CHAPTER 6
Most days it begins before dawn. Cars creep through the murky light, rolling in from Cooke City or Silver Gate, or from the opposite direction, perhaps Roosevelt Lodge, parking at various "hot spot" viewing areas in the Lamar Valley along the northeast entrance road. Drivers and passengers, tightly bundled, climb out into mornings that can be frosty even in summer, cups of coffee and spotting scopes in hand, exchanging quiet greetings with people they met in this very same place just yesterday, or the week before, or the week before that. Meanwhile those not yet ready to greet the day, mostly younger children, snooze away in the cars under blankets, soon to be roused as the first wolves or even grizzly bears come into view. By mid-morning the crowd will thin somewhat, only to reassemble for yet another hard look later in the evening.
Biologists have hardly been the only ones watching wolves in Yellowstone. So too have come visitors by the thousands, some for literally months at a time, creating what can only be called a full-blown wildlife-watching phenomenon. Almost from the beginning, summer was a busy time for wolf watching, especially in the Lamar Valley, and within a couple years the winter months had grown more popular, too. Now, sixteen years after the reintroduction started, the so-called shoulder seasons—those months sandwiched between summer and winter, and historically the slowest time in Yellowstone—are also drawing crowds. It’s truly a world community, with people arriving not just from across America, but Canada, England, Germany, Portugal, Sweden, Norway, Japan, Australia, and Italy.
Amazingly, a study conducted in 2005 estimated that some two hundred thousand people were seeing wolves in Yellowstone every year, making it hands-down the best place on Earth to observe these animals in the wild. To put this into context, Rick McIntyre describes a good day of wolf watching in Alaska’s Denali National Park, where he spent fifteen summers, as seeing a single wolf for five minutes perhaps three miles away, only to then have it disappear over a ridge. “Compare that to Yellowstone,” he says, “where for much of the year you can watch the same wolves over and over, often following them through their entire lives.”
For those who’ve been peering through the spotting scopes, an unforgettable aspect of such encounters is the wolf’s eyes, which can seem to look right through you. They are the eyes of something untamed, of a creature either unwilling or unable to divorce itself from the wild. On so many days we humans seem insatiable, determined to cobble together a fantasy in which there’s nothing we can’t have, can’t own. But to a lot of wildlife watchers the wolf defies all that, standing as a link to the kinds of mysteries that lie well outside our pipe dreams of manipulation and control. Seeing a wolf in the wild can feel like one of the final frontiers of nature—a frontier that can never be possessed. What incredible fascination such meetings often bring.
By the time we were three years into the reintroduction, the watchers were following wolves around like teenagers dogging rock stars. Stories were being traded—both about individual animals as well as the histories of the packs. Observations became ever more sophisticated, organized so that whenever a wolf was spotted it was only a matter of minutes before those looking for them up and down the Lamar Valley coalesced. Almost everyone involved in this project has stories of seeing people break down in tears on seeing a wolf in its natural habitat for the first time. More than a few have declared the experience to be among the most important of their lives.
At the same time, numerous dignitaries have come to Yellowstone to see wolves, including President Bill Clinton, Secretary of the Interior Bruce Babbitt, Montana congressman Pat Williams, and George W. Bush’s 2000 campaign manager, Joe Albaugh, not to mention directors of various government agencies from around the country. So too have come celebrities, from Tom Brokaw to Cameron Diaz, from Ted Turner and Jane Fonda to Sheena Easton and Ed Asner, from Sports Illustrated supermodel Rebecca Romijn-Stamos to rapper DMX. In truth it seems we’re always fielding calls from people of note who want to see wolves. Many later tell us that the chance to watch wolves in the wild, an experience that somehow feels exceptionally real, gave them a much-needed respite from the distractions of daily life. Rapper DMX, or just “X” as he’s often called, was stunned on coming to Yellowstone and seeing both grizzly bears and wolves. “I didn’t even know this existed,” he told me, going on to say that he loved it, that the experience changed his entire point of view.
