It was late January 2010, six weeks after the Druids had run O-Six off the elk she had brought down not far from where she stood now. In the interim, her fellow travelers, her sister and her mate, had carefully kept their distance from the Druids. They were leery of a clash, but O-Six had been creeping closer and closer to the pack whenever she could find them. No matter how often the Druid females chased her off, she always returned, drawn by the presence of the two new males. When she couldn’t see them, she howled for them, and lately they had begun howling back. But so had the female Druids, and their call had been not a welcome but a warning.
The Druids had suffered a reversal of fortune in recent months. In the five years since 21’s death, the pack had held its own but never enjoyed the stability it had once known. A succession of alpha pairs came and went, and the pack’s size fluctuated. Out of nine pups born to the Druids the previous spring, not a single one had survived. Worse, they had lost their alpha female in the fall—killed by wolves from another pack. White Line, the three-year-old black who had moved in on O-Six’s elk, had now assumed the role, but 480, the alpha male, was her father, so they weren’t likely to breed. The pack needed fresh blood.
Now an even more immediate problem had emerged: every wolf in the pack had mange. The disease, which is carried by mites and causes hair loss, is common among wolves and isn’t necessarily debilitating, as long as it is confined to a few patches. If it spreads out of control, however, it can become fatal: a wolf deprived of its winter coat can’t survive for long in the deep snow of Yellowstone.
Rick had been monitoring the pack’s health for weeks, watching as they chased O-Six around Little America. At first he’d been concerned for the intrepid female’s welfare. Now, however, he was more worried about the fate of her pursuers, some of whom had lost a good portion of their fur. With more of their energy spent just trying to stay warm, the Druids were getting weaker and weaker, less able to chase prey and feed themselves. A few were already too feeble to hunt, and if their situation didn’t improve, they might soon be unable to travel at all.
The females could not afford to lose the two brothers, who had appeared out of nowhere a few weeks before, a pair of black angels in their hour of need. They offered the prospect of an infusion of vitality and, with breeding season approaching, the possibility of a new alpha male and a litter of pups come spring—another generation of hunters and fighters, a chance to hold on to the Lamar Valley for one more year.
O-Six wandered down off the knoll to the west, and the brothers followed. White Line had been lingering just out of sight on the far end of the knoll with two of her sisters, oblivious to the encounter taking place nearby. Suddenly the Druids seemed to realize that they could no longer smell the two males. They began trotting west to investigate.
O-Six was halfway up a neighboring ridge when the trio appeared far below, three black wolves in a line, scent-trailing her and the two males. Hers was a smell they had become very familiar with, and they were never pleased to find it. Now she raced across the face of the ridge and down through the forested slopes on its far side, heading for a low spot in the Lamar River known as Buffalo Ford. The brothers followed hesitantly. Even in their weakened state, the Druids managed to close the distance, and for a moment the brothers seemed torn between their new acquaintance and the pack they had recently adopted as their own. Eventually the smaller black peeled off and headed back toward the Druid females. His brother chose instead to follow O-Six as she headed south across the frozen river.
The Druids had no real chance of catching O-Six, who almost seemed to be enjoying the chase. The running they had already done had cost the pursuers energy they couldn’t afford to spend. Having recovered at least one of their males, the three sisters clustered, exhausted, in the lee of a basalt cliff. One of them collapsed in the snow, while White Line, whose mange was too severe to lie down on such an icy bed, stood over her, trying to nap standing up. Before long she tipped over onto the sleeping wolf beneath her. She managed to right herself, then fell again. Her sister licked her gently until White Line stood once more, her snout pointed down, her mangy tail a limp black rope.
O-Six led her remaining prize up to the top of a prominent butte, and then paused on an exposed ledge, where the pair bedded down. She had chosen a spot with a commanding view of Little America, less than a mile from where her pursuers were resting. Why had she stopped? She had found a willing mate, albeit not perhaps her first choice, and she was on the far western edge of Druid territory. She had only to lead the male a bit farther away from her rivals, and she’d be home free, with the prospect of starting her own pack in a territory relatively unvisited by neighboring clans. Yet she lingered.
