American Wolf

by Nate Blakeslee

  So instead he continued to collect material, a little more every day, making the mountain higher. Some of what he recorded made for gripping reading, though for every engrossing account of a wolf like O-Six fighting off a bear or taking down an elk, there were pages and pages describing sedentary wolves engaged in the same mundane behaviors you might observe while watching a dog whiling away empty afternoon hours on a back porch: standing, facing west, sniffing the ground, sitting back down. When Doug Smith and his team began a research project, they were always trying to answer a specific question—the relationship between wolves and ravens, for example—and this gave their note-taking some direction. But Rick wrote down everything.

  —

  Back in Denali, where he’d spent all his free time taking pictures of wolves and other wildlife, he had grown so obsessed with getting the perfect shot that he found himself encroaching on animals, entering their space in ways that bordered on harassment. You learned to rationalize it, he would later tell friends; it was part of being a professional wildlife photographer. Somebody else was inevitably doing something worse than you were, and there were always boundaries you wouldn’t cross. Until you did. He began to feel a kind of helplessness in the face of his compulsion, like an alcoholic. The solution, he finally decided, was to stop cold turkey.

  By the time he got to Yellowstone, he was done with photography. Now he only took notes.

  But the compulsion that had driven him in Denali hadn’t really gone away. In some ways, it was even more pronounced than before. A pleasant morning in the park with his friends would turn tense if too many hours went by without a sighting and the prospect of a wolfless day arose. Laurie in particular would grow more anxious as a morning waned, knowing how much it meant to Rick to see a wolf each and every day, and unable to rest until she’d found one. When she finally got a wolf in her scope, she would hurriedly call him over, sometimes interrupting his interaction with nearby visitors midsentence, and Rick would all but run to the scope, lest the momentary sighting be lost before he arrived. Once he had his wolf, he could relax.

  Over the years, the daily watching and the meticulous note-taking had become ends in themselves, and Rick savored what he considered to be personal milestones, evidence of his astounding perseverance. Since coming to Yellowstone, he had transcribed close to five million words of field notes into his journal; the King James Bible, the longest book he knew of, had only around eight hundred thousand. Cal Ripken, the celebrated Baltimore Orioles shortstop known as the “Iron Man” because he never took a day off, had played in 2,632 consecutive games. Rick hadn’t missed a day in the park since June 12, 2000, the day he returned from his mother’s memorial service, which meant that he had surpassed the Iron Man’s achievement back in 2008. And Ripken’s streak, of course, was interrupted by days off between games, not to mention winters, as Rick sometimes reminded people.

  One night during his 891-day streak of consecutive sightings, the park was hit by a blizzard that was bad even by Yellowstone standards. The road from the park’s northwest entrance to Silver Gate was the one stretch park officials kept open all year long, so Yellowstone’s handful of winter visitors would have at least some access to the park. But with this storm the snow was coming down so heavily that the plows could barely keep up.

  The next day brought more snow and high winds. By midday, visibility was near zero, and Yellowstone’s superintendent made the unusual decision to close the park. Rick hadn’t yet spotted a wolf when he heard the news, and he was in no hurry to leave. He drove his yellow Xterra cautiously through the Lamar Valley, as Doug McLaughlin followed in his Nissan Pathfinder.

  There wasn’t a soul on the road, not even a ranger. It was just the two of them crawling through the valley, Rick stopping from time to time to check for signals and updating Doug with his handheld radio. The overcast, snow-filled sky was so dark, it might as well have been night. The wolves were in the valley, it seemed, but not where they could be easily viewed. The conditions continued to worsen, and snow was accumulating at an alarming rate. It was getting difficult to see where the road ended and the ditch began, and the window of opportunity for a safe return to Silver Gate was rapidly closing. If they got stuck, there would be nobody coming to pull them out, at least not until the next morning.

