American Wolf Read online

  “In Nate Blakeslee’s riveting, endlessly adventurous narrative, the world of Yellowstone alpha wolf O-Six comes vividly alive and yet remains brutally wild. Gorgeously written, and offering stunning insights into both animal and human nature, American Wolf is a masterly feat of science journalism.”

  —Michael Finkel, author of The Stranger in the Woods

  “As in a great novel, we are swept along in a multigenerational saga involving matters of character, courtship, and shifting social relations. Except this is a story of wolves and wolf packs, as closely observed through the years by scientists, not nature poets. And in the background, the human fates and furies who control the animals’ destiny: hunters and ecologists and fanatics struggling to adapt an ancient mythology of wolf-terror to the modern American West.”

  —Tom Kizzia, author of Pilgrim’s Wilderness

  “Heartbreaking frontline coverage of our war on the wild….Blakeslee hauntingly gives the victims faces, families, and stories. A quietly angry, aching, important book.”

  —Charles Foster, author of Being a Beast

  “A compelling environmental drama of the reintroduction of wolves to the Rockies, as clear-sighted on human politics as it is on wolf politics. As wolf packs battle one another for control of precious territory, unknown to them another battle is taking place, between the wolves’ supporters and those who would eradicate them.”

  —Neil Ansell, author of Deep Country

  “Nate Blakeslee’s account of the Lamar Valley wolves, based largely on the two decades of meticulous notes kept by Yellowstone wolf watchers, is the Game of Thrones story of modern western wolves, and unfolds in just as riveting a fashion. It is an absolutely mesmerizing read.”

  —Dan Flores, author of Coyote America: A Natural and Supernatural History

  “Wolves are neither gods nor demons. Real wolves are complex beings with personalities, ambitions, careers, and—thanks to us—more than their fair share of tragedy. American Wolf gives us true profiles of wolf lives lived in their actual families. And when humans get involved, the trajectory of their lives forever changes.”

  —Carl Safina, author of Beyond Words: What Animals Think and Feel

  “In an extraordinary feat of reportage, Nate Blakeslee brings us the wild’s most storied animal as we’ve never seen it before. Here is the joyful wolf, the heroic wolf, the desperate wolf, the despairing wolf—the wolf as an individual as fully realized as its human allies and enemies. Written with heart but not sentimentality, American Wolf is nothing less than Shakespearean tragedy played out against the backdrop of our troubled relationship with nature.”

  —J. B. MacKinnon, author of The Once and Future World

  Copyright © 2017 by Nate Blakeslee

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Crown, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.

  crownpublishing.com

  CROWN is a registered trademark and the Crown colophon is a trademark of Penguin Random House LLC.

  Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following for permission to reprint previously published material:

  Doubleday, a division of Penguin Random House LLC: Excerpt from The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood, copyright © 2000 by O. W. Toad, Ltd. Reprinted by permission of Doubleday, an imprint of Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved.

  Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company: Excerpt from The Ninemile Wolves by Rick Bass, copyright © 2003 by Rick Bass. Reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Blakeslee, Nate, 1970–

  Title: American wolf: a true story of survival and obsession in the West / Nate Blakeslee.

  Description: New York: Crown Publisher, 2017

  Identifiers: LCCN 2017008953 | ISBN 9781101902783 (hardcover)

  Subjects: LCSH: Wolves—Yellowstone National Park. | Endangered species—Yellowstone National Park. | Wildlife management—Yellowstone National Park. | Mammal populations—Yellowstone National Park. | Nature—Effect of human beings on—Yellowstone National Park.

  Classification: LCC QL737.C22 B54284 2017 | DDC 599.77309787/52—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/​2017008953.

