Authors: Jim Crumley
The Last Wolf (18 page)
She moved at an easy trot, her huge feet padding in near silence among the pines, though the trees felt her passage. The trees relished her presence in their midst after a long absence as the
tribe of wolves had thinned out all across the land. The long-lived tree generations were rooted in times of wolf plenty and tree plenty (for the trees too were a dwindling race).
In that land of Rannoch, pinewoods and moor together were the best hope for wolves, and therefore for nature. Such compact logic was understood by all creatures except men, for on the moor
they had long since become obsessed only with their own precarious survival. They had misplaced the knowledge that their salvation there lay in wild nature, and that the salvation of wild nature
lay in the wolf. Pinewoods and moor together offered a place where wolves might withdraw, heal, recover, begin again, a place from which they might emerge fit to travel again. That recovery would
reawaken the old knowledge in all wolves, re-establish Rannoch as a sacred place for wolves to which they would return forever.
So the trees greeted the brush of her fur, the pad of her feet, the warmth of her presence. Tree to tree, they passed her through the darkness until she stood at the edge of the clearing that
accommodated the track. The horse was travelling west and into the wind. The wolf turned that way and followed, not using the track but travelling parallel to it, keeping a screen of trees between
her and the clearing so that in her mind as she travelled she could see her own shape as one on the track might see it, and it was a shape made of broken shadows. For that she was grateful to the
trees, and relished their presence in return, and in that spirit she closed on the horse and its rider, increasing her pace until she was level with the horse, and she fell in with the
horse’s pace, watching through the trees.
Suddenly the horse stopped and gave soft voice. The rider spoke: ‘What is it?’
The horse stared at the trees. The wolf was a shadow among shadows. The rider stared too, but that shadowed confusion offered no explanation. Yet the rider thought something moved between the
horse and the shadows, some warm air of communication that a rider might feel but not understand.
‘Come on lass, I’m hungry. You’re hungry, for that matter.’
The horse moved off at once then responded to the soft command for more speed.
The wolf had stopped when the horse stopped. She stood still now and listened to the diminishing sound, and knew that the horse possessed knowledge of her. The scent of the close-up horse and
now the cooler scent of the rider lingered in her. She would know both again, the very horse, the very rider.
HAPTER
12
Yellowstone
On so many days, we humans seem insatiable, determined to cobble together a fantasy in which there’s nothing we can’t have, can’t own. But to a lot of
wildlife watchers the wolf defies all that, standing as a link to the kinds of mysteries that lie well outside our pipe-dreams of manipulation and control. Seeing a wolf in the wild can feel
like one of the final frontiers of nature – a frontier that can never be possessed.
– Douglas W. Smith and Gary Ferguson,
Decade of the Wolf – Returning the Wild to Yellowstone
(2005)
THE NATIONAL PARK SERVICE did not end what was euphemistically known as ‘predator control’ until 1926. The great American wilderness was no such thing, because
outwith Alaska, in what America calls the lower forty-eight states, the philosophy that ‘the only good wolf is a dead wolf’ was ubiquitous. The very phrase was a grimly pointed
reworking of General Philip Sheridan’s immortal utterance in the winter of 1868 to the Comanche chief Tosawi, who introduced himself to the General with the words ‘Tosawi, good
Indian.’ Dee Brown’s
Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee
noted that the General’s response was: ‘The only good Indians I ever saw were dead.’ Brown wrote:
Lieutenant Charles Nordstrom who was present, remembered the words and passed them on, until in time they were honed into an American aphorism: The only good Indian is a
dead Indian.
There is a curious parallel between Scotland and the United States of America in that subjugation of the human natives and the wolves seemed to go hand in hand, as if there were some unspoken
recognition among their distant governments that the people might draw inexplicable sustenance from the presence of wolves in their midst. Many readers may well find that notion preposterous, but
consider the quote from Smith and Ferguson at the beginning of this chapter: ‘Seeing a wolf in the wild can feel like one of the final frontiers of nature – a frontier than can never be
possessed.’ Nothing was more intolerable to the London government of the eighteenth century or the Washington government of the nineteenth century than the idea of a frontier that can never
be possessed.