  Doug heard his friend’s voice come over the radio. “What emergency provisions do you have?” he asked. Rick wanted to see a wolf, and he was willing to push his luck a little further, even if it meant risking a night spent in a blizzard in the back of an uninsulated SUV. Doug always kept a sleeping bag, water, and food in his truck, in case he got stranded, just as Rick did. Just a few more minutes, they both agreed.

  On a hunch, Doug left Rick on the side of the road, where he was still trying to pin down a weak signal, and drove about a mile farther on. Minutes later he radioed Rick: he had wolves. Rick hurried to him and looked through Doug’s scope, the wind turning the exposed skin on his face a bright red.

  There they were.

  Distant and difficult to see through the snow, which was now blowing sideways, but there nonetheless. He had his sighting. Both men jumped into their trucks and headed for home, Rick busting through snowdrifts in his Xterra, struggling to stay in the center of what was by then only a suggestion of a road. Somehow they made it back to Silver Gate. For weeks afterward Doug was the hero; he had saved the streak.

  Rick didn’t have much to report when he sat down to type up his notes that night. It had only been a brief sighting, after all. But he wrote it up anyway, like he always did.

  8

  RETURN TO THE LAMAR VALLEY

  Judge Molloy issued his ruling on Thursday, August 5, 2010. He signed the decision at 2:43 in the afternoon, too late for the news to make Friday morning’s papers, buying himself—and every other government official involved—one last day of peace before the storm hit. The news was this: wolves must be returned to the endangered species list throughout the Northern Rockies, effective immediately.

  Declaring wolves recovered in Idaho and Montana but still endangered in Wyoming did not pass legal muster, Molloy decided. Nothing in the language of the Endangered Species Act or in its legislative history allowed for such a maneuver, despite Fish and Wildlife’s creative effort to reinterpret the code. “Even if the Service’s solution is pragmatic, or even practical,” the judge wrote, “it is at its heart a political solution that does not comply with the ESA.” Doug Honnold had won.

  It was just two weeks before Idaho officials were scheduled to announce wolf-hunting quotas for the fall; Montana game regulators had already set a limit of 186 wolves, more than double the number authorized in 2009. Both hunts would have to be canceled. The New York Times lauded the ruling in an editorial. “State plans meant to satisfy hunters rather than protect the wolves cannot do that,” the editors wrote. “The gray wolf may need federal protection for years to come.”

  Honnold and his clients were delighted, though in reality it wasn’t a total victory. Molloy had declined to rule on any of the other issues raised by the plaintiffs, such as the sufficiency of the recovery standards, or the question of whether genuine connectivity had been achieved. In Molloy’s view, the fundamental flaw in the rule’s logic—holding that some Northern Rockies wolves were endangered while others weren’t—rendered all the other issues moot. Honnold felt he had made a compelling case that Fish and Wildlife’s entire approach to recovery needed to be revisited, but Molloy had punted on that question.

  Anticipating the backlash, Ken Salazar, the interior secretary, sought to channel blame away from the federal government and toward Wyoming officials, whose recalcitrance had forced the judge to rule as he did. Governor Freudenthal did take some lumps in the days that followed, but inevitably most of the vitriol was aimed at the feds. “I don’t know why any state would ever allow another reintroduction of a species because the federal government and radical environmentalists simply cannot live up to their word and allow state management,” Idaho go
vernor Butch Otter told reporters.

  Civil disobedience—another round of “shoot, shovel, and shut up”—was widely predicted. The response from frustrated officials in Idaho County, who oversaw a stretch of prime wolf habitat in the Lolo National Forest along the Montana border, captured the mood in rural Idaho. “At what point do we consider ourselves backed into a corner?” a county commissioner asked at a meeting shortly after the ruling was announced. “Can we file an action [saying] to the judge, ‘You’re not a wildlife biologist. Sit down and shut up?’ ” Officials in Montana and Idaho filed an appeal to the Ninth Circuit, though any possible relief from a higher court would come far too late to salvage this fall’s hunting season.

