CHAPTER 3
From at least the days when trapper Osborne Russell first stumbled into the Lamar Valley in 1835 (he knew it as Secluded Valley), lost in a reverie of what it would be like to spend the rest of his life wrapped in such wild, unfettered beauty—“where happiness and contentment seemed to reign in wild romantic splendor”—travelers have been swooning over this magnificent landscape. In this toss of fescue and sticky geranium and sage, cut by the easy drift of an icy mountain river, visitors are afforded glimpses of an American West nearly unchanged from the glories of two hundred years ago. Lying at the heart of what biologists refer to as the northern range, here is home ground for coyote and bald eagle, bison and pronghorn. Even bighorn sheep and mountain goats can be seen now and then clinging to the steep terrain that rims the valley. And in winter, one of the world’s largest, densest elk herds imaginable, which a decade ago was coming down from a historic high of some twenty thousand animals. It was here that the last wolf disappeared from Yellowstone, killed in 1926. And here that three groups of reintroduced wolves would in 1995 once more walk into the life of the wild, taking their pack names from natural features laid down on maps long before: Crystal Creek, Rose Creek, and Soda Butte.
The extraordinary prey base embodied by this elk herd was a driving factor in determining where in Canada we’d go to capture wolves bound for Yellowstone. Simply put, we wanted animals used to hunting not caribou or moose, but rather Rocky Mountain elk—the same prey that would make up the bulk of their food supply in and around the national park. The vast majority of wolves hunt what their parents teach them to hunt, avoiding animals not familiar to them—using a so-called “search image.”1 As pointed out by livestock industry spokesman Wallis Huidekoper, speaking to the annual convention of the Montana Stock Growers Association in 1916, “It is a well-known fact that stock-killing individuals among wolves are only a small proportion of their kind inhabiting a given area.” To be sure, there will always be found the occasional maverick willing to take on unfamiliar prey, including cows or sheep. Often these are fairly young wolves, yearlings (“teenagers,” if you will), eager to try something new. What’s more, wolves are keen observational learners, able to change behavior simply by watching fellow pack members. That means bad habits can spread quickly through the group. Still, this is the exception, not the rule.
With the top predator missing from Yellowstone for some seventy years, there had evolved in the region’s elk herds a higher-than-normal percentage of older, weaker animals.2 Indeed, necropsies done on wolf kills in the northern part of the park between 1995 and 2005 showed the average age of adult cow elk taken by wolves as fourteen years old, with animals twenty or older not uncommon. What’s more, high densities of elk and other ungulates living at or near the threshold of what the available food resource can sustain—a number referred to as “carrying capacity”—are far more likely to suffer from poor nutrition. That, in turn, renders them relatively easy prey. From a purely biological point of view, then, the timing of the reintroduction was perfect—a fact made abundantly clear within hours of the wolves walking free of their acclimation pens. The Soda Butte Pack made a quick kill a mere half mile from their fenced enclosure, as did that highly confident Rose Creek wolf, Number 10, who just a few hundred yards from his pen managed to kill a bull elk weakened by winter and poor nutrition.
Given all that was in the wolves’ favor, some people wondered about our decision in Yellowstone to first place them in acclimation pens—chain-link enclosures roughly an acre in size, where the animals spent their first ten weeks in the national park. (The use of such enclosures prior to release—termed a “soft release”—may seem especially curious given that no such pens were used in the Idaho segment of the wolf reintroduction. There animals were instead launched by means of “hard release,” which means they were delivered to a site, one to a kennel, then the doors opened to send them hustling off into the wild.)
The reason for using soft release in Yellowstone has to do with how close the national park is to cattle and sheep ranches. Wolves have a strong homing response. If you capture and later turn them loose in a strange place, their first reaction is to head off in the direction they came from, sometimes traveling forty miles or more, looking for familiar landmarks—signs of home. Had Yellowstone’s wolves headed north thirty or forty miles from their release sites in the Lamar Valley, they would’ve found themselves right in the middle of livestock country—something we wanted to avoid at all costs. The pens were an attempt to soften, or attenuate, this strong behavioral response. By all indication it worked, as few wolves ever ventured very far north out of the park.
