase—but he wasn’t against wolf-hunting in general. He agreed with Ed Bangs and the wildlife professionals in the states: wolves were back to stay, and no amount of hunting was going to change that. Still, he didn’t like the idea of Congress intervening in a decision about how the ESA should be applied. It was a bad precedent, he told Tester.

  But it wasn’t bad science, in his opinion. “Biologically, you’re fine,” he said. Yes, it was a political solution to what was essentially a legal conundrum, but life was politics. There was no getting around it.

  “We need you reelected,” he told Tester. “So go ahead.”

  —

  In the fall of 2010, O-Six found herself ranging farther and farther east to find elk, and Rick began to pick up signals from her packmates’ collars in the Lamar Valley on a regular basis, and even to points beyond. On one foray, O-Six made a kill in an area known as Round Prairie, four miles up Soda Butte Creek, the tributary of the Lamar that ran southwest from Silver Gate and down into the park. Getting the meat to the pups meant trekking back down Soda Butte, through the entire Lamar Valley, and back to the den above Slough Creek—roughly ten miles. To the amazement of the watchers, O-Six made the round-trip twice in one day, traveling forty miles altogether. It was a herculean effort, but it wasn’t sustainable. It was time to move the pack to where the food was. It was time, in other words, for O-Six to go back to the Lamar Valley, the place her mother had been born, the place the Druids had once ruled.

  The problem was that despite the Druids’ demise, the valley wasn’t completely free of wolves. A small pack known as the Silvers—a mated pair and two adult daughters—had moved in the previous winter, taking advantage of the Druids’ decline. They were soon joined by O-Six’s onetime companion 147, the black male she and her sister had been running with when she first encountered 754 and 755. His brief dalliance with O-Six’s sister hadn’t lasted, and she’d eventually gone back to her natal pack. The Silver females had welcomed 147’s company, while the resident alpha male had done his best to run him off. But the Silver alpha was past his prime, and when the inevitable showdown came, 147 defeated him. The old male wasn’t seriously injured, however, and 147 allowed him to stay, in a kind of emeritus role.

  This behavior was not unprecedented, but it was unusual, and Rick watched with interest as the two males adjusted to their new arrangement. In time, 147 began to treat the old wolf like a big brother, clutching him around the neck with his paws and licking his face. For their part, the old male’s daughters, one of whom was just a yearling, chased and tumbled with 147 as if they had known him since birth. In the spring, the alpha female gave birth to a litter of 147’s pups, the first born in the valley to a pack other than the Druids in over a decade.

  The presence of the Silvers in the valley might have been what was pushing the Lamars so far east, up into the Soda Butte drainage. The packs were roughly the same size, though the Silvers had more adults, and dislodging them would have been a somewhat risky proposition for O-Six.

  On October 20, Rick discovered just how far east the Lamars were roaming. That morning in the frosty predawn darkness, he climbed into his Xterra and started the motor. As the SUV idled in front of his cabin, he turned on the rooftop antenna as he always did. To his surprise he immediately got a powerful signal from 754 and 755. It was too strong to be coming from the park; the Lamar males were in Silver Gate.

  He took a quick look out his window, but it was still black outside. He picked up his radio and called Laurie and Doug, the two people in town he knew would be awake already. Like Rick, Laurie was already in her driveway, warming up her Subaru. In the calm, professional voice he always employed on the radio, he told her to stay put: the Lamar males were nearby. It was unclear if O-Six or the pups were with them; it might have been just the two males out hunting. Laurie was ecstatic, but there was nothing to do but stay near the radio and wait for the sun to come up.

  Then she heard a howl. She got out of the car and listened. It was high-pitched, almost certainly that of a pup, and very nearby. She stood in the driveway, waiting for an answer. When it came, it was like nothing she had ever heard. The pack’s calls to one another echoed against the sheer walls that towered over the town, and she stood dumbfounded, just a few yards from her front door, immersed in the sound of their voices.

