American Wolf

by Nate Blakeslee

  —

  That summer Wyoming’s hunters finally got the news they had been waiting years to hear. On July 7, Interior Secretary Salazar met with Matt Mead, Wyoming’s newly elected governor, at the state capitol in Cheyenne. With Salazar was Dan Ashe, whom President Obama had just appointed his new Fish and Wildlife director. They hadn’t made the long journey from Washington by choice. Wyoming senator John Barrasso had demanded the meeting as a condition of Ashe’s confirmation by the Senate, where by long-standing tradition even a single member can hold up a presidential appointment indefinitely at his or her own discretion. Barrasso, a Republican from Casper, wanted a deal made to get wolves delisted in Wyoming once and for all, and he wanted it done now. Seven days after Ashe was confirmed, he was on a plane to Cheyenne.

  The next day Governor Mead announced that the two sides had reached a tentative agreement. Wyoming’s recalcitrance seemed to have paid off in the end; despite lengthy negotiations over the preceding year, state officials had made scarcely any concessions. Under the proposed management plan, almost the entire state—everything south and east of the Yellowstone–to–Grand Teton National Park corridor—was still a “predator zone,” in which wolves could be killed at any time for any reason. Back in 2009, this had been a deal-killer for Fish and Wildlife, yet now the department reversed itself and signed off on the arrangement, under the somewhat circular logic that an almost total lack of wolves in the eastern four-fifths of the state meant that it wasn’t critical wolf habitat. (The same could have been said for Yellowstone National Park prior to 1995.) In fact, by the agency’s own count, there were forty-six wolves currently living in what would become the predator zone, including three breeding pairs. Under the terms of the agreement, it was assumed that all these wolves would be killed in relatively short order, once the delisting order was approved.

  Likewise, the state’s plan still lacked any firm commitment to maintain a buffer above the absolute minimum of one hundred wolves outside Yellowstone. But that didn’t seem to matter anymore, either. If it was becoming abundantly clear to wolf advocates just how few friends they had left in Washington, officials at Fish and Wildlife were just as capable of reading the tea leaves. The fight over wolves was moving from the courts to the political arena, and it was a war the wolves were losing.

  No firm deal had yet been made, so there was no timetable for Wyoming’s first wolf hunt. It wouldn’t happen that fall, which was fast approaching. Still, Crandall’s remaining outfitters began exploring the idea of adding a wolf hunt to their menu of services. It was starting to seem like the feds really meant it this time.

  —

  On August 19, Doug spotted 754 bedded with his brother in the heather not far from Soda Butte Creek. Eventually he stood and, after rousing 755 with a submissive lick, began heading east. Through his scope, Doug could immediately tell something was wrong with the way 754 was moving: his front left leg was broken. He had apparently injured it the night before, most likely during a hunt. The leg wouldn’t hold any weight at all, which meant that 754 could barely manage more than a trot. A broken leg was the most common injury for wolves and, next to a wounded jaw, the most worrisome. For a lone wolf, it was often a death sentence.

  A few days later a watcher spotted 754 far up the Soda Butte Creek drainage, limping alone through Round Prairie, with four coyotes tailing him relentlessly. So formidable on four legs, a wolf with only three is a humble creature. The huge black wolf was three times the size of any of his pursuers, but in his reduced state he could only tuck his tail and plod along, ears flat and head low, until he reached the woods. Had those coyotes in Round Prairie been strange wolves instead, 754 would easily have been killed.

  Over the next six weeks, as his leg slowly healed, 754 returned to the fold, never straying far from his brother and O-Six and feeding off of the pack’s kills as he always had. Even with nothing to contribute, he was as welcome as he had ever been, though elk were now becoming truly scarce. Between kills, the wolves were reduced to gnawing on the dusty, suntanned hides and scattered bones of winter-killed bison that had died months before.

  In one respect, the timing of the injury was fortunate: had the break occurred in winter, when the pack was fully mobile and wandering the length and breadth of its territory, 754 would have been hard-pressed to keep up. He hopped along as best he could at his brother’s side, plopping down for a rest at every opportunity. Even so he found himself left behind from time to time, especially when the pack crossed the road. The blacktop was more intimidating than ever, now that he couldn’t dart across. He was so flustered one evening that Rick had to stop traffic for him so that he could join the rest of the pack heading up Druid Peak to the den.

