Gray Wolf Makes Controversial Comeback in Northern Rockies

Five inches of powdery snow covered the mountainside in western Montana as Ralph Thisted studied paw prints around an elk rib cage still stained dark with blood.

The powder was too dry to hold prints well, and Thisted spent several minutes looking for a good example. Finally, he pointed at one depression the size of a man’s fist.

“That one looks like it may be one of the pups,” Thisted said. “The adults are larger.” How large? He formed his hands into a circle the size of a saucer.

For 2 1/2 years, Thisted has been witness on his Montana ranch to one of the most remarkable, and most controversial, occurrences in wildlife history--the return of the gray wolf to the Northern Rockies.

A pack has lived and borne pups in this remote valley since 1990. It wasn’t supposed to be here. At one point, it was reduced to six orphaned pups who had to teach themselves to hunt.

The next year, one pup was captured after preying on sheep and now is at a refuge. Two pups were killed. The other three scattered, their fates unknown. One may be the alpha male, or leader, of the current seven-member Ninemile pack; biologists aren’t certain.

Each small triumph of survival in the Ninemile Valley was reported in the local press. It became one of the most celebrated wolf packs ever, its fortunes chronicled in a 1992 book, “The Ninemile Wolves,” by Rick Bass.

Thisted, now retired from the cattle business, watched the pack develop, observing them through binoculars and a large spotting scope in his living room, rising before dawn to hide in a barn across the valley and record the wolves on videotape.

Now, with hunting season just ended, Thisted is relieved that none of the wolves--he would never say “my wolves”--fell to gunfire.

“They made it through,” he said with satisfaction. “I spotted them just the other day, all seven of them. But there’s always going to be somebody that’s out to get them.”

Half a century ago, people took pride in killing wolves. A shy but fierce predator capable of bringing down full-grown moose and elk, the gray wolf was poisoned, trapped, shot, bountied and even dynamited to extinction in the Western United States by ranchers who feared losing their stock.

Now the wolf is coming back, moving through the forests of the Northern Rockies to new dens in the valleys and foothills. The animals are reawakening all the old fears and suspicions and hatreds, and generating new ones. To many enemies, the wolf is not just a predator but “nature’s criminal,” killing animals that are not just prey but defenseless victims.

But this time, the wolf has friends--environmentalists, animal-rights activists, movie stars and nature lovers.

They are turning the wolf into a celebrity of sorts, a symbol of what they see as the essence of the wilderness.

At their most extreme, they portray the wolf not just as acceptable, but as noble; not just desirable, but almost sacred.

And they demand that the wolf take primacy over other interests, such as the cattle and sheep ranchers who graze their stock near wolf habitat.

“That’s not realistic,” said Steve Fritts, a wildlife biologist with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service who is coordinating wolf recovery efforts in the Northern Rockies.

“Some wolves will cause problems. They’ll go to places they shouldn’t go, do things they shouldn’t do. We have to manage those animals, and always will have to manage those animals. Managing wolves is the cost, if you will, of having wolves back.”

When Fritts says manage, he means killing wolves that repeatedly prey on livestock. The euphemism itself speaks to how sensitive the question of wolves has become.

The wolf has always been more than a garden-variety predator. Culture and religion have turned it into a powerful symbol of evil.

Author Barry Lopez explored the animal’s symbolic past in his 1978 book, “Of Wolves and Men.” In medieval Europe, the Roman Catholic Church used wolves to create a sense of real devils prowling the world. The church’s portrayal of werewolves as a common evil to be hunted down and killed served to smother social and political unrest during the Inquisition.

The wolf found no friends in colonial or frontier America. A 1638 Massachusetts law prohibited firing guns within town limits except at an Indian or a wolf.

Lopez argues, in fact, that killing wolves became itself an almost religious act as America moved West: “As civilized man matured and came to measure his own progress by his subjugation of the wilderness--both clearing trees for farms and clearing pagan minds for Christian ideas--the act of killing wolves became a symbolic act, a way to lash out at that enormous, inchoate obstacle: wilderness.”

Western settlers had a more concrete reason for killing wolves: the settlers’ survival, and that of their cattle, sheep and horses.

Cattlemen of the last century pressured state and territorial legislatures for help in defeating the predator. Montana enacted its first bounty in 1884, offering $1 for a dead wolf.

The first year, 5,450 were turned in for bounty; the next year, 2,224 came in. The bounty went as high as $10, and through 1918 bounties totaling $342,764 were paid on 80,730 dead wolves in Montana.

Even in Yellowstone National Park, the wolf was not wildlife, it was “vermin” hunted with traps and guns.

