American Wolf

by Nate Blakeslee

  O-Six drove her family along the side of the ridge, determined to put several miles between herself and the invading pack. The Mollies began scent-trailing, following their noses down to a meadow where the Lamars had bedded the day before. They milled about like army ants, inhaling every trace of the resident pack’s presence, parsing what intelligence they could gather about O-Six and her considerable brood. They were undeterred by what they learned, pushing farther east along the Lamars’ trail, giving up only when it became clear that the pack was by now miles away.

  A week later Rick saw firsthand what happened when a pack didn’t flee, or at least not fast enough. Just east of Lamar Canyon, a group of nine Mollies chasing elk through the trees came upon a quartet of Blacktail wolves that had ventured out of their own territory, most likely pursuing elk as well. Curious about the oncoming wolves, the Blacktails hesitated, and the Mollies overtook them not far from the road. Three of the four Blacktails ran wildly for home after the skirmish, but the next morning the body of a four-year-old male was found on the frozen Lamar River, not far from the bank. He’d recently injured a leg, no doubt making him the slowest among his comrades and the first to be run down.

  In the update she sent out that night, January 4, 2012, Laurie gave him her customary obituary, a task she’d found herself doing with disturbing regularity since the Mollies first left the Pelican some five weeks earlier. She tried to be diplomatic about it; the Mollies were just doing what came naturally to wolves, she pointed out. But the truth was she dreaded their inevitable clash with the Lamars as much as everybody else in Yellowstone’s wolf-watching community.

  —

  On February 4, O-Six was finally collared. Doug Smith hadn’t meant to dart her. When he came across the pack flying over Jasper Bench, he’d thought he was targeting 776, the two-year-old gray female who had lost her collar and needed a new one. The mother and daughter were difficult to tell apart, especially from the helicopter, with the snow swirling below the blades. When he landed and examined the gray lying in the snow, however, he was surprised to find a bit of blood in her vulva—a sign the wolf was in proestrus, a hallmark of the breeding female. Was he about to collar O-Six? It could have been 776—she was just old enough to breed. The truth was he couldn’t be sure which wolf he’d brought down; he hadn’t spent hours watching the pack through a scope as Rick had.

  He returned to the chopper and radioed Rick, who was watching from the road. “I think I’ve got the old lady instead,” he said, using his term for an alpha female.

  But despite the distance and the chaos caused by the chopper’s appearance above the pack, Rick was certain he’d seen O-Six head into the woods before Smith had taken the shot. Laurie, who was standing beside him, felt the same. It had to be 776.

  Smith trudged back through the snow and looked at the gray again. She was in remarkable shape: no broken or worn teeth, her muscle tone excellent. She weighed ninety-seven pounds. Convinced he had the daughter, not the mom, he fitted her with the improved collar the project had begun using—a state-of-the-art four-thousand-dollar device that could be tracked not only by radiotelemetry in the field but also by GPS from a desk in the Wolf Project’s offices. Then he loaded her into the chopper and ferried her across the valley to a secluded spot on the northern side, far from the Mollies’ last known location, where she could safely recover from the effects of the tranquilizer.

  By the following evening the mistake was plain. At the first good sighting of the pack, Rick could clearly see that Smith had collared O-Six, not 776. He was chagrined, and Laurie was beside herself. She was their favorite wolf, the one they had watched more than any other for the last two years. How could they have been so wrong?

  Smith had told himself the gray in his sights couldn’t be O-Six, he later confided in Rick, because O-Six would have immediately run for the trees, and he wouldn’t have been able to get her. Rick supposed that subconsciously he had felt the same way, that O-Six would never allow herself to be caught. She was too clever. Her official number was now 832, though she would always be O-Six to the watchers.

  That same week Smith also collared the light gray female pup, the one the watchers had singled out for her unusual beauty. She was now known as 820.

