In those first few weeks, he had begun carrying a pistol with him, he told me, for fear that somebody would find him and force a confrontation. “I don’t want trouble,” he said. There hadn’t been any, but he still seemed flummoxed by what had happened to him, a feeling that was reinforced by the bizarre experience of watching the documentary on O-Six, in which he was represented by a stock image of a hunter with a rifle. Millions of people were passing judgment on something he had done one morning, alone, in one of the remotest places in the Lower 48. “She didn’t tell me she was famous before I shot her,” he said.
A few days after her death, Mark Bruscino had called to let him know that some wolf advocates wanted a meeting. They were after O-Six’s remains, he explained, so that she could be buried in the Lamar Valley. Bruscino hadn’t revealed Turnbull’s name, but he’d offered to act as a go-between. Turnbull refused. He had no interest in a meeting, and he had no intention of giving up his trophy. “I didn’t do anything wrong,” he told me time and again as we talked that first morning.
And yet he couldn’t help but feel besieged, even though hardly anybody outside Crandall knew that he had been the one who pulled the trigger that day in 2012. Shortly after he shot O-Six, Turnbull had posted a picture of her carcass lying in the back of his truck on the wall at the Painter Outpost. It wasn’t especially gory, but she was clearly dead. One day a government trapper who was a regular at the café asked him to take it down. It would only stir up trouble if people realized which wolf it was, he explained. The trapper was an old friend, and Turnbull reluctantly complied. From time to time he’d overhear a tourist asking about the famous wolf who had been shot in Crandall, but he’d always played dumb.
Turnbull seemed genuinely mystified by the watchers’ enthusiasm for individual wolves but was also curious about it. I mentioned that some wolf advocates had held a memorial service for Yellowstone wolves that had been killed in the hunt, including O-Six. He said he’d wished he’d known about it, because he would have gone—not to be disruptive but just to see what it was like.
Turnbull knew about loss. About three months before he shot O-Six, his younger brother had died suddenly of a heart attack. He’d been an outdoorsman, too, and at his funeral a family friend had sung “A Country Boy Can Survive,” Hank Williams Jr.’s defiant tribute to rural life. Then, a few days into the furor over O-Six’s death, he lost his uncle Wayne, the old hunting guide–turned–delivery driver. Turnbull seemed acutely interested in what people in the park thought of him. “I don’t want them thinking I’m the world’s biggest asshole,” he said. “That’s not me.”
Then he described for me what happened the day he’d shot O-Six, the details spilling out as though he’d been waiting for someone to come and give him a chance to tell the story. When he reached the part about 755 and the rest of the pack howling over O-Six’s body, he suddenly seemed to realize how this scene would play when I relayed it to the watchers back in the park. “It was almost sad,” he acknowledged. “I’m a hunter, but I’ll admit that.”
—
“Do you want to see it?” he finally asked, after we’d been talking for an hour or so. It took a moment to register what he was referring to; I hadn’t imagined that he’d have O-Six’s pelt there in the cabin. He stepped into a back room I couldn’t see. When he returned, he had an enormous gray wolf skin draped over his arm. He proudly hung it on a hook next to the door so I could see how long it was. Most of his trophies were at his house in town, he explained, but this one was special. He usually kept it hanging on the wall, with the receipt for his wolf tag tacked up above it, so everyone could see he had shot her legally.
He urged me to feel the fur. He’d shot her at the height of winter, and her coat—amazingly soft, like a rabbit’s—was as thick as it ever would be. He’d had her tanned professionally and had ensured that every inch of her hide was preserved, including her paws, so that the pelt could be used to create a full mount—the kind of specimen you might see in a museum diorama—if he decided to spend the money to have it done. There was no sign of damage from the collar she had worn; good taxidermists could excise such flaws and seamlessly rejoin the skin, he explained.
“Now, that’s a trophy,” he said.