  ISBN 9781101902783

  Ebook ISBN 9781101902790

  Map by David Cain

  Cover design and illustration by Michael Morris

  Cover photograph: Tom Murphy/National Geographic Magazines/Getty Images

  v4.1

  ep

  For Manny and June

  It would be so lovely to not have to follow the scents of the politics, the laws, the cattle, the humans, the hunters, the roads. It would be so lovely to just stay in the dark woods and concentrate only on pure unencumbered biology: foot sizes and body weights, diets, range and distribution. It would also be fiction.

  —Rick Bass, The Ninemile Wolves

  No beast so fierce but knows some touch of pity.

  But I know none, and therefore am no beast.

  —Richard III

  All stories are about wolves. All worth repeating, that is. Anything else is sentimental drivel….Think about it. There’s escaping from the wolves, fighting the wolves, capturing the wolves, taming the wolves. Being thrown to the wolves, or throwing others to the wolves so the wolves will eat them instead of you. Running with the wolf pack. Turning into a wolf. Best of all, turning into the head wolf. No other decent stories exist.

  —Margaret Atwood, The Blind Assassin

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Author’s Note

  O-Six Lineage

  Map of Lamar Valley

  Prologue: December 6, 2012

  Chapter 1: Return of the Wolf

  Chapter 2: In the Valley of the Druids

  Chapter 3: A Star Is Born

  Chapter 4: Killers

  Chapter 5: The King of Currumpaw

  Chapter 6: Rebels in the Sage

  Chapter 7: Iron Man

  Chapter 8: Return to the Lamar Valley

  Chapter 9: Betrayal

  Chapter 10: Rampage of the Mollies

  Chapter 11: “The Worst Possible Thing I Could Tell You”

  Chapter 12: A Good Day in the Park

  Chapter 13: Enough Is Enough

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  Source Notes

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  Every scene depicting wolves in this book was drawn from contemporaneous observations. I could not have accomplished this without the generous cooperation of Laurie Lyman, who lent me her notes—some twenty-five hundred pages—on the wolves of Yellowstone’s Northern Range. Laurie’s daily observations, supplemented on the occasions when she was absent from the park with notes she collected from friends, allowed me to get to know the Lamar Canyon Pack, and they form the basis for my descriptions of the life of O-Six and her family.

  Rick McIntyre graciously provided me copies of his own notes from key moments in the life of the pack, which, along with my interviews with other observers, allowed me to draw those scenes more fully.

  Rick and Laurie’s cooperation should not be construed as an endorsement of the ideas—about wolves or people—found in these pages. Those are my own.

  Finally, the names and identifying characteristics of two individuals, referred to in this account as Steven and Wayne Turnbull, have been changed to protect their privacy.

  Detail left

  Detail right

  PROLOGUE

&nbs
p; December 6, 2012

  The hunter left his truck at the end of the gravel road and trudged into the fresh December snow. He was a broad-chested, clear-eyed man of middle age, wearing a brown Carhartt sweatshirt and heavy winter boots. The snow before him, tinted blue by the soft early-morning light, was crisscrossed with wolf tracks, and he followed them to the edge of an open field. Beyond it, perhaps a quarter of a mile away, was a steep, heavily forested ridge, and to his right another peak loomed, blocking out the morning sun.

  On a cord around the hunter’s thick neck hung a brown plastic whistle, shaped like a chess pawn. He put it to his lips and blew a series of short bursts, covering and uncovering the small fluted horn on the end, mimicking the wail of a dying cottontail rabbit. It resembled nothing so much as the cry of a colicky baby, a noise he had not heard in twenty-five years. He waited half a minute, then sent another call floating through the thin mountain air—shrill and defiant at first, then tapering off into whimpering acceptance. You had to make it sound real, that was what most people didn’t understand. Just blasting away on the call like a kazoo would get you nowhere; the trick was to imagine what it would be like to be eaten alive by a coyote, the horror and pain of that kind of death.

  And you had to be patient. He’d been stalking the pack for weeks, sighting a wolf or two here and there but never getting close enough for a shot. He’d howled them the night before, using nothing more than his cupped hands and his own voice, and had eventually heard a response. They hadn’t been far, and they weren’t far now. He waited.

