American Wolf

by Nate Blakeslee

  The Agate broke for the river again at his first opportunity, only to be overtaken once more by his younger and faster pursuers. Had the pups been a bit older, he might have succumbed to his attackers’ greater numbers. Instead, twisting and turning between the males and O-Six, he managed to protect his flanks long enough to make a third dash for freedom, and this time the Lamars gave chase for only a short spell before letting him go.

  The conflict was unlike anything the pups had ever experienced. They excitedly retraced the course of the running battle, sniffing the ground and lingering in the spots where the fighting had been most intense, the rent snow leaving a chaotic record of the fracas. The emboldened pack spent the rest of the afternoon tracking down every last place the Agates had visited in the preceding days, but the intruders were long gone, and the confrontation turned out to be the last between the two neighboring families. The old male recovered from his wounds, but the Agates, bereft of their longtime matriarch, retreated to their core territory. It was O-Six’s first successful defense of the valley.

  —

  On January 3, Doug Smith spotted the Lamars in the Slough Creek flats from the passenger seat of a helicopter. It was collaring time again. He’d agreed not to dart O-Six out of deference to the wolf-watching community, who felt she was too special—too wild—to wear the mark of any human endeavor. Bob Landis was particularly insistent, though for more practical reasons. Some of his best footage from the previous year had featured O-Six; in his mind any film he might make of her story would be ruined if she suddenly appeared in a research collar halfway through.

  Yet Smith wanted at least one more collared wolf in this particular pack. Currently, project members could track both of the adult males, but how much longer 754 would stick around was an open question. Unless something happened to his brother, he would have to leave the pack to find a mate, which would mean 755 would be the lone remaining collared wolf. Smith knew how fast a pack’s fortunes could reverse; he didn’t want a repeat of what had occurred with the Silvers, when 147’s abrupt death had left researchers wondering what had become of the pack he left behind.

  He doubted he could dart O-Six even if he wanted to. As the pilot banked over the creek, she headed straight for the nearest trees as she always did. The pups weren’t as savvy, and Smith managed to bring down the smaller of the two females after a few passes. He found her in good health, if a little on the thin side at seventy-one pounds. Her collar number was 776.

  The pack was now on the move almost constantly. O-Six had managed to keep her entire brood alive almost to adulthood, which was a rare trick. This was a dangerous time for the pups, however. Now that the pack was roaming across its entire territory, the chances of being left behind were greater than ever. The pups were nearly full grown but still naïve and would be hard-pressed to feed themselves if they became separated from the pack.

  On January 31, the watchers spotted the Lamars on Druid Peak, nosing around the old Druid den site. It was halfway up the mountain, completely obscured from the road. Rick knew from long experience where the wolves would be visible as they came and went from the den area, however. A narrow trail along a rock outcrop, known as the Ledge Trail, was the preferred route to the den forest. It was exposed enough that watchers could spot comings and goings. Sure enough, though none of these wolves had ever visited the Druid den before, they used the very same trail.

  Laurie noticed that Shy Male was not among the wolves visiting the den. A watcher on the radio reported that he was far to the west, under a copse of trees above Lamar Canyon, howling for the pack. He was only a few miles away, which meant he could likely track them down in the night, if the weather held. Wolves have glands between their toes that leave their unique scents behind as they walk, but heavy snow could make it difficult to scent-trail. For the time being, Shy Male was by himself, not far from the border of the Lamars’ territory. If strange wolves found the pup before his parents did, he might become the young family’s first casualty.

  At first light the next morning, Laurie spotted a single pair of tracks in the valley but no wolves. The pack was gone. Rick had signals indicating they were far to the east, likely up the Soda Butte drainage. The temperature meanwhile had plummeted to forty below. It was so cold that steam from the valley’s warm springs was freezing in the air, forming tiny crystals of ice that hung on the breeze and caught the morning sun. The phenomenon, called fairy dust by park veterans, was usually cause for delight. But now the brutal cold felt like a bad omen for O-Six’s lost pup.

  Shy Male eventually was spotted howling forlornly as he made his way east. There was no reply; the pack was simply too far away. He was at least headed in the right direction. In the afternoon, however, the pup lost the pack’s trail. To Laurie’s dismay, he turned and headed west. There was no way to know how long it had been since he’d had something to eat. The pack was still far to the east the next day, which dawned just as cold. Shy Male, meanwhile, had continued in the wrong direction. By midmorning, he had made it all the way to the old den above Slough Creek, where he wandered about in circles, looking for his family in the place where he had been born.

  The next morning the Lamars were back in the valley, and the watchers counted them anxiously. There were seven. After three days on his own, Shy Male had found the pack at last. Or more likely, Rick thought, the pack had found him.

