American Wolf: A True Story of Survival and Obsession in the West

by Nate Blakeslee

Territorial conflict was the most common cause of death for the park’s wolves, most of whom didn’t live beyond four or five years. Life for wolves was an adventure, but it was usually not a long one.

As a science, wildlife management was still in its infancy, and park officials genuinely believed that predators would eventually decimate the park’s prey population if left to their own devices. They didn’t realize that wolves and elk had coexisted in Yellowstone for thousands of years, that the two species had in fact evolved in tandem with each other—which explained why the elk could run just as fast as the wolf but no faster.

Wolves were the driving force behind the evolution of a wide variety of prey species in North America after the last ice age, literally molding the natural world around them. The massive size of the moose, the nimbleness of the white-tailed deer, the uncanny balance of the bighorn sheep—the architect of these and countless other marvels was the wolf.

Nor did Yellowstone’s early managers understand what would happen to an ecosystem without predators. Once the wolves were gone, the ungulate population in the park exploded, and the quality of the range quickly began to deteriorate. Overgrazed hillsides eroded, and stream banks denuded of woody shrubs began to crumble, damaging prime trout habitat. Elk browsing at their leisure, undisturbed by predators, decimated stands of young aspen and willow. To...

The idea that wolves might be the solution to Yellowstone’s problems surfaced as early as 1940, though it wasn’t until the 1970s that the federal government began seriously considering reintroduction. Elected officials in Idaho, Wyoming, and Montana (the states surrounding the park) were adamantly opposed to the idea, in deference to two constituencies that exercised an outsize influence on local politics: ranchers and hunters. Ranchers, whose own ancestors had helped rid the mountains of predators in the first place, feared they’d lose livestock once the reintroduced wolves began spreading beyond the park’s boundaries. Elk-hunters, meanwhile, knew the wolves would be subsisting on the same game they cherished—and they’d only just won the fight to keep rangers from reducing elk numbers. From the hunters’ perspective, every elk taken by a wolf was a lost opportunity, and wolves ate a lot of elk.

As his collar indicated, 10 was indeed dead. He had been shot by a local man named Chad McKittrick, who, after being arrested and charged with a federal offense for shooting an endangered animal, claimed he had thought he was shooting a feral dog. It wasn’t the perfect crime; a friend of McKittrick’s had disposed of 10’s collar in a culvert filled with spring runoff, not realizing that it was, of course, perfectly waterproof and still transmitting. The defendant was anything but repentant; while out on bail, he rode his horse down the middle of Red Lodge in the annual Fourth of July parade wearing a T-shirt that read NORTHERN ROCKIES WOLF REDUCTION PROJECT.

McKittrick’s defiance made him a bit of a local hero to some. When a federal judge sentenced him to six months in prison, it only reinforced what many in the area thought about wolf reintroduction and about the federal government in general: overreaching bureaucrats in Washington had rammed wolves down their throats, and people weren’t going to just stand by and do nothing.

Rick arrived in May 1994, less than a year before the first wolves were scheduled to be released, and found a community deeply divided about the wisdom of reintroduction. Over time he came to know which gas stations, restaurants, motels, and curio shops were run by pro-wolf proprietors, and which were anti-wolf. The downstairs gift shop at the airport in Bozeman, Montana, where most Yellowstone visitors landed, stocked all things wolf—stuffed animals, knickknacks, calendars, posters—while the upstairs shop near the gates had nothing. A wolf-loving friend of Rick’s had once asked the woman at the upstairs counter why. After some hedging, she finally put her cards on the table. “Because we don’t like wolves, that’s why,” she said.

It wasn’t Rick’s first conflict with Park Service management. With over twenty thousand employees, the service was as bureaucratic and hierarchical as any agency of the federal government, though Rick found that some bosses were more hidebound than others. A few would have been right at home in the U.S. Army. Rick once sat in the back row at a meeting of interpretive rangers while a supervisor demonstrated in surprising detail how pens were to be carried while on duty.