She had been playing hide-and-seek with the Druids for weeks, gambling with her life on a daily basis for a chance to be near the two new males. In the meantime, she had eaten reasonably well, taking down a number of elk, sometimes in tandem with her sister and her sister’s mate, sometimes on her own. Killing an elk without the assistance of other pack members was a dicey proposition, one that many lone wolves never managed at all. Even when an entire pack hunted together, most chases didn’t end in success, and some ended in disaster—fleeing elk can kick backward with lethal force without breaking stride. Elk that stood their ground—relying on their superior size, and, in the case of bulls, their dangerous antlers, for protection—were seldom taken, either. But O-Six, since leaving her natal pack, had become surprisingly adept at single-handedly bringing down prey. She was an excellent hunter; what she needed was a piece of land where she didn’t have to risk her life every time she went looking for a meal. Little America was good habitat, but most of it belonged to the Druids, and the Druids did not tolerate trespassers.
At least that had always been true in the past. The game O-Six had been playing would likely have been fatal during the Druids’ heyday, but those days were long gone. In two months of chasing O-Six, this generation of Druids had never come close to catching her. She should have been dead by now, but here she was—not only alive but the healthiest, most vital wolf for miles around.
High on her perch, O-Six seemed to be waiting for the smaller male, bedded far below with the miserable Druid females, to make a decision. She didn’t howl, but it seemed she didn’t need to. After a brief respite, the male stood up and wandered a short distance away from the resting females, his nose to the ground. He caught the scent he was looking for, and moments later he was gone. The Druids, too exhausted to follow, howled helplessly.
When the black reached his brother and O-Six, there were warm greetings all around, as if the three had been together for years. Shortly thereafter, as the Druids’ unanswered howls echoed off Specimen Ridge, the trio set out together once again. O-Six paused to urinate. Instead of squatting, she raised her leg to scent-mark a tree, then scratched the earth nearby, lest her sign be missed somehow. It was the mark of an alpha female, and its message was unmistakable: This land is mine.
The two males inspected her mark, then added their own on top. They were hers, too.
—
Eight days later Doug Smith darted the two males from a helicopter. The larger, puppyish black became known as 754; his dominant brother was now 755. Smith would have liked to collar O-Six, too, but she had an uncanny knack for dodging his efforts. Most wolves seemed to lose their wits when the roaring machine appeared overhead, running flat out with heads down, without regard for strategy or cover. But O-Six was different. She watched the chopper as it came around and seemed to anticipate which way the pilot would turn. It wasn’t just Rick who considered her to be a special wolf; Smith had noticed her, too.
Over the weeks that followed, the three companions became inseparable, and Smith began referring to the new would-be pack as 755’s group. There was no doubt that 755 would become the alpha male. He jealously shepherded his brother away from O-Six, pinning him time and again when he seemed to get too interested. 754 never failed to submit promptly, and the conflict nev
er escalated. If the trio stayed together long enough to produce pups, he’d become an uncle but would likely never get to breed O-Six himself. He’d have to leave the pack someday if he wanted a mate of his own, though as Rick watched him rolling on the ground beneath 755 or deferentially squatting to urinate in his presence, it was hard to imagine him as an alpha.
755 might have outranked his brother, but it was clear to Rick that O-Six was very much in charge of the new outfit she had assembled. Now nearly four years old, she had seen a great deal in her time, while the males still had a lot to learn. Hunting was the first lesson. Now that the two males were collared, the group was much easier to locate, and there were many opportunities to watch them chasing elk in both Little America and, increasingly, in daring forays into the Lamar Valley.
