American Wolf

by Nate Blakeslee

  Some of the Mollies seemed to have become separated from the main group, and now it was chaos on the mountainside, as Rick’s radio crackled with reports from watchers to the east and west. Mollies had been spotted in twos and threes moving off in every direction, and it was unclear how many, if any, had actually made it to the den. O-Six remained on her perch, her head cocked to one side, listening intently for signs of the enemy’s location. 776 and Middle Gray were howling from opposite sides of the den forest, but there was no answer, either from the Mollies or from 754 or 755. Finally O-Six hazarded a foray down the ledge trail toward the den, as 820 held back. Meeting no resistance, she sidled back down into the den forest and out of sight.

  When the Mollies finally reconvened an hour later, it was a half-mile to the west, on a foothill below Druid Peak. They rallied and howled, long and loud. Then all sixteen moved off in a group to the south, crossed the road and the river, and headed toward the far side of the valley. None of the Mollies were bloodied or visibly limping, and the watchers hadn’t observed any of them make contact with a Lamar wolf—though it was anybody’s guess what had happened in the thick trees around the den site. The entire encounter had lasted about two hours.

  There was still no sign of the Lamar males, and Rick suspected they had missed everything, despite the howling and yipping from their daughters. O-Six’s signal had disappeared, suggesting she was back in the den, which was a good sign. But the pups’ fate remained unknown.

  The watchers had to wait three days for a definitive answer. In the days after the battle, Rick got strong signals from each Lamar collar, so there was no question that those wolves, at least, were alive and in the vicinity of the den, which suggested that the pups were still there, too. Finally O-Six was spotted slipping down out of the den forest, off the mountain, and across the road. She was moving with purpose, most likely to a carcass the rest of the pack had taken somewhere in the valley. If she returned promptly, that would be a sure sign she was still tending the pups.

  To Rick’s relief, she came straight back about two hours later, her belly bulging. She had saved the youngest generation of Lamars. O-Six might have led the invaders away from the immediate vicinity of the den with her desperate dash through their ranks, but Middle Gray was the one who had kept them from returning, drawing the Mollies away at the crucial moment. Rick had long assumed that 776 was the most likely of O-Six’s daughters to emerge as an alpha. Now that Middle Gray had been tested and shown her mettle, it seemed there might be two future pack leaders in the Lamars’ midst.

  Sightings were difficult over the next few weeks, limited mainly to small hunting parties of two or three wolves coming or going from the den. It would remain that way until the pups were big enough to move down out of the den forest. Thus it wasn’t until mid-May that Rick realized the black male yearling hadn’t been seen for some time, not since the raid on the den. He’d somehow cheated death in February, when the Mollies caught him during the clash on Crystal Creek, but this time it seemed he hadn’t been so lucky. The watchers had no way to know for sure, but the most likely explanation for his absence was that he was dead, another victim of the Mollies. He was the first pack member O-Six had lost.

  —

  By midsummer, the Mollies had split apart, as packs that reached their ungainly size often did. To the watchers’ relief, a half-dozen of them, including the alpha female and a new mate she had picked up, returned to the Pelican Valley. It might well have been the case, Rick speculated later, that finding an alpha male to replace the deceased 495 had been the pack’s objective in staying abroad for so long. All that chaos and conflict, caused by one kick from a bison’s hoof. The Mollies that remained north gradually went their separate ways, some drifting off alone, others joining neighboring packs. More troubling to O-Six’s clan, a few had connected with a new group that had come together in the Lamar Valley. The Wolf Project hadn’t given them a pack name yet, but they seemed to be settling in for a long stay.

  With only five members, however, this faction was a force that could be reckoned with. On August 3, the Lamars came upon the interlopers at a bison carcass on a bench along the south side of the valley. Eight of the nine adult Lamars were there, and they came barreling in with tails raised, catching the smaller pack off guard. When the surprised wolves scattered, the Lamars pursued a wolf known as 822, a three-year-old black Mollie who had been present for both last winter’s confrontation near Crystal Creek and the attack on the den forest in late April. Slight and fast, she led the Lamars on a mile-long chase, fleeing at full sprint down the bench, across the river, and all the way to the road, with her pursuers, led by 755 and the fleet-footed 820, close behind.

