Haber believed that losing even one animal damaged the well-being of the pack as a whole in ways that weren’t yet completely understood. He published rarely, but he was very active in local politics, showing up at public meetings to argue with state game managers about hunting and trapping near the park. Alaska’s numerous wolves have never had federal protection, and the packs outside Denali are heavily hunted by sportsmen. In an effort to boost caribou herds, the state game department had long controlled wolf numbers through heavy trapping of its own, along with culling from helicopters.
Over the years, dozens of Denali wolves had been lost to trappers, too, when packs ranged out of the park in search of prey. Haber eventually became so frustrated that he gave reporters a disturbing video he’d recorded of a bloodied wolf who had tried to chew himself free from a leg snare set by the game department. The resulting backlash from appalled Alaskans led to a commitment from the state to kill fewer wolves. A hero to some, Haber was widely hated in Alaska’s hunting community.
Rick found Haber’s take on pack dynamics and the importance of individual wolves convincing. Haber’s passion was infectious as well. By the early 1990s, the planned Yellowstone reintroduction was all anybody who cared about wolves was talking about, and Rick channeled his enthusiasm for the idea into what would become his first wolf book, which he called A Society of Wolves, a passionate argument for the wolf’s return.
In the course of his research, Rick found himself reading everything he could find on the historical treatment of wolves in the United States. The more he read, the more convinced he became that his ancestors had committed a terrible injustice. When the Pilgrims landed on Plymouth Rock, there were perhaps as many as two million wolves on the continent. Most of the early colonial governments, eager to make their settlements safe for livestock, paid bounties for wolf hides; they forced some Native tribes to pay regular tribute in dead wolves. Later, on the Great Plains, wolfers motivated by financial gain—wolf hides were highly valued back east—used poison to devastating effect. The most common practice was to ride for several days in an enormous circle, leaving poisoned buffalo meat all along the route. By the time the wolfer came back around to the beginning of his circuit, dead wolves—along with countless other predators and scavengers, including eagles and other raptors—littered the ground. The wolves were skinned on the spot; the rest of the carcasses were left to rot.
Meanwhile, the elimination of the buffalo removed a key food source for wolves, drastically reducing wolf habitat in the center of the country and making the Mountain West one of the last redoubts of the species. When ranching finally arrived in the Rockies, state-sponsored bounties and government poisoning programs kept the region’s woods filled with traps and poison bait. The decades-long campaign was devastatingly effective, though as on the plains, the incidental killing of other woodland creatures was common. Later backcountry-savvy trappers were hired to methodically purge wolves from even the remotest areas in the West. By the 1920s, the wolf had been all but eliminated from the continental United States, except for a small population in northern Minnesota and Michigan’s Upper Peninsula.
It was a campaign unprecedented in its scope and thoroughness: one species almost completely wiped out another. The impetus for the killing was clear enough. But as Barry Lopez asked in Of Wolves and Men, his seminal meditation on the fraught relationship between the two species, why did the pogrom continue even after the threat to the westerner’s way of life was essentially gone? Why did our ancestors feel they had to root out every last wolf, and why were hunters still so eager to shoot them in the few places they remained?
There was hate, Lopez decided, but there was something else, too—something more akin to envy: “Here is an animal capable of killing a man, an animal of legendary endurance and spirit, an animal that embodies marvelous integration with its environment. This is exactly what the frustrated modern hunter would like: the noble qualities imagined; a sense of fitting into the world. The hunter wants to be the wolf.”
After Rick finished A Society of Wolves, he traveled to western Colorado and spent two days in the land that had been home to one of the last wolves known to have lived in the state. Gazing out over the juniper and sage, he was moved to perform a ceremony of sorts in memory of the wolf, who was known as Rags the Digger. He played a song written by a Blackfoot Indian friend on a portable cassette player, and then offered a silent apology for Rags’s death and a prayer that his spirit would one day walk again in the body of another wolf, a belief found in some Native American traditions. Without the wolf, Rick wrote in the book’s epilogue, the landscape was incomplete. “The only way we can experience ‘an entire heaven and an entire earth,’ ” he wrote, quoting Thoreau, “is to bring the wolf back.”
