CHAPTER 2
Even to Carter Niemeyer-a barge of a man, able to churn upstream in the roughest waters-it seemed a bleak beginning. He’d rolled north out of Montana in 1994 in a fit of late-autumn wind and snow, bound for the wilds of Alberta, sent as cleanup man for a wolf capture effort still half-formed and full of disarray. A lawsuit against the wolf reintroduction was working its way through the courts, leaving many of us wondering if the project would happen at all. Meanwhile wire cable had arrived in Canada from the States, intended for Canadian trappers to use in making the modified snares needed to capture wolves ultimately bound for Yellowstone. Unfortunately it was the wrong gauge, coyote wire, too thin to even begin to hold an animal as powerful as a wolf. No holding facilities were in place. There were no local vets lined up to work the project.
In addition, promises had been made several months earlier to various Canadian wolf trappers, offering goodly sums of money for the delivery of live animals to American biologists—roughly three times what they normally earned for pelts. But since those initial offers there’d been not another word, a slip-up in follow-through that put these highly independent men—guys already suspicious of anyone dim-witted enough to actually want live wolves—in the foulest of tempers. Now on the receiving end of their sour moods is the Yank sitting in their midst—the big one, Carter Niemeyer—who on this snowy afternoon finds himself twenty miles north of the village of Hinton, Alberta, in the living room of trapper Wade Berry, surrounded by a gaggle of beer-soaked woodsmen, the whole bunch hurling curses strong enough to make a longshoreman blush.
Failing to hear from the Americans, the trappers have gone back to what they’ve done all along, which is kill wolves for pelts. Early on Wade takes Carter out to the fur shed to show him seven wolf hides on stretching boards. “This is what we do to wolves,” he says. Carter shakes his head, tells him it doesn’t make sense to kill for four or five hundred bucks, when he’s offering close to fifteen hundred for the animals alive. Wade’s not convinced. By late afternoon Carter is still swimming in insults, being told time and again to pack his bags and get his ass back home. “A real pissing match,” Carter would later describe it. Sometime after the beer but before the homemade chokecherry wine gets poured, a trapper named Brad who works for Wade stomps in from the cold to announce he’s got two dead wolves outside. Wade’s a bit bleary, though still fuming, and he looks at Carter with a sneer.
“You ever skinned anything?”
“Yeah,” Carter tells him. “I’ve skinned plenty.” Which is sort of an understatement. Through his work both as an animal damage control officer as well as a taxidermist, Carter has by this point probably slipped the pelts from some six thousand coyotes, not to mention bears, lions, even the occasional wolf. Unconvinced, Wade tells Brad to bring in the two dead wolves, right there into the living room. “I’m thinking maybe we should have a skinning contest,” he says. “Ya know, Brad’s our best skinner.”
For a moment both would-be contestants seem confused. “You mean right here—in your house?” Carter says, scarcely able to believe what he’s hearing, casting a doubtful look at Wade’s wife, Karri. “Jeez, we’ll get blood over everything.”
“Hell with that,” Wade scoffs. “We can replace the carpets.”
And so it is that Carter Niemeyer, sent up north to kindle the collaring operation that will eventually land wolves in Yellowstone National Park, finds himself in the corner of a man’s living room in northern Canada next to a burly, bearded trapper, knives and sharpening stones at the ready, each with a 120-pound wolf in his lap and blood everywhere, covering their hands, soaking through shirts and pants and long johns.
“I don’t think we were really racing,” Carter will explain later. “But I did get mine done first.”
It’s the spectacle that changes everything. The next thing Carter knows Wade’s put aside insults in favor of some honest-to-goodness male bonding. He insists Carter have another round of chokecherry wine, then later, that he not drive back to Hinton but instead spend the night on the couch. “Wade had this little heeler-type dog that spent nights upstairs in the loft with him and Karri,” recalls Carter. “Guess he wasn’t feeling too good, ’cause every hour or so I’d hear the ’tap-tap-tap’ of his toenails as he trotted down the steps of the ladder, crossed the living room to the kitchen where he puked all over the floor. Then came the tapping of toenails going back up the ladder again. Round after round of it, all night long.”
The next morning Wade asks Carter if he still wants wolves. That confirmed, Wade tells him to head back to the Terra Vista Hotel in Hinton to get his stuff—collars, tools, sedatives, a jab stick—and an hour or so later he’s in a pickup with Brad and Wade, driving up the highway in a blanket of blowing snow, heading for a trap line at the edge of Rock Lake. Once at the site Brad and Wade head off into the woods by themselves, and sure enough, before long they find a wolf in a neck snare, alive but seriously hypothermic. They yell Carter over, and he wastes no time sedating the animal. Then, to Wade’s total dismay, he hefts the wolf on his shoulders and carries it to the truck, where he sticks it in the backseat, starts the engine, and turns the heater on full blast. Soon after comes a shout—still another wolf—this one too caught with a snare around its neck, the animal cowering on the steep side of a stream bank in a small alcove. The place proves so hard to reach that in the end Wade and Brad have to hold Carter upside down by his legs in order for him to reach the animal and tranquilize it. This one too goes into the backseat of the truck to be warmed. By now Wade is seriously tense, shooting nervous looks at Carter, wanting to make absolutely sure his new buddy has a good handle on just how long a shot of tranquilizer really lasts.
