—
In early December 1997 the pack, which now included five nearly full-grown pups and an unrelated male who had recently joined, journeyed up over snowy Mount Norris at the eastern end of their territory and into the high country that divided Yellowstone from the Shoshone National Forest. They were far beyond the range of telemetry equipment, and following them through that country—ridge after heavily wooded ridge, riven by plunging valleys lined with frozen creeks—was unthinkable in winter. Coming down the other side, the wolves followed Crandall Creek as it wound its way toward the Clark’s Fork of the Yellowstone River.
It was elk-hunting season, and hunters on horseback, rifles slung over their shoulders, patrolled the trail that followed the lower reaches of the creek, studying the snowy ground for the tracks of last night’s passing game. Both pursuing elk, the wolves and the hunters instead found each other.
On December 3, Doug Smith got a call from the Wyoming Game and Fish Department, which regulated hunting in the state. An outfitter had found a dead wolf along Crandall Creek and packed him out. His collar identified him as the Druids’ beta male, and he’d been illegally shot. When Smith took the plane up over Norris and into Crandall, he picked up the signal for 38, the alpha male. He seemed to be holed up at the bottom of a deep gorge that held one of the creek’s tributaries. He wasn’t dead, but he wasn’t moving much, either. Most likely he’d been shot, too.
Smith and his colleagues debated whether to hike down to the injured wolf, tend his wounds, and relocate him to the park. Ordinarily they’d let a wolf fend for himself—they weren’t zookeepers, after all—but it wasn’t natural causes that had endangered 38, and this made the decision less clear-cut. They ultimately decided not to interfere, though Smith flew over the gorge once a day to track the wolf’s progress. After a few days, 38 had scarcely moved from his original location, though the collar indicated that he was still alive. Unable to hunt and isolated from his pack, he was in all likelihood beginning to starve to death. It was bad enough to lose a wolf to some elk-hunter’s fleeting impulse; 38 alone, at the bottom of that ravine, slowly dying was too much for Smith. He took a helicopter up and dropped meat into the gorge, hoping 38 would find it.
It took eleven days for the wolf to die. When Smith retrieved his body, the Druids’ former leader—a hefty 122 pounds when he was introduced into the park—weighed just 88. The perpetrator was never found, though suspicion fell on a local hunter.
—
Not long after the Druids returned to the Lamar Valley, a veteran wildlife cinematographer named Bob Landis spotted a young black wolf moving cautiously toward the pack. Taciturn and endlessly patient, Landis had spent nearly as much time in the Lamar Valley as Rick, whom he had known since his Denali days and often relied on to find the wolves he filmed. The visitor was 21, a two-year-old from the Rose Creek Pack. He’d been roaming in recent months, eager to leave his natal pack and begin a family of his own, but his appearance in Druid territory was a surprise. The Rose Creek yearling that the Druids had killed just a year before had been one of 21’s own littermates.
But fortune had always been kind to 21. The fact that he had lived to adulthood at all was something of a miracle. He was one of the eight rescued offspring of the ill-fated 9 and 10 recovered from the makeshift den near Red Lodge and returned to the park by Doug Smith. Although he could never be sure, Smith had always suspected that lucky 21 was the last pup found on that unforgettable day, when he’d returned for one last look to the talus pile in which the pups had holed up. Groping blindly on his knees, shoulder-deep in a crevice, he had felt something soft just beyond his grasp. The pliers on his pilot’s Leatherman gave him the extra inch of reach and the purchase he needed to pull the squirming, yelping pup from the hole.
Now 21 was a robust and adventuresome adult, the very picture of an alpha, if he could find a place in the Northern Range where such a wolf was needed. The Druids had lost 38 and their beta male only a few days earlier, but something—perhaps the family’s collective howl, diminished as it now was—had told 21 that the pack’s adult males were gone.
