Laurie began visiting Yellowstone whenever she could get away; when she retired, in 2006, she bought a beautiful two-story log house on the edge of Silver Gate. Her husband, also a retired schoolteacher, joined her when he could, but she spent most of her time these days with Rick and a small community of dedicated wolf-watchers from across the country, each of whom lived for the few weeks or months they spent in Yellowstone every year, hauling their scopes from one pullout to another, hoping to see something wonderful.
It was an eclectic group. Many of them were retired, like Sian Jones, a plainspoken former police detective from England, who made the long flight to the park every winter. Kathie Lynch, a biology teacher from northern California, and Marlene Foard, who taught special education in Salt Lake City, were among the many educators who became regulars, taking advantage of long summer and winter breaks. Foard was in her early thirties and hadn’t missed a summer in the park since reintroduction. She drove a Toyota SUV with an enormous decal on the hood depicting a polar bear nosing through a pile of garbage, above the words I’D RATHER BE EATING SEALS.
The youngest regular was Jeremy SunderRaj, whose parents started bringing him to the park when he was six. On one of his first visits, he watched as a pack of wolves defending their den separated two grizzly cubs from their mother and killed them both. He was hooked. Now a teenager, his plan was to study wildlife biology in college. He was working in Silver Gate so he could spend the entire summer in the park, shadowing Rick as he made his rounds every morning.
In between visits, the watchers kept in touch with one another on Facebook and stayed abreast of the latest developments on blogs dedicated to wolves or news from Yellowstone. Laurie stood barely five feet tall, but she had a big personality, by turns assertive and motherly, and she gradually became the hub of the community. She and Rick compared notes on the phone almost every night, and Laurie chronicled what she and her friends had seen in an e-mail she sent out daily to all her wolf-watching contacts. Eventually her updates became so popular that Nathan Varley, a biologist who ran one of the park’s most successful wolf-watching guide services, hired her to post them to his website, where hundreds of subscribers around the country could read them every night.
In 2007 Laurie and Rick were joined in Silver Gate by another die-hard wolf-lover named Doug McLaughlin, who ran a boarding service for Thoroughbred horses in rural Washington State. That winter a friend volunteering in Yellowstone had called Doug, who was then sixty and unmarried, to ask if he might be able to fill in for two weeks. He fell into a routine of daily wolf-watching and quickly got to know the regulars in the Lamar Valley, along with their lexicon. The watchers had a name for every pullout along the park road, for landmarks not found on any map—a kind of shorthand almost indecipherable to the uninitiated. He was mesmerized by the magic of Yellowstone: the crystal-clear lakes, the mountains, the endless forests of pine and Douglas fir, and above all the wolves themselves. After a week he called his three adult daughters back home in Washington and told them he wasn’t sure when he was coming back. By spring, he had sold his business and moved to Silver Gate, where he found a job managing resort cabins. He had spent nearly every morning since in the park, watching wolves.
Doug found he had a knack with a spotting scope and became so adept that he quickly emerged as Rick’s most valuable spotter. He held the informal record among the watchers for the most distant sighting—eleven miles. He once pinpointed a pack moving through tall weeds from over a mile away by the pollen cloud billowing above them as they trotted along. Tall and lanky, with a quick laugh and an avuncular disposition, Doug was also a natural salesman; as he became a regular among the watchers, he began selling spotting scopes to visitors from the back of his truck.
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Nothing compared to the solitude of a crisp, cold Yellowstone morning. And yet wolf-watching was a social experience, too. It was all about enjoying the camaraderie of your fellow watchers, with their shared thermoses of hot coffee and stories about grandchildren or home renovations or football or whatever they could think of to pass the time. You had to cultivate a Zen-like patience and trust that the sighting would come, somewhere in the park, at some time, before the sun went down and it was time to go back to the cabin or the campsite.