And just like that, Carter Niemeyer is neck-deep in wolves. In the closing weeks of 1994, other animals will be caught—most of them, thankfully, in modified snares—then transported by the same sort of pickup truck express to a newly located holding facility. Among them will be Number 7, an outstanding yearling female who in 1996 would go on to hook up with a male from another pack, thus creating the first naturally occurring wolf pack in Yellowstone. Reinforcements arrive from the States, including Steve Fritts, Val Asher, Alice Whitelaw, Jim Till, Joe Fontaine, and veterinarian Mark Johnson.
Order rises from chaos. Once captured in snares, the wolves are collared and processed, then released again near the places where they were first taken, each returning quickly to its own pack. Later on those same individuals are located still again—this time by men in spotter planes tracking them by the signals being given off by their radio collars. On finding the wolves this time, though, helicopters are launched—as it turns out, in bitterly cold conditions, the thermometer stuck at roughly thirty degrees below zero. Biologists hang out the open doors of the aircraft with darting guns in hand, each man wrapped in thick layers of warm clothing, any exposed skin freezing in an instant. Their mission is to fire darts containing tranquilizer not only into the animals that were captured earlier but also into as many of their pack mates as possible, no matter the age or gender. Some groups are darted out in open meadows, still others on frozen lake ice.
Back in the States, three acclimation pens have been constructed in the northern region of the national park—each about an acre in size, each meant to hold one family group. This idea of taking as many members as possible from three separate packs, as opposed to simply grabbing random wolves that may not know one another, plays on the strong bonds that exist between animals of the same group. The hope is that keeping families together will lower stress levels—important not just in the weeks of confinement to come but also after the wolves walk free, when some might be tempted to make a mad dash back to Canada. Again, in this first year of capture, the three groups—one for each acclimation pen—will contain a total of fourteen animals. The following winter, in 1996—the second and last time Canadian wolves are captured—will see four family groups from British Columbia, totaling seventeen more. The fate of wolves in Yellowstone will rest on the shoulders of these thirty-one animals.
To reach this point had taken more than twenty-five years. While the value of returning wolves to the world’s first national park was seen by a handful of biologists as early as the 1940s, it wasn’t until much later that there was strong political will to save the country’s dwindling wildlife resources. Inspired in part by plummeting populations of whooping cranes, in 1966 Congress passed the Endangered Species Preservation Act. It allowed the Secretary of the Interior to make a list of endangered domestic native fish and wildlife, and also provided for expenditures of up to $15 million a year to purchase habitat for their protection. (The first outlay of such funds, by the way, was in 1968, used to purchase 2,300 acres in Florida for the National Key deer.)
This basic law was made stronger still in 1969, with the passage of the Endangered Species Conservation Act. Prompted in part by concerns over dwindling whale populations, the act prohibited the importation of threatened species—or any product made from them—no matter where in the world they happened to reside. Curiously, among the early challenges to this law was one coming from the Pentagon, who argued that sperm-whale oil was essential to submarine guidance systems. (Others would argue its importance in other industrial applications, including automatic transmission fluid.) Over time the 1969 act was found to lack the necessary “teeth” for effective enforcement. Before long, scientists and politicians alike were calling for still stronger measures of protection.
And so it was that 1973 saw the creation of the Endangered Species Act (ESA), passed by Congress with nearly unanimous support. It was a landmark piece of legislation. For starters, the ESA made a distinction between species actually endangered and those merely threatened. It also allowed for the protection of not just animals but plants, too. Finally, it permitted the listing of species that were scarce or absent in only part of their range—a key factor in bringing the gray wolf back to Yellowstone. Once a species was placed on the list, the law required that a plan be crafted outlining specific steps for recovery. On signing the legislation on December 28, 1973, President Richard Nixon echoed the sentiments of millions of Americans: “Nothing is more priceless and more worthy of preservation,” he said, “than the rich array of animal life with which our country has been blessed.”
