On a bright January
Sunday Nicole and I struck out on I-90 East, headed for Bozeman. We
had grand plans: Yellowstone and the Gallatin National Forest, wolves
and maybe wolverines, old friends, whiskey and camping in the snow.
Nicole, my former coworker, was back in Montana to conduct research
for her senior college project on wolverines; I was unemployed and a
week out from starting grad school. Aside from being a little broke,
we didn't have many worries at all.
Driving
back east makes me claustrophobic. The roads are so crowded and
narrow. Here
and
there
are
just a highway exit apart. In Montana the road opens up. You know you
could drive all day and be nowhere at all. I cranked up the radio and
we sailed along I-90.
We were still
singing goofy songs as we came into Bozeman around 6 PM. The sun was
just disappearing behind the Tobacco Root Mountains, and the Bridger
Range was sinking into night.
We were staying with
Joshua, also a former coworker, now employed as a wildlife biologist.
Nicole wanted to talk to him about his work and follow him in the
field as he tracked wolverines. That was the official reason for this
roadtrip, fun notwithstanding.
But Joshua had
already been out in the field for a week, had in fact beaten us back
to Bozeman by only half an hour. In the rugged tradition of wildlife
biologists everywhere, he'd grown a heavy beard.
“Man,”
he said, sprawling on the couch, “it's good to be home. I mean, I
guess I can't complain about getting paid to track
wolverines,
but still...”
I glanced at Nicole
and saw in her eyes that she would probably commit felonies if it
meant getting paid to track wolverines.
We passed around the
whiskey and decided that Nicole and I could go camping in Yellowstone
the next day and return in time to go tracking with him later in the
week.
In the morning we
all went out for a leisurely breakfast with many refills of coffee,
then lay around the house for half the day arguing about natural
history. I've run with many crowds in my life: nerds and ex-pats,
hard-drinkers and early-to-bedders, jocks and preschool teachers and
poets – but I think I most love the eco-geeks. Happily there is no
shortage of such people in Montana.
Sometime in the
afternoon we set out for Yellowstone.
ii.
The park in winter
is another world. Snow softens the dry stark lines of Gallatin
Canyon. The river where we took kids rafting is ice-choked and low.
There were people in Mammoth, but they seemed to be mostly employees.
We pulled over to watch a pair of bull elk sparring on a hillside.
The canyon magnified the sounds they made, the grunts and huffings,
the clatter of their antlers. Some hikers popped up over the rim of
the hill and pushed in too close until the bulls stopped sparring and
drifted away. I suppose some things about Yellowstone never change.
There was only one
other group camping at Mammoth Campground, but a ranger still found
us and scolded me for not having front plates on my car. Grouchy
rangers, another constant...
We huddled in the
tent drinking tea until we gave up and crawled into sleeping bags. I
was facing one way and Nicole the other. Theoretically, we should
have had plenty of room – so why did we keep kicking each other?
The mystery was
solved in the morning. Chilly, I had curled up in the bottom of my
bag, like a squirrel in a burrow, and Nicole had done the same in
hers. We had duked it out all night over the one patch of tentspace
where in a warmer world our feet would have been.
But the sun was
rising over the gray world and it was time to go find some wolves. We
were tired and giggly and it was about 12 degrees F.
“Aren't
you glad we don't have kids on this trip?” I said.
“Heck
yeah, it's hard enough to get them out of their sleeping bags in
July.”
We wove through the
park in the predawn. A few other travelers were around. Since only
one road was open, it was a fair guess that they were headed to the
same place.
As we left the
hydrothermically active area around Mammoth, the reading on my car
thermostat kept dropping, from 12 to 0 to -10. The sun was up as we
entered Lamar. Rick McIntyre's yellow Nissan, which in the summer
might as well have been a billboard saying 'Wolves This Way,' was not
visible, but a crowd of heavily bundled people with spotting scopes
and binoculars stood at a pulloff overlooking the river valley. Among
them was the familiar reedy figure of McIntyre. He rushed over when
we stopped. He spoke softly but with great urgency.
“If
you'll come now, right now, get your binoculars, we have wolves in
the scope.”
He was a man totally
under the spell of wolves, and he always wanted the people around him
to be the same.
We located the pack
on the far side of the river, six wolves, black and gray. One of the
black pups looked strange, off balance somehow, and I realized that
its tail was entirely naked from mange. The wolves were moving in a
loose string, stopping occasionally to bed down in the sage. A short
distance away, the human observers spotted a bull elk under an aspen,
and it was clear that the wolves had also noticed. A few of the
wolves left the group and moved towards it. The bull stood his
ground. The wolves slunk closer, closer – and the bull stamped his
hooves and made a short charge. The wolves drew back and then in
again, and once more the bull charged. This time the wolves moved
back for good. Not too fast or too slow, they drifted deliberately
back to their packmates and the whole group was on the move again,
passing over a bluff and out of sight. The bull stood like stone
under the aspen for a long time.
I had forgotten,
while watching this little drama, that it was -10 degrees, but then I
remembered. We climbed back into the car and ate breakfast.
