The Company of Wolves (3 page)

The gray female was a disperser, a wolf that had left her natal pack somewhere far to the north and gone wandering. In this mountainous environment, wolves may disperse as far as five hundred miles. It is still not well understood why they sometimes leave their packs. Perhaps this wolf was driven south by some inherited longing to breed and have her own pack, and couldn’t wait for the older females in her pack to die off. Perhaps she was chased out of her pack by more aggressive siblings. Perhaps she was simply not social enough to stick with the pack and one day drifted into the pines and never looked back. No one can say what may have led her south. Wolves tend to go where wolves have gone before. There are den sites and trails in the Arctic that have apparently been used continuously for centuries. Her journey may have followed paths taken by generations of wolves, or she may have followed the borders of existing wolf territories until she stopped where there was no fresh scent of other wolves. Perhaps she was led by an ingrained ability to recognize good country, by some inherited mental pattern of the relationship between slope and tree cover and meadow and lake surface that over the millennia programmed wolves to settle where deer or elk or caribou or bison would also find sustenance. For whatever reason, she came into the drainage of the North Fork of the Flathead River, on the northern edge of Montana, and there she stayed.

Why a lone wolf should have arrived in 1979, and not ten or twenty years before, may be easier to guess. Wolves had been persecuted in southern British Columbia and Alberta until the 1970s. They were poisoned until the 1960s, and no game laws restricted the hunting of wolves until the 1970s. In Alberta alone, more than fifty-four hundred wolves were destroyed in a rabies-control operation
between 1952 and 1956. Wolves had been exterminated even from Banff National Park. But the poisoning stopped, and by the 1970s wolves were beginning to reappear there. It is likely that the gray female came from at least as far away as Banff. Habitat change might have helped draw her south. When logging companies clear-cut large swaths of forest in southern British Columbia and Alberta in the 1970s, they opened up new habitat to white-tailed deer. The deer proliferated, offering the wolves a food source they may have found newly sustaining. And in northern Montana, a series of mild winters gave an additional boost to the white-tailed deer population.

For fifteen months after the wolf was trapped, the radio collar beeped out the solitary wolf’s locations in Glacier National Park and north of the border, in Canada. Skiing in winter or flying in small airplanes in summer, Boyd would locate the radio signal and plot the wolf’s movements on maps. Ream named the wolf Kishinena, after a creek in the northeastern corner of the park. From the airplane, Boyd occasionally saw the wolf, a gray shape loafing in the snow or heading for the cover of trees to hide from the airplane. “She was extremely elusive,” Boyd recalls. “Nobody ever saw her from the ground.
Nobody
. In winter, a lot of wolves, when they hit your ski tracks, will walk for a while in them, because it’s easier travel. She would never do that. When she hit your tracks, she would go back the way she came and go around them. Or she would jump over them.”

Still, Boyd was getting to know the wolf, and getting a feeling for her engagement with the wider world. One winter day, Boyd happened onto her tracks in the snow. Usually she backtracked such trails, lest she scare the wolf or accustom it to human presence. That day, she followed the tracks and came upon the carcass of a moose calf minutes after Kishinena had killed it. She didn’t see the wolf, but the carcass was still steaming. The wolf had gnawed a small hole between the ribs of the moose and was starting to pull the entrails out when it heard the skidding sound of Boyd’s skis and darted into the pines.

Realizing she had frightened the wolf away, Boyd took a quick look at the kill and left immediately. She waited four days before going back to the scene. When she got there, it was clear that Kishinena had not returned. Smaller tracks in the snow indicated that coyotes had eaten the moose calf.

She found that coyotes often trailed the wolf, and even urinated on the same rocks and tufts of grass the wolf marked as she traveled around her territory. They didn’t accompany the wolf, but regularly, if the wolf left a kill to go off and sleep in the woods, the coyotes moved in and finished it. “They kept her hungry,” says Boyd.

