The Company of Wolves (41 page)

Reintroduction was at best experimental. But in 1975, there were other reasons the National Park Service would not even come close to approving a reintroduction. Yellowstone was laboring under a heavier burden: recovery of grizzly-bear populations. Sheep ranchers had lost grazing allotments where grizzlies were known to summer, and one rancher near Yellowstone had actually been prosecuted for shooting a bear. Logging and mining operations were modified for the sake of bears, and parts of Yellowstone closed to hikers to keep them from encounters with bears. The park was already embroiled in conflict, and it was no time to invite new controversy.

Cole’s environmental assessment for a wolf release remained unsigned by the regional director of the Park Service. In 1975, Anderson retired and Cole transferred to Voyageurs National Park in Minnesota. John Townsley became the superintendent of Yellowstone National Park. Says Norman Bishop of the National Park Service, “John Townsley said to me in about 1980, ‘We aren’t going to mention wolf recovery until we get the grizzly on a good footing.’ He was very sensitive to the fact that if he even mentioned wolf recovery it could shoot grizzly recovery.”

• • •

In 1977, the first recovery plan for Northern Rocky Mountain wolf populations was written, but it made no specific recommendations for reintroduction. It was argued that a healthy population of wolves existed just across the border, in Canada, and because of that, species that seemed down to their last gasps, such as California condors or whooping cranes, were more deserving of attention. The argument that wolves should be returned to Yellowstone simply to restore the historic fauna was not in itself enough, but the argument would change.

Renée Askins would help to change it. When Askins was a student at Kalamazoo College in Michigan in the 1970s, she wanted to work with wolves. With Erich Klinghammer’s Indiana Wolf Park only two hours away, she arranged to do a behavioral study there. Watching wolves for as many as eighteen hours a day, she saw in them something powerful and moving, something reflective of the human need to balance impulse and order. She wrote a paper about the ways different religious traditions viewed wolves. One day, John Weaver was visiting Wolf Park to talk with Klinghammer about the behavioral implications of wolf reintroduction in Yellowstone National Park, and Askins met and talked with him. She visited Yellowstone and realized, “The longer I was with the captive wolves, the more painful and difficult the compromises of seeing them in captivity grew. Wildness joined what I experienced in Yellowstone and what I experienced with wolves in captivity. I made the commitment that I would spend time working to see them in the wild.” In 1981, she moved out west to work toward the return of wolves to Yellowstone.

Askins arrived in Yellowstone at a time when plans for reintroduction were becalmed. The Reagan administration had taken office with a vendetta against anyone who argued for programs which might restrict a private landowner’s property rights or use of public lands. The ranching community of the West was tied both ideologically and politically to the new administration, and ardent preservationists were ferreted out of the Department of the Interior. In 1982, Russell Dickenson, the director of the National Park Service, told Congress that the Park Service had no intention of introducing wolves into Yellowstone.

Askins wanted to get the issue rolling again. She heard about an
exhibit prepared by the Science Museum of Minnesota entitled “Wolves and Humans,” a rich celebration of wolf complexity and personality. She decided that bringing it to Yellowstone would help create a broader constituency for wolf reintroduction, and that the exhibit might serve as a platform from which those already supporting reintroduction within the National Park Service could launch a renewed effort. Working with the Yellowstone Library and Museum Association, the National Park Service, and Defenders of Wildlife, she got a grant to bring the exhibit to Yellowstone, and organized a symposium on wolves to coincide with the opening. The Park Service was so impressed with her dedication and effectiveness that it hired her to work for the summer as coordinator of the exhibit. The exhibit was a huge success. Whereas the Park Service had doubted that thirty thousand people would visit the exhibit in the course of its display at Yellowstone, in fact 215,000 came to see it. “We just couldn’t handle them all,” recalls Askins. “We had to let people in fifty at a time.”

Blue-eyed, with long brown hair and a ready smile, Askins conveys at once innocent optimism and youthful enthusiasm. She has an affability and a likeness to people that draws her into conversation and inspires others to listen to her. On Askins’ second day on the job, William Penn Mott came to Yellowstone to be inaugurated as the new director of the National Park Service. After the ceremony, Yellowstone Park Superintendent Robert Barbee introduced Askins to Mott. Askins, unabashedly a persuader, set about convincing Mott not only that wolf reintroduction was ecologically desirable, but that it was an act with far-reaching implications for the human spirit. Mott was especially interested in the way parks might meet spiritual needs. He and Askins talked for an hour. And Mott listened.

