Once he had eaten his fill, the bear laid himself down directly on top of it, challenging any creature larger than the ever-present ravens or magpies to come near. A large enough pack might have been able to drive him off, but with only each other to rely on, the brothers didn’t even try to dislodge their adversary. Here was a meal for O-Six and the pups, so close she could see it from the den mouth, yet the brothers were powerless to deliver it.
—
O-Six’s standoff with the sow and her yearlings lasted for over seven hours. As the pups cowered unattended in the den, she drove the bears from the bowl, sometimes hundreds of yards away, only to find that the trio had returned before she could make it back to the den mouth. She was forced to lunge at the sow again and again, growing wearier as the hours went by but never losing her poise, lest she put a foot wrong and suffer the consequences. Her barking echoed off the mountain and down into the drainage below, yet still there was no sign of the brothers. The pups needed to nurse four to five times a day, but O-Six couldn’t afford to turn her back on the bears long enough to enter the den. Nor could the pups, who had yet to open their eyes, come to her.
After hours of fruitless effort, O-Six tried a new tactic. She charged at the bears, then ran from them, but never very far. When the sow turned away, she darted in again to nip at her retreating rump, then leaped backward to avoid the maw of the spinning bear, like a Camargue matador trying to snatch the ribbon from between a bull’s horns. In this way, she eventually managed to draw the bears away from the den, down the mountainside toward the creek below. A kind of stalemate eventually settled in, the sow and cubs grazing with a wary eye on the wolf, while O-Six watched from atop a nearby rock. Finally, with evening coming on, the bears headed west, and an exhausted O-Six turned back toward the den.
—
By the end of May, the pups were leaving the den and coming down into the grassy bowl to explore. There were two males and two females, all grays. The footing around the mouth of the den proved less than ideal for the pups and their caretakers. A pup’s first tentative steps out of the den often led to a tumble down into the brush below, while tugging four squirming pups by the scruff of the neck, one at a time, up the fifteen feet of loose dirt when it was time to return tried the patience of mother, father, and uncle.
Whatever 754’s shortcomings in other areas, patience with his nieces and nephews was something he seemed to have in abundance. The pups played with bones, bits of hide, and sticks—anything that might be tossed into the air and pounced upon, or that two tiny sets of teeth might tug at the same time. But their favorite game by far was jumping on the adults, and 754 took more than his fair share of these maulings. He seemed to truly delight in the pack’s first litter, though like his brother, he sometimes retreated to a secret bedding place that the pups could not find.
Even as 755 and O-Six settled into domestic life, 754 never quite gave up on his furtive efforts to win the female’s affection. When 755 was away, he would often nuzzle her jaw or lay his head across her back. She didn’t rebuke him, but she didn’t give him much encouragement, either, and 755 was rarely gone for long.
755 proved to be an attentive father, poking his head inside the den mouth every time he passed the entrance, obsessively monitoring the pups’ location. This got harder as his offspring became more mobile. They especially enjoyed the soggier areas of the bowl, jumping into the water and tackling one another with abandon. He developed the habit, when returning from a hunt, of circling the perimeter of the den site’s broad bowl before visiting the den proper. He nosed his way among the boulders on the mountainside above, down through the copse of trees a few hundred yards east, across the open, grassy meadow below, and back up the sage-covered western edge, sniffing the ground as he went.
By the time he completed his circuit, he had made an inventory of all the creatures that had come and gone in his absence. To him, it was as if the animals, or at least their ghosts, were still present, so visceral was their scent. His nose, at least one hundred times more sensitive than a human’s, told him which direction they had come from, how long they had stayed, and where they were headed when they left. Only when he was satisfied that any intruders were gone would he make his way to the den and greet the pups bouncing up to meet him, lean an affectionate shoulder on O-Six, and finally acknowledge his crouching, tail-wagging brother, more often than not with a flash of teeth.