  His name was Steven Turnbull, and he was in a valley known as Crandall, deep in the Absaroka Mountains northwest of Cody, Wyoming. The Clark’s Fork of the Yellowstone River flowed through a narrow canyon at the western end of the valley, opening up into a wide, flat basin ringed with lodgepole pine, where it was joined by Crandall Creek, cascading down from the mountains bordering Yellowstone National Park. The creek was named for a gold prospector who was killed by Indians while making his way to a promising placer mine near the headwaters of the Clark’s Fork in the spring of 1870. With the nearest settlement at least twenty miles away, the bodies of Marvin J. Crandall and his partner were not found until the following spring, when a search party came upon their severed heads, said to have been mounted on their own picks, on the banks of the creek.

  Crandall was still a difficult place to reach, especially in winter. It was served only by a single road, the two-lane Chief Joseph Highway. In summer, the winding road provided a scenic route from Cody through the Shoshone National Forest to Yellowstone, which lay about twenty miles west of the basin as the crow flies, over some of the most rugged terrain in the Northern Rockies. In winter, the snowplows went no farther than Crandall’s western edge; travel to Yellowstone required a snowmobile.

  No more than fifty people lived in the valley year-round, raising cattle or running one of a handful of guest ranches or hunting outfitters. A single store, known as the Painter Outpost, sold breakfast and beer, catering in winter mostly to snowmobilers and hunters, and in summer to the few Yellowstone-bound tourists determined enough to take the less-traveled route to the park.

  Yellowstone became a national park—the nation’s first—shortly after Marvin Crandall and his fellow prospectors arrived, which theoretically protected its resources from the great wave of western migration that washed over the Rocky Mountains by the end of the nineteenth century. In reality, the fur traders who inundated the park ignored the designation, along with almost everything else that originated in Washington, D.C. Now Yellowstone was overrun with tourists, at least in summer. Turnbull seldom spent time there. The park was for visitors; Crandall—especially in winter, covered with three feet of snow—was the real Wyoming.

  Yellowstone did have one thing he loved, however, and that was elk. Every winter massive herds migrated out of the park, leaving the high country for lower, less snowy pastures. Some of them followed the Clark’s Fork drainage east as it wound its way down into Crandall, which became a game highway for months at a time. Turnbull had lost track of how many elk he had taken in this valley over the years.

  But it wasn’t like it used to be, not since the wolves had come back to Yellowstone. The elk had once paraded down into the basin every winter, some years as many as a thousand. You could pick the animal you wanted to shoot, almost like ordering from a catalog. Now you were lucky to see two hundred in the valley all winter, and the State of Wyoming had begun rationing elk tags by lottery. The wolves took the rest.

  Over the last fifteen years, the wolves had spread—well beyond the borders of the park, where the first few packs were reintroduced by federal wildlife officials back in the mid-1990s. Like most people he knew, Turnbull had been against the plan from the beginning, and he thought there were now far too many wolves in Wyoming. But, of course, nobody had asked him for his opinion.

  It was the same with grizzlies. When he was a kid, he could throw down a bedroll and sleep on the ground anywhere in Crandall. He would never do that now. After decades of federal protection, the woods were full of bears—so many that you didn’t even have to be in the backcountry to spot them. You saw them from the road; people saw them right outside their cabins when they stepped onto their porches in the morning. To be safe, Turnbull always carried a .44 Magnum pistol with him in the woods (even in hunting season, when you weren’t really supposed to).

  The grizzlies claimed their share of game, too, especially newborn elk and moose—but nothing like what the wolves took. The wildlife experts in Yellowstone claimed game numbers were down because of drought more than anything else, but Turnbull didn’t buy it. It was the wolves. He’d seen the chewed-up carcasses in the woods with his own eyes.

