Читать книгу The Killing of Wolf Number Ten - Thomas McNamee - Страница 7

A helicopter tops a line of spruce and skims the open snow. A man leans out, a gun at his shoulder, and then is lost from sight in a blur of swirling white and terrible noise.

The mother wolf and her daughter are running as fast as they can. The man shoots, a dart makes a hole in the snow, he shoots again and the dart sinks into the big wolf ’s thigh. The world slows down, grows quiet, grows vague, the light dies.

The small wolf sniffs at her mother’s lips and open eyes, looks up in terror to see the helicopter returning, low above the snow, the roar unbearable.

There is a long, slow time until the blades droop and stop, and a man and a woman rush to the large black wolf. They tie a nylon mask over her eyes and wrap her gently in an old quilt, then do the same with the small pale wolf. The small wolf is wearing a radio collar. The man and woman carry the bundles across the snow and load them into the helicopter.

The mother wolf lies curled in a tight ball on a bed of straw inside a chain-link cage. She opens one eye to see her daughter in an adjacent cage. She looks out for only an instant. People are hurrying back and forth with metal things, cameras, medical bags, two-way radios, flashlights, lanterns. There are sounds of motors starting, cars and trucks leaving, the camp growing quiet. The sun goes down, a few electric lights come on.

A man approaches the cage, silent, holding a broomstick with a hypodermic needle taped to its tip. A quick jab and once again the black wolf ’s consciousness dims. Masked again, she is aware that people’s hands are lifting her body and she should be afraid but she is not. They carry her on a stretcher to a corrugated metal building and lay her on a steel table. The lights are bright as summer noon, people are swarming over her, but their voices are soft. Mark Johnson, chief veterinarian of Yellowstone National Park, tells his assembled staff, “We’ve got to handle these wolves gently, respectfully, with love.”

Network news videographers cluster around the medical tables, their white lights flaring. Reporters scratch at their pads, murmur into microphones. Flashes flash. It’s a big story, the restoration of a race exterminated in its ancestral home seventy years ago.

The American biologists here, and the technicians, the officials of the United States Forest Service, Fish and Wildlife Service, National Park Service, all are holding their anxiety and fear at bay with a stiffened sense of duty and professionalism, which lends their voices a military brittleness:

“Body temperature 101, pulse 110, SpO2 ninety percent.” (That last is oxygen saturation in the blood.)

“More straw for Pen Four, please.”

“Right away.”

“Fuel supply?”

“Adequate so far.”

“Lights up, chopper incoming.”

Equally if not more anxious and afraid, the conservationists who have come in their fragile confidence that this is really happening hug each other, trying not to celebrate too soon, knowing that at any moment, even now, all this can be shattered by a court order.

“What do you think they’re up to?”

“God only knows.”

The silence is what is so terrifying.

It is thirty below today in mid-Alberta, the sun a pale disc in a featureless sky, barely clearing the treetops at midday. Out from the mountains in scraggy cut-over woodlands, a provincial park maintenance camp has been temporarily transformed into a nerve center, dead center of concentric circles of worry and hatred hundreds and thousands of miles across: Decades of struggle to return the wolf to Yellowstone have culminated here.

The enemies of the wolf are legion and strong. Hatred of the wolf is centuries old and needs no reason. Hatred drove the wolf to extinction throughout the lower forty-eight United States but for a tiny remnant in Minnesota. The federal government itself exterminated the wolves of Yellowstone. The last two were killed in 1926. For twenty-five years the wolf ’s human friends have argued for restoration, and for twenty-five years the wolf ’s enemies have fought back in the courts, in politics, and in the minds of ranchers and hunters and anyone else who would listen.

At the dozens of hearings preceding the wolf reintroduction, there were always demonstrations pro and con. This one was in Helena, Montana.

Many longtime residents of the northern Rocky Mountains believe things about wolves that are not true. The ranching economy is fragile, and the hunting of big game in the untrammeled landscapes of Wyoming, Idaho, and Montana is one of the last great freedoms left to a diminishing way of life. More than a few ranchers fear that wolves will kill enough calves to destroy all hope of profit. In a few cases they may be right. Many hunters think that wolves will reduce the elk and deer populations to miserable remnants. Occasionally, in combination with exceptionally brutal winters, wolves may reduce prey populations, but they never destroy them. The hunters’ fears are wildly disproportionate. Some politicians have made of the wolf an all-purpose embodiment of evil, child killers even.