  Steven Turnbull learned about Molloy’s ruling on the evening news. The situation was so complex, he wasn’t sure whom to blame. One thing was clear: Montana and Idaho hunters had been screwed again. Now they know how we feel in Wyoming was his first thought. The consensus among the regulars at the Painter Outpost was that it was another example of federal judges overstepping their bounds. Turnbull had a friend who was convinced it was part of a plot to end hunting altogether, not just for wolves but for all big game. It was the first step, he believed, in the federal government’s broader scheme to disarm the American public: if hunting were outlawed, then there was no longer any rationale for people to have guns.

  You heard all kinds of rumors in Crandall about wolves: that the reintroduction had been illegal from the beginning, that the reintroduced wolves weren’t the same species that had once lived in Yellowstone. They were Arctic wolves, it was said, 150-pound monsters, whereas the indigenous wolves had rarely exceeded 80, so small they didn’t even prey on elk. It was hard to know what to believe.

  Turnbull wasn’t crazy about the federal government; he still blamed the EPA for the loss of his gas station. But he didn’t hate the feds the way some people in Crandall did. In fact, he admired President Obama for trying to do something about the high cost of health insurance, which Turnbull had only rarely been able to afford. Heart trouble ran in his family—his father had died of a heart attack—and he’d recently had an operation for a clogged artery, the cost of which he was still slowly paying off. He planned to sign up for Obamacare as soon as he could. The law hadn’t gone into effect yet, but it was starting to look like he’d be getting insurance before he got a wolf.

  —

  On a chilly morning that October, John Tester, the Democratic U.S. senator from Montana, attended the Montana State University Homecoming Day parade in downtown Bozeman. As he often did at such events, he rode a green and yellow John Deere tractor down the street, waving at his constituents from its high seat. Unlike some Montana politicians, he looked very much at home in the seat, a burly man in boots with a flattop haircut and a blue corduroy Future Farmers of America jacket. A third-generation farmer, he had grown up on a piece of land homesteaded by his grandfather in north-central Montana, in the middle of the vast prairie that covers most of the state.

  Wheat, not wolves, was what people cared about in Tester’s part of Montana; the town nearest his farm—Big Sandy, population six hundred—was known as the home of Big Bud 747, the world’s largest tractor. But wolves were on his mind as he steered the John Deere down Bozeman’s picturesque main street, waving to the crowd and nodding to people he knew. Tester had a lot riding on the outcome of the wolf fight, and as he had recently come to understand, so did some very powerful people in Washington.

  Tester had been elected to the U.S. Senate in 2006, at the age of fifty. Relatively speaking, he wasn’t a powerful person in Washington, a junior member in a body that valued seniority above all else. And yet as the 2010 midterm elections drew near, his fortunes were becoming a matter of acute concern for Democrats everywhere. Tester’s 2006 win had been pivotal: it was one of six races in which Democrats had defeated incumbent Republicans, swinging the Senate back to Democratic control. It wasn’t much of a majority—fifty-one Democrats to forty-seven Republicans, with two independents—but it was all they needed. It meant a Democrat, Harry Reid, was the new majority leader, giving him control of the flow of legislation and the power to make key appointments in the Senate’s all-important committee system.

  Coupled with a new Democratic majority in the House and in 2008 the election of President Obama, Tester’s win meant the Democrats had complete control in Washington—at least for the moment. The rise of the Tea Party movement had radically changed the political calculus in the country, and pollsters were predicting a bloodbath for Democrats in the 2010 midterms, which were less than a month away. Republicans would almost certainly regain control of the House, bringing Obama’s legislative agenda to a halt.

  Reid, Obama, and the big Democratic donors were already thinking ahead to the 2012 elections, when the Republicans’ goal would be to take back the Senate as well. Tester would be up for reelection then, and his seat would undoubtedly be one of the GOP’s primary targets. He had won it by the thinnest of margins—less than 1 percent—and Montana had a tendency to swing back and forth between Democrats and Republicans in statewide elections.

