The Company of Wolves (32 page)

As long as wildness has a human dimension, we will argue over this. We may become astute technicians and learn to account for enough of the varied factors of landform and prey, migration barrier and weather to keep the red wolf out there. But behind it all there will always be computers ticking away, committees deliberating, biologists watching. For red wolves, at least, the wild of the future promises to be very different from the wild of the past.

The Sierra Vista Ranch house is a neat, white-stucco-sided building beside a tree-lined arroyo in the low, rugged hills of southern Arizona. The landscape is mesquite and cactus. A veranda looks north upon a sweeping view of the Altar Valley and the steep gray wall of the Baboquivaris. To the south are the low shapes of the Sierra Pozo Verde of Sonora, Mexico, to the east the Sierra San Luis. There is a huge vault of sky, with great white schooner clouds drifting over gray puddles of cloud shadow.

It is far from the city, from daily news and common convention. The space and silence set one apart, and the desert light seems to rob things of their substance. The hawk soaring overhead vanishes into the blinding light of the sun. The glimpse you get of the bobcat may only be its tail disappearing into the brush. The lizard you think you see scurrying over a rock may in fact be only the creature’s shadow. It is a place where definitions shift and arguments grow. Some of the
arguments are about wolves: whether there are any out there—and if there are, where they have come from.

Sitting on the veranda of the Sierra Vista Ranch house late on a summer afternoon in 1991, Joyce Vanelli heard a coyote howl. The sun had just gone below the hills behind the house. And when the coyote howled, Vanelli heard something else: “Something tried to join in,” and howl with the coyote, she said. “But it couldn’t. Something that could not have been another coyote tried to mimic the coyote. I couldn’t say it was a dog or a wolf.”

In October 1991, her hybrid wolf-dog, which was going into heat, ran off into the hills behind the ranch house. “She takes off all the time,” says Vanelli. “I went after her, because it’s a bad area in there for drug runners—they shoot dogs—so I went up the hill and down the other side.” She caught up with her dog and was bringing her back when, she says, “I heard the wolf howl. I definitely, definitely heard the beautiful sound of a wolf. He was calling her back.” She says she would have worked her way down through the brush to see the wolf, but didn’t because “I didn’t know what I would run into.”

Next April, Vanelli was driving along the dusty ranch road toward the highway to Sasabe. When she drives, she says, she looks at the ground along the road for Indian relics. She had stopped because she thought she saw some bits of pottery, and as she looked down, she saw the footprints of a large canid along the side of the road.

“It was a wolf,” she says with conviction. She had raised captive wolves in Utah. “I’ve been around these animals all my life. I lived with wolves for years and years and years. I know that had to be a big, big animal. It was running with a smaller animal, maybe a coyote. I got Dale, the caretaker at the ranch, and we went down together, and we saw where they had run a deer.” They backtracked the prints to a clump of mesquite where the wolf and its companion had come out onto the road.

She called the Buenos Aires National Wildlife Refuge, which borders the ranch. The refuge superintendent, the regional director from Albuquerque, and the leader of the Mexican Wolf Recovery Team all happened to be at the refuge that day, and they sent out a technician to take plaster casts of the tracks. But the technician didn’t take casts of the smaller print Vanelli said she had seen alongside
the large one. “People are strange,” says Vanelli. “These people at Buenos Aires are extremely uneducated about wildlife. They don’t get out—they sit behind a desk. They don’t see.”

It is not for lack of effort that refuge officials haven’t seen wolves. Steve Dobrott, biologist at the Buenos Aires Refuge, has photographs he took of wolf tracks on the Gray Ranch in New Mexico in 1984. And in 1990, a man cutting wood in the San Luis Mountains, just east of the refuge, reported that he had heard a wolf howl and that as it did so, his German shepherd crawled in fear under his trailer. He reported that he had seen the wolf, and its tracks. Says Dobrott, “He took me over to the wash and showed me the tracks. I couldn’t tell—they were washed out. But they were big. We went back there in the evening with the fire truck. I cranked up the siren. We got three coyote groups to howl back. When I went back to the man’s camp and told him I got coyotes to howl back, he said, ‘No, didn’t you hear that other thing?’ So we don’t know.”

Refuge officials have heard tales of wolves in the area for years. There are plenty to hear. Emma Mae Townsend, widow of locally famous wolf trapper Hack Townsend, recalls that just two years before, when Hack was still alive, he was sitting on the porch of his home in Arivaca, a few miles from the refuge, when he heard a wolf howl. “He howled back and it sounded just like a wolf, and he got a howl back. And then he hollered, ‘Emma, there’s a wolf down there at the dump!’ ”

Danny Culling, Emma Mae’s son-in-law, who works at the refuge, says he saw a wolf on the neighboring King Ranch with his father-in-law in 1985. He says, “There was a wolf spotted at Milepost Two, near Amado, a year ago,” by a surveyor for the U.S. Forest Service. Feliciano Lopez, a ninety-year-old rancher with a deeply furrowed desert-dweller’s face, says he heard wolves howl near Apache Wells the year before that. Carol Riggs, a Cochise County rancher, says she has watched wolves playing near Rucker Canyon.

And Dennis Parker, who studied wildlife biology in college and is now a wagon-maker in Patagonia just over the Santa Rita Mountains from Arivaca, carries around Ross Kane’s three glossy color photos that are to all appearances of a wolf crossing a road in the Canelo Hills of southeastern Arizona. Parker says he himself photographed
wolf tracks in 1984 in the Huachuca Mountains and saw scratches and tracks there again in April 1986. “I would say that, once we got out there in the wild and took a look, we’d find a lot more.”

