The Company of Wolves (39 page)

Bruce tells me, “Ralph is more in favor of wolves than I am. I think they ought to have a chance, but if they got to slaughtering cows, well …”

Ralph jumps in: “Boy, some people have no concern about anything out in the woods,” he says. “Logging doesn’t bother ’em, mining doesn’t bother ’em. But mention the wolf and they go through the roof.”

The Thisteds know that some of their neighbors would like to see the wolves removed. “There’s probably not a place for wolves in the Ninemile,” Ralph says. “It’s a small area, and they’re bound to get in trouble sooner or later. Anything that’s found dead, the wolves are just going to be blamed for it.”

Says Bruce, “Years ago, a farmer would lose a cow and he’d drag it out on the railroad track. It’s going to be the same with the wolves: if they lose a cow, they’ll blame it on wolves.

“I think it’s ridiculous,” Bruce continues. “We lost calves every summer from logging trucks, and the sheriff wouldn’t even come out and investigate. Logging trucks would come running down the road sixty miles an hour. One summer, we lost a half-dozen calves to the logger camp up there. We know they butchered ’em up there—we had someone tell us. When we lost a half-dozen calves to coyotes, we didn’t have reporters here. Why are you reporters so interested? Let me turn this around and ask you that.”

Ralph, who has fallen silent, figures out his magpies now. He
thinks it was so cold the grasshoppers in the field couldn’t fly, and the magpies descended on them, and the coyote perhaps came for the same feast.

Returning to the wolves, he says, “It’s an adventure, because there’s so many people interested in it—because so many people are excited about it. We had a rancher come down to talk to us from the Paradise Valley. They’ve got wolves there, too. He wasn’t upset about it.”

That the wolves should have picked the Thisteds’ pasture as a rendezvous site is at least a fortuitous coincidence. “It’s an ideal spot for them in the valley, because they had a place where they weren’t harassed,” says Bruce. Almost anywhere else, he says, “I just don’t think wolves and people mix. This is the only full-time residence at the end of the valley, so they haven’t been bothered.

“I like wildlife,” says Bruce. “Always have. Heck, when I see a bull elk out there, I watch him till he’s out of sight.”

“In high school, all you thought about was going hunting,” says Ralph.

“You get older, you mellow,” says Bruce. “It’s a thrill for me to see a wolf.”

Montana is getting older and mellower, too. Wolves are coming back, and they are coming back in part because people aren’t shooting them on sight. They go where the country beckons, and perhaps part of the welcome sign is a sense, not just of the willingness of the landscape to take them in, but of the willingness of people. There are places like the Ninemile Valley here and there around the Northern Rockies. The Fish and Wildlife Service has invited people to call in their wolf sightings. The Forest Service provides mailers so that hikers and joggers can write down sighting reports and send them in. From the fall of 1991 to the fall of 1992, there were more than three hundred reported sightings. A pack of five, with two collars, was sighted near Murphy Lake. An elk calf was killed by a wolf on the Idaho border, near St. Regis. Another Glacier Park disperser was found down in the Bitterroots. There was evidence of a wolf near Darby, and howling near Dillon, and there were sightings even in Yellowstone National Park.

Wolves go where wolves have gone before. They seem to be
headed to a rendezvous with wolf destiny in the place most Americans think of as the symbolic heart of wilderness, to Yellowstone. And as they go, Bob Ream is up there in his airplane, soaring over the mountain fastness of the great divide, the sun smiling down on his small aircraft, the wolves pressing close to the ground below. And Ream is listening.

In August 1992, a crew of filmmakers set up their equipment several hundred yards from a bison carcass in the Hayden Valley in Yellowstone National Park. The bison had died in a rutting battle, and already grizzly bears and coyotes had found it and were scavenging a meal. Something else was there, too, standing off to the side, patiently watching the bears—a large dark animal, bigger than the coyotes, black with a white blaze on the chest. The animal sauntered over to the kill just as a sow grizzly and her two cubs were leaving. They passed close by each other, the strange animal not seeming to give the bears much notice. But the bear cubs stood on their hind feet and swiveled their heads around in an ursine double take, as if to say, “Was that a wolf?”

