The Company of Wolves (9 page)

Gish prided himself on being able to distinguish between story and lore. “These Mexican wolves never would try to pull down a cow on a range unless they turned it around and stampeded it. They almost always attacked its flanks.” He guesses he has seen “maybe half a hundred” wolf kills, largely in Mexico, and all were of livestock. Most of the reports wolfers got of wolves were complaints from livestock owners, but they also followed up on other reports. “I’ve got a report of an old woman sitting on a privy in an outhouse in the rain and a wolf came and bumped the door open.” In another report, “a male and a female wolf came down to a ranch down in the Chiricahuas, a couple of years ago. Their dogs barked at the wolves. Then the dogs ran. One of them lost its tail to one of the wolves, and hid under the porch of the house, where it died.” In another, “a guy walked up to Big Lake in the spring, when it was still muddy. He saw a wolf jumping up and down in those thick weeds that come with the rains, jumping up and down, catching mice.

“Even when you’re hunting wolves, the admiration for the animal’s
activities is tremendous. They have something no other animal has. They actually challenge you. They can come out with things that will astonish you.” A trapper might pursue one wolf for months and see nothing more substantial than its tracks and the bones of its kills. Wolves would dig up the traps and leave them sprung and empty, as if to spite the trappers. “Bill Casto gloried in it. And he got a big kick out of it if they got the best of him.”

Wolves back then didn’t exactly thrive: Gish found that, when wolves managed to den, they had an average of five pups, but only an average of two survived the first six months. The rest, he guessed, starved. “I got the sense not all attacks by wolves were successful, even on domestic cattle. I think that the wolf’s fear of being put out of commission entered into a lot of decisions in preying situations. I saw very little evidence of ruthless attacks. They just didn’t take many chances.” He describes seeing tracks indicating that wolves came upon cattle at a watering place at night and “walked around and around just keeping the cows restless. You could see where one of ’em would tramp around in one spot and circle and circle and circle. Then you can see where the steer kicked out and ran and the wolf followed,” and made the kill.

The more he talks, the more Gish’s face softens, the more his mind takes his body back to the days when it did not betray him. He recalls a wolf that killed cows in the Canelo Hills, and as he recounts finding the wolf’s track and following it into the hills, he seems to rediscover an old truth, and he breaks into the story to exclaim, “They so intrigued you that you couldn’t let go. You realized you didn’t know half what you thought you did, and you wanted to keep going on. You couldn’t let go.

“The Mexicans themselves never bothered to fool with the wolves. It was just like the water and the sky.” Only when modern ranchers moved in and a European tradition took hold did they start to trap. He recalls Seminole Indian refugees he met while trapping along the Bavispe River in Sonora. He says, “They were very sharp people. They had an awful lot of respect for these wolves. It was a part of the folklore that the wolf was ethereal almost. That they had properties and capabilities that were not controllable by people. It was something that existed up there in the sky.

“I share their appreciation for the qualities of the wolf as he really
was. I’ve got photos of wolves that were killed, and it’s sad to see such a beautiful thing dead.”

Behind Gish’s house, there are low fences built to contain Destiny, a hybrid wolf-dog with a very aggressive view of strangers. And there is an old sheet-metal-sided trailer, built in the early 1950s by Gish’s father-in-law, where Gish keeps his files, clippings, typewriter, and fax machine. The sheet-rock ceiling crumbles under a long-unrepaired leak in the roof. He hobbles in and begins to pick up books and papers to show his visitor.

“I have dug stuff out of the history that you wouldn’t believe,” he says. He picks up a tattered paperback copy of Allen and Allen’s
Pioneering in Texas
, and, perhaps quoting something from the book, announces that a “Colonel Dodge” claimed to have seen forty thousand wolves crossing Nebraska’s Platte River at night. He hefts a thick typescript that appears to be a compendium of short summaries of the lives of every Indian-fighter in Texas. Pointing to a copy of Young and Goldman’s
Wolves of North America
on his shelf, he praises it as the best book on wolves. “You can bank on it,” he says of the book. “You can bank on it because it was our people and that kind of people working with their own hands out in the field that he based it on.” He waves a copy of Barry Lopez’s
Of Wolves and Men
and says, “This is all bunk. This guy wouldn’t know a wolf from a Volkswagen.”

He says there has been no study, “nothing ethical, since Young.” He believes, “A major amount of misinformation is trickling down from David Mech.” He talks of other books about wolves, and is sour on all of them. “I’m sick and tired of these new biologists making up a biology which doesn’t exist.”

Gish did two studies of the Mexican wolf in his lifetime. The first was the study Voorhies commissioned him to do in the 1940s. The second was an unpublished historical account of the eradication of the Mexican wolf, entitled “An Historical Look at the Gray Wolf in Early Arizona Territory,” commissioned by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service in 1970. David E. Brown drew heavily upon it in
The Wolf in the Southwest
, and listed Gish as a “major contributing author,” but Gish feels his own study should have been published and given credit.

He feels he ought to have a say in the future of the wolf, the way
he had had a say in its past. “I felt at least I was entitled to be considered as knowledgeable in the field, and at least deserved to be considered.” But he is not. Though there is an effort to restore Mexican wolves under the leadership of officials of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the Arizona Department of Game and Fish, they do not ask Gish for his views.

If he were asked, he would say the effort is a sham. He believes fervently there are still wolves in Arizona. He says a woman biologist working north of the Animas Mountains in New Mexico ran into a wolf that she saw at a range of fifty yards, “in clear sight.” When she went back to the New Mexico Game and Fish Department and reported it, he says, “she was transferred to a desk job.” He shows three pictures taken by Ross Kane in 1991 in the Canelo Hills, of a wolf crossing a road. They show the landscape of southeastern Arizona, dry grass, low oak or scrub on the hills in the background, a dirt road, and a wolf crossing it. The light is low—late day, perhaps just before sunset. The wolf is deep-chested, with a broad head and long legs. In one picture its head and tail are both held low as it steps into the road, looking nervously toward the photographer.