Maybe it’s fitting that the capture of wolves bound for Yellowstone should begin with such big helpings of craziness. The years leading up to the reintroduction, after all, had been long on turmoil, short on common sense. Even the federal agency ultimately responsible for such projects, the US Fish and Wildlife Service, was at times anything but enthused about the prospect of a reintroduction. In some years only Yellowstone National Park continued to quietly suggest that wolves had a place in a healthy ecosystem. “At one point,” recalls Northern Rocky Mountain Wolf Coordinator Ed Bangs, “the director of the US Fish and Wildlife Service told us that ’the only wolf coming into Montana is the one on my tie.’”
On the other hand, John Varley recalls attending a congressional committee hearing in 1991 where he watched dumbfounded as Republican senators from across the West lectured the committee on why they needed to go ahead with the project. “None of these people were wolf lovers. But Senator McClure, the chair of the Senate Interior Committee, had been arguing for years that an experimental reintroduction was far better than having wolves show up on their own. ’This way,’ he said, ’we get to set the rules.’ The rest of us just sat there, stunned.” Likewise Varley remembers William Penn Mott, director of the National Park Service under Ronald Reagan, being a critical force for this reintroduction. “Both in front of Congress and in front of the public, it was Mott who talked most often about the need for wolves in Yellowstone.” Then again, Varley also recalls one of the longest afternoons of his life being when he gave the wolf pitch to the annual meeting of the Montana Stockgrowers. “They were hissing me. They were booing, throwing catcalls. It even upset the group’s leaders—up there holding their arms out, trying to quiet the crowd.”
As support grew for the idea of reintroduction, in 1992 the government started seeking public comments, holding meetings in scattered cities and towns throughout the intermountain West—gatherings that sometimes had all the appearance of troops massing for battle. Those people submitting comments from outside the region were heavily in favor of the project. (Four years later, in 1996, a national poll conducted by Colorado State University showed between 75 percent and 82 percent of the public, irrespective of their political affiliation, strongly supporting the reintroduction.) Here in the northern Rockies, though, the sides were more evenly divided, each showing no shortage of zeal. As conservationist Hank Fischer recalls in his book Wolf Wars, proponents and opponents alike descended en masse on capital cities like Helena, Montana, the latter holding signs declaring the wolf to be THE SADDAM HUSSEIN OF THE ANIMAL WORLD. Armed guards stood at the doors of the public meetings. One man testifying against the project seemed to sum up the feelings of the opposition well, declaring that “only a brain-dead son-of-a-bitch would favor reintroduction of wolves.”
By the time the public comment period for the Environmental Impact Statement was over, some 160,000 remarks had arrived on the doorstep of the US Fish and Wildlife Service—at the time, more than for any other similar document in American history. Again, the vast majority were in favor of the reintroduction. Yet as capture efforts got under way in Canada, several lawsuits were launched—actions Judge William Downes ended up lumping together, his logic being that each one contested how the reintroduction was handled under provisions of the Endangered Species Act. That move made for some strange bedfellows, including a pairing of the Sierra Club Legal Defense Fund (not tied to the Sierra Club, and these days known as the Earth Justice Legal Defense Fund) with the American Farm Bureau.
The suit brought by the Sierra Club Legal Defense Fund insisted that the reintroduced wolves should be classified as endangered, rather than the “experimental, nonessential” population designated by the US Fish and Wildlife Service. That designation, made by virtue of a special provision within the Endangered Species Act, was chosen to allow more management flexibility than would otherwise be permitted under the “endangered” listing. Under experimental, nonessential status, if a wolf ventured onto private property the landowner could chase it off—so long as he didn’t injure it. More significantly, should a wolf attack livestock, the rancher could legally kill it. The Sierra Club Legal Defense Fund team argued that any wolf already living in Montana—animals that immigrated on their own and therefore had full protection of the Endangered Species Act—would merely by crossing into the Idaho or Yellowstone “recovery zones” have their level of protection lowered. This was plain bad science, the litigants claimed—and even worse, bad management. Yet more than a dozen of the best North American wolf scientists thought otherwise, calling the experimental designation a reasonable tool for getting the job of reintroduction done without placing an unnecessary burden on local residents.
For their part, the Farm Bureau claimed the reintroduction violated basic procedures of the Endangered Species Act—an interesting twist, given how often that organization has shown a fierce dislike for the ESA, having on several occasions sued to weaken it. The Farm Bureau suit led to a hold being placed on the project literally while wolves were en route to Yellowstone from Canada, confining the animals to their transport kennels. This was a heartbreaking situation. To finally get the wolves into the park, as per the approved plan, and then be told by the court that they were to remain in their tiny shipping kennels, unable even to be released into fenced acclimation pens, was by sheer virtue of its cruelty a hard pill to swallow. After waiting nervously well into the night, we finally received word to release the wolves into the pens. Not wanting another minute’s delay, four of us hiked to the sites in the wee hours and pulled open the doors on the kennels, allowing the wolves to at long last take their first steps on Yellowstone ground. Included in that group was biologist Wayne Brewster, a key national park administrator who had much to do with making this reintroduction happen in the first place. Heading back down the trail after releasing wolves into the Rose Creek Pen, around two o’clock in the morning, I recall him stopping, casting a reflective look. “Just think,” he said. “This is something no one’s ever done—or will ever do again.”
