For six weeks in 1992, Carrera searched remote ranching country on the Sonora-Chihuahua border. “I found only one heifer that was killed by a wolf near Río Negro,” he says. He heard about a wolf killed over the carcass of a cow on an ejido near Tres Ríos in Sonora. Though he questioned one of the suspected wolf killers at Tres Ríos, “he didn’t want to talk and he sent me off.” He heard that the man might have the wolf’s skin, and offered a reward for that, but as yet he has not found physical evidence to prove that the wolf, rather than an occasional hybrid, is surviving in the wilds of Mexico. In 1993, he went back, this time with funding from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, Wolf Haven, and private Mexican supporters, but still found no hard evidence.
If Carrera finds wild wolves, what then? How would they be protected? The terrain is remote, and Mexican wardens do not even have vehicles with which to patrol. Ranchers still put out poison. There is a law calling for fines and imprisonment for anyone killing a wolf in Mexico. Says McBride, “It’s on the books, but I don’t know where you’d go to find the book.” Surely not in the remote ranches of northern Mexico. Surely not in the hearts of Mexican cattlemen.
There are captive wolves in Mexico. The Chapultepec Zoo, the San Cayetano government facility near Mexico City, La Michilia Biosphere in Durango, and a private ranch in Chihuahua each have a pair. The Aragón Zoo has six uncertified wolves, but recent genetic studies have revealed in some of them mitochondrial DNA characteristic of wolves from northern Canada, and that raises the possibility that zookeepers in the past bred other subspecies into the line. In all, there are only fourteen certified pure Mexican wolves in captivity in Mexico. Even if they can be bred, Carrera worries about what might be done with them after that. Both uninhabited land and native prey are disappearing. Says Carrera, “I don’t think many places will support the wolf very much longer.”
Carrera fears that the enormousness of the task of doing anything for wolves in the wild makes it seem far easier simply to catch the wolves and bring them into zoos for captive breeding. But without wolves in the wild, Carrera fears, it would do little more than allow us the illusion that something is being done while we watch their extinction.
If prospects for recovery are dim in Mexico, hopes for reintroduction must focus on the United States. And with the fear that captivity will shape the Mexican wolf into an animal that can’t be reintroduced, there is a sense of urgency about finding a place in the United States in which to release the wolves. When the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service asked Texas, Arizona, and New Mexico to suggest places where wolves might be reintroduced, Arizona identified fifteen sites that had the potential to support wolves. Some, like the Catalina Mountains just behind Tucson and the Santa Rita Mountains nearby, were rejected because urban growth clouded the future for wolves there. The Department of Game and Fish looked closely at four of the areas and in 1992 began working on a reintroduction plan for the Blue Range Primitive Area in east-central Arizona. Information being developed in that plan will go into a federal Environmental Impact Statement being developed for the Mexican-wolf reintroduction.
Texas ducked the issue by declaring that it had no areas of public land of suitable size. A number of people since then have suggested that Big Bend National Park and adjoining state wildlife areas would be a good reintroduction site, but McBride disagrees. “The only deer in the park are in the Chisos Mountains,” he says, “and I just don’t see the wolves going up and down trying to get them. You’ll hardly ever see wolves killing stuff on the side of a hill. They get dragged and kicked when they’re hunting. Furthermore, those deer are really utilized by mountain lions.” He doesn’t think there ever were many wolves in the area, or in the Sierra del Carmen, across the border. “I never did see any sign of them, or hear any talk of them there.”
New Mexico suggested only the White Sands Missile Proving Grounds, thirty-four hundred square miles of land administered by the Army. Not far from Las Cruces, New Mexico, the San Andres Mountains stretch north a hundred miles, like a tilted bench, rising to the eastern sky. They are sparsely wooded with piñon and juniper, mountain mahogany and yucca. The eastern escarpment looks down into the white gypsum sands of the Tularosa Basin. East of Las Cruces, Highway 70 climbs toward San Augustin Pass, passing the Star Wars Deli, the Moon Gate Cafe, and a billboard advertising the Space Museum in Alamagordo, which invites the traveler to “Dare to Dream.” A military jet screams over the pass, rolls right and left, and then sweeps east over the chalky haze of White Sands. An F-14 shrieks overhead and does a barrel roll. Two buzzards circle, too old to be concerned with all this martial pride and haste. Signs by the road say “Warning, U.S. Government Property—No Trespassing.”