The strange animal slinked over to the bison, where another bear was still feeding. It stole up to the carcass, took a piece of meat, and trotted away with the loose-limbed gait of a wolf. A coyote waiting nearby stood almost mouth to mouth with the black animal as it
bolted the meat, but its proximity didn’t seem to bother the black animal.

The National Park Service, the media, and the wider community of wolf fanciers, however, were bothered. Wolves had not been trapped or shot or found dead in the park for sixty years. The last photograph of a wolf in Yellowstone, a jittery home movie that itself remained a piece of controversy, had been taken nearly twenty-five years before. Now the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service was in the midst of preparing an environmental-impact statement which would recommend reintroduction. If wolves follow the same routes and cover the same ground year after year, as is suggested by Montana’s Ninemile wolves, this might be the start of a naturally occurring breeding population. But if this were a wolf and it produced young in Yellowstone, said Ed Bangs, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s coordinator for the environmental-impact statement, that would preclude reintroduction of an “experimental-nonessential” population. It would also mean that wolves were back, and because they weren’t experimental-nonessential wolves, ranchers would be forbidden even to frighten them away if they caught them in the act of attacking cows or sheep.

A lot rode on the identity of the mysterious dark animal. Was it a wolf or a hybrid wolf-dog? Park rangers might try to trap the animal and examine it for obvious dog characteristics, but, explained Wayne Brewster of the National Park Service, even this scrutiny might not prove conclusive. Since no pattern of DNA unique to dogs has yet been found, not even DNA testing could tell definitively whether it was a hybrid. Even if it were judged to be a wolf, the question would arise: how had it gotten there? Had it walked? Or had it arrived in the truck of a clandestine wolf-restorer? “And if you do capture it,” said Brewster, “there’s a risk of injury or mortality. Right now, we don’t think it’s worth the risk.” So the Park Service ruled out capture.

Two weeks later, at the International Wolf Symposium in Edmonton, a group of wolf biologists assembled to view the videotape. John Weaver, who was completing a study of wolves in Jasper National Park, said, “If it does have dog blood, it’s not much.” But, clearly of two minds, he added, “The impression I have of wolves in Jasper National Park in June and July is they almost look like greyhounds. This one looks too well fed.” David Mech said, “I don’t like
that steep pitch in the head. I don’t think we can say what it is.” He also expressed concern about the black-and-white coloring, but Diane Boyd said she had seen similarly colored wolves in Glacier. Robert Ream smiled quietly at the thought that this animal might prove that wolves can indeed make it all the way from Canada to Yellowstone without human assistance. Roy McBride said, “That’s a dog. It’s got no muscle on it. He’s kind of narrow between the ears. He acts like he knows what a bear is. But I think somebody turned him loose.” Ron Nowak, who has done more morphological study of wolves than anyone else, said the contrasting black-and-white color and the steepness of the head gave him doubts. “I think people who know behavior would be in a better position to say,” he sighed.

Months passed without a satisfactory answer, though the animal was seen again several times in the park. A retired Forest Service supervisor watched it for fifteen minutes through binoculars near Blacktail Ponds in December.

Meanwhile, another wolf was shot, outside the park, near Worland, Wyoming. A hunter said he had seen it running with a pack of similar animals, and thought at first it was a coyote. Tests of the animal’s DNA, however, showed that it was related to the Ninemile wolves, and could have been one of the young from the earlier pack or a wolf from the same ancestry that had come all the way from Glacier. “This demonstrates that they have the capacity to get to Yellowstone on their own,” said Steve Fritts, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s coordinator of wolf recovery for the Northern Rockies.