Askins perceived that the debate about wolves is not just about historic faunas or ecosystem functions or loss of livestock. She realized that the debate is so laden with hidden meanings that it is almost wholly symbolic. “You can never predict the way people are going to connect to the animal,” she says. “They’re so wholly a metaphorical animal. They are a creature of dawn and dusk. In Minnesota three years ago, I was flying with Dave Mech, and there were thirteen wolves out on the ice on a little peninsula. We came around to see them again and—
bump!
—they were gone. The closest forest was
a mile away—they couldn’t have gotten there. They just disappeared. I think they offer a vehicle for us to talk metaphorically about the things in our lives that are not here or we wish were here.

“Wolves represent something far greater than the consummate predator in an ecosystem,” she says. “When I talk about the wolf issue, I talk about the importance of wildness in our lives. It’s wildness that heals us. We need contact with it, regardless of whether we live in the city or in the Alaskan wilderness.

“Wolves offer that sense of wildness—the way wolves move, the way they play, their unpredictability, their living on the edge of their endurance, savage and surviving out there.” To see such things, she says, helps us to find ourselves.

Askins went on to Yale to earn a graduate degree in wildlife ecology, and twice during that year, Mott spoke at Yale. Both times, Askins lobbied him to work for wolf reintroduction. By the time of their second meeting at Yale, Mott was listing wolf reintroduction as one of his priorities. He had wolf buttons made, and he had gotten the Zion Natural History Association to produce educational materials about wolves. Says Askins, “He made an extraordinary issue out of wolf reintroduction. He started right from the beginning to mention it in his talks and put it on the agenda.” But once Mott put it on his agenda, he was undermined by Congress. When the Park Service sent Yellowstone Park biologist Norman Bishop out to do educational programs about wolves, the Idaho and Wyoming congressional delegations complained to the Reagan appointees at the top of the department, and the Park Service had to reel Bishop back in. When Mott indicated the National Park Service might move forward and write an environmental-impact statement on wolf reintroduction into Yellowstone, Senators Simpson and Wallop of Wyoming and Symms of Idaho prevented it. But Mott kept talking about wolf reintroduction. “He was gutsy,” says Askins.

After Yale, Askins returned to Wyoming. In 1986, she started a project aimed at the restoration of wolves in Yellowstone under the auspices of the Craighead Research Institute. And in 1990, she formed a separate group, the Wolf Fund, which would work toward the goal of reintroducing wolves into Yellowstone by seeking out key individuals and convincing them. Askins would meet, for example, with Interior Secretary Donald Hodel or Assistant Secretary William
Horn, to try to get them to think about the issue. “We find people who comprise pivotal points in the way things work,” she said. “I think that’s how it’s done. This has to do with people and shifting bedrock. We try to move people.”

People
were
moving. Three hundred miles to the northwest of Yellowstone, in Missoula, Montana, Hank Fischer, of Defenders of Wildlife, was also working toward the reintroduction of wolves. Fischer had come to Montana from Ohio in the early 1970s, worked for a time as a free-lance writer. He took wildlife-biology courses at the University of Montana and then went to work for Defenders. The National Park Service’s 1980 management policies called for the restoration of species lost to parks through human agencies; that suggested that Yellowstone might be considered as a site for reintroduction. When a series of warm winters in the 1980s dramatically increased the elk herd from twelve to nineteen thousand, that seemed to Fischer to lend weight to the argument that predators were needed to help restore ecological balance. He began attending the meetings of the Northern Rocky Mountain Wolf Recovery Team to urge them to call for specific reintroductions. “Just getting to the point where we had a recovery plan that suggested reintroduction took four or five years. Getting the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to sign the recovery plan took another one and a half years.” The revised plan, approved in 1987, called for reestablishment of the wolf in three areas: in Glacier National Park and the Bob Marshall Wilderness, in central Idaho, and in Yellowstone National Park. Lacking the wholehearted support of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, it was signed not by the director of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, Frank Dunkel, but by John Spinks, deputy regional director.

Once the plan was approved, Fischer sought to build enough public support to convince the government to implement it. Defenders of Wildlife sponsored the “Wolves and Humans” exhibit in Yellowstone, and also manned a “Vote Wolf” booth in Yellowstone, at which volunteers informed visitors about wolf issues and urged them to write letters and sign petitions in support of reintroduction. Fischer wrote articles, talked with ranchers, and lobbied.