When Turnbull noticed me shooting video with my phone, he urged me to stand next to the pelt so people could get a better sense of how big O-Six had been, as he took over filming. Reluctantly I did, holding out one of her legs to show how wide her paws were, examining her long snout, now devoid of teeth. It was impossible not to think of the countless stories I’d heard about what she’d done with those tireless legs and those formidable teeth, the elk she’d taken down single-handedly, the territorial battles she’d won, the pups she’d reared, the loyalty and love and fear she’d inspired, and the enormous and magnificent stage upon which she’d done it all, in front of her thousands of fans. Now she was hanging from a plastic hook in a two-room cabin with an audience of just Turnbull and myself and Bubba, silently looking on from his cage. It felt profane, though I had no idea how to explain to my host why. Instead I stepped quickly out of the frame, took my phone back, and turned off the camera.
—
I visited him several more times over the course of the next two years, and each time he became more open and friendly, which was more or less his default mode with everyone he encountered. I came to understand that he had built his life around his favorite pastime, like a ski bum with a bow and arrow and a rifle instead of a snowboard. Despite how angry it made him the first time he watched it, he had rewatched the O-Six documentary several times, marveling at the scenes of ungulate behavior more than anything else, he told me. A scene in which a herd of bison shunned an elk calf trying to hide in their midst from nearby wolves fascinated him. “I’d never seen anything like that before,” he said.
Hunting was an intellectual pursuit for him. You had to know your prey, and you had to take them ethically. He spoke often about the principle of fair chase and what it meant to him. He wanted me to know he’d followed the Lamar wolves’ movements for weeks before he found them, driving around Crandall looking for tracks and listening for their howls. “I put in my time to get that wolf,” he said.
On one visit, he agreed to take me to the location in the valley where he’d shot O-Six. But when we got close, he seemed strangely reluctant to show me the exact spot, driving by quickly and gesturing vaguely toward the area. It was private property, he said, and though he had permission to hunt there, he didn’t feel good about taking me there now.
When I returned later without him, I began to realize why. Crandall was undeniably spectacular, yet the place where he’d found the wolves that morning was disappointingly prosaic. O-Six had died perhaps half a mile from the Chief Joseph Highway, on a piece of ranch property that hosted a modest house, a couple of outbuildings, some man-made stock ponds, and a row of farm equipment. Turnbull had spotted O-Six and 755 between a hayfield and a twenty-five-yard-wide strip of close-cropped grass that served as an airstrip for the landowner’s small plane in the summer. O-Six, the queen of a wilderness beyond compare, had been shot more or less in someone’s front yard, or what passed for such in Crandall.
Standing near the spot where she died, it occurred to me that no special skill had been required to bring her in, either, other than good marksmanship. Turnbull had parked his truck, walked maybe 150 yards, and sounded his rabbit distress call. The wolves had come right to him, stopping a couple of football field lengths away, a reasonable distance with a modern rifle scope. No doubt to O-Six the man standing in the willows was like any of the thousands of humans she’d encountered in Yellowstone from a similar distance—not a threat. Whether it had been fair chase was debatable, but it was not a good story, and Turnbull seemed to know it. I suddenly understood Louie Cary’s wry smile when I’d told him whom I had come to Crandall to find. “The great wolf hunter,” he’d said.
Over the course of the two years that followed our first interview, Turnb
ull’s feelings toward wolves seemed to harden somewhat, especially after Judge Jackson returned Wyoming wolves to the endangered species list in 2014. During our final meeting, he told me that for the first time in his life, he’d failed to draw a tag for an elk in the upcoming fall hunt. The elk were simply not there anymore, not like they used to be, and they didn’t seem to be coming back.
“I’m against wolves,” he told me. “I want to make sure that’s clear.”
I assured him that it was.
—
On a beautiful afternoon in June 2015, Yellowstone’s wolf-watchers gathered in Silver Gate to celebrate Rick’s career. He wasn’t retiring, but it had been twenty years since he’d come to Yellowstone, and to his friends it seemed as good a time as any to show their appreciation. They had reserved the cavernous main hall of the Range Rider, a hundred-year-old hotel made from old-growth pine logs that was by far the biggest building in town. At least a hundred people had made the trip to town for the occasion, making it the largest gathering of the far-flung tribe in years.