And that meant, to many ranchers and hunters around Yellowstone, that the return of the wolf was all but inevitable. Either wolves would walk into the park fully protected by the Endangered Species Act, or officials would release them and perhaps dole out some conditions under which a rancher might harass, remove, or even shoot them to save his livestock.

It looked as if the long debate over returning wolves to Yellowstone was over.

Wolves have had a troubled life in Yellowstone from the time the first whites arrived. Reservation of Yellowstone as a national park in 1872 did not protect wolves. The cavalrymen who patrolled the park from
1886 to 1916 killed several dozen of them. In 1914, passage of the law establishing the Predatory Animal and Rodent Control Service made it national policy to eliminate predators from all federal lands. In 1915, a year before the birth of the National Park Service, Vernon Bailey of the U.S. Bureau of the Biological Survey was sent to Yellowstone to develop a program to eradicate predators. He found the number of wolves in Yellowstone “alarming” and warned that unless park officials started “getting wolves and coyotes out of that region” they would consume all the elk. A year later, when the National Park Service assumed management of the park, it invited predator-control agents of the Bureau of Biological Survey into the park to take wolves, coyotes, and mountain lions. In ten years, the predator-control agents killed at least 134 park wolves. Joseph Grinnell, a professor of biology at the University of California, and his former student George Wright objected. But Park Service Director Stephen Mather feared that, if control of coyotes and wolves didn’t continue, the predators breeding in the park would spill out into neighboring cattle and sheep ranches, and the ranchers would run to their congressional representatives crying that the national park was bad for their businesses. The national-park idea was then young and not widely accepted. Mather saw his first responsibility to be the building of a constituency to support the parks.

In 1926, what appeared to be the last wolf in the park was taken. Though reports of individual wolves, and even of occasional packs, trickled in over the next five decades, there was no evidence that wolves were breeding in Yellowstone. In 1933, the Park Service announced the policy that no native predator should be harmed because of its utilization of other animals in a park, except when the animal threatened the existence of another species. But the new policy came too late. In 1938, when Adolph Murie completed a study of the role of coyotes in controlling elk numbers in the park, he concluded that wolves and mountain lions had been eradicated. Predator control stopped inside the park, but the Bureau of the Biological Survey set up poison-bait stations along the park boundaries, in effect erecting a wall of cyanide to keep park coyotes from wandering onto the ranchlands beyond the park.

Today, it is not clear whether wolves survived in the park or in the back country of the neighboring Bridger-Teton and Shoshone national
forests. In the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s, forest rangers and range riders now and then heard howls or saw animals in the neighboring national forests. Yellowstone Park ranger Ben Arnold said he saw four wolves feeding on an elk carcass in the park in 1934. Glen F. Cole, supervisory research biologist in Yellowstone in the 1960s, combed park records and came up with 104 observations of 156 wolves in or adjacent to the park between 1930 and 1969. He judged sixty-nine of those observations to be reliable sightings of wolves.

Others doubt that wolves survived, however. John Craighead, the distinguished biologist who studied grizzlies in the back country of Yellowstone from 1959 to 1973, says that, with one notable exception, “there weren’t any wolves in there, absolutely. Wolves, when they are present, cover a lot of ground, and they make a lot of tracks. In winter, wolves can’t really use the whole park, because the snow is six to ten feet deep,” depriving elk and bison of forage: all the wintering elk and bison concentrate around the thermal areas, and if wolves survived in the park, they, too, would have concentrated around the thermal areas. In years of traveling those areas in winter, Craighead says he never saw wolf tracks or heard howls.

Without a wolf population in view, scientists were never able to appraise the role of wolves in the Yellowstone ecosystem. Today, that role is hotly debated. There is no compelling evidence that predators ever regulated ungulates in Yellowstone. It has been suggested that there are so many different species of predator and prey that no one species of predator can control prey numbers. Yet many people have believed that the eradication of wolves knocked Yellowstone out of ecological balance.