The Company of Wolves (43 page)

The ranchers observe that most of those promoting wolf reintroduction are, like Askins and Fischer, relatively recent migrants to the West. They see that the real force behind the effort comes from people who live in cities and suburbs far from the Northern Rocky Mountains. The ranchers point out that such outsiders don’t have to bear the cost in lost cattle and sheep, reduced hunting opportunities, and increasing headaches dealing with bureaucrats. But if it comes down to that, taxpayers in the distant cities are increasingly convinced that they have been paying subsidies for logging roads and grazing leases on public lands, and that the management of the public lands they pay taxes to maintain ought to reflect their views as well as those of ranchers.

It all comes down to the issue of control. Says Fischer, “The debate is over who has primacy over public land. Basically, what it
shows is, if these people can bring wolves back here, it shows that the grazers and the forest products industry aren’t calling the shots any more.”

Says Askins, “Wildness isn’t just waving grain. Wildness is about giving up control. It’s about making room.” In the end, she says, “This is not about controlling wolves, this is about controlling the West, and the wolf has simply become the metaphor for control. Having something that is beyond our control and perhaps beyond our understanding is healing. It creates an understanding and a humility in ourselves.”

But deference and humility simply run against the grain of the Old West, and many opponents can’t quite believe Askins. If they dismiss the idea of wildness as bogus, they are apt to look for more sinister motives. They frequently charge that conservation organizations are using the wolves as a marketing tool. Troy Mader, who runs the Abundant Wildlife Society, a Gillette, Wyoming, organization devoted to stopping wolf reintroduction, says, “Wolves are the most lucrative asset for raising money in the animal kingdom. I’m talking about animal-preservationist groups. The main thing on their agenda is create a crisis so they can make some money. They’re not doing it for wolves; they’re doing it because they want to make money and control land.” Montana Congressman Ron Marlenee held that wolf reintroduction was “a tool for overzealous environmentalists and bureaucrats to implement federal land-use control on private property and restrict access to public lands.”

But the fact is, a vast number of Americans see wildness slipping away from them, and from the West as well. To them, wolves embody a wildness they want, and a wildness modern civilization can sustain. An overwhelming majority of people commenting on reintroduction, both inside and outside the Yellowstone area, favored it. Support for reintroduction was so strong that in the summer of 1993, when the environmental-impact statement was published, it called for reintroduction of wolves into a 20,700-square-mile area of central Idaho and a 25,000-square-mile area centered upon Yellowstone National Park. The two reintroductions would be conducted differently. In Idaho, there would be a “hard release.” Wolves would be captured in the wilds of Canada and released directly into the national
forest that makes up most of the recovery area. In Yellowstone, there would be a “soft release.” Packs or pairs with young captured in Canada would be brought to Yellowstone, put into holding facilities in the back country, fed deer and elk carcasses, and as far as possible kept from human contact. After a few months, once the young are used to the area, the gate to the pen would be opened and the wolves allowed to leave. Supplemental feeding would continue as long as needed. The only land-use changes contemplated by the environmental-impact statement were possible closures of one-square-mile areas around active dens, and the delay of timber harvests until after June 15. Even then, closures seemed to Bangs unlikely, because closures announce where a den is and increase the likelihood of harassment by curious wolf-fanciers or destruction by someone with a grudge and a gun on his hip.

Says Bangs, “We tell everybody, ‘There’s no big government going to come down on you unless you kill one illegally.’ If we ever go into a more restrictive management mode, it will be because of some jerk who got loose with a gun.”

In both areas, the wolves would be designated “experimental-nonessential” populations, an administrative measure which would allow the Fish and Wildlife Service to forgive inadvertent killing, such as by highway accident, and to allow ranchers to harass or kill wolves caught in the act of attacking livestock on private land. Though the federal government would not provide compensation to ranchers who lose cattle or sheep to wolves, it would rely on private parties, such as Defenders of Wildlife, to do so.

Loss of livestock was, at any rate, no longer the issue. Said Kim Enkerud, of the Montana Stockgrowers Association, “I remember a one-sentence resolution: No wolves, no way, no how. Now our resolution is: Well, wolves are coming here.”

It all had an air of finality about it. Says Bangs, “The big thing with the wolf process is that wolves are coming on their own. Unless we prevent them from getting back, they’ll get there. It may take them fifty or sixty years.”

But they’re coming.

• • •

It is September in Yellowstone, and most of the out-of-state visitors have gone. There is a dusting of snow on the peaks, and a cold wind sighing down from them. Clouds have rolled in from the west. In the depth of night, coyotes break the silence with low howls, followed by three short yips. As if in answer to them, the sky flashes with lightning and a crushing blast of thunder. There is a long silence, perhaps of hours. And again they howl. But this time, the noise seems to announce the arrival of elk in camp. Cows are browsing down the hill from my tent. A bull follows them out of the spruce and aspen, bugling its high-pitched challenge to other bulls. The sound seems to echo off the mountain walls. The bull snorts spurts of steam into the cold morning air, and walks menacingly, neck low, head tilted back, nose straight in front of its eyes, boasting, spoiling to chase the cows into a tightly engineered and submissive bunch. For the elk, too, the issue is control.

The sun comes up on the Lamar Valley, a broad grassland edging the meandering Lamar River. Specimen Ridge rolls up a couple of thousand feet, its higher reaches forested with spruce and fir, which thin out into grassy hilltops. The valley might be ten miles wide here. And those little black dots on the valley floor are bison the size of trucks. There were once wolves here, following the bison and elk. There may be wolves again.