Having come from what was for the most part solitary research on Isle Royale, walking five hundred miles to see maybe a single wolf, at first I tended to avoid the buzz and clutter of Yellowstone’s roadside gatherings. One day, though, I was out with the crowds in the Lamar Valley, when sure enough a wolf began crossing the road. (By this time we’d figured out the main crossing zones for the animals and had closed them to human entry, not even allowing vehicles traveling the highway to stop.) The excitement was building. As I peered through my spotting scope, something in the foreground caught my eye. A man in a wheelchair was the closest person to the wolf, and as the animal crossed the road, it paused to gaze directly at him, offering one of those rare, altogether unforgettable feelings of being connected to the wild. From where I stood I could see what the encounter meant to him. He was truly moved. And that, in turn, moved me. From that day on I’ve been much less of a snob about roadside wolf watching. Here were wolves giving back to people, sharing with us something that seems increasingly precious in this exceedingly prescribed, prepackaged world.
Not just tourists, but people I meet throughout the year, from every walk of life, have shown a deep fascination for wolves. In 1997 I was in Dillon, Montana, to capture a rogue wolf pack that had been killing sheep in the area. As it happened a biologist on the Beaverhead National Forest had come onboard to help; he took to the work easily, ultimately helping us to process five animals. As we loaded the wolves for the trip back to Yellowstone, he asked me to please call him should we ever need more help. It had been, he said quietly, one of the five best days of his life. The return trip to Yellowstone meant first driving to the Dillon airport, where we’d staged the capture operation. On first arriving, I’d been on the receiving end of some less than enthusiastic comments from locals, grumbling loudly about “them sons-of-a-bitchin’ wolves.” After the capture, though, with wolves actually in tow, some of the same men were falling all over themselves trying to get a look. I paused for a few minutes to give them a good view. The scorn and the sneer had gone right out of them. “Wow, would you look at that one … Look at those eyes—they look right through you, don’t they? … Hey, that one’s wakin’ up!” It was much like what had happened when we first brought wolves through the park from Canada. While we were transporting animals in their shipping containers, people ran up and posed beside the crates, asking to have their photos taken—this, even though the wolves weren’t visible, caged behind aluminum slats. Like them or not, these animals have proven themselves a wild version of highly charismatic people, lives of the party at every party they attend.
For the past many years, key to a lot of people’s wolf-watching experience has been Rick McIntyre—the masterful Pied Piper of the wolf watchers, a volunteer for part of the year, then a project employee in seasonal months—who is unlikely to miss even a single day in the field. Rick adds important structure to wolf-watching events, controlling in largely unseen ways crowds of well-meaning people who can get totally caught up in the frenzy—forgetting that wolves are wild animals, oblivious even to traffic on the northeast entrance road. I remember one cold winter night having dinner with him near my home in Gardiner, Montana, on the northern edge of the park, when a nasty storm blew in and snow began to fall. Rick refused all offers to stay over, even though reaching his home on the other side of Yellowstone meant crossing the park in truly awful weather. The Druid Peak Pack had been missing, he explained. He was counting on driving home through the Lamar with his radio collar receiver on, maybe catch the signal that might announce their return. Only then would he feel fully prepared for the next day of wolf watching. Stationed at Silver Gate, Montana, along the remote northeastern corner of the park, he’s been known to go months without driving to town. Even getting him to park headquarters for meetings can be trying, as he’s reluctant to miss a single moment when something might happen with the wolves.
“Imagine if you were a historian,” Rick offers. “And by some strange circumstance you had the chance to go back in time and be witness to a really important era, maybe spend time next to Abraham Lincoln in the White House. Think of all the things you’d want to learn about, the questions you’d want to have answered.” When it comes to American conservation, he believes this wolf reintroduction will be seen by future generations as having enormous significance. Rick says that on most days he has the old phrase “carpe diem” running through his head—seize the day. “This is an incredible privilege,” he explains. “I’m always aware of that, always motivated to be here.” Thus far, Rick’s compiled more than four thousand single-spaced pages of field notes on the Yellowstone wolves—three times more material, he points out, than found between the covers of the Bible.
