American Wolf

by Nate Blakeslee

  He’d called to console Rick, but he found himself breaking down instead. Rick tried to comfort him, in his own way. He began to list all the wolves that had been spotted that morning and the behavior that had been observed. The intensive winter study period was under way, and Rick had helped the crews find a pair of packs. “It was a good day in the park, Doug,” he told him softly.

  Smith had thought he was finished crying, but he wasn’t, and he got off the phone as quickly as he could.

  —

  As soon as Ed Bangs heard the news, he knew there was going to be trouble. He had tried to warn state game officials about allowing hunting too close to the park for fear something like this would happen. He’d seen it time and again during his years in Denali—hunters could shoot a hundred wolves on the other side of Alaska without engendering a peep of protest. But shoot one park wolf that people had come to know and love, and suddenly everyone in the state was talking about the evils of wolf-hunting. He had retired back in the summer of 2011—two months after Senator Tester’s rider became law—but he still talked to Doug Smith about once a week. Bangs didn’t offer much in the way of condolence when he reached his old friend on the phone Saturday morning. Most wolves died from misadventure of one kind or another; as far as he was concerned, there was no difference between a bullet from a gun, a bite from another wolf, or a kick from an elk. Smith didn’t take it personally; he knew it was something Bangs had needed to believe in order to do his job.

  Bangs was more worried about what was going to come next. “The media is going to have a field day with this,” he told Smith. “Don’t do anything to feed the frenzy.”

  That evening Nate Schweber, the New York Times reporter who had written about the death of collared wolves back in November, filed another story. This one, which ran not on the website’s Green blog but in the much more widely read National section, was titled “ ‘Famous’ Wolf Is Killed Outside Yellowstone.” By the time it appeared in the next morning’s paper, it had already been read online by reporters around the world, many of whom filed their own stories the same day, including for such far-flung outlets as the Daily Mail and the Guardian, both major London newspapers. The Associated Press picked up the story, and suddenly O-Six’s death was being discussed all over the country. ABC News ran a segment on the death of “the most famous wolf in the world,” as did National Public Radio, bringing the story to millions of people who hadn’t even known there were wolves in the Rockies, much less that they were being hunted. Doug Smith found himself doing interview after interview from his desk in the wolf office.

  With each new report, vitriol in the comments section was showered on Wyoming officials and the Fish and Wildlife Service in equal measure. “Why are there trophy zones right next to the park?” one reader of the popular magazine Science wanted to know. “Let’s send Wyoming, Montana and Idaho the bill for the 117 million dollars US Taxpayers spent to restore the wolves to their original territories!”

  —

  A few days into the furor, Smith got a call from Mark Bruscino. Until O-Six was shot, Bruscino had had only a vague notion of who she was or why she was so celebrated. Now he was getting calls from people demanding to know why he had allowed a hunter to shoot her. As diplomatically as he could, Bruscino told the callers that his office managed wolves at the population level; they didn’t take into consideration the fates of individual animals. He didn’t add what he told colleagues in private, which was that as far as he was concerned, O-Six was just another wolf; she contributed nothing more to the Yellowstone population than any other alpha female did.

  Nor did he really believe she was that well known, beyond the small group of dedicated watchers in the park. Bruscino seemed to think Smith was to blame for the backlash against her death, that’d he’d been stirring the pot by calling reporters. “You need to tamp this down,” he told Smith.

  “I can’t,” Smith replied, “because it’s not me that’s causing it.”

  It was true. Smith hadn’t called the Times, and he hadn’t been the one who referred to O-Six as “the most famous wolf in the world,” the line from Schweber’s piece that would be repeated time and time again in follow-up coverage of O-Six’s death. Schweber had been quoting a Los Angeles photographer, one of dozens of professionals who had photographed her over the years. It was hard to quibble with that description, however; thousands of people had watched her in the park since she first denned at Slough Creek in 2010. And yet it was also true that the Times report on her death, and the avalanche of coverage that followed, had brought her story to a much wider audience than she had ever enjoyed in life. Calling her the world’s most famous wolf in the pages of one of the world’s most widely read newspapers had become a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy.