  If the anti-Obama fervor that was sweeping the nation’s rural areas lasted into the 2012 campaign season, Tester would be vulnerable. He was friendly with the president; the two had been junior senators together. Tester had supported Obama’s massive stimulus bill—the original animus for many Tea Party adherents—as well as Obamacare, though neither had been especially popular in Montana. On other issues, such as gay marriage, he’d taken a more independent line, in keeping with the attitudes of his relatively conservative constituents.

  At the time of Molloy’s ruling, a new opponent for Tester had yet to come forward, but Republican congressman Denny Rehberg was widely considered to be preparing a run. A wealthy rancher and real estate developer, Rehberg had been in politics for most of his adult life. He’d made an unsuccessful run at the Senate in 1996 and was already laying the groundwork for taking on Tester. He had the backing of the state’s powerful mining industry, which he had long championed in Washington.

  Lately Rehberg had been touring the state, holding town hall meetings. Like rural elected officials across the country, he was getting an earful about the bailout of the banks and runaway federal spending—but he was also hearing a lot about wolves. After Molloy’s recent ruling, he had written an opinion piece for the Bozeman paper, promising to hold hearings on the issue. “It’s like a bad horror movie where the monster keeps coming back no matter how many times you think it’s been killed,” he wrote. The piece also took a more direct dig at Tester, who he suggested was out of touch with his constituents: “Montanans overwhelmingly opposed federal bailouts, the nearly trillion-dollar spending bill that has yet to stimulate the economy, and of course Obamacare. It’s because I was listening before I voted that I’m the only member of Montana’s delegation who voted against them all.”

  Shortly thereafter Rehberg signed on to cosponsor an anti-wolf bill that had been floating around Congress for months, a resolution that would specifically exempt the gray wolf from the Endangered Species Act. It was meant as a kind of legislative solution to the legal impasse over the management of wolves, an end run around the courts. The resolution was a long shot; Congress had never before put its thumb on the scale in a fight over a specific animal, deferring instead to the bureaucracy at Fish and Wildlife and the act’s interpretation by the federal judiciary.

  The bill was going nowhere—the Democratic majority in the Senate would never let it through. But that didn’t matter; Rehberg, who kept a stuffed wolf in his Capitol office, was getting credit for trying to fix a problem that a lot of Montanans cared about, and that edge might make all the difference in a close race against a Democrat tainted by his association with Obama. Tester couldn’t do much about his voting record on the stimulus and Obamacare, but he needed to find a way to take the wolf issue off the table.

  —

  As the homecoming parade was winding down, Tester spotted
Mike Phillips, the former Yellowstone Wolf Project coordinator, shaking hands and working the crowd. Phillips was running for reelection, too. He had represented Bozeman in the Montana House of Representatives since 2007, though he was also still working for Ted Turner as the director of the Turner Endangered Species Fund. Bozeman, a bastion of progressive politics and environmentalism, was one of the few places in Montana where Phillips’s résumé was completely noncontroversial. He was somewhat less popular in the halls of the capitol in Helena, where he was disdainfully referred to in some circles as “Ted Turner’s personal wolf biologist” and where his legislative agenda was met largely with stony indifference. Yet Phillips was ambitious and he understood politics. Standing together on Main Street under an impossibly blue sky, the two men went over Tester’s options for how to deal with Rehberg and the wolf issue.

  The irony was that Tester shouldn’t have been vulnerable at all on wolves. He’d proposed a federally funded program to compensate ranchers who lost stock, and he’d come out strongly in favor of state management of wolves and a regular hunting season. And the idea that Tester—whose farm rarely earned more than twenty thousand dollars a year and who famously butchered his own meat and carried it on the plane to Washington—was out of touch with rural Montanans was risible.

  Yet he wasn’t one to grandstand. After Molloy’s ruling, he sent a letter to Secretary Salazar, urging him to convene stakeholders from all three states to restart the process of negotiating a solution to the impasse. But after talking to Harry Reid about the high stakes of the 2012 elections, he realized he didn’t have that kind of time.