In July 1980, Kishinena’s radio collar stopped transmitting, probably because the batteries died. Unable to get the wolf to step into a trap so she could replace the batteries, Boyd concentrated her study on the radio-collared coyotes. Every once in a while, she would come upon the tracks of the wolf, and backtrack them. She found very few of Kishinena’s kills, and saw no sign of another wolf. There were reported sightings of a black wolf in the fall of 1981, but no one managed to snare or trap it, and its presence was so far simply a rumor. With no additional wolves, interest in Ream’s Wolf Ecology Project flagged, and by 1982 Ream’s funding had dried up. Boyd took a job as a fire lookout and stayed on the North Fork as an unpaid volunteer.

Then things changed suddenly. One overcast, ten-degree February morning in 1982, rangers Jerry Desanto and Steve Frye skied out from a patrol cabin in the northwest corner of Glacier National Park and crossed the fresh tracks of two wolves. They skied the four miles to Boyd’s cabin on the North Fork, near the Canadian border, to tell her about it. “I just dropped what I was doing,” says Boyd. She strapped on her skis and went out with Desanto and Frye to see the tracks.

They picked up Rosalind Yanishevsky, a volunteer bear researcher who was a winter neighbor, skied east along the international boundary to Sage Creek, and followed it south into the park. Along the creek, they struck the tracks of the two wolves. Desanto guessed that one set of tracks belonged to Kishinena, the only known wolf in the neighborhood, and the larger, accompanying tracks appeared to belong to a male. The male’s prints were distinctive: the outer toe on his left front foot was missing.

The wolves were clearly traveling together. It was midwinter, the time when courtship and mating occurs. Desanto told Boyd that he had seen places where the two wolves urinated in the same spot. That excited Boyd even more. She had seen such double markings in Minnesota and knew that courting males and females urinate over
each other’s marks in the snow. Not far down the track, they all saw double marking, the sign of two wolves bonding. This was a mating couple.

For two years, Boyd had been tracking a creature she seldom saw, and which, because it was alone, was biologically incomplete. “It seemed all along like such a natural place for wolves,” says Boyd. “But with only one, it seemed so bleak. These marks foretold a future for the wolves. I felt great excitement.”

There was something more. The trail of the wolves led them south on Sage Creek to its confluence with the North Fork. With Yanishevsky, Boyd followed the tracks north along the North Fork. They found that the wolves had passed just across the river from Boyd’s cabin and stopped for a long while, looking at the cabin as if considering at length something that was going on there.

After her two years of rare and sporadic sightings of the solitary wolf, Boyd was elated by the prospect that there might soon be a family. She was not to be disappointed. In June, Bruce McLelland, a Canadian biologist, drove up to a recently logged clearing in a remote part of the forest a few miles north of the international border and saw seven wolf pups. Boyd and Desanto hiked to the spot and found the litter. One gray pup poked along through the weeds and wild-flowers, and a second pup darted into the woods so quickly that she could not decide what color it was. The other wolves had already fled. She did not see any adults. She could not be certain that this litter was Kishinena’s, but she knew of no other wolf in the area. Both Boyd and Desanto were wildly excited.

With pups, the pair of wolves had become a pack, a complete and functioning unit of wolf society. When the pups were two months old, the three-toed male was accidentally killed in a bear snare. But the female successfully reared all seven pups without the male, and by winter the pack was traveling south across the international boundary. For the first time in a half-century, a family of wolves hunted, howled, and tested the winds of Glacier National Park.

The event pumped new interest and new funding into Ream’s Wolf Ecology Project, and Diane Boyd was again employed. She would hear of hunter sightings of the pack, and now and then she
would see their tracks. She never identified Kishinena or her tracks again, but eventually she would trap and radio-collar many of her presumed descendants. In 1984, a lone gray male Boyd believed was a member of this original litter was trapped and radio-collared. Boyd tracked him for two years as he wandered northeast to Waterton Park and south to Lake McDonald, and then circled back and found a mate in the vicinity of the Wigwam River, just northwest of Glacier National Park. Boyd guessed the female had dispersed from somewhere to the north. In 1985, McLelland caught a lactating female, probably one of the 1982 litter, put a radio collar on her, and released her. Boyd followed her back to the den, a few miles north of the Canadian boundary, and found a pack of thirteen wolves. That pack wandered back and forth across the international boundary. Boyd, Ream, and Mike Fairchild, who joined the project in 1984, named the group the Magic Pack, because it appeared and disappeared as if by sorcery. By the end of 1985, they estimated that there were fifteen to twenty wolves in Glacier National Park.

