The Company of Wolves

by Peter Steinhart

  With radio collars on pack members, Ream’s researchers have been able to follow the wolves over vast distances. They have watched them disperse south to the Ninemile Valley and the Idaho-Montana Divide. One wolf from the Magic Pack went 550 miles north to the Peace River Country in Alberta. Clearly the wolves of Glacier could reach Yellowstone.

  Ream knew how intolerant people might be of the returning wolves, and that biologists still argued about the effects of wolves on prey. Once it was clear that wolves were coming back, he began to address questions that would be posed concerning recovery. One of the first was, what effect might wolves have on elk, moose, and deer? To find out, Dan Pletscher of the University of Montana School of Forestry radio-collared thirty moose, thirty elk, and thirty deer. All the collars had mortality transmitters: if the collar lay still for four hours, the radio pulse rate doubled to a hundred beeps per hour, and Boyd and Fairchild would go in quickly to determine what had killed the animal. The study showed that, among white-tailed deer, two were killed by mountain lions, two by humans, and two by wolves. Among moose, two were killed by bears and one by wolves. Among elk, nine were killed by mountain lions, two by humans, and three by wolves. Says Ream, “This shows very nicely that the wolf is just one of a number of predators. It certainly is no worse than any other predator.”

  The research in Glacier National Park kept Ream at the center of wolf issues. He was a member of the recovery team that wrote the original recovery plan in 1977 and then revised it in 1987. When the 1987 revision called for the reintroduction of wolves into the wild, the state of Montana, angry that the federal agencies made all the rules about grizzly recovery but did not pay the costs of state responsibilities for the bears, declared it would not participate in endangered-species recovery unless the species was delisted. Wolf recovery was growing more and more contentious.

  There are two different philosophies urging the return of the wolf in the Northern Rockies.

  One view, which Ream holds, says that the wolves are already back, and that they are headed straight for Yellowstone. “I think dispersal is going to be the mechanism by which wolf recovery is going to occur,” says Ream. “We’ve had nine long-range dispersals. Most of them have been north into Canada, but the last three have been south into Montana and Idaho. We still have two dispersers that haven’t been found. We still have a lot to learn about dispersal.”

  The other view says wolves are going to be reestablished in Yellowstone only by human agency. That view is given greater authority by the politics of the situation. Ranchers fear that wolves that get to the park on their own may be beyond control, because the Endangered Species Act makes it illegal to kill them. If wolves are introduced into Yellowstone by human agency, they can be deemed an “experimental-nonessential” population and subject to greater restrictions if they leave the park. Ranchers catching such animals in the act of killing livestock, for example, might be permitted to shoot them. Therefore, many who see the return of the wolf as inevitable are fighting hard for reintroduction. Says Ream, “In the last year, I’ve seen a flipflop. Livestock people were totally against reintroduction; now they’re saying that doesn’t look too bad.”

  At the same time, there are people in the agency who look upon the wolves arriving by dispersal as passive and uncertain. They see that as something less than management, whereas they see reintroduction as something clear, predictable, and tangible. Ream explains, “The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is more management-oriented and more control-oriented.” And they want to spend money on management, not on research.

  In 1988, the recovery team was disbanded, and its members were told that the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service would carry out the plan. In place of the recovery team, there would be a Wolf Working Group, consisting chiefly of U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, U.S. Forest Service, National Park Service, and Indian-reservation biologists. The Wolf Working Group was more interested in reintroduction than in natural recovery, partly because its members were managers who felt that reintroduction was a way to control where the wolves go and where they don’t, partly because of a lawsuit filed by Defenders of Wildlife, charging that the Secretary of the Interior would be remiss if he did not proceed with the introduction. In 1993, a draft environmental-impact statement proposed reintroduction into Yellowstone National Park.

  With reintroduction in the forefront, Ream’s federal research money dried up. He would like to keep the studies going. “I don’t think the study area is full yet,” he says. “I think we’ll see some change in home range as the population increases. Since we’ve been in since the first wolf arrived, I feel we should follow it until it reaches saturation. But they think we’ve gotten enough data.”

  Ream feels he has been pushed into the periphery. “When I was on the recovery team, I felt I was very much in the loop,” he says. “Now …” he shrugs his shoulders. But he is still out there pulling for the wolves—flying his own aircraft on his own time, at his own expense, following the radio signals of collars now maintained by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the National Park Service, monitoring the progress of the wolves.

  It is clear that wolves are returning to the Rockies. Ream looks down at the landscape below. The peaks of Glacier rise dark and green, ridge after fading ridge, to the north. To the south and east are the Bitterroots, the Sapphires, the Beaverheads, and, beyond the Continental Divide, the Tobacco Roots and the Madisons. There are no broad croplands or extensive urban areas to cross, but plenty of wild country. Ream traces the route with his eyes, off into the haze-shrouded east. Wolves go where wolves have been before. And if there is a wolf highway down below, invisible to human senses but broad and beckoning to wolves, it is aimed at the nation’s jewel of wild places, Yellowstone National Park.

  It is clear to Ream that down below, in the Ninemile Valley, something momentous is taking place.