There are six to seven thousand wolves in Alaska. They are not listed as endangered or threatened, as they are in the lower forty-eight states, and Alaska Department of Fish and Game officials believe they are increasing and expanding their range. They have traditionally been exploited by trappers and hunters, who in the 1980s were trapping and shooting about a thousand a year for their skins—which are used as rugs or as trim on parkas—or purely for excitement. Until 1989, there was no limit to the number of wolves a hunter could take, and some hunters killed twenty or more a year. The department has encouraged the take, on the general principle that wolves compete with humans for game.

The idea that wolves must be removed to make way for human hunters has long been gospel in Alaska. To some degree, it reflects the experience of hunters and trappers. In the early twentieth century, canine diseases such as rabies and distemper, probably brought to Alaska by the first dog teams, apparently decimated the wolf
packs. In the absence of wolves, moose moved into areas of western Alaska and the Brooks Range where native languages had no words for moose. Just as the wolves were recovering, federal officials tried to help Alaskan hunters by liberally poisoning and shooting predators.

When federal predator-control people moved into an area, wolves quickly vanished. Dean Wilson, a fur trapper and buyer from Copper Center, recalls that, in the 1940s, “wolves were quite common. The prey was uncommon at that time. In the 1950s, Frank Glaser, an old U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service predator-control guy, came in, and I guess they put poisons out and snared up wolf kills. They worked there for a couple of winters, and they took down the wolf population substantially. By the late 1950s, we were seeing real substantial increases in moose and caribou.”

As a result, in the 1950s and 1960s, much of Alaska had unnaturally low wolf and bear populations, and high populations of moose and caribou. These years were an era of lush hunting for those who looked upon Alaska as a last frontier, a land in which a man or a woman could live apart in nature, dependent on his or her own resources.

The era of predator control continued until 1959, when Alaska became a state and suspended the poisoning. By 1965, a step ahead of prevailing views in the rest of the nation, Alaska even eliminated the bounty that had been paid on wolves.

With an end to the use of poisons, however, wolf and bear populations began to recover. And because they had high numbers of moose and caribou to feast upon, wolves increased rapidly, perhaps even grew to higher densities than had existed before controls. The predator populations probably combined with hunting, cold winters, deep snows, and dry summers to reduce caribou and moose populations. No biologist has precisely apportioned the blame, but most will say hard winters and overhunting by humans were the most important causes of the declines. The Fortymile caribou herd, east of Fairbanks, was estimated to number more than 500,000 animals in the 1920s; by 1975, it had dropped to 6,000. The Western Arctic herd had dropped from several hundred thousand to 75,000 by 1977. Moose declined in the Tanana Flats, near Fairbanks, from 12,000 in the 1960s to 2,800 in 1975. In the 1970s, Alaskan hunters and trappers
saw their golden age ending, and they clamored for a resumption of wolf control.

At the same time, biologists in the Department of Fish and Game were claiming to see evidence that the accepted orthodoxies about predator control were wrong. Dick Bishop came to Alaska in the early 1960s and went to work as a biologist for the Alaska Department of Fish and Game. “I subscribed to the predation gospel of the sixties,” that predators took only those animals which were bound to die anyway. “I was wrong,” he says. “When I went to work on some of these big-game projects, I began to realize there were some inconsistencies in the data. Unless you took into consideration predation, the data just didn’t make sense. I was talking to my superior in the department one day. He was really trying to get rid of the bounty on wolves. I said, ‘It’s a really interesting coincidence that in some of these areas that have no calf survival there are high wolf populations,’ and he said, ‘My god! Don’t tell the public!’ ”

Alaskan biologists began to feel that the mechanisms of predation described by Errington and other biologists in the lower forty-eight might not apply to wolves in the far north. More and more, it appeared to Bishop that predators were determining the number of prey. When the Fortymile caribou herd failed to rebound, says Bishop, “there was simply wolves. There had to be an element of predation affecting that population. There was just nothing else going on.”

Alaskans sought to put their view to the test. In 1976, the Alaska Department of Fish and Game began shooting wolves from airplanes and helicopters in an effort to increase moose and caribou in the Tanana Flats area. Similar wolf controls were launched in other parts of the state as well. Conservation organizations in the lower forty-eight objected to the hunts as a return to the old days of wholesale predator extermination. They viewed the control program as defiance, both of science and of an increasingly held view that wolves were special animals that should not be shot. There were lawsuits and threats of tourist boycotts. Similar hunts began in British Columbia, the Yukon, and Northwest Territories. When television news showed the hunters shooting the wolves, the opposition stiffened. By 1983, then Governor Steve Cowper refused to fund wolf-control measures, and the board stopped authorizing them. For seven years,
Alaskans argued over wolf controls, but the state was unable to move toward consensus.

To build a case that wolf controls were justified, Alaska Department of Fish and Game biologists sought scientific evidence that controls increased moose and caribou numbers. In 1983, department biologists published a review of the wolf-reduction campaign in the Fortymile area, along the Yukon border. Their study concluded that prey populations had been pushed by hunters and bad winters to low densities, but that the wolves and bears that preyed on them didn’t begin to decline until several years later, and in their relatively higher densities predators took an even higher proportion of the remaining prey. The study concluded that wolves kept the populations down and declared that, in such cases, “a manager has two choices. These are either wait for a natural recovery of prey while reducing or eliminating harvest, or reduce the number of wolves.”