O-Six typically took the lead, flushing herds out of the trees and running them back and forth across the hillsides, testing each elk to find the slowest animal. The two males should have been welcome additions to any hunting party; in a typical pack, large males like 754 provided the muscle for the final takedown, grabbing the elk by the throat and crushing the windpipe after the lighter, more fleet-footed females had run their prey to exhaustion. But 754 and 755 seemed unable or unwilling to follow O-Six’s cues, running in circles or chasing the wrong animal on too many occasions. They were less partners than trainees. A few of the wolf-watchers had begun calling them “dumb and dumber,” a moniker that Rick found offensive. Still, even he had to concede that O-Six’s decision to join forces with these two was puzzling. The simple truth was that they were unlikely candidates to be anybody’s saviors.
One snowy February afternoon, a few lucky visitors watched as O-Six came thundering down off a ridgeline on the north side of the Lamar Valley in hot pursuit of a bull elk, her two companions sprinting along behind her. The elk bounded across the road near Buffalo Ranch, heading for the Lamar River beyond. O-Six never slowed, but 754 and 755 pulled up when they reached the blacktop, unwilling to cross. O-Six eventually took the bull down herself in the river valley below. Still the two males held back, even after she returned to the road to check on their progress. Only later, under cover of darkness, did they find the courage to cross and join O-Six in a meal.
The same dynamic unfolded time and again as the winter wore on. O-Six tried to lead her charges to every corner of their new territory, only to be thwarted by the Northern Range’s single, solitary road. The males wanted to come with her, but they couldn’t conquer their fear of the mysterious surface and its inherent strangeness, oddly elevated and flat, with no cover, smelling like nothing they’d ever known. And, of course, the road was where the cars were, and the people. It seemed that whatever pack the brothers had been born into had seldom encountered humans, and they, too, were alien and threatening.
To O-Six, the road meant nothing. She didn’t approach people or cars, but she didn’t go out of her way to avoid them, either. To her, a car was like anything else on the landscape that was neither predator nor prey—like a rock or a tree or even a bison. It wouldn’t harm her, and she couldn’t eat it; it was a nonentity.
It was a phenomenon Rick had encountered many times. In any given population of animals, some will seemingly be up for any challenge—crossing a road, fording a deep stream, attacking a rival or an unusually large prey animal—and some will not. In fighting dogs, the tendency to rise to a challenge is known as gameness, and it has been a highly coveted attribute cultivated through generations of selective breeding. In wolves, the provenance—and the desirability—of the trait is less clear. The same fearlessness that might serve an animal well in Yellowstone, where cars moved very slowly and humans were harmless, might be fatal in the world beyond the park’s borders.
—
By late winter O-Six was moving boldly through Druid territory and encountering little resistance. Sightings of the Druid clan en masse had become less and less frequent; the pack seemed to have splintered. The alpha male was now gone for good. With his mate dead and no unrelated females in the pack to breed, he had finally wandered off in search of better prospects. The members Rick managed to find were now severely afflicted with mange. Their tails were ropy and pink, their fur shaggy around the shoulders and thin across the back and hindquarters. The sick Druids looked more like scrawny, starving hyenas than wolves.
In mid-February a neighboring pack known as the Blacktails killed an elk in Druid territory near Slough Creek, at the far eastern end of Little America. The next day a small group of Druids, starving and unable to take prey of their own, approached the carcass looking to scavenge a meal. They didn’t notice that the Blacktails were still in the area, or perhaps they were too desperate to care.
O-Six was nearby, too, and when the Blacktails attacked, she jumped into the melee, singling out White Line, her old nemesis. The Blacktails, meanwhile, ganged up on a Druid known as Thin Female. Even in her weakened state, White Line was still dangerous, but O-Six launched into her with abandon. The two females drove at each other, battling chest to chest, each straining to reach the other’s vulnerable neck or flank without exposing her own to counterattack. The parries and counterparries came so quickly that the pair resembled one twisting and lurching mass, half gray and half black. O-Six’s muzzle was dark with blood by the time White Line’s sisters rallied to her side and drove O-Six away, limping as she retreated, looking back over her shoulder at the scene of the battle. The Druid alpha’s flank was bleeding, but she was still upright and moving well.