This legal action by the Farm Bureau had another consequence, too. When the lawsuit was first filed, the judge actually put a hold on our efforts in Canada—delaying capture operations for a time, forcing us to operate later in the winter than we’d originally planned. From the very beginning, this reintroduction was designed to avoid having wolves stuck in acclimation pens during the February breeding season, on the off chance that restraining them at this time in their yearly life cycle might prove too stressful. But these legal delays gave us no choice, forcing us to place wolves in pens smack in the middle of breeding season. To our surprise—and without question, our great relief—the pens ended up having little effect, with four of the seven groups breeding despite captivity. (It’s interesting to consider that at our sister project in Idaho, where wolves were never held in acclimation pens, there was in the first year no discernable breeding activity.)
Ironically, the delay caused by the Farm Bureau suit inadvertently improved the success of the reintroduction. By late winter, the time when the wolves finally walked free, elk and other ungulates were at their weakest, vulnerable from having endured months of snow and cold. That made the wolves’ job of taking prey much easier—a fact that may have helped hold them in the area, keeping at bay any urges they might have had to strike north again to look for signs of home. This unique jump start, accented by breeding activity in the first year, may have been the single most important factor in the program’s early success.
As if suits by the Sierra Club Legal Defense Fund and Farm Bureau weren’t enough, thrown into the mix at the same time was legal action from a couple in Wyoming, who maintained that because wolves inhabited Yellowstone all along, the reintroduction was unnecessary. These previous resident wolves, the couple suggested, had escaped detection by researchers for twenty years by employing some highly unusual behaviors, including refusing to howl, not traveling in packs, and steering clear of roads and trails. In truth biologists have been remarkably successful detecting wolf packs in locations around the world. Yet beginning with a landmark study by biologist John Weaver in the mid-1970s, no one ever managed to find a viable population of wolves in greater Yellowstone. It was in drawing from this work that Weaver became among the first to recommend wolf reintroduction in a report to the National Park Service in 1978.1 While the argument of stealth wolf packs never made much legal headway, in the end it was the wolves themselves who settled the matter. No one, after all, is better at finding wolves than other wolves. When our reintroduced animals dispersed—all of them, by the way, wearing radio collars—traveling alone across hundreds of miles for months at a time, often on the lookout for potential mates, not a single one ever managed to hook up with an uncollared, non-reintroduced wolf.
Even though this was one of the last legal actions claiming wolves were already in Yellowstone, an ongoing complaint even today is that the wolves we reintroduced are significantly different from those of the past—specifically, that we took from Canada a larger, more aggressive subspecies. Yet modern genetic analyses of wolves living across North America don’t support such claims. Wolves travel far and wide, and because of this they don’t tend to readily segregate out, grouping into different subpopulations. In other words, their wide-ranging movements tend to keep the gene pool mixed, which in turn prevents the creation of localized forms.2 It’s largely for this reason that over the years modern taxonomic analyses have reduced the number of wolf subspecies from twenty-four to just five.3 Only when we take a wolf from the northern end of their range, in the Arctic, and compare them to a wolf from the southern end, in Mexico, are we able to discern a noticeable difference. And even then such differences are subtle. An Arctic wolf, for example, would have no trouble breeding successfully with a Mexican wolf.
At their worst, these ongoing notions of a super-subspecies have been downright macabre. One frequently heard campfire tale is that Yellowstone’s reintroduced wolves “kill for fun,” engaging in such bizarre behavior as chewing the lips off elk, leaving the rest to rot. Such stories are grim reminders that no animal on the face of the earth has had a more vigorous blanket of mythology laid on it than the wolf. Granted, some ancient cultures, not to mention many contemporary indigenous people, have long told stories painting the wolf in glowing terms. At times he appears as a pillar of wisdom, standing now and then with “brother” coyote, who by contrast is depicted as clever but self-defeating. Positive wolf hero figures are not only accomplished at survival, procuring food and defending territory, but are also often seen as a kind of model for human social order. The fact that wolves are highly independent, for instance, yet at the same time fiercely loyal to the pack represented a behavioral ideal to cultures who valued both individual freedoms and social responsibility. Likewise, the extraordinary dedication wolves show in caring for pups, with virtually every adult in the pack engaged in those duties from roughly May to September, was hardly lost on the native tribes who shared the land with them.
But on the other side of wolf lore are found tales dark and murky and filled with fear, causing angst right into modern times.
