on its hanger. Doug is married, but I find the shirt curious. Maybe it’s a sign along my path: don’t give up, you get to have your plaid shirt guy. Either our marital therapy will work, or it won’t, but regardless, there’s a plaid shirt in my future. I drag myself back to reality, and ask how Doug’s fascination with wolves began.
He was eleven or twelve, he says. Growing up in Wisconsin, Doug was not as distanced from wolves as most were in the 1970s: Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Michigan were the only states that hadn’t exterminated wolf populations earlier in the century, keeping at least a few alive until 1960. At that point, all that remained were on Isle Royale, near the Canadian border, and in remote parts of Minnesota. Wolves lived only in truly wild places, stimulating dreams and fantastical visions in young boys’ heads. Dangerous, powerful, magnetic, the wolf was mysterious, a thing of legend and folklore. Wolves to Doug were also symbolic of something greater: the scapegoat, the unloved. The unloved have a romantic allure—that ever-doubting piece within is inexplicably drawn to those who are looked down upon and persecuted for reasons that defy logic and offend sensibilities.
As a young man, Doug worked with wolves on Isle Royale under the tutelage of Rolf Peterson, one of the world’s best known wolf researchers. Rolf was the first biologist to feed Doug’s growing passion for wolves. Doug has worked for the National Park Service since 1994, with wolves the entire time. He’s continually researching wolf behavior: predation patterns, kill rates, social norms, the influence they have on elk herds in the park.
Doug has spent thousands of hours in planes, mostly in a tiny yellow Cessna, viewing thousands of wolves, and has spent countless hours hiking, tracking, and processing wolves for research purposes. Throughout his twenty years in Yellowstone, Doug has learned the stories of these wordless wild animals, stories he labels fascinating and enriching. Magical, even.
“When wolves are present they have this power to take control,” Doug pauses and his hands are, for once, at rest. “You feel the power of the wolf blowing through.”
Doug tells us that wolves in the more secluded packs act differently from those whose territories include well-traveled park roads, that their behavior patterns are much more complex, sophisticated. Wolf packs whose territories are well within park boundaries are substantially less likely to have a member killed by a hunter, affording greater stability in the pack’s structure, which in turn allows for better communication, generational learning, and long term relationships. In other words, the less interaction with humans, the more effective and stable the family, or pack. Although the mother wolf cares for her pups almost solitarily for the first few weeks, the entire pack pitches in during the rest of the pups’ early lives. Packs that lose members lose teachers and role models. It can create chaos.
Doug admits he’s learned a few parenting tips from his study subjects.
“They’re infinitely patient, and use positive reinforcement to shape behavior of the pups. They model behavior, they nudge the pups along, and they repeat this over and over again. Mothers, fathers, uncles, aunts, siblings—the entire pack participates in teaching the young ones how to be a wolf.”
But the biggest lesson he’s learned from the wolves is to never feel sorry for himself. Wolves are resilient, intelligent, and tenacious. He’s seen a wolf with an obviously broken leg still take down and kill a bison. The wolf does what he needs to do to feed himself and his family. He doesn’t dwell in self-pity.
I wonder what it’s like to work with an animal that stirs such intense feelings, and I ask him how he balances the science, the conflicting viewpoints, and the politics.
“I believe very much in what I’m doing. I believe in the Park Service, in their mandate, which rests on the concept of preservation. I believe in the responsibility and mission of increasing understanding through research and connecting with this knowledge, using science as the underpinning of action.” He also understands that people—the citizens, landowners, ranchers, farmers and hunters—who live on lands bordering wolf habitat have a legitimate concern about wolf populations. They want their voices heard. They want to know that they are a part of wolf management decisions.
“Extremists consider the wolf-reintroduction just one more form of government pushing policies down their throats, while most others sit somewhere between that position and a place of, Hell, if you make me deal with those damn wolves, how are you going to make it up to me? Few people who actually live in wolf-populated land are begging for looser control.”
While he’s first and foremost a scientist, Doug is also concerned about what he calls massive, seemingly unsolvable problems regarding wolves and humans. When I ask Doug if he ever gives up hope, he responds with a slight shrug, “Yeah, I do.”
At present, wolves who step foot outside Yellowstone Park boundaries during hunting season are unprotected, a situation many find ludicrous. A buffer zone with limited hunting is one suggested compromise, coming from park personnel such as Doug who find an unlimited hunt right up to the border to be counterproductive to the efforts of the National Park Service. Doug himself is a recreational hunter, and has no issue with hunting for food or even sport. But to kill wolves just because they’re wolves is against everything he stands for. As Doug’s Canadian colleague, author of Wolves of the Yukon, Bob Hayes states, “We’ve been killing wolves for a hundred years; let’s try something else.”
I need to try something else. I want to be a wild woman. To follow my passion, to take care of myself first, to speak my mind. Find my tribe. To not evoke descriptions dominated by the word nice. Nice is a fine trait, but wild and passionate means adventure and movement, a release of what’s been contained, a heartswelling connection with soul. I’ve been moving toward wild for years, riding my bike through canyons and scrambling up red rock cliffs. The outer wild is gradually working its way inward, fueling my journey. I’m closer to releasing the wild creature who has always lived within me, who has always been told to behave herself—who has been crying to be let loose. She’s of the earth, and of me. But she’s been squashed.
Here in Yellowstone I’m entranced by one of the wildest things on our earth, an animal we tried and failed to tame, the wolf. During the last century, we wouldn’t allow wolves to be part of our environment. Now people and organizations throughout the country are working to live in the same space with wolves. Wildness can coexist with my more tame self, just as wild creatures can coexist with humanity in the same landscape.
We look for wolves the next day, early morning, late in the evening. We see none.
Snow lies thick on the ground, frozen on pine needles. She sleeps in a curl, nose tucked under tail. Her body warms her body. Last spring’s pups are almost yearlings, nearly as large as Sophie. Almost capable of joining the hunt. Elk forage for food in the valley below. A calendar would say it’s January, 2008. A map would place her in west-central Idaho, near the Sawtooth Mountains. And biologists would say she was a two-year-old female that belonged to the Timberline pack. Her stomach is full of yesterday’s elk, and she rises on stiff legs, sniffing the air in the pre-dawn dark. She straightens her forelegs and bends chest to ground, her pelvis high. She arches her back and lifts her nose. She howls. The sound floats on the frozen air. It slips into the trees. Walking from pup to pup, she nudges shoulders. She nudges each yearling, her mother, her father. They sleep. She steps away. She moves into a trot, and runs steadily west.
She turns north, then west again. She traverses a mountain, arrives at a cliff. Far below, a river. Chunks of ice pile on both banks, and the swift water flows green under thin sheaves of ice growing in from the edges. She picks her way down, paws finding purchase on a rock, in a crevice, on a wind-buffed shelf. She reaches bottom and she swims the frigid river, its current pressing her body downstream. She hauls herself onto the frozen bank. Shakes. Water flies a dozen feet, freezing as it lands on snow, on deadwood tossed from the river, on the rocks that have tumbled down the cliff. Up. She climbs the other face of the deepest river gorge in the country, pausing only once to look