In 1986, the Magic Pack left Canada and denned in the park. It was the first known reproduction in Montana in over fifty years. That same year, the pair of wolves on the Wigwam River produced a litter a few miles north of the border. There were two packs to follow, Magic and Wigwam, and more wolves to trap. In summers, Boyd would set steel-jawed traps along unused park and national forest roads. The jaws of the traps were offset to minimize injury to the wolves, and Boyd checked the traps twice daily. The pups were not shy of traps, and Boyd was able to catch several and put radio collars on them. Though she found it relatively easy to trap adult females, the big feet of the large males would straddle the jaws of the traps, which would throw the feet out as they snapped shut. She collared only a few big males, but she trapped enough wolves to begin to know the social structure of the packs.

For fourteen years, Boyd kept the company of wolves. In summers, she would fly to locate radio-collared wolves and trap and radio-collar new ones. In winters, she would ski to tracks she had found by radio-tracking from the ground and backtrack. She generally would not follow the wolves on the ground, because she felt it important not to accustom them to humans. Wolves are legally hunted just across the border, in Canada, where they are not considered
an endangered species. In the United States, there are stiff penalties for those who harass or kill them, but they are nevertheless shot clandestinely by ranchers and outfitters who consider them dangerous to livestock or competition for hunters. Boyd didn’t want to let the wolves get used to her presence only to be shot by someone else. Besides, backtracking would reveal what the wolves had done. Boyd would find where they rested, where they played, and where they hunted. She would see their scent marks in the snow in winter, and scats and scrape marks, where they had scratched the dirt, by the sides of roads in summer.

Over the years, she followed hundreds of miles of wolf tracks in the snow. She seldom saw the wolves. What she saw regularly were impressions of wolf life stamped upon the ground in a kind of code, the individual unit of which was the footprint. A wolf’s paw is much bigger than a dog’s, and Boyd could not completely cover a large one with her whole hand. A wolf print shows four big toe pads, each larger than a human thumbprint, and a big triangular heel pad behind them. There may be claw marks, but wolves tend to wear down their claws traveling, and prominent claw marks are more characteristic of dogs. The toes of dogs tend to splay outward, whereas wolf toes and claw marks tend to point ahead, as if the wolf were more focused on its goals. The footprints in the snow or the soft mud of a little-used dirt road telegraphed meanings the way letters cluster into words and sentences on a page of print. Here, where a wolf ran, prints were far apart, and the toes dug in. There, where a wolf walked, they settled down close and left even impressions all around the edges. Big wolves left deep impressions, younger animals daintier prints. A shallow depression showed where a wolf slept, or sat and scratched. Here they passed in single file through the deep snow of a winter meadow. There a playful wolf jumped out of ambush on an unsuspecting companion. Here a pack moved along a seldom-used dirt track at the edge of the park, focused and businesslike as it left scent marks and scats to notify other wolves that this territory was taken. Boyd could read the passage of wolves as if their images still hovered over the ground.

She often thus reconstructed hunts. One day, she and Ream were skiing on the Magic Pack’s trail in British Columbia. The wolves had been trotting along in single file when they suddenly veered off the
path they had taken. From the way the tracks turned, Boyd guessed they had scented a small herd of elk some distance away, in a clearing below a forested ridge. The wolves moved quickly through thick timber. Before they reached the end of the timber, the wolves began to lope. The elk, less than a hundred yards away, had probably not yet detected their approach. The wolves were running when they burst through the timber and into the clearing. The elk fled toward the opposite side of the clearing, but the snow was deep, and the wolves made directly for a cow elk that was having difficulty breaking a trail through it. The chase was short; they brought her down within a few yards. There was little sign of struggle. By the time Boyd and Ream arrived, all that was left was the skeleton, part of the face, and tatters of meat on the ribs. Ravens had already begun to pick the carcass clean.