—
Six days later Doug McLaughlin arrived home to find multiple phone messages from Rick and Laurie waiting for him. He’d been on a polar-bear-watching expedition in Canada and hadn’t heard anything about the Lamar wolves for a week. Something told him the news wasn’t good. He called Laurie first.
“What I have to tell you is the worst possible thing I could tell you,” she said. “Your favorite wolf was shot.” 754 was dead.
He’d been killed by a hunter in Crandall on November 11, the day before Doug got home. The shooter wasn’t a local, nor was he an elk-hunter. He’d come to Crandall specifically to hunt wolves and had tracked the Lamars across Hunter Peak on horseback for days before he spotted his opportunity. He’d brought 754 down the mountain on the back of his horse, stopping at the Painter Outpost to show anyone who was interested. It was the kind of story Turnbull loved, though he hadn’t been around when the wolf was brought in and had to hear about it secondhand the next day. The hunter had driven to Cody to check the carcass in at the Wyoming Game and Fish office there. A supervisor had called the Wolf Project to arrange for the return of the collar, and the serial number had confirmed 754’s identity. The fate of the rest of the pack was unknown.
Doug picked out his favorite photos of 754—he had hundreds—and sent them to Laurie, who posted an online memorial for her readers. In the days that followed, the watchers received word that three more Yellowstone wolves, including the only collared wolf in the Junction Butte Pack, had been shot north of the park, not far from Jardine.
Still the Lamars did not return to Yellowstone, and GPS data from O-Six’s collar indicated the pack was still in Crandall, not far from where 754 had been shot. Rick speculated they might be looking for their lost packmate, though it was impossible to say without knowing the exact circumstances of his death. Had the rest of the pack been present when he was shot? Did they know he was dead, or did he seem to just disappear into the endless wilderness east of the park, as Shy Male had done the previous winter?
On November 15, after nine days in Crandall, the Lamars returned to the valley. Rick spotted them on the west side of Druid Peak, counting anxiously until he found the twelve who remained: O-Six and 755, the eldest daughters 776 and Middle Gray, 820 and her three yearling sisters, and the four pups. He got on the radio and spread the word: the Lamars were back, and they were safe.
O-Six howled long and low, unaccompanied by the pack. She might have been letting the Junction Butte wolves know that the valley was still hers, despite the Lamars’ long absence. Or, Rick thought, she might have been trying to bring 754 home, summoning him with her call as she had in Little America three years before, when he and his brother were just yearlings, and everything laid out below her still belonged to the Druids.
On November 28, the New York Times reporter Nate Schweber called Doug Smith to ask about the death of 754 and other collared wolves; he was writing a piece for the paper’s environmental blog. Smith was measured in his comments to Schweber, pointing out that losing the only collared wolf in the Junction Butte Pack had made his job harder. Nathan Varley, the biologist-turned-guide who published Laurie’s nightly updates, struck a more strident tone. For years, anti-wolf forces had hammered away at the harm that wolf reintroduction—and the concomitant decline in elk numbers—had caused to the hunting economy. But what about the money lost when hunters killed wolves like 754? Guides had been bringing paying clients to see the Lamar wolves for years. As many as half a million people might have seen 754 in his lifetime, Varley told Schweber. Who was going to compensate guides like him for the loss, as he put it, of “a million dollar wolf”?
Varley had grown up in Yellowstone, the son of the park’s chief of scientific research, and his opinion carried weight. Still, some of his fellow advocates, mourning the death of a beloved wolf, were taken aback by his effort to put a dollar figure on 754’s life. But not Doug McLaughlin. For years, he’d been trying to convince activists that the only way to get a seat at the table with state game regulators was to speak their language. Elk were a valuable resource, but so were wolves.
