Читать книгу Howl - Susan Imhoff Bird - Страница 9
ОглавлениеWolf stands with forelegs planted, head lifted, as the wind ruffs her smoke gray fur. The land rises behind her—shrubs and bunch-grasses as tall as her chest, a valley and rising hill beyond, aspen and willow throughout—she is host. Her eyes lock on mine and I stare. I am a guest in her land. I bow my head, and she lifts her nose. Our exchange complete, she turns and sniffs the air before moving off, loping, her long legs moving the grass as does a summer wind, a burst, here and gone.
As we drive along the narrow road into Lamar Valley I see this part of Yellowstone for the first time. I’ve visited West Yellowstone, and driven up to Old Faithful from Jackson in the south, but I’ve never been on this northernmost road that sweeps east to west, from entry gate at Gardiner, Montana, to entry gate in Silver Gate, Montana, moving through Wyoming in between. Immense and verdant in early June, the valley cradles the surging Lamar River, hundreds and hundreds of bison, lolloping black bears, and countless eagles, cranes, coyote, and other smaller creatures. And a pack of wolves, the well-known and beloved Lamar Canyon pack, a pack trying to survive its decimating losses of the winter. The alpha female—well known throughout the wolf-watching world as the 06 female—and the beta male, 754, had both been shot by hunters in Wyoming, outside park boundaries, just months before.
Bison, large as cars, plod with massive shoulders hunched around their necks, eyes blinking, gargantuan heads swinging side to side. A herd crosses the road. A dreadlock-bearded bull, its horns ridged and curving into its wooly mane, leads the leisurely procession, two younger bulls following, neither as filled out, as wooly, or as impervious as the first. A few cows, three or four calves that bound and weave between the plodders. Hooves pound the ground, deadened clomping, the sound of two hundred years ago.
Our eyes dart left and right searching for movement or at least familiar, recognizable shapes. Cars halt in each paved pullout along the road, and people stare into the river-split valley, some with binoculars, others with cameras, and the serious wildlife viewers with tripod-mounted scopes. We drive past a collection of cars and small buses and I want to tell Mark to stop, to let me out, let me see what’s going on, but I hesitate from the sheer unfamiliarity of it all. I’ve never done anything like this.
Mark drives on, and I squash the voice inside that says go back, fearing I might have missed something important, a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. I don’t want to be wrong. Nerves tighten my gut, and I perch on the edge of the back seat in our rented Dodge Durango. People litter both sides of the two-lane road, scanning for wildlife, and we continue west toward the heart of the valley, North America’s Serengeti. Another mile, two. None of us know exactly where to start. I begin to release my worry over the spot we didn’t choose, when Kirsten’s words register.
“Gray thing running,” she’s said, pointing to our left, out in the midst of the valley.
A small shape, moving. Wolf?
We’re approaching a pullout where thirty people stand, looking out at the grasslands. Mark angles into a narrow slot and we pile out of the car.
“What are you seeing?” I ask a tiny, dark-haired woman. She wears a black fleece vest and hat. She stands next to a scope.
“A wolf, eating a baby bison that died. It’s Middle Gray, one of 06’s daughters. Would you like to look?”
“Yes, thanks,” I eagerly nod, and move to the scope. I lean in to the eyepiece and see my first wolf. It’s far away, but I can see it tearing at the honey-colored carcass, then moving away, circling, returning for more. She tears flesh, looks right, left, then moves in for another bite. A mouthful, a lift of head. The carcass at her feet retains its shape, a bison calf, legs outstretched, neck extended. Its torso is half eaten, and an animal I’ve never seen except in films and photographs is lowering her head to rip more flesh from its bones.
