The Company of Wolves (36 page)

As Ream finishes recounting the past wolf sightings at Kelly Thumb, the radio begins to ping like a dripping faucet. Wolf 9013 is indeed down below. We are at ninety-one hundred feet. We turn south, banking gently. The signal grows faint. Ream switches from right antenna to left antenna and back again, back and forth, listening for the signal. He peers out his window, looking for a gray wolf below. We circle, corkscrewing down, closer and closer to the ground, dropping to sixty-eight hundred feet. Now we are looking up at Kelly Thumb as we go around and around it. There is a latticework of long shadows, the trunks of burned lodgepole in the morning sun below. We circle, straining to find the wolf in the web-work of trees.

We don’t see him, only his raven flying off to the south. One might imagine the wolf has changed shape, turned into a raven, and flown off. More likely, he is growing accustomed to airplanes and is simply lying very still in the shadows below, pressing against the ground, waiting for the gnatlike whine of the airplane to go away.

Wolf 9013 was caught and collared inside Glacier National Park two years ago. In the past four months, he has wandered down here to the Idaho side of the Continental Divide. He is not old enough to be either the wolf Schlegel saw twelve years before or the wolf that left tracks seven years ago, and yet he is in exactly the same location. How did he end up here? Ream is much interested in this question. Thinking about the travels of the wolf below ripples the watchful
quiet of his boyish face. The persistence of wolves stirs his sense of wonder.

We head north, toward Missoula. The molar white of the Mission Range looms in the distance, and beyond it, in a blue-green haze, the mountain ridges of Glacier National Park, where Wolf 9013 was collared. The park is 150 miles away and across two main highways. “I think this pretty well proves these interstate highways have no impact on wolf movements,” says Ream. Pointing off to the southeast, he adds, “There’s as much wild land between here and Yellowstone. So I just don’t think there are any barriers to wolves repopulating Yellowstone.”

Yellowstone is the heart of the matter. Wolves have been gone from Yellowstone for decades. Of all the places in the world to which Americans would like to see wolves returned, Yellowstone is their heart’s desire. It is the largest national park outside Alaska, and the emblem of American wildness. To millions of Americans, a return of wolves to Yellowstone would be a sign that nature is still alive, persistent, mysterious, and beautiful. Reintroduction of wolves there has been proposed repeatedly since the 1930s, but real momentum has gathered behind the idea since the early 1980s. There are a variety of ways it might happen. Wildlife officials might capture wolves in Canada and release them in the back country of the park, or wolves might simply walk from Canada to Yellowstone on their own. Ream sees the wolf below as one of the pioneers in that recolonization. “I’ve really been intrigued by this whole dispersal thing. I’ve said all along it’s going to be the mechanism by which recovery will be accomplished. And that seems to be what’s happening.”

With Missoula below, Ream turns northwest and follows Interstate 90 a few miles. The highway veers off to the left, and we are flying over the Ninemile Valley. A dirt road accompanies a shallow creek up the valley, crossing a succession of fenced pastures. The slopes rising from each side of the creek are forested, but patched with clear-cuts. There is a wide green meadow, and at its edge an old barn. Last year, a litter of wolves was raised in that meadow. This year, there are more wolves.

Ream flicks the radio switch with his thumb. The radio pings, announcing that there is another radio-collared wolf below. We turn
right, and follow a side canyon; and the signal grows louder. The source of the signal is a narrow ridge between two creeks draining down into the Ninemile. As we circle and corkscrew down again, it becomes clear that the signal is coming from a location perhaps less than two hundred yards across. But we see no wolves. They hunker down, press against the ground, and don’t move.

The wolf below has also appeared where previous wolves materialized. In 1989, four wolves—two adults and two young ones—that had migrated out of Glacier National Park were trapped near Marion, Montana, because they had begun to attack livestock. They were returned to the park, but the two adults left the release site, and the two young ones starved. The male adult stepped into a trap outside the park. Even though he was treated by a veterinarian, he was later found starving and suffering from gangrene. A Fish and Wildlife Service officer shot him to put him out of his misery. The black female adult headed south across the Swan Range, down the Swan Valley, and into the Ninemile drainage. She found a gray male wolf there, they mated and in the spring of 1990 had a litter of six pups. They raised the litter in the pasture below, paying no attention to the cows grazing there. In July 1990, however, the female was shot to death. In September, the male was struck and killed by a vehicle on the interstate. The six pups were left on their own in the meadow below.

