The Company of Wolves

by Peter Steinhart

  Once the plan was approved, Fischer sought to build enough public support to convince the government to implement it. Defenders of Wildlife sponsored the “Wolves and Humans” exhibit in Yellowstone, and also manned a “Vote Wolf” booth in Yellowstone, at which volunteers informed visitors about wolf issues and urged them to write letters and sign petitions in support of reintroduction. Fischer wrote articles, talked with ranchers, and lobbied.

  In 1987, he helped persuade Utah Representative Wayne Owens to introduce a bill calling for reintroduction, but the Wyoming and Idaho congressional delegations blocked it. In 1988, Congress called upon the National Park Service to determine whether wolves would affect prey and grizzly bears in the park, and whether or not reintroduced wolves would be controlled in and out of the park, and to reports its findings. Completed in 1990, the study found that wolves would pose no threat to either prey species or grizzlies in Yellowstone. A day after the report was published, Senator James McClure of Idaho introduced a bill calling for the removal of wolves from the endangered-species list, and subsequent reintroduction into Yellowstone. In effect, he was conceding that wolves were inevitable, and that the ranchers would be wise to compromise in order to protect their ability to deal with depredations. Congress, however, rejected McClure’s bill as an attempt to circumvent the Endangered Species Act, and instead called for the preparation of an environmental-impact statement for wolf reintroduction into Yellowstone National Park. That amounted to tentative approval of reintroduction.

  Many of Yellowstone’s neighbors were outraged.

  The Yellowstone River flows out of Yellowstone National Park into Montana’s Paradise Valley. From Gardiner to Livingston, the valley is a land of great swooning hills of grass and forest. Overhead is an enormous overarching sky. The snow-covered serrations of the Absarokas line the east. There are dark pyramidal peaks with spidery webs of snow dusting their summits, and deeply gouged avalanche chutes diving down into dark forests of spruce and pine. Below them are long sensuous rolling meadows where elk bugle in the fall. It is a vast, lush, heart-throbbing country, the kind of landscape that’s apt to invite immodesty and passionate devotion to causes. It was once dedicated entirely to ranching and hunting. Today, suburban ranch houses sprout on the hilltops. Close up against Yellowstone National Park, the Church Universal and Triumphant sprawls across a vast bulldozed construction pad, a jumbled city of trailers and buildings and school buses apart in style and spirit from the lonely ranches up and down the valley. It is a parable of the modern West: migrants from the urban world have come to find peace or deliverance or beauty, but they bring with them urban styles that challenge the setting and discomfort the older population. In such places, the Old West finds itself fighting for its life. The wolf has become a symbol in the conflict.

  Frank Rigler has a ranch just north of Corwin Springs, overlooking the Yellowstone River. His family has lived on this land since 1908, when his grandfather, a former miner, settled here. He recalls an uncle who was working for Canyon Inn in the park who saw wolves there in 1908. At forty-nine, Rigler is muscular and compact, quick-moving and intense, almost a blur of motion. Beneath his close-trimmed beard, his face lights up now and then with a very youthful whimsy. He is not a keeper of secrets or a quiet plotter; his feelings are right near the surface and he is critical unto sarcasm, emotional unto anger. He tells of coming out of his ranch house one day to see a stranger taking pictures of the apple trees growing next to his sheep pasture. When he asked what the fellow was doing, the young man identified himself as representing something called “The Grizzly Project,” and told Rigler that apple trees attract grizzlies and that grizzlies that visit ranchyards end up getting shot. Rigler didn’t appreciate the lecture. “Sometimes you just get mad,” says Rigler. His eyes narrow, and he coils as he finishes the story, then unfurls a punch just two inches from the nose of the listener. “I hit him as hard as I could. Then I told him, ‘You see that “No Trespassing” sign out there? You get off my property and stay off!’ ”

  Both a rancher and an outfitter, Rigler keeps sheep, cows, and horses on eight hundred acres of his own land. “There’s families been ranching here for 100 years, ever since the 1880s,” he says. “Something’s gotta eat this grass.” In the fall, he leads hunters out into the hills behind his house to hunt elk “from here to Yellowstone.” Kevin Gallagher, who is helping Rigler build a new house, says he has seen elk so numerous that they looked like waving grass moving along the hillside behind Rigler’s barn. Rigler tells of a cousin who lived in California and had been a hunter, but decided that hunting was beyond his ethical limits, gave away his guns, and became a vegetarian. When the relative came to visit and they got into a disagreement over the virtue of hunting, Rigler told him to hit the road and never come back. “You can choose your friends, but you can’t choose your relatives,” he sighs.