  —

  Both wolves recovered well and returned immediately to the pack. A few days after the collaring operation, Laurie was standing behind her scope in the parking lot at the Slough Creek turnoff, scanning the hillside south of the park road. It was midmorning, about twenty degrees, and an inch of new snow lay on the ground from the night before. She could hear the Lamars howling. The pack was somewhere in the trees on a shoulder jutting north from Specimen Ridge. The watchers called the area Divide Ridge, because it stood between Little America to the west and the Lamar Valley to the east. It was a spot rich in wolf history; one of the acclimation pens had been built near the base of the ridge, in a drainage known as Crystal Creek. It was surprisingly close to the road, roughly four hundred yards from where Laurie now stood.

  Eventually she spotted the Lamars. All eleven of them had moved into an open area not far from where the pen once stood. They seemed to be howling at something above them on Specimen Ridge. Rick, just down the road in the next pullout, had radioed earlier that the Mollies were in the area chasing a coyote, though Laurie hadn’t yet seen them from her vantage point.

  Another watcher stood next to Laurie, a wildlife photographer named Peter Murray who had recently moved to the area and was now spending all his free time following the wolves. He scanned the skyline at the top of Specimen, looking for whatever it was that had set the Lamars off.

  “Holy shit!” he blurted.

  Laurie pulled away from her eyepiece and followed Murray’s alarmed gaze. Ten wolves were coming down Specimen, stretched out in a long line parallel to the horizon, like a cordon of sheriff’s deputies searching the woods for a lost child. The Mollies had found O-Six at last.

  They paused perhaps a quarter mile above the Lamars, who had now fallen silent, and waited. Laurie wanted to yell, “Run!” Instead she radioed Rick, lowering her voice to a whisper because the Lamars were so close. Rick had already spotted the two packs squaring off. There was nothing Laurie could do but sign off and hold her breath as O-Six and the rest of the pack paced back and forth excitedly.

  By now the Mollies had been roaming the Northern Range for over forty days. In that time, they had killed four wolves—that the watchers knew of. The Blacktail they had slain had been caught on the very ridge where the Lamars were now trapped. If the Lamars ran now, they might still escape unharmed. On the other hand, only ten of the nineteen Mollies were present, and among the missing was the wolf that seemed to have become the new alpha female. O-Six, meanwhile, had 755 by her side—along with hulking 754 (his leg now mostly healed); her two adult daughters, 776 and Middle Gray; and their brother, Shy Male. Together with her five pups, now almost full-grown yearlings, she had eleven wolves of her own. If O-Six was ever going to stand and fight, this was the time to do it.

  Her answer came in the form of a bellicose howl, which the rest of her pack lustily joined. There would be no retreat. When the Mollies heard the challenge, they jumped to their feet and raced down the hill with tails raised, still spread out in a long line like a cavalry charge. The Lamars moved steadily uphill to meet them, spreading out until the rival packs faced each other in two almost perfectly matched lines, each advancing on the other.

  Just before the lines met, however, the Lamars panicked and broke ranks, fleeing in every direction. The charging Mollies were upon them almost immediately. A black Lamar pup was caught and dragged down, and soon eight snarling wolves were around him in a circle so tight that Laurie couldn’t see him at all. She had watched wolves kill coyotes in just this way: all you saw from a distance were the raised tails and straining haunches of the attackers, but you could imagine all too easily what was happening at the bottom of the pile. It was usually over in a few seconds. The pup was almost twice t
he size of a coyote, but he was still in serious trouble.

  After perhaps a minute the attackers left the pup lying in the snow and headed off en masse to pursue other Lamars careening through the trees. Laurie could hear bark-howling coming from all over the ridge as the splintered Lamars ran for their lives. Wolves were everywhere, and it was impossible to follow them all. She couldn’t find O-Six, though she did spot 755 fleeing west at full sprint, trying, it appeared to her, to draw the Mollie wolves away from the pups. Unnoticed in the chaos, the downed black pup roused himself and limped off down the slope, heading for the road.

  Rick tossed his scope into his SUV and rushed from one lot to the next, steering with his left hand and operating his radio with his right, trying to get the best view of the conflict and dreading what he might find when he did. But there were too many trees, and too many folds in the ridge swallowing the wolves as they scattered. Eventually watchers on the opposite side of the divide reported that fleeing Lamars had made it into the valley, unpursued by the invaders.