First in Europe, and later in the United States, wolves were wiped out with a vengeance applied to no other animal on Earth. “Wolfers,” as American hunters were often called, went far beyond the usual killing tools of rifles, snare traps, and cyanide baits. Many staked steel wires near den sites, attaching to the free ends large fish hooks wrapped with pieces of chicken. Pups coming out of the den at night swallowed the morsels whole, sometimes literally pulling their stomachs out trying to get loose. Others gobbled hunks of meat laced with razor blades and nails, or in some cases were set on fire. Once captured some had their lower jaws cut off or wired shut, later released to slowly starve to death. Half a century later, soldiers returning from World War II quickly took up the sport of shooting wolves in northern Minnesota and Michigan, referring to the activity as “killing Nazis.” (As an interesting aside, wolf hunters in the early twentieth century routinely laced the carcasses of wolf-killed prey with strychnine. When the animals returned for a second round of feeding, which is typical wolf behavior, they were of course killed. In a remarkably short amount of time some animals adopted new feeding habits, no longer returning to a carcass after the initial kill. Far from earning respect for being smart, people began accusing them of wasting meat, of killing for fun.)
What is it that makes wolves ripe for such hatred and cruelty? After all, other animals are clearly more ferocious, more dangerous to humans, from bears to lions to rattlesnakes. Over the past hundred years in all of North America there have been fewer than twenty cases of wolves attacking humans.4 And while it’s true that these other predators—“stenchy beasts,” as they were commonly referred to in the Middle Ages—were also greatly disliked, none has ever been given the weight of evil itself. Was it, as Rolf Peterson suggests, that wolves are so similar to us—adaptable, dedicated to mates, relying on a cooperative social structure—that puts such a chill in our spines? Or have our nightmares about seeing the devil in the eyes of the wolf been merely bad dreams about our own animal nature?
Considering this tortured past, combined with the honest-to-goodness trouble that wolves do occasionally get into, it’s not surprising that the Yellowstone reintroduction would draw anxious, even bitter responses. Fifteen years ago there were people living on the edges of this ecosystem who refused to let their children stand outside and wait for the school bus, convinced they might be carried off by wolves. Many influential politicians continue to demand wolf death in no uncertain terms. So great was the frenzy at times that one day recovery coordinator Ed Bangs—the man in charge of all wolf decisions in the northern Rocky Mountains—told me soberly that it was now clear to him how people had come to burn witches.
Given these fiery feelings, security around this project during the reintroduction phase was extremely tight. Whether we were in Canada or Yellowstone or anywhere in between, the wolves were never without armed law officers standing nearby—twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. While the wolves were in the acclimation pens, specially trained security rangers were on hand, though not actually in view, since we didn’t want to accustom the animals to humans. These security forces never appeared when I and other biologists were in the pens feeding the wolves, but we always knew they were out there, watching our every move.
Yet for all this bad blood, people who admire the wolf make a tremendous mistake when they ignore the very real problems it can create—when they fail to separate noble ideas of the animal from the reality on the ground. There will always be a small number of wolves willing to add beef or lamb to their diet. For ranchers, the loss of even a single cow or sheep can be significant—not merely because many cattle operations operate on razor-thin margins of profit, but because for many it’s more than a little disturbing to see an animal you helped bring into the world being served up as dinner for a bunch of predators. What’s more, much of the apprehension about wolves was handed down to locals from their own relatives, many of whom really did face significant ordeals, especially around the turn of the twentieth century. What’s seldom understood, though, is that a majority of those problems stemmed from the fact that unregulated hunting had sent the prey base plummeting to its lowest levels in history. Not just wolves, but cougars, coyotes, and even bears were heading for ranch lands. On the other hand, by the time wolves were being reintroduced to Yellowstone, sound conservation efforts—many initiated during the early decades of the twentieth century—had led to historic high levels of many prey populations, including elk. In truth, an ongoing challenge for Wyoming and Montana in recent years has been figuring out how to reduce elk herds, more often than not by liberalizing hunting activity.
Finally landing in Yellowstone with wolves in tow, in January of 1995, marked the end of two decades of extraordinarily difficult work. Countless hours had been invested by biologists and land managers, by dozens of politicians and thousands of citizens, both in this region and around the country. The wolf had come home to the world’s first national park. And the place would never again be quite the same.
Portrait of a WolfNUMBER 9
The remarkable story of wolf Number 9 begins when she and her yearling daughter, Number 7, were captured on a bitterly cold day in Alberta. From there they began the long journey to Yellowstone, finally landing in an acclimation pen in the Lamar Valley, not far from the famed Buffalo Ranch, near a small stream called Rose Creek. About a week later mother and daughter were joined in the pen by another adult wolf, an especially bold and beautiful animal known as Number 10—the sole member of his pack to have been caught in Canada. Given that these two adults were strangers, we weren’t at all sure how things were going to go between them. Actually, the relationship got off to a rocky start, with 10 nipping 9 on several occasions hard enough to draw blood—his way, we believe, of making it very clear who was in charge of the show.