  Rigler once had nearly four thousand acres, all on lands lying north of Yellowstone National Park, in corridors used by elk, bison, deer, and antelope as they migrate out of the heavy winter of the higher ground in the park. In the warm winters of the 1980s, the number of wintering elk north of the park grew and grew. To provide more wintering ground, the state of Montana started buying up winter range for elk outside of the park. Montana approached Rigler for three thousand of his acres. “After a while,” he shrugs, “you get so many elk, you throw up your hands and say, ‘Hey, let ’em have it.’ It wasn’t pseudo—elk range like they have in Jackson. I thought these elk could migrate out of the park and they wouldn’t overgraze the park.”

  Clearly, Rigler doesn’t regard Yellowstone National Park with any sense of neighborliness. “They don’t take care of it,” he says. Among other things, he believes it is overgrazed. “If I had a piece of ground above Yellowstone National Park that looks like the park does now, they’d have taken my land—they’d have condemned it. The last beaver I saw in the Hayden Valley was dragging sagebrush. There’s no trees left out there.” In winter, he says, the elk all move out of the park onto private lands, and he believes that is because the park managers are inept. In 1988, fire burned one-fifth of the park; park managers look upon the conflagration as a natural event, but Rigler sees it as a waste of resources. He thinks park managers were foolish not to extinguish the fires promptly. “It’s these same people who are promoting the recovery of the wolf,” he says.

  In 1987, he got involved with wolves by going to a meeting inside the park. Like many people who live near mountain parks, Rigler wants the roads to open as early in the year as possible. He attended the meeting, he says, because it was on his mind that budget cuts were causing the park to open the roads later and later each year. “The park didn’t have money to plow the roads. But at the same time, they’d hired the University of Wyoming to do a study that said you gotta educate people that wolves are good. It cost the taxpayer a lot of money.” On the visit, he came upon the Defenders of Wildlife wolf-information booth, in which volunteers talked about wolves, passed out fliers, and put on puppet shows for children. Rigler looked upon the booth as a Park Service entity, and he got angry. He was particularly outraged by a puppet show he watched that day. “They would tell visitors that the Little Red Riding Hood view of wolves was all wrong. They had a puppet Little Red Riding Hood and a puppet wolf. The Little Red Riding Hood puppet said, ‘I was wrong. Wolves have changed.’

  “Wolves haven’t changed!”

  He fears what wolves will do on his ranch as they follow the herds of elk and bison and deer out of Yellowstone in winter. “They’d run the horses through the fence, into the highway. I had some dogs do that.” One horse ran through three fences. When Rigler caught up with him, an artery on the horse’s leg was spurting blood. “You think wolves are going to do anything different? Hell, wolves are just the same as dogs. It isn’t what they’d eat, it’s what they’d chew up.

  “That’s the pantry up there,” he says, gesturing toward the park. “Well, a lot of ’em leave the pantry. The wolves aren’t
going to stay on that Forest Service ground, either. They travel sixty miles in a day.”

  Even more, he fears that he will lose the ability to do what he wants with his land. “The biggest thing is property rights. My place right now is in prime grizzly-bear habitat: the grizzly has more rights than I do.” He fears that, once wolves become established in the Paradise Valley, he may be prevented from hunting on his own land, or even stopped from developing his land to compensate for the loss of ranching and hunting. Talking about the land he just sold for elk habitat, he explains, “If you get a bunch of wolves denning down there, they’ll shut it down to fishing.” He notes that parts of Denali National Park have been closed to keep people from disturbing active wolf dens, and says, “One-third of Yellowstone is now shut down due to grizzly bears.* How much will be shut down for wolves? The hikers won’t even be in there!”