Cool morning air brushes my cheek. I tug my hat over my ears. Voices blend and soften. A coyote approaches the wolf; the wolf turns and snarls. The coyote leaps backward, then paces ten feet from the calf. An eagle circles. Adult bison stand, immobile, a dozen feet away. I straighten, move away from the scope, and the valley expands. I find the partially eaten calf. Twenty yards to the right, another calf lies on the ground, a cow bison standing guard. From the hum of voices comes explanation: the calf being eaten was killed by a coyote kick. The calf at the adult’s feet, stillborn. Is the cow its mother? She stands alone, unmoving. There must be an understanding that what lies before her is wrong. I don’t dare suggest she feels something for her dead baby. But I wonder. A group of bison, ten or so, drift over to join the solitary mother, and they all stand around the calf on the ground, occasionally nibbling the grass at their feet. Camaraderie, some kind of bovine mourning process.
“Would you like to look through my scope?” The quiet voice enters my reverie, and I turn to see a woman with short, well-cut gray hair looking at me.
“Yes, thanks,” I reply, and move over, place my eye against the eyepiece. She is taller than me, and I lift to my toes to look through her Swarovski scope, positioned to allow view of both bison calves. A coyote darts in to take a bite of the by now well-eaten calf. Mom and company continue to guard the other. A few sandhill cranes prance in the marshland to the right, and I watch as a golden eagle circles, then dives down to the calf, driving off the coyote.
To my left is the Pied Piper of wolf watchers, Rick McIntyre. He sits on a camp stool, watching the wolf. The hair under his cap is a faded red, his skin is pale, and he is so thin I wonder how frequently he bothers to eat. Wolf watchers envelop him. He ducks his chin to speak into a recorder and I catch a handful of words: Middle Gray, calf, road. He’s been here since the beginning, since the first wolves were brought back into the park, almost twenty years ago. Photographer, author, a man who’s followed his passion from park to park for more than thirty years. His job here is to help park visitors see wolves. He utilizes telemetry—tracking collared wolves via radio signal—a scope, and information collected by dozens of park visitors and dedicated wolf watchers, some of whom live right outside the park’s eastern border and watch wolves almost every day of their lives.
He responds to my greeting with a gentle smile.
“Are you getting to see some wolves?”
“This is my first morning, my first wolf,” I reply.
“Ah,” he nods. “I hope you’ll see more. I need to pack up and move down the road, clear a space for Middle Gray to cross as she heads back home.”
He places his stool in the back of his SUV, hops in, and drives onto the road. I search the valley for Middle Gray, who is no longer eating, nor is she circling the carcass. She is a dozen feet away from it, heading east. She trots smoothly, in a straight line across the ochre earth.
A million years ago—a blink of the earth goddess’s eye—the dire wolf lived in North America. From matter had come insectivores and creodonts. As time passed and each evolved, the ancestors of animals on earth today emerged. They lived in a world untamed. Rocky hills and uplifted moraines, flowering plants, scrubby grasses. Conifers, dense and dark, covered the land. Screeches split the air, howls echoed. Thundering hooves, death screams as prey lost to predator. Not a word spoken, just lapping of windblown water, splashing creeks, the steady drum of rain on dusty soil.
The dire wolf, toes splayed wide, trots between far flung trees, seeking her pack. Separated during the last hunt, distracted by a stream and seduced by her thirst, she trails the others by half a mile. In the far distance are moving bodies, and she increases her speed. Maybe they’ve closed in on a bison, maybe they need her. The pack works together, sometimes as many as twenty, thirty, trapping a horse or bison then attacking, their teeth razor sharp and quick to draw blood. Five feet long from nose to tail, her shoulders are more than two feet from the earth, and she weighs 115 pounds. Her mate is ahead but she’s drawing near. A bison is besieged. He butts the wolves with his huge head, unable to stop them from tearing at his flanks. She reaches the pack and jumps at the dark animal’s rear leg, her teeth ripping skin and muscle to scar the bone underneath. When the bison topples, the whump of his body hitting earth vibrates beneath her feet and echoes across the rimrocked plateau.