  When the darkness at last began to give way, she saw three figures moving through the trees east of the house. It was O-Six and the two males. They were close enough that had they been her dogs, she could have called them to her. Over the next hour they moved in and out of her view, sometimes in the woods to the north of the house, sometimes across the street in the meadow to the south. The pups were somewhere out of sight; periodically they howled in distress, and the adults answered. Rick joined Laurie in her driveway, and they watched together, too excited to get out their scopes and not really needing them in any case.

  Rick looked up and down the road as the sun rose and the handful of buildings scattered along Highway 212 came into view. Every morning he left for the park in total darkness and returned in the afternoon or evening; this was the first time he could remember in his fifteen years here that he had actually seen the morning sun on the narrow valley. His absence from the park didn’t go unnoticed, and as word got around that the Lamars were in Silver Gate, watchers began to join them in ones and twos. By the time a small crowd gathered, the three adults were walking boldly along the side of the road. O-Six crossed the highway at will with 755 in tow, and 754 darted furtively across when he had to. Scarcely any cars were on the road at that hour.

  Rick’s joy at seeing the pack right outside his front door was tempered by the significance of this excursion: The Lamars considered the area east of the park to be part of their territory. Nothing good could come from that. There may not have been a wolf-hunting season that fall, thanks to Judge Molloy’s ruling, but there were cattle east of the park—especially along the Clark’s Fork and its tributaries, like Crandall Creek—and cattle and wolves didn’t mix. In recent years, Wyoming officials had taken an increasingly aggressive stance toward livestock depredations in the area. After ten cows were lost in 2008, government hunters destroyed an entire pack based near Crandall Creek and all but a handful of members of a pack that denned in Sunlight.

  —

  That fall the Silvers suffered a serious loss that suddenly made the Lamar Valley look much more attractive to O-Six and her family. On November 1, as Rick scanned for the Silver pack, he detected a mortality code coming from 147. A few days later Wolf Project biologists hiked in and found him lying under some pines. He had puncture wounds, most likely from a fight with other wolves, though it wasn’t clear which pack had been in the area. The perpetrator might have been a lone wolf roaming through the valley, which was not uncommon. It was a sad occasion for the watchers. 147’s kindness toward the old Silver alpha had made him a favorite.

  Still, his death was a good omen for the Lamars. Without an alpha male, the Silvers’ claim on the valley would be tenuous. With no collared wolves remaining among the Silvers, the watchers had no way to track the pack. Rick guessed they would likely scatter. It showed how fragile pack life was, even in a wolf paradise like Yellowstone. A pack was thriving one moment, and then it was simply gone the next.

  Shortly after 147’s death, the Lamars began frequenting a site
on the eastern end of the valley that the Silvers had been using for months. There was no sign of the Silver alpha female, the old male, or the pups, and O-Six had apparently moved her brood in without a fight. It was a piece of land Rick knew well: the Druids’ old summer rendezvous. O-Six had presumably never visited the spot, but somehow she found it and made it her own, just as generations of Lamar Valley wolves had done before.

  The Lamars’ move to the rendezvous made them easy for the watchers to locate in the mornings, though viewing was not quite what it was back at the den on Slough Creek. The best spot for watching the pack was a full two miles from the site, and there were trees and foothills that tended to obscure the action. But it was possible to keep tabs on their comings and goings and, with a little luck, to catch a few glimpses of domestic life.

  Now six months old and weighing perhaps fifty pounds, the pups were beginning to rank themselves. Dark Gray Male was the most assertive, snapping and snarling at his littermates from time to time, though they didn’t always appear to notice. Shy Male tended to fall behind when the family was on the move and would often bed by himself, some distance from the pack. He was leery of the road and sometimes refused to cross, hiding in the trees and howling instead. Rounding him up when it was time to move on required no small effort by the adults. The task more often than not fell to his uncle, 754, who seemed to take a special interest in the pup.

