Читать книгу The Rise of Wolf 8 - Rick McIntyre - Страница 11

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Wolf Interpreter

THE FOUR MALE pups described in the prologue were born in the spring of 1994 in Alberta, Canada, east of Jasper National Park. Their family was known locally as the Petite Lake pack. At that time, I was in the extreme southern part of the United States, working as a seasonal naturalist for the National Park Service at Big Bend National Park in west Texas, the most remote national park in the lower forty-eight states. As I drove toward an abandoned Depression-era ranch near the Rio Grande river, where I was to lead a tour for park visitors on local history, I tried to figure out how to get around a major setback in my life.

The previous day I had received a call from Tom Tankersley, the assistant chief naturalist at Yellowstone National Park. We had an understanding that I would have a job that spring at Yellowstone as the park’s wolf interpreter, and I would specialize in giving talks about the possibility of reintroducing wolves into the park. I would be the world’s only official wolf interpreter. But Tom had called to tell me that government funding had not come through for this new position, and the offer would have to be rescinded. He was sorry, but it could not be helped.

As I continued driving through the desert landscape, I tried to come up with a plan to save that position. I passionately supported reintroducing wolves into Yellowstone, and I felt with my previous experience with wolves while working for the National Park Service in Alaska that I could help win acceptance for the proposal. Beyond that, I had a gut feeling that I just had to be there. A door had been closed, and I had to find another way through.

An inspiration suddenly came to me. I led the walk, then rushed home and called Tom. I had a proposition: What if the position could be privately funded? After a few moments of silence, Tom said he would check. He called back the next day to say there did not seem to be any regulations prohibiting private funding, so my idea might work. He gave me an estimate of how much would be needed for the four-month position and a deadline for having the money in an account managed by the Yellowstone Association, the nonprofit that handled donations for the park.

After thanking Tom and finishing the call, the reality of my situation set in. How were we going to get that much funding? By my standards at the time, it was a lot. Fortunately, I was about to leave on a lecture tour to publicize my recent book, A Society of Wolves, and I would be speaking to several large groups in California. The timing was ideal.

It turned out that I was lousy at explaining the situation. I had trouble clearly stating why Yellowstone needed funding for the wolf interpreter position. In my first talk, in a Southern California community, I mumbled a few words about how people could support Yellowstone’s wolf reintroduction proposal. If anyone wanted to help, they could speak to me after the program. No one did. Then I drove north to San Francisco to give a talk at the California Academy of Sciences. The deadline Tom had given me was a few days away. I knew this would be my largest audience, and if my plan was going to work, it had to happen there or I would have to give up on going to Yellowstone.

Four hundred and fifty people showed up. I managed to make a slightly more coherent explanation of the Yellowstone wolf story and how people could help. After the program, a crowd gathered around me, and several people asked about funding the position. A few made small pledges. I was grateful for their contributions, but as I added them up in my head, I knew that I was nowhere near the goal I needed to reach.

A young couple stood there quietly, listening to what I was saying. I sensed they had to leave. The man stepped forward, handed me his business card, and said that they would like to help. He told me to look at the back of the card. I did and saw that he had pledged $12.50. I thanked him and said I would let him know when I reached my goal. Other people asked me wolf questions. As the couple walked off, I took another look at the back of that card and saw my mistake. The pledge was not for $12.50. It was for $1,250. With previous pledges, that amount would bring me close to the figure Tom needed.

That was the moment I knew the Yellowstone job was going to happen. I excused myself from the people gathered around me and ran off to find that couple. They were still nearby. Feeling somewhat awkward, I asked if I had read the back of the card correctly. The man, Gary, modestly told me I had. He introduced me to his companion, Trish. We talked about wolves and Yellowstone, and I thanked them for their generosity. The next day I called Tom and told him we had enough funding for the job. We set a starting date and began to plan how the new position would be structured.

I packed up, left Big Bend the first week of May, and started to drive north toward Yellowstone. It would be a trip of about fifteen hundred miles, and I planned on doing it in three days. As I drove through hundreds of miles of barren west Texas countryside toward New Mexico, I had plenty of time to think about how events in my life had led to this new assignment.

I WAS BORN in Lowell, Massachusetts, and spent my first ten years in the nearby small rural town of Billerica. We lived in a renovated schoolhouse on Concord Road. A farm was across the street and the surrounding land was full of woods, ponds, brooks, and fields. It was wild country, the perfect place for a kid like me. Looking back, I feel I had an idyllic childhood there.

It was the 1950s and, to use a modern term, we were free-range kids. On summer days and weekends during the school year I would go wherever I wanted in the outdoors, either alone or with other guys in the neighborhood. Some days it was fishing in one of the local ponds, other days it was just walking in the woods. Sometimes it was biking along the endless back roads in our town. The common thread was being outdoors, and as I spent more and more time out there, I became increasingly fascinated with wildlife. I was drawn to the small fish in the brook behind our house and would occasionally catch some of them and keep them in a small aquarium. I found turtles even more intriguing, and I put a lot of thought and experimentation into figuring out how to catch them. After examining one, I always released it.