A few watchers, including McLaughlin, began to suspect that the preponderance of collared wolves among those taken in the hunt thus far was more than just a coincidence. The collars identified wolves roaming outside the park as Yellowstone wolves, which, at least in theory, allowed hunters who were angry about reintroduction to single them out. Killing a collared wolf, the watchers speculated, was a way of sending a political message to the federal government; it was a kind of terrorism. Doug even suspected that hunters were illegally using radio receivers to locate and track collared wolves, as the park’s biologists did. The list of frequencies used by the Wolf Project was a closely guarded secret, but a hunter with a relatively inexpensive handheld scanner could eventually find which ones were in use.
Rick was skeptical of these claims. The collars weren’t easy to see at a distance, especially during hunting season, when the wolves’ winter coats were thickest. And he knew from long experience how difficult it could be to find a collared wolf in a mountainous, wooded landscape, even with a receiver tuned to the correct frequency and an intimate knowledge of the target’s preferred trails and resting places. Still, there was no denying that it was shaping up to be the worst hunting season that Yellowstone’s wolves had ever endured.
—
A large black male wolf had been shadowing the Lamars since their return to the valley, drawn by the presence of so many breeding-age females in the pack. Rick had never seen him before, and his provenance was a mystery, though he was clearly a young wolf, perhaps only a yearling. The females seemed interested, especially 776 and Middle Gray, but 755 was leery of the newcomer. With 754 gone and the only other males in the pack just pups, it fell to him to chase the black off by himself.
But the young wolf was persistent. On a snowy morning in early December, he approached the Lamars in the river bottom once again. Creeping forward, tail tucked, his posture was as deferential as could be. He clearly had no intention of ousting 755, and it occurred to Rick that he might make a good addition to a pack that had just lost its beta male. He marveled at how socially adept the park’s wolves were. There was no telling how long or how far the young male had roamed, yet he had shown up in the right place at just the right time, scarcely three weeks after 754 was shot. How could he have known there might be a place for him here?
But 755 drove him off, and that night the Lamars headed up over Norris once again. The next day O-Six’s collar confirmed Rick’s worst fear.
The pack was back in Crandall.
12
A GOOD DAY IN THE PARK
Through the rifle’s scope, the wolves looked like statues in the snow—one black and one gray, standing perfectly still, their ears cocked forward, their eyes on him. Turnbull had cut their tracks on the Chief Joseph Highway at dawn, about a mile and a half from his cabin, and pulled over to investigate. A few minutes of studying the ground told him what he needed to know. There were at least a half-dozen of them, and they had passed through not long before he did, heading south toward a ridge known as Cathedral Cliffs. He’d left the two-lane highway on a private drive that belonged to a friend, then angled as best he could toward the ridge on gravel roads before he was forced to park and head out on foot, sounding his predator call as he went.
He’d been lucky. If the wolves had made the timber at the base of the mountain, he’d likely never have spotted them. Instead they’d still been in the willows not far from the road, and they’d come to investigate his call, just as he’d figured they would. He saw only two, but there was no point in waiting for the rest; he might never get a better opportunity than the one he had right now. He decided he wanted the gray. He exhaled and squeezed the trigger.
At the rifle’s crack, the black wheeled and flew into the brush.
The gray staggered and dropped.
It was a long walk through the snow to where she lay, but Turnbull barely felt the weight of the rifle
and his snow boots as he got under way. This was a trophy very few people in his part of the world had ever taken.
When he came within fifty yards of his prize, he caught a glimpse of movement in the brush behind her. The black wolf had returned. His eyes on the hunter, he stepped cautiously out of the willows and sat down not far from where the gray lay. They formed a rough triangle in the snow, the three of them. The black was so close that Turnbull could see that he wasn’t entirely black after all. His fur was tipped with white along his withers, giving him a grizzled look. The wolf didn’t come any closer, but he didn’t retreat, either. He seemed to be waiting to see what the hunter would do next.
Turnbull paused, uncertain. He had never seen an animal behave this way. The rifle’s deafening retort, the death of his comrade, the advancing hunter—the wolf should have been half a mile away by now. Then the black lifted his snout into the air and howled. It was a sound Turnbull had heard many times over the years but never like this, alone in the snow with the wolf a stone’s throw away. He stood still and listened, transfixed. The wolf howled again, longer and louder this time.