  The pups were now feeding at kills, though they sought food from the adults at the rendezvous site as well. Regurgitation is less a choice than a reflex, and to keep their own stomachs full, O-Six and the two males were obliged to pin the pups when they came running, tails wagging, to solicit a meal. The adults held them down for a few seconds, their enormous jaws clamped lightly on the pups’ throats, until the youngsters got the message and stopped trying to lick at their mouths. After a few weeks of pinning, a simple curled lip was usually enough to keep the hungry pups at bay.

  When it came to joining in the hunt, however, the young wolves needed little encouragement. The valley was full of elk that fall. One rainy morning shortly after they’d moved, the entire pack bedded atop an embankment above a curve in an old course where the Lamar River no longer ran. An enormous herd was passing about a mile to the north, not far from the park road. This end of the valley was the part that most resembled the Serengeti, to which it was so often compared: flat and grassy, with wide-open vistas that allowed predator and prey alike plenty of warning about what was coming their way. Adults and pups were lounging on the dried-up riverbank, like lions in the hot Serengeti sun, passively watching the distant ungulates. The fickle nature of Yellowstone’s own sun made no difference to the wolves, and neither did the chill wind, which at that moment was blowing a steady rain into their faces. They did not miss the sun, nor did they mind the rain.

  The elk drifted south, moving in the pack’s direction. When the lead animals spotted the family hunkered down in the wet sage, the herd turned abruptly east, and the wolves found themselves staring at the flank of a passing parade of cows and calves, with a few young bulls in the mix, snorting and huffing in alarm as they got within range and prancing to show their fitness. O-Six and the two adult males scarcely moved, but the pups popped up and down like prairie dogs, alternately excited and intimidated by the hooved mass of buff-colored hide thumping and surging before them. Dark Gray danced back and forth, ready for action, though when a solitary elk broke from the herd in his general direction, he immediately turned and ran for the protection of his parents.

  When the last elk had passed, the pups waited for a cue from O-Six. Would they give chase? They would not. Whatever their mother was looking for in the passing herd, she hadn’t seen it. One by one the adults roused themselves and left the bank. 754 paused briefly to submit to his brother, who rewarded him with a high wagging tail, then lingered behind to make sure each of the pups, including Shy Male, kept up with the family as they drifted across the valley.

  It was unusual for so many elk to be in the valley this early in the winter. They typically stayed at higher elevations until a bit later in the season, not coming down until the deep snow on the mountaintops forced them to seek lower ground. But this year they were already coming to the valley in droves. As the elk arrived, hundreds of trumpeter swans were leaving, though it was somewhat early for their migration as well. The elk and the birds appeared to know something that the wolves and the watchers did not.

  What that was became clear on November 20, when a massive snowstorm hit the Northern Range. Even for Yellowstone, the snowfall was staggering. The roads in and out of the park were all but impassable, and the power and phones were out for days in Silver Gate. Trees overloaded with snow and buffeted by the wind collapsed, falling across the roads. Snowplow crews managed to clear enough snow and debris to open the park for a couple of days, but then another round of flurries, coupled with a relentless wind, created dangerously high drifts, and the superintendent closed the park again. (Rick still managed to get his daily visits in, of course.) When it reopened, the plowed roads were jammed with bison desperate for some relief from trudging through snow up to their bellies. No wolves were sighted for four straight days.

  The storm was unusual only in its intensity. During the winter, Yellowstone was one of the coldest inhabited places on earth. Trees at higher elevations in the park had been known to simply explode, succumbing to the rapid expansion of their frozen sap. The park was also one of the snowiest places in the nation. Snow could fall any day of the year, even in the middle of summer. Average snowfall north and south of the park was roughly twenty feet per year, but Yellowstone itself usually got more than twice that amount. The November snowstorm was the beginning of what would become one of the harshest winters in years. O-Six’s first winter in the valley would be one to remember.