I recently heard astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson say, “All kids are scientists.” That triggered a memory of something I did back then. The farm across the street had two dogs: Rex and Shepy. Like all farm dogs, they were never tied up and did whatever they wanted. I noticed that most mornings Shepy would walk off into the woods and come back late in the day, just like I often did. I wondered what he was doing out there, so one morning when I saw him set out, I followed him and watched as he wandered through the woods and fields, investigating various scent trails. He was exploring the country, much as I had been doing. We were kindred spirits. That day was a preview of how I would eventually study wolves in Alaska and Yellowstone many decades later.

After finishing college as a forestry major at the University of Massachusetts, I got a job in Alaska at Mount McKinley National Park and was stationed sixty-six miles out on the park road at Eielson Visitor Center. The mountain was eventually renamed Denali, its original Native American name, and the park’s name was changed, as well, but when I arrived there they were both still called McKinley. Eielson was built on the Arctic tundra at a location with a commanding view of the 20,320-foot then-Mount McKinley, the highest peak in North America. The interior of the visitor center had displays on mountaineering, geology, wildlife, and tundra vegetation, but the view was the main attraction. My duties included conducting nature walks out on the tundra, leading half-day hikes, and giving evening campfire talks at Wonder Lake Campground. That campground offered a close view of McKinley and was one of the most spectacular viewpoints in the entire national park system.

Visitors to McKinley were always especially taken with the park’s large population of grizzlies, and I felt the same way. That first summer I watched every bear I saw until it went out of sight. I was also fascinated by the other animals in the park: caribou, moose, Dall sheep, and the vast array of migrating birds that nested on the tundra. But from my first day in Alaska, my goal was to see a wolf. At that time in McKinley, they were rarely seen.

One day at Eielson I heard people talk about seeing two wolves stalking a mother moose and her two calves. When my shift was over, I drove out and found the cow and her calves. Then in the nearby willows I spotted two gray wolves, the first wild wolves I had ever seen. They moved back and forth in the brush, trying to get between the cow and her calves. When the wolves gave up on the calves and went out of sight, I headed back to Eielson, elated at having had the experience of seeing those wolves.

The next summer I returned to Alaska, and I kept going back for a total of fifteen summers. In 1975, the Alaska Legislature asked the federal government to officially change the name of the park to Denali, and although that was not to happen until 1980, Denali was the name commonly used in Alaska at that time, and the name I will use for the park and the mountain from now on.

Wolves gradually became more commonly seen, and I spent a lot of time watching and learning about them. I read Adolph Murie’s 1944 groundbreaking book, The Wolves of Mount McKinley, and eventually found a high viewpoint where I could watch the distant den site of the East Fork pack, the pack Murie had studied in the late 1930s and early 1940s. I got to know the pack’s alpha female and her mate, the alpha male, a wolf with a bad limp. I saw the alphas and the subordinate adults in the pack take care of the pups at the den site, and I watched as they hunted caribou and dealt with grizzly bears that came too close to the den. I once witnessed the pups stalk their sleeping father and leap on him like they were attacking a prey animal. He shook them off good-naturedly, walked off, and resumed his nap.

During those years of my life, I was essentially a migrant worker. I was in Denali for those fifteen summers and, in the winters, had jobs in desert national parks such as Death Valley and Joshua Tree in California. I switched to Glacier National Park in 1991 and spent three summers there. My third year, I worked in the Polebridge section of the park, the prime area for seeing wolves. Wolves had been killed off long ago in Montana and other western states, but in the late 1970s a few crossed the border from Alberta and settled in the northwestern part of Glacier, the first wolf recolonization in the American West. The wolves were hard to spot because of the thick forests, but I saw a number of them that summer, including a family playing in a meadow.

Around that time, I was asked to write a book about wolves. I had built up a lot of wolf sightings in Denali and Glacier, and I had read all the books written about wolves and most of the scientific papers on them as well. I knew the biggest current issue was the possible reintroduction of wolves into Yellowstone. They were native to the area when Yellowstone was set aside as the world’s first national park in 1872, but the early park rangers, like nearly everyone else in the country at the time, felt wolves were no good. In 1926, they killed the last few wolves in the park.

For my book, I made several trips to Yellowstone to interview the Park Service biologists and managers planning the potential reintroduction. They included John Varley, director of the Yellowstone Center for Resources, and Norm Bishop, a longtime Yellowstone interpretive ranger doing public outreach in communities near the park. After that I spoke with many of the advocates for reintroduction, such as Hank Fischer with Defenders of Wildlife and Renee Askins of the Wolf Fund. I also went to Helena, Montana, to interview Ed Bangs, the US Fish and Wildlife Service biologist who was the wolf recovery coordinator for the Northern Rockies. While I was there, I went to a hearing on the reintroduction and testified in favor of it.