Working in tandem, the brothers became more adept at finding food as the pups grew. There were a surprising number of elk in the immediate vicinity of the den, despite the nearly constant presence of O-Six. They seemed to feel safe there, and to a certain degree they were. The pack was reluctant to kill prey too close to the den, for fear of attracting bears or other wolves.
When the brothers did make kills, the carcasses were often miles from the den site, and getting food to O-Six and the pups that spring kept them busy. One brother would sometimes show up at the den carrying a large piece of elk, such as a leg assembly, but this process was clumsy, involving frequent stops to renew his grip. More commonly the males used their stomachs as grocery bags, swallowing up to twenty pounds of meat and making the long journey back to the den. When they arrived, their sides bulging noticeably, they regurgitated the meat for the pups, like birds feeding chicks in a nest.
As the pups made the switch from milk to meat, the brothers’ return from hunting forays set off a frenzy, with all four leaping to lick at their chins—which triggered the regurgitation—then diving headfirst into the meal. Usually the brothers were obliged to repeat the trick for O-Six, after which they wandered off a short distance and coughed up still more, this time burying the meat in a cache to be dug up and consumed later. After a short rest—not too long, lest birds, coyotes, or bears finish off the distant carcass—the delivery team would get up to repeat the whole cycle again.
While the bear problem never went away, it became more manageable, especially with 755’s help. He and O-Six developed a kind of tag-team routine, the alpha male driving the intruder away from the den, while his mate wandered off into the brush, luring the bear farther away, before doubling back by an unseen route. Still, the pups could never play on their own without at least one adult nearby, keeping watch, and the site never seemed quite secure enough for O-Six.
One morning she abruptly decided to move the pups to a hole she’d recently enlarged on the eastern side of the bowl. Still covered in mud from her digging, she managed to carry one of her offspring by the nape of the neck the hundred yards or so to the new den, which was somewhat more secluded than the original. But the rest of her brood seemed to think the relocation was a game of hide-and-seek, and she was forced to search the entire bowl before she finally cornered them all. The last to be caught refused to be carried, rolling over on his back, snapping his tiny teeth, and kicking at his mother’s open jaws.
Situated high on the mountainside, the den had a clear view of the flats of Slough Creek far below, as well as the Lamar River where it exited Lamar Canyon and, beyond, a long arm of Specimen Ridge. One morning as the pups were playing on a fallen log and 754 and 755 were bedded nearby, O-Six walked to the center of the bowl and sat in a field of luxurious grass, surveying the mountainside that dropped away below her. Suddenly she threw her muzzle into the air and howled. The two males roused themselves and trotted to her side to join in. The pups scampered over, confused and startled, looking everywhere for the danger that had prompted their mother to sound this alarm. But there was no danger. There was just warm sunshine and soft grass and the bounty of an enormous territory that belonged only to them. They tilted their tiny heads back and added their voices to the chorus.
—
The location of O-Six’s den was nothing if not strategic. The plateau itself was only sparsely wooded, and it would have been difficult for roaming wolves to approach the den area unseen. It also happened to be perfectly visible from the Slough Creek campground road, a two-mile dirt track that led from the park road north
along the creek toward a popular tent camping area. A short walk from a parking pullout along the road led to a low hill, nicknamed Bob’s Knob after filmmaker Bob Landis, that had a perfect view of the entire setting: the den area, the grassy mountainside below, and the broad marshy flats of Slough Creek at the base of the mountain.
Once the pups made their first appearance outside the den mouth, the hill was a mob scene every morning, with tripods for spotting scopes and cameras covering every possible flat surface. The den itself was only about a mile from the viewing area, and the wolves often came even closer, venturing down to the creek just a few hundred yards below the watchers. O-Six’s family was now officially known as the Lamar Canyon Pack, though the watchers just called them the Lamars. Every tour guide in the park included a stop to watch the pups, and they put on a show every morning and evening that delighted their audience. By the summer of 2010, O-Six had become the biggest star in Yellowstone.
