American Wolf

by Nate Blakeslee

  755 hadn’t run far, and now he slowly made his way back toward the pack. He stood in the snow on the south side of the road and howled at his family high up on the hillside above him. When he got no response, he came closer, across the road to the base of the hill. The two males could plainly see him, but they didn’t stir. Neither did the rest of the pack, lying on the snow nearby. They were his offspring, all he had left from his time in the Lamar Valley, but they were no longer his.

  It wasn’t his valley anymore, either, and he seemed to realize it all at once. He began moving west at a slow pace, stopping to look back up the hill one last time. When he set off again, he moved with a purposeful trot. He left the valley through Lamar Canyon and passed through the flats of Slough Creek, heading over Bob’s Knob as he made his way. He continued west, following the creek to its confluence with the Yellowstone River, and still farther, all the way through Little America, without stopping, until he had left his home far behind.

  13

  ENOUGH IS ENOUGH

  In the days that followed, Rick tracked 755’s movements as he continued to roam alone, heading ever westward into territory he had likely never before seen. Twenty-four hours after leaving the valley, he was far out on the desolate and treeless Blacktail Plateau. The next day his signal was detected near the Wolf Project offices in Mammoth, on the opposite side of the Northern Range, some thirty miles from the Lamar Valley. That spring Rick watched as 755 roamed from one pack’s territory to another, trying unsuccessfully to find a mate. It occurred to Rick that perhaps he never would.

  By the time the hunting and trapping seasons around the park concluded, twelve Yellowstone wolves had been lost, including six collared animals. Of the park’s ten packs, seven had lost at least one member to the hunt. But a final insult was still to come. On April 24, a rancher and outfitter in Jardine named Bill Hoppe found thirteen dead sheep on pasture he leased a few miles from the park boundary. Montana wildlife officials determined the culprits were a pair of wolves. Rather than send government trappers, they issued Hoppe a special permit that allowed him to shoot the pair himself, should they return to his property. In an effort to streamline the removal of problem wolves, the state had recently begun using such permits more often, though critics of the practice warned that ranchers didn’t have the resources to determine whether a wolf spotted on their property was really a livestock killer or merely in the wrong place at the wrong time.

  Two weeks later Hoppe shot a collared female from Yellowstone’s Canyon Pack known as 831. He hadn’t observed 831 attacking livestock; he had merely spotted her on his pasture. When Doug Smith heard the news, he looked up 831’s tracking data and found that she had been near Mammoth, ten miles away, both the day before and the day after the sheep were killed. He couldn’t be sure, but he strongly suspected that the State of Montana had allowed Hoppe, long an outspoken critic of wolf reintroduction, to kill the wrong wolf. Word got around, meanwhile, that Hoppe hadn’t promptly removed all the sheep carcasses from the property, as was customary in Greater Yellowstone to prevent other predators from coming to the scene. 831 might have been attracted to Hoppe’s pasture not by the presence of livestock but by the smell of carrion.

  Smith had reached his limit. He told a reporter from the Bozeman paper what he thought had happened, and the paper ran a story that did not look good for Hoppe or Montana game officials. Its suggestion that the wrong wolf had been shot outraged game commissioners, but Smith didn’t care—he was tired of playing politics. Montana officials came to Hoppe’s defense, noting that he had legally shot 831 and disputing Smith’s claim that she probably hadn’t attacked the sheep. Not long after the story came out, however, Hoppe surrendered his right to shoot the second wolf and moved his remaining stock to another pasture.

  —

  The identity of the hunter who shot O-Six remained something of a mystery. Unlike his friend Mike Hirsch, Turnbull had kept his name out of the papers. Rumors were flying in the park, however, about who he was and where he might be found. Rick had learned his name—several people in Silver Gate knew Turnbull—but kept the information to himself. He’d heard quite a few watchers say they’d like to chew him out, but that wasn’t Rick’s style, and he’d discouraged them from seeking a confrontation.