By the time my book A Society of Wolves: National Parks and the Battle over the Wolf was published in the fall of 1993, I was well versed on the Yellowstone wolf reintroduction proposal. In addition, I had been around wild wolves in Alaska and Montana for sixteen years. All that led to my going to Yellowstone in the spring of 1994 to start my job as the park’s wolf interpreter.

WHEN I ARRIVED in the park in early May, I met with Tom Tankersley, and we went over the schedule he had created for this brand-new position. I would live in a government trailer at Tower Junction and present wolf programs throughout the two-million-acre park. I had already developed a slide show on wolves and the possibility of bringing them back to Yellowstone. I would give that program weekly at the Madison and Bridge Bay Campgrounds and occasionally at the Mammoth and Fishing Bridge Campgrounds, as well. Those programs would go through the end of the tourist season in early September.

I would also give daytime talks in several of the park visitor centers. For those programs, I would show video footage of wolves in Denali that my friend Bob Landis had taken during the years I worked there. Bob would go on to shoot numerous wildlife documentaries for the National Geographic television channel and the PBS program Nature, including many on the wolves of Yellowstone. The plan that summer was that I would put Bob’s footage up on a monitor, describe the behavior of the wolves, and then talk about the proposed wolf reintroduction in Yellowstone.

Most of my time would be devoted to what the Park Service calls “roving interpretation.” That involves going to where the biggest crowds are and informally talking to as many people as possible. Only a small percentage of park visitors go to scheduled ranger programs, so there is a need to reach the many people who do not attend any of our talks. It is like being a street preacher, rather than a minister giving a sermon in church.

I borrowed a wolf pelt for the summer and tried to figure out how to attract the attention of visitors so I could tell them the reintroduction story. I remember the first time I stopped in the parking lot at Tower Fall. I put on my park ranger hat, checked my uniform, took out the wolf pelt, and started to walk toward a crowd of people. I was immediately surrounded by scores of visitors who all asked about the pelt.

I developed a talk where in a few minutes I explained that wolves were native to Yellowstone but had been killed off by the early rangers. The Park Service later realized what a mistake we had made and now hoped to reintroduce wolves to the park by bringing animals in from Canada. I talked to one cluster of people, then moved on to the next group. I could get my message out to about three hundred people an hour that way. Most of them would never have gone to any of the park’s formal programs. To add variety to my work, I went into gift shops with the pelt and strolled through the aisles. As they had done in the parking lots, people rushed over to see what I was carrying. I then went through my short talk before switching over to the next aisle.

In midsummer we got word that the park’s wolf reintroduction proposal had been approved by Bruce Babbitt, President Clinton’s secretary of the interior. From that point on I revised my talks to say we would be bringing the wolves back during the coming winter. By the end of the season, I estimated that I had talked to over 25,000 park visitors about wolves and the plan to reintroduce them to Yellowstone.

That summer I finished work on my second wolf book, War Against the Wolf: America’s Campaign to Exterminate the Wolf. It was a collection of historical documents going back to colonial days that traced the origins of anti-wolf bias in America and the reasons our country was determined to kill off all the wolves, even in national parks. The book also reprinted some of the early writings that began to portray wolves in a more positive light, such as Ernest Thompson Seton’s Lobo the King of Currumpaw. It finished with the current plans to bring wolves back to the Northern Rockies and the Southwest. I commissioned wolf biologists and wolf advocates to write new articles for the book and wrote several new essays myself on wolf recovery and the plans for Yellowstone. The book came out in the spring of 1995.

My job as wolf interpreter ended in September, the traditional time when park visitation dropped off. I had been invited to go on a speaking tour of Ireland and England that fall, and I left the park to talk about wolves and the Yellowstone reintroduction in Belfast, London, and several other cities. One of my lectures was to the Royal Zoological Society. I also was interviewed several times by BBC radio stations. The wolf reintroduction program was capturing international attention.

That fall I thought a lot about the summer I had spent in Yellowstone. A comment made by Henry David Thoreau, who grew up just a few miles from where I did in Massachusetts, came to mind. He was born in 1817, much too late to see wolves as he walked through the woods of New England. In an 1856 journal entry, he expressed his sadness over the extermination of wolves and other native animals in his area. He felt he lived in a tamed and emasculated country. Thoreau spoke of the sounds and notes of the natural world no longer in his woods and mourned that he had to live in an incomplete land. He went on to say, “I listen to a concert in which so many parts are missing.” The most prominent of those missing sounds was the howling of wolves. Yellowstone in 1994 was in the same state as Thoreau’s native land of Massachusetts. There was an unnatural silence in the park, a silence uninterrupted by the sound of wolves. But that silence was about to be broken. Wolves were coming back.