The book was published in 1993, and Rick traveled widely to promote it, speaking at venues that ranged from small bookstores to the California Academy of Sciences. He had become a proselytizer for wolves, carrying the gospel to anyone who would listen. When he landed his job in Yellowstone, he immediately began planning his next book: the triumphant saga of the wolf’s return.
—
Rick’s transition to year-round work in Yellowstone was a milestone for him in more ways than one. He rented an old cabin in Silver Gate that had once served as the community’s one-room schoolhouse, and for the first time he acquired his own furniture. He was, at long last, settling down, and he found he liked it. As the wolf-watching community grew, he enjoyed seeing the same faces year after year.
Eventually Rick warmed to his new role in the park as well. Ad hoc roadside talks weren’t the same as slideshows in a visitor center, but he gradually acquired the necessary skills. Once he found something that worked, he stuck with it. He told the same jokes over and over. When a tour guide brought a wolf-watching client over to see how Rick used his telemetry equipment, he almost always offered some variation on the same basic gag: that the antenna detected brain waves, though none seemed to be emanating from the guide or client, or else the device emitted dangerous radiation and must never be pointed at anyone’s head, as it inevitably was at that moment. The joke never failed to garner a laugh or two, assuming the client understood enough English to follow it, the odds of which were increased considerably by Rick’s characteristically slow delivery.
He always included plenty of facts and figures about wolves in his talks, but he found that stories about individual wolves were what moved people. Over the years, he learned to tell stories that suited whoever happened to be in his audience on a given day. For a busload of young cancer survivors, he had tales about wolves, like Limpy, who had managed to overcome their disabilities and thrive. For a visitor from the South, Rick might make an allusion to professional wrestling, which he loved almost as much as wolves. It didn’t matter to him that the matches were fixed. He loved the larger-than-life personalities, and he saw timeless themes in the endless battle between good and evil that was the hallmark of every match—the same lessons he found in the stories of the wolves he followed.
He liked westerns and Charles Bronson movies for the same reason, along with the new Marvel superhero films, which he drove to Bozeman or Cody to see every time one came out. He was well read and kept abreast of current affairs—he was a particular fan of the wonderful stories featured on This American Life—and yet his understanding of what motivated the people around him was shaped by an almost childlike optimism. He cried easily; any story in which an animal or a child got hurt might briefly bring him to tears, or close to them, though he was never ashamed. He was a storyteller who never tired of hearing stories, the more fabulous the better.
Rick’s dream, though he seldom described it as such, was to someday tell a story so good that the people who heard it simply wouldn’t want to kill wolves anymore. It was an ambition not entirely without precedent. Rick often told visitors about Ernest Thompson Seton, the great nineteenth-century painter and naturalist whose short story about trapping one of the West’s last remain
ing wolves became a national sensation and changed the way many Americans thought about wolves and the natural world in general.
Originally published in Scribner’s Magazine in 1894 under the title “Lobo, the King of Currumpaw,” the story recounted how a friend in the New Mexico Territory hired Seton to kill a wolf that had plagued ranchers in the area for years. Seton, who had some experience as a trapper, tried a variety of poisoned baits and buried traps, but Lobo, as the ranchers called the enormous gray male, was simply too wily.
Finally Seton found the wolf’s weak spot. He trapped Lobo’s naïve young mate, known to ranch hands as Blanca, and dragged her carcass through a field laden with traps, knowing that Lobo’s blind loyalty would drive him to follow her scent heedlessly. When Seton returned to check his handiwork, he found Lobo held fast by traps on three of his legs. Seton had outsmarted him at last.
But when the time came, he couldn’t bring himself to shoot Lobo. Something about the nobility of the enormous beast, among the last of his kind, hopelessly ensnared and yet still lunging gamely at his captor—and perhaps the shame of having resorted to such underhanded tactics to catch him—kept Seton from finishing the job. Instead he brought Lobo back to his employer’s ranch, where he chained him up with plenty of food and water nearby. The next morning he was dead—the victim, Seton surmised, of a broken heart.