  —

  The pups now looked like lithe versions of their parents. Both female pups resembled their mother, and as their frames filled out, it became more difficult to tell the three Lamar females apart as they moved across the valley. Soon they would be considered yearlings, yet they hadn’t become any less playful. That winter the pups spent countless hours stalking mice. The rodents had marginal nutritional value for animals as large as wolves, but mousing wasn’t about being hungry—it was about having fun. Hidden beneath two feet of snow in tunnels of their own making, the mice couldn’t be seen from the surface, but the wolves could hear them moving. With their uncannily sensitive ears cocked forward, heads tilted to one side, the pups listened for the telltale scrabble beneath the snow, then reared up, foxlike, for a two-footed pounce. Most often they missed. When one of the pups managed to catch one at last, he paraded around with the hapless mouse dangling from his mouth, daring his littermates to try to take it, or tossed it high into the air and pounced on it again.

  One evening Laurie watched 776 and her sister, whom she and Rick had begun calling Middle Gray, lounge on the snow in the trees near Soda Butte Creek. The rest of the pack was nearby; they had a carcass in the woods. As she studied the two sisters, Laurie noticed something black on the snow between 776’s paws: she’d caught a raven. She had no interest in eating it—her belly was already full of elk—yet it was clearly a cherished prize.

  The young wolf stood up, gathered the limp bird in her jaws, and began looking for somewhere to hide it. She set the raven down briefly on a frozen stream, only to have it slip off the ice and into the shallow water, necessitating a brief bobbing exercise to retrieve the now-sopping wet bird. She trotted along until she found a suitable nook under some brambles, where she carefully tucked her package, pushing some snow across the entrance.

  No sooner had she made her cache than her brother, Dark Gray, began nosing among the feathers scattered around her former resting place. He promptly began scent-trailing the bird, only to be distracted by a hole along the bank of the creek, from which he pulled an enormous chunk of ice. Something about its size and texture appealed to him, and he settled down with the chunk between his paws and began gnawing away at it as though it were a bone, as content with his find as his sister had been with hers.

  The pack’s adults, meanwhile, were more interested in one another. It was mating season again, and the love triangle that connected the three of them was much in evidence. O-Six did little to discourage 754’s affections, but 755 policed their interactions diligently, and when O-Six was ready, the alpha male didn’t miss his opportunity. Rick
had gotten into the habit of timing such couplings, known as ties, over the years with his wristwatch; a particularly long one was marked on the calendar, the better to predict when the pups might be born.

  —

  As the brutal winter wore on, bison left the park by the hundreds, searching for lower ground. It wasn’t the cold they were fleeing: their fur had an underlayer so efficient that scarcely any body heat reached the ends of the longer guard hairs above. The relentless snow was what drove them out. For every bite of grass they ate, a mound of heavy snow had to be shoved aside. It was a task for which the bison’s broad forehead and muscular neck and shoulders were well suited, but even so, there were limits to how much snow the beasts could move before the effort outweighed the meager reward, and this year the snowpack was much deeper than usual.

  Most of them left the park near Gardiner, which meant they wouldn’t survive to see the spring. Some of Yellowstone’s bison carry brucellosis, a disease that under rare circumstances can be transmitted from wildlife to domestic cattle. Thanks to a long-standing agreement with ranchers north of the park, Montana authorities slaughtered most of the bison that left the park in the winter to prevent any possibility of contagion; this year the migration was bigger than usual, and five hundred were killed.

  Those that remained in the valley were slowing down, conserving what energy they had left. More and more they resembled white statues, almost indistinguishable from the granite boulders that dotted the valley’s endless fields of snow. The elk were suffering, too.

  The wolves, on the other hand, could not have been healthier. Their fur kept them so warm that they seldom sought shelter from the cold. Even when it was time to rest, they simply curled up in the snow wherever they were and closed their eyes. And every winter-killed animal was a free meal, so the Lamars were eating well.

  One morning 776 spotted a bison on its haunches near Soda Butte Creek, surrounded by ravens. She approached with caution—bison were dangerous, even when they were half-starved—but the animal didn’t move. It was dead, frozen in place as it dozed upright in the deep snow. The ravens had done their best, but there was little they could eat until the carcass was properly opened. 776 made a few experimental tugs at the bison’s hide, but the carcass was so stiff that she couldn’t get good purchase. In the end, she decided it wasn’t worth the effort; there was no shortage of food, after all. She left the bison sitting there, still upright, its massive head staring straight ahead at nothing, a strange sentinel in the frozen silence.

  —

  In mid-March it was clear that O-Six was pregnant again. Rick watched her soliciting food from the males, a sign that she was slowing down and would be denning soon. Unlike last year, this spring she would be well provisioned in the den. The pups had become accomplished hunters, and Rick had watched them join 754 and 755 to take down elk without O-Six’s help. But where would the new litter be born? O-Six had been spending more time in the old Druid den site on Druid Peak, though Rick had also spotted her checking out the Slough den as well.

  By the end of the month, she’d made her choice. The new pups would be born on Druid Peak, in the same den where O-Six’s mother had been born, or very near it. The den site was not especially high on the mountainside, nor very far from the road that ran along its base, yet it was impossible to see from the ground, nestled as it was in a heavily wooded recess. This time there would be no grand unveiling of the pups as there had been at the Slough Creek den, no scenes of O-Six moving her newborns around by the scruff of the neck or chasing them down when they wandered too far. The trees around the site were just too thick.