For the team of wolf project employees, maintenance workers, and volunteers who in 1994 and 1995 helped build what would eventually become seven pens—pounding steel posts, ratcheting enormous panels into place—it often felt as if we were erecting maximum-security detention centers. Ten-foot-high runs of chain-link were capped by inward-leaning aprons, the corners of the enclosure rounded to guard against wolves climbing up and out. To keep the animals from digging out, four-foot-wide mats of chain-link were laid along the inside perimeter of the pens, staked down every four feet with long spikes of iron rebar.
Of course during their time spent in the pens the wolves had to be tended to, which meant twice-weekly feedings of road-killed deer, elk, moose, and bison. In the fall prior to the wolves’ arrival, state and county agencies alerted us to fatally wounded animals on the region’s highways. The word was passed on to the wolf project, as often as not to volunteers Deb Guernsey and Carrie Schaefer, who then sped off in a pickup truck to retrieve the bodies—a job that earned them the somewhat dubious title of “carcass queens.” It was smelly, inglorious work, followed by the equally tedious job of gutting the animals before storing them in freezers for later use. Given all the threats being made against wolves at that time, we never talked much about any of this, afraid someone might start lacing the roadkill with strychnine.
Because the pens were located anywhere from a quarter-mile to a full mile from the nearest plowed road, getting several hundred pounds of meat in each week was no easy task. With snow on the ground we relied on mule-drawn sleighs—a means of transportation that meant bringing in area cowboys to serve as mule-drivers, men who for the most part were strongly opposed to wolf reintroduction. Yet they did an extraordinary job, often under trying conditions, including dealing with several Park Service mules with quirky dispositions. Two of those mules, for instance, while hooked to the sleigh seemed to take great delight in running over whomever was trying to steady them. In addition to sleighs we occasionally used packhorses, and every now and then even carried meat in on our backs. I recall one day doing exactly that in full Park Service uniform with Hillary Clinton along; all of a sudden the elk leg I was carrying started leaking blood all over my back, giving the First Lady what was no doubt a less-than-inspiring sight.
Some people worried that all these trips to the pens for feeding would habituate the wolves to humans. But as one who made a lot of those trips, I ended up thinking much the opposite was true. Food in hand or not, the wolves clearly didn’t like us anywhere near them. Given that the pen curtailed their normal flight response, my sense was that the enclosure may have actually reinforced their fear of humans. Either way, it’s worth noting that following their release, it would be several years before we recorded a Yellowstone wolf getting anywhere close to a human.
Yet the use of acclimation pens was hardly perfect. If ever there’s been an animal that loves freedom, it’s the wolf, and several did everything they could to get out—not just digging and chewing on the fence, but sometimes hanging by their teeth from the overhangs. This we considered a big deal. A wolf makes her living by her teeth, after all, and we worried constantly that worn-down or broken canines might limit an animal’s ability to hunt—aging the wolf, in a sense, before her time. Hours were spent at the wolf office in Mammoth concocting schemes to stop the chewing—repellents, electric fencing, even giant Plexiglas liners. None, though, proved practical. Thankfully most of the wolves didn’t chew, and even those that did usually stopped after a few weeks.
There was one big exception—a group captured from British Columbia during the second year of the project, in 1996, first penned and finally released near Nez Perce Creek, in the central region of the national park. The Nez Perce wolves, as they were known, never really settled into the acclimation pen. Some people speculated their restlessness was due to the pen being located within earshot of snowmobiles, a sound that in Canada they would’ve almost certainly associated with the men who hunted them through the long months of winter. Still another theory was that their unsettledness had been inspired by a single alpha female, Number 27. A fence biter from the very beginning, this was one wolf seriously unhappy about captivity. (Nor, for that matter, was she particularly fond of me. One day while feeding I walked toward her with an elk leg and, unlike every other wolf I encountered during the reintroduction, she didn’t give ground. Pausing at a distance of about ten feet, we both stood fast, looking at each other. Just as I was thinking about taking one last step to assert myself, I heard a deep, guttural growl coming from her throat. I decided against the extra step.)