In fact wolves flee from any person. They kill cattle and sheep only seldom. And how could they destroy their prey populations? How could wolves, elk, bison, moose, and deer have evolved together down through the millennia? But hatred and fear, as the world has seen forever, can be impervious to truth.

The opposition has united behind the bland-sounding Wyoming Farm Bureau. All the recent years’ high-horsepower lawyering wears that modest cloak. Only last week the U.S. Court of Appeals in Denver denied their plea for an injunction to block the wolf restoration. And now there’s not a peep from them. Is it safe to believe they’ve given up at last?

At first she seemed black, but in this ice-blue light the dark wolf ’s fur can be seen to be silver-tipped, her undercoat gray, lighter gray, fawn. Human fingers search her coat and skin. “Some ticks. No open wounds. Moderate scarring.”

“Oxymeter.” A technician clips it to her lolling tongue. Her pulse, her respiration rate, her temperature, and the concentration of oxygen in her blood are all healthy. “Lice. Dust, please.”

A second technician pulls back her black lip. “Teeth bright white, unchipped. Probably four years old.” He measures every dimension of her body. “Ninety-eight pounds.”

“Big for a girl.”

“She’s a good one.”

The wolf ’s vulva is pink: She is in estrus, ready to breed.

No one knows where her mate may be, the alpha male of the pack of which she is the alpha female. He evaded the traps that caught the black wolf and her daughter two months ago. That daughter, once collared and released, became what the biologists call a Judas wolf. She and her mother, thereafter, were easy to find. All the people here, and the dozens more elsewhere watching over every delicate step of this operation, would like to see that alpha male also caught, because it is the project’s goal to capture whole families for Yellowstone—wolf packs are families). The plan has been to reintroduce three packs this year and three the next, in the hope that intact families will be less likely to try to return the thousand miles home to the north. But that older, wiser wolf has seen with his own eyes his mate and daughter trapped, and he is unlikely to be fooled now.

The technician draws a long dark draft of blood from the female wolf ’s foreleg, to be analyzed for rabies, parvovirus, and distemper. An earwax sample on a Q-tip goes into a test tube. Softly squeezing the wolf ’s lower belly, he pushes out a fecal sample, to be checked for parasites. He slides a fat pill of worm medicine down the wolf ’s throat. “Rabies, please.” A first injection, then a second—“Penicillin, please”—to ward off any possible infection from all this poking by humans. “PIT tag, please.” Through a shallow incision in the wolf ’s skin he inserts a Personal Identification Tag—essentially an invisible bar code, just like those available for pets—so that in future she (or her body) can be unmistakably identified.

He punches a plug of flesh out of each of the wolf ’s ears and slips them into a glass tube for DNA analysis. He clips a red plastic tag securely through each hole, bearing the letter Y, meaning that she is bound for Yellowstone, and the numeral 9.

All this has taken less than an hour. Number Nine reawakens on her bed of straw.

A Shorts Brothers Sherpa C-23—normally a fire-fighting plane, property of the U.S. Forest Service—sits in its hangar at Missoula, Montana, ready to take to the air and come here to Hinton, Alberta, to pick up the first group of wolves. There’s a rumor that the Farm Bureau may be trying to come up with some last-second Hail-Mary move.

Wolf Number Thirteen, under anesthesia and ready for his medical exam at Hinton, January 1995. In a contest, a class of schoolchildren had given him the name King, but the professionals always used only the numbers. Some wolf watchers later called him Blue because of his unusual coloration.

“We don’t have time to go for Nine’s mate. We’ve got to get these wolves in the air.”

“Helena’s waiting to hear from Washington.” That is, Ed Bangs, the head of the whole project for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, based in Helena, Montana, is waiting to hear from Mollie Beattie, the director.

The conservationists are out of the loop now and can only speculate. But you can look at the agency people pacing up and down, the hard huffs of their breath in the icy air. You can listen to them not talking to each other. Waiting for the phone to ring. They more or less maintain their soldierly bearing, but everybody knows that most of them have devoted their careers and their hearts to this climactic moment.

“You think Mollie’s waiting to hear from somebody higher up?”

“Who the hell knows.”

“Let’s go.” The call has come. Mollie Beattie and her boss, Secretary of the Interior Bruce Babbitt, are ready to fly to Yellowstone for the most important event since its creation.