He sometimes compares his enormous popularity with wolf watchers to what it might’ve been like to be a tour guide in London in the 1960s, helping people catch glimpses of The Beatles. “Where else could a government employee be so warmly received?” When I visit him in the field, always with crowds of people around, one of his favorite pranks is to use his telemetry receiver as a “bureaucrat finder”—waving the antennae wildly, letting it come to rest near where I’m standing, then adjusting the receiver so it screeches loud with feedback. “Looks like we found one,” he quips. Beyond making sure things stay orderly in the melee of wolf watching, Rick provides us with vital information about individual wolves and pack sizes, as well as wolf interactions with elk, grizzly bears, and coyotes. He regularly spots for us during capture operations, often calling in wolf locations at first light.
Not surprisingly, the economic impact of wolf watching has been impressive. Studies prior to the reintroduction estimated wolves would bring in annually about 23 million dollars to communities surrounding the greater Yellowstone ecosystem1; though we can’t yet affix a firm figure to it, early signs are that the numbers may be bigger still.2 Several new businesses have sprouted up to serve the demand for guides, while a few old ones on hard times have discovered an eager client base for wolf-watching safaris. (It’s worth noting that in the Boundary Waters Canoe Area, some outfitters sell out dogsled trips based on a guarantee not to actually see a wolf, even to hear one howl, but merely to see a track.) Of course most wolf watchers stay in motels, eat out, and end up buying everything from warm clothes to spotting scopes to souvenirs—often at times of the year when visitors have traditionally been few and far between. As Mike Phillips points out, the idea of gray wolf recovery in Yellowstone—which has been around since the 1940s—started gaining a lot of steam in the 1980s. By 1992 the handwriting was on the wall, and certain forward-looking businessmen moved to take advantage of it.
But not everyone’s pleased. A primary engine of the former wolf free economy was hunting on national forest lands surrounding the park, and some people maintain wolves will all but ruin that. Compared to hunters, they complain, who are known to lay down thousands of dollars for a weeklong elk hunt, wolf watchers aren’t big spenders. Yet there are still plenty of unknowns about all this. We’ve no clue, for example, how many fewer people are actually coming to hunt because of a perceived loss of game. Nor can we say how many sportsmen are day hunters, taking cow elk in winter, compared to the more costly quest for bulls in autumn.
Still, there can be another downside to having wolves so visible. The most easily seen wolves in the world, after all, are also the ones most exposed to people. So far we’ve been lucky, having had only four animals displaying what could be called habituated behavior—pulling food from garbage cans, walking toward people instead of away from them, circling cars stopped on the roadways. Thus far every habituated wolf we’ve seen in Yellowstone has been a young animal with time on his hands. The chores of the pack—defending territory, mating, killing elk, reinforcing the social hierarchy—tend to fall on the shoulders of older animals. A young wolf with everything provided for him, at the bottom of the pecking order, may out of a combination of curiosity and boredom decide to occupy his time with a little people watching.
It’s certainly true that wolves almost never attack people. In those few instances when they have, it usually involved people feeding them, which over time can make them lose some of their natural fear of humans. (Six of the fewer than twenty bites that have happened were on the Alaska pipeline, where workers routinely fed wolves handouts from their lunches.) We know Yellowstone visitors have given food to wolves on at least two occasions, though of course the real number is probably a lot higher. One time people were seen pulling up to two animals on the side of the road and tossing food out; as the wolves approached, the driver snapped a couple photos and hurried off. Wolves crossing roadways may also walk by people, and some watchers have had a hard time resisting the urge to move in close for pictures. At other times a pack might make a kill at night close to the road, which by first light begins to draw crowds. On the plus side, people like Rick McIn-tyre—as well as increasingly knowledgeable visitors—are helping us keep people at safe distances, sometimes moving to observation knolls slightly farther away in order to not influence wolf behavior. Such caution can seem even more important when you stop to think that a young wolf in the Lamar Valley could conceivably end up dispersing to locations outside the park—lands with small towns and livestock and pets. Helping a wolf maintain its wariness here in Yellowstone might be what keeps it alive in years to come.
The Park Service has a new message concerning the feeding of wildlife, and a blunt message it is: “You feed them,” the warning goes, “we kill them.” Indeed, in 2009 we were forced to kill a wolf people had been feeding near Old Faithful; we then had to kill another one, in 2011, near Fishing Bridge. To be clear, it’s not that wolves are merely habituated to humans that get them into trouble, but that they’ve been food conditioned by handouts. With an animal as smart as a wolf, or for that matter, a bear, that conditioning takes a remarkably short amount of time.
