The Company of Wolves (38 page)

The new wolves were not as shy as the previous pack: there were reports of wolves standing and barking when humans approached, instead of running off. One of the males in the pack, a black wolf, would go off by himself for a few days at a time and then return. A farmer along Interstate 90, near Frenchtown, saw the black male walking among his cows without attacking them. Jimenez went out with the farmer one night. “We were out there by the interstate, howling, with trucks roaring by,” he says. “It was a new dimension in wolf research.”

On May 20, 1992, the wolves were found to have eaten off a dead steer in the Ninemile Valley. It was not clear whether they had killed the steer or just scavenged an animal that had died of disease. Following the Fish and Wildlife Service’s announced depredation procedures, Jimenez captured a male and the female within a few days. He put a capture collar on the male and released him. “If they kill another cow, they will probably have to be removed,” he said, “but it isn’t clear they killed the cow, only that they ate off it.”

Months passed, and no other cows were lost. Jimenez hoped that this meant either that the wolves had not killed the cow or that, if they had, it hadn’t made them habitual cattle killers. The latter is a novel idea, but it hasn’t been tested, because, once depredation occurs, the Fish and Wildlife Service is generally obliged to remove the predator. “In the past,” says Jimenez, “when it occurred, we went in and destroyed our data base.”

He feels parental about these wolves. “You get pissed off if they come near cattle. You want to say, ‘I told you once, I told you a thousand times!’ ” He feels responsible both for the wolves and for the people who live out there.

But the dead steer makes Jimenez’s job harder. “I keep everybody informed where they are and tell them, ‘If they’re around cattle, let me know.’ The ranchers’ attitude is, ‘We appreciate knowing where they are, but we slept better not knowing.’ ”

The tenacity of these wolves engages Jimenez on a level beyond biology. “There’s the attraction that they’ve been wiped out and you have this perspective of reestablishing things, and of righting the
wrongs. They keep hanging on, they keep knocking.” And they keep knocking in the same places. The mystery of that entrances Jimenez: “There’s a side of me that just kind of smiles. We know some things, but we don’t know everything. The Ninemile is not that unique. Given they could go in any direction out of Glacier, why would a wolf end up there? I don’t understand it.”

In a sense, Jimenez practices the art of consolation. Consolation has a way of turning up, much the way wolves have a way of turning up, again and again in the same setting. It is tempting to see Jimenez as a noble experiment in coexistence. But if his work here is an experiment, who designed it? Jimenez? Circumstance? The wolves?

Bob Demin drives his truck very slowly down the Ninemile road. On a horse behind the truck rides Arch, a grizzled cowboy, whose face is set in that half-wince, half-sneer that men affect when it is important not to show pain. After Arch come the cows, about sixty of them, and calves and three bulls. They amble slowly, their sides heaving right and left. Behind them, a motley group of riders—schoolgirls, housewives, and retirees—drive the cattle. An old man in a bright-orange hunting cap, riding along in the cab of a truck, brings up the rear. It is the fall drive. Demin is bringing in the cows and calves he has summered on Forest Service grazing allotments above the Ninemile Valley. The horses in Shirley Hager’s pasture race over to the fence to celebrate the passage.

There is a fresh dusting of snow on the Ninemile Divide, to the southwest. Clouds hug the peaks. It is wintry cold, and the riders are bundled in sheepskin jackets, hunting coats, and ski parkas. It has rained off and on, and is snowing even now a few miles up the valley. This drive has gone well: Demin is short only one cow. He thinks that, when he brought it off the allotment in the woods, it got mixed in with a neighbor’s stock, and will turn up.

This is an important day. In a business that is 70 percent worry, Demin is getting this summer’s calves into his own pasture, right outside his kitchen door. He has already sold the calves via a videotape auction, and they will be trucked off to market in a few weeks. The cows will remain under his watchful eye over the winter.

The cowpokes herd the last of the cows into the pasture and latch
the gate, and then head on over to the house for a barbecue. Demin has cooked beef in a pit in the ground and there are casseroles, elk meat, and fruit pies. He introduces me to Arch, the sun- and wind-sculpted old cowboy, and tells him I am writing about wolves. Arch turns and walks off on bowed legs, nodding his head to acknowledge the introduction, and saying, in a voice as creaky as saddle leather, “Balance of nature, I guess.” It is both summary and farewell: it is all the hospitality he can muster. His response expresses the conservatism of ranching, and the suspicion with which outsiders and newcomers and wolves are all met in the rural West.