  —

  A few weeks after the storm, a solitary wolf stood howling high atop Specimen Ridge. He was perched on a thick cornice of snow, looking down into the valley from a vantage point roughly a mile west of the rendezvous site. Far below, the Lamars heard the call and turned their attention to the mountain. With the Silvers gone, the pack had roamed the valley unchallenged for over a month. From time to time they picked up the scent of a lone wolf wandering through, but there had been no real threat.

  This was something different. The wolf on the ridge was 586, the beta male of the Agates, O-Six’s natal pack. In late fall, the Agates had begun frequenting the eastern end of Little America, which had seen less use since the Lamars moved from the den above Slough Creek into the Lamar Valley. The Agates, who spent most of their time farther to the south along the Yellowstone River, were still led by O-Six’s mother, known as 472, though she had now reached the advanced age of nine. One of O-Six’s sisters was still with the pack as well. Her father had died in 2007, but two dispersing wolves—a pair of Mollies from the park’s interior—had recently joined the Agates, and one had become 472’s new mate. The other was 586, a barrel-chested 130-pound gray, bigger even than 754.

  The Lamars still considered the eastern end of Little America—at least as far as the natal den above Slough Creek—to be part of their territory, and the packs had been ranging closer to one another in recent weeks. On December 1, they’d gotten close enough to exchange howls, raising the possibility that a confrontation was coming. With nine wolves, the Agates had greater numbers, boasting five adults to the Lamars’ three. O-Six chose retreat that day, leading her clan higher and higher onto Specimen, until the Agates were far out of range. Whether O-Six and her mother recognized one another’s howls was unclear; in any case, mother and daughter never got close enough on that occasion to test the resilience of their familial bond.

  As it happened, they never would. On December 6, O-Six’s mother was found dead on the western edge of Little America, not far from Junction Butte. She’d been killed by other wolves, most likely the neighboring Blacktail Pack, which made occasional forays down into the outskirts of Agate territory. Her tenure as an
alpha had been among the longest since reintroduction, and she had left a considerable legacy in Yellowstone’s Northern Range, most notably in female leadership: at least five of her daughters had become alphas in other packs.

  Now, three days after her death, 586 was alone in Lamar territory. The Agates had entered the valley the day before, chasing elk, and he’d become separated from the pack. He was old—one of the oldest wolves in the park—yet he was still very hale, with a thick gray coat and a deep, basso howl. He was also heavy. As he leaned over Specimen’s sheer drop, the fresh snow under his feet suddenly began to give way. He leaped back just as the cornice crumbled, sending a river of snow cascading toward the edge. Suddenly an entire section of the ridgeline gave way, and thousands of pounds of snow and ice plummeted down the mountainside with a thunderous roar, slamming into the trees below and sending a spray of fine white powder high into the air.

  If the Lamars had been unsure of his location before, they certainly knew where he was now. They also knew from his unaccompanied howl that he was alone. The pack replied in a confident chorus, and then for good measure jumped atop one another in a licking, rollicking heap. Undeterred by the avalanche or the challenge of the wolves below, 586 continued to look for a likely place to descend Specimen. As he made his way down, the Lamars approached from the south, moving through the trees in the rippling foothills. When the intruder finally reached the flat plain of the valley and broke into the open, the Lamars spotted him and began advancing at a run, the two adult males in the lead, with O-Six just behind. The old Agate didn’t flee; instead he approached with ears flat and tail wagging low, as though he were greeting his own pack, as he might well have believed; at his advanced age, his eyesight and hearing were likely not what they once were.

  By the time he realized his mistake, 754 and 755 were within striking distance. The old male turned and sprinted for the river, breaking trail through the deep snow. The Lamars followed, loping easily through his wake, and were on him in seconds, with 755 leading the attack. Outnumbered and desperate as he was, the solitary Agate was not an easy victim. He was a more experienced fighter than either of the Lamar males, and his wide leather collar and thick winter coat offered some protection from their slashing teeth. The pups joined in as best they could, snapping at the intruder’s rear legs and hindquarters to no real effect.