  One afternoon, however, he found himself at the Painter Outpost in Crandall. Overhearing two men talking, Rick realized that one of them had to be Turnbull. He was only a few steps away, but Rick was uncertain about what to do. He felt he should say something, but he wasn’t sure what. Hey, I don’t want to be any trouble, he imagined telling the hunter. I knew her. If you want to talk about her, I’d be happy to do that. He thought it would be good to know something about Turnbull, to know what had motivated him to shoot a wolf. And maybe Turnbull would tell him what O-Six’s final moments were like. He was the only one who could.

  In the end, however, Rick said nothing. He just walked out to his car and drove back to the park.

  —

  The enormous backlash following O-Six’s death seemed to change the dynamic in the national debate over wolves. Six months after her death, Fish and Wildlife published its proposal to delist wolves throughout most of the Lower 48. The agency received more than one million comments, the most ever submitted in response to any such proposal for any species in the history of the Endangered Species Act. The vast majority opposed the move, including the young followers of an enterprising ninth grader from Olympia, Washington, named Story Warren, who had created a popular Instagram account called Kids4Wolves in the wake of O-Six’s death. On February 7, 2014, a panel of experts assigned to review the delisting rule released their long-anticipated report. To the surprise of many, they unanimously rejected the proposal, finding that it wasn’t based on the best available science.

  It was the first in what would become a string of victories for wolf advocates that year. On September 23, Judge Amy Jackson reversed Fish and Wildlife’s delisting rule for wolves in Wyoming, immediately returning them to the endangered species list. Jackson found that the state’s refusal to agree to manage for 150 wolves, as Idaho and Montana had done, instead of the bare minimum meant that the species wouldn’t be adequately protected under state management. She directed Fish and Wildlife to return to the bargaining table with the State of Wyoming. The state’s fall hunt was canceled, to the jubilation of advocates everywhere, especially those who were following the fate of O-Six’s offspring east of Yellowstone. Wolves in Crandall would be safe, or at least as safe as they ever were.

  Less than three months later advocates had cause to celebrate once again. U.S. District Court Judge Beryl A. Howell, another Washington, D.C., justice, ruled that wolves in the Upper Midwest must be returned to the list as well. Since hunting was first authorized in 2011, Michigan had yet to hold a full wolf-hunting season, and in fact voters there had already rejected wolf-hunting in a statewide referendum held shortly before Judge Howell’s ruling came down. In Wisconsin and Minnesota, however, hunters and trappers had killed more than fifteen hundred wolves over the previous three years. That was too many, according to Howell, who chastised Fish and Wildlife in her decision. “The D.C. Circuit has noted that, at times, a court ‘must lean forward from the bench to let an agency know, in no uncertain terms, that enough is enough,’ ” the judge wrote. “This case is one of those times.”

  By the time the Yellowstone Wolf Project marked its twentieth anniversary, on January 12, 2015, the tide seemed to have turned. The nation’s papers and news sites were filled with stories about the benefits of wolves in the ecosystem; the term “trophic cascade” suddenly seemed to be everywhere. National Geographic and a host of other publications, meanwhile, prominently reported on a study by a Washington State University ecologist that called into question the benefits of culling wolves to protect livestock. It seemed that more culling led to more livestock predation, unless the culling was large enough to seriously reduce the wolf population. The reasons were unclear, though some biologists s
peculated that smaller packs and the existence of more lone wolves from splintered packs—both functions of exposure to hunting and culling—led to more attacks on easier prey like livestock.

  In the fall, members of Congress tried once again to attach a wolf-related rider to a must-pass budget bill, as Senator Tester had done in 2011. This version would have reversed both Judge Jackson and Judge Howell’s rulings, legalizing wolf hunting in Wyoming, Wisconsin, Minnesota, and Michigan. Like Tester’s rider, the language in the measure would have prevented a judge from reversing the move. But this time, things were different. Perhaps mindful of the overwhelmingly negative public response to Fish and Wildlife’s proposal to delist wolves nationwide, twenty-five senators, led by Barbara Boxer, the California Democrat, signed a letter to President Obama urging him to veto any budget bill that undermined protection for endangered species.