The lodge was only two hundred yards from Laurie’s house, but it was too far to walk in her heels and dress, and she arrived on the back of a four-wheeler, clinging to the driver’s shoulder with one hand and holding her hair in place with the other. Inside were rows of chairs filled with all the people Rick had helped to find wolves over the years, the ones for whom a single visit wasn’t nearly enough, who had returned to the park time and time again. Some of them he saw only once a year, but he remembered their names and their favorite wolves. Doug McLaughlin was there, of course, along with Jeremy SunderRaj, on summer break after his first year at the University of Montana, and Bob Landis, with his ever-present camera. Landis took a seat in the front row so that he could film the occasion.
As the audience looked on, Marlene Foard, the veteran watcher from Salt Lake City, presented Rick with a quilt with an image of a wolf and a bound collection of letters written by the watchers themselves, each describing a favorite memory of Rick. As Rick stood quietly nearby, looking somewhat uncomfortable, Foard explained the significance of the gifts and spoke briefly about what Rick had meant to her. Finally she handed him the quilt. “Okay, thank you,” Rick said, a bit too abruptly, and the crowd tittered knowingly.
The afternoon’s highlight would be a story from Rick himself, and he had worked on it for weeks in honor of the occasion. Doug Smith stood up to introduce him, drawing a laugh by recalling the subject of the first meeting he attended when he took over as project director almost twenty years ago. It concerned what to do about a headstrong seasonal ranger named Rick McIntyre. Then he turned serious. After years as Rick’s supervisor, he told the watchers, these days he sought him out just to talk sometimes, especially when things weren’t going well, because Rick always gave him a boost. “I kind of need Rick,” he said. “And I think everybody here needs Rick. He really is the glue that holds us all together.”
And the wolves need him, too, he continued, perhaps more than Rick knew. It wasn’t just that he had watched more wolves, as Smith put it, “than anybody in the history of humanity.” It was the community he had helped build, a confederation of people who cared about wolves, one whose impact was felt far beyond Yellowstone.
For his talk that afternoon, Rick had decided not to speak about O-Six. Her death was still too raw, and he was still processing what her story meant. It was bad enough that he still encountered visitors, two and a half years after her death, who hadn’t yet heard the news and wanted to know how many pups she’d had that spring and where they could spot her. “I’m sorry to have to tell you this…,” Rick would begin, and watch their faces fall.
When a producer for a well-known radio program asked him about her legacy the previous summer, all Rick had been able to come up with was a story about a kindergarten class from a town near the park that had visited not long after she died. “I know the man who shot that famous wolf,” one of the boys announced before Rick could even begin his talk for the small group of kids. “My dad just bought a license to kill a wolf,” he added, and Rick, who still found it difficult to even talk about O-Six, braced himself for what was coming next. “But I hope he doesn’t,” the boy said, and Rick found himself filled with optimism.
Today he wanted to talk instead about O-Six’s grandparents, 21 and 42. It was a story he had told many times, but even now, eleven years after their deaths, he was still deepening his understanding of the significance of their lives. It was a story, he told his audience, of a great romance, like Johnny Cash and June Carter, a comparison his friends had heard him make many times before. But this time he made their tale a story about what wolves feel, how they experience what we call happiness, joy, and a sense of connection to one another.
Rick reminded his audience that 21 had never known his father. He’d been born during the brief and tragic adventure outside the park by his parents, 9 and 10, an excursion from which 10, the Wolf Project’s first official alpha male, never returned, shot by a poacher while the pregnant 9 was digging a hasty den nearby. Yet when 21 and the other pups were returned to the park, they were placed in the same holding pen that 10 had once occupied. As the alpha male, he had scent-marked it thoroughly, a smell the returning pups could hardly have missed.
His time in the pen, Rick suggested, meant that the young 21 had met his father, in a way. Rick invited the watchers to imagine what an animal sees in his mind’s eye when he smells a familiar scent. Does he see, as the celebrated animal rights advocate Temple Grandin had suggested, a picture of the creature that corresponded to the scent? Did 21 see his father in that pen?