Tens and hundreds of thousands of years elapsed, her progeny roaming the plateau, crossing hills and plains, continually in search of prey. Bison and horses, and occasionally a giant ground sloth, a mastodon. Then 750,000 years ago, Canis lupus, the gray wolf, traveled from Eurasia to North America. It settled onto tundras, mountains, and plains, from the Arctic to the southwestern tip of the continent, existing alongside the dire wolf. The gray wolf was well established before Native American and Inuit peoples arrived, and hid amidst the tall pines, watching as human beings moved onto its land. Near the close of the Pleistocene epoch, over eleven thousand years ago, the dire wolf began to die off as the number of large prey animals decreased. The gray wolf, which ate small as well as larger mammals—perhaps because it was less dense than the dire wolf, more agile, able to dart and sprint—adapted better to these harsher conditions and by seven thousand years ago, became the primary canine predator in the Northern Hemisphere.
The world of the gray wolf’s dominance is large and stark, naked of human beings, flush with foliage, trees, rocks, water, predators and prey. Animals rove, den, and spend their lives dodging those that pursue them, or pursuing those that dodge. Species and plants evolve, and the land matures. Weather dictates behavior, cycles govern existence. Life emerges, and ceases.
A gust of wind throws hair across my face. I brush it away, clear my eyes, scan the sightseers for Mark and Kirsten. They both look toward the river, where it bends and overflows its banks, where cranes high-step and birds erupt from hidden swales and swirl into the sky. We traveled here together, spent last night in Cooke City, will camp tonight in the park. They had planned the trip, then asked if I wanted to join them. Daniel, too. Mark would fly his old Cherokee, and we’d visit Idaho, then Yellowstone, then Missoula. I’d said of course, but Daniel couldn’t take time away from work. I packed everything I thought I might need, threw in more socks, and asked if my bicycle would fit in the plane. Mark’s brow furrowed. He said maybe, if all the camping gear and our bags left enough room. A seven-day trip was too long for me to go without cycling. Mark had planned a stop in Pocatello, Idaho, then a night’s stay in Rexburg, seventy-five miles away. I could ride between the two towns, could probably ride in Yellowstone, too. I packed my cycling gear—helmet, shoes, granola bars and electrolyte chews—in hopes that all those sleeping bags, tents, mattress pads, and cooking supplies would squish.
The bike fit.
We’d flown from Salt Lake City to Pocatello, where I hopped on my bike and pedaled north. Before I left home I’d called the Idaho Department of Transportation to ask about a bike-safe route, and the clerk suggested I call the Pocatello Chamber of Commerce, where I was directed to Birgitta, who owns a bike and might know more about that kind of thing. I left her a message, and an hour later received a call from a young man at the local bike shop, who helped me map out my route. Most of it was on the old Yellowstone Highway. Red-winged blackbirds burst from fields, flapping and coasting high above my head as I pedaled. A line of cars waited to pay admission fees and drive through Bear World. The Snake River flowed wide and opaque as I rode over it, grateful for the fact that everyone isn’t like me, and every place isn’t like my own neighborhood. The entire way, I’d been gifted with a tailwind that smelled, at times, of baking potatoes. I arrived in Rexburg sweaty and starved.
The next morning we’d flown to Bozeman, Montana, rented the Dodge Durango, and driven to the park, and now we stood, gazing at the immense valley known around the world for its wolf-viewing.
This morning’s wolf has left the baby bison. She is headed east. She trots across the shrub-dotted land and up toward the road, a good half mile from us, where she crosses the tarmac and lopes up the hillside, north, to her home. Everyone at the pullout watches, electricity charging the air, until her tail disappears from view. Then the valley becomes again an immense expanse of earth, speckled with bison and cranes. An eagle soars high above, scouring the land for movement.
Absence. Void. My teeth chatter and under my skin, muscles echo the vibration. My legs tremble so hard my feet jump in the footrests. The nurse wraps another blanket over me, hot from the warmer, its waffled texture under my fingertips up and down, here and gone.
I woke to drizzle, angry drops slipping down the window, nothing but gray. From the bare trees lining the hospital drive, to rooftops and high-rises five miles away, to the foothills of the Oquirrh Mountains on the far edge of the valley, their peaks hidden, perhaps stolen during the night.