  On a hillside just north of the road, 755 caught her, burying his teeth in the base of her back and dragging her down so that the rest could pile on. Pinned and helpless, the Mollie female made no attempt to fight them off. After about sixty seconds of violent thrashing, most of the Lamars withdrew. But O-Six remained, grabbing her opponent by the throat and whipsawing back and forth savagely until she was satisfied that the bloodied and broken wolf would not get up again.

  After the showdown in the valley, the Lamars had no further trouble from the Mollies, though the months-long struggle did ultimately cost them a bit of territory. A pair of Mollie females joined with some males from the neighboring Blacktail Pack and settled into an area on the far west side of Little America. It was never a core part of the Lamars’ territory, but the pack had sometimes ranged that far west, especially in the winter. Now they fell into an uneasy truce with the new group, which came to be known as the Junction Butte Pack.

  By the time the dust settled, the Mollies’ rampage had profoundly reordered affairs in the Northern Range. They had killed at least nine wolves in four different packs. O-Six’s natal pack, the Agates, had disappeared altogether, virtually all its senior adults lost to the Mollies.

  One thing remained the same, however: O-Six still controlled the Lamar Valley. She had won.

  11

  “THE WORST POSSIBLE THING I COULD TELL YOU”

  The late-summer weeks that followed were warm and hazy. Smoke from a fire burning northwest of Gardiner drifted into the valley, dimming the watchers’ scopes. It was the last month of the 2012 tourist season, and the park was packed with visitors, as full as Rick had ever seen it. Getting from one pullout to another had become a frustrating exercise in patience and perseverance. Hitching Post in particular was a zoo.

  Everybody wanted to see O-Six. She had never been the star of a documentary like 21 and 42 (though Bob Landis hoped to change that), never made the papers from coast to coast, like Limpy, whose thousand-mile journey briefly turned him into a celebrity, but everyone seemed to know who she was anyway. She had become one of the sights to see when you went to Yellowstone, like Old Faithful or the Upper Falls.

  The pups from her third litter, now four months old and becoming quite active, put on a lively show as they romped around the meadows near the den on Druid Peak. They were lucky to be alive, though they didn’t realize it. Neither did the scores of visitors who stopped by to watch the charmed pups for an hour or two, unless they were lucky enough to catch Rick recounting the story of the attack on the den.

  South of the lot, meanwhile, random groupings of the scattered Mollies were making regular appearances in the river bottom. When they were in view, some visitors couldn’t resist the temptation to venture out, cameras or binoculars dangling from their necks, trying to get just a little closer. Rick policed them as well as he could, but he couldn’t be everywhere at once. The wolves ignored the interlopers up to a point, beyond which they inevitably retreated, as often as not to some haven invisible to the frustrated crowd back at the roadside. It was hard to fault the guilty parties for their excitement; most would never get a chance to see a wolf again as long as they lived. Still, Laurie in particular looked forward to the end of summer vacation and that first dusting of snow, when the park would become theirs again.
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  Middle Gray and 776, both now two years old, spent more time than most tending to the new pups, which included two grays and two blacks. Of the two sisters, Middle Gray was the more maternal, constantly shepherding the youngsters back toward the den forest, whereas 776 was cut more from her mother’s cloth, inclined to join the hunt whenever she could. The pups were also drawn to 754, just as the first two litters had been, and he allowed them to jump on him with as much forbearance as ever, though the last vestiges of his own youthful exuberance were almost gone. He often sat by himself, slightly apart from the pack, gazing down from his high perch, like some stone griffin, at the tiny comings and goings on the park road far below.