During the first round of wolf releases, when time came to open the pen gates and turn the animals into the wild, to our surprise most of them refused to leave. This was exactly opposite of what we’d expected, having figured we’d be dashing off at a good clip just to stay out of their way. While to us the situation was frustrating, others found it mildly amusing—or in a couple cases, even pathetic. Conservative commentator Paul Harvey announced one day to his radio show audience that by feeding the wolves for ten weeks we had turned them into welfare animals, too fond of government handouts to ever go out and make a living on their own. But through telephone consultations with other wolf biologists, including Dave Mech, Rolf Peterson, Ed Bangs, and Steve Fritts, we came to believe that our passing through the pen gates some twenty times in the previous two and a half months, carting in several tons of carcass meat, had caused the wolves to see the opening not as a portal to freedom but as a dangerous link to humans. They may well starve to death, suggested Mech, before they’d walk into a part of the pen with such strong associations to humans.
We thought it might be possible to solve this problem by cutting a hole somewhere else in the pen, near those places in the enclosure where the animals had found comfort during their long internment—places marked by well-worn tracks in the snow from frequent pacing, as well as hollow depressions where they’d bedded down to rest. It worked. Yet even after these new holes were cut, the wolves tended to be cautious, not leaving until long after we’d disappeared. Not so with wolf Number 27. Being especially bold, she dashed out of the freshly cut escape hole in full view of the research team, her three daughters running for her heels, trying their best to catch up. From Nez Perce Creek she headed north, covering some twenty-five miles every night, often through deep snow, leaving even those of us in the tracking plane hard pressed to keep tabs on her. In the end her three young daughters got their fill of this brutal pace, finally breaking off to travel by themselves. Meanwhile her mate, along with a male pup, waited a full day before leaving the acclimation pen; by then her trail had gone cold, making it impossible to catch her.
It was probably Interstate 90 that finally turned her, sending her drifting back toward the rugged folds of the Beartooths, where she’d eventually give birth to pups near the tiny town of Nye, Montana—unfortunately, smack in the middle of sheep and cattle country. Her proximity to livestock, along with the fact that she was a single mother, led us to launch a capture operation to bring her back to the Nez Perce pen and release her later in the year. Number 27, though, had other ideas. Proving yet again not just the wariness of wolves but also their astonishing intelligence, over and over she gave us the slip—all through summer, through autumn, and then into winter, until one bone-chilling day in February we finally managed to dart her from a helicopter and fly her back to the national park.
Meanwhile Number 48, the one remaining pup from a litter born in the spring of 1996, seemed to have taken escape lessons from mom, remaining at large for another three weeks. Unfortunately, when we did finally catch up to 48, it was after a sheep-killing incident. Following the “two strikes you’re out” rule of the day, whereby wolves who preyed on livestock a second time were eliminated (later, as the population grew, that rule was hardened to “one strike and you’re out”), we carted her back to the park and placed her in the pen with her mother and pack mates, hoping we could prevent her from getting into trouble a second time. Thankfully, the rehabilitation took hold. Number 48 went on to become alpha female of the Nez Perce Pack, skillfully leading her group through the sprawling wild lands between Old Faithful, Hayden Valley, and Madison Junction. Remarkably, she held that leadership position until her death in December 2005 at the ripe old age of nine, when she was killed by members of the Gibbon Pack.
As the time approached to release Number 27, we were holding our breath, wondering what sort of goose chase she might have in store for us this time. In the early weeks, though, she stayed put, probably in part because her daughter had had a litter of pups of her own; like most adult females, 27 was likely unwilling to leave, wanting to do her part in the “extended child care” that’s such a mainstay of wolf society. Now made up of three generations, the pack slowly but surely moved across the park, traveling from one camp to another, finally landing north of Yellowstone Lake in the magnificent Hayden Valley. These base camps, known as rendezvous sites, are a kind of aboveground den—secure and secluded, perfect for stashing pups when they’re still too young to do much traveling. From these sites adults take turns hunting, bringing back nourishment for the young either as pieces of carcass or as food in their stomachs, while the rest of the group remains close by to watch over and play with the pups, spending hours enduring mock ambushes and having their tails yanked by some of the most playful, insistent children of the animal world. For those of us who follow wolves, sorting out pups is always an easy task. Most youngsters can’t manage a dozen steps before falling out of line and jumping into the air, as if firecrackers were exploding under their feet.