  By nightfall they had managed to count ten Lamar wolves; only the black pup was missing. All ten seemed to be moving well, with no major injuries. It could have been much worse. That night the pack retreated far to the east, out of the valley and up the Soda Butte Creek drainage. To the watchers’ relief, the black pup, bloodied but not seriously injured, eventually joined them in their temporary exile.

  —

  The Mollies, meanwhile, set about making themselves at home. Rick knew they hunted bison back in the Pelican Valley, but the area was so remote that he had only ever seen them in action in a remarkable video taken many years before. Fearless and unpredictable, bison were the undisputed lords of Yellowstone, roaming the park with impunity, jamming up the snowplowed roads in winter where the walking was easiest, and ignoring even the giant RVs that passed within feet of them. Mature bulls stood six foot tall at the shoulder and could reach two thousand pounds, and even cows might grow to half that weight. Their docile appearance was deceptive; getting butted by a bison moving at full speed was like being hit by a car traveling at thirty-five miles per hour. Bison seldom ran when confronted by predators, preferring to stand and face the danger head-on, their massive horned skulls held low like shields. In the Lamar Valley, this display of bravado and power was enough to deter wolf attacks most of the time, at least on healthy adult bison.

  The same dynamic did not hold in the Pelican. The video Rick watched showed fourteen Mollies attacking a bison at least ten times their size. In the heat of the battle, they leaped onto the fleeing bull’s back, holding on to his flesh with their teeth until the bison flung them through the air, swinging his massive head in an effort to hook them on the way down. Bison are herd animals, but the Mollies had learned that their solidarity held out only as long as the footing was good. Again and again they drove their quarry into deep snow and set upon him, until eventually, after nine hours, the bull succumbed and the wolves had their prize.

  Now Rick was watching the descendants of those wolves doing the same thing right in front of him in the Lamar Valley. On February 12, two groups of Mollies took on a herd of bison in a snowy meadow below Jasper Bench. One faction, twelve wolves strong, chased a string of adult bison out of the trees and onto the valley floor. The panicked bison—unaccustomed to such bold and reckless attacks—ran for their lives, struggling to break trail in the deep snow. A second squad of Mollies, consisting mostly of yearlings, went up the hillside and made contact with a calf, only to be driven back by its nearby mother. When the yearlings high on the hillside saw that their comrades on the valley floor had managed to take one of the bison down, they came sliding down the absurdly steep hill with reckless abandon, pivoting this way and that, tumbling head over heels, reaching the bottom by sliding on their rears.

  In short order all nineteen Mollies were around the downed behemoth, and together they made it disappear. Not since the heyday of the Druids, when thirty-seven wolves stalked this same landscape, had the Lamar Valley seen a force like this.

  —

  When the Lamars returned to the valley, Shy Male didn’t come with them. He was nearly two years old, so it was a natural time for him to be moving on. Still, Laurie was surprised. She had thought, or maybe just hoped, that he might spend one last summer with the pack, helping his younger siblings corral another litter of pups. She still held out hope that his brother Dark Gray, the first of O-Six’s offspring to disperse, would make his way home someday. But after five months without a confirmed sighting, it hardly seemed likely. Now there were only two wolves left from O-Six’s first brood, the females 776 and Middle Gray.

  O-Six would be denning on Druid Peak again soon. She had already begun frequenting the den forest, no doubt cleaning out the burrow she’d used last season or digging a new one. With the Mollies in the valley, it was the worst possible time to have pups. The pack had avoided the invaders so far by being mobile, relying on O-Six’s unfailing instinct of when to fly from trouble. Now they would be tied to one spot; the roaming Mollies were bound to find them sooner or later. It was hard to shake the feeling that history was repeating itself—the same wolves that had killed O-Six’s grandmother, the valley’s longtime matriarch, were now coming for the new queen.

  But what choice did she have? Unless O-Six was willing to leave the valley and cede her territory to the invaders, the pups would have to be born there. In any case, leaving her territory to give birth somewhere else would have been no less dangerous.