My belly is empty. Bob walks alongside as the nurse pushes me from the outer edge of the hospital to a room in its heart, a room dangerously close to the spot where I, six hours before, gave birth to two boys, one alive, one dead, each connected to the other by a meandering blood vessel woven through their shared placenta. We pass through wide wooden doors that open at the press of a square metal button. My legs jump. I clench my jaw. I am wheeled down a hallway of shiny linoleum. I press down against my legs. This void is larger than me.
He lies on an open table, lights hot and bright eighteen inches above his body. He has no fat, cannot keep himself warm. Eyes covered by a strip of cloth, he is naked but for a miniature diaper. He is attached to machines by wire leads and a tiny pulse oximeter around his foot. Heart rate, respiration, oxygen saturation, temperature. Each vital has an acceptable range, and the machines shriek an alarm when a limit is breeched. His Apgars, three and seven, are not terrible for a thirty-two-weeker, and he is, at three pounds thirteen ounces, one of the largest preemies in the room. I tuck my index finger into his hand, which curls loosely around it, and tears spill. I cannot look at Bob. Beeps assail me, assorted volumes and pitches. Lights—green, blue, red, soft white—flash, or hum steadily. For a moment my body is calm—my jaw relaxed, my legs at rest. Jake looks nothing like any baby I’ve ever seen. No chubby cheeks, just scrubby skin over toothpick bones. His head too large, his nose a dot, the skin of his feet and hands translucent. An IV sticks in his left hand, the needle as fine as thread.
It’s mid-morning and the day is warming, though the wind holds a chill. We’ve erected our tents, tossed sleeping bags and pads inside, stored our food in the bear-safe lock boxes, and come back into the valley. Wolves are crepuscular animals, hunting at dawn and dusk. We may not see a wolf, but black bears, bison, and deer are abundant. The park itself, its towering conifers, massive walls of stone, thundering rivers, gives me more than enough to ponder, and I am silent as we drive back along the Lamar Valley road.
Mark parks by twenty other cars, and we join those who stand where grass meets pavement. I recognize a woman from earlier, the one with short gray hair, a Swarovski scope.
“Any wolves?” I ask.
“No,” she says, “but the calf’s body is still there. A coyote’s been eating. Would you like to look?”
I peer out into the valley, see the concave body, then look to the right where mama bison stands over the other dead calf.
“I’m Kris,” she smiles. “I love the wolves. You watch long enough, you get to know some of their personalities. They all have stories. We watched 06 for years—she was amazing, dynamic. Our rock star.”
“She was killed in December?” I ask.
A wince, a nod. Kris’s eyes spark green. “She was born back in 2006—that’s why the name—and became the alpha female of the Lamar Canyon pack, which has been so visible, most everyone who watches wolves knows of her. She had her first pups in 2010, and a second litter the next year. She was so charismatic, just beautiful, full of fire. Thousands of people watched her, took pictures, read about her. Then last December, 2012, she left the park, probably on a hunt, and was killed by a hunter. Legally. She was fifteen miles outside the park.”
Kris is silent as we search the valley before us. I imagine 06, think of her daughter tearing at the bison calf carcass this morning.
“The alpha male’s brother had been shot just weeks before she was, and the pack has struggled. It’s fallen apart. If people knew the stories of these wolves, that they are parents, children, that they teach their pups, play with them. That they’re beings, filled with life, history, families. They could never kill these wolves, not if they knew.”
Jake was born in April of 1991, when wolves were, for most of us, creatures of fairy tales and magazine articles. Gray wolves, at that time, claimed territories in upper Wisconsin, on Isle Royale in Lake Superior, and in the wild hills of northwestern Montana. Every other state in our nation—except Alaska—cleared them out a century ago. Wolves had been vilified by early settlers, and this wild canine that had inhabited land across all but the Southeast was virtually extirpated by the 1920s. However, while Jake lay in the hospital biologists and politicians were working to legislate the reintroduction of wolves. The proposal took form in the 1970s, shortly after the Endangered Species Act was signed into law, and after nearly two decades, was moving closer to a congressional vote. The gray wolf was to be returned to its former home, beginning in the central Idaho wilderness, and in Yellowstone National Park.