Mark Johnson, the Yellowstone vet, supervises the loading. After one last pre-flight medical check and a gentle dose of tranquilizer, each custom-made stainless steel shipping containers holds one baffled and disoriented but certified-healthy wolf. There are eight for Yellowstone National Park, and four for the parallel project to restore them to the wilderness of central Idaho. In Yellowstone there await three secure and hidden pens, in each of which, it is hoped, one family of wolves will gradually become accustomed to an entirely new environment. They will be set free only once they seem calm and ready. The Idaho wolves will be turned loose as soon as they arrive, to see if they will adapt as readily as some biologists believe to be possible. It is all an experiment, never tried before.

Everything is ready at Hinton. Then a call comes from Missoula. The runway has iced over, and the Sherpa cannot fly. Johnson decides that it will be less stressful to leave the wolves in their boxes. “They’ll settle down.” But he doesn’t like it. Nobody does.

Then the ice melts, and the Sherpa takes off for Calgary. Then Calgary is socked in by fog and the plane flies on to Edmonton. At Edmonton the pilots find that their U.S. credit cards are not accepted by the Canadian phone system and so they cannot report back to Missoula or call the wolf team at Hinton. The weather toward Hinton in any case is “zero-zero”—zero ceiling, zero visibility. At long last, in mid-afternoon, which in these parts means dusk, the ceiling briefly parts, the Sherpa makes a break for it, and in the fading light the plane touches down.

Big, blond, rough-handed, tough-talking Carter Niemeyer believes this is the last he will see of these wolves. He has more to trap anyway, and had better do it quick. He has had his hands full getting this job done. It needed not just the best trapper—which he was—but also one who could deal with the isolated and suspicious trappers of backwoods Alberta. They were lucky to get four hundred dollars for a good wolf pelt, and now this giant American shows up offering them two thousand for a live wolf? Smelled awful funny.

Carter Niemeyer with the first Canadian wolf trapped for relocation.

But Niemeyer has already seen a lifetime’s share of ignorant and suspicious country boys. He has spent his whole career as an agent of the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Animal Damage Control unit—the on-purpose obscurely named outfit whose work consists almost entirely of killing animals that farmers and ranchers want killed. He has trapped and killed gophers, badgers, mountain lions, bears, and coyotes in the hundreds. He has even killed some wolves. But along the way, Niemeyer began to notice that some of the animals being blamed for depredations weren’t guilty. Wolves had begun to recolonize Idaho and Montana from the north, and ranchers there were claiming a lot of wolf kills. When Niemeyer determined them to be otherwise, his bosses and colleagues still pressured him to find and kill wolves. He found himself more and more on the side of the persecuted predators. In his old gang’s eyes, what Niemeyer is doing now—setting up and running a large-scale project to re-create two extinct wolf populations—is tantamount to treason. “Some of my bosses and contemporaries,” he would write in his memoir, Wolfer, “would have been happy to see every predator in the West slung dead over a barbed-wire fence.”

Mark Johnson seems as soft as Carter Niemeyer seems hard. Both those impressions on further examination will prove false, but they’re the ideas they have of each other now. Johnson thinks Niemeyer’s handling of the wolves is quite a bit on the rough side. “His excessive idealism got in my way,” Niemeyer would write. “I didn’t have the luxury of taking a wolf ’s pulse and temperature and putting an eyeshade on it when I had moments to get it out of a neck snare and make sure its airway was open.”

He goes on to describe an exchange with Johnson when he, Niemeyer, is on the phone with a reporter who is also a friend of his. “Johnson began whispering that I should hang up, shut up. He made slashing motions at his throat.

“‘Don’t talk to reporters!’ he said.

“‘Just a minute, Arthur,’ I said, smothering the receiver in my hand. ‘Shut the fuck up and don’t interrupt me when I’m on the phone!’”

Johnson remains acutely focused on the welfare of these wolves at this moment. His speech tends to be soft, there’s nothing aggressive in his body language—in contrast to Niemeyer’s pronounced swagger—but somehow he is always here, between the wolves and anything that might harm or frighten them: He is the one human being in this story who will be present in the wolves’ lives throughout the whole operation, the one they will come to recognize as an individual with a particular touch, a particular voice.

With the last kennel lashed to the floor, Johnson belts himself in and the Sherpa climbs into the overcast, on a bearing for Calgary and Canadian customs. But once again Calgary is socked in, and the Sherpa tilts north toward Edmonton. Then the radio crackles, Calgary has opened up. Johnson is as still and silent as his wolves, and equally resigned. They slip into Calgary under lowering clouds, and the Canadian customs officials rush them through, and soon they’re airborne again, this time for Great Falls, Montana, and United States customs, whence they are to fly on to Missoula. There they will meet a caravan of vehicles manned by park and forest rangers and be driven the last three hundred miles to Yellowstone.