Demin is sixty-one, no-nonsense straight, purposeful, and focused. In a way, he bridges the gap between the Old West and the urban world that applauds the return of wolves. He grew up on this ranch, then went off to join the infantry and was away for twenty-eight years. He was stationed for years at San Francisco’s Presidio, and saw that city through the tumultuous years of the hippies and the rise of gay rights. In 1979, he retired and came home to take over management of the ranch from his aging mother.

The ranch requires watchfulness. Cows die and disappear. “One year,” he says, “my mother thought we lost one to a human predator. One year, a neighbor down the valley, it seemed like all his cows had twins and everybody else’s cows didn’t have any calves.” Hunters are also a problem. In two weeks, the opening of deer season brings an assortment of hunters, some of whom shoot before they know what they’re shooting at. A rancher must also live with the flat-out stupidity of cows. “One year,” says Demin, “I had a cow that got into a ditch and rolled in it and got on her back and couldn’t get up and died.” And predators are a concern. There are bears, mountain lions, and now wolves. Nobody can say for sure whether the wolves killed the cow they were feeding on in May, but Demin thinks they did.

Demin is especially aware of the wolves. His cows were grazing in the pasture the wolves used as a rendezvous site, and it was his Forest Service grazing allotment that the wolves denned on this year. “The ranger down there didn’t even want to tell me where the thing was,” says Demin. “His comment was, ‘It’s up there in the middle of your allotment. You probably don’t want to put your cows up there.’ I said, ‘Where am I going to put my cows?’ ”

When he found out he had wolves near his cattle, he went to see Montana Congressman Ron Marlenee, a fiercely outspoken opponent of wolf reintroduction. “I talked to Marlenee. He said, ‘Now, we’re not going to have any wolves.’ I said, ‘Wait a minute: they’re here!’ and I showed him pictures. He said, ‘Get rid of ’em.’ I said, ‘That’s easier said than done.’ The wolves are here and they’re going to stay here. There’s nothing I can do about it, or anyone else can do about it.

“Before they were here, I never thought about wolves. I wasn’t too happy when that female showed up, the one that was involved in the predation over at Marion. She didn’t last too long—somebody shot her. And the male, I guess he was a model citizen. In the next meadow, he killed an elk, and he was going back and forth to the pups, and I had some cows in that pasture—he didn’t bother the cows.”

If the wolves would stay up in the hills, he says, he would have little problem with them. “Some of the people here are much more shoot-’em-on-sight people. As long as they don’t bother me, I’ve got no problem with ’em. I could live with ’em. It’s just another hazard. But if they’re out here killing my cows, and I’ve got a rifle, if I can kill them, I would.”

To make clear his resolve, he talks about coyotes. For ten years, he had no trouble with coyotes. Four years ago, just when the cows were calving, coyotes took to hanging around his pasture. “I’d go out in the morning and see them wandering around where the cows were. I’d take a rifle and shoot around them to scare them off.” But the third day, he saw a coyote walking with what seemed to him to be purposeful looks behind a freshly born calf. “I said, ‘Buddy, you don’t learn,’ and I shot him.”

Ranching is a form of pessimism. “We’ve been lucky so far,” says Demin. “Before, we had a pair of wolves and their pups, and they didn’t kill anything over here. This year, we had the same thing, and they took that one yearling. What’s going to happen next year, when you’re facing up to seven wolves? Things are going to be a little different. When you talk about a pack of ten to twelve wolves, it’s going to be a different situation. Right now, there’s so few of them.”

There are two issues here. One is the likelihood of wolf predation on cattle—if the wolves take his cows, who, if anybody, will compensate
him? The other issue is what controls federal agencies will put on land uses once wolves get established. The potential for restrictions on Demin’s Forest Service allotment is relatively small. “I don’t turn out until the first of July,” says Demin, “and by then, the wolves have probably moved to a rendezvous site. I don’t think the Forest Service would say not to use the allotment because of the wolves.”