Opponents argued against this reintroduction—bringing wolves from across the border in Canada, letting them acclimate, then setting them free under legislative protection—by pointing out that wolves were already recolonizing, reestablishing themselves in America. Making their way down from Canada a few at a time, settling in the high hills. In 1986, a wolf den was discovered in Montana’s Glacier National Park—the first wolf den found in the West in over fifty years. This example of recolonization, a natural process, became an argument against reintroduction, an artificial method of reestablishing wolf populations in their former territories. Proponents of reintroduction countered that recolonization would take an unpredictable, lengthy journey, while suitable habitats could benefit from wolves right away. The latter argument prevailed, and the reintroduction was set to begin as soon as plans were solidified, and the right people signed the right forms. It was only a few years away.
Just a mile down the Lamar Valley road, we stop again. The viewing area is filled with cars and we squeeze into a spot half gravel, half weeds. A bear of a man wearing a thick mustache and bright yellow fleece taps on my window.
“Come look,” he says. “I’ve got a grizzly in my scope; she’s over on the hill up there.” He points across the valley to a hillside thick with massive clumps and stretching fingers of snow.
I squint, the dusky cinnamon bear emerges. Her hump glistens in the sunlight filtering through the trees. She moves, a lumbering roll, fur sparking. She’s five hundred feet away, thank God.
“I’m Michael, Michael Powers,” he says, offering a hand. “And this here’s my son, Hayden.”
Hayden’s cheery face peeks from underneath a fishing hat. He turns back to his own scope, fixed on the grizzly.
Not a soul is frugal with his scope here. Everyone wants to share the joy of seeing the bear, the eagle, the wolf, the playful coyote pups. Michael Powers is from Arizona. He spends two weeks each summer in the Yellowstone area with his wife and son. His personalized license plate is DRUID21, for the alpha male of the Druid Peak pack that, during the first dozen years of Yellowstone’s wolf reintroduction, was one of the most viewed wolf packs in the world.
“It’s like going to see a movie knowing there’s no script, until the moment something happens. You may come in with an outline, but all that’s there are the main ideas—yes, there are so many bison, this many wolves and packs, this many black and grizzly bears. But the details come as you interact with the place. Optics play an important role in this—wildlife here is accustomed to people, and pretty aware, so I believe if you want to see them as naturally as possible, it’s better to view from a distance. That’s why I love sharing the scopes. That’s why I tapped on your window.”
Wildlife viewing takes time and a wallop of patience—lots of standing still and squinting into scopes. I can’t reconcile cycling, here, with looking for wolves. I try not to think about my bike stashed in the car as Michael continues.
“My job is high stress, and I can just feel that peeling away from me when I’m out here watching wildlife. It just slips away. One day I watched a big male grizzly make his way along the hillside north of Soda Butte. Then he disappeared behind the hills, and I knew where he was going. I said to my wife, let’s get in the car and go to the Trout Lake pullout, and Hayden was in the back in his car seat—he was three. We parked, facing where I thought the grizzly would appear, and suddenly there he was, cresting one of the hills right in front of us, and Hayden shouted dog! He hadn’t yet learned the word bear. No one else was there. Just us.
“Then one time Hayden and I were watching the Cottonwood pack on an elk kill. The wolves had eaten and were mostly just lying around when I saw a coyote trying to sneak in. I got Hayden on the scope and said, watch this—I knew what was going to happen. The coyote appeared in the scope and then a blur of two wolves shot out of the grass, chasing the coyote away. For a moment it was quiet, and then Hayden said, Dad, that was amazing.
“I want this experience to be available for everyone. There’s nothing like it, anywhere. And Hayden’s picked up on that too. He’ll go looking for people who haven’t been able to see the wolves or the bears, and offer them a look through our scopes.”
I lean into his scope and look again at the grizzly. Her cubs are not in sight. She lifts a paw to her mouth, chews, shakes her head. She could kill me with the swipe of a paw. Could tear me apart in seconds. Would kill anyone, anything, do whatever she had to do to protect her cubs.