  Nobody was more surprised than Rick by the attention her death received. It hadn’t happened when 21 died, but then 21 had died of natural causes. The irony of O-Six’s death was irresistible to reporters: Who could have foreseen that one of the very first wolves killed in Wyoming’s first legal hunt would be Yellowstone’s best-known animal? Stories on her death inevitably mentioned the hundreds of other wolves that had been taken in the hunt across the three states that fall. Such statistics had been reported before for previous hunting seasons in Idaho and Montana, but now it was as if people were finally hearing the hard truth about wolf-hunting for the first time, since they could put a name and a face on the phenomenon. Memorial pages sprang up on blogs, where fans were encouraged to leave their favorite O-Six photos and memories. A celebrated sculptor in Gardiner captured her in bronze. National Geographic’s NatGeo Wild channel began working with Bob Landis on a documentary about her life.

  Doug Smith, like Bruscino, was fielding his share of angry calls. Some longtime wolf advocates seemed to feel that collaring O-Six had led to her death, and more than one called for Smith’s resignation. Much of the funding for the Wolf Project came from private donors, money raised by Smith himself. He had long told donors that the project offered a chance to invest in research on an unexploited wolf population, a rare opportunity in North America, or anywhere else in the world for that matter. But the death of O-Six, along with so many other collared wolves that fall, called the entire premise into question. Why should donors continue to sponsor collars if hunters were just going to shoot the wolves wearing them?

  Everybody wanted to know what would become of the pack, but Smith had no answer for them. Four days had passed since O-Six’s death, and the Lamars still hadn’t returned from Crandall. It was possible they would not return at all. When an alpha died, especially a female, packs tended to splinter. 755 would certainly need to find a new mate, at least, and there were no females in the pack who were unrelated to him. With breeding season approaching, he was probably already looking, and the search might lead him anywhere. The best Smith could tell people was that with O-Six’s death, the quota had been filled in the Crandall area. As long as the pack didn’t drift too far east, they should be safe, at least for now.

  —

  The Montana Fish and Wildlife Commission met the Monday after O-Six was shot. The meeting had been scheduled for months, but her death dominated the agenda. Commissioners announced that they would entertain a proposal to close down several hunting zones north of the park, including the subunit near Jardine where three collared wolves had been taken already, in response to the high number of collared wolves killed in the hunt that fall. With the trapping season set to begin in just a few days, the prospect of the park losing several more wolves was a real one. Doug McLaughlin and several other watchers made the trip to Billings to attend the meeting and speak in favor of the closings. In the end, the commission voted 4–1 to close down the zones.

  That night the Lamars came back to the park at last, and the next morning all eleven were sighted rallying near the base of Druid Peak. Rick observed 776 scent-marking like an alpha. She was the clear candidate to succeed her mother, but just how that would happen was anybody’s guess.
The watchers enjoyed a few days with the pack all together in their old haunts, but it didn’t last. On December 15, they were spotted heading over Norris once more, and for the next two weeks Rick was reduced to receiving periodic reports from a friend with telemetry equipment east of the park. The pack stayed in Crandall for a few days, but then, leaderless and adrift, they set out farther east. By December 22, they were forty miles out, which put them in an open hunting zone where the quota hadn’t yet been met.

  Fortunately they didn’t stay long. By New Year’s Eve, 755, 776, and 820 were back in the park, but the remaining pack members were nowhere to be found. The trio howled and howled from Druid Peak, but there was no reply, except from the Junction Butte Pack far to the west. If the Junction wolves decided it was time to take the valley, 755 could do little to stop them, with only himself and two daughters to defend it.

