Over the past decade or so, Doug and I have been especially lucky, having gathered some unforgettable wild memories with one another, many of them while sitting in the bow or stern seat of a canoe. In 2000 we floated down the remote Hood River, just inside the Arctic Circle, in Canada’s Nunavut Territory. Several years after that, we paddled together on a trek with legendary Canadian outfitter and explorer Alex Hall, dropping down a shelf of remote lakes near the headwaters of the Thelon River, in Canada’s Northwest Territories. We embarked on this latter trip two years after my wife, Jane, was killed in a canoeing accident north of Thunder Bay, Ontario. Against that background the sprawling Thelon country seemed especially precious, a source of great comfort in the wake of great loss. Each night, after setting up the tent, Doug and I would part from the rest of the group for an hour or so, measure out our allotted drams of Scotch, fire up a pair of cigars on some sand esker, and begin to talk.
We spoke of being with Jane on the Hood River: how she bounced across the tundra every morning passing out cups of strong coffee, how we were able to pluck lake trout from the river for dinner without even trying. How at the end of the journey we stripped down to our underwear and plunged into the Arctic Sound. We smiled over the memory of stopping on a sandbar at noon to stretch our legs, and suddenly spotting a pair of wolves just across the river—a white male and black female—playing with their pups so enthusiastically they sent thick clouds of dust drifting through the air. How when the adults finally looked up and spotted us they immediately sprung into action, squirreling their young away in the den. When we pushed off and began floating downstream again, the male trotted alongside us on a small ridge, howling, clearly anxious for us to be away.
We sat there with those cigars and those splashes of Scotch and considered the miracle of hundreds of thousands of caribou moving south every summer, following the greening tundra. We thought of grizzlies vacuuming raspberries and cloudberries from among the dwarf birch, then swaggering down to the shallows of the river to sniff for trout. Doug told me of other trips, how in the dim wash of midnight the northern lights had come pulsing and spinning and reeling, as if they might reach out and lick the tundra. In the end, though, mostly we talked about being grateful that such wild places, such fully functioning ecosystems—at least a few of them—are still to be found. Lands where nature flows in currents so big you’ve got no choice but to go along, moving in every minute of every day with careful, rapt attention, offering always the respect that the last stark places on Earth require.
The year after Doug and I returned from the Northwest Territories, in early autumn, the two of us, along with his wife, Christine, and their two little boys, pushed off from Pumice Point on the western shore of Yellowstone Lake and headed south, paddling for Peale Island. Named in 1878 for geologist A.C. Peale, the island sits in the middle of one of the wildest remaining corners of Yellowstone. A place of big quiet. Of pelicans and osprey and bald eagles, and over on the southern shores, located a half mile away, a brilliant parade of elk and grizzlies and wolves. To the east rises the staggering highline of the Absaroka Range, while far to the west are the lonely forests of the Pitchstone Plateau. To the south begins the loose swagger of the Thorofare, big meadows cradling the Yellowstone River all the way out of the national park and into the canyons of the Bridger-Teton Wilderness.
On reaching Peale Island we set up camp and helped the boys toss their fishing lines into the lake. Later, in the last of the twilight, we ladled tamales onto plates from a Dutch oven sitting on hot coals, washing them down with a little red wine. Then, late in the evening, long after dark, our conversation was suddenly interrupted by a strange sound coming from the south. Across the water was an outburst of loud splashing, not unlike what a herd of horses might make running through the surf. We got up from the campfire, adults and kids alike, and moved slowly down to the shore of the island, standing wideeyed, peering into the darkness, every now and then one of us tossing out some thought about what might be going on. Then—and fairly quickly—the splashing stopped. A few minutes later, coming from roughly the same place on the mainland, there began deep howls from a pair of wolves, calling back and forth along the shore. Bouncing across the open water, the howls seemed especially close and deep, saturating us.
The next day we canoed over to the shore and tried to put the pieces together. The tracks indicated wolves had come on the elk herd and started to run them, no doubt looking for the limp or the wheeze that might promise a likely meal. At that point the elk had decided to escape the danger by taking to the lake—a strategy we’d seen used fairly often, and successfully, along the rivers of the northern range.
Standing out there in the fine light of late morning, trying to solve this particular story of predator and prey, we once again experienced that feeling of gratitude, of being lucky. Yellowstone, having regained the wolf, was playing with a full orchestra now, the music rolling out with the rhythm and complexity of a hundred, two hundred years ago. Music that had been hobbled in the 1920s, when the last of the park’s wolves were killed some forty miles north of here, on the grassy swales of the northern range. The sounds we heard that night on Peale Island were the sounds of a wild ecosystem being fully wild. A last, cherished strain of the rhythms that once drummed across the breadth of the continent.