Maudlin and fantastic by modern standards, the ideas in Seton’s piece—about a West that was rapidly losing its wildness, about man’s duty to be a good steward of God’s creation—nevertheless captured the nation’s imagination and helped popularize the feeling that the country’s natural endowment, and the wonders of the West in particular, were treasures to be savored and protected. The story’s success had tangible results, chief among them renewed interest in the national park movement. More to the point, as far as Rick was concerned, Seton planted the seed that eventually flowered into the campaign to protect the nation’s remaining wolves.
Rick wanted his Yellowstone book to finish the job that Seton had begun. He was proud of his first wolf book but knew it wasn’t the kind of writing that moved people, as the story of Lobo had, along with the dozens of other tales in the “outlaw wolf” genre that blossomed in the years after its publication. He’d made a careful study of how the stories were crafted and the methods the authors had used to inspire sympathy for a species that had been so widely despised for so long. He sometimes imagined turn-of-the-century readers, nestled in their cozy houses back east, following along as the West’s last remaining wolves were pursued by men on horseback, raptly turning the pages as the stories built toward their climatic final scenes. All of them rooting, just this once, for the wolf.
—
Now that wolves were being hunted again, Seton’s message seemed more vital than ever, yet Rick’s employment with the Park Service made the politics of the situation delicate. He was careful not to directly criticize the way officials in Montana and Idaho managed wolves; establishing a hunting season was their prerogative.
But hunting near the park was different. Some Yellowstone wolves had become tolerant of humans, especially those who lived in the Lamar Valley, where wolf-watching had become so popular, raising the question of whether it was ethical to shoot them when they left the park. Very few had actually become habituated, the term biologists use for an animal that approaches people, cars, or houses looking for food. In the entire history of the Wolf Project, Doug Smith had been forced to kill only two habituated wolves, both of whom had been illegally fed by visitors and had lost their natural fear of humans. Neither wolf had harmed anyone—in fact, there hadn’t been a single recorded instance of a wolf attacking a person since reintroduction. But Smith could not undo what they had learned, and both continued to approach people no matter what deterrents he tried.
Yet even nonhabituated wolves that had grown accustomed to seeing cars and people at a safe distance—as many in the park had—would make easy targets for hunters. Wolf advocates had lobbied for a kind of buffer zone around the park in which hunting would never be allowed, but such efforts hadn’t gotten far. The Park Service was still smarting from an attempt in the 1980s to extend its jurisdiction around Yellowstone to improve wildlife management in the park itself. It had met with such a cold reception from members of Congress that park officials had been forced to abandon the issue. Just how vulnerable Yellowstone’s wolves would be to hunters was anybody’s guess.
When the first Montana hunt began, on September 15, 2009, they found out. Within three weeks, hunters killed four of the ten wolves—including the alpha male and female—in the Cottonwood Creek Pack, a recently formed tribe known to move back and forth freely across the park’s northern boundary. Most had been shot on the northern end of the Buffalo Plateau, not far from the rural community of Jardine, which, despite its proximity to Gardiner and its annual summertime flood of wolf-loving tourists, had become something of a locus for anti-wolf sentiment in the Yellowstone area.
Though the pack itself was relatively new, several of the Cottonwood Creek wolves were very familiar to watchers, including a pair of seven-year-old females known as 527 and 716. Both females had once survived a rival pack’s lengthy siege of their den by sneaking out for food, a drama that had likely never been witnessed before and that kept Rick and his fellow watchers riveted for days. They were the only animals in the pack wearing research collars, and hunters had shot them both, so there was no longer any way to monitor the pack’s movements. The last Rick had heard, 527’s stuffed and mounted carcass was now decorating a bar in a resort in Pray, Montana, a tiny hamlet on the road from Gardiner to Livingston. She’d been shot by a hunting guide and professional rodeo rider who lived nearby. With both alphas dead, the pack would most likely fall apart, if it hadn’t already.