They survived until spring, when several of them went over Squaw Peak to the north and killed two steers near Dixon. Three were trapped and removed; the other three disappeared. A few months later, a female radio-collared wolf that had vanished months before from Glacier National Park appeared in exactly the same pasture in the Ninemile Valley. In 1992, Ream was flying up the Ninemile and located her. He decided to fly over the Idaho Divide, trying other radio frequencies, and there he found the male, Wolf 9013. Both wolves had traveled more than 150 miles from where they had been collared, and both were in locations that had been frequented by other wolves.

Ream has been looking for wolves in Montana for nineteen years. In the 1960s, he had heard stories of wolves being shot in Montana, and he wanted to find out whether there were wolves still in the wild. In 1973, the year the Rocky Mountain gray wolf
(Canis lupus
irremotus
) was listed as an endangered species, he began to collect reports of wolf sightings in Montana and Idaho.

For decades, people had been saying the wolf was gone. But in fact, all along, ranchers and back-country rangers as far south as Wyoming had repeatedly seen glimpses. In 1976, George Gruell, then a biologist on the Bridger-Teton National Forest, in northwestern Wyoming, gave the Rocky Mountain Wolf Recovery Team a list of fifty purported sightings. A range rider for the Hansen Ranch, near Jackson, Wyoming, observed wolves in the woods. Gruell talked to a man who had seen a wolf run across the ice on Jackson Lake in the 1940s. Says Gruell, “He was flabbergasted at its size and thought it was a moose.” He said the man did not tell any authorities because he didn’t want to be accused of making up stories.

Through the 1970s, the reports increased in Montana. Shortly after Ream started collecting sightings, Jerry Desanto, a Glacier National Park ranger, walked into a meadow near Polebridge, on the North Fork of the Flathead River, and saw a wolf. By 1977, Ream had collected 315 credible sightings. Three skulls of recently killed animals were confirmed by taxonomists as belonging to wolves. In 1979, Joe Smith caught Kishinena, the wolf Diane Boyd followed for two years, just north of the Canadian border. With all this evidence that wolves were poised to make a comeback in the Northern Rockies, Ream’s Wolf Ecology Project got funding enough to hire Diane Boyd and Mike Fairchild to track wolves on the North Fork.

When the wolves began denning in Glacier National Park, Ream’s effort to find wolves turned into an effort to study them. The Wolf Ecology Project got funding from the National Park Service, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the U.S. Forest Service, and the University of Montana. When funding ran short, Ream got private donations to keep volunteers in the field doing winter tracking. His studies on the North Fork of the Flathead River have given a detailed picture of the recolonization. A genealogical chart hangs on the wall of his office. The Wigwam Pack, which formed just north of the Canadian border in the early 1980s, was poisoned out. The Magic Pack, which denned in Glacier in 1986, split in two and became the Camas and the Sage Creek packs. The Sage Creek Pack consisted of two adults and five pups until British Columbia opened a hunting season and all but a mother and one pup were shot. Before
the shootings, two males had left the pack, and they joined with a dispersing female to form the Headwaters Pack. In 1990, two females in the Camas Pack bred and the pack divided into the North Camas and South Camas packs. A female from the Camas Pack dispersed and joined with a surviving male from the Wigwam Pack to form the Spruce Creek Pack.

With radio collars on pack members, Ream’s researchers have been able to follow the wolves over vast distances. They have watched them disperse south to the Ninemile Valley and the Idaho-Montana Divide. One wolf from the Magic Pack went 550 miles north to the Peace River Country in Alberta. Clearly the wolves of Glacier could reach Yellowstone.