Rick returned to his theme—how a wolf’s sensory experience helps create its emotional landscape—again and again, as he told the familiar story of the rise of the Druids under 21, the valiant but gentle warrior, and 42, the matriarch who oversaw the pack’s astounding growth. At last he came to the story’s sad ending—42 killed by the Mollies, and four months later, the aging 21’s lonely climb to the top of Specimen Ridge, where Rick found his body. But why, Rick wondered, had 21 chosen to die on top of Specimen Ridge? Did he want to take one last look at his territory, like some Scottish clan leader from an earlier era? He’d puzzled over it for a long time, he told the watchers, but he believed he had finally solved the riddle.
The breakthrough had come, he told them, when he was thinking about the story of Hachiko, the dog whose name had become synonymous with loyalty in Japan in the 1930s. Unaware that his master had died, Hachiko faithfully waited at the local train station for him to arrive home from work, as had been his daily custom. He returned every day for over nine years, always expecting to see the man, who never appeared. Suddenly Rick knew why 21 had gone to the top of the mountain: he was looking for 42. She had been by herself, far from the pack, when the Mollies attacked and killed her on Specimen. Four months had passed since she died, but for all 21 knew, she was still alive, wandering in the woods, looking for him.
He had gone to the top of Specimen on the last day of his life, Rick suggested, because that was where he and 42 had gone together countless times—to mark a particular tree that served as a kind of sentry post along the edge of the Druids’ territory. Of course, she wasn’t there that summer day when 21 visited the spot alone. But her scent was still present, Rick reminded his audience, which would have offered 21 at least a glimmer of hope at finding his missing mate. “Now the question at that moment would be: Can a wolf in the wild experience what we know as joy and happiness?” Rick said, his voice breaking noticeably. “And my answer is yes.”
Rick had been speaking for over an hour, and there was not a single person in the room who didn’t know how his story ended, but his audience was still rapt, the room crackling with emotion. He brought the story to a close by imagining 21’s final moments. After the long climb up the mountain, the old wolf would have needed a rest, so he’d bedded down near the sentry tree in the spot where Rick and Doug Smith would later find him. All the aches and pains of ol
d age and the exhaustion from his long climb would have started to fade, Rick said softly, as he began to die. But even as he faded away, 42’s scent would still have been in his nostrils, and in his mind perhaps he savored one final thought—an image really. One last glimpse of the wolf that had meant everything to him.
People had been sniffling in the audience for some time, and a few now cried unabashedly. It had taken twenty years, and it had come almost in spite of himself, but Rick had become a master of his craft. Looking out over the assembled watchers, their faces turned expectantly toward his, it was impossible to deny the essential truth of what Smith had said before Rick began his talk. He was needed.
And therein, maybe, was the meaning of O-Six’s death. While she lived, Rick—along with Laurie and Doug and so many others over the years—had told thousands of people about her life, most often on the side of the road in the Lamar Valley but also in media interviews and in countless gatherings like this one. Yet it wasn’t until she was dead—until the New York Times saw fit to give her an obituary—that Rick realized just how far her story had traveled, how powerful the simple act of storytelling could be. Maybe it didn’t matter if he never wrote his book about O-Six; maybe, in a way, he already had.
Sitting with a couple of friends in his cabin after the gathering ended, Rick made an announcement of sorts. Lately he’d been thinking, he said casually, that maybe it wasn’t so important that he be in the park every day. After all, he could easily get reports from Laurie or Doug or any number of other watchers to keep him up to date. After fifteen years in the park, including, according to his calculations, over eighty-five thousand wolf sightings, he was beginning to see things differently. Looking back on it, he was proud of his streak of consecutive sightings, but he was also relieved that he was no longer in the midst of it. He was calmer now, less anxious, or at least he was trying to be. If he didn’t need to see a wolf every day, then maybe he didn’t need to be in the park every day, either.
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