Rick suspected that 754 and 755 occasionally traveled over the park’s northern boundary as well. Now that that the Druids’ hold on the Lamar Valley was so tenuous, it was possible that O-Six would eventually move into the valley herself, which would make such excursions less likely. Historically, when the Druids left the park, they had generally gone east, into Wyoming, where there was no wolf-hunting season, at least not yet. Park wolves were still safe there, or as safe as they had ever been, and Rick took some consolation in that.
But it wouldn’t last forever, and once hunting was legalized in Wyoming, Rick thought, the park would essentially be surrounded by hostile territory. Rick had gotten a brief glimpse of what that would be like in the spring and summer of 2008, when wolves had temporarily lost protection in Wyoming. The state’s wolf-management plan allowed any wolf found outside the narrow mountainous corridor that included Yellowstone and Grand Teton National Park—roughly 85 percent of the state, in other words—to be killed without a permit at any time of year. A federal judge had quickly returned them to the endangered species list, but in that brief window scores of wolves had been shot.
One of them was Limpy. Off researchers’ radar for years, he’d been shot the very first day federal protection was removed. He had been with a pair of wolves near an elk feeding ground about eighty miles southeast of Grand Teton National Park. All three wolves were killed, most likely by someone who had been monitoring their movements for some time. His death had been covered by the Salt Lake City papers, where his unexpected appearance had caused such a stir six years before, and picked up by news outlets around the country. Yellowstone’s wolf-watching community went into mourning.
Game officials in Wyoming resented the coverage Limpy’s death received. Yellowstone’s habit of producing “famous” wolves only made their jobs harder, and they weren’t shy about calling Doug Smith and letting him know it. Wolf Project biologists didn’t encourage the phenomenon; they never gave collared wolves names, like zoo animals, only numbers, and their official reports and published papers were as dry as those produced by wolf biologists anywhere else. But they didn’t really discourage it, either, and Smith, for his part, believed that positive accounts about ind
ividual wolves, such as Bob Landis’s films on the Druids, were good for wolves everywhere. They offered a counterbalance to the steady stream of complaints about livestock depredation or depleted elk herds and frustrated hunters.
But it hadn’t been enough to deter U.S. Fish and Wildlife from delisting wolves. Laurie had taken the death of the Cottonwood Creek wolves hard, especially the two females, and she included an obituary of sorts in her daily update. “When Rick writes his book, all of their lives will contribute to knowing and understanding wolves in the wild, and these girls will be standouts,” she wrote. For every beloved Yellowstone animal lost to the hunt, Rick knew that dozens of unheralded wolves were being killed across the Northern Rockies. By the end of the season, the combined tally in Idaho and Montana had reached 258. Rick supposed he’d have to get used to it. Every day he’d expected to see something new; now he waited to hear something terrible.
—
Thousands of visitors watched the Lamar pups that spring and summer. When they got home, they posted breathless accounts on Facebook, along with countless photos of the pack and its new pups. The relentless parade of bears through the den area created a chance to photograph two of the West’s iconic animals interacting with each other, though the action occasionally got a bit too exciting. One morning as a large group on Bob’s Knob watched the Lamar wolves run an elk into the creek, a grizzly began making its way up from the flats in the general direction of the watchers. Rick kept an eye on it, watching the pack and the elk through his scope, and soon realized the bear was making straight for the crowd. He calmly but firmly ushered everyone back to their cars, then followed the bear in his own vehicle until it nosed its way past the parking lot and it was safe for everyone to come back out.
When O-Six finally ventured out of the den to hunt, she came right down to the creek to stalk elk, creating photo opportunities that professional photographers might wait years to get. Stunned visitors saw her kill elk single-handedly right in front of them. Some considered it the experience of a lifetime, while others, perhaps used to seeing somewhat less bloody depictions of predator-prey interactions on television, were appalled by the unedited version. But it left an indelible impression regardless, and O-Six’s legend grew.
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