A dozen years ago I received as a gift a cookbook titled Wild Women in the Kitchen. A collection of recipes and stories and folklore, it’s packed with brief tales about infamous women throughout time, from Joan of Arc to Sarah Bernhardt to Cher. I ignored the book for years, mainly because cooking is not one of my passions. Five years ago—long after Bob and I divorced—I decided to open it and read some of the stories. Who were considered wild women, and how are they different from me? The recipes I skimmed or ignored, but I read one, then another, then a dozen of the biographical paragraphs before I paused to contemplate. These women dared to be themselves, they made decisions based on their own needs and desires. They moved across countries and oceans, they followed their hearts, they lived bravely, their lives affected others. They spoke up. They trusted their paths. From Jane Austen, who dared to wittily write of society’s conventional restrictions upon women, to Alice B. Toklas who in 1907 fell in love with Gertrude Stein and later published a cookbook with a scandalous recipe for hashish fudge, to Eleanor Roosevelt with her famous Sunday evening salons. These women were courageous. True to themselves. I considered my own life, realizing how far from wild I was. Not only were these women wild, most seemed to have found—or created—their own tribes.
It rains during the night, and in the morning I discover I’d planted my tent on top of a natural drainage. My sleeping bag, on top of a pad, is damp. I tug a hat over my hair, some pants over my long johns, a jacket over my top. Mark and Kirsten are already at the splintering wooden picnic table. Water boils. Coffee is imminent.
“Sleep well?” Mark asks.
“Mm-hmm, you?”
“Good, great,” they nod.
I don’t tell them I woke up in midnight dark, remembering the artificial sugar packets in my duffle bag, terrified a bear would sniff them out and I’d be exposed as a fool. A maimed or possibly dead fool, who couldn’t follow simple rules. I’d slept poorly after that.
We drink coffee. Kirsten makes oatmeal. Mark jots in his journal, I open my own and try to pluck thoughts from the ether and write them down. I can’t. I expand here, and my mind is a galaxy filled with words, concepts, ideas, possibilities. But I can’t pin one down. I belong here, I’m of this land, I share a trace of origin with these creatures—the crane, the grizzly, the wolf—yet I am foreign, out of place. When those wolves, almost twenty years ago, were released here in the park, they stepped into the unknown. Transplanted, they were allowed time in one-acre pens to adjust to the climate, the smells, the air. And when the gates fell open, some clung to the familiar and wouldn’t leave. But eventually, all the wolves left wire fences behind and ranged over the 3,400 square miles of the park. They mated, formed packs. They created families. They explored new land. Attacked prey. These early wolves were invited interlopers, running free, carving out territories in land taken from them decades before. In the pens they’d been restrained. Released, they struck out and reclaimed everything they’d once been.
Mammoth Hot Springs was once an army post. In the park’s early years, poachers, souvenir hunters, and entrepreneurs who set up camps and tours, outmanned and outmaneuvered the park’s gamekeepers and wardens. Park administrators sought federal help to protect the beauty and stability of the ecosystem. The army arrived in 1886—fourteen years after the park’s official opening—and stayed for thirty years. Mammoth, now, is soldier free, but remains Yellowstone’s official hub. Mark, Kirsten, and I walk past log cabins, graceful two-story brick and frame buildings, a sandstone chapel constructed by Scottish masons, all built during the army’s tenure. We head to the Yellowstone Center for Resources, to see Doug Smith, head of the Wolf Project.
Doug Smith is a Paul Bunyan. His stride is twice that of mine, and were we not inside a grand building constructed in 1897 he’d be ducking as he passed through doorways. He is a man larger than life, his energy traveling in an aura disturbing electrons and protons throughout his environment. Jumping and sizzling, they mix and reform and change the air, the furniture, those around him, me. As with the teacher who magnetically engages his student and the actor who hooks and hypnotizes his audience, Doug captures his visitors’ attentions and I sit, mesmerized, noticing little of his office other than a wall of bookshelves to his right and a huge map of the park replete with hand-drawn odd-shaped circles and ellipses delineating wolf pack boundaries, labeled with pack initials and written in dry erase marker, pinned to the wall directly behind him. A plaid shirt on a hanger is hooked to a high shelf of his bookcase. A large computer monitor sits on a credenza behind his back, and at times during our discussion he turns to it, locating visual aids to illustrate his words.