  In the end, it was not 754 who left the pack that summer but Dark Gray. He’d begun turning up in the watchers’ scopes less frequently since early August. By the first week in September, he was gone. It wasn’t surprising that he was the first to strike out on his own; even as a pup, he had stood out for his boldness. Still, the watchers missed him, especially Laurie. She could still remember him tumbling down off the narrow landing in front of the den above Slough Creek and being dragged back up in his mother’s jaws.

  Wolf generations were so short: just when you got to know one litter of pups, some of them would inevitably disappear, and another group was on the way. Without a collar on Dark Gray, the watchers would likely never know what the future held for him or where in Greater Yellowstone he would end up. He might become an alpha and sire generations of pups of his own, or he might be killed the moment he left the Lamar Valley. Rick liked his chances. If nothing else, he was an outstanding hunter, having learned from the best.

  —

  On August 30, 2011, the wolf-hunting season opened in Idaho. Montana’s would follow two weeks later. Montana set a statewide quota of 220 wolves, but Idaho set no upper limit, the goal still being to drive wolf numbers as low as legally permitted. What might have been a gloomy day in the park became full of excitement as O-Six finally moved the pups out of the den forest and onto the valley floor, to a spot she had chosen near the base of Mount Norris, about two miles east of the old Druid summer rendezvous.

  Always a traumatic event for pups born on Druid Peak, the move down off of the mountain began smoothly enough. After months of high water, Soda Butte Creek had finally returned to normal flow, and the pups crossed without incident. Set up on a hill at the base of Druid Peak, the watchers could see the family moving through an early-morning fog in the valley south toward the river corridor. The pups were awed by the new surroundings, by turns cowering and running excitedly ahead. The yearlings helped O-Six herd them south toward the rendezvous, chasing the pups down when they occasionally made a break for the mountain and home.

  Just as the family reached the river, two visitors on horseback riding a trail through the valley spotted them and began to approach. At the sight of the horses, 755 panicked and fled east, with 754 limping along behind as best he could. O-Six made for the trees on the far side of the valley, with two of the pups in tow. The remaining three were still in the river corridor, but the curious riders decided to follow O-Six, and she couldn’t turn around until she reached the trees. Over the next hour, the watchers looked on apprehensively as O-Six methodically searched for the three missing pups, howling periodically and pausing to listen for their replies. By the end of the evening, she had found only two. Laurie feared the worst, but two days later all five were sighted in the rendezvous.

  Just after dawn on September 20, Laurie spotted a pair of female Agates not far from Junction Butte in Little America, moving north across a frost-covered plain toward the ford in the Lamar River. She’d been following the progress of the two wolves, one of whom was O-Six’s younger sister, for months as they tried to form a new pack. Hearing a howl, Laurie scanned the landscape until she spotted a slender gray bedded in the sage, calling after the two females. To her delight, it looked very much like Dark Gray, the missing Lamar yearling. If she
was right, it meant he hadn’t gone far after all, and he seemed to have found a home, or at least a decent prospect.

  —

  By late September, the Lamars were beginning to go on longer jaunts from the rendezvous with the pups in tow. They were big enough now that it was sometimes difficult to tell them from the yearlings, and when all eleven members set out together, they were a force to behold. One evening Rick watched as the pack boldly drove off a grizzly that had tried to take over a kill the wolves had made near the river the night before.

  776 was emerging as the beta female, frequently taking the lead position as the pack moved across the valley floor, and joining her mother in the vanguard of hunting forays. Like her mother, she showed no fear of the road. She was clearly an alpha in the making and wasn’t shy about dominating her sister Middle Gray when she felt it was necessary. Now that 754 was back in the fold, Shy Male had resumed his habit of shadowing him, never missing an opportunity to submit to his uncle.