In an effort to rein him in, the Park Service assigned Rick to the visitor center near Old Faithful, seventy miles from the Lamar Valley. The main attraction in that part of the park, of course, was the geyser itself. It could be counted on to go off every ninety minutes or so, and the park kept visitors apprised of the estimated time of the next eruption on a chalkboard in the viewing area. If they had a little time to kill, families might get ice cream or wander into the auditorium during Rick’s slideshow on wolves. The pictures were interesting, but there would be a great deal of watch checking in the audience, and periodically a mass exodus would occur to get a good spot to watch the eruption. It was like trying to do stand-up comedy at a nightclub with the Super Bowl playing on the TV above the bar. Rick could have had slides of an alpha female giving birth in a den while her mate wrestled grizzlies outside in an ice storm, and it wouldn’t have made a difference. Old Faithful was Old Faithful.

He was also required to conduct “wolf walks” through the woods near the visitor center, in which he discussed the role wolves played in Yellowstone’s ecosystem. To his frustration, there were no wolves in those woods nor anywhere else in the vicinity of Old Faithful; they were all still in the Northern Range. In the calculus of the Park Service, that was of little consequence. Old Faithful was where the visitors were, so this was where Rick needed to be.

One afternoon a boy asked him, “Are we going to see wolves on this walk?” Rick had to admit that they would not. “Why not?” the boy wanted to know. “Because there aren’t any wolves in this part of the park,” Rick replied. “Then why are we doing a wolf walk here?” the boy asked. Someday, Rick wante...

If he did skip a day, who knew what he might miss? The celebrated primate researcher Jane Goodall didn’t even have a college degree when she was assigned to watch chimpanzees in Tanzania, Rick liked to remind people, yet she was the first to record them using twigs as tools for fishing termites out of the ground, a discovery that upended the conventional understanding of primate intelligence. She had been in the field for months, much longer than any other observer, before she witnessed that startling behavior. And yet if you had approached her the day before she made that discovery and asked her if a chimp was smart enough to use a tool to get what it wanted, she would have said no. It was all about showing up.

When the black reached his brother and O-Six, there were warm greetings all around, as if the three had been together for years. Shortly thereafter, as the Druids’ unanswered howls echoed off Specimen Ridge, the trio set out together once again. O-Six paused to urinate. Instead of squatting, she raised her leg to scent-mark a tree, then scratched the earth nearby, lest her sign be missed somehow. It was the mark of an alpha female, and its message was unmistakable: This land is mine.

O-Six typically took the lead, flushing herds out of the trees and running them back and forth across the hillsides, testing each elk to find the slowest animal. The two males should have been welcome additions to any hunting party; in a typical pack, large males like 754 provided the muscle for the final takedown, grabbing the elk by the throat and crushing the windpipe after the lighter, more fleet-footed females had run their prey to exhaustion. But 754 and 755 seemed unable or unwilling to follow O-Six’s cues, running in circles or chasing the wrong animal on too many occasions. They were less partners than trainees. A few of the wolf-watchers had begun calling them “dumb and dumber,” a moniker that Rick found offensive. Still, even he had to concede that O-Six’s decision to join forces with these two was puzzling. The simple truth was that they were unlikely candidates to be anybody’s saviors.

The same dynamic unfolded time and again as the winter wore on. O-Six tried to lead her charges to every corner of their new territory, only to be thwarted by the Northern Range’s single, solitary road. The males wanted to come with her, but they couldn’t conquer their fear of the mysterious surface and its inherent strangeness, oddly elevated and flat, with no cover, smelling like nothing they’d ever known. And, of course, the road was where the cars were, and the people. It seemed that whatever pack the brothers had been born into had seldom encountered humans, and they, too, were alien and threatening.

To O-Six, the road meant nothing. She didn’t approach people or cars, but she didn’t go out of her way to avoid them, either. To her, a car was like anything else on the landscape that was neither predator nor prey—like a rock or a tree or even a bison. It wouldn’t harm her, and she couldn’t eat it; it was a nonentity.