  Obama let it be known he wanted a clean budget bill with no mention of wolves or any other endangered species, and congressional leaders declined to adopt the rider. After years of defeats, wolves were finally winning again.

  In Idaho and Montana, however, things had changed very little, at least from the wolf’s perspective. Livestock depredations were down, in part because wolves had learned to avoid ranches after two decades of heavy culling, but also because ranchers had become more savvy about how to protect their stock. The Forest Service had retired some of the national forest grazing leases with the most conflicts, like the Diamond G south of Crandall, under an arrangement with a pro-wolf nonprofit that compensated ranchers for the value of the leases and the cost of relocating stock.

  But hunters and trappers in both states were still killing a lot of wolves, especially in Idaho. In the five years since legal hunting began, trophy hunters had taken over 2,500 wolves in the Northern Rockies, 1,500 of them in Idaho alone. Wolf populations are notoriously difficult to estimate, but official counts showed that the total in Montana at the end of 2014 was 554, down about 100 from pre-hunting levels. In Idaho, game officials had managed to reduce the population from a high of 893, in 2009, to 770.

  Montana’s elk populations, however, were trending up, somewhat lessening the pressure on state game officials to drive down wolf numbers with large quotas and long seasons. The same thing was occurring in Wyoming. Despite the court-imposed ban on wolf-hunting, game officials reported another outstanding elk harvest in 2015, though hunters near Yellowstone were still enjoying lower success rates. Despite the heavy take of wolves in Idaho, it was felt that elk numbers hadn’t rebounded sufficiently, and officials authorized nearly year-round wolf seasons in some zones. When that didn’t work, they resorted to aerial gunning by game department employees.

  They had on occasion gone a step further. In December 2013, game officials hired a professional trapper and sent him deep into the Frank Church River of No Return Wilderness, a federal preserve along the middle fork of the Salmon River in central Idaho so remote that it is unreachable by any road. His charge was to completely eliminate a pair of packs in the area.

  If not for a chance meeting between the trapper and a biologist named Isaac Babcock, who had tracked collared wolves in the area for years, the plan might have remained a secret. Babcock snapped a photo of the trapper on horseback heading into the woods leading three mules behind him, carrying the provisions he would need for the months-long job. The photo and story found their way to the Idaho Statesman, and the backlash was immediate. But for the color film, the image, as the New York Times observed, could have been captured in the nineteenth century.

  —

  On a warm day in the summer of 2015, Rick watched from the roadside as 755 squared off with a grizzly over an elk carcass. He was in the Hayden Valley, a broad plain along the Yellowstone River about twenty-five miles southwest of the Lamar Valley. With 755 was a four-year-old female he had taken up with the previous fall. She was from the Canyon Pack, which had long controlled this part of the park. The Canyons were known for their beautiful white females, and 755’s new mate was striking, not quite white but a pleasing and easy-to-spot pale blonde. As luck would have it, the longtime Canyon alphas, both ten years old, had recently left the Hayden and moved to parts unknown in the park’s interior, leaving the territory available.

  Rick recognized the grizzly. He was an old male known as Scarface, and he had haunted this part of the park for years. He’d taken over the wolves’ kill on the banks of the Yellowstone the day before and had been lying on it more or less continuously ever since. As Rick looked on, the pair tag-teamed the bear, as Rick had watched 755 and O-Six do so many times over the years, hazing and harassing him until both wolves managed to get a chance to feed.

  The female departed first, heading up out of the river bottom and into a nearby stand of trees, where three pups ran out to greet her. Rick knew there was a fourth in there somewhere, waiting for his mother to come home with dinner. Late in the day, his father headed that way, too. After two and a half years on his own, scavenging off other packs’ kills and roaming across the Northern Range, 755 was an alpha again. He had finally found a home.

  —

  Back in the Lamar Valley, the chaotic aftermath of O-Six’s death gradually stabilized. 776 eventually left, following her new mate back to the Hoodoos’ traditional territory near Crandall, where she settled in as that pack’s new alpha female. Middle Gray’s paramour 856 departed with them, leaving his would-be mate behind. But another Wyoming wolf took his place at Middle Gray’s side, and in the spring of 2013, to the watchers’ delight, she bore a litter of pups in the old Druid Peak den. The Lamars had a new alpha pair, and the valley would host another chapter in their story.