  Over the next three weeks, as O-Six settled into the den, the Mollies killed at least two more wolves, including one of O-Six’s littermates in the Agate Creek Pack. Every day the watchers hoped to see them heading back over Specimen toward home, but the pack showed no signs of leaving.

  —

  When they finally came to the den, they came in force. Rick, Laurie, and Bob Landis were at Hitching Post one evening, quietly chatting and checking their scopes from time to time, hoping to spot a Lamar wolf coming or going from the den before it got too dark. Suddenly Rick noticed movement, but it wasn’t the wolves he was hoping to see. Sixteen Mollies were coming around the shoulder of Druid Peak, heading east toward the den. The Mollies were using the Ledge Trail, just as the Lamars did and the Druids had before them, though Rick couldn’t remember a time when he had seen so many wolves on the narrow rocky trail at once. An uncollared gray was in the lead, and Rick could clearly see that she was scent-trailing, following whichever Lamar wolf had passed that way most recently. There was only one logical place that scent trail would lead.

  It was April 25, 2012, five days after O-Six’s estimated due date. She hadn’t been seen for several days, and Rick couldn’t get her signal, which meant she was probably inside the den, in all likelihood nursing newborn pups. He quickly scanned for the remaining collared Lamars on his receiver. He got signals from 754, 755, and the yearling 820; they were on the mountain, though how far from the den was difficult to tell. The Mollies were advancing slowly but with purpose, moving inexorably closer to the point where the trail to the den forest dropped down and into the trees.

  “No, no, no,” Laurie said as the seemingly endless string of wolves threaded unchallenged through the trees toward the den. They had known this day was coming. So far the Lamars were the only pack in the Northern Range yet to suffer casualties during the Mollies’ five-month rampage, a testament to O-Six’s abilities as an alpha. But this time she couldn’t run, not if she wanted her pups to survive. She couldn’t hope to prevail in a fight, either. She was Butch Cassidy holed up in the cantina with the Sundance Kid, and the Bolivian army was moving into position.

  After the last Mollie disappeared into the den forest, Rick and Laurie hefted their scopes and headed up onto a hill behind the lot to get a better view. Landis scrambled to do the same, lugging his heavy camera and tripod. This wasn’t the end any of them had anticipated, but if it was going to be O-Six’s last stand, they wanted to be there with her until the last moment.


  The trio found the den forest again from their new perch, but nothing was moving in or out of the trees. Five minutes passed in near-total silence.

  Suddenly O-Six came exploding out of the woods with a gang of wolves in pursuit. She was alone, separated from her pack, racing downhill through a small meadow. Rick instinctively began mapping her escape route, but to his horror he saw immediately that she had none. Fleeing heedlessly, she had allowed herself to be driven to the edge of an outcrop bordered by a sheer precipice. Behind her were the charging Mollies, closing in on their target; in front of her was a fifty-foot drop. O-Six was going to turn and face her attackers head-on, or else she was going to go over the cliff and die at the bottom.

  She didn’t stop at the cliff’s edge. To Rick’s amazement, she flew straight over. A controlled leap brought her to a precarious ledge not far below the advancing Mollies. Pivoting, she managed to drop down even lower to a second spot as her pursuers stopped short, unwilling to try their luck. O-Six was in a steep, narrow gully moving straight down the face of the bluff, one Rick had never noticed before. It was the kind of route only a bighorn sheep or a mountain goat might tread with confidence, but O-Six had taken her chances, and the decision had saved her life.

  From the Mollies’ perspective, she had simply disappeared. Suddenly they wheeled and began loping east. Rick swung his scope and spotted Middle Gray sprinting away from the den forest and drawing what appeared to be the majority of the invading pack off with her.

  O-Six shimmied to the bottom of the bluff and ran all the way to the base of the mountain and crossed the road not far from Hitching Post. When she realized she had left her antagonists far behind, she began cautiously making her way back up toward the Ledge Trail. The Mollies, meanwhile, broke off their pursuit of Middle Gray and headed back toward the den forest. Rick could hear Middle Gray’s yipping alarm call as she watched the invaders approaching the den. O-Six crept cautiously up the mountain, where she found 820 cowering on an outcrop just below the Ledge Trail.