Be that as it may, as the twentieth century struggled with its conscience through the pre- and post-war years, the pioneers of wolf conservation began to find a market for their ideas and their
books. Aldo Leopold’s now famous Road to Damascus moment in
A Sand County Almanac
was beginning to burn into the American folk-mind. He was young, he said, and ‘full of
trigger-itch’. ‘A pile of wolves’ that turned out to be cubs welcoming the return of an adult, appeared below the rimrock where he was sitting having lunch:
In those days we had never heard of passing up a chance to kill a wolf. In a second we were pumping lead into the pack, but with more excitement than accuracy . . . when
our rifles were empty, the old wolf was down, and a pup was dragging a leg into impassable slide-rocks. We reached the old wolf in time to watch a fierce green fire dying in her eyes. I
realized then, and have known ever since, that there was something new to me in those eyes – something known only to her and to the mountain . . . I thought that because fewer wolves
meant more deer, that no wolves would mean hunters’ paradise. But after seeing the green fire die, I sensed that neither the wolf nor the mountain agreed with such a view.
Leopold’s remarkable book, arguably the single greatest piece of nature writing ever, was published in 1949, the year after he died in a fire, and at a time when he was an adviser to the
United Nations on conservation. How much healthier our wild landscapes might have been had he lived – and had the United Nations listened – is an idle speculation, but he had come to
understand the place of the wolf in nature’s hierarchy, and the necessity of its presence for the wilderness to be in good heart. The American architect Frank Lloyd Wright said that he did
believe in God, but he spelled it Nature. If you hold with that illuminating idea, then you could do worse than have
A Sand County Almanac
for your bible.
Five years before its publication, Adolph Murie, the first serious wolf biologist, had published
The Wolves of Mount McKinley
, a ground-breaking work now regarded as a classic, not least
because it was produced in a climate of wolf-hatred when pressure was being exerted by hunters to kill wolves inside the Mount McKinley National Park (now Denali) in Alaska. And some just went in
and killed every pup in every den they could find anyway.
Nor was it just an American problem. This was how bad things had got:
In 1968 . . . the grey wolf had just been listed as an endangered species in the lower forty-eight states; the Soviet Union had declared war on wolves; poisoning was still
widespread across Canada; and the purity of the red wolf, which inhabits the south-eastern United States, was rapidly being eroded by an influx of coyote genes.
Between public hatred and government extermination, wolves had disappeared from one-third to one-half of their former range, which originally included almost all the
landmass of the Northern Hemisphere above twenty degrees latitude (which runs through Mexico City and Bombay, India). They were gone from much of western Europe and the more populated areas of
Asia as well as from Mexico and the contiguous United States. If the wolf had any friends, it wasn’t clear who they were.
So wrote another front-line wolf biologist, L. David Mech, in his foreword to a book called
Wolf Wars
by yet another, Hank Fischer. The book is the story of the plan to restore wolves to
Yellowstone National Park, which straddles the northern US states of Wyoming, Montana and Idaho. It was a long and bloody campaign, arguably the most divisive in the troubled history of wildlife
conservation anywhere in the world. Fischer’s book was published in 1995, the year the first Canadian wolves were finally released in Yellowstone, but even at that defining moment the wolf
wars were far from over. Fischer wrote:
No one declared a truce in the wolf wars after wolves returned to Yellowstone Park and central Idaho. In fact, the battle cries grew shriller than ever. The Wyoming
legislature, dominated by agricultural interests, welcomed wolves with a $500 bounty for anyone who managed to shoot one straying outside park boundaries. The governor vetoed the bounty but not
the sentiment behind it. Montana’s legislature responded with a resolution calling for the government to stock New York’s Central Park with wolves. Idaho’s new governor
threatened to call out the National Guard to drive wolves from his state.