Just finding the wolves in the vastness of the park could be an extremely difficult task. Rick’s telemetry readings indicated only the general direction and distance at which a collared wolf might be found, and sometimes even that information was unreliable. Especially here in Yellowstone’s craggy Northern Range, the signals from collared wolves emanating from one direction had an annoying habit of bouncing off the sides of opposing bluffs, such that watchers might spend an entire morning scoping the wrong side of a valley. A bevy of circling ravens might mean wolves on a carcass somewhere nearby, or it might mean nothing at all. A promising signal might be a wolf approaching, or it could be a pack moving away, not to return for hours and hours. There was a lot of standing around, endlessly scanning with scopes set to lowest magnification, listening for howling, fruitlessly checking the radio for reports from the next pullout, and—especially on the coldest days—retreating to the warmth of the car when your fingers or toes became too numb.
Experiencing Yellowstone through a spotting scope was an entirely different experience from seeing the park from a car or even from a hiking trail. Only when you tried scanning the entire length of Specimen Ridge or Druid Peak one two-hundred-yard diameter circle at a time did you get a sense of how big the Lamar Valley really was. Every contour of the land seen with the naked eye from the roadside was really several such folds, each with a dale in between, sometimes visible and sometimes hidden. And each of those dales held countless features of its own—boulder gardens, narrow creek-filled drainages, meadows bound by copses of aspen or fir or lodgepole pine—where a wildlife drama might unfold. You’d follow a creek upstream from the valley floor until its bed became a swale, which in turn became an enormous drainage, big enough to spend an hour exploring through your scope. Then you’d pull your eye away and realize that this miniature landscape you’d just begun to study was only one tiny portion of a vast mountainside. And beyond that was another valley, and another mountain, and so on, for miles and miles. The fact that wolves were seen at all in Yellowstone was the real miracle.
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In his 1944 monograph The Wolves of Mount McKinley, Adolph Murie described the “inexhaustible thrill” of watching wolves, though he conceded somewhat drily that not every minute of every hour was thrilling. “Many hours were spent watching the wolves at the den,” he wrote, “and yet when I undertake to write about it there does not seem to be a great deal to relate, certainly not an amount commensurate with the time spent observing these animals.” That didn’t deter Rick. Wolves tended to run through the night and rest most of the day, and the truth was that he had spent a considerable portion of the last thirty years of his life watching wolves sleep. In recent years, he had begun taking a midday nap himself, since there wasn’t much to see in the afternoons anyway. On most evenings, he’d come back out before the sun went down, when the wolves roused themselves for a night of hunting.
Between sightings, the watchers spent much of their time enjoying other species. When wolves were scarce, for example, grizzlies could usually be counted on for a good show, beating the bushes for pronghorn fawns or elk calves every spring, or gorging on berries in the summertime. In time, a dedicated watcher came to know every likely nesting area for eagles and osprey, the carefully hidden locations of coyote dens, the ponds that hosted the park’s scattering of beaver colonies, the places where river otters liked to play. And then there were the great herds of elk, pronghorn, and buffalo—the animals that inspired Congress to make Yellowstone the world’s first national park. The Lamar Valley boasted the highest prey density of anyplace on earth outside the African Serengeti. The playful bison calves—called “red dogs” for their ruddy fur—cavorting in the spring were a favorite, though th
e watchers also had to be leery of the bulls in mating season, when surging hormones made them unpredictable and dangerous.
Inevitably they spent a lot of time watching elk, just as the wolves did. It wasn’t a bad strategy; wherever there were elk grazing, there was the possibility of a predator sighting, too. As splendid as the elk were, wolf-watchers who had been in the field long enough invariably adopted a kind of morbid humor about their role in the food chain, and the unfortunate but inescapable fact that elk were essentially bait for the animals they were all hoping to see. “Aren’t they beautiful?” Doug had been known to comment when he had winter-weakened elk in his scope and no visitors were around. “Maybe if we’re lucky, one of them will die!”