  There is a full moon over the Ninemile Valley, but it peeks through tatters of rainclouds that have given the sky a ragged blackness. When the clouds part, the silvery moonlight illuminates the pines and spruces in grays and greens. It casts dark shadows behind small pebbles on a dirt road that winds up the north side of the valley. Mike Jimenez gets down from his battered blue government pickup truck and stands in the night, listening to the rush of a creek down the hill and the sigh of wind in the pines. At forty-four, he has wrinkles at the corners of his bright-brown eyes. With a generous smile and an expression of pleasant surprise, he looks as though he was placed on earth just to put people at ease.

  Jimenez tests the silence, and then he howls—a short, deep note that rises, hovers, and then falls again. He waits a few seconds and howls once more, starting two notes higher, and rising higher before the tremolo and the falling note. He runs through the sequence more rapidly than most howlers; it is more like conversation than like an invocation of spirit.

  Almost immediately there is an answer from down in the valley, a repeated bark, at once peevish and questioning, as if to say, “Who’s out there? Come on, there’s someone out there, and I don’t like it.” We listen. Jimenez says it might be the wolf, no matter how doglike it sounds. Its pitch is as deep as a wolf’s, and wolves sometimes do respond by barking back, sounding annoyed at Jimenez’s intrusion in their night quiet. Pups may squeal and yammer, and then he’ll hear an adult make short summary barks that seem to silence the young ones. But this barking, though deep, seems to go on too long for a wolf’s, into the undignified and ineloquent repetition of dogdom.

  He switches on the radio receiver and holds up the directional antenna. The signals ping loudest from just the direction of the barking. Maybe it is a wolf; maybe it’s a dog barking at the wolf. We drive down to the valley floor and howl again. Now there are two animals barking from a pasture a quarter-mile down the valley. One of them is clearly a dog, its voice without music, its yammer expressing, if anything, discomfort with the night. Jimenez tries the radio again, and the signals come from up the slope, away from the dog.

 
We go up the valley a couple of miles to the suspected rendezvous site. The Ninemile is a cafeteria for wolves. As we drive up the dirt road, there are deer in every pasture; from the clustering of eyes shining in the night, one can judge that there are hundreds of them. “Deer and cows both use the fields,” says Jimenez, “and the wolves hunt the deer among the cattle.” Even though cattle would be easier prey, no wolf has yet been shown to have killed a cow here.

  We stand in the dark awhile, listening. The night air is cold. The wind is soft, but the trees are full of murmurs, and the creek is full of drowning voices. We howl again. A hundred yards away, a coyote looses a cackling bark, a kind of loony mirth on the heels of Jimenez’s more dignified howl. Another coyote chimes in with a high, hysterical squeal, repeated over and over again without cadence or dignity. Still, no wolf howl lights up the night.

  Driving back down the valley, we see wolf scat on the road—almost certainly fresh, since we didn’t see it when we came down the road a few minutes before. It’s hard to avoid the inference that this is a message intended for us. Perhaps a critical view of Jimenez’s howl? He collects it in a Ziploc bag. We look on the road for fresh tracks. In the headlights of the truck, our shadows on the trees become lumbering sasquatches.

  We take the dirt road back up the hillside and radio-locate the female. Her signal is faint, and then strong, and then it vanishes, suggesting that the female is moving behind rocks and trees, and perhaps behind the crest of the ridge above us. Jimenez howls. There is silence. Then, in the valley, like a far-off wind, the faint but unmistakable howl of a wolf, low and rising and mournful, rides the air.

  Jimenez is out here checking because, twice this weekend, people have seen the wolves and the wolves have not, as usual, quickly melted away into the forest. Two days ago, Jim and Chris Farrington, who have a weekend cabin here, were out cutting wood. While he was operating the chain saw, she walked into some dense brush, and there encountered two pups and an adult wolf, seventy-five feet away. The adult wolf stood its ground and barked, then howled; that spooked Chris, so she left. Later the same day, she and Jim both saw the pups, but the pups didn’t move off, either.

  That behavior bodes ill for the wolves, especially with hunting season only a few weeks away. In October 1991, a hunter shot one of the wolves. Jimenez discovered it while he was tracking three of the wolves through the snow. “The back end of a stump was all blown out, and there was blood in the snow. The wounded wolf’s tracks went off, and there were human tracks following it. Whether it lived or died, I don’t know.”

  Jimenez has been tied to the wolves of the Ninemile Valley for two years. Born in California, he took a degree in biology from San Francisco State University, and had been visiting the North Fork area of Montana since his college days. He met Ream, Boyd, and Fairchild and became interested in the wolf study. He enrolled at the University of Montana, wrote a master’s thesis on the Glacier wolves, and went to work for the Fish and Wildlife Service in Helena. When the first wolves turned up in the Ninemile Valley, he was detailed to monitor them. He was a highly fortuitous choice for the job.

  The wolves had moved from a den somewhere in the hills to a rendezvous site in the pasture down in the valley, the pups staying in the woods at the edge of the pasture while the adults went off to hunt. When the adults brought food back, the whole family would be out loafing or cavorting in the meadow. At night, Jimenez would hide in the old barn at the edge of the meadow and watch the wolves through an infrared scope, which illuminated the animals in longwave light invisible to their eyes.