Johnson oversees the unloading of the wolves to a heated hangar at the Great Falls airport and goes through the paperwork with the customs officers. Meanwhile he’s hearing yelling from inside the crew lounge—the pilots on the phone with their boss. It seems they’ve hit the limit of their statutorily allowed flying hours, and no, they will not be granted a single hour’s extension, which is all they need to get to Missoula. The caravan, still somewhere on the road, does have a cell phone, but nobody has the number. Johnson covers his mouth with both hands, then goes back to check on the wolves. In some of the ventilation slots there is fresh blood: The wolves have begun to try to chew their way out.

Johnson calls his colleagues, knowing that there’s nothing to be gained. The tranquilizers have long since worn off. The wolves have been handled with all the tenderness their handlers could muster, but think about it: Darted, drugged, blindfolded, poked, prodded, caged, boxed up, trucked, loaded, pitching and yawing for hours inside this noise machine, unloaded, reloaded, bombarded by the voices and noises and smells of their one great source of terror—humanity—the wolves are under inconceivable stress. It is not unusual for wild animals in the stress of no more than ordinary captivity just to drop dead. These wolves’ lives may be at stake.

Eventually the rangers reach Missoula and learn that they must drive on to Great Falls. At three o’clock in the morning, they arrive. The crew load the four wolves for Idaho onto a truck, and then the other eight into a long horse trailer. Mark Johnson follows them into the trailer, craving sleep, unable to find it even after twenty-four hours awake. Inside their carriers, the wolves lie still, eyes closed, withdrawn, beyond exhaustion.

It is dank cold and still dark as the caravan sets forth for Yellowstone. Patrol cars front and rear and several large National Park Service SUVs provide security. The rangers are packing serious armament, for anywhere along the way there could easily be some crank who would love to put a hole in a wolf, or for that matter in a wolf-loving G-man.

The wolf returns to Yellowstone in glory. Schoolchildren cheer and wave American flags. Camera lenses glitter in the morning sun in hundreds. Television news teams have descended on the national park from around the world, their logo-emblazoned vans tilting their dishes toward their relay satellites. Video crews are shooting video of other video crews. Part of the coverage is how much coverage there is.

Half a dozen just-polished ranger patrol cars flashing red and blue and, behind them, a long gray horse trailer containing eight wolves and their vigilant veterinarian drive slowly through the little town of Gardiner, Montana, in a surge of cheers. At the horizon looms the Roosevelt Arch, which commemorates the creation of the world’s first national park in 1872. The motorcade passes beneath it at eight thirty-five a.m., to the blare of band music and the roar of the hundreds gathered to welcome them. With a stop at park headquarters, the big brass join the parade: the park superintendent, Mike Finley; the director of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, Mollie Beattie; and the Secretary of the Interior, Bruce Babbitt. Following them come park service senior staff and the park’s own team of biologists, who will be taking charge of the wolves now.

On January 12, 1995, the gray wolf returned to Yellowstone. From left to right, project leader Mike Phillips, park maintenance foreman Jim Evanoff, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service director Mollie Beattie, Yellowstone Park superintendant Mike Finley, and Secretary of the Interior Bruce Babbitt brought the first of the wolves in its shipping kennel to the Crystal Creek pen.

Past this point, the park is closed to all but these few and a press pool. In solitude, therefore, the caravan makes its processional way some twenty miles to the south and east, to the lower valley of the Lamar River, where the last wolves of Yellowstone perished, in 1926, and where these eight wolves and another group soon to come are now to make their new homes.

The Lamar and the rolling grassland savannas below its confluence with the Yellowstone River constitute what is known as the Northern Range. It is one of the world’s great places for wildlife, comparable in richness to the Serengeti Plain of east Africa. The Northern Range this winter is home to perhaps eighteen thousand elk, about two thousand mule deer, five hundred bighorn sheep, several hundred antelope, two hundred moose, a few white-tailed deer, a few mountain goats, and five or six hundred descendants of the last wild bison left alive in the United States in the eighteen-eighties. In summer, most of those numbers roughly double. There are seven other herds of elk besides the huge Northern Herd. The wolves will have enough to eat.