  The pups, meanwhile, were flourishing. One of them, the light gray female, had become a favorite of the watchers. Her very light coat—almost white in the summer—made her easy to recognize, but it was her beautiful facial markings that truly set her apart. Her face was almost two-toned, white on the cheeks and gray through the nose and eyes, which were unusually expressive.

  Aside from their traumatic move to the rendezvous, the new litter seemed almost charmed. They had little trouble from bears; Laurie even watched the pups play with a young grizzly, perhaps two years old, who had just left his mother and was still adapting to life on his own. For a half hour, the pups chased him playfully as he spun and bluff-charged this way and that, never making an aggressive move and seemingly enjoying every moment. Days later the pups experienced their first real snow, gleefully sliding down embankments and rolling on top of one another.

  So often in summer, packs tended to drift apart in Rick’s experience, with yearlings that seemed to come and go, neither fully committed to the pack nor completely independent of it. Or there would be succession struggles, as subordinate adults bucked against the alphas’ leadership. But the Lamars were unusually cohesive, O-Six’s powerful presence the pole around which the rest of the pack orbited.

  —

  Despite Rick’s pleasant mornings in the park with the Lamars, it was impossible not to think about the hunt when he returned to Silver Gate in the evenings. The woods were full of elk-hunters, and he frequently heard gunshots as he sat in his cabin, typing up his notes or eating his bison spaghetti. Every time a wolf was spotted in the back of a truck in Gardiner, Rick would hear the report. The first legal trapping season in decades would soon begin in Idaho.

  October 5 brought more bad news. Fish and Wildlife had officially endorsed the Wyoming delisting plan announced back in the summer. As expected, the state’s management plan for wolves was essentially the same document that Fish and Wildlife had rejected three years before. The plan was sent out to experts for a lengthy peer-review process, with the tentative goal of turning management over to the state in time for a hunting season in the fall of 2012, which was roughly fourteen months away. If it came to pass, Yellowstone would essentially be surrounded by wolf-hunting zones, and no wolf foraying out of the park in any direction would be safe.

  For the watchers, a kind of siege mentality set in. Laurie had always been sensitive about the dirty looks she sometimes received from locals passing through the park when she was on the side of the road with her scope. Now it seemed to her that it was happening more often. “Get a good look,” a man in a passing pickup told her, “they won’t be there much longer.” The scowls always seemed to come from drivers with Wyoming plates. She imagined them heading down into Crandall, where so many Yellowstone wolves had been lost over the years, and waiting for their chance to shoot another—legally this time.

  Shortly after Fish and Wildlife’s announcement, the Wolf Project recorded the season’s first confirmed losses to the hunt. Both of the former Agates that Laurie had spotted traveling with the Lamar yearling Dark Gray had been shot north of the park. There was no way of knowing whether Dark Gray had been with them at the time, and his whereabouts were unknown. Project staff spotted a female yearling, the last known living member of the ill-fated pack, traveling far and wide in the months after the death of her companions. She was alone.

  Thanks to Doug Smith’s efforts, the quota for the hunting zone just north of the park had been reduced from twelve in 2009 to just three, and the two Yellowstone wolves were the second and third taken, closing the area for the season. That should have meant no more Northern Range wolves were in danger, at least until fall came around again. Nevertheless the park lost one more, when a hunter illegally shot a wolf known as 692 near Jardine on November 5, 2011. She was a five-year-old female, well known to the watchers as one of the founding alphas of the Blacktail Pack, though she had been wandering more or less on her own for some time. She had been born an Agate, in the same litter as O-Six. The hunter, a local, told authorities he was unaware the limit had been reached in the area, though it had been closed for a full month. He was fined $135.

  10

  RAMPAGE OF THE MOLLIES

  On a clear morning that fall, Erin Stahler flew over the Pelican Valley in Roger Stradley’s Piper Cub, looking for the Mollies Pack. Known for its brutal weather and dense grizzly population, the Pelican wasn’t ideal wolf habitat, but then the Mollies had not come there by choice. The high, snowy valley in the park’s interior was where the pack’s original alpha female, driven from the Lamar Valley by the Druids fifteen years before, had finally stopped running.