Setting up in the darkness every morning, spending countless hours chatting by the roadside, checking in by radio, Rick, Laurie, and Doug became friends. It often fell to the three of them to come up with names for uncollared wolves, so that one could be told from another. It was Laurie who had named O-Six, after she found herself spending so much time chronicling the audacious female’s behavior. Rick and Laurie and Doug—between them they knew more about the wolves of the Northern Range than even the Wolf Project biologists. The professionals recorded their subjects’ ages and weights, their ranges and diets, their fertility and longevity. But the watchers knew their stories.
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Laurie wrote up the battle between O-Six and White Line and the chase of the renegade bull in her update the night of February 20, 2010, and suddenly O-Six and her exploits were all the far-flung community of Yellowstone wolf-watchers were talking about. There was a new star to follow in the Northern Range.
A few days later White Line’s carcass was spotted on a wooded ridge not far from Lamar Canyon. Rick volunteered to hike up and remove her remains so the project biologists could examine her. When he reached her, he found that her carcass had been extensively scavenged over the preceding days. Wolves didn’t eat other wolves; the most likely culprit was a mountain lion that had been spotted recently in the canyon.
Carrying White Line’s remains down to the valley floor, Rick couldn’t help but think of the death of 21, the Druid alpha male he had loved so much. Now, nearly six years after 21’s death, he was bringing another dead Druid alpha down the mountain. White Line’s demise made a difficult truth impossible to ignore: the saga of the Druids—the story of 21 and his descendants—was now all but over.
And it wasn’t just the Druid story that had turned sour; things had taken a bad turn for Yellowstone wolves in general. If 21 was the star of the Wolf Project’s first decade, the truth was that in the years since his death, the show wasn’t quite what it used to be. Dozens of Yellowstone wolves had been lost in recent years to mange and other canine diseases. As the park’s surplus population of elk leveled off in response to renewed predation, meanwhile, the wolf population had begun to do the same. From a high of 174 wolves just seven years before, the number of wolves had plummeted to roughly 100.
Project biologists had long suspected that such a drop would occur as a kind of equilibrium was reached between predators and available prey, but it was still hard for veteran watchers to accept. Wolves were now harder to spot than they had been in years, and Rick resigned himself to the inevitability of an occasional day without a sighting.
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Outside the park, meanwhile, another profound change had taken place. As Rick and his friends watched O-Six chase elk across Little America, wolves themselves were being legally hunted for the first time in modern memory. After years of courthouse wrangling, the management of wolves had at last been returned to state control in both Montana and Idaho, though Wyoming’s bid to open its first wolf-hunting season was tied up in litigation. Yellowstone wolves were still protected as long as they stayed in the park, where hunting was never allowed, but as soon as they left the park’s northern and western borders, they entered woods filled with hunters and were now fair game.
Wolf advocates had fought against this day for years, filing lawsuit after lawsuit to keep wolves on the endangered species list. As employees of the National Park Service, Doug Smith and his fellow Wolf Project members were bound to support the decision made by their colleagues at U.S. Fish and Wildlife to declare the species officially recovered in the Northern Rockies. Unofficially, Smith had long feared losing federal protection, or “delisting,” since it would inevitably mean the deaths of wolves his team had followed for years.
It wasn’t that Smith believed his wolves were sacred. In fact, almost every year since reintroduction, he had reluctantly approved the shooting of a handful of Yellowstone wolves who had attacked livestock grazing near the park. Such culling wouldn’t normally have been allowed under the Endangered Species Act, but a special concession had been made to ranchers in the original reintroduction plan: any reintroduced wolves who preyed on livestock would be shot. The wolves’ overall impact on ranching hadn’t been severe; around two hundred cattle—out of roughly five million across Montana, Idaho, and Wyoming—were lost to predation in an average year. (By comparison, tens of thousands of cattle were killed every year by winter storms, lightning, floods, or drought.) But some individual operations near the core reintroduction areas were hit hard, and a promise was a promise.