The snow here at six thousand two hundred feet is about a foot deep, the wind raw as a whip. A truck-sized sleigh drawn by two sly-looking mules waits at the trailhead. On the rough board seat sit two impressively bearded mule drivers. Two wolf containers are lashed to the bed, and the sleigh lurches forward. It moves slowly up the narrow drainage of Rose Creek, to a sparsely forested hollow of aspen and lodgepole pine in which there stands a roughly round chain-link enclosure, one acre in size. The fence is ten feet tall with a further inward-slanting two feet of chain link at the top and an apron of chain link beneath the soil extending inward three feet—designed so that the wolves can neither climb out nor dig out. The pen cannot be seen from the road. The wolves will see as little of humanity as possible—only the biologists who will come to drop off road-killed elk or deer from time to time. Hidden from the wolves and from possible intruders, armed park rangers will be guarding them twenty-four hours a day.

The actual pens varied somewhat from this idealized schematic, having to conform to their individual sites’ topography and to be situated so that they were invisible from any road.

The gate is open. Inside is little but open space—a few trees, a doghouse where a wolf feeling shy may hide. Strong hands gently lower the kennels to the ground and carry them into the pen. Wolf Number Nine and her daughter, now designated Seven, are in their new home. The other six wolves, an intact pack, are delivered to the pen at Crystal Creek, a few miles away, with Babbitt and Beattie carrying them the last few dozen yards and smiling officially for the cameras. Automated shutters click and whir, tape rolls, the pool reporters scribble. It is a media moment par excellence, as the evening news tonight and the front-page photographs across the country tomorrow morning will attest.

But it’s all a sham, a tragic, idiotic sham.

The jubilation at the entrance to the park, the flag-waving children, the brass bands, the satellite dishes, the whole parade have been in vain, for the order sought by the Farm Bureau and the anti-wolf groups sheltering under its name has come from the Tenth Circuit Court in Denver—an emergency stay of forty-eight hours. The kennels may be placed inside the acclimation pens, but they may not be opened. The return of the wolf to Yellowstone is on hold.

Nine and Seven have no idea where they are, of course. They have been jounced, shaken, pitched, and rattled for untold hours inside metal boxes with only small holes for air. The noises have been loud, harsh, and utterly foreign. Now at last it is quiet, but still they lie inside their steel cells.

Mark Johnson pushes chunks of ice through the holes, which the thirsty wolves lick up eagerly. He wishes he could speak soft words to them, but he also knows that the less they have of any human presence, the better off they will be in the future.

If they have a future. The judges may rule that the wolves must be returned to Canada, but the Canadians have already said they won’t take them—in which case they must be euthanized.

At seven-thirty that morning Alice Thurston of the U.S. Department of Justice was already in court in Denver arguing, please, the wolves can be let out of the kennels and into the pens without actually being released. Then at least they can have water, and light, and food. They can stretch their miserably cramped legs. And if the court so orders they can easily be rounded up. But the judges will have none of it.

Mark Johnson tells his colleagues at park headquarters that the wolves’ condition is bad. If this situation continues, he says, it could be fatal.

Federal officialdom makes its stand before the cameras, each personage going on a little longer than strictly necessary for sound-bite usage.

Yellowstone Park superintendent Mike Finley: “ … Injustice….”

Secretary of the Interior Bruce Babbitt: “ … Extraordinary moment in the history of the American West … who we are in America….”

Fish and Wildlife Service director Mollie Beattie: “This is going to be wolf heaven if we can just get them out of purgatory.”

The biologists gather in uneasy silence, nothing to say.

Yellowstone wolf project leader Mike Phillips takes a seat at the end of the big table in the park’s executive conference room and hunches at a taped-up cluster of microphones. Phillips is blond, compact, tense as a drawn bow. The straight set of his lips indicates the pressure of his passion contained—passionate anger. Having led the restoration of red wolves to North Carolina, Phillips has considerable experience with wolf controversy. His experience has not made him patient, however.

Thanks to the dirty pool played by the reintroduction’s opponents, the wolves were confined to their shipping containers for thirty-eight hours. This is Number Seven, Number Nine’s daughter.

The room is stinking hot, and jammed. Flashes and spotlights blind and irritate. Unkempt print reporters scribble on their little pads. The wolf reintroduction is the biggest story Yellowstone has ever had.

Phillips squints into the TV lights. “These wolves have been in their kennels for thirty hours straight. When wolves are extremely stressed,” he says—very slowly—“they have a tendency to slip into a stupor of sorts. These wolves have done that. They are not doing well.” He does not say, “They may die,” but that is what he means.

This court order was really a punch below the belt. The Farm Bureau could have filed its appeal much earlier, but they timed it so that if they succeeded the wolves would be already on the way. They wanted to inflict the maximum damage possible, and they have done it.