But neither the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the agency charged under the Endangered Species Act with leading the effort to recover the Mexican wolf, nor the Arizona Department of Game and Fish is convinced there are wolves in the wilds of Arizona. Terry Johnson, nongame and endangered-species coordinator for the Arizona Department of Game and Fish and Arizona’s representative on the recovery team, says he has heard secondhand reports of sightings and heard about Kane’s photographs, but says neither the reports nor the photographs come to the department with enough supporting evidence to prove that there are wolves in the area. He declares, “There have been no documented occurrences of Mexican wolves in southern Arizona or in immediately adjacent northern Mexico during this last decade.”

It is not as if the agencies are closed to the possibility that the Mexican wolf survives in the wild. Says Johnson, “We have sight-record cards we will make available to anybody who is willing to submit them. We are ready to accept any documentation that people are ready to submit, and then try to follow them up as best we can. But we haven’t received any.” And if there are only sporadic sightings of wolves in Arizona, says Johnson, “there are not enough to call it a viable population in the northern part of the range.”

Canis lupus baileyi
was the name given by taxonomist Edward Goldman to the Mexican wolf, the southernmost subspecies of gray wolf, which ranged from southern Arizona and New Mexico south into central Mexico. It was a slightly smaller wolf, as might be expected of a desert subspecies—desert races tend to be smaller than races from higher, colder altitudes. While it was not, strictly speaking, a desert wolf, but inhabited the wooded uplands above the deserts, the deer it fed on are among the smallest races of white-tailed deer in North America. Dennis Parker speculates that the northern margin of its distribution ran roughly along the present route of Interstate Highway 10 across Arizona and New Mexico, for north of that line the blue oak of the Sierra Madre habitat ends and gray oak, more typical of the Mogollon Rim country, takes over. North of that line, he speculates, the territory belonged to the subspecies
mogollonensis
, a larger wolf that fed on the larger mule deer of the uplands. And east of the Continental Divide, the neighboring subspecies was said by Goldman to be
monstrabilis
. Little record of that subspecies exists, for it was eradicated before much collecting was done. Both genetic screening and morphological studies suggest that, if the red wolf is either a hybrid or a separate species,
baileyi
may be the oldest North American subspecies of gray wolf, a subspecies that moved farther south as later subspecies crossed the land bridge from Asia.

For thousands of years, the Mexican wolf roamed the mountains of northern Mexico and the southernmost edges of Arizona, New Mexico, and perhaps Texas. But a century of shooting and poisoning did the Mexican wolf in. The last “documented” wolf in New Mexico was a carcass found in the Peloncillo Mountains by trapper Arnold Bayne in 1970. Two wolves of undetermined origin were taken in Brewster County, Texas, in December of the same year. The last documented Mexican wolf in Arizona was probably taken a few years later near Aravaipa Canyon by a private trapper for a $500 bounty put up by local stockmen. In 1976, the Mexican wolf was declared an endangered species.

If there is no viable natural population of wolves left in the wild, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has, under the Endangered Species Act, a duty to recover them. Environmental groups have sued to press the service to reintroduce the Mexican wolf. Bobbie Holaday, who heads a 550-citizen group called Preserve Arizona’s Wolves, explains: “The wolf is a part of our southwestern heritage. It belongs back in the wild as part of the fabric of life. We have taken away the predators, and the wilderness areas are now void of the real essence of the wilderness, the howl of the wolf. We have saved thousands and thousands of acres of wilderness in Arizona, but we don’t have its essence. There is the wild spirit, and it’s in us all. All of us have this longing for complete freedom, and what better symbol or embodiment of that than the wolf?”

There is, she believes, also a purely ecological reason to restore wolves. “The wolf has a very, very important role in the ecosystem. It’s not just restoring one single species; we are trying to restore the whole fabric of life. We have taken it out of the ecosystem in areas where we now have ungulates seriously overgrazing. There are areas
in Arizona with burgeoning elk populations. There are some areas, like the North Kaibab, where there is a similar situation with deer. The animals are starving in winter.”

Holaday urges wolf reintroduction also because it may help to reverse a dangerous trend of extinctions. “We’re losing species so rapidly,” she says, “and we have to do something about stopping this. If we just keep letting species go right and left, sooner or later they’re going to come for us.” Eventually, she believes, the earth may cease to support human existence.

Says Holaday, “Biologically, there’s no reason not to reintroduce the wolf. There’s prey. There’s space. There’s water. People are the problem, and we have to do a lot of work to resolve that problem.”

Ranchers are the heart of the opposition to reintroduction. Jim Chilton, who owns two ranches near the Arizona-Sonora border, says, “The hard evidence shows a high propensity in wolves to eat beef.” If a wolf kills one of his cows, he wonders, will the government pay for the cow? What kind of proof will be required to get the government to pay? Will compensation be for the cow, or will it also pay for the time a rancher must spend riding the range looking for wolf tracks and missing cattle? If he sees a wolf killing his sheep or cows, must he call a federal animal damage-control agent to come deal with the problem, or can he shoot the wolf himself?

Ranchers fear also that reintroduction of wolves means restrictions on their use of private and public land, especially the federal lands they now lease to graze cattle. Already, 87 percent of Arizona is public land, and ranchers are seeing their grazing leases on Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management lands increasingly restricted. Ranchers fear that, if a wolf dens on a grazing lease, the area will be closed to grazing. Chilton purchased his two Arizona ranches in part because federal grazing leases came with them. There had been no wolves on the land for fifty years. If the government now introduces wolves, he says, it should be liable for any livestock losses and for any decreases in the value of the land he owns.