The Killing of Wolf Number Ten. Thomas McNamee
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good example of how dangerous wolves are. Doug Smith is capturing Number Three, an eighty-pound male from the Crystal Creek pack, with a salmon net.
Three is caught. His wide-open mouth is not an expression of menace but rather one of fear.
Number Three really did want to get out, of course, and luckily Mike Phillips was there with a second net.
Once subdued, Three got an injection of tranquilizer and a medical examination. Here Deb Guernsey and Mike Phillips are waiting for the drug to wear off before releasing him.
And so. The wolf-haters chalk up another point on the scoreboard, and yet another hearing is scheduled in Washington. There’s no time to waste. The Yellowstone wolf team know they’ve got to get those wolves out of the pens and on the ground, come what may.
March 21, 1995
The sun of this first day of spring is headache-bright on wide white meadows crosshatched with animal footprints. Snow-dust wind-wracked from the Douglas-firs on the mountainsides swirls into snow-devils on the flat, dervishing down to the frozen Lamar River. Bison nest in pits in the snow. A few cud-chewing elk lie bedded just inside the forest edge. The south-facing slopes, melting bare, have been nibbled and trampled into barely vegetated mud by the thousands of elk that winter in this valley.
A few first faint washes of green have appeared on the sunniest prominences. A thin cloud settles on the summit of a black mountain called The Thunderer. Mountain goats live up there, in inconceivable weather. Dozens of mountain bluebirds, still in their migration flocks, flutter across the valley floor.
At four forty-five in the afternoon, a crew of biologists, the one allowed reporter, and a videographer hike through deep snow up over Crystal Bench and down to the pen containing the Crystal Creek pack. Mike Phillips unlocks the gate.
The wolves flee to the farthest reach of the pen, pacing fretfully back and forth in the black mud they have churned up there. Twice a week for ten weeks, people have come to leave the elk, deer, and bison carcasses that have sustained the wolves through their incarceration, and every human visit has been marked by this anxiety and stymied flight. Familiarity has not tamed these wolves.
Working quickly, the men set up the electronic motion detectors that are to alert them by radio when the wolves pass through the gate and into the world. The videographer aligns and focuses a camera that will run unattended for the next two hours to record for posterity the Crystal Creek pack’s first free steps in Yellowstone.
Every wolf got a thorough medical exam before the pen gates were opened.
Doug Smith had to get used to hoisting the hundred-pound dead weight of a tranquilized wolf.
The crew leave eight pounds of road-killed elk inside the pen, another thirty pounds ten yards outside. The wolves haven’t been fed for four days. Their bellies are empty.
Back at the trailhead, cigars are distributed. Puffs of triumph rise stinking into the breeze and evanesce.
One big “Yee-ha!” and a group high-five are all the celebration necessary.
As the sun descends, the Lamar awakens. Eleven bull elk, still splendidly antlered though soon to doff their crowns, appear on a ridgeline, then twenty-six, soon a hundred and more, all bulls. A herd of cow elk and their calves—at least a hundred of each—move out of the trees and down to the roadside where sun-warmed asphalt and snowmelt have greened a fringe of grass.
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