The Company of Wolves (35 page)

Dr. Steven Fain is perhaps a little less sanguine than Newton. “We have genetic variation,” he says. “We don’t have much to work with. This is an example of a very, very genetically depauperate species.” He describes what is happening. Of twelve specific DNA sequences identified in two of the founder wolves, only six were passed to the next generation. In the next pairing, he found seven variations, but one offspring only inherited one of them, and another inherited five. “The variation is still there,” he says, “it’s just averaged over a larger number of individuals.” Careful breeding may conserve enough of the genes for the wolves to survive.

When Fain looked at the same DNA segments in the Ghost Ranch and Aragón Zoo wolves, he found that the Ghost Ranch line had more variability than the McBride wolves. He concluded that
bringing the Ghost Ranch and Aragón lines into the breeding program could double the genetic variability of the Mexican wolf.

Whether or not the various gene lines are brought together, the very existence of these wolves seems to demand a future release into the wild. For, in the end, a wolf in a zoo is not a wolf. It is the interaction of genes and environment that makes a species, and the whole complex interplay of thousands of such processes that makes an ecosystem. If we lock wolves up in zoos, we stop the interactions. We change their evolution.

So Newton proceeds all along as if these wolves are aimed at eventual release. He wants them to dig dens, to stay shy of humans, to keep their social habits. The wolves aren’t named, because, “when you give them a name, you want to talk to them. The first thing humans want to do is relate to an animal. I don’t want any relating to these animals at all—no talking, no play. In the long run, that will benefit reintroduction if that occurs. My philosophy is to give them numbers. That keeps the human psyche away from them.”

But where are we going to put the wolf? Newton can’t do much about this question here at the zoo, and it is a question that much troubles him. He looks back at the stockade. The female wolf is up again, running the barrier path, looking apprehensively over her shoulder.

The Mexican wolf’s prospects south of the international border are at best dim. “There is very little hope for the Mexican wolf,” sighs Julio Carrera of Antonio Narro University in Saltillo, Mexico. Carrera is a round-faced man with dark, inquisitive eyes and a neatly trimmed white beard. He has a look of pained resignation about him. “My whole life I am interested in wolves,” he says. He has tried to be the Mexican government’s point man on the subject. But the government hasn’t embraced Carrera or his efforts, so he has had to seek private backing for his project.

He has been looking for wolves in Mexico.
Canis lupus baileyi
once ranged south through Durango and Zacatecas, almost as far as Mexico City. In 1977, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service arranged for McBride to go into Mexico to ascertain the status of the Mexican wolf in the wild. He talked to cattle buyers, bankers, and other
people who would be likely to hear of wolf predation; he looked at the habitat and talked to ranchers. In his estimate, there were only fifty to a hundred wolves left. Today, Mexican wolves may survive in Chihuahua, Sonora, Durango, and Zacatecas. There were reports in 1991 of three wolves seen traveling along the Chihuahua-Sonora border; American biologist Charles Jonkel says he saw wolf tracks in that area at that time. In 1988, there was a report of a wolf killing cattle on a ranch in Sierra de las Tunas. A forester in the Sierra del Promontorio said he heard howls in 1991. And Carrera spoke with a Mexican trapper who claimed to have seen a wolf drinking from a watering trough near El Salado in Zacatecas.

For six weeks in 1992, Carrera searched remote ranching country on the Sonora-Chihuahua border. “I found only one heifer that was killed by a wolf near Río Negro,” he says. He heard about a wolf killed over the carcass of a cow on an
ejido
near Tres Ríos in Sonora. Though he questioned one of the suspected wolf killers at Tres Ríos, “he didn’t want to talk and he sent me off.” He heard that the man might have the wolf’s skin, and offered a reward for that, but as yet he has not found physical evidence to prove that the wolf, rather than an occasional hybrid, is surviving in the wilds of Mexico. In 1993, he went back, this time with funding from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, Wolf Haven, and private Mexican supporters, but still found no hard evidence.

If Carrera finds wild wolves, what then? How would they be protected? The terrain is remote, and Mexican wardens do not even have vehicles with which to patrol. Ranchers still put out poison. There is a law calling for fines and imprisonment for anyone killing a wolf in Mexico. Says McBride, “It’s on the books, but I don’t know where you’d go to find the book.” Surely not in the remote ranches of northern Mexico. Surely not in the hearts of Mexican cattlemen.