  The Pelican had few elk in winter, but the original Mollies taught themselves to prey on bison, and their descendants remained the only pack in the park that did so regularly. They seldom got to enjoy their meals as they would have wished, however. The Mollies lost most of their carcasses after an hour or two to the Pelican Valley’s ubiquitous grizzlies, which could smell a fresh kill from miles away.

  Still, the pack endured. Theirs was a story of perseverance, and Stahler, like Doug Smith and the rest of the team, had come to admire those original pioneering wolves and their descendants. Now that the Druids were no more, the Mollies had officially become the last of the original handful of packs brought down from Canada.

  In Stradley’s capable hands, the tiny plane swept the windy, craggy terrain as methodically as a crop duster working a wheat field, while Stahler scanned through the pack’s frequencies on her receiver. Eventually she spotted the alpha female, 486, in the southwestern part of the valley, traveling alone. In the Pelican’s upper reaches, Stahler found what seemed to be the rest of the pack. She counted nine adults sleeping in the snow, along with seven pups. The Mollie alpha male, 495, was not among them.

  After another pass, Stahler found out why: her receiver picked up 495’s collar transmitting in mortality mode. Discoveries like this were why project biologists flew the park so often. Outside the Lamar Valley, it was impossible to know what was going on with most of the packs without a plane, and this was a major development—though just how big Stahler didn’t yet realize.

  A few days later a crew hiked in to investigate and found 495’s carcass in the snow. He had suffered traumatic injuries, most likely from a bison kick. Even past his prime at nine years of age, 495 was an amazing specimen. At the time of his collaring in 2005, he weighed 143 pounds, making him one of the largest Yellowstone wolves on record. With his dark coat and massive head, he resembled a juvenile black bear lumbering across the snow. Many of his male offspring had grown up to be almost as formidable as their father.

  He had been the pack’s alpha male for a little over two years, and his reign had been a productive one. With five adults, seven yearlings, and seven pups, the pack was flourishing. Now, however, the longtime Mollie alpha female 486 would have to find a new mate, most likely from outside the pack, since most of the subordinate males were related to her. Ordinarily a dispersing male from another pack
would fill that position, but a large pack could intimidate would-be suitors, and the Pelican was so remote that lone wolves seldom wandered through. In the end, 486 decided to leave the pack to seek a mate on her own.

  The problem was that it was almost time for the Mollies’ annual journey out of the valley, the time when the pack needed leadership the most. Elk tended to leave the Pelican early in winter when the snows got too deep. Bison were a viable, if much more difficult, alternative, but the pack had also formed the habit of coming north to the Lamar Valley, revisiting the same rich hunting grounds the Druids had wrested from them so long ago. Over the years, the watchers had learned to expect some conflict, like the ambush that claimed the life of 42 in 2004. Yet the Mollies rarely stayed long. They were after elk, not territory. Within a few weeks, they usually returned home to the Pelican, not to be seen again until the following year.

  But this winter things were different. When the Mollies left home, they were nineteen wolves strong, less a pack than an army—but one that was in considerable disarray. A subordinate female had stepped into 486’s place, but there was no new candidate to take over for the dead alpha male. The result was mayhem on a scale not seen since the Wolf Project began.

  On December 2, the Mollies killed the alpha male of the Mary Mountain Pack in the Hayden Valley, an area along the Yellowstone River west of the Pelican. From there, the pack moved north, engaging O-Six’s natal pack, the Agates, in a series of skirmishes. On December 22, Doug Smith detected a mortality code from Agate 775, the alpha male. Nobody had witnessed the conflicts, but Smith wasn’t surprised that two alphas were among the casualties. They tended to do the heavy fighting when packs collided. The trail of destruction made it clear enough where the Mollies were headed, and it was only a matter of time before they arrived.

  —

  On January 6, Rick and Laurie were in a pullout near the midpoint in the Lamar Valley when they spotted the Lamars bedded on a bald knob near the top of Specimen Ridge. Suddenly the wolves were up and moving in unison to the east. Rick scanned in the opposite direction and saw the reason: the Mollies were coming over Specimen a mile to the west, all nineteen of them.