From the willows behind the black, more wolves began to emerge.
There had been no way of knowing for certain the size of the pack Turnbull was stalking. Now there seemed to be no end to them. They arrayed themselves in a loose semicircle around the black, all silently focused on the body of the gray, the snow beneath her torso now a bright red. Turnbull counted eleven in all. He instinctively dropped to one knee and raised the rifle. Wolves didn’t attack people; he knew that. But what did it matter what you knew or didn’t know when you were alone with eleven enormous predators? He’d seen what they could do to a five-hundred-pound elk. He glanced back at his truck. It was only 150 yards away, but it might as well have been a mile. If they came at him, he wouldn’t last sixty seconds.
The black howled a third time, and suddenly they all joined in. Turnbull lowered the rifle and slowly rose to his feet. He stood there, agape, disarmed by the otherworldly sound, by the sheer overwhelming sadness of the cry. She was their leader, he thought. She wasn’t just the black’s mate; she was the one they couldn’t do without, and that’s why they wouldn’t leave.
But he could, and he did. He left his trophy in the snow and began trudging toward the truck, following his deep tracks through the snow. He glanced back from time to time to make sure he wasn’t being followed. The wolves were still huddled together around the downed gray, howling. He could still hear them when he reached his truck. He racked his rifle behind the seat and began a three-point turn, fumbling and clumsy from the cold and the adrenaline rush that still hadn’t left him. He pulled out onto the Chief Joseph Highway, suddenly wishing somebody had been with him to see what he had just witnessed, what he was sure nobody in the State of Wyoming had ever seen.
An hour later he returned to the spot, armed this time with his .44 Magnum. His trophy was still lying where he had left her, but there was no sign of the pack. He began moving cautiously toward her, swiveling his head from side to side, certain that every disturbance he heard was an approaching wolf. When he reached the gray, he saw that he had put the bullet right through her chest, exactly where he wanted it. He also noticed that she was wearing a wide leather collar with a battery pack on it. She was a Yellowstone wolf.
Her thick winter coat had kept him from seeing the collar before, but he wasn’t surprised to spot it now. A collared wolf had been shot in Crandall just a few weeks before. He reached down to get an idea of her heft. Her coat was unbelievably thick, her paws enormous. Somehow her fur was still perfectly dry underneath; she’d been lying in one place for an hour, yet her body hadn’t melted the snow at all. She was heavy, at least a hundred pounds. He was not a small man, but he tried to imagine what her six-foot-long body would feel like draped across his shoulders. He looked back at his tracks in the snow, marking the long walk back to the truck. There was no way.
He slid his hand beneath the sturdy collar and began dragging.
The law said hunters had to check wolves in with Wyoming Game and Fish within twenty-four hours. He drove into Cody later that morning, Thursday, December 6, 2012, with the wolf in the bed of his truck. Inside the agency’s familiar office, he found Mark Bruscino, the large carnivore section supervisor. Bruscino was in his mid-sixties, balding, with the standard-issue Wyoming cowboy mustache. Turnbull had met him at least thirty years before, when he was still a young man hunting in the woods around Cody, and Bruscino was the local game warden. Now he spent his time managing grizzlies, mountain lions, and for the first time in his long career, wolves.
He wasn’t happy to see the collar on the animal in the bed of the pickup. For the second time that month, he’d be calling the wolf office in Yellowstone to tell Doug Smith that another one of his wolves had been shot in Crandall. Bruscino pulled the collar off the gray and took a look at the serial number printed on the inside surface. It meant nothing to him, but Smith would know which pack she came from. He called and left a message on his voicemail, reading off the serial number so that Smith would have it when he returned to the office.
Back in his cabin a few hours later, Turnbull was surprised to get a call from Bruscino. He’d heard back from the wolf office in Yellowstone. “You just pissed off a whole bunch of people,” he said.