There are captive wolves in Mexico. The Chapultepec Zoo, the San Cayetano government facility near Mexico City, La Michilia Biosphere in Durango, and a private ranch in Chihuahua each have a pair. The Aragón Zoo has six uncertified wolves, but recent genetic studies have revealed in some of them mitochondrial DNA characteristic of wolves from northern Canada, and that raises the possibility that zookeepers in the past bred other subspecies into the line. In all, there are only fourteen certified pure Mexican wolves in
captivity in Mexico. Even if they can be bred, Carrera worries about what might be done with them after that. Both uninhabited land and native prey are disappearing. Says Carrera, “I don’t think many places will support the wolf very much longer.”

Carrera fears that the enormousness of the task of doing anything for wolves in the wild makes it seem far easier simply to catch the wolves and bring them into zoos for captive breeding. But without wolves in the wild, Carrera fears, it would do little more than allow us the illusion that something is being done while we watch their extinction.

If prospects for recovery are dim in Mexico, hopes for reintroduction must focus on the United States. And with the fear that captivity will shape the Mexican wolf into an animal that can’t be reintroduced, there is a sense of urgency about finding a place in the United States in which to release the wolves. When the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service asked Texas, Arizona, and New Mexico to suggest places where wolves might be reintroduced, Arizona identified fifteen sites that had the potential to support wolves. Some, like the Catalina Mountains just behind Tucson and the Santa Rita Mountains nearby, were rejected because urban growth clouded the future for wolves there. The Department of Game and Fish looked closely at four of the areas and in 1992 began working on a reintroduction plan for the Blue Range Primitive Area in east-central Arizona. Information being developed in that plan will go into a federal Environmental Impact Statement being developed for the Mexican-wolf reintroduction.

Texas ducked the issue by declaring that it had no areas of public land of suitable size. A number of people since then have suggested that Big Bend National Park and adjoining state wildlife areas would be a good reintroduction site, but McBride disagrees. “The only deer in the park are in the Chisos Mountains,” he says, “and I just don’t see the wolves going up and down trying to get them. You’ll hardly ever see wolves killing stuff on the side of a hill. They get dragged and kicked when they’re hunting. Furthermore, those deer are really utilized by mountain lions.” He doesn’t think there ever were many wolves in the area, or in the Sierra del Carmen, across the
border. “I never did see any sign of them, or hear any talk of them there.”

New Mexico suggested only the White Sands Missile Proving Grounds, thirty-four hundred square miles of land administered by the Army. Not far from Las Cruces, New Mexico, the San Andres Mountains stretch north a hundred miles, like a tilted bench, rising to the eastern sky. They are sparsely wooded with piñon and juniper, mountain mahogany and yucca. The eastern escarpment looks down into the white gypsum sands of the Tularosa Basin. East of Las Cruces, Highway 70 climbs toward San Augustin Pass, passing the Star Wars Deli, the Moon Gate Cafe, and a billboard advertising the Space Museum in Alamagordo, which invites the traveler to “Dare to Dream.” A military jet screams over the pass, rolls right and left, and then sweeps east over the chalky haze of White Sands. An F-14 shrieks overhead and does a barrel roll. Two buzzards circle, too old to be concerned with all this martial pride and haste. Signs by the road say “Warning, U.S. Government Property—No Trespassing.”

It is because it was federal property that the New Mexican government suggested White Sands: the state wouldn’t have to spend money on studies or on public hearings in which ranchers and environmentalists belabored one another, and it could let the two agencies of the federal government fight out the wolf issue among themselves. The Army, not wanting to subject itself to the demands of other federal agencies, withdrew the site from consideration, but reversed itself after the Mexican Wolf Coalition, the Wolf Action Group, the Sierra Club, the National Audubon Society, the Wilderness Society, and the Environmental Defense Fund all sued. A decision on reintroduction has not yet been made.