Today there are very few such places left. That can be hard to accept, perhaps especially when you consider our nation’s history—in particular, the gusto with which wild lands were said to have shaped the highest qualities of our character. In the 1700s wilderness was sometimes referred to as “the great equalizer.” That nickname, arising from the fact that wild nature offers both blessings and dangers equally, irrespective of class and wealth, would later become a primary source of symbol and story about what it meant to be an American. In one of the first skirmishes of the Revolutionary War, townspeople from the town of Machias, Maine, prevented a British ship from commandeering a shipment of pine—chasing down the vessel and capturing it, decorating it with pine boughs, and renaming it Liberty. Meanwhile their neighbors were soon plastering images of nature across their flags, stamping them into coins, sewing them as cloth panels into the quilts they pulled up at night to keep themselves warm.
This deep identification with the natural world—in particular, using it as a stew pot of imagery about democracy—would lead popular late-nineteenth-century writer Henry George to claim that it really didn’t matter whether people actually traveled to the recently created Yellowstone National Park, nor the various forest reserves being established in the region. Simply knowing such places were out there, he said, would engender a “consciousness of freedom.” Even members of Congress got the connection, approving in 1872 the whopping sum of $10,000 to purchase Thomas Moran’s Lower Falls of the Yellowstone, which became the first landscape painting to hang in the US Capitol. Standing in front of that magnificent painting, some claimed, viewers would forever be able to perceive the promise of democracy. Perhaps celebrated scholar Henry Nash Smith put it best: For most of our nation’s history, he wrote, Americans defined themselves “not by streams of influence from the past, not by a cultural tradition nor by its place in a world community, but by a relation between man and nature.”
It’s worth noting that when a culture has the kind of love affair with nature that Henry Nash Smith writes of, it will also seep into other areas of the society, including science. In the early twentieth century, when biology seemed to suddenly be growing more blinkered, more interested in dismantling a species to see what made it tick, rather than consider the habitat that supported it, some celebrated scientists were quick to object. The great zoologist William Hornaday—a key player in helping save Yellowstone’s wild bison, and for whom Hornaday Peak in the northeast corner of the park was named—cautioned that biology was becoming little more than an exercise in clinical thinking. He worried about scientists growing ever more cautious, unwilling to stand up for sound conservation choices, “never lifting an active finger on the firing line in defense of wild life.” If they weren’t careful, he warned his peers, science would soon be in danger of losing its heart.
It seems ironic that just as we’ve started to get a better handle on the complex factors driving the relationships of a given habitat, when at last we’re beginning to comprehend at least some of the more rudimentary aspects of complex systems, those systems themselves are increasingly at risk of unraveling. In that sense, maybe the gift of the wolf to Yellowstone, and to the world, isn’t simply its beauty, its considerable sex appeal. Its gift comes instead from what it has to teach us about all the life with which it coexists.
Science will never by itself be able to supply the culture with the generosity of spirit that allows space for “the other” to exist, especially when the other is as inconvenient as a wolf. That comes from somewhere else. Maybe from a summer walk along the river with your kids, or a fall picnic when the aspen trees are yellow and the elk are bugling. From anything, really, that allows us to unhook from what we know, even if just for a few minutes, and reach out into the miracle and mystery that still surrounds us.
No matter where any of us might lay our heads down tonight, we can drift off to sleep knowing that wild Yellowstone is still out there, still thrumming. And when we wake up tomorrow morning, here will be the comings and goings of elk and wolves and grizzly bears and bald eagles and pronghorn and wolverines—each species, if thoughtfully considered, raising the simple idea of making a living into something close to poetry. When it comes to wolves, it isn’t life span or disease resistance or breeding strategies or pup survival or pack lineages that matters most. It’s having made allowances for these last great waltzes of the wild. Waltzes so deep and nuanced that even scientists find themselves now and then beyond the need to analyze, content instead to merely imagine. And in the end, to walk away understanding that if these last wild places disappear, then the part of us those places have given fire to will, in time, disappear as well.
Gary Ferguson
December 2011
PREFACE TO THE 2012 EDITION
Much has happened in the six years since Decade of the Wolf was first published. For starters, the wolves of Yellowstone have become a fully functioning population—they’ve achieved a “natural density,” if you will—and this influences almost every aspect of their daily lives. There’s more competition and conflict now between wolves along adjacent territories. Such competition has brought to a close that time when a male and female pair of wolves could simply go next door to start a family of their own. At the same time, diseases like distemper continue to be deadly, especially to wolf pups, with some packs in 2008 again losing entire litters of pups. Indeed, the wolf population in Yellowstone as of December, 2011 is 101 animals in ten packs, down considerably from what it was in the middle of the first decade of the new century.