  The Lamar female 820 hadn’t been so fortunate. Shortly after 755 was driven from the valley, the pack’s other females began persecuting her at every opportunity, pinning her again and again and preventing her from coming in to feed on kills. O-Six’s death had caused the pack’s breeding-age females to view one another as competitors, and 820’s dominant sisters wanted her gone. She became a lone wolf like her father, occasionally pairing up with him for short periods but more often wandering by herself. Eighteen months after O-Six’s demise, she was dead, shot after preying on chickens in the yard outside someone’s home near Jardine.

  Rick was glad to see a new generation of Lamar wolves denning in O-Six’s old home, but he often found himself driving south, along the park road that paralleled the Yellowstone River, to check on 755. The old male was now seven, an age that O-Six, the wolf who taught him everything he knew, had never reached. His black coat had turned a rabbit gray. His new family was called the Wapiti Pack, after the Native American word for elk, of which there were plenty in this part of the park. The pack’s summer rendezvous was on the far side of the Hayden Valley from the road, and sightings of the pups were infrequent and usually brief.

  Still, Rick found that the wait was worth it.

  EPILOGUE

  In the spring of 2014, I met someone who knew Steven Turnbull. Although she wouldn’t tell me where he lived or give me his phone number, she agreed to call him and give him mine. I didn’t have much hope that it would lead to an interview. In the dozens of reports on the death of the famous Yellowstone wolf, Turnbull’s name had never surfaced, and he had never spoken to the media. Fourteen months had now passed since he had taken the world’s most beloved wolf, yet he was still a blank space in the story, a null, a mystery.

  To my surprise, I received a call from him that same night. “Hi, Nate, this is the guy you were looking for today,” said a voice, booming and gruff. I offered to let him remain anonymous* if he would agree to talk to me about shooting O-Six. Again, I did not have high hopes. But it seemed I had unwittingly reached out to him at the perfect moment. Bob Landis’s film about O-Six, titled She-Wolf, had just premiered, and Turnbull had watched it. The film, which featured wonderful footage of the Lamar wolves, stayed away from the politics of wolf-hunting, but it had still touched a nerve. Turnbull was ready to tell his side of t
he story. “I shot her, and I’m not ashamed,” he boomed. “I’d do it again!” We arranged to meet the following morning near his cabin in Crandall.

  Turnbull was waiting at a snowy pullout along the Chief Joseph Highway, sitting behind the wheel of a large pickup idling against the cold, when I pulled up in my rented Subaru. Looking down on me through the driver’s window, he seemed to briefly reconsider the wisdom of his decision. He made me promise once again not to use his name. “I’m from Wyoming,” he said. “I found her, and I can find you, too.”

  Satisfied that we understood each other, he told me to follow him up a snowy road to his cabin. Inside it was cozy and tidy, and once we took off our coats, he became less wary and more hospitable. He offered me some elk jerky he’d made himself earlier in the winter. It was outstanding.

  The walls were covered with photos of Turnbull smiling alongside various freshly killed trophies: bear, moose, antelope, and lots of elk, including some truly massive bulls. I noticed a beautiful picture of O-Six in the Lamar Valley, by a local photographer whose name I recognized. On a shelf along one wall was a birdcage with a parakeet inside. His name was Bubba, Turnbull told me, a gift from his girlfriend after his beloved hunting dog had died. “I don’t suggest you put your finger in there,” he added.

  We sat at a small kitchen table. The drawers and cabinets all had antler pulls that looked homemade and skillfully done. Turnbull had a stack of paper he wanted to show me, printouts of stories about O-Six’s death that a friend had collected and brought by. “Man, there are some people out there who really hate your guts,” his friend had marveled. It was true. In the months after he shot O-Six, Turnbull had been the target of considerable scorn, especially in the comments section of various online reports, where a few anonymous readers suggested creative and cruel ways in which he might be harvested himself.