Pups do grow up, of course, by fall gaining enough maturity to travel with the older members of the pack. Soon Number 27 was off and running again—this time heading west, landing some fifty miles away near Dillon, Montana. Shortly afterward we got the news we’d feared all along: Sheep were dead in the area, and by all appearances 27 had something to do with it. This being her second offense, in October a helicopter took off from Dillon, Montana, with a gunner on board. Thirty minutes later, the great wanderer was dead.
To be honest, 27’s death gave me pause. She’d always shown the kind of independent streak that spoke of the wild, unfettered heart that wolves are both loved and hated for. I often imagined that we of the wolf project were to her nothing but a rotten nuisance, creatures intent on disrupting her desire to simply live in the wilderness on her own terms. As mentioned earlier, she growled at me one day in the Nez Perce pen—not something most wolves ever did. Beyond that, though, before we actually brought her to the Nez Perce site after that capture near Nye, Montana, we placed her alone for a short time in another holding facility, near Fishing Bridge. On the day we went into that pen to capture her for transport to the Nez Perce site, she lunged through waist-deep snow ahead of our nets, finally stopping to face us, teeth bared and growling. In that face, grizzled and gray with age, was the look of a beautifully fierce and resolute animal. The only wolf skull I have in my office in Mammoth is that of 27—a reminder of her incorrigible, incorruptible spirit.
The wolves with her at the time of her death, including her son, Number 29, were brought back to the Nez Perce acclimation pen for what was hoped to be a serious bout of rehabilitation. But Number 29 would keep alive the memory of his mother—in particular, her distaste for the Nez Perce pen—by applying some pretty clever tricks of his own. Of the thirty-one Canadian wolves reintroduced to Yellowstone during 1995 and 1996, Number 29 would have the distinction of becoming the only wolf to figure out how to escape from the acclimation pens. For the longest time we were clueless, hugely embarrassed by the thought that we’d placed him and his pack mates in a pen with a hole in it. Over and over we walked the enclosure, failing to find any flaw. Unlike his mother, rather than bolting once he was free of the pen, this little escape artist instead set about digging back under the fence to free his mates, at which point the whole gang took off for Dillon, where we had to recapture them. Desperate to hold these Houdinis, we decided to fortify the pen with an electric fence, only to have him give us the slip yet again.
Following this final jailbreak, the US Fish and Wildlife Service told us that given the group’s history of getting into trouble with livestock, if 29 and his mates left the park again they’d be shot at the border. On the other hand, if they behaved for a year the slate would be wiped clean. This seriously affected our approach to dealing with the pack, making us decide against capturing them the following winter for radio collaring for fear that it might cause them to range far afield—even though no data exist to suggest that it would. Besides, my bosses were strongly opposed to stressing them in any way. On one hand they didn’t want to risk the safety of the animals. At the same time, if the wolves did decide to leave the park they didn’t want people blaming the collaring operation for their departure. On making his last great escape, Number 29 headed not west but south, where for a time he joined up with other wolves, eventually becoming one of the founding members of the Gros Ventre Pack near Jackson, Wyoming. One day in the pen, long after 29 was gone, I happened to look up and see a small tuft of hair hanging high on the chain-link. Suddenly I got it. Incredibly, he’d jumped up ten feet to the overhanging panel at the top of the enclosure, dangling there by his teeth, pawing the air like a monkey until he was finally able to find purchase and scramble out.
It was a trick with serious consequences. The last time I handled 29, his canine teeth were all but gone, broken off to stubs during those inspired athletic moments hanging from the chain-link. Again, given that wolves make their living with their teeth, we worried that when it came to taking down elk he’d be severely compromised. But that didn’t seem to be the case. Over the years I’ve asked several wolf biologists how this animal could still function while missing the teeth responsible for grabbing, holding, and tearing the flesh of his prey. The usual answer is that the sheer force of a wolf’s jaw would by itself be enough to do the job—a force, by the way, with a crushing power of more than twelve hundred pounds per square inch (compared to roughly six hundred pounds per square inch for a large dog).3 Number 29 may have been reliant on other wolves from his pack to open up a freshly killed elk, tearing through the tough hide, but once that was done he could use the shearing action of his premolars and molars—carnassial teeth, unique to carnivores—to consume the prey. Then again, some of Number 29’s success may have had to do with simple determination. In my more than three decades of studying wolves, the animals never cease to impress me with how they almost never give up. I imagined 29 chasing and killing elk with his bum teeth as if nothing had changed at all.