Conservation – principally in the shape of Defenders of Wildlife and the Sierra Club – had taken on the huge American agriculture industry and, suddenly, the White House; for in
1994, Congress went Republican after 40 years of Democrat domination, an era during which the Nixon administration had passed the Endangered Species Act and the wolf had been the first species to
be listed. Fischer was the Northern Rockies field representative for Defenders of Wildlife from 1978 onwards. He developed the Wolf Compensation Fund and served on Congress’s Wolf Management
Committee. His persuasive testimony before Congress, in court, and at endless public hearings, became a powerful ally for the wolves’ cause. He was a spectator among the huge crowds that
gathered at the Roosevelt Arch to welcome the motorcade of government vehicles bringing the first wolves into Yellowstone.
It was a watershed. Conservationists all across the northern hemisphere celebrated and reasoned that if you could put wolves, of all things, back into the United States, anything was possible
anywhere. Yellowstone shone its light into many murky corners of the world, and it still does. But in 1995, Fischer was not so sure. He had fought the wolf wars from the beginning and bore the
scars. His book concludes on an almost weary note:
Although historians may view Yellowstone Park wolf restoration as an important conservation milestone, it’s not a particularly good model for endangered species
recovery. The process took too long, was unnecessarily divisive, and cost too much. The United States has hundreds of imperilled wildlife species in need of help. Unless we adopt new tactics,
our nation’s efforts to conserve endangered species will fail.
His solution is to find a process that unifies rather than divides; political, industrial and conservation leaders who promote co-operation rather than confrontation, and whose organisations are
hell-bent on finding answers. He quotes the biologist Paul Errington, perhaps the best-known 27 words out of the millions that comprise the copious literature of wolves: ‘Of all the native
biological constituents of a northern wilderness scene, I should say that the wolves present the greatest test of human wisdom and good intentions.’ To which Fischer adds his last word:
‘Bringing wolves back to Yellowstone Park certainly shows our nation’s good intentions. But the test of our wisdom will be whether we allow them to flourish.’
Well, by the end of 2007, Yellowstone had 11 different wolf packs ranging in size from four wolves to 22, and a total of at least 171 compared to the peak figure of 174 in 2003. And 2007 was the
first year since reintroduction that no new packs were formed, suggesting that the national park, with its superabundance of grazing animals including elk, moose, bison and deer, has all the wolves
– or at least all the wolf territories – that it can handle. But in 2008, although the number of wolves had dropped to 124, there were 12 packs. One way or another, that sounds like
flourishing to me.
A companion reintroduction in central Idaho, west of Yellowstone, a certain amount of dispersal that is inevitable given the wolf’s propensity for travel, a slightly more relaxed attitude
to the wolf thanks to Yellowstone’s high profile and impressive public relations efforts on behalf of wolves, and the cross-border movement of Canadian wolves – all those factors have
established a population of around 1,500 wolves in the three states of Idaho, Montana and Wyoming. A few have crossed into Oregon. That too sounds like flourishing.
Whether wisdom will continue to hold sway, time will tell. But what seems from this distance like a grotesque numbers game has begun, so that some critics of wolf reintroduction from the farming
and hunting lobby say the numbers in the north-west Rockies states could be as low as 300 and still sustain a viable wolf population while the more optimistic scientists have argued for 2,000, and
hunters have claimed that elk populations are declining due to wolves in a year in which they shot more than 22,000 elk in Wyoming alone. That kind of statistical feeding frenzy makes me squirm,
but that may be simply because there is nothing in Europe to compare it with.
The decision of the Fish and Wildlife Service in 2008 to ‘delist’ wolves in the northern Rockies under the Endangered Species Act, and hand over wolf-management to the three states
who found the original introduction scheme too politically hot to handle, made my eyebrows rise, but it was upheld in 2009 by US Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar, with the conspicuous proviso
that the wolf would remain listed in Wyoming because its law and management plans were not strong enough. But management of wolves will be turned over to state agencies in Montana and Idaho and
parts of Washington, Oregon and Utah, plus the Great Lakes states of Michigan, Minnesota and Wisconsin.