But even killing for bounty was too mild for some. Trappers told stories of dousing live wolves with gasoline and setting them afire, of wiring their mouths shut and leaving them to starve, of strangling their pups and dynamiting their dens, of stringing them up in trees and sniping at their twisting bodies with pistols. In 1905, the Montana Legislature passed a law requiring the state veterinarian to inoculate wolves with a mange and turn them loose to infect others.

Wolves that survived this gauntlet tended to be the wiliest, the most cunning. Many were the last wolves left in areas where cows had replaced game, and they survived by killing the cattle that were the only large prey left.

Though there may have been a few stragglers into the 1940s, for all practical purposes the wolf was gone by 1930. More than a half-century has passed. Times and attitudes have changed.

The Endangered Species Act became law, and the gray wolf was formally listed in 1973. Now, the Fish and Wildlife Service is drawing plans to return the wolf to those same mountains and valleys where it once was pursued.

Ranches tend to stay in the family in Montana, and many ranchers today grew up hearing grandpa tell tales of tracking and killing wolves. They are thunderstruck at the idea that his work would be undone. They worry about their own herds today.

Final studies of recovery plans now are under way. But a 1987 blueprint calls for introducing breeding wolf pairs in Yellowstone National Park and across the Bitterroot Range in central Idaho. Some wolves migrated by themselves into a third area, Glacier National Park, in 1985, and two packs are breeding there now.

The draft plan set a goal of 10 breeding pairs in each of the three recovery areas. When that goal is met for three successive years, the Fish and Wildlife Service says, the wolf can be removed from the endangered species list in the Northern Rockies.

Public hearings on the plan last summer drew charged testimony from both sides. Some supporters pleaded emotionally for the chance to hear a wolf howl in the wild; the Blackfeet Indian tribe said the animal was sacred to them.

More commonly, supporters said the wolf was necessary to re-establish a natural balance. In Yellowstone, they said, the lack of an effective predator has allowed elk and bison herds to mushroom beyond healthy limits.

“I’d like to think that we still have places in the United States that have a complete ecosystem where we have all the plants and animals still functioning,” said Hank Fischer, regional representative of the Defenders of Wildlife.

But Fischer said he understands the emotion behind wolf supporters.

“Around the campfire, wolves cast pretty big shadows,” he said. “They’re just so evocative of wildness. Our world is changing so much, people just yearn for some touch of wildness. Animals like wolves let them do that.”

Critics feared that people would be attacked. Biologists dismiss that concern, saying wolves are among the most reclusive of predators. They have been known to stand back and watch even when humans crawled into their dens and handled their pups.

There have been a few ambiguous encounters between humans and wolves. But biologist L. David Mech, a noted wolf expert, says the fact that the person usually was uninjured or had only a few scratches shows the wolf’s intent was not to kill.

Hunters argued that wolves would decimate game herds. Biologists agree that game animals would be killed and hunters would be affected. One estimate is that the 100 or so wolves necessary for recovery in the three areas will kill 1,500 to 2,000 elk a year.

But they say the loss is unlikely to have any substantial effect on game populations. Yellowstone National Park alone has about 25,000 elk.

Other critics said wolf recovery would mean new restrictions on the use of federal land, which would hurt mining and logging. The Fish and Wildlife Service said the area immediately around dens would be restricted for a month or so in the spring, when pups are born, but no other restrictions are expected.

But the strongest arguments came from stockmen who fear for domestic herds. They find the idea galling for two reasons.

First is the idea of bringing in wolves and setting them loose, knowing they or their packs eventually may prey on stock at nearby ranches. “If the wolves come in here naturally, it’s nobody’s fault. Then it’s just a risk of the game,” said Scott Wiley of the Lost Trail Ranch near Marion, Mont. “But if the wolves are reintroduced at the taxpayers’ expense, then I think we should definitely be paid for any damages.”

Even more galling is the question of control. Wolves still are listed as endangered in Montana. That’s true even though the Wildlife Service estimates there are at least 1,500 gray wolves in Minnesota, about 55,000 in Canada and probably 6,000 or more in Alaska.

It is a federal crime to kill an endangered species.

“I raise these sheep,” says Bob Gilbert of Helena, Mont., secretary-treasurer of the Montana Woolgrowers Assn. “I’m not going to let dogs or coyotes get in and rip up my sheep.

“But I’m supposed to sit there and watch this wolf get into my sheep, kill my sheep, and call (federal authorities) and say, ‘Come and help me get this wolf out of there.’ And in the meantime, my sheep are torn up and killed.”