In so many areas, our scientific understanding about wolves continues to grow. We’ve watched as multiple litters of wolf pups born in the same pack (which was fairly common in earlier years of the reintroduction) have, under conditions of less prey and more consistent competition, become increasingly rare. We’ve got a better sense of how long wolves live in the wild. Thanks to genetic research, we’re better able to predict how certain packs are likely to fare in the face of disease. Genetics have also helped us affirm that a mixing of genes is indeed occurring between wolves from the park and those from other recovery areas in the northern Rockies—an important factor in the long-term health of the population.
Yet there remains much we still don’t know. As mentioned above, thanks to genetics we can say with confidence that wolves from different recovery areas are breeding with one another. But we’re still uncertain about some of the key factors that influence this sort of gene mixing. For example, there are currently two schools of thought about how the hunting of wolves affects genetic diversity. One school says that because offspring don’t breed with their parents, if an alpha wolf is killed by a hunter, it’s going to be an outsider wolf that replaces the dead leader. According to this line of thinking, you’re actually promoting genetic connectivity by breaking down wolf packs through hunting.
The counterargument, however, is that genetic connectivity is better enhanced by protecting packs instead of shooting them up. When you have a stable social structure, you’ll also have a pair of leaders producing pups every year. When pups take their place at the bottom of the social hierarchy, they put pressure on the older offspring to leave the pack. Now if it comes your time to leave, and you find no breeding opportunity next door, you’ll eventually bounce out of that particular landscape until you get to the next recovery area. Wolves are very capable of going hundreds of miles, after all, and one of the primary reasons they travel so far is because there hasn’t been a good chance to pair up in the place they were born. If there had been, most—though not all—would have stayed put. Protecting some areas in the northern Rockies for intact wolf packs, then, may actually enhance the outward movement necessary for genetic mixing.
As of yet we don’t have enough data to know if either of these theories is right, or if they both are.
Wolves have now been removed from the endangered species list, perhaps for good. Though that action was certainly reasonable, what was deeply troubling to many was that it was brought about not according to the standard protocols of the Endangered Species Act, but rather by Congress attaching a de-listing rider to a national budget bill. This raises important concerns about the future of resource management; specifically, whether critical scientific data will be easier to ignore. All that aside, since the delisting, wolves living outside the national parks have been hunted, and they’ll continue to be hunted into the forseeable future. (One concern for state land managers in developing wolf hunting guidelines has to do with how to better direct harvest activity toward areas with the greatest potential for conflicts.)
There are other things as well that need to be figured out when it comes to hunting wolves. For example many national parks—not just those in the northern Rockies, but Voyageurs in Minnesota, as well as many in Alaska—are wrestling with the issue of so-called “border” wolf packs. Border packs refer to animals that spend part of their time inside the national park and part of it outside. For example, in both Glacier and Grand Teton National Park, natural conditions are such that all the wolves spend roughly half their time within park borders, and half outside. Some of the packs in Yellowstone also meet this description. But here, additionally, we have groups that spend 100 percent of their time inside the park, and others that spend about 95 percent there. A key question is whether this latter group—the “95 percenters”—should be subjected to the same level of harvest as a group living outside the park, perhaps near major livestock operations. This concern was brought into focus in 2009, along the northern border of Yellowstone, when hunters shot both alphas of a pack that resided almost entirely within the national park. With wolf hunting here to stay, it may be reasonable to create a mosaic of hunting zones, including so-called “sub-quota” areas, where fewer wolves can be taken.
When it comes to attitudes about the wolf, especially outside the national parks, on some days it seems little has changed at all in the past sixteen years. The animals continue to find themselves in an angry ping-pong game of politics, the result of their kind being neither fully predictable, nor always well behaved. The fact that many people outside the park, especially those struggling to keep livestock alive on open range, are still resisting the wolf’s return is as easy to understand now as it was sixteen years ago. Outside of Yellowstone, wolves continue to cause real losses to real people—a fact that those who want this animal on the land should never fail to acknowledge, nor stop trying to minimize. But wolves are not “Canadian terrorists,” as one of today’s more popular bumper stickers proclaims. Despite fanciful claims to the contrary, there is no subspecies of superwolf, disconnected from the daily demands of raising young and making a living. No wolf pack is unbound by the fact that, at least in Yellowstone, prey eludes them five times more than it succumbs—and further, that it breaks their bones and cracks their skulls on a regular basis. No pack is invulnerable to the ravages of parvovirus and mange and canine distemper, which have in various years left many of their kin lying dead all around them.
Yet there remains today a willingness, even an eagerness, to give them power beyond reality, beyond the limits of the system in which they live. Such attitudes are a blow to the heart of ecology. It may be many years before we see a dampening of this urge to turn the wolf into a malevolent supercreature, much as the Catholic church did in the middle ages, declaring it quite literally to be “the devil’s dog.” But those who know the wolf only as the devil will never have a full sense of either the beauty or the profoundly inspiring utility that comes from such a rich interplay of life, fully expressed in a robust landscape.