As the days went by, though, to our enormous relief things improved between the pair, at least to the point where they were able to ignore each other. From there things got better still; during times of rest the two animals began curling up in the pen, getting ever closer. Though we weren’t aware of it at the time, 9 and 10 would actually end up mating—something we didn’t think would happen in any of the acclimation pens, let alone one containing two adults that started off as complete strangers. Sadly, 10 was not long for this world. Yet the wolf he made peace with, and then finally bred, would prove one of the most critical players in all of Yellowstone. Genetic studies done in 1999 showed that 79 percent of all wolves in Yellowstone—including several others of great importance—were related to the outstanding alpha female Number 9.
On walking out of the acclimation pen in March of 1995, the three wolves stayed together for only a week before 9’s yearling daughter, Number 7, split off to begin a life of her own. During a routine tracking flight on April 18 we managed to locate her well to the west, near Tower Junction; her mother and Number 10, though, were nowhere to be found, vanishing like snow on spring ground. Eleven long, anxious days passed before we managed to find them again—forty miles to the northeast at the edge of the Great Plains, on the pine-covered flanks of Mount Maurice. Shortly afterward magnificent Number 10 was dead, shot down on a sage-covered hill by a man who claimed he thought it was a wild dog. Number 10 would be the first of the Yellowstone wolves to die. Because he was the first to go, but also because he was such a splendid animal, I took it hard, as did a lot of other people both inside and outside the wolf project.
At the time of the shooting, Number 9 was five miles to the south, wandering in a tight circle on the west flank of Mount Maurice, waiting, watching through the timber for a mate that would never return. Wolves show a fantastic degree of loyalty to other members of their pack, especially their mates, often hooking up for life. In that sense Number 10’s failure to appear would’ve surely caused 9 great anxiety. The fact that she wasn’t moving much—leading a somewhat sedentary lifestyle, roaming the same small area on Mount Maurice over and over—suggested to us that either she was injured or about to den. To find out we launched a ground search, led by US Fish and Wildlife biologist Joe Fontaine. Working closely with the indefatigable Carter Niemeyer, Joe was eventually able to find a litter of pups under a tree, the whole bunch knotted together in a big ball of fur. Not wanting to keep 9 away from her pups a minute longer than necessary, Joe made a hasty retreat. Piecing the story together, we came to understand that when 9 couldn’t wait any longer for her mate she’d hurriedly scraped a shallow depression in the ground under a large Douglas fir, then laid down on her side with her back against the trunk, giving birth to the first sizable litter of pups born in the greater Yellowstone ecosystem in some seventy years.
Unlike some mammals, wolves aren’t at all inclined to play the single-parent role. A lone female like 9 would be hard-pressed to leave the den site for food without placing the pups at risk from predators ranging from cougars to coyotes to stray dogs. With that dismal fact staring us in the face, there began a heated debate among wolf recovery team members. Some in the US Fish and Wildlife Service (the agency actually responsible for 9 and her pups, given that they were now located outside Yellowstone National Park) were inclined to let nature take its course. After all, they maintained, these were wild animals and should be managed as such. The National Park Service team, meanwhile, led at that time by the feisty director of the wolf project, Mike Phillips, couldn’t imagine leaving these miracle pups—offspring we never expected to see in this first year—to end up as lunch for some coyote. Better to gather them up and take them by helicopter back to the Rose Creek pen, he argued, releasing them when they were bigger, more able to fend for themselves. It was a spirited argument, but in the end the nod went to Mike Phillips. We wasted little time launching a capture plan.
Which is how on May 17 I found myself at the south edge of Red Lodge, leaning out an upstairs window of the Super 8 Motel with a radio antenna in my hand, listening for Number 9 to trip the modified leg hold traps we’d laid for her near where Joe Fontaine had seen those pups. Hour after hour dragged by with no action—not all that surprising, given how routinely wolves manage to evade traps set for them. In the end, though, in the wee hours before dawn, 9 finally took the bait, drawn to one trap set by Carter Niemeyer, containing scat from her now-deceased partner.