Bob’s Knob became an office of sorts for Rick, who arrived every morning well before dawn and set up his scope, alongside Laurie, Doug, and whoever else happened to be in town. They enjoyed an hour or two to themselves before the crowds arrived. When more cars began to pull in, Laurie and Doug sometimes retreated to a spot high on a hill overlooking the campground road, but Rick almost always stayed to talk to the visitors. It was his job, after all, and he made sure each and every visitor who wanted to see the wolves had a chance to look through his scope.
It had become one of his favorite aspects of wolf-watching—that moment when a visitor saw a wolf for the first time. Somehow the newcomers never quite seemed to believe it was going to happen, despite the chorus of happy murmuring from the watchers, faces glued to their eyepieces, standing all around them. After all, the landscape before them looked like nothing but an empty mountainside, even with the help of the binoculars many visitors kept hanging from their necks. The scope itself was an intimidating tool for the uninitiated, with its multiple knobs and finicky nature, so easily knocked out of focus with the slightest jostle. At Rick’s behest, however, they carefully bent forward, hands behind their backs, and looked, and more often than not the exclamation that ensued—in German, Italian, Chinese, Hebrew—was one of pure joy: “I see them!”
Whenever Rick heard a howl, he’d immediately stop talking and urge everyone nearby to be quiet. The veteran watchers treasured every howl. Observing wolves from a mile or two away was like watching a movie without sound; your imagination had to supply the yips you knew you were missing when puppies were at play, or the growl of an alpha wolf pinning a yearling. But howls echoing through the valley were real, and hearing them somehow brought the wolves closer.
As a crowd-pleaser, a good howl never failed to deliver, especially when it was answered by unseen wolves in some far-off part of the landscape. Visitors often wanted to know what the howls meant, and Rick did his best to interpret them. Wolves frequently howl for no evident reason at all, but some sounds do have special significance. A single wolf that has become separated from his pack will sometimes howl for hours in a relatively high pitch that, to human ears, sounds lonesome. An alpha male howling to warn off an intruder will howl at a much lower pitch—a gruff, foreboding sound. The low notes in a howl, coupled with its long duration, help the sound travel farther, making it audible—to other wolves, at any rate—as much as ten miles away in open country.
When an entire pack howls to challenge a nearby rival pack, wolves will join in at different times and will modulate their calls in so many different ways that the chorus becomes a cacophony, making it difficult to determine just how many wolves are howling, which is to say how big a fighting force the pack can muster. Wolves will sometimes howl before setting off for a nightly hunt, apparently as a kind of morale-boosting exercise, or to celebrate returning pack members. This type of howl often follows a “rally,” an exuberant display of affection in which wolves leap on one another, forming a furry pile of tail-wagging bodies (a phenomenon many dog owners experience on a daily basis upon returning home from work).
There was a time, centuries ago, when that sound might have been heard almost anywhere in the northern hemisphere. Now it was nothing but fodder for metaphor, like talk of working like a beaver or making hay while the sun shines. Actually experiencing the thing itself, haunting and strange even in the broad daylight, had become one of Yellowstone’s signature wonders, and Rick always enjoyed watching people share the experience for the first time.
—
As an ambassador to the wolf-watching public, Rick was in many ways an unlikely candidate. Outside the stilted setting of nature talks, his interactions with people were often fraught. He could seem oddly formal and even rude at times, though he didn’t always realize it. Ending a conversation was a particular challenge for him. He was never quite sure when the other person was finished with him, and he developed the habit of saying “Okay, then” and turning away somewhat abruptly, without the customary wrapping up. As an interpretive ranger, of course, he was surrounded by people all day, listening to him tell stories. But talking at people wasn’t the same as talking to people. Communication for Rick was largely a one-way affair, and it was a craft to be perfected.