There’s a great riddle about all this that people like to chew on now and then over cups of coffee: Why are wolves by nature afraid of people in the first place? Any one of them, after all, could make short work of any one of us. In the course of my own work, I’ve actually driven a mother wolf from her den to reach the pups—an intrusion she met by hustling away with her tail tucked between her legs. I also once mistakenly approached a kill before the wolves were finished with it, only to see the entire group scurry off in fear. Such cautious behavior may be related to the fact that we’ve long been killing them, thereby ingraining a level of cultural fear. Wolves on Isle Royale have been protected for over fifty years, yet they still flee whenever they see a person. On the other hand, in some remote locations where wolves never experienced persecution, they show little fear of people, often coming very close. Yet they also show no aggression, seeing humans as neither prey nor threat.
The first thing we’ll do with a wolf losing its sense of caution is to watch it carefully, noting its behavior. At the same time we try to make sure responsibility for staying separated isn’t laid entirely on the wolf—that the people are also behaving. It should go without saying that one should never closely approach wolves, avoiding them whenever possible. And of course feeding them—or any other wild animal, for that matter—is about as blatantly irresponsible as you can get. If a wolf continues to show habituated behavior, we’ll first harass it in a way that doesn’t cause injury—typically with rubber bullets or loud, sharp explosives called cracker shells. So far, we’ve never had to go beyond this stage. In the end the offending animals left these risky behaviors of youth, becoming as adults far more wary. If necessary, though, our final step would be to remove the wolf from the wild by killing it. Again, if things ever progress to this point, it’ll surely not be all the wolf’s fault. But the people who helped cause the behavior will be long gone, leaving the wolf to pay for the problem with its life. What’s more, should a wolf ever bite somebody in this, one of the most well-known parks in the world, all the terror of Little Red Riding Hood—still clearly simmering in parts of the culture—will come flooding back.
Curiously, we’ve got a different situation around Yellowstone National Park headquarters at Mammoth, where hundreds of employees live. Here resides a fairly tame elk herd that spends much of the year in and around people—if not exactly for their company, then at least for the lawns they keep. In recent winters wolves have figured out that they can take these animals, and that’s been a little disturbing to some of the residents. Typically the wolves move in under the cover of darkness, and on a few occasions people have looked out their windows to see the animals walking right through their backyards. Meanwhile the family dog either goes wild or, just as likely, turns strangely quiet and passive. Whether wolves in your yard is thrilling or deeply troubling depends on your perspective.
Several times wolves have killed elk close to these same housing areas, including once in the yard of the elementary school. Another time an elk was taken near a restaurant, leaving blood on the steps and sidewalk. Again, some people were excited, some weren’t. The difference between this situation and those of our earlier discussion is that these wolves aren’t habituated, choosing to always flee at first light or with any sign of humans. The park’s response has been to inform residents how to minimize the chances of an encounter: being careful with food; understanding that because dogs can be perceived by wolves as potential rivals it’s important to keep them on a leash and bring them in at night; not to run if approached by a wolf.
Even in the research community, not everyone’s pleased about how easy it is to see wolves in Yellowstone. Veteran Canadian wolf biologist Lu Carbyn once commented that Yellowstone has changed the face of the wolf mystique. It used to take tremendous effort to see a wolf, he explained, and now here was Yellowstone, where a person could drive out and find them anytime he wanted. Lu seemed to be suggesting that something was lost, that making the experience of wolves an everyday occurrence, as opposed to something rare as it had been in the “old days,” wasn’t necessarily a good thing.
Many of North America’s best biologists have a great keenness for the wolf research conducted from roughly the late 1930s through the 1970s—an era defined both by an unspoken passion for the wolf itself, as well as by a string of hearty, patient men willing to make long and determined treks by snowshoe through the remote lands of Canada, Alaska, Minnesota, and Wisconsin. Men like Sigurd Olson and Adolph Murie; Durward Allen, Dave Mech, and Doug Pimlott; Lu Carbyn, John Theberge, Rolf Peterson, and Paul Paquet; Vic Van-Ballenburghe, Robert Stephenson, George Kolenosky, and Gordon Haber, to name a few. It was a time of strong traditions. A period when “wolf meetings” consisted not of two or three hundred people flocking into a convention center, as happens today, but rather a small cadre of biologists huddled around a woodstove in some remote cabin in the North Woods. My own professional work with wolves began toward the end of this era, and as a young upstart, I was well aware of what a privilege it was to be standing in such proud company. Yet even with all that, I’m more convinced than ever that the visibility of Yellowstone’s wolves is by and large a good thing. In fact from where I stand, this unpredicted visibility seems arguably one of the best reasons to have brought wolves back.