That didn’t mean the remaining Druids weren’t dangerous. This was especially true of 40, the alpha female, who ran to meet 21 on a snowy hillside not far from the river as Landis watched through his camera’s viewfinder. She was a slender gray, unimpressive in stature—especially nose to nose with the hulking black intruder—but notorious for her ill temper. She had risen to leadership in a putsch of her own design, driving out her mother, the former alpha female, who had been reduced to forlornly following her brood, scavenging at whatever scraps she could find. 40 was equally hard on her two sisters, constantly reminding them of their inferior status. Largely symbolic in most packs, pinning an underling was an activity that the snarling 40 undertook with uncommon enthusiasm.
Now she advanced on 21, with her sisters in tow. The male retreated, but not far. When he turned to face the females, it was with his tail raised high—he didn’t want to fight, but he wasn’t afraid, either. With his camera rolling, Landis watched from the roadside in quiet fascination as 40 and her sisters chased him across the hillside for hours, seemingly on the verge of attacking but always stopping short. The five pups, anxious and unnerved, looked on from a distance. The confrontation had shifted from a territorial challenge to a ritual of sorts, one seldom observed in the wild and never before filmed. The new male was being tested, Doug Smith would say later, to see if he possessed that ineffable combination of qualities that make an alpha an alpha.
Had 21 been found wanting, he would have been lucky to escape without injury. As it happened, the choreography of the encounter gradually took on the trappings of play. The male bowed, his forelegs spread wide and his head near the ground, and the sisters leaped forward. He hopped aside, and they turned with him in delight, nearly skipping as they took off running together, like a pack. Eventually one of the females put a paw across 21’s back, and he allowed it to remain, his lips split wide in a canine grin. When the pups finally joined in, they jostled one another for a chance to lick at 21’s jaw from below, wagging their tails as they had for 38, as though they had known the newcomer all their short lives.
—
Thus began 21’s tenure as alpha male of the Druids. His reign lasted six and a half years, though his partnership with 40 didn’t survive nearly that long. The problem lay in the delicate politics of breeding. A wolf pack is essentially a family, typically consisting of a breeding male and female, known as the alpha pair, along with yearlings from the previous spring’s litter, and a few two- or even three-year-old offspring who have yet to leave home. Wolves breed only once a year and are reluctant to do so with their own offspring, which means that usually only the alpha pair will mate. When an unrelated male joins a pack, however, other combinations become possible, and 21 showed interest not only in 40 but in her two sisters.
For the first three years after 21’s arrival, 40 prevented her sisters from breeding as best she could, savaging them at every opportunity. They rarely if ever fought back, submitting to her attacks by rolling over and showing their stomachs. If any pups were born to 40’s sisters, they didn’t survive. (It was possible that the alpha had killed her rivals’ litters, though project biologists couldn’t be sure.) Meanwhile, 40 produced few pups of her own, and the pack’s numbers grew only modestly.
That changed in the spring of 2000, when 21 managed to impregnate a sister known as 42, along with her adult daughter, even as he sired pups with 40 herself. He divided his time between three dens spread across the valley, each about three to four miles apart. One evening in May, while away from her den on a hunt, 40 came upon 42, who was also out hunting with another female for company. As Rick watched through his scope, 40 delivered a vicious attack, forcing both the wolves to submit. She then followed the pair back toward 42’s den, where her pups, barely a month old and still defenseless, were being watched by a third female. Rick and his colleagues feared the worst. The next morning he
spotted a female wolf near the road, so wounded she was barely moving.
But to his surprise it wasn’t 42. It was 40. She was bleeding from bite wounds, including one that had severed her jugular artery, and she died shortly after she was found. On closer examination, project biologists found that she had been bitten all over, almost certainly by multiple attackers. The savagery of the attack was startling; Doug Smith discovered a hole in the back of 40’s neck deep enough to sink his index finger all the way to the knuckle. Sometime during the night, the long-suffering Druid females had apparently decided they’d had enough. It was the first documented instance of a pack’s subordinate members killing their own alpha. 40’s pups were now motherless, and their future was in doubt. Would they be killed along with their mother?