Ream knew how intolerant people might be of the returning wolves, and that biologists still argued about the effects of wolves on prey. Once it was clear that wolves were coming back, he began to address questions that would be posed concerning recovery. One of the first was, what effect might wolves have on elk, moose, and deer? To find out, Dan Pletscher of the University of Montana School of Forestry radio-collared thirty moose, thirty elk, and thirty deer. All the collars had mortality transmitters: if the collar lay still for four hours, the radio pulse rate doubled to a hundred beeps per hour, and Boyd and Fairchild would go in quickly to determine what had killed the animal. The study showed that, among white-tailed deer, two were killed by mountain lions, two by humans, and two by wolves. Among moose, two were killed by bears and one by wolves. Among elk, nine were killed by mountain lions, two by humans, and three by wolves. Says Ream, “This shows very nicely that the wolf is just one of a number of predators. It certainly is no worse than any other predator.”

The research in Glacier National Park kept Ream at the center of wolf issues. He was a member of the recovery team that wrote the original recovery plan in 1977 and then revised it in 1987. When the 1987 revision called for the reintroduction of wolves into the wild, the state of Montana, angry that the federal agencies made all the rules about grizzly recovery but did not pay the costs of state responsibilities for the bears, declared it would not participate in endangered-species recovery unless the species was delisted. Wolf recovery was growing more and more contentious.

There are two different philosophies urging the return of the wolf in the Northern Rockies.

One view, which Ream holds, says that the wolves are already back, and that they are headed straight for Yellowstone. “I think dispersal is going to be the mechanism by which wolf recovery is going to occur,” says Ream. “We’ve had nine long-range dispersals. Most of them have been north into Canada, but the last three have been south into Montana and Idaho. We still have two dispersers that haven’t been found. We still have a lot to learn about dispersal.”

The other view says wolves are going to be reestablished in Yellowstone only by human agency. That view is given greater authority by the politics of the situation. Ranchers fear that wolves that get to the park on their own may be beyond control, because the Endangered Species Act makes it illegal to kill them. If wolves are introduced into Yellowstone by human agency, they can be deemed an “experimental-nonessential” population and subject to greater restrictions if they leave the park. Ranchers catching such animals in the act of killing livestock, for example, might be permitted to shoot them. Therefore, many who see the return of the wolf as inevitable are fighting hard for reintroduction. Says Ream, “In the last year, I’ve seen a flipflop. Livestock people were totally against reintroduction; now they’re saying that doesn’t look too bad.”

At the same time, there are people in the agency who look upon the wolves arriving by dispersal as passive and uncertain. They see that as something less than management, whereas they see reintroduction as something clear, predictable, and tangible. Ream explains, “The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is more management-oriented and more control-oriented.” And they want to spend money on management, not on research.

In 1988, the recovery team was disbanded, and its members were told that the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service would carry out the plan. In place of the recovery team, there would be a Wolf Working Group, consisting chiefly of U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, U.S. Forest Service, National Park Service, and Indian-reservation biologists. The Wolf Working Group was more interested in reintroduction than in natural recovery, partly because its members were managers who felt that reintroduction was a way to control where the wolves go and where they don’t, partly because of a lawsuit filed
by Defenders of Wildlife, charging that the Secretary of the Interior would be remiss if he did not proceed with the introduction. In 1993, a draft environmental-impact statement proposed reintroduction into Yellowstone National Park.

With reintroduction in the forefront, Ream’s federal research money dried up. He would like to keep the studies going. “I don’t think the study area is full yet,” he says. “I think we’ll see some change in home range as the population increases. Since we’ve been in since the first wolf arrived, I feel we should follow it until it reaches saturation. But they think we’ve gotten enough data.”

Ream feels he has been pushed into the periphery. “When I was on the recovery team, I felt I was very much in the loop,” he says. “Now …” he shrugs his shoulders. But he is still out there pulling for the wolves—flying his own aircraft on his own time, at his own expense, following the radio signals of collars now maintained by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the National Park Service, monitoring the progress of the wolves.

It is clear that wolves are returning to the Rockies. Ream looks down at the landscape below. The peaks of Glacier rise dark and green, ridge after fading ridge, to the north. To the south and east are the Bitterroots, the Sapphires, the Beaverheads, and, beyond the Continental Divide, the Tobacco Roots and the Madisons. There are no broad croplands or extensive urban areas to cross, but plenty of wild country. Ream traces the route with his eyes, off into the haze-shrouded east. Wolves go where wolves have been before. And if there is a wolf highway down below, invisible to human senses but broad and beckoning to wolves, it is aimed at the nation’s jewel of wild places, Yellowstone National Park.