This particular wolf
group, the Junction Butte pack, hadn't existed in the summer, and
even if it had, certainly wouldn't have been found chasing elk in the
grassy gamelands of the valley. This territory, until December, had
been ruled by the Lamar Canyon pack, led by the wolf dubbed the '06
female' and her mates, 754 and 755, the numbers indicating that they
were full brothers.
But 754 and the 06F
had been shot in the early winter; they were among eight
radio-collared Yellowstone wolves killed around that time. Very few
wild animals earn a New York Times obituary, but the 06 F was famous;
thousands of park visitors had watched her in her grassland kingdom,
among them my own students, who had watched her swim the river to
join her mate on a fine June morning.
Where is the
pleasure in shooting something that is so beautifully adapted to
survive? I can understand the position of ranchers with stock to
protect, but the radio-collared wolves were shot ...well, I can't
say why. For bragging rights, perhaps, or in the hopes of crippling
research programs. There's a school of thought that says an
individual or a society's respect for the environment, or lack
thereof, correlates to their capacity for human empathy; in my
experience at least this seems to be true.
Down the road a ways
we stopped at another crowd of people, and this time the wolf they
were watching was 755. He had been wandering was the word, floating
from the edges of one pack to another, lingering at a carcass in once
place, getting chased out at another. Junction Butte had been pushing
him forward, but at the moment he had a temporary respite. He lay in
the sage with his head drooping on his paws, a burly wolf with his
black coat grizzled to gray. I hate to be anthropomorphic, but I felt
for 755, lying there alone, driven from his territory, his mate and
brother shot, and the rest of the pack wandering somewhere to the
east. If he wasn't depressed, I was depressed on his behalf. It
wouldn't have been sad in the natural order of things, but humans had
done it to them, out of conscious malice, and that made all the
difference.
ii.
Finished with
wolf-watching, Nicole and I packed up camp and headed back to
Bozeman. To my disappointment, we had no chance to swim in the
Boiling River, the point where a hot spring flows into the Gardner
River. Too close to the outlet and you're scalded, too far and
suddenly you're back in a mountain river in January. Not to mention
getting out...
There were many
golden eagles in the Paradise Valley along Highway 89 towards
Livingston. One was perched right by the roadside, sitting atop a
mule deer carcass so fresh that its blood still stained the grass.
It was windy and the
car shook in the wind and the cottonwoods swayed along the river.
I always think of
the John Prine song 'Paradise' when driving that stretch of 89. It
was written about Kentucky but could just as easily have been about
Montana. The chorus goes:
Daddy, won't you
take me back to Muhlenberg County
Down by the Green
River where Paradise lay?
I'm sorry my son but
you're too late in askin'
Mr. Peabody's coal
train has hauled it away.
But it's not all
gone yet, thank God.
We spent the evening
roaming Bozeman and the next morning early found us hitting the road
to go wolverine tracking. Joshua's work for the day was to hike up to
a certain post, way up a canyon in the Gallatin National Forest, and
rebait it with roadkill and scent lure, unappetizing to humans, but
supposedly ambrosial to wolverines. It is quite difficult to guess
what might attract a wolverine, harder still to spot one. Many people
study them for decades and catch only a glimpse in all the years.
The post was wrapped
with wire and gun brushes. The hope was that a wolverine climbing for
bait would snag fur, which could be collected for sampling, and leave
tracks, which could be followed, as long as you had the nerve and
fortitude to travel as a wolverine travels, over brush and sheer rock
faces in an unbroken, untiring, lope.
We were all hoping
for tracks.
The initial section
of trail (actually a heavily snowed-over road) had been packed down
by backcountry skiers and made for easy walking. Cliffs of dark,
twisting volcanic rhyolite towered overhead. Snow had made fantastic
sculptures on the crowns of baby lodgepoles.
Joshua's small,
elderly dog trailed at his feet, stepping in his footprints to make
easier going.
We moved steadily
uphill. It was unseasonably warm; Nicole had to stop and cache some
of her many gratuitous layers under a rock. The snow was deep and the
ski tracks dwindled until we stumbling and post-holing thigh-deep.
Finally we stopped to strap on snowshoes. Mine made us all laugh.
They were a rented pair, acquired at the last minute under dubious
circumstances, and properly scaled to float a 200-lb man. On me, they
were like canoes.
“I
think I'll actually be able to walk on water with these things.”
“You
already are,” Joshua said. “So to speak.”
We shuffled on. When
we stopped to rest the dog sat on my snowshoes to stop himself
sinking, and there was room for him there.
Finally we came to a
meadow with a stream winding through, and snow drifted all around,
great puffs of snow covering the stream except where it broke through
here and there.
By deceptive and
circuitous paths we left the trail, crossed the stream on a snow
bridge, and made our way to the bait post. Joshua and Nicole rebaited
it with musky lure while I stood back with the dog. It was crucial
that alien scent by kept to a minimum, that curious skiers not follow
our trail. Nobody had, but still there were no tracks or hair to be
found.
With no tracks to
follow the work was done, and we turned and went back, a round trip
of 11 miles. The going was much easier downhill, even on my
snowcanoes.