  Rigler has become a spokesman for the outfitters and ranchers that oppose wolf reintroduction. At hearings, he offers grim aphorisms and slogans. For example: “What do wolves and AIDS have in common? Once you got ’em, you’ll never get rid of ’em.” Speaking about damage to livestock and closure of public lands, he asks, “Who’s gonna pay for it? We’re short of money in education. We’re short of money in health. We’re short of money in so many things. Let’s get back to basics before we start to think about the wolf.”

  The media, he says, have sold out to the other side. “They don’t tell the whole story. We never get our side in the press. These press people are a bunch of bunny huggers any more. You can quote me.” He says a crew came out from the television program 48 Hours to film a segment on wolves. “These people are very sympathetic to wolves. I’m an outfitter, and I sent ’em down to my cousin. He had pictures of cows lying there with their guts out, still alive. The wolves are sitting there, all blood, watching these cows. One got its bag tore off and its guts hanging out and its eye tore out.” 48 Hours wouldn’t use the pictures, but they wanted Rigler to lead one of his hunters out with their film crew in attendance so that they could film the hunter bringing down an elk.

  “Hitler educated people that Jews were bad. I’ve got a Weekly Reader here with a story about a government scientist. That’s how they’ve educated my children. They’ve changed the image of the wolf—all at government expense.” He rummages around his kitchen until he comes up with a copy of Kids: The Weekly Reader Magazine, and then he reads from it, “ ‘But scientists are helping the wolves. They’re finding safe places in national parks for wolves to live. They’re teaching kids the truth about wolves.’ ”

  Rigler bangs his fist down on the kitchen counter. “Bullshit! These scientists—paid for by my tax dollar!—they’re just reading each other’s work. They’re not doing science, it isn’t science they’re dealing with. They’re simply promoting an image of the wolf.

  “Guys like Mech, guys like Bangs—guys like that, they’ll build an empire around wolves.”

  “It’s going to change my way of life. It’ll flat break me. My land would be totally worthless. Where am I going to put my horses? Where am I going to put my cows?” He bangs the countertop again in frustration. “People are after your ass! After your way of life!”

  The heart of the opposition to wolves is the ranching community. At a public hearing in Helena, one rancher compared releasing wolves in the park to dumping hazardous waste in a suburban neighborhood. The president of the Montana Woolgrowers Association declared, “Anything that has blood in its veins will be a target for wolves!” A rancher from Jordan, Montana, said, “On our ranch, we lose from ten to one hundred lambs every year to coyotes. Nobody in their right mind would introduce the wolf, which is a far worse predator than a coyote.… We in agriculture will protect our livestock and our private property from all predators, by any means possible. No wolves, nowhere!”

  Some ranchers were children when the last wolves were trapped and poisoned. They recall the sense of triumph in the killing of wolves, the ardent belief that eradicating wolves made the land more productive. The killing of wolves is still a symbol of the iron-willed, independent capitalism that defined the Old West, and there are men and women today who feel it is a duty to shoot a coyote on sight, and would just as quickly shoot a wolf.

  That older view of the West is deeply embattled, because ranch life is changing and rural life is in trouble. Sheep ranchers are not doing well in Montana. There were one million sheep in the state in 1972; there are only about half that many today. Montana sheep-growers lost about 20 percent of their sheep to weather, disease, predators, and other causes in 1992; coyotes accounted for three-quarters of all the predator losses. Some individual operators have lost as much as 30 percent of their sheep to coyotes alone.

  Predators, however, are only part of the sheepgrowers’ problem. Grazing permits cost more. Federal wool subsidies have been discontinued. Foreign competition is tough: Australia has a nearly twenty-year supply of wool in storage, waiting for a market to materialize. Rural sons and daughters are drawn to the cities by more remunerative careers. Even if they want to ranch, when their fathers or mothers die, children cannot afford to pay inheritance taxes on the land, so the land is sold. Much of eastern Montana is, as a result, losing population.