In the spring of 2002, Carter Niemeyer found himself face-to-face with the reality of what that promise meant. After central Idaho’s Whitehawk Pack encountered cattle grazing in the Sawtooth National Forest, they began taking livestock on a regular basis, eventually settling near a fenced pasture owned by a local rancher. Government trappers killed several pack members, but still the depredations continued. Niemeyer tried every technique he could think of to drive the remaining wolves off, including installing specially modified speakers along fence lines. Rigged to respond to the presence of radio signals emitted by the wolves’ research collars, the speakers blasted the sounds of civilization—gunfire, human voices, car engines—at any collared wolf that came near. Volunteers even camped near the pastures, to ensure a constant human presence between the livestock and the wolves. Nothing seemed to work.
Finally, one morning in April, Niemeyer found himself climbing into a helicopter with a twelve-gauge shotgun, heading out to hunt down the descendants of the very same wolves he had personally brought down from Canada just seven years before. Niemeyer had hoped the day would never come, but he wasn’t the type to delegate unpleasant tasks to other people. Over the next five hours, the pilot buzzed the panicked pack as Niemeyer methodically shot every remaining member. It was among the worst days of his life, but if this was the price of having wolves running free in the Northern Rockies again, he was willing to pay it.
—
At least White Line had died the way a wolf was meant to, Rick thought, defending her territory and trying to provide for her family. If the Druid saga really was over, it was equally true that O-Six had helped bring the story to a close. And yet Rick supposed that O-Six was a Druid herself, in a sense. Her mother had been born in the den on Druid Peak, after all, and maybe that gave O-Six as good a claim on the valley as White Line or any other wolf in Yellowstone.
There was something undeniably remarkable about her. If she had pups of her own and stayed in the Northern Range, near the road, the rise of her clan might be a story worth following, too. Even though she had come out on top in her contest with White Line, her odds of survival were not all that good. She was an amazing hunter, a once-in-a-generation hunter. But after she denned, she’d be unable to get food for herself. Her two new running mates would have to do the heavy lifting, and their abilities were far from proven. If they couldn’t deliver, the pups might not survive. And O-Six might not, either, for that matter.
But Rick believed she would make it. Druid blood was special.
4
KILLERS
Steven Turnbull parked his truck in front of the Painter Outpost, Crandall’s only store—and restaurant, and bar—and stepped out onto the flattened snow in the unpaved parking lot.
It was a Monday afternoon in late March 2010, which meant the bar would be full, or as full as it ever got. Mail was delivered to Crandall from the post office in Cody on Mondays and Thursdays, and people up and down the valley drove in around four p.m. to collect their junk mail and bills at the small bank of post office boxes near the store. Afterward a handful of regulars would come inside for a beer.
Crandall wasn’t really a town, so its residents had no city hall or library or school or public park, no real center of gravity to gather around. What they had was the store, and sooner or later everyone ended up there. You could pick up a fishing license, along with toilet paper, milk, a few groceries, beer, and the latest gossip.
The Clark’s Fork ran behind the store, and beyond loomed Hunter Peak, still dusted with snow, though it was greening up a bit. Across the valley, massive Table Mountain was also beginning to show signs of spring, which meant they would soon be opening the road to Yellowstone. Beautiful as it was, the park had nothing that compared to Crandall’s stunning vistas of the heart of the Absarokas.
But they were cruel mountains; you took your chances traveling through Crandall, especially in winter. Tall poles marked the sides of the snow-covered road, which all but disappeared between plowings. Turnbull had pulled more than a few neighbors out of the ditch with his pickup over the years. Occasionally somebody went over the high side on one of the slippery switchbacks and rolled down the mountainside, where they were beyond anybody’s help.
The barroom at the Outpost had four or five stools and a few tables, with pine wainscoting running down a back wall covered with beer signs. It was neat and clean and relatively new. The original store had been destroyed in the great 1988 fire that burned nearly half of Yellowstone before sweeping down into Crandall and sending everyone scrambling for their lives.
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