  There were plenty of elk in the valley, and the pack was eating well. The scattered Mollies occasionally visited a Lamar kill when the coast was clear, sneaking what meals they could. No such visit went undetected, and the adult Lamars spent an inordinate amount of time examining the scent trails of every wolf that had come and gone in their absence. But the intruders gave the Lamars a wide berth, and their presence was no more than a nuisance. The Lamars’ biggest worry was getting across the busy road to feed the growing pups. But soon O-Six would move them down to their summer rendezvous, and even that minor annoyance would disappear.

  —

  Still, real danger was looming, and it wouldn’t go away. On August 31, 2012, just as hunters in Montana and Idaho were gearing up for the start of the second season since wolf-hunting was legalized by Senator Tester’s budget rider, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service officially removed wolves in Wyoming from the endangered species list. After a contentious peer-review process, the five experts Fish and Wildlife had selected to review Wyoming’s plan returned a split decision—three agreeing with the agency that the plan passed muster, and two finding that it didn’t offer sufficient protection. That was good enough for Fish and Wildlife, which issued its rule just in time for Wyoming’s long-delayed first legal hunting season to go forward.

  For wolf advocates, the timing could not have been worse. Earthjustice was forced by law to give the government sixty days’ notice before filing suit, which meant the hunting season would be well under way before any judge reviewed the legality of the delisting rule. When they did file, it would not be Doug Honnold’s name on the suit. After more than fifteen years of litigating on behalf of wolves, he had finally returned to his native California, leaving his colleague Tim Preso in charge of the Northern Rockies office. Rather than take his chances in Wyoming, Preso decided instead to sue Fish and Wildlife in federal court in Washington, D.C., where the agency was headquartered.

  Yellowstone wolves now had no safe way to leave the park. To the north was Montana, where hunting guides with clients, especially around Jardine, were all but guaranteed to see Yellowstone wolves in the woods. To the west was Idaho, where hunters and trappers would be allowed to take up to five wolves per person in a season that would last six months. To the east, in woods that were still full of hunters despite the declining elk herds, Wyoming’s sportsmen would all be vying to see who could get the first legal wolf. Game officials set a quota of eight wolves in the hunting zone that included Crandall. Wolves leaving the park to the south, meanwhile, would most likely find their way into Wyoming’s predator zone.

  On September 10, the first day of the Wyoming season, a hunting guide named Mike Hirsch shot a wolf from a local pack on the Two Dot Ranch, an enormous spread between Cody and Crandall. It was the first wolf legally taken by a trophy hunter in Wyoming in decades. Wyoming law prohibited state officials from revealing the name of a hunter who shot a wolf, or the exact location in which the wolf was taken, in order to protect the privacy of everyone involved. But Hirsch happily gave an interview to the paper in his hometown of Powell, twenty-five miles northeast of Cody. He was proud to be the first, and he wanted everyone to know it.

  When the news reached Crandall, Turnbull called Hirsch, an old friend, to get the story himself. He was surprised that Hirsch had allowed his name to appear in the paper. “Aren’t you worried someone is going to come after you?” he asked. Turnbull had never met any of the park’s wolf aficionados, but he worried that some of them were angry enough about Wyoming’s new hunting season to do something crazy.

  Turnbull already had his wolf tag and had been out every morning that week, driving the Chief Joseph Highway looking for wolf tracks in the fresh snow. He figured it was his best chance of finding a pack, though so far he’d seen nothing.

  —

  News of the hunt colored everything the watchers saw in the park that fall. A few days after Hirsch got his wolf, O-Six moved the pups to the summer rendezvous at the base of Mount Norris, the same spot she had used the year before. Behind Norris was a drainage known as Cache Creek, which eventually led to the headwaters of Crandall Creek at the park boundary and, turning due east, down into Crandall proper. The Lamar adults sometimes ventured out that way in search of elk, but they usually didn’t get too far before turning back toward home.