  Increasingly, the land is bought by outsiders. In western Montana, the Bitterroot, Flathead, and Paradise valleys sprout suburban ranchettes where cattle once grazed. The new owners don’t herd cows. And they don’t feel threatened by wolves.

  For example, Kevin Gallagher inherited a ranch in the Paradise Valley. He had grown up in Iowa, the son of a small-town weekly newspaper editor. When the ranch changed owners, the Forest Service canceled its grazing lease, and effectively put it out of business as a cattle operation. Gallagher supports the ranch by working as a carpenter. “I’m lucky I have a trade that allows me to keep my ground,” he confesses. “My only other viable thing would be to put in campsites. The only thing we got here is tourism. All you gotta do to see what it’s going to look like in twenty years is to go to Jackson Hole, Wyoming.”

  He loves his land and what he sees on it. Last winter, there were 350 elk, 150 deer, sixty antelopes, and a dozen bison in his pasture. One winter morning in 1990, he looked out over a light cover of snow on the ground and saw a wolf. He didn’t think it was bothering anything. “I’m live-and-let-live until I’m crossed,” he says. “I don’t think wolves are going to be that big a problem.”

  The newcomers don’t buy seed or farm equipment, so the businesses that once supported ranchers languish. The old ranching community shrinks. Because the newcomers have come for the scenery and the wildlife, they support new restrictions on logging, mining, and grazing. That makes life harder on the ranchers. Says Bangs, “These ranchers like being ranchers. They don’t like going to meetings. But now they have to. This week they’ve got this wolf meeting. Next week, the water rights meeting.”

  If wolves are reestablished, some ranchers will lose stock to them. In May 1987, two Glacier National Park wolves killed a steer near Babb, Montana. Two ranchers witnessed the attack. It took federal Animal Damage Control trappers two months to catch the wolves. One was shipped to Minnesota, the other radio-collared and released. The trappers followed it back to a rendezvous site where they found two other adults and three pups. The trappers waited to see whether the wolves would kill livestock again, and in August they found the radio-collared male feeding on a dead sheep, and shot it. Animal Damage Control trapped two of the wolves and shot two more, but four months after the first killing, there were still stock-killing wolves wandering around the area, and that made ranchers angry.

  Such incidents are not expected to become widespread if wolves are reestablished, however. Not all wolves develop a taste for livestock. In Alberta, between 1974 and 1990, ranchers lost 76 cows, 159 calves, and 33 sheep a year. In northern Minnesota, where there are more than 1,500 wolves, annual depredation on cattle averaged 4 cows, 23 calves, and 50 sheep a year between 1979 and 1991. Wolves in northern Minnesota attac
ked on the average 1 cow in 2,000 and 1 sheep in 1,000. Only 28 to 30 of the 7,200 farms in Minnesota wolf range suffer losses in a year. The state of Minnesota has established a compensation fund to pay such victims. To qualify for payments, Minnesota farmers must get federal officials to identify the lost cow or sheep as a wolf kill, but all ranchers with verified claims have been paid. The cost to the state has been as little as $8,000 and as much as $43,000 a year.

  Fischer recalls that, after the Babb incident, “We wondered, ‘How can we make this better?’ ” Fischer decided that the most useful thing Defenders could do was to compensate the ranchers for their loss. It would show that those who championed endangered species were willing to pay their costs. “Mott had always told us the most important thing we could do was set up a compensation fund,” says Fischer. “It would take the economic argument out of the issue.” So Fischer went out to raise money. Within a few days, he had several thousand dollars. The ranchers in Babb were paid, and the situation cooled down.

  The idea of compensation grew. Fischer set a goal of raising a $100,000 fund with which to pay ranchers who lost stock to wolves. Defenders sold wolf posters and solicited private donations: singer James Taylor put on benefit concerts to help raise the money. In eighteen months, they had $100,000. Between 1987 and 1994, Defenders had only had to pay out about $15,000 of the fund. It proves one thing, says Fischer: “This isn’t about money.”