The New York Times

October 29, 2000

On the Run With Wolf B36

The war over gray wolves has been raging ever since they were reintroduced to the American West five years ago. The story of one wolf's perilous life captures the conflict between those who celebrate them and those who want to see them dead. By SARA CORBETT

This is the story of B36, a female wolf. She is lithe, with an almost pure white chest and a dusting of brown across her powerful shoulders. Her eyes, like those of most wolves, are a haunting, opalescent yellow. Once upon a time, B36 roamed northern British Columbia, a nameless wild animal in a frigid and empty landscape, but then one day five years ago, she was darted, sedated and put through customs at Great Falls, Mont. At which point, for better or worse, B36 became an American.

Her name tells the tale of her citizenship, "B" signifying that she lives in Idaho as opposed to Wyoming, "36" relating to her place among the 66 gray wolves plucked from Canada by the United States Fish and Wildlife Service over the course of 1995-96 and relocated to the American West as wards of the Endangered Species Act. Of these wolves, B36 was an instant standout, a good 10 pounds heavier than the average female and strikingly alert. "She just had a strong presence about her," recalled one of the conservationists who watched the wolf quickly shrug off the heavy-duty sedatives used during her relocation. "You could tell she was more determined than the others."

While the other released wolves paired up and staked out territories among the lodgepole pine forests of central Idaho, B36 chose to explore. For nearly two years, she crisscrossed 10,000-foot mountain ranges and raced up and down the 90-mile Middle Fork of the Salmon River, blithely barging in and out of other wolves' territories, leaving a thoroughly perplexed team of government biologists in her wake. And as others died -- as B26 starved to death and B4 got eaten by a mountain lion and B13 turned up shot through the stomach on somebody's ranch -- B36 thrived. When she finally settled down, she did it with an overachiever's zeal, finding a mate who was even bigger and whiter than herself and, more unusually, one believed to be a rare native wolf -- a genuine American male. "He looked nothing like any of the reintroduced wolves I'd seen in Idaho," said Isaac Babcock, a young biologist working for the wolf-recovery program in Idaho. "He was tall, lanky and extremely white, and he had this proud, stoic stance." The wolf also had a ring of scar tissue circling his right front leg and a visible limp, suggesting that at one point he'd escaped a snare or leg trap. The Old Man, as Babcock dubbed him, appeared to be a survivor. In the spring of 1998, guided by signals from the radio transmitter B36 wore around her neck, Babcock hiked deep into the back country and discovered B36 and the Old Man high up on a ridge, looking after the largest litter of pups born to a reintroduced wolf in Idaho, nine yipping youngsters who would form the core of their pack.

By most accounts, B36's growing family, known as the White Cloud pack, was a perfect symbol of the wolf's triumphant return to the West. Indeed, the Northern Rockies wolf-recovery effort qualifies as one of the Endangered Species Act's greatest success stories. In five years, the original group of 66 gray wolves has multiplied to as many as 500, while an estimated 3,000 more currently roam the northern parts of Minnesota, Michigan and Wisconsin. Fledgling populations of the endangered Mexican gray wolf are beginning to take hold in Mexico and Arizona as well. But an issue that riles everyone -- from wildlife managers to cattle ranchers to the urbanite spiritualists who haunt Internet news groups with screen names like Spiritwolf and Wolf Sister -- is how many wild wolves this country needs, or wants, or is able to handle. If we owe the wolf a debt, having killed off hundreds of thousands of them during the great Western cattle drives of the last century, at what point do we declare ourselves atoned?

Even as the Fish and Wildlife Service is considering a move to reclassify gray wolves in most parts of the country from "endangered" to merely "threatened" (the public comment period ends Nov. 13), a number of environmental groups have warned that it's too soon to declare the wolf a fully restored member of the American ecosystem. And as the fate of B36 and her pack would come to illustrate, the revival of the species has, at times, come at a brutal cost. he white cloud wolves' proximity to humanity quickly elevated their profile.

Their territory stretched across roughly 350 square miles of Forest Service land, encompassing two stunning sets of mountains, the White Clouds and the Boulders. To the north was a speck-on-the-map ranching community called Clayton, and to the south sat the celebrity-jammed resort area of Sun Valley, where B36 and her pack were quickly adopted as exotic, star-quality neighbors. The local paper ran stories on their whereabouts. Vacationing millionaires hiked high into the hills at sunset, hoping to hear them howl. And if there were any lingering doubts about the White Cloud pack's prosperity, they were laid to rest in 1999, when B36 duly whelped another seven pups. The wolves didn't know, however, that an invisible line ran through their fertile diamond of wilderness, marking not only the border between Custer County to the north and Blaine County to the south, but also between two sides of an ideological turf war. It's a conflict familiar enough to any frontier-type town with a pretty view and a decent airport, but one that gets fought with particular vehemence in Idaho: the old Westerners versus the new Westerners, the right-leaning ag folks versus the left-leaning, mountain-biking invaders, the ranchers versus the environmentalists. The cow people, in other words, versus the wolf people.