A scientist, Doug relies on observation and its resultant charts and graphs. But Doug is anything but dry and didactic; his tall, tightly muscled form is in constant motion, and his voice moves from exultation to solemn respect in split seconds. Doug eats an unpeeled carrot while we talk, occasionally dipping it into a pot of grainy brown hummus—lunch. His blue eyes flash and his chiseled jaw and cheekbones are unsettling in their rawness. A pure, male energy seated behind a desk, munching a carrot and explaining bar graphs. Although his intensity makes my nerves flutter, I wouldn’t miss this for the world. This man knows more than anyone about the reintroduction of wolves to Yellowstone National Park.
“I’d always been light on the enjoyment aspect,” Doug says. “But lately I’ve shifted from a wholly scientific view to seeing the human piece, the gift of nature to man and our need for that.”
We discuss the story Doug and Gary Ferguson write of in Decade of the Wolf, about a wolf crossing the road one morning in Lamar Valley that stopped to stare at a park visitor who was sitting, roadside, in his wheelchair. Watching the interaction through his scope, Doug saw the wolf pause and make eye contact with the man, who, Doug says, was visibly moved. The inquisitive wolf, the curious human visitor, coming together in a moment that is likely to have forever changed the human. This, Doug says, is what national parks are all about. They are places created for human enjoyment, places where humans are offered the possibility to explore the magnificence of the natural world.
“Wolves are totemic, iconic. They are intelligent, capable, complex. There’s much about them we don’t know—we can’t know—and we’re intrigued by that. We have a desire to access this understanding.”
Doug meets my eyes with his own, and his energy overwhelms me. Yet he has that plaid shirt hanging in his office. He’s a plaid shirt guy.
I’ve known, ever since Bob and I divorced, that I have a love out there somewhere, and that he has a plaid shirt. Not a thick wool but a soft, well-worn flannel. A shirt that suits his gentle manner. In marrying Daniel I had decided he was that love—maybe not exactly my plaid-shirted vision—for how many of us can predict the person we end up loving? My eyes move to that shirt on its hanger. Doug is married, but I find the shirt curious. Maybe it’s a sign along my path: don’t give up, you get to have your plaid shirt guy. Either our marital therapy will work, or it won’t, but regardless, there’s a plaid shirt in my future. I drag myself back to reality, and ask how Doug’s fascination with wolves began.
He was eleven or twelve, he says. Growing up in Wisconsin, Doug was not as distanced from wolves as most were in the 1970s: Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Michigan were the only states that hadn’t exterminated wolf populations earlier in the century, keeping at least a few alive until 1960. At that point, all that remained were on Isle Royale, near the Canadian border, and in remote parts of Minnesota. Wolves lived only in truly wild places, stimulating dreams and fantastical visions in young boys’ heads. Dangerous, powerful, magnetic, the wolf was mysterious, a thing of legend and folklore. Wolves to Doug were also symbolic of something greater: the scapegoat, the unloved. The unloved have a romantic allure—that ever-doubting piece within is inexplicably drawn to those who are looked down upon and persecuted for reasons that defy logic and offend sensibilities.
As a young man, Doug worked with wolves on Isle Royale under the tutelage of Rolf Peterson, one of the world’s best known wolf researchers. Rolf was the first biologist to feed Doug’s growing passion for wolves. Doug has worked for the National Park Service since 1994, with wolves the entire time. He’s continually researching wolf behavior: predation patterns, kill rates, social norms, the influence they have on elk herds in the park.
Doug has spent thousands of hours in planes, mostly in a tiny yellow Cessna, viewing thousands of wolves, and has spent countless hours hiking, tracking, and processing wolves for research purposes. Throughout his twenty years in Yellowstone, Doug has learned the stories of these wordless wild animals, stories he labels fascinating and enriching. Magical, even.