Firmly establishing themselves on the west side of Yellowstone National Park, the Nez Perce wolves continued to show some of their old fondness for wandering. Having collared new members of the pack in subsequent years, we knew they left the park in winter, traveling widely, one time in early 2003 showing up on the National Elk Refuge near Jackson, Wyoming. Sooner or later they always returned, though, led by old Number 48, sometimes the entire group traveling together and at other times individual members dropping off to go their separate ways. Despite such flux the core group stayed intact, for the most part occupying the very heart of the territory that Number 27 fled back in 1996. During some years they would be the largest pack in the park, exceeding twenty animals.
If many of us with the wolf project tend to recall the early Nez Perce wolves for how they routinely exhausted us, they were a paid vacation compared to another group placed in this same pen in late 1996—wolves not a part of the original animals brought down from Canada. In the fall of that year, two alpha wolves from northwest Montana, near the town of Choteau—members of what was known in the area as the Sawtooth Pack—had been found killing cows. As a result they were removed from the population, making orphans of their ten pups. Not wanting to leave these youngsters in the field, where their lack of experience would almost surely doom them, we agreed to take them in here at Yellowstone. Personally I was uneasy with that decision, doubtful we’d be able to integrate the pups successfully into our existing population. But we made our best effort, placing them in a pen with two adult Nez Perce wolves in confinement for rehabilitation.
While in the pen everyone seemed to get along famously. Yet on release in March they immediately split up—the two Nez Perce wolves going one way, the ten pups another. Unfortunately, the severe winter that year caused elk and deer reproduction to be a virtual bust, with much of the national park absent of its usual abundance of spring elk calves and deer fawns—the one type of prey these inexperienced wolves might have been able to kill. So they turned to livestock. Through 1997 fully two-thirds of all sheep and cattle killed by wolves could be traced to these Sawtooth pups; as a result, most were eventually removed by control actions. In the end only two of the animals remained, Numbers 70 and 72, sole survivors of an experiment gone bad.
For all the problems the Nez Perce wolves gave us, in at least one sense their release can be considered a success. The Yellowstone wolf plan had always called for reintroducing family groups—again, part of an effort to ease anxiety and discontent in the animals, thereby reducing their urge to wander. But the disintegration of the Nez Perce Pack, whereby wolves left the acclimation pens and roamed alone, meant they eventually paired with other solitary wolves to form new packs. In the end Number 29 started the Gros Ventre Pack, while his siblings, Number 26 and Number 30, began the Washakie and Thorofare Packs, respectively. Including offspring from the original Nez Perce animals, these wolves produced seven litters of pups—a significant contribution to the restoration of wolves in greater Yellowstone.
In nearly every other pack the use of acclimation pens seemed to reduce movements following release, and at the same time, helped maintain familial ties. In fact, so well did things go in these early stages that while the original reintroduction plan called for releases over three to five years, in the end we needed only two. (There was some debate over whether a second year of reintroductions was even necessary; we ended up going for it, primarily to increase genetic diversity.) We were truly “ahead of schedule and under budget,” as the original wolf project leader Mike Phillips liked to say. And that was beautiful music to a lot of ears.
Portrait of a WolfNUMBER 10
Though his life was cut short in his prime, just weeks after walking out of the acclimation pen, Number 10 was arguably one of the most memorable wolves we’ve encountered. Outweighing nearly every other animal bound for Yellowstone, he was bolder, more confident than most—once again, markedly different from the very cautious Number 9. Veterinarian Mark Johnson recalls working with 10 at the holding facility near Hinton, Alberta. When it came time to administer a sedative, explains Johnson, which was accomplished by means of a syringe attached to the end of a long pole, the normal process was to try to distract an animal’s attention away from the needle. Most times this was easy, with some of the more timid wolves being so uncomfortable they hid their faces in bales of straw. Not so with Number 10, who never looked away, never blinked. That sort of poise and selfassurance is something a lot of wolf researchers, myself included, have a great deal of respect for; so it was that long before he hit Yellowstone, 10 had for many in the wolf project already become a favorite.