In 1987, he helped persuade Utah Representative Wayne Owens to introduce a bill calling for reintroduction, but the Wyoming and
Idaho congressional delegations blocked it. In 1988, Congress called upon the National Park Service to determine whether wolves would affect prey and grizzly bears in the park, and whether or not reintroduced wolves would be controlled in and out of the park, and to reports its findings. Completed in 1990, the study found that wolves would pose no threat to either prey species or grizzlies in Yellowstone. A day after the report was published, Senator James McClure of Idaho introduced a bill calling for the removal of wolves from the endangered-species list, and subsequent reintroduction into Yellowstone. In effect, he was conceding that wolves were inevitable, and that the ranchers would be wise to compromise in order to protect their ability to deal with depredations. Congress, however, rejected McClure’s bill as an attempt to circumvent the Endangered Species Act, and instead called for the preparation of an environmental-impact statement for wolf reintroduction into Yellowstone National Park. That amounted to tentative approval of reintroduction.

Many of Yellowstone’s neighbors were outraged.

The Yellowstone River flows out of Yellowstone National Park into Montana’s Paradise Valley. From Gardiner to Livingston, the valley is a land of great swooning hills of grass and forest. Overhead is an enormous overarching sky. The snow-covered serrations of the Absarokas line the east. There are dark pyramidal peaks with spidery webs of snow dusting their summits, and deeply gouged avalanche chutes diving down into dark forests of spruce and pine. Below them are long sensuous rolling meadows where elk bugle in the fall. It is a vast, lush, heart-throbbing country, the kind of landscape that’s apt to invite immodesty and passionate devotion to causes. It was once dedicated entirely to ranching and hunting. Today, suburban ranch houses sprout on the hilltops. Close up against Yellowstone National Park, the Church Universal and Triumphant sprawls across a vast bulldozed construction pad, a jumbled city of trailers and buildings and school buses apart in style and spirit from the lonely ranches up and down the valley. It is a parable of the modern West: migrants from the urban world have come to find peace or deliverance or beauty, but they bring with them urban styles that challenge the setting
and discomfort the older population. In such places, the Old West finds itself fighting for its life. The wolf has become a symbol in the conflict.

Frank Rigler has a ranch just north of Corwin Springs, overlooking the Yellowstone River. His family has lived on this land since 1908, when his grandfather, a former miner, settled here. He recalls an uncle who was working for Canyon Inn in the park who saw wolves there in 1908. At forty-nine, Rigler is muscular and compact, quick-moving and intense, almost a blur of motion. Beneath his close-trimmed beard, his face lights up now and then with a very youthful whimsy. He is not a keeper of secrets or a quiet plotter; his feelings are right near the surface and he is critical unto sarcasm, emotional unto anger. He tells of coming out of his ranch house one day to see a stranger taking pictures of the apple trees growing next to his sheep pasture. When he asked what the fellow was doing, the young man identified himself as representing something called “The Grizzly Project,” and told Rigler that apple trees attract grizzlies and that grizzlies that visit ranchyards end up getting shot. Rigler didn’t appreciate the lecture. “Sometimes you just get mad,” says Rigler. His eyes narrow, and he coils as he finishes the story, then unfurls a punch just two inches from the nose of the listener. “I hit him as hard as I could. Then I told him, ‘You see that “No Trespassing” sign out there? You get off my property and stay off!’ ”

Both a rancher and an outfitter, Rigler keeps sheep, cows, and horses on eight hundred acres of his own land. “There’s families been ranching here for 100 years, ever since the 1880s,” he says. “Something’s gotta eat this grass.” In the fall, he leads hunters out into the hills behind his house to hunt elk “from here to Yellowstone.” Kevin Gallagher, who is helping Rigler build a new house, says he has seen elk so numerous that they looked like waving grass moving along the hillside behind Rigler’s barn. Rigler tells of a cousin who lived in California and had been a hunter, but decided that hunting was beyond his ethical limits, gave away his guns, and became a vegetarian. When the relative came to visit and they got into a disagreement over the virtue of hunting, Rigler told him to hit the road and never come back. “You can choose your friends, but you can’t choose your relatives,” he sighs.