—
The next morning Rick McIntyre sat in his SUV in a pullout beneath Druid Peak in the predawn darkness, trying to get a signal on the Lamar wolves. Doug McLaughlin sat shivering in his own truck with the engine idling nearby, waiting to hear what he found. Laurie was out of town, and nobody else was around; they had the valley to themselves. As he scanned through the frequencies, Rick heard a text alert from his cell phone. This often happened when he entered the valley first thing in the morning. Silver Gate had no cell tower, so messages sent the night before tended to stack up while he was at home, and then all come through at once as soon as he got far enough into the park to get service. The first message was from Dan Stahler in the wolf office.
Through the window of his truck, Doug saw his friend’s posture sag and his head swing slowly from side to side. Rick put his phone back in its cradle and stared at the steering wheel for a moment. When he rolled down his window, his face was ashen.
“O-Six is dead,” he said.
The two friends sat together in the dark and cried.
Rick thought about the last time he had seen her, heading up over Norris. It had been snowing steadily and visibility wasn’t ideal, but he’d still been able to track the Lamars through the trees the entire way up the mountain. All twelve of them had been strung out in a line across the mountainside, moving back and forth across the slope as they ascended, like hikers on a switchback trail. Middle Gray had been in the lead, with O-Six content to follow in her wake, keeping everyone moving in the same direction, holding the family together as she always had. Laurie and Doug had been there, too, watching alongside him.
Laurie would later remember how purposeful they seemed, like a troop of soldiers; there was no play, no straying to investigate strange scents, no pausing to rest. Just up, up, along the ridgelines that ran parallel to the floor of the valley, toward the skyline. Near the top they crossed paths with a nervous group of bighorns, which drew together at the sight of the pack and then bolted when the time seemed right. The wolves held their course. They stopped momentarily at the top, twelve figures beautifully silhouetted against the skyline. And then they were gone. Rick had lingered awhile behind his scope, hopeful that the pack might come back down, but O-Six didn’t return.
And now she never would.
Laurie. Rick would have to call her and tell her. He would have to tell everybody. He thought of all the people he would see in the park in just a few hours’ time, all the watchers who were in town that week. He knew what he had to do, but he couldn’t.
“I—I want you to go ahead and tell the other people when you see them today,” he told Doug. “I’m not sure I’ll be able to s
ay another word.”
—
The first watchers Doug encountered that morning were in a pullout west of Little America, where the park road climbed steeply to an overlook with a dramatic view of a valley known as Hellroaring, hundreds of feet below. As soon as he pulled in, Sian Jones, the retired English detective, strode over to greet him. When she saw the look on Doug’s face, she pulled up short.
“Something terrible has happened, hasn’t it?” she asked.
Doug found himself at a loss for words, but she guessed it anyway. It was what they’d all been fearing since the Lamars returned to Crandall a few days before.
“Is it O-Six?” she asked.
He nodded. She crumpled where she stood, sagging until she was seated on the ice, and began bawling.
Word spread through the park. At the wolf office, Doug Smith’s phone rang constantly, as one colleague after another called to see if it was true. Smith wasn’t in Yellowstone when the news came in. He had been invited to give a lecture at the University of Nevada in Reno, and he was waiting backstage in a packed auditorium when Dan Stahler called to give him the news. He barely had time to digest it before stepping out onto the stage.
Driving home from the airport that night, Smith called Rick. Over the years, he had developed a soft spot for his eccentric colleague, and he hadn’t forgotten how crushed Rick had been that day on top of Specimen when the two rode up together to recover 21’s remains. As a wildlife biologist, Smith was used to death. He’d examined countless elk stripped to bones and bits of bloody hide; he’d done necropsies on wolf pups that had died of starvation; he’d watched wolves kill other wolves through a spotting scope. But the truth was that he did get attached to individual wolves; how could you not, after you’d followed the same packs for generations? Unlike most of the watchers, he actually handled the wolves, during the annual collaring operations, and somehow that made him feel even more protective of them, particularly the special ones. But he couldn’t protect them. Nobody could.
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