  On January 2, the Montana Outfitters and Guides Association, joined by a local Montana state representative and a trio of hunting groups, sued the game commission, arguing that the vote to close the wolf hunt near Jardine had been taken illegally, since it wasn’t posted on the original agenda and the public was not given the proper notice. A local judge granted a temporary injunction, and the areas were immediately reopened to hunters and trappers. The state legislature, meanwhile, began debating a bill that would prevent the commission from instituting any such midseason closures in the future or creating any kind of a buffer zone around Yellowstone where hunting wolves was prohibited. The message was clear: as far as the State of Montana was concerned, there was no such thing as a special wolf.

  Doug McLaughlin decided he’d had enough. He announced that he was raising money for a new campaign, to be known as the War of 754, in memory of his favorite wolf. Publicly, he told donors that the money would go to raise awareness about the killing of collared wolves, which was true as far as it went. But he felt more drastic measures were in order, and these plans he discussed only with a few close friends. He went to the wolf office and requested logs of locations recorded for wolves wearing GPS collars. The logs were public information, and Doug wasn’t obliged to tell anyone why he wanted them. From the location data, he identified the most common paths that Northern Range packs used when they left the park.

  Over the course of the next few months, he hiked out to the locations marked on his map, his backpack loaded down with tools for a guerrilla campaign against hunters: high-pitched noise emitters and radio signal jammers, along with car batteries to power them. At the park’s boundary line, he planted his noise emitters, each equipped with a motion sensor, facing back toward the park’s interior, to discourage approaching wolves from leaving by their accustomed routes. The signal jammers he pointed in the opposite direction, to prevent anyone nearby from monitoring signals from radio-collared wolves coming down out of the park. He wasn’t sure if the devices were legal, but he didn’t care. He was certain the other side was breaking the rules, and he had no interest in losing an unfair fight.

  —

  On January 13, two Lamar pups, now almost fully grown, were captured and collared in the Crandall area, where the pack, including 755 and his adult daughters, seemed to have localized. Now that wolves had been returned to state control in Wyoming, Mark Bruscino had begun his own collaring program, to keep tabs on their numbers and movements. One of the pups he caught was the spirited black male who had caught Rick’s eye. He was now known as 859.

  It was an ominous development. In addition to general research, state wildlife officials used collars for a purpose that never came up in Yellowstone: tracking wolves believed to have been involved in cattle depredations. The collars made them much easier to find and kill. Beyond that, the symbolism of the act wasn’t lost on the watchers: the Lamars, or at least some of them, were Wyoming’s wolves now.

  On January 20, 755 came back to the park alone. He was spotted on a knoll above Slough Creek, cautiously investigating a kill the Junction wolves had made in the area a few days before. Rick and Doug stood behind their scopes on Bob’s Knob with a couple of other watchers, as 755 moved slowly across the mountainside, his nose to the ground, warily watching for the pack he knew couldn’t be far off. He made his way up to the old den site, the center of so many good memories for both him and the watchers. Rick was grateful that he was back in the park, but it wasn’t easy to watch him come back to this spot as he was now, a lone wolf, bereft of 754, his constant companion, and O-Six, his leader and mate. As they looked on in silence, Rick heard one of the watchers nearby break down and begin sobbing.

  Over the next few days, Rick followed 755 around the Lamar Valley as he scavenged off kills, running from the younger and faster males in the Junction Butte Pack when he got too close for their liking. The Junctions had available females that 755 seemed interested in, but he could never seem to get close enough to draw one out.

  On January 25, his fortunes reversed. He was spotted near the den on Druid Peak with a gray female, a Mollie known as 759. She had lost her collar some time ago, but her unusually short tail made her easy to identify, and the watchers were familiar with her from the previous spring and summer when the Mollies rampaged through the Northern Range.

  Now all the acrimony between the two packs seemed to have been forgotten. The pair stayed near each other for the remainder of the week and were spotted in a tie. 755 had found a new mate. The project began calling the pair 755’s group, just as they had when he and his brother first connected with O-Six three years earlier. Doug Smith managed to dart 759 and fit her with a new collar. She was spending more time near the den on Druid Peak, suggesting that she was pregnant and looking for a good place to settle in.