As Rick and his colleagues looked on in amazement, 21 supervised the relocation of the far-flung litters, consolidating the pups—twenty-one in all—into one massive brood. 42 rose to become the new alpha female, and suddenly harmony reigned in the pack, as all the females worked together to raise the enormous litter. Even under normal circumstances, keeping pups fed, healthy, and safe from predators is a struggle, and mortality rates of 50 percent are not uncommon. Yet an astounding twenty of the Druid pups survived to adulthood, ushering in a golden era for the pack.
21 continued to breed with multiple females, and by August 2001 the pack had grown to thirty-seven wolves, roughly three times the size of the next-largest pack in Yellowstone. The Druids became the dominant force in the Northern Range, expanding their territory and winning battle after battle with neighboring packs. 21 had become a kind of Abraham of Yellowstone wolves, siring more pups than any alpha before or since.
The entire Druid saga played out in the wide-open landscape of the Lamar Valley, and some of the most astonishing action happened in full view of the park road, to the delight of both researchers and visitors. Wolves had already been among the world’s most studied animals prior to the reintroduction, yet there was so much more to learn. This was especially true of predation: in the project’s first decade, researchers in Yellowstone witnessed an unprecedented one hundred wolf kills. Employees who lived in the park watched wolves run down elk in their own front yards. Yellowstone had become a place where you might see something out your kitchen window that researchers elsewhere waited years to observe.
—
The Yellowstone Wolf Project’s offices were in the park headquarters in Mammoth, not far from the northwest entrance near Gardiner. When he was first hired, Rick’s job was to organize talks at the Mammoth visitor center. But every chance he got, he drove thirty miles east to the Lamar Valley to look for wolves—usually the Druids—with the project biologists. He knew he was supposed to be talking to visitors, but the excitement of following wolves around the valley as they made their first kills and established their territories was irresistible. As a sort of compromise, he began approaching any visitor he happened to see in one of the park road’s various pullouts, as he was scanning the mountainsides with his scope. “Hello, my name is Rick McIntyre,” he told them. “Would you like to see a wolf?”
With only a few dozen wolves in the park in these early years, visitors had virtually no chance of seeing one on their own. But with Rick’s help, they could. Soon word got out, and Yellowstone’s traffic enforcement rangers found themselves dealing with overflowing parking lots in spots where normally there would be only a handful of cars. Park management was not pleased. Wolf reintroduction was about making an ecosystem whole; it was never really supposed to be a tourist attraction, and everyone had assumed the wolves would be too difficult to spot in any case. Now, thanks to Rick, visitors were trampling the sage to get a better view of history in the making. Rules were being broken, and wolves, from the perspective of some park employees, were becoming a hassle. Rick’s supervisor urged him to stick to his assigned duties, but nothing he told his new charge seemed to deter him.
It wasn’t Rick’s first conflict with Park Service management. With over twenty thousand employees, the service was as bureaucratic and hierarchical as any agency of the federal government, though Rick found that some bosses were more hidebound than others. A few would have been right at home in the U.S. Army. Rick once sat in the back row at a meeting of interpretive rangers while a supervisor demonstrated in surprising detail how pens were to be carried while on duty.
Rick himself was not a stickler for rules. He had been issued a green clip-on tie, though he never wore it. The Park Service gave rangers a yearly allotment to spend on uniforms, but Rick tended to wear his until they were threadbare—and sometimes beyond. He had repaired the crotch of a particularly comfortable pair of green government-issue jeans with dental floss.
In an effort to rein him in, the Park Service assigned Rick to the visitor center near Old Faithful, seventy miles from the Lamar Valley. The main attraction in that part of the park, of course, was the geyser itself. It could be counted on to go off every ninety minutes or so, and the park kept visitors apprised of the estimated time of the next eruption on a chalkboard in the viewing area. If they had a little time to kill, families might get ice cream or wander into the auditorium during Rick’s slideshow on wolves. The pictures were interesting, but there would be a great deal of watch checking in the audience, and periodically a mass exodus would occur to get a good spot to watch the eruption. It was like trying to do stand-up comedy at a nightclub with the Super Bowl playing on the TV above the bar. Rick could have had slides of an alpha female giving birth in a den while her mate wrestled grizzlies outside in an ice storm, and it wouldn’t have made a difference. Old Faithful was Old Faithful.