It was a phenomenon Rick had encountered many times. In any given population of animals, some will seemingly be up for any challenge—crossing a road, fording a deep stream, attacking a rival or an unusually large prey animal—and some will not. In fighting dogs, the tendency to rise to a challenge is known as gameness, and it has been a highly coveted attribute cultivated through generations of selective breeding. In wolves, the provenance—and the desirability—of the trait is less clear. The same fearlessness that might serve an...

The pack was reluctant to kill prey too close to the den, for fear of attracting bears or other wolves.

When the brothers did make kills, the carcasses were often miles from the den site, and getting food to O-Six and the pups that spring kept them busy. One brother would sometimes show up at the den carrying a large piece of elk, such as a leg assembly, but this process was clumsy, involving frequent stops to renew his grip. More commonly the males used their stomachs as grocery bags, swallowing up to twenty pounds of meat and making the long journey back to the den. When they arrived, their sides bulging noticeably, they regurgitated the meat for the pups, like birds feeding chicks in a nest.

Wolves had become one of those polarizing issues, like abortion or gun control or war in the Middle East, about which the country could not seem to reach a consensus.

But the truth was that wolves were just the latest flashpoint in a fight that had been simmering in the West for decades. The real struggle was over public land—what it should be used for and who should have the right to decide. The federal government owned almost half of all the land in the West, in large part because nineteenth-century homesteaders found much of it too arid or too rugged to settle, unlike the more hospitable Midwest, which settlers had made into the nation’s breadbasket.

The government instead adopted a pattern of selling access to the West’s rich resources—grazing rights, timber, precious metals, oil and gas—without actually selling the land itself. As a result, the residents of a place like Idaho, where fully two-thirds of the land is federally owned, don’t make decisions about how the resources in their own backyards should be used. Instead agencies like the U.S. Forest Service and the Bureau of Land Management call the shots from Washington, and people all over the country—even those who visit a place like Yellowstone or the Grand Canyon only once in ...

As the environmental movement gained steam in the 1970s, rising resentment over conservation measures on federal land boiled over in the so-called Sagebrush Rebellion, when western politicians pressured Congress to turn control over much of the land to the states or even to private owners. Timber companies resented bans on logging in national forests to protect owls and other endangered species. Exhaustive environmental reviews slowed new mining projects for years. For every environmentalist, like Honnold, who resented the fact that cattle were grazed on public lands, there was a rancher in the West who resented paying the fees and believed that t...

When the effort to wrest control of the West from the federal government failed, some of the frustrated anti-government fervor expressed itself in darker ways, like the white nationalist militia groups that cropped up, most notoriously in Montana. Overreaching federal judges, restrictions on gun ownership, job-killing bans on logging and mining—the list of grievances was long, and the return of the wolf was seen by many as just one more burden to bear. When politicians like Butch Ot...

The anger was real, and from what Honnold had seen it was getting worse. As his list of victories grew, so did his list of enemies. Death threats had been sent to his office in Bozeman. The off-road vehicle suit Honnold had won had inspired someone—presumably a disgruntled ATV enthusiast—to leave an unlit gasoline bomb on the steps of the local ranger station. A note scrawled on the side read, “Bye, bye, fuc...

During the winter, Yellowstone was one of the coldest inhabited places on earth. Trees at higher elevations in the park had been known to simply explode, succumbing to the rapid expansion of their frozen sap. The park was also one of the snowiest places in the nation. Snow could fall any day of the year, even in the middle of summer. Average snowfall north and south of the park was roughly twenty feet per year, but Yellowstone itself usually got more than twice that amount.

The answer seemed to be a resurgence of willow, the riparian shrub that is the beaver’s preferred food. And why was the willow coming back? Smith was still trying to figure that out, but he knew the answer almost certainly had something to do with wolves. As their numbers grew after reintroduction, elk numbers had of course declined, but—just as important—their behavior had changed as well. No longer free to congregate at their leisure along stream banks, elk were spending less time browsing on willow, which left plenty for the beavers.