  But Rick didn’t mind. O-Six had chosen a den that had been used by the park’s most successful pack for more than a decade, and that seemed propitious. He’d documented at least a dozen litters born there, had watched 21 and 42 come and go from the den forest every spring, year after year. Localized on Druid Peak, the Lamars were now officially Lamar Valley wolves, and he welcomed the idea of spending the spring and summer here, watching them move through the landscape he knew so well.

  He had spent so many years in the valley, scanning the sides of Druid Peak to the north, Specimen Ridge to the south, and the river corridor in between that he might as well have lived there himself. When he closed his eyes, he could see every hill, every contour of the river, every dip and rise in the valley’s floor in his mind—the way lifelong residents of a neighborhood knew every tree, every building, every street—and could tell a story associated with each. Now the valley would be the stage for a new story.

  O-Six had come home.

  9

  BETRAYAL

  In early April 2011, an alarming memo came down from the superintendent’s office: if the Obama administration and the new Republican majority in the House of Representatives couldn’t reach an agreement on a spending bill by April 15, Yellowstone National Park—along with the rest of the federal government—would shut down. The park road through the Northern Range would remain open, but only for purposes of travel between Silver Gate and Gardiner; there would be no stopping within the park for any reason, including wolf-watching.

  Talk of a government shutdown had been brewing for months. As predicted, the fall elections had resulted in a GOP takeover in the House, and the new Republican speaker, Ohio’s John Boehner, immediately demanded massive budget cuts as a condition for any new spending agreement, along with the repeal of Obamacare. The Republican caucus now included a sizable Tea Party contingent, and the new members let it be known that they were prepared to stop at nothing—furloughing thousands of federal employees, even defaulting on interest payments on U.S. government debt, one of the pillars of the global economy—to achieve their goals. A lengthy game of brinksmanship between President Obama and Speaker Boehner had ensued, dominating the headlines for months.

  At the last possible moment, Obama acquiesced to the cuts, signing a federal budget bill funding the government for the remainder of the fiscal year. (A separate bill unraveling Obamacare never made it to his desk, having been shot down by the Democratic majority that still held the Senate.) Disaster had been averted, but a new era of hyperpartisanship in Washington had begun.

  The 459-page funding bill made no mention of wolves or the Endangered Species Act, but tucked deep inside was a paragraph, barely a hundred words long, that radically changed the terms of the debate. It read:

  Before the end of the 60-day period beginning on the date of enactment of this division, the Secretary of the Interior shall reissue the final rule published on April 2, 2009 (74 Fed. Reg. 15123 et seq.) without regard to any other provision of statute or regulation that applies to issuance of such rule. Such reissuance (including this section) shall not be subject to judicial review and shall not abrogate or otherwise have any effect on the Order and Judgment issued by the United States District Court for the District of Wyoming in Case Numbers 09-CV-118J and 09-CV-138J on November 18, 2010.

  In plain English, the provision reversed Judge Molloy’s ruling—reinstating Fish and Wildlife’s decision to delist the wolf in Idaho and Montana—and stipulated that neither Molloy nor any other judge would have the power to overturn Congress’s intervention. In Wyoming, meanwhile, the wolf would remain under federal protection, pending the outcome of the state’s lawsuit against Fish and Wildlife. The directive, known as a budget rider, had been inserted with the approval of the lead budget negotiators for each side—Harry Reid for the Democrats and John Boehner for the Republicans—just two days before the House and Senate voted on the bill. It was authored by Montana senator John Tester.

  Tester’s rider was unprecedented. It marked the first time in the thirty-eight-year history of the Endangered Species Act that Congress had intervened in the rule-making process to force a desired outcome. With a single paragraph, lawmakers had upended years of jurisprudence based on countless hearings and hundreds of pages of expert testimony.

  If the move was brazen, it was also cunning. Had the rider’s language been in a s
tand-alone bill put to an up-or-down vote on the Senate floor, its passage would have been extremely unlikely. Pinning it to the coattails of the must-pass budget bill, however, gave Democratic members the cover they needed; they weren’t voting against wolves, they were voting for a budget that their leaders had negotiated, a compromise that represented the best possible deal they could get in the face of a Tea Party–dominated Republican caucus that was intent on cutting federal spending to the bone and was willing to hold the federal government hostage to get it done. The rider was Reid’s favor to Tester, the boost he needed to climb past Rehberg in the polls.

  As is often the case with changes slipped in at the eleventh hour, there had been no debate on the merits of the rider, nor even any formal announcement of its adoption. Environmental lobbyists caught wind of the move shortly before the scheduled vote, however, and spread the word to liberal bloggers, who were outraged. But it was too late. The deal was done, and no hundred-word paragraph—no matter how controversial—was going to be allowed to derail a budget agreement months in the making, sealed just hours before a looming government shutdown was set to begin. Tester’s rider was just one of a laundry list of policy changes tacked onto the bill—like those governing the fate of prisoners at Guantánamo Bay or low-income women seeking abortions in Washington, D.C.—during the backroom negotiation between Reid and Boehner. Wolves had become another commodity in Capitol Hill’s never-ending swap meet.