Like so much of his too-short life, 10’s walk out of the acclimation pen came with no lack of drama. The previous week we’d opened the pen gate to allow final release of the Crystal Creek wolves only to, as mentioned earlier, find them unwilling to leave. After much discussion, we decided to try to facilitate their movement out of the enclosure by cutting a hole elsewhere in the pen, in a place without such strong links to humans. We tested the idea on the Crystal Creek Pack, tossing a little incentive into the mix by way of a deer carcass placed just outside the freshly cut hole. Seventeen hours later, to our enormous relief, we picked up the signal from a motion detector placed near the opening, indicating the animals had at last departed. (We later discovered that either the wolves hadn’t left the pen at all, meaning the equipment had misfired, or if they did, they’d come back. Eventually we figured out that the animals were leaving at night, only to slip back in again during the day. Whenever we checked, they were in the pen, as if nothing was going on, but a quick scan of the area revealed tracks, some of which went straight to a winter-killed elk. Ultimately it would take the pack ten days to leave the pen for good.) Buoyed by our apparent success, we decided to launch a similar cutting operation at the Rose Creek pen, as those wolves seemed to be having similar doubts about abandoning the enclosure. A team of us gathered at the Buffalo Ranch and began loading cutting tools, camera equipment, and a partial deer carcass onto a sled for the mile-long hike north to the pen site.
It was cold that day, a time of year not quite winter and not quite spring, the minutes and hours pushed by gusty winds and clouded by curtains of snow. Just south of the pen, at the lip of a small rise, we stopped for a moment to take stock of the situation. Surprisingly, Number 9 was pacing nervously back and forth. That was strange, because at the approach of humans this very cautious wolf would almost always take refuge in the rear of the pen, in her so-called comfort zone. As we stood there trying to figure out what was going on, suddenly there erupted the most soulful, yearning howl imaginable—not from inside the pen, but behind us, on an open hillside just to the east. We peered through the falling snow to see bold, magnificent Number 10 standing there, looking right at us. “Like a ghost,” as one of the members described him. Clearly, this wolf had little of the reluctance to leave that others had displayed. More intriguing still was that he was hanging close by, waiting, possibly encouraging his newfound partner to take her own walk into the wilds. On one hand we were elated, very much caught up in the drama of the moment. But at the same time there was panic rising in our throats. What if our presence caused 10 to change his mind, abandon his mate to run off on his own across the frozen hills of Yellowstone? How fully bonded would two adults be who only ten weeks earlier were total strangers? Anxious to make tracks, we abandoned our plan of cutting a hole in the back of the pen, dropped the deer carcass near the gate, and then fumbled for a bit trying to figure out the least intrusive route out, finally choosing to hustle away down a sheltered ravine. All the while 10 was eying us, paralleling our route from a nearby ridge, howling. It was a startling, muscular show of authority, and it cut right through the bluster of that winter storm. We could hardly miss the message that seemed to be spilling out of his upturned muzzle: Number 10 wasn’t just free. He was back in charge.
The end came for this beautiful wolf soon afterward, on a warm day in April east of Red Lodge, Montana, when a local man armed with a borrowed rifle dropped him with a single bullet. The shooter—testifying that he thought he was aiming at a wild dog—was later found guilty of the federal offense of killing an endangered species and sentenced to six months in jail and the loss of hunting and fishing privileges for two years. It was barely a month into the reintroduction, and already we’d lost one of the stars of the show. For me the entire incident was a bad dream come true. The critics were right, I remember thinking at the time—we just couldn’t overcome hundreds of years of intense hatred toward wolves. To some people, as disturbing as the shooting itself was, more unsavory still was the reaction of a handful of locals who cheered the killing, calling it an act of heroism. A few suggested, and not entirely in jest, that it was just the sort of thing to make the guy an appealing candidate for governor.
For the rest of us, the memory of Number 10 lived on in his progeny—eight little wolves born to his mate, Number 9, laid down in a scrape of dirt under a Douglas fir tree, on the northwest flank of Mount Maurice. He remains in many ways an ideal icon of this reintroduction: both a symbol of the extraordinary strength of wolves—their ability to thrive if given half a chance—and at the same time, a reminder of how frail such vitality can be in the face of humans who would wipe them from the earth.