  —

  Hunting big game was what life in Wyoming was all about, as far as Turnbull was concerned. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d bought beef at a grocery store. He might pick up a little suet from time to time, to help make lean elk meat into good burger. But meat to him meant elk. Even though hardwood was difficult to come by in his part of the world, he always found what he needed to smoke his own jerky every winter. With a healthy dose of coarse black pepper and a little garlic, there was nothing like it. He bagged it up and gave it to his friends, at least those who didn’t already have sacks full of it themselves.

  He wasn’t in the woods every fall just for the meat. He loved the elk, and he loved the mountains they called home. He had a house about an hour’s drive east, in a small farming town, but he spent most of his time at his cabin in Crandall, supporting himself with any work he could find nearby: painting cabins in the summer, acting as a caretaker for those same places in the winter, cutting firewood—manual labor of various kinds.

  His grandfather had started taking him hunting for rabbit and duck in the backcountry around Cody when he was five years old. When he was a teenager, he’d hunted with his mother’s old .30-40 Krag, the rifle of choice for the U.S. Army before World War I. He wasn’t sure how old the gun was, but it had been given as a wedding present to his maternal grandfather, who then handed it down to his daughter on the occasion of her own wedding. It was reliable only up to a hundred yards or so, with a muzzle speed so slow you could practically see the bullet coming out of the barrel. Turnbull’s sister had asked for it after their parents died, and he hadn’t argued. He had a much better rifle slung over his shoulder now, but he didn’t use it that much. He was mainly a bow hunter these days. He’d killed moose, black bear, eight-hundred-pound bull elk—any kind of big game you could find in these mountains—with his bow.

  He loved the elegance of the bow, the same weapon (albeit greatly refined) that Indians had used to hunt elk in these very woods for hundreds of years. He’d always been taught to get as close to an animal as you could before you took your shot, and leaving your rifle at home ensured that your stalking skills would be tested. He watched all the hunting shows and read all the magazines, and he’d noticed that these days the emphasis seemed to be on long-rang
e shooting. A manufacturer in Cody made a rifle that could supposedly kill an elk at a thousand yards. To Turnbull, that wasn’t ethical. For him, fair chase, the notion that a hunter should eschew any technique that gave him or her an improper advantage over game, was more than just an empty slogan.

  The other good thing about bow hunting was that the archery season for elk began in September, a month before the general rifle hunt, which meant you could get out in the woods when they were still relatively devoid of other hunters. Crandall had become increasingly popular with out-of-towners in recent years, and there were guide services in the area catering to wealthy clients—though not as many as there once were, when the elk were more plentiful. Private ranches along the Clark’s Fork were world famous for their lightly hunted herds and their enormous bulls. He couldn’t afford to hunt at those places, and he didn’t care. Most of Crandall was National Forest land, where anybody could hunt for the price of a fifty-dollar elk tag—assuming you could get one.

  The start of bow hunting season was his favorite time to be in the woods. The weather in September was still beautiful, with warm days and nights chilly enough to bring out the fall color in the aspens, cottonwoods, and willows. The bulls were rutting then, bugling to the cows in their harems and butting heads with their rivals. You had to get the meat out fast, as temperatures were warm enough to be a concern—though you couldn’t really leave your kill out overnight anyway because of the bears. When you got back the next morning, there’d be nothing left of your elk, or worse, you’d find a seven-hundred-pound grizzly lying on top of it.

  October meant the rifle hunt for bulls, followed by antlerless elk, usually beginning in mid-November. By the end of December, the season was over, but Turnbull still found excuses to get out into the woods. He’d stalk elk with his video camera, filming the big bulls in his favorite spots, getting to know them by their racks. In late winter, he’d go out and collect shed antlers, occasionally trying to match them with the bulls on his recordings. The woods were full of sheds, and he’d fill his pickup and sell them by the pound in town. They usually ended up as meal for animal feed. Black bear season came in the spring, and in the summer he kept himself sharp with archery practice, fletching his own arrows. It was the only time of year you could shoot at targets without losing arrows in the snow.