  Still, Rick was worried. Over the years, the Druids had sometimes ranged out of the park that way, but Crandall had been thick with wolves in those days, and the Druids had seldom lingered long for fear of a conflict. Now that government hunters had thinned the local packs, however, a Yellowstone wolf might travel for miles without meeting another wolf or smelling another pack’s mark. O-Six might even decide to claim Crandall as her own.

  —

  By the first day of fall, September 22, the crowds had diminished and the watching was easier. The Lamar pups were now big enough to accompany the adults on longer jaunts, and the family, fully mobile at last, seemed unusually carefree and playful. As Laurie and Rick watched, O-Six led the entire pack on a long ramble across the southern side of the valley and up onto a prominent bench. One of the black female yearlings was leaping over tawny 820 and her other littermates. Later Laurie spotted them playing with something slightly shiny, tossing it high into the air and jostling one another to catch it when it landed. On closer inspection, she saw that it was a plastic water bottle, probably left behind by a hiker on the Specimen Ridge trail.

  Watching the pups play with a piece of litter was disconcerting, but it was also a sign of how far park officials had come in their drive to make Yellowstone a true wilderness. Bears once routinely fed on garbage heaps in Yellowstone, as visitors gathered around to watch at the behest of park rangers; now a single piece of trash was an exotic toy for an animal that had come back after a decades-long absence.

  The delighted pups took turns crunching the bottle and bounding after one another. The enthusiasm was infectious, and soon 755 and O-Six were cavorting like yearlings themselves, racing across the bench until O-Six was running full out, her figure gliding over the thin snow as if she were on skates. Even at six and a half years of age, she could still outdistance her younger mate. “I have never seen an alpha female and alpha male enjoying each other so much,” Laurie wrote in her note that night. Later she and Rick watched as 754 and one of the black pups chased each other around a log. They were still getting to know this litter, but this one, a male, was spunky and adventuresome—one to keep an eye on.

  —

  On November 6, Election Day, the attention of the nation was focused on Montana once again. As expected, control of the Senate hinged on John Tester’s contest against Denny Rehberg, along with a handful of other competitive races. Mitt Romney was polling at least ten points ahead of President Obama in the state, but Tester, amazingly, had managed to stay almost dead even with his Republican challenger. When the last returns were tabulated, deep in the night, he had edged Rehberg by fewer than twenty thousand votes and the Democrats had preserved their majority.

  Rick spent the day tracking the Junction Butte wolves as they made a foray through O-Six’s territory. After a lengthy détente, the pack was becoming bolder, venturing more and more frequently from its base in Little America through Lamar Canyon and into the west end of the valley in pursuit of elk. Now Rick watche
d as the ten of them wandered deeper into the valley, howling at one another when they became briefly separated, then coming together en masse to feed on an old bison carcass north of the road. Later they all crossed the road and climbed up to a good resting spot on Jasper Bench on the south side of the valley.

  The Junctions seemed unaware that all thirteen Lamar wolves were already on the bench, perhaps a mile away, watching them. O-Six had spotted the pack as soon as the howling began, but she made no move to confront them. She didn’t seem to consider them a threat, despite their frequent incursions into the valley, perhaps because she herself had begun making more forays east of the park, expanding her territory in the opposite direction.

  Later that afternoon, as Rick had the bedded Lamar wolves in his scope, he heard gunshots from across the valley. The Lamars heard it, too. It was park rangers taking target practice on a hill behind Buffalo Ranch. O-Six stood and gazed across the valley as the sound of each shot reverberated off Specimen Ridge. Rick wondered if she had any notion what that sound signified. It wasn’t likely; she’d spent the vast majority of her six and a half years inside the park’s boundaries. Her pack had never been in the woods with hunters, never endured the consequences of preying on livestock.

  As the shots continued, she began heading east, away from the troubling sound, and away from the Junction Butte wolves. The rest of her charges rose and followed. That night they continued east, all the way through the valley, up over Norris, and down into Crandall.