The vast majority of what people experience of nature these days, after all, comes from television. And maybe it’s there where Lu’s concerns are most fully realized. Entertaining, and even educational, as it may be, television flattens wildlife watching—purging the physical discomforts, removing all the time normally spent waiting for something to happen. Every inconvenience is left behind on the cutting room floor. The result is often a kind of tepid album of greatest hits, a nonstop string of events that even most of us working in the field see only a handful of times in our lives. While it’s true that wolves show themselves frequently in Yellowstone, their appearance is nonetheless still in the context of the larger wild preserve—uncut, unedited. A person has to at least be willing to make direct contact with nature, to experience an unfolding of life that goes far beyond the animal he’s come to see. In that sense wolf watching in Yellowstone is an experience of nature much as it’s always been.
It’s hard to deny that many people who’ve thrilled to seeing wolves in Yellowstone will go home a little more thankful for the wild tapestry of life still sprouting across the American West. Some will even come to understand that if you care about wolves, then you absolutely must care about things like winter range for their primary prey base, the elk, which outside of federal lands is being lost at a frightening rate. Wolves, in other words, for some are the way “back in” to the kind of relationship with nature long considered a fundamental aspect of American identity. The sight of wolves running like the wind through the Lamar Valley, or sliding down snowfields in fits of play, or even sleeping away a summer afternoon in the tall grass, can be a remarkable touchstone to that which makes our lives and our culture just a little more fascinating, a little more rich with wonder.
Portrait of a WolfNUMBER 14
She was the youngest and least known of what we sometimes call the heroine wolves, the mystery of her life deepened by having lived in some of the most remote lands anywhere in the Lower 48. Her number was 14, a member of the Soda Butte Pack, so named for a nearly extinct hot spring vent standing near their release site at the east end of the Lamar Valley. Number 14 arrived in the second of two wolf shipments from Canada that took place in 1995 (as did Number 10, who joined 9 and her yearling daughter at Rose Creek), carried to the pen with little pomp or fanfare. Unlike 9, who blessed the ecosystem with eight little ones in May of 1995, only one of 14’s pups survived that year—a female known as Number 24, born northeast of Yellowstone in the rugged folds of the Stillwater Canyon.
It was the following year, though, when her life took a major turn. In 1996 she denned on a private thirteen-thousand-acre ranch north of Yellowstone Park, near the small village of Roscoe, Montana. She and her mate, Number 13, were in many ways model citizens, never once preying on livestock, despite there being an abundance of it all around. Even many of the ranch cowboys were fond of her, one commenting to me that it was really nice to see her out there with the elk. Some of the neighbors, though, thought otherwise. After receiving numerous death threats to the pack, we made the decision to launch yet another capture effort, relocating what had by then grown to four adults and four pups, in hopes they’d find homes on less contentious ground. This time, rather than the pups being squirreled away in a jumble of talus, as 9’s offspring had been, they were deep inside a burrow. To retrieve them, Mike Phillips crawled into a dark hole with flashlight in hand—an intrusion the little ones, at this point about six weeks old, met with their game faces on, growling and being just as fierce as they could be.
Once back in Yellowstone for the summer—again, placed in an acclimation pen to cool whatever urge they might have to run back to the same place—we set them free in October of 1996. Their new home was to be a long ways from just about everything, along the wild and remote southeastern arm of Yellowstone Lake. Helping us out that day was then-director of the US Fish and Wildlife Service, Jamie Clark, who’d been a good friend to the late Mollie Beattie. Indeed Jamie pretty much picked up where Mollie left off, both having proven themselves strong supporters of wolf recovery. After working long and hard on a never-ending list of bureaucratic challenges in Washington DC, Jamie found the hands-on labor of turning wolves loose into the wild enormously satisfying.
