The Killing of Wolf Number Ten. Thomas McNamee
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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