And still the emotional roller coaster continued. Having finally caught and processed Number 9, checking her health and then placing her, still sedated, in a kennel in the shade, we headed off to gather her pups, assuming they were under that same tree where Joe had spotted them a week before. We found the tree, lifted up the low-hanging branches, and to our utter shock, discovered every single pup was gone. If over the past ten years there’ve been moments close to terrifying, this was one of them. Should we fail to find the pups we’d of course have to let 9 go, and the chances of catching her a second time were slim to none. Checking maps and photographs from previous tracking flights, we noted an area up the mountain a good three-quarters of a mile where she’d been pinpointed on several other occasions. Against slim odds the team spread out and began moving upslope, each of us imitating the quiet grunting sound that adult wolves often make when returning to the den, hoping to draw out the pups. Luck was on our side. After a long search they finally betrayed their location high on the mountain in a jumble of rocks, calling out in squeaks and squeals. As near as we could tell Fontaine’s earlier visit had worried the alpha female, leading her to move them one by one—probably under the cover of a dark night—from that original scrape of dirt to this more secure location.
Pulling wolf pups from a jumble of rocks is no easy proposition; even at three weeks we expected these little fur balls to put up a fight. Slowly, carefully, we fished seven of them out of the talus slide, each one moaning and growling. At that point I felt sure we had the whole bunch, but Carter and Joe weren’t convinced, thinking there might be one more deep in the rocks, hunkered at the back of a dark crevice I couldn’t quite get to. Again and again I strained to stuff my six-foot, two-inch frame into that crack far enough to reach the back of the hole, but all I could touch—and this just with the end of my middle finger—was something that felt more like a piece of mud than a wolf pup. I needed two more inches. Luckily our helicopter pilot had a folding pair of pliers, and armed with these back in I went, Carter and Joe at my legs pushing excitedly to get me farther into the rocks, leaving a fair collection of bruises in the process. Finally, at the limit of my reach I was able to get a hold of that solid mass with the pliers, then slowly pulled it out. Lo and behold, there was the eighth and final wolf pup. Breathing an enormous sigh of relief, we loaded the family into the helicopter and flew them back to Yellowstone. In the course of my week-by-week, year-by-year tracking flights, I’ve often wondered whether that pup is still alive—whether, even, he was in fact the future alpha male Number 21 of the Druid Peak Pack. Having helped effect his rescue, I have to admit to feeling a certain connection to him. But like so much having to do with Yellowstone’s wolves, I’ll never know.
I wish I could say that after the rescue nothing else happened to stress either the wolves or us. But having transported the family safely back to Yellowstone, in late July a windstorm blew in and nearly destroyed the pen, some ten trees ripping through the chain-link. Shortly afterward, every single pup scampered away. Number 9, though—ever the wary wolf—decided against escape, and on the day I arrived to feed she was still inside the pen. It was easy to see the pups frolicking just outside the enclosure, but catching them was another matter. At one point I nearly knocked myself senseless making a dive with an outstretched net trying to catch one of the little ones, who easily—and, it seemed, with great joy—simply outran me. In the end we got six of them, the other two remaining at large, roaming freely but never going far from their family. One of those little renegades, Number 18, lived to be eight years old and for many years was the alpha female of the Rose Creek II Pack (the Rose Creek group had a “II” added to their pack name at the point it no longer any of the original members). Appropriately, she was never collared, remaining through 2003 the only alpha female in all of Yellowstone we couldn’t capture during our yearly collaring efforts. Luckily, her markings were distinctive enough to allow us to at least observe her from the air.
Number 9 and her pups—those we could catch, anyway—remained confined for another nine weeks, until the end of hunting season on the national forest lands adjacent to the park. Even with the pups much older and larger, fully able to travel, we had no illusions about the pack’s chances of success. Number 9 was still the sole skilled hunter and defender, able to kill game but unlikely to be able to protect her pups from attacks by other packs. Besides, autumn is no easy time for wolves. It’s then that prey animals have a clear edge, having been fattened and strengthened by a summer of good eating. But on October 11, the day we headed in to free the wolves by removing a panel from the pen (we were no longer cutting holes in the chain-link, thus saving on pen parts), suddenly the odds got a lot better. In a fine turn of events, a lone wolf from the Crystal Pack—Number 8, who the week before had been fifteen miles away near the Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone—showed up at the pen site in a courting mood, unable to resist the attraction of a lone female. It was a match made in heaven. Number 8 received a big promotion to alpha wolf, while 9 got a much-needed hunting partner. Meanwhile the eight youngsters had a father figure whom they welcomed with no questions asked, nipping and barking and pulling on his tail with abandon. This willingness to adopt offspring sired by other animals, though common in wolves, is in the mammal world actually a rare quality. One of these young male pups, 21, besides becoming alpha male of the Druid Pack, would himself adopt five youngsters, sired by wolf Number 38.