For a good year the eight-member family thrived, with 14 giving birth in 1997 to a litter of pups near the shores of beautiful Heart Lake. By this time 14’s mate, Number 13, was well past old age. Even at the time of initial release, he sported a coat that had gone from black to a bluish gray, leading us to nickname him “Old Blue.” He was also extremely cautious. While still in the acclimation pen, at the first hint of our approach Old Blue was the only animal to make a beeline for the safety of one of several doghouses we’d placed in the pens. Given that shy nature, we were a bit dumbfounded when on release he suddenly gained his courage, displaying all the confidence of an alpha male. By February of 1997, though, Blue was often seen struggling behind the pack. The next month his collar began emitting the fast, steady signal we call mortality mode, or just “mort mode,” indicating that he’d finally died. Old Blue blasted the average four-to five-year life span of a Yellowstone wolf out of the water, making it to the wholly ancient age of 11.9. (On average females live four months longer than males; the longest lived females we know of are 7 and 42, who lived to be eight years old, though that record may soon be broken by two wolves born in 1996—44 and 48—still going strong.) Though we didn’t yet know it, shortly before his passing Blue had bred with 14 one last time.
Following the death of her mate, in a move no scientist I’ve ever spoken to has ever seen or heard of, 14 simply took off. Leaving her home territory at Heart Lake, parting from both her pups and yearlings (this in itself is extraordinary), she wandered westward through the snow, crossing terrain so inhospitable it contained not a single track of another animal. Through a combination of tracking from the air, as well as actually following for miles her prints on the ground, we finally located her on the Pitchstone Plateau—standing alone on an empty, windblown slope. She halted momentarily, peering at the airplane as we circled, then simply resumed her journey, traveling west for another fifteen miles. Shortly afterward our tracking record grew incomplete, leaving us unsure just where she roamed. After about a week she returned to her own territory, reuniting with her family. Though no one wanted to say 14 traveled alone so far because she was mourning the loss of her mate, some of us privately wondered.
Normally we try to retrieve the carcass of a wolf right away, thereby giving ourselves a better chance of determining the cause of death. But Number 14 and her offspring remained very close to the place where Old Blue died, denning in a nearby cave in April of 1997—one of the few such den sites in all of Yellowstone. Not wanting to disturb the pack, we waited—months, as it turned out—until the family finally left the area the following August. As you might guess, by the time we recovered Old Blue’s radio collar there was little left of his carcass. Yet his radio collar was well chewed—a sign, perhaps, of what may have been his last contribution to a litter of teething little pups.
Following 14’s long sojourn, the pack carried on, though without their alpha male. A lack of snow in the fall of 1997 put a major delay on the annual elk migration down from the high country, the herds not fleeing the weight of winter until well into December. When the snows finally did come that year, and the elk began moving southeastward toward the park border, the Soda Butte wolves moved right along with them—in the process crossing into territory occupied by the Thorofare wolves. Not surprisingly, that intrusion led to a battle. While at eight animals the Thorofare Pack had numbers equal to Soda Butte, only two of their wolves were adults, compared to four mature animals in the trespassing pack. With the odds clearly in their favor, the Soda Butte wolves first killed Number 35, the Thorofare alpha male. Later, walking around the site, following tracks and studying the blood-soaked snow, we began piecing together the fight. Number 35 had been caught on the ice along the shores of Yellowstone Lake, eventually coming to a log where the wind had sculpted snow into a small cavern. It was here he made his last stand, crawling into the cavity and using it as a kind of backstop. It must have been a grisly battle, as evidenced by the fact that we found nothing but hair, urine, and blood; the alpha’s radio collar lay on the snow, no hint of the wolf that wore it. This lack of remains left us wondering if the Soda Butte wolves consumed him, though that would be rare, as typically wolves don’t eat their rivals. I was so intrigued by the scene that I later returned on horseback, trying again to locate some sign of 35. There was nothing.