In uncanny complement to Mike Phillips’s dense muscularity, Yellowstone’s chief wolf biologist, Doug Smith, has the stretched, lean boniness of a movie cowboy, complete with mustache and reserve. But he is no less tightly wound today. He visits the pens repeatedly, opens the doors of the kennels to find the wolves cowering and still, making no move to rise, much less to leave. Having worked for years on the great decades-long Isle Royale study, Smith knows wolves well and up close, and he knows how bad these wolves look. Back at park headquarters at Mammoth Hot Springs, he speaks one sentence: “This is sickening.”

The afternoon wears on. No one goes home. Justice is begging the court—please, please to hurry their decision. At seven o’clock in the evening the phone rings. The stay is lifted.

There is no need for Mike Phillips to say more than “Let’s go.” He and Doug Smith and the rest of the wolf crew jump into their trucks and blaze along the ice-covered roads to the pens. They draw up the vertically sliding kennel doors and secure them, quietly lock the pen gates, and withdraw in a hurry. By the time all the wolves’ boxes have been opened, it is ten-thirty p.m. The wolves have been caged for thirty-eight hours. And yet, at Crystal Creek, not one of the six wolves will leave its kennel. Nor, at Rose Creek, will Nine. Seven, however, puts a cautious foot to the snow, sniffs the chill night air, and steps forth into Yellowstone.

When the shipping containers were finally opened, the wolves were beyond exhaustion.

Hours later, her mother stands at last and, wobbily, walks out into the night. There is snow to eat, to quench their thirst. There is a big haunch of elk.

In a brief celebration at the wolf project office back at park headquarters, there are quick beers of relief, then in blurred succession follow shallow sleep, gathering in the frozen dark of five in the morning, coffee in the truck, and finally lying belly down in the snow behind a low ridge above the pen with spotting scopes until first light.

By dawn Nine and Seven have eaten most of their haunch of elk, and have sniffed and scent-marked the pen’s whole perimeter. At midmorning they are running, running, running, mouths agape, tongues hanging out, silent, around and around, just inside the fence, pounding a dark path in the snow.

Back in Alberta, Carter Niemeyer and his crew keep trapping. Within a week they have eleven more wolves for Idaho and six for Yellowstone. Among the latter is one extraordinary light-buff male, very big—a hundred and twenty-two pounds—and possessed of an imposing bearing. There is about this wolf a calm, a quiet, a confidence, something magisterial, something none of these people long familiar with wolves have seen quite the equal of before. Unlike any of the other wolves, he will stare you straight in the eye and keep staring. He has bitten two jab sticks in half. He has the big balls of a breeder. Everyone agrees: Number Ten, as he will henceforth be known, is the very definition of an alpha male. He will make the perfect mate for Number Nine.

—If they don’t kill each other first. Unrelated wolves, when entirely strangers, and especially in close quarters, may well fight to the death. That is why the wolf team wanted so badly to capture intact families. The hope now is that Nine’s advanced state of estrus will overcome whatever hostility might arise between her and this magnificent alpha male.

Muleteer Ben Cunningham and his indefatigable Billy took food to the wolves on a sleigh—in fair weather and foul.

Even after his trapping and his several anesthetizations, his medical exams, all that handling by people, his long trip to Yellowstone in a stainless steel cage, Number Ten, unlike any of his predecessors, seems neither disoriented nor exhausted. He does not cower in his kennel. When the biologists slide the door open, he strides right out and goes straight to Number Nine. Young Seven edges cautiously away from what she instantly recognizes as grown-ups’ business. Ten gives Nine a thorough stem-to-stern sniffing. She stands for it with a sort of frozen dignity and, in due course, a certain amount of reserved reciprocal sniffing.

Ten lays his head across the back of Nine’s neck. This is not a romantic gesture. In wolf language it means, I like you, yes, but I also outrank you. Nine bridles, snarls, and scoots out from beneath Ten’s embarrassed expression of tough love.

Nine and Ten stiffen and stand tall, growling. They come together slowly, touch noses, sniff each other’s rears, snarl, and separate. Two hours of nastiness pass, but they have not fought. By the end of the day, each has occupied the farthest possible reach of the pen from the other. From time to time one or the other will open an eye and mutter a low growl.

By next morning, Nine and Ten are curled up together, by no means with the easy slump of puppies but nonetheless together, and asleep.

There is about this wolf a calm, a quiet, a confidence, something magisterial …

… the very definition of an alpha male.