The group was a family now, with the alpha pair going on to produce pups every year from 1996 through 1999. Number 9 would breed yet again in 2000, though none of her pups survived, perhaps in part because of her advanced years. No one knows the maximum breeding age for a female wolf, but by that point she was likely eight or even nine, clearly pushing the limit; her black fur had turned so gray that from a distance it appeared nearly white. That spring she disappeared east of the park, in the rugged folds of the Absaroka Wilderness. Her radio signal was never heard again. There were no sightings, no tracks. Even now I get calls and e-mails from people wanting to know if it’s possible to start a fund to erect a statue somewhere in the park to honor her extraordinary life. As for her second mate, Number 8, he too thrived, remaining the alpha male of the Rose Creek Pack until 2000. Not long after his death there began a long, slow decline for the Rose Creek wolves, suggesting his influence may have been greater than we ever realized.
Five of the eight pups born from the famous pairing of 9 and 10 would themselves go on to breed, including females 16, 17, 18, and 19. Number 18—the little pup who refused to be caught outside that damaged acclimation pen, and who likewise remained uncaptured as an alpha female—would in 1997 breed in the same pack as her mother, each female setting up at a separate den site. The following year both mother and daughter bred again, this time, remarkably, wriggling in and out of the same den—behavior seldom seen outside Yellowstone. That may have been too much family for one little house, though, since the next spring each wolf again secured her own site. When 9 actually left the pack the next spring, abandoning her alpha position, 18 moved in to fill the slot. Number 18 bred both in that year and again in 2001, ultimately giving birth to some thirty-two pups. Throughout the period she seemed content using the same nooks and crannies of the territory she’d first learned about from her mother.
Meanwhile her sister, Number 19, didn’t fare half as well. Soon after giving birth alone near Slough Creek, she was killed, likely in a territorial skirmish by members of the neighboring Druid Peak Pack; her pups, suddenly orphaned, would all die at roughly two weeks old at the den where they were born. (Their bodies were later retrieved and can now be seen in an interpretive display at Yellowstone’s Albright Visitor Center.) Nor was fate particularly kind to another sister, Number 17, the only gray in a litter of black pups. After hooking up with male Number 34, in July of 1997, she too would die—less than three months after giving birth to pups—the result of a stick piercing her in the chest while on a furious chase of an elk. Suddenly finding himself a single father, Number 34 traveled some thirty miles with the little ones to the den site of his former mate’s sister, Number 16. They stayed together for a while, yet in the end trouble befell this female as well when a car struck her and broke her leg—an injury that kept her from returning and caring for the pups. Despite our best efforts to offer food, all of them eventually perished. Number 16’s leg did eventually heal, though, at which point she was right back in the action, going on to pair with wolf Number 165 north of the park to form the Sheep Mountain Pack, giving birth to pups in both 1998 and 1999.
If fortune was hard on some of 9’s daughters, it was somewhat kinder to the one son who managed to survive to breeding age, Number 21. After two and a half years spent with his mother and the rest of the Rose Creek Pack, he left that group to become alpha male of Druid Peak, gaining the top dog position in December of 1997 under rather unfortunate circumstances. In that era, probably because they were still settling into the landscape, the Druid Peak animals sometimes traveled onto prime elk hunting areas on national forest lands just east of the park. On one such ill-fated trip the only two adult males of the pack were cut down by poachers’ bullets—including alpha male Number 38, a particularly strong and beautiful animal. This shooting, which didn’t actually kill 38 outright, led us into a hearty debate about whether we should intervene and tend his wounds. We decided against it, though in truth I’ve often wondered about that choice, especially since I was the one with the grisly task of tracking 38 while he slowly died—a process that took eleven days. The job was hardly a challenge, given that the bullet wound rendered him unable to move very far on any given day. Despite our earlier decision to “let nature take its course,” we eventually tried slipping him some meat, but he never took it. In the end he died from a combination of his wounds and, quite likely, starvation. Indeed, the same wolf that had tipped the scales at a hearty 125 pounds at the time of the shooting would by his death weigh a scant 88 pounds.
In his newfound role as alpha male, 21 was not only responsible for a great many litters—fathering pups seven years running, from 1998 through 2004—but for a long time was one of the most easily seen and often celebrated of all Yellowstone’s wolves. Carrying the same large shoulders that distinguished his mother, 21’s profile, even from a distance, was hard to mistake. Also like his mother, he was a black wolf that grayed over time, giving him a distinct coloration. He was remarkably gentle. Many a time did he come back from a hunt only to be mobbed by twenty pups begging for food. He took it calmly, though, always in stride. Likewise, after making a kill he was never seen fiercely defending the carcass from underlings, forcing them to wait their turn, as is so often assumed to be the case with wolves. Instead he would sometimes simply walk away—to urinate, maybe even take a nap—allowing young wolves who had nothing to do with the kill to take their fill. Likewise, when tussling with underlings, he would now and then take a playful posture, letting the youngsters be on top of him, as a father might do when wrestling with his young sons.1 For all these reasons, 21 became for many of the Lamar Valley wildlife fans the favorite wolf of them all.