More wolves, it seemed, meant more beavers, but that wasn’t all: the return of Yellowstone’s top predator was having repercussions up and down the park’s food chain. The Lamar Valley that O-Six claimed as her own was not the same landscape that her Druid ancestors had been introduced to fifteen years before. It was healthier in ways that even some of the wolf’s most ardent advocates hadn’t anticipated. Biologists called this type of chain reaction a trophic cascade,

One of the most dramatic changes concerned coyotes. Yellowstone had long hosted one of the densest coyote populations in North America, but that quickly changed with the reintroduction of wolves. After decades as Yellowstone’s top canines, the park’s coyotes seemed to have lost their collective memory of how to coexist with their much larger relatives. They routinely approached wolves feeding on carcasses, as was their habit when they spotted an easy meal. Time and again wolf-watchers observed coyotes realizing their fatal mistake far too late, as the faster and more powerful wolves easily ran them down and killed them. Wolves colonizing new areas of the park routinely dug up and destroyed coyote dens, killing any pups they found, to eliminate competition for prey and to make their own dens safer. In short order, Yellowstone’s newly dominant canines reduced the Northern Range’s coyote population by half.

What happened next was revelatory. The park’s rodent population, long depressed by years of unchecked predation by ever-present coyotes, rebounded immediately. This meant a sudden increase in the food supply for raptors like owls and hawks. Healthier birds began having larger broods, and Yellowstone’s bird-watching community began seeing an avian renaissance, something they never realized they were missing.

Weasels and foxes also benefited from the rebounding rodent population, and their numbers began to grow, too. Even pronghorn numbers were up. Though no predator in North America can run down a healthy adult pronghorn, coyotes routinely fed on helpless newborn calves, which had long depressed the park’s herds. Wolves, however, seldom take p...

Another surprise for Smith and his colleagues was the sheer number of animals that fed on wolf kills. Not only ravens and magpies but also coyotes, foxes, and eagles routinely visited almost ever...

Wolf kills were also a major new source of nutrition for the park’s bears and, it turned out, a very timely one. Wolf reintroduction coincided with a steady decline in the production of whitebark pine nuts in the park, a key source of protein for bears. They routinely raided nut caches created by the park’s squirrels in the fall, the season when bears were preparing for hibernation and needed to feed as much as possible. Climate change was considered the most likely cause for the decline, and researchers expected to see less healthy bears and fewer cubs as a result. Yet the bears seemed to still be thriving, possibly, researchers theorized, because elk carcasses brought down by wolves were offsetting the loss of the nuts.

New research on declining elk numbers brought unexpected results as well. Each year state game managers tabulated the number of elk taken by hunters—the harvest, as it was known. The northern Yellowstone herd had declined dramatically, limiting the harvest in a few areas immediately adjacent to the park, but statewide elk harvests hadn’t dipped at all in Wyoming, Montana, or Idaho. In fact, they were trending up: in 2010, for example, Wyoming hunters took 25,420 elk, a new record for the state and a 30 percent jump from 1995, the year wolves were first reintroduced.

Even more promising, from Smith’s perspective, was a new study by the young biologist Arthur Middleton, who set out to measure elk calf survival rates in the region east of the park. Wolf critics, especially the Wyoming Farm Bureau, were acutely interested in Middleton’s study, correctly anticipating that he would report the numbers to be at almost historic lows. But they were somewhat less enthusiastic about the findings from the second phase of Middleton’s project—his assessment of what was causing the decline. After months of observing elk interact with predators, he concluded that grizzlies, not wolves, had taken the majority of the calves, and that most elk in the region rarely en...

The science was on Smith’s side, but it didn’t seem to matter to ranchers and hunters, or to state legislators. The debate wasn’t about scien...