When the battle was over, Thin Female had gotten the worst of it. Rick, who had witnessed the entire confrontation, watched her slouch away, bloodied and battered, and curl up in the snow with her sisters around her. She had avoided lying down on ice or snow all winter because of her mange; now it seemed she was beyond such considerations. A Wolf Project biologist found her dead the next morning.
—
Ten days later O-Six was leading the brothers through Lamar Canyon, the narrow gorge that connected Little America and the Lamar Valley, when she came across White Line once again. This time the Druid female was alone. Uncowed by their recent clash, she had been tailing O-Six for days, still holding out hope she could win the two males back. As the highest-ranking Druid female, she would have been 755’s mate had she been able to hold on to him. Now, as the brothers looked on, O-Six squared off with White Line for a second time.
The brothers made no move to join in as their leader attacked, but she didn’t need their help. O-Six lunged again and again, as White Line, weakened by months of poor feeding, struggled to fend her off. She was losing badly but refused to retreat. Suddenly she buckled under her attacker, exposing her flank, and O-Six sank her inch-long canines deep into her opponent’s leg. Moments later White Line, bleeding profusely, simply stopped fighting. As if by some unspoken agreement, O-Six sensed the contest was over, too, and stood and watched as her defeated opponent limped off into the woods alone, looking for a suitable place to die.
The park road ran right through Lamar Canyon, and a dozen people had been standing near their cars in a pullout when O-Six attacked White Line. Through their scopes, they watched the battle in the trees on the side of the canyon above them, until the warring parties eventually went their separate ways. While the watchers were still marveling at what they had just witnessed, a bull elk appeared above the parking area, halfway up the partially wooded side of the canyon, running full out with O-Six and the two males just behind. Scopes were frantically swung back and forth, as the action appeared and disappeared through the gaps in the trees. Then the watchers lost sight of both predators and prey, and the chase seemed to be over.
Then the bull reappeared. He turned unexpectedly downhill, ran clear of the pines, and barreled straight toward the startled watchers at the roadside. Five feet tall at the shoulder, with an enormous spread of antlers, he was in full flight, panicked and heedless of his surroundings. O-Six was on him again, by herself now, closing the gap in the snow. He veered away from the pavemen
t at the last moment and began running parallel to the road.
The watchers had no need for scopes now—the chase was unfolding only a stone’s throw away. O-Six ran right by the lot without a glance at her audience, oblivious to anything but the fleeing bull. These were the moments the most dedicated watchers lived for, the excitement that made the zero-degree mornings, the long cold waits along the roadside in the wind or the driving snow, even the days without a single sighting, all worthwhile.
O-Six reached the bull’s heels, close enough to make contact. The elk wheeled and crossed the road, and O-Six suddenly broke off the pursuit. She’d gotten her teeth into his hide in a few places but not enough to slow him down. The bull was big, with plenty of vigor, even this late in winter. If she’d had the two males with her, the trio might have brought him down within two hundred yards of the parking lot, with everyone watching. But the males hadn’t been able to keep up with the action—or perhaps quailed when the chase veered toward the road—and had lost track of O-Six and her quarry somewhere in the trees above. The watchers could hear them howling for her as she slowly made her way back in their direction.
—
It was more than sheer luck that landed so many watchers in just the right place to catch the stunning action that morning. Spread out along the Northern Range was a small group of aficionados with whom Rick kept in constant radio contact throughout the day, a wolf-spotting network that park biologists and professional guides called “Rick radio” and had come to rely on themselves. Chief among the spotters was a fifty-eight-year-old retired schoolteacher from San Diego named Laurie Lyman, who lived within shouting distance of Rick’s cabin in Silver Gate. Laurie had caught the wolf bug in the late 1990s, after observing wolves raised in captivity by a documentary filmmaker in northern Idaho. Fascinated by the complexity of their social interactions, she devoured every wolf-related film or book she could find, and in time almost every piece of art in her third-grade classroom was wolf-themed.
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