The Fish and Wildlife Service concluded that White Sands would support wolves comfortably. Says Peter Siminski, leader of the captive management breeding team for Mexican wolves, “The habitat’s there. Wolves are pretty adaptable. If you get them through the first breeding and pups, they’ll survive.” Others disagree, however: Parker argues that there is no documented evidence that wolves ever lived in White Sands. And Roy McBride says, “I wouldn’t try to stick wolves in White Sands. You could raise camels in a used-car lot, but what’s it going to cost you? What are the wolves going to eat there?”
Though he hasn’t walked the San Andres or Oscura mountains, he has flown over them many times, and he says, “They don’t look like any places I’ve ever caught wolves.”

All around White Sands is cattle country, and ranchers are passing rumors that wolves have already been reintroduced. Pete Gnatkowski, a rancher in Carrizozo, saw a wolflike animal after a friend had shot it; the hair around its neck was matted, as if it had worn a collar. Another friend shot another wolflike animal after it killed some sheep. Gnatkowski worries that, if wolves are introduced into White Sands, they will leave the reintroduction site and raid neighboring livestock herds. Ranchers have turned out in numbers to oppose reintroduction.

But ranchers may not have the last word. The bulk of the United States population live in cities, and they hear in the howl of the wolf the call of wildness, the sound of what was once right in nature. It is yet another identity that the Mexican wolf will bear.

West of Carrizozo, Highway 380 snakes up over the northern end of the Sierra Oscura, which rises like a board lifted up to the setting sun. Sometime long ago, the Sierra Oscura probably met the San Andres Mountains, which rise out of the west, and today they look like pillars that once supported a huge, high, mountainous dome. As the highway climbs over these hills, it runs through grassland with a lot of piñon pine. The land looks as if it would support a deer herd and afford wolves the cover of low-growing piñon and a maze of arroyos.

Between the Oscuras and the San Andres Mountains is a low, sandy desert valley that was the Trinity site, the place the first atomic bomb was tested. The mountain walls east and west lean toward each other, dark with piñon pine. The valley in between is not the flat, white creosote desert you might imagine the Trinity site to be, but greener, more mountainous, a bit closer to heaven. To think that someday wolves might pad across the valley, to imagine the immense silence of this place stirred by the howls of wolves, is to think about the righting of wrongs and the redemption of the human heart.

It is also to think about shifting definitions. What are all those wolf watchers seeing out there? Are they wolves or dogs, coyotes or hybrids? Are they wild creatures or the product of squint-eyed meddling?
Are they beasts of ravening desolation, the shadows of government tyranny, or the shapes of hope and freedom? Are they atonements for the angry, mushroom-shaped cloud that has for half a century darkened our lives? Things are not always easy to see in this landscape.

Bob Ream flies his Cessna 633 south and west from the Missoula Airport, over the Idaho-Montana Divide. He flies over the White Mountain fire lookout and the edge of Big Burn, an area that has remained almost treeless since a 1910 forest fire. To the east is the snow-covered mass of the Continental Divide. Below is a wide, glacially cut canyon, the walls of which are cloaked in Douglas fir and lodgepole pine. This is good elk-and-moose country—good wolf country, too, because there are no cattle here. As Ream flies over Kelly Creek, the ragged spur of rock known as Kelly Thumb points up at the sky. Ream adjusts his radio and fishes for the signal of a radio-collared wolf.

The last government-trapped wolf in Montana was taken in 1936. But for the packs in Glacier National Park, wolves probably haven’t denned in Montana since the 1940s. By midcentury, most people thought wolves were extinct in Montana and Idaho. Twelve years ago, Mike Schlegel of the Idaho Department of Fish and Game took
a picture of a wolf in the valley below. Seven years ago, a researcher found wolf tracks on the hillside. There have been reports of wolves here since then, and not long ago Ream, a University of Montana biologist and member of the state legislature, flew over Kelly Thumb, looking for Wolf 9013, a gray radio-collared male, and found him, exactly where, nearly twelve years before, Schlegel had taken a photograph of a wolf. “When I found him,” says Ream, “that whole slope was covered with elk trails, and I saw two moose standing right on Kelly Thumb.” A few weeks ago, Wolf 9013 was at Lolo Pass, and then he was sighted ten miles south of the pass, on the edge of the Selway-Bitterroot Wilderness. Ream located him in a small meadow on Fish Creek in Montana, but when he flew a few days later, the wolf was thirty miles away, on Burdette Creek in Idaho.