What he worries about is the Fish and Wildlife Service coming up with restrictions. Conversant enough with the world to know that a large number of wolf advocates see the animal as a symbol of wilderness, he worries about losing his grazing allotments to a demand for wilderness for the sake of the wolf. “Our experience in the Ninemile shows they can be just like coyotes, as far as living with man. It’s not a wilderness. They seem to like these roads—it’s easier to get around on them. They say they need these corridors of wildness to move around on. That’s bullshit. That first wolf den was right on the edge of a clear-cut and within a half-mile of two houses.” Now, he says, “the Fish and Wildlife Service makes a point of saying you don’t require any special management. But you never know.

“Wolves are a part of the planet …” he sighs. Though he leaves the rest of the sentence under his breath, maybe it is this: “… but I wish we didn’t have to have them right here.”

It must say something about the wolves that, in settling into the Ninemile Valley, they didn’t choose a pasture owned by a Ron Marlenee but one watched over by Ralph and Bruce Thisted. The Thisteds live on the edge of Ninemile Valley, overlooking the pasture of the farm they operated for fifty years. They raised cattle and today the comfort and lively curiosity in their faces testify to their apparent success. A few years ago, actress Andie MacDowell bought the old farmhouse and pasture on the valley floor, and the pasture is now leased to other ranchers. The Thisteds built their new home on a hill overlooking the pasture, and now live there, two bachelor brothers, each amiably contesting what the other says about just about everything. There is a broad flagstone fireplace, wood-paneled walls, and picture windows giving expansive views of the spruce and fir trees and the pasture below. Bruce—white-haired, straight-spined, trim,
with intense blue eyes—sits in a chair in the middle of the room with a pair of binoculars in his hands. He says Ralph saw a bunch of magpies take wing down in the meadow and has gone out to see what alarmed them. “Being we heard the wolves howl in the meadow last night,” he says, “it may be the wolves got some deer.”

Says Bruce, “I believe there’s wolves been coming through here forever. We heard one howl ten or fifteen years ago. If you’d have said it was a wolf then, people would have said, ‘Oh, yeah, sure.’ It was like a bigfoot or a UFO.”

Ralph walks in. He is lanky, fit, and bubbling with enthusiastic curiosity. “Magpies, ravens, and a coyote,” he says, reporting on what’s going on in the meadow. “That coyote won’t leave—I got within twenty feet of him. I can’t imagine what those birds were up to.”

In July 1989, the Thisteds saw the first wolf. They were fixing a fence by the road when their pointer dog, Heidi, began to bark. “Her hair was standing on end,” says Bruce. “We saw something in the trees, just a shadow moving. I had the .22 in the truck. I got it, and I looked through the scope sight. I said, ‘It’s not a coyote.’ It was something we didn’t know what it was. You see things like that in the woods all the time.

“Thanksgiving, we started seeing the wolf tracks. Then a lion hunter out here asked me, ‘You see that wolf track around here?’ That’s when Ralph became pretty sure it was a wolf.”

And when the litter appeared in their old pasture below, the brothers were delighted. “We could sit here with the scope and watch the wolves play by the hour,” says Bruce. The grass in the meadow was a couple of feet high. People coming along the road couldn’t see the wolves through the grass, but the house was high enough that the Thisteds could see down into it. Ralph would go over before daylight to the barn and hide with a video camera. As it grew light, he would videotape the wolves. “All the time I was there,” he says, “they never realized I was there. Even the magpies didn’t know I was there. If you can fool a magpie, you can fool anything. After the sun was up, they’d go back into the timber.”

“The cattle were here,” says Ralph. “There’d be cows out in the field, and wolves at the same time. The wolves were playing, and the cows didn’t even look at ’em. They never bothered anything. I have videos of them a hundred feet from the cows. You can hear the cows,
and the wolves are barking a little bit, and the cow doesn’t pay them any attention.”

They watched the first litter grow and shared their videos with Jimenez. They were philosophical when the wolves killed the cows near Dixon, and Ralph helped Jimenez to trap the wolves in the pasture and transport them to Glacier.

In April 1991, the female with the collar appeared. They saw her first through the trees. She was hunting mice in the meadow. “It was in the exact spot in the pasture as the other pack,” says Bruce. “A week before that, there was another one, over here.” He points down valley a little. “It had a collar.” Diane Boyd came out with her radio receiver and went through some frequencies, and up came the collar. “We’d get the signal from this living room.”