The Killing of Wolf Number Ten. Thomas McNamee
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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