It is because it was federal property that the New Mexican government suggested White Sands: the state wouldn’t have to spend money on studies or on public hearings in which ranchers and environmentalists belabored one another, and it could let the two agencies of the federal government fight out the wolf issue among themselves. The Army, not wanting to subject itself to the demands of other federal agencies, withdrew the site from consideration, but reversed itself after the Mexican Wolf Coalition, the Wolf Action Group, the Sierra Club, the National Audubon Society, the Wilderness Society, and the Environmental Defense Fund all sued. A decision on reintroduction has not yet been made.
The Fish and Wildlife Service concluded that White Sands would support wolves comfortably. Says Peter Siminski, leader of the captive management breeding team for Mexican wolves, “The habitat’s there. Wolves are pretty adaptable. If you get them through the first breeding and pups, they’ll survive.” Others disagree, however: Parker argues that there is no documented evidence that wolves ever lived in White Sands. And Roy McBride says, “I wouldn’t try to stick wolves in White Sands. You could raise camels in a used-car lot, but what’s it going to cost you? What are the wolves going to eat there?” Though he hasn’t walked the San Andres or Oscura mountains, he has flown over them many times, and he says, “They don’t look like any places I’ve ever caught wolves.”
All around White Sands is cattle country, and ranchers are passing rumors that wolves have already been reintroduced. Pete Gnatkowski, a rancher in Carrizozo, saw a wolflike animal after a friend had shot it; the hair around its neck was matted, as if it had worn a collar. Another friend shot another wolflike animal after it killed some sheep. Gnatkowski worries that, if wolves are introduced into White Sands, they will leave the reintroduction site and raid neighboring livestock herds. Ranchers have turned out in numbers to oppose reintroduction.
But ranchers may not have the last word. The bulk of the United States population live in cities, and they hear in the howl of the wolf the call of wildness, the sound of what was once right in nature. It is yet another identity that the Mexican wolf will bear.
West of Carrizozo, Highway 380 snakes up over the northern end of the Sierra Oscura, which rises like a board lifted up to the setting sun. Sometime long ago, the Sierra Oscura probably met the San Andres Mountains, which rise out of the west, and today they look like pillars that once supported a huge, high, mountainous dome. As the highway climbs over these hills, it runs through grassland with a lot of piñon pine. The land looks as if it would support a deer herd and afford wolves the cover of low-growing piñon and a maze of arroyos.
Between the Oscuras and the San Andres Mountains is a low, sandy desert valley that was the Trinity site, the place the first atomic bomb was tested. The mountain walls east and west lean toward each other, dark with piñon pine. The valley in between is not the flat, white creosote desert you might imagine the Trinity site to be, but greener, more mountainous, a bit closer to heaven. To think that someday wolves might pad across the valley, to imagine the immense silence of this place stirred by the howls of wolves, is to think about the righting of wrongs and the redemption of the human heart.
It is also to think about shifting definitions. What are all those wolf watchers seeing out there? Are they wolves or dogs,
coyotes or hybrids? Are they wild creatures or the product of squint-eyed meddling? Are they beasts of ravening desolation, the shadows of government tyranny, or the shapes of hope and freedom? Are they atonements for the angry, mushroom-shaped cloud that has for half a century darkened our lives? Things are not always easy to see in this landscape.
10
THE PERSISTENCE OF WOLVES
Bob Ream flies his Cessna 633 south and west from the Missoula Airport, over the Idaho-Montana Divide. He flies over the White Mountain fire lookout and the edge of Big Burn, an area that has remained almost treeless since a 1910 forest fire. To the east is the snow-covered mass of the Continental Divide. Below is a wide, glacially cut canyon, the walls of which are cloaked in Douglas fir and lodgepole pine. This is good elk-and-moose country—good wolf country, too, because there are no cattle here. As Ream flies over Kelly Creek, the ragged spur of rock known as Kelly Thumb points up at the sky. Ream adjusts his radio and fishes for the signal of a radio-collared wolf.