He was also required to conduct “wolf walks” through the woods near the visitor center, in which he discussed the role wolves played in Yellowstone’s ecosystem. To his frustration, there were no wolves in those woods nor anywhere else in the vicinity of Old Faithful; they were all still in the Northern Range. In the calculus of the Park Service, that was of little consequence. Old Faithful was where the visitors were, so this was where Rick needed to be.
One afternoon a boy asked him, “Are we going to see wolves on this walk?” Rick had to admit that they would not. “Why not?” the boy wanted to know.
“Because there aren’t any wolves in this part of the park,” Rick replied.
“Then why are we doing a wolf walk here?” the boy asked.
Someday, Rick wanted to tell him, you’ll have a boss, and you’ll know the answer to that question.
What tortured him wasn’t just that the Druids were so far away. It was the knowledge that if he had been conducting his talks in the Lamar Valley, his audience wouldn’t have to be content with mere slides—they might actually see wolves. Still, he wasn’t going to let the distance keep him from seeing the animals himself. Rising long before dawn, he made the tiresome drive—an hour and a half each way on the park’s roads, where the speed limit was only forty-five—to the Lamar Valley and back every day, returning in time to do his talks at Old Faithful. Sometimes he arrived in the evening instead and slept in his car, so he would be in the valley at first light. Eventually, after four summers of frustration, Rick’s superiors in the naturalist division gave up and transferred him to the biology department. His new boss was Doug Smith.
—
Immediately after Rick’s transfer, Smith received a warning from his own boss. Ranger McIntyre, he said, was essentially unsupervisable. But he was Smith’s problem now, and the boss made it clear he considered the matter closed. “If I hear the name ‘Rick McIntyre’ again,” he said, “you’re in trouble.”
Rick liked and admired Smith, and he was happy to leave the crowds at Old Faithful behind. His new job was to help the Wolf Project keep tabs on the wolves in the Northern Range, mostly in the Lamar Valley. He became a key spotter for the annual winter study, in which teams of researchers—often graduate students—were brought in to follow each pack intensively for thirty days, documenting the wolves’ daily movements and hiking out t
o investigate every kill after the wolves had finished eating.
Smith was impressed with Rick’s fieldwork and his encyclopedic knowledge of wolves and their habits, but he wanted Rick to keep talking to park visitors, too. Now that it was clear that wolves weren’t going to leave the valley, visitors inevitably were going to interact with them, especially as their numbers grew. Smith needed someone to help manage that interaction, to make sure visitors didn’t approach wolves, or disturb dens, or park along the road in areas where wolves were likely to cross. If Rick could help people understand wolves in the process, and help shape the new and rapidly growing phenomenon of Yellowstone wolf-watching, Smith figured, all the better. He hired Rick on as a permanent employee in the spring of 1999; for the first time in twenty-four years, Rick spent a summer and a winter in the same place.
—
Once he became a full-time Yellowstone resident and settled into his daily routine of watching the Druids, Rick found that he didn’t want to do anything else. Strictly speaking, he worked only forty hours a week, but he came to the park every morning regardless of whether he was on the clock. When he wasn’t officially on duty, he didn’t wear his uniform—otherwise there was no difference in his daily routine. He didn’t take vacations, and he rarely got sick. He would occasionally get offers to speak on wolves at various conferences around the country, but he always turned them down. His work in the park was too important.
In June 2000 he took a short trip to Massachusetts for his mother’s funeral. Although he didn’t realize it at the time, it would be the last time he ever traveled any real distance from Yellowstone. It wasn’t that he’d made a conscious decision not to leave again; it just sort of happened that way. His father, an engineer at AT&T, had died of a heart attack when Rick was ten, and his mother, a homemaker, had never remarried. His only sibling, Alan, was six years older, and the two were not close. For the next fifteen years, the farthest Rick ever ventured from the park was an occasional evening trip to the nearest movie theater, seventy-five miles away in Cody. He never missed another day watching wolves.
American Wolf Page 4