While Thorofare’s alpha male was being dealt the death card, his mate and the rest of the pack were on the run, heading south, at one point turning up Escarpment Creek. It was a place we’d never seen them before, and probably with good reason, given that the drainage dead-ends at the base of a ten-thousand-foot plateau known as the Trident. Perhaps because they were unfamiliar with the terrain, at one point the wolves traversed a narrow chute, triggering an avalanche. When the rumble finally stopped, alpha female Number 30 and a lone pup were gone, swallowed by a river of snow. A week later we visited the site, digging into debris well over our heads—all the while hearing the radio collar beeping somewhere below in the icy rubble, but never managing a recovery. The following summer we rode in on horseback some thirty-two miles from Ninemile Trailhead, finally locating their skeletons at the foot of a small waterfall, shrouded in the lavender blooms of harebells.
With one brief, fierce battle Number 14 and the Soda Butte wolves had managed to claim a territory of massive proportions, stretching some forty miles from the southern shores of Yellowstone Lake all the way past the park’s southern boundary into the Bridger-Teton Wilderness. It was the largest territory of any wolf pack in the ecosystem. While in summer two or even three groups of wolves could sustain themselves here without much trouble, so harsh is the region during cold months that all but about two hundred elk leave for friendlier winter ranges—some heading to lands located south and east of the park, others traveling northeast all the way to the Lamar Valley.1 During the winter of 1998, the Soda Butte wolves (eventually renamed the Delta Pack) made a trek to the National Elk Refuge just outside Jackson Hole, Wyoming, where typically some five to ten thousand elk are found. They lingered for a while but chose not to settle in, even though one of the packs in that area was headed by 14’s daughter, Number 24—the lone little pup to survive back in the spring of 1995 in the Stillwater Canyon. For reasons only they can know, 14 and her kin instead headed back to those inclement lands of southern Yellowstone, where they would spend most of the next several years.
Calamity struck again in April of 2000. On a routine tracking flight along the south edge of Yellowstone Lake, near where 14 had been released after being removed from that ranch near Roscoe, Montana, we found her dead, a golden eagle already on site and beginning to feed on her body. Bedded down nearby were her pack mates, one of which was an adult male we’re quite sure had bred with her, bringing the promise of pups to the pack for the first time since 1997. A hundred yards away was a dead moose, partially consumed. Examining the carcasses, putting the clues together, it seemed clear that both predator and prey had died in the same great battle. Number 14 was six years old. On a later overflight our pilot saw a grizzly bear covering her body with debris, as bears will often do to keep scavengers away, protecting the carcass as if it was his own kill.
We discussed hiring a helicopter to retrieve her, as we did with the Thorofare wolves that had died in that earlier battle—both to confirm the circumstances of her death, as well as to see if she was pregnant. But we were unlikely to learn much from such a recovery trip, given that scavengers had already begun to consume her, obscuring the forensic details. Much of my reason for wanting to go get her was sentimental. Besides having known her intimately since her arrival in Yellowstone, this was a wolf that spent much of her life roaming the wildest, deepest reaches of the ecosystem. Many a time in winter I’d watched her leading her pack, usually some forty or fifty feet ahead of the next animal in line, steadily pushing through the deep snow. It was hard for me to lose her, to let her go without knowing the details of what had happened, quite possibly to never find her remains. In the end, though, I simply couldn’t justify the trip.
The following summer I climbed aboard my horse, Amos, and headed for the Delta to find what was left of her. Not surprisingly, little was waiting for me but bone and hide. I found too the dead moose she’d been battling with, also entirely consumed by scavengers. Yet the trek proved worth the effort. Examining the scant remains, I discovered that since the last time I’d handled 14 she’d broken her leg and it had mended itself. The bone hadn’t healed straight, there was a slight bend to it now, but it was nonetheless solid. Watching her numerous times from the airplane, I was never able to detect anything wrong with her. I knelt one last time by her tattered carcass, feeling the quiet of this extraordinary spot in the Yellowstone backcountry. A slight breeze came up, fingering the tall summer grass. As I looked around, all in all it seemed a beautiful place to come to rest.
Wolf Number 44, born into the original Soda Butte Pack in 1996, was still alive in early 2005, somehow making a living in these lonely folds of the Wyoming backcountry; she finally died later in the year. Meanwhile 126 went on to succeed Number 14 as the alpha female of the Delta Pack, producing several litters of pups of her own. The year 2005 may have also been her last; it was then she simply vanished, lost to the wild heart of Yellowstone.