The last government-trapped wolf in Montana was taken in 1936. But for the packs in Glacier National Park, wolves probably haven’t denned in Montana since the 1940s. By midcentury, most people thought wolves were extinct in Montana and Idaho. Twelve years ago, Mike Schlegel of the Idaho Department of Fish and Game took a picture of a wolf in the valley below. Seven years ago, a researcher found wolf tracks on the hillside. There have been reports of wolves here since then, and not long ago Ream, a University of Montana biologist and member of the state legislature, flew over Kelly Thumb, looking for Wolf 9013, a gray radio-collared male, and found him, exactly where, nearly twelve years before, Schlegel had taken a photograph of a wolf. “When I found him,” says Ream, “that whole slope was covered with elk trails, and I saw two moose standing right on Kelly Thumb.” A few weeks ago, Wolf 9013 was at Lolo Pass, and then he was sighted ten miles south of the pass, on the edge of the Selway-Bitterroot Wilderness. Ream located him in a small meadow on Fish Creek in Montana, but when he flew a few days later, the wolf was thirty miles away, on Burdette Creek in Idaho.
As Ream finishes recounting the past wolf sightings at Kelly Thumb, the radio begins to ping like a dripping faucet. Wolf 9013 is indeed down below. We are at ninety-one hundred feet. We turn south, banking gently. The signal grows faint. Ream switches from right antenna to left antenna and back again, back and forth, listening for the signal. He peers out his window, looking for a gray wolf below. We circle, corkscrewing down, closer and closer to the ground, dropping to sixty-eight hundred feet. Now we are looking up at Kelly Thumb as we go around and around it. There is a latticework of long shadows, the trunks of burned lodgepole in the morning sun below. We circle, straining to find the wolf in the web-work of trees.
We don’t see him, only his raven flying off to the south. One might imagine the wolf has changed shape, turned into a raven, and flown off. More likely, he is growing accustomed to airplanes and is simply lying very still in the shadows below, pressing against the ground, waiting for the gnatlike whine of the airplane to go away.
Wolf 9013 was caught and collared inside Glacier National Park two years ago. In the past four months, he has wandered down here to the Idaho side of the Continental Divide. He is not old enough to be either the wolf Schlegel saw twelve years before or the wolf that left tracks seven years ago, and yet he is in exactly the same location. How did he end up here? Ream is much interested in this question. Thinking about the travels of the wolf below ripples the watchful quiet of his boyish face. The persistence of wolves stirs his sense of wonder.
We head north, toward Missoula. The molar white of the Mission Range looms in the distance, and beyond it, in a blue-green haze, the mountain ridges of Glacier National Park, where Wolf 9013 was collared. The park is 150 miles away and across two main highways. “I think this pretty well proves these interstate highways have no impact on wolf movements,” says Ream. Pointing off to the southeast, he adds, “There’s as much wild land between here and Yellowstone. So I just don’t think there are any barriers to wolves repopulating Yellowstone.”
Yellowstone is the heart of the matter. Wolves have been gone from Yellowstone for decades. Of all the places in the world to which Americans would like to see wolves returned, Yellowstone is their heart’s desire. It is the largest national park outside Alaska, and the emblem of American wildness. To millions of Americans, a return of wolves to Yellowstone would be a sign that nature is still alive, persistent, mysterious, and beautiful. Reintroduction of wolves there has been proposed repeatedly since the 1930s, but real momentum has gathered behind the idea since the early 1980s. There are a variety of ways it might happen. Wildlife officials might capture wolves in Canada and release them in the back country of the park, or wolves might simply walk from Canada to Yellowstone on their own. Ream sees the wolf below as one of the pioneers in that recolonization. “I’ve really been intrigued by this whole dispersal thing. I’ve said all along it’s going to be the mechanism by which recovery will be accomplished. And that seems to be what’s happening.”
With Missoula below, Ream turns northwest and follows Interstate 90 a few miles. The highway veers off to the left, and we are flying over the Ninemile Valley. A dirt road accompanies a shallow creek up the valley, crossing a succession of fenced pastures. The slopes rising from each side of the creek are forested, but patched with clear-cuts. There is a wide green meadow, and at its edge an old barn. Last year, a litter of wolves was raised in that meadow. This year, there are more wolves.
Ream flicks the radio switch with his thumb. The radio pings, announcing that there is another radio-collared wolf below. We turn right, and follow a side canyon; and the signal grows louder. The source of the signal is a narrow ridge between two creeks draining down into the Ninemile. As we circle and corkscrew down again, it becomes clear that the signal is coming from a location perhaps less than two hundred yards across. But we see no wolves. They hunker down, press against the ground, and don’t move.