  Part of Jimenez’s job was to protect the wolves, part to be on the spot to look after the ranchers’ rights; most of it was public relations. “There’s a really common myth that we’re dumping wolves everywhere,” he says, “so a lot of it was to establish rapport, telling people this is what’s going on, and telling them to come to us if you have problems.” It was not a simple assignment. Jimenez’s baptism in the Ninemile was a complaint by a resident that the male wolf in the pack had killed her dog. “There were cattle all over,” says Jimenez. “The wolves would go in and out of cattle. The male wolf would cross the pasture, taking the pups to and from kills. The male wolf was taking the pups over to a moose kill and he ran into this dog. It was not a threat. It was an old dog. It didn’t bark.” Just as the wolf attacked the dog, its owners came up the road and turned into their driveway. When the owner turned, her car headlights spotlighted the wolf on top of her dog, killing it. She called Ed Bangs of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service in Helena at 11:30 p.m. and held the phone out the window to let Bangs hear the wolf howling. Jimenez was sent out to the Ninemile Valley the next morning.

  “She wanted to vent at someone,” says Jimenez. He talked to her for a couple of hours, buried the dog for her, and held a little graveside ceremony for which he even made a cross. “We sat and talked on the injustices of life. She was a whole lot more pro-wolf before she lost that dog,” but she still invites Jimenez back to barbecues in summer.

  The encounter made it clear that the job entailed more than Jimenez or the Fish and Wildlife Service had supposed. “All of a sudden,” says Jimenez, “the Fish and Wildlife Service needed to do something more than just monitor.” He saw that he would have to “try to come up with solutions to help ranchers live with wolves,” and figured he could best protect the wolves by trying to see to it that the ranchers’ experience with them was benign.

  His approach was to try to meet as many of the residents of the valley as he could, and to approach them with a kind of “I got some good news, I got some bad news” routine. “Basically, I’d listen and not talk down to them,” he says. “Some of them were, ‘Thank you very much, we don’t want ’em.’ It’s hard to change people’s attitudes. Those ranchers see wolf tracks on the road, and twenty feet away they have calves—it’s a legitimate concern. It’s a tough place to have predators.”

  He sees that they have problems of their own. Once he was called up to check on a report that the wolves had killed some lambs in the valley. “These two elderly people had five lambs and an ewe killed by predators. He’s got a heart condition, and each lamb had a grandchild’s name. The lambs were their winter money. I expected to get torn apart. It ended up being a coyote that killed them.”

  The ranchers actually saw the wolves rarely—they saw tracks, or caught quick glimpses of wolves darting across the road. Jimenez found he could help both wolves and ranchers by letting the ranchers know where the wolves were and what they were doing: “A lot of people’s tolerance is improved if you just make sure they know what’s going on.” He would take ranchers out tracking, and he would urge them to let him know where the wolves were. “If you’re a rancher, you feel better if you have some input. I tell them, ‘Give me a call.’ ”

  Jimenez saw that the essential issue was that the ranchers wanted to have control over their own lives. “A lot of the resentment for predators is focused about that. They can’t do a lot about markets or about disease, but a predator shows up and that’s something they can do something about.” He recognized that living with wolves would require of the ranchers a very untraditional sense of forbearance. He hoped somehow to convince them that they didn’t have to do anything about these wolves. He hoped, too, that the wolves would cooperate by staying away from livestock.

  Jimenez would go out and check up on the wolves and on the ranchers every couple of days. When the male was killed on the highway in September, Jimenez had to make a decision about the orphaned pups. He decided he would have to bring them food, and proposed to feed the pups road-killed deer for the next six weeks, until hunting season. After that, he thought, successful hunters would leave enough gut piles in the woods, and unsuccessful hunters would leave enough wounded deer behind, to let the wolves fend for themselves. He had to find the roadkills. In the beginning, he spent a lot of time cruising back roads at night, looking for dead deer. Then he discovered that bicyclists often knew, from having cycled through the pungent
smell, where animals had dragged themselves off the road and died in the bushes; he got cyclists to tell him where to find roadkills. At first, the state of Montana agreed to let him have the necessary permit to take roadkills, but when stockmen outside the Ninemile area put pressure on the Montana Department of Wildlife and Parks, the state revoked the permit. Ironically, local people were beginning to support Jimenez: “People in Ninemile would call me up and say, ‘I know where a roadkill is.’ ”

  Part of Jimenez’s job was to keep the wolves from becoming habituated to people. “I’ve always tried to keep them from associating with me. Once in a while, they did see me, and I would be really obnoxious with them, shoot over their heads, make a lot of noise. I used rubber gloves to keep human scent off carcasses.” He put the roadkills out only at night, so that other humans wouldn’t follow him and linger to watch the wolves. One of his worries was that the wolves would use the roads too often during hunting season. “The first week of hunting season brings out these road hunters, people who drive around in trucks and shoot out of the windows. There’d be gut piles on the road, and wolf tracks coming down to the gut piles that night. I’d go around at night with a shovel and pick up the gut piles and put ammonia down on the dirt to hide the smell.”