His first appearance in front of an audience had come about more or less by accident. As a student at the University of Massachusetts, he spent three summers in the backcountry of the White Mountain National Forest in New Hampshire, surveying and re-marking old boundary lines and working on firefighting crews. He had assumed he’d be a backcountry forest ranger after graduation. Then, in his last summer at school, the only job he could find was as an interpretive ranger, giving talks near a campground in the White Mountains. He hated public speaking, and had no idea how to create a presentation. He stumbled his way through it, hiding behind the projector during his first few slideshows.
What he really wanted to do was write. Rick had enjoyed literature classes in high school and dreamed of being a novelist. He grew up only ten miles from Concord, and after reading a selection from Thoreau’s Walden, he borrowed the family car and visited the replica of Thoreau’s cabin on Walden Pond. The solitude appealed to him, as did the notion that there was wisdom to be found in the study of nature. He also liked Thoreau’s ideas about work, which aligned nicely with the way a lot of young people saw the world in the late 1960s. The goal was to do as little work as necessary, so that you could maximize the time available to do what you pleased.
After reading Edward Abbey’s memoir Desert Solitaire, about a couple of seasons the ardent conservationist spent as a ranger in Utah’s Arches National Park, Rick decided his future was with the National Park Service. His first assignment was as an interpretive ranger at Denali, where once again his job was to talk to visitors about what they were seeing in the wilderness. He began keeping a journal, though he still wasn’t writing much otherwise. In his spare time, however, he began experimenting with wildlife photography and found he had a knack for it. Once he’d mastered the craft, getting good shots was chiefly a matter of patience and dedication, and Rick found he had both in abundance. What began as a pastime quickly grew into an obsession. He published widely, eventually landing his work in National Geographic, the holy grail for wildlife photographers worldwide.
He followed a grizzly cub from its early months through adulthood and published a book of photographs documenting the first five years of its life. Eventually his fascination with bears waned, however. They lived a long time, which meant you could follow individuals for years, but they were solitary creatures that seldom interacted with their own kind. That made their behavior, for Rick, somewhat too predictable.
—
Far more engaging, he discovered, were the park’s wolves. He started spending hours watching a den he had managed to locate, fascinated by the wolves’ social dynamics. After several seasons of viewing, he found that he was getting to know individual wolves; just like dogs, they had distinct personalities.
Back in the 1930s, Adolph Murie had bee
n struck more than anything else by what he called the wolves’ “friendliness” to one another, a revelation at a time when the popular understanding of wolves still held them to be snarling killers, remorseless and insatiable. Standing alone in the snow behind his scope, watching the wolves feed and care for the pups, Rick understood what Murie had meant. They were indeed friendly, but they could also be cruel, snapping at or even pinning one another to reinforce their relative places in the pack’s hierarchy. Inevitably one wolf always found himself at the bottom of the totem pole, living through an endless succession of difficult encounters with his packmates, fraught with fear and the prospect of rejection. And there were others for whom life just seemed easy, who were blessed with the charisma to make others love them and want to follow them.
In time, Rick befriended Gordon Haber, Alaska’s best-known wolf biologist. Haber was something of an iconoclast. He was among the first to argue that wolf packs developed their own sets of habits and customs, a constellation of behaviors that changed over time as pack members came and went and that could best be understood, according to Haber, as a kind of culture. Wolf packs continued to use the same den sites for generations, for example, even after the alpha female who dug the original den was long dead. Wolves who grew up mainly chasing elk usually had offspring who did the same; wolves who included deer in their diet passed that tradition down as well. Likewise, packs that frequented cattle and sheep ranches seldom changed their ways unless humans intervened.
When a pack lost its more experienced members, this process of cultural transmission could get derailed. Haber once documented the curious case of a pack that lost its alphas to trappers before any of the yearlings had learned to hunt Denali’s mountain sheep, which made difficult prey. The pack survived by learning to catch snowshoe hares, an adaptation that Haber later observed older wolves teaching to pups.
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