The wolf below has also appeared where previous wolves materialized. In 1989, four wolves—two adults and two young ones—that had migrated out of Glacier National Park were trapped near Marion, Montana, because they had begun to attack livestock. They were returned to the park, but the two adults left the release site, and the two young ones starved. The male adult stepped into a trap outside the park. Even though he was treated by a veterinarian, he was later found starving and suffering from gangrene. A Fish and Wildlife Service officer shot him to put him out of his misery. The black female adult headed south across the Swan Range, down the Swan Valley, and into the Ninemile drainage. She found a gray male wolf there, they mated and in the spring of 1990 had a litter of six pups. They raised the litter in the pasture below, paying no attention to the cows grazing there. In July 1990, however, the female was shot to death. In September, the male was struck and killed by a vehicle on the interstate. The six pups were left on their own in the meadow below.
They survived until spring, when several of them went over Squaw Peak to the north and killed two steers near Dixon. Three were trapped and removed; the other three disappeared. A few months later, a female radio-collared wolf that had vanished months before from Glacier National Park appeared in exactly the same pasture in the Ninemile Valley. In 1992, Ream was flying up the Ninemile and located her. He decided to fly over the Idaho Divide, trying other radio frequencies, and there he found the male, Wolf 9013. Both wolves had traveled more than 150 miles from where they had been collared, and both were in locations that had been frequented by other wolves.
Ream has been looking for wolves in Montana for nineteen years. In the 1960s, he had heard stories of wolves being shot in Montana, and he wanted to find out whether there were wolves still in the wild. In 1973, the year the Rocky Mountain gray wolf (Canis lupus irremotus) was listed as an endangered species, he began to collect reports of wolf sightings in Montana and Idaho.
For decades, people had been saying the wolf was gone. But in fact, all along
, ranchers and back-country rangers as far south as Wyoming had repeatedly seen glimpses. In 1976, George Gruell, then a biologist on the Bridger-Teton National Forest, in northwestern Wyoming, gave the Rocky Mountain Wolf Recovery Team a list of fifty purported sightings. A range rider for the Hansen Ranch, near Jackson, Wyoming, observed wolves in the woods. Gruell talked to a man who had seen a wolf run across the ice on Jackson Lake in the 1940s. Says Gruell, “He was flabbergasted at its size and thought it was a moose.” He said the man did not tell any authorities because he didn’t want to be accused of making up stories.
Through the 1970s, the reports increased in Montana. Shortly after Ream started collecting sightings, Jerry Desanto, a Glacier National Park ranger, walked into a meadow near Polebridge, on the North Fork of the Flathead River, and saw a wolf. By 1977, Ream had collected 315 credible sightings. Three skulls of recently killed animals were confirmed by taxonomists as belonging to wolves. In 1979, Joe Smith caught Kishinena, the wolf Diane Boyd followed for two years, just north of the Canadian border. With all this evidence that wolves were poised to make a comeback in the Northern Rockies, Ream’s Wolf Ecology Project got funding enough to hire Diane Boyd and Mike Fairchild to track wolves on the North Fork.
When the wolves began denning in Glacier National Park, Ream’s effort to find wolves turned into an effort to study them. The Wolf Ecology Project got funding from the National Park Service, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the U.S. Forest Service, and the University of Montana. When funding ran short, Ream got private donations to keep volunteers in the field doing winter tracking. His studies on the North Fork of the Flathead River have given a detailed picture of the recolonization. A genealogical chart hangs on the wall of his office. The Wigwam Pack, which formed just north of the Canadian border in the early 1980s, was poisoned out. The Magic Pack, which denned in Glacier in 1986, split in two and became the Camas and the Sage Creek packs. The Sage Creek Pack consisted of two adults and five pups until British Columbia opened a hunting season and all but a mother and one pup were shot. Before the shootings, two males had left the pack, and they joined with a dispersing female to form the Headwaters Pack. In 1990, two females in the Camas Pack bred and the pack divided into the North Camas and South Camas packs. A female from the Camas Pack dispersed and joined with a surviving male from the Wigwam Pack to form the Spruce Creek Pack.
The Company of Wolves Page 27