  It was the first bit of good news about Yellowstone’s wolves in some time. When a reporter from a paper in Missoula called wanting to do a follow-up story on O-Six’s death, Rick told him that despite everything that had happened to the pack that winter, 755 had landed on his feet, and the prospects were good for another litter of pups to be born in the Lamar Valley. The pair were not as inseparable as O-Six and 755 had been, but at least he was no longer alone.

  The fate of the rest of the pack was difficult to discern. Then, in late February, Middle Gray was spotted in the Soda Butte drainage, not far from 755 and 759. For some reason, 755 seemed hesitant to greet her, and the source of his apprehension became clear when a second wolf came out of the trees behind her. He was so blond he was almost white, and he was big. It was 856, the alpha male from a pack known as the Hoodoo Pack, which held the territory north of Crandall. Middle Gray seemed eager to reconnect, but 755 was leery of his daughter’s new suitor. 755 was still in his prime, but 856 was a formidable wolf, and it was far from clear which of the two would become the alpha, if the Lamars were somehow to reunite as a single pack. Finally the two couples came together, Middle Gray sniffing the strange new female accompanying her father, and 755 tentatively investigating 856. There was no hostility during the brief encounter, which ended with each couple moving off in a separate direction.

  To the watchers’ delight, 820 began turning up in the valley, too. She was sighted near the Druid Peak den area in early March. Though still technically a yearling, she was now almost two years old, and her beautiful tawny coat had grown just a bit darker. Her father wasn’t around, but she smelled him and seemed determined to summon him home. As the watchers looked on, she howled for several minutes, methodically turning in every direction until she had filled the valley with her calls. She seemed to be on her own. If Middle Gray wouldn’t return to the fold, then perhaps 820 would.

  —

  When the Lamars did return in numbers to the valley, on March 12, it was not the homecoming the watchers were hoping for. Doug, Laurie, and Rick heard howling from the den area and spotted 755 running for his life, heading east across the mountainside. Then, to their amazement, the entire Lamar clan emerged from the woods. With them was not only Middle Gray’s new companion but a second Hoodoo male as well—a suitor, it seemed, for 776. It was c
lear that some kind of confrontation had taken place in the thick woods around the den, but exactly what had happened, the watchers could only guess.

  The collared black pup, 859, trotted down the mountainside and out toward the river, scent-trailing 755 and his new mate, 759, who had also been spotted fleeing from the den forest after the morning’s chaotic encounter. Confused about the confrontation and clueless about its significance, the pup knew only that his father was nearby, and he wanted to find him. When the pair finally came together in the sage, it was a happy reunion, one that Rick was pleased to see.

  But then Rick got a good look at 759 and realized how disastrous the encounter at the den had been. She had clearly been brutalized, her entire back end covered with blood. She was hobbling along after 755 gamely, but she didn’t look good. When they paused and bedded in the sage for a short while, 755 licked her wounds. It had to have been Middle Gray and 776 who did the damage, Rick thought, and probably some of the yearling females, too. As far as he knew, Middle Gray was the only Lamar who had actually encountered her father’s new mate before; to the rest of the pack, she was a stranger. They had found her near the den they considered their own, and they had done what their instincts told them to do. With the two new males present, 755 had likely been powerless to intervene, or perhaps he had come too late.

  The next morning 759 was curled up in the trees on the south side of the valley, near death. The watchers didn’t yet realize it, but 755 did. Leaving his mate behind, he’d begun searching the valley for the rest of his pack. He found 776 near the park road not far from the Buffalo Ranch, but the reunion didn’t last long. The two Hoodoo males came loping down the side of the hill above the road, with the rest of the Lamar wolves behind them.

  The young males were moving stiffly, suggesting that 755 hadn’t fled the fight at the den the day before without inflicting some damage himself. But now 755 retreated, and when the chase ended, 776 accompanied the Hoodoos and the rest of the pack back up onto the hill. She couldn’t have her father and her new mate, too, and it seemed she had made her choice. They all bedded in the sage: Middle Gray and 776, the only two left from O-Six’s first litter, 820 and the other yearlings, and the pups.