“When wolves are present they have this power to take control,” Doug pauses and his hands are, for once, at rest. “You feel the power of the wolf blowing through.”
Doug tells us that wolves in the more secluded packs act differently from those whose territories include well-traveled park roads, that their behavior patterns are much more complex, sophisticated. Wolf packs whose territories are well within park boundaries are substantially less likely to have a member killed by a hunter, affording greater stability in the pack’s structure, which in turn allows for better communication, generational learning, and long term relationships. In other words, the less interaction with humans, the more effective and stable the family, or pack. Although the mother wolf cares for her pups almost solitarily for the first few weeks, the entire pack pitches in during the rest of the pups’ early lives. Packs that lose members lose teachers and role models. It can create chaos.
Doug admits he’s learned a few parenting tips from his study subjects.
“They’re infinitely patient, and use positive reinforcement to shape behavior of the pups. They model behavior, they nudge the pups along, and they repeat this over and over again. Mothers, fathers, uncles, aunts, siblings—the entire pack participates in teaching the young ones how to be a wolf.”
But the biggest lesson he’s learned from the wolves is to never feel sorry for himself. Wolves are resilient, intelligent, and tenacious. He’s seen a wolf with an obviously broken leg still take down and kill a bison. The wolf does what he needs to do to feed himself and his family. He doesn’t dwell in self-pity.
I wonder what it’s like to work with an animal that stirs such intense feelings, and I ask him how he balances the science, the conflicting viewpoints, and the politics.
“I believe very much in what I’m doing. I believe in the Park Service, in their mandate, which rests on the concept of preservation. I believe in the responsibility and mission of increasing understanding through research and connecting with this knowledge, using science as the underpinning of action.” He also understands that people—the citizens, landowners, ranchers, farmers and hunters—who live on lands bordering wolf habitat have a legitimate concern about wolf populations. They want their voices heard. They want to know that they are a part of wolf management decisions.
“Extremists consider the wolf-reintroduction just one more form of government pushing policies down their throats, while most others sit somewhere between that position and a place of, Hell, if you make me deal with those damn wolves, how are you going to make it up to me? Few people who actually live in wolf-populated land are begging for looser control.”
While he’s first and foremost a scientist, Doug is also concerned about what he calls massive, seemingly unsolvable problems regarding wolves and humans. When I ask Doug if he ever gives up hope, he responds with a slight shrug, “Yeah, I do.”
At present, wolves who step foot outside Yellowstone Park boundaries during hunting season are unprotected, a situation many find ludicrous. A buffer zone with limited hunting is one suggested compromise, coming from park personnel such as Doug who find an unlimited hunt right up to the border to be counterproductive to the efforts of the National Park Service. Doug himself is a recreational hunter, and has no issue with hunting for food or even sport. But to kill wolves just because they’re wolves is against everything he stands for. As Doug’s Canadian colleague, author of Wolves of the Yukon, Bob Hayes states, “We’ve been killing wolves for a hundred years; let’s try something else.”
I need to try something else. I want to be a wild woman. To follow my passion, to take care of myself first, to speak my mind. Find my tribe. To not evoke descriptions dominated by the word nice. Nice is a fine trait, but wild and passionate means adventure and movement, a release of what’s been contained, a heartswelling connection with soul. I’ve been moving toward wild for years, riding my bike through canyons and scrambling up red rock cliffs. The outer wild is gradually working its way inward, fueling my journey. I’m closer to releasing the wild creature who has always lived within me, who has always been told to behave herself—who has been crying to be let loose. She’s of the earth, and of me. But she’s been squashed.
Here in Yellowstone I’m entranced by one of the wildest things on our earth, an animal we tried and failed to tame, the wolf. During the last century, we wouldn’t allow wolves to be part of our environment. Now people and organizations throughout the country are working to live in the same space with wolves. Wildness can coexist with my more tame self, just as wild creatures can coexist with humanity in the same landscape.
We look for wolves the next day, early morning, late in the evening. We see none.