He thinks reports of wolves are silenced, dismissed, put down the way UFO reports are put down, by bureaucrats who have a vested interest in denying the existence of wild wolves. “They want you to believe there aren’t wolves here. They have declared the Mexican wolf extinct in the wild wherever he existed, and they made that determination without any fieldwork in the wild.” They want instead to reintroduce captive-bred wolves, which he doubts will survive in the wild.

His face reddens, and his tone grows angry. “That’s the ecofascists taking over total control of the resources of the United States under government mandate. Bureaucrats already have hundreds and hundreds of officials, and the program isn’t even approved. They want a bureaucracy. They don’t want a wolf. It’s a land grab.” A cascade of symbols issues forth. “Riparian water rights. Spotted owls. Such-and-such a minnow. Whatever. It’s all designed to create a bureaucracy and bring a range of programs with no accountability. They are creating meetings and organizations all over the U.S. It’s as phony as a three-dollar bill!

“They have to get title for the land for them to be on, and they
have to keep people out. So who’s going to enjoy it? Only the bureaucrats. The helicopter fliers and the dart nuts.”

If the authorities are really interested in wolves, he says, “all they have to do is allow the wolves that are still alive in Mexico and in southern Arizona to come back in, and set up an effective compensation system for stockmen who lose stock to them.

“I have a relationship and an understanding of the wolf that these people don’t have,” he says. “I cannot be so far off base after all these years. I have no problem with wolves. I know what they do.

“I would like to see wolves in a lot of places where I see people,” he says. Instead, what he sees creeping across the desert and up the mountains of Arizona is “the encroachment of rules, regulations, license fees, and arbitrary decisions on the world. I doubt that, anywhere in these United States and maybe in Mexico, these wolves can very long survive. I recognize the overpowering dominance of the open free market. And I have seen thousands and thousands of acres become asphalt and cement.” When he bought the lot he lives on, he bought three lots together, so he would have space on all sides, but houses have crept up to his fences. At the time he moved out here, there were irrigation canals and citrus groves. “Every one of those irrigation canals used to have gigantic cottonwood trees, all of which have been cut. The citrus groves are gone. The wolf is not built for that kind of world. God never made him that way.”

He would probably agree that God didn’t make him to work in factories or to smile as the suburbs sprawled out from Phoenix, either. Gish watched the Old West turn into the New, and, like the wolf, he has not been master of the transformation. “I never made much money in my life,” he declares with an air of defiance. “We haven’t accomplished much in the way of getting on top of the economy.” Asked if he means this implied comparison between his history and the wolf’s, he looks off, through the piles of papers and the sheet metal walls of the trailer, at something beyond, and he nods and says in a soft voice, “Our time is past.”

It is both a lie and a cliché to say that killing is a kind of love for the wolf. Dan Gish was certainly not a wolf hater, though he worked for wolf haters, for men who were so sour on life that they wanted to reduce it to numbers, to profit and loss, to what they could suck out of the marrow before the bones bleached. It’s an awful paradox:
he identifies with what he spent his life chasing. The wolf has meanings for him as powerful, deep, and true as those cherished by the most ardent of wolf defenders. And when the last wolf vanished, he lost something more precious than he knew. It cut his bond to the earth and severed connections between eye and heart. There is a lesson in this for us all.

In February, a pilot flying over the snowbound stillness of northern Minnesota has spotted a wolf kill in the snow below and radioed its location to wolf biologists at the North Central Forest Experiment Station, thirteen miles from Ely. Hours later, a group of wildlife enthusiasts and schoolteachers participating in a Vermilion Community College weekend wolf seminar have skied a mile over the flat surface of a frozen lake toward the kill. The skies are so gray they make the spruce-and-balsam-fir-forested ridges seem almost black in color. There are four inches of fresh powder on the ground from the previous night’s storm. It is quiet but for the clatter of ski poles and the zipping of skis over ice crystals. The kill is away from the lake, in a spruce bog, a low area with dwarfed and twisted trees. The croak of ravens off in the woods at the edge of the swamp announces our arrival.

There is a strong catbox odor of foxes. Fox footprints weave through the spruce, looping around in wide, gossipy, intersecting
arcs in the snow. They stop to sniff at something, then hurry on. A wolf kill is an event in the woods. It is food for ravens, foxes, and eagles, and they attend it like the opening of opera season.

To us, a wolf kill is a window on an unseen world. Wolves are not watched; they are glimpsed. One may see a flash of yellow eye or a movement in a thicket of branches, and then it is gone. Much of our impression of the animal has come from reading its tracks in the snow. And much of what we imagine comes from having found its kills.

By the time we find this one, there is nothing left but a mat of dun-colored fur and a welt of frozen blood. It was once, judging by the fur, a deer. The night’s snowfall has blotted out the record of the hunt, but the surface of the snow around the hair is tattooed by the feet of ravens and foxes. There are delicate featherings in the snow where ravens landed or darted out of the way. No bones are left at the kill, but fox trails lead to a wolf bed, a hollow in the snow under a cluster of sheltering spruces where the wolf has curled up to sleep after its feast. Wolves sometimes cache pieces of meat near or under these beds, to hide them from scavengers. Digging with a bowie knife, we unearth a few chips of bone and a frozen chunk of blood. The bed has already been excavated and the meat removed by the foxes. Ravens must have watched excitedly, judging from the fanlike tracks of wing feathers around the fox trails.