As B26 starved to death and B4 got eaten by a mountain lion and B13 turned up shot through the stomach, B36 thrived. 'She just had a strong presence about her,' said one conservationist. And so when B36 and her pack came down out of the hills and ate two Custer County calves at the end of March this year, things got bad quickly. To the ranchers who run mostly modest, family-owned outfits along the Salmon River, wolf reintroduction had grown too successful, and Idaho's wolves -- now more than 190 of them -- became a predatory nuisance, a threat to an already hardscrabble way of life. Suddenly, it seemed, there were wolf tracks everywhere, next to barns and next to pickup trucks, looping right through herds of wandering cows. A collection of ranch mothers sent letters to Idaho's Congressional delegation, demanding armed guards at the school bus stops to protect their children from wolves. When two more chewed-up calves surfaced, a hand-lettered sign went up in the front window of a small Clayton store: kill all the goddamn wolves and the people who brought them here. Meanwhile, the citizens down in Blaine County -- routinely referred to as "bunny huggers" and "trust-funders" by their neighbors in Custer -- started fretting that their beloved wolves would end up dead at the hands of a vigilante rancher.

But then the government stepped in. In an effort to keep the peace, a crew of biologists and Fish and Wildlife officials arrived in the White Cloud wolves' territory along the East Fork of the Salmon River on a crisp morning in early April, storing a number of steel cages in a rancher's barn and then heading off in a helicopter to look for the errant wolves. This was what's known, in fedspeak, as a "control action." Because wolves in most of the northern Rockies are listed under a special, less stringent designation of the Endangered Species Act as a "nonessential experimental population," the government has the authority to manage wolves perceived as problematic -- either by relocating or killing them.

The designation was a key concession to the livestock industry in the decadelong political struggle over wolf reintroduction, and one whose interpretation remains controversial. How many dead cows mandate killing a wolf? Normally, the government tries to find wolves new, livestock-free territory before it resorts to killing them. Since Western wolf recovery began five years ago, the government has relocated 91 wolves and killed 82 more. They found B36 easily that morning, following her signal until they spotted her, a silvery flash on a hillside of knotty brown sage. Almost instantly, the wolf, who was visibly pregnant with her annual springtime litter, began to run, skirting the snow line beneath the lip of a ridge and streaking toward a sheltering stand of aspen. The helicopter gave chase, hovering several hundred feet above the running animal as a government agent, armed with a sedative-loaded dart gun, looked to get a clear shot. Finally, after almost 10 minutes, he found his mark, nailing B36 in the back, then watching as she slowed, staggered and fell.

She was carried back to the ranch, slung in a net beneath the helicopter, her pregnant body limp, immobilized by the drugs. Before the day was out, the crew would capture three more wolves -- two of B36's yearling pups and her mate, the Old Man -- packing each wolf in snow to cool its exhausted body, and then, after a medical examination, hefting it into one of the waiting steel cages. Throughout it all, the wolves lay frozen in their heavy cowls of fur but nonetheless conscious, saliva pooling from their mouths, their yellow eyes roving. Even the ranchers who'd gathered to watch were shaken by the sight. Late that night, after a five-hour drive north, two biologists set B36 and the others free at the end of a rutted Forest Service road, deep in the Selway-Bitterroot Wilderness, one of Idaho's emptiest landscapes. B36, now fully lucid, was the first to go. "Not to be too anthropomorphic," said Kent Laudon, one of the biologists, recalling the night, "but she was not happy. She was pretty aggressive, snarling and pawing at the cage. She was clearly a dominant animal, even more aggressive than her mate. And she was out of there, fast."

The hope was that she would settle into her new territory and give birth to her pups, due sometime within the month, and that supported by her mate and the two relocated pack members, B36 would remain the matriarch of an intact wolf pack. It was hoped, too, that the other wolves -- the five or six of B36's offspring still living in the White Clouds -- would, with the disruption of their pack structure, stop feeding on ranch cows. But wild animals being wild, it simply didn't go that way. Almost immediately, another dead calf turned up on the same ranch on the East Fork of the Salmon; under pressure from the ranchers, federal officials returned by helicopter, with orders from the Fish and Wildlife Service to shoot and kill the remaining members of the White Cloud pack.

Over the course of two days in April, Rick Williamson, a government trapper, killed five wolves with a 12-gauge shotgun, while one wolf escaped to the brush. Melodie Baker, an East Fork rancher and Custer County commissioner who witnessed the last of the dead wolves being dragged from the helicopter, described it as "the most gut-wrenching, emotional thing" she'd ever seen. But nobody, it seemed, was more affected than the gunner, Williamson himself, who emerged that day from the helicopter looking stricken. Collecting the carcasses, he'd been shocked to discover a telltale ring of scar tissue on one of the dead wolves' front legs. It was the Old Man, the native-born alpha male, who'd somehow limped his way back home through more than 160 miles of wilderness in just two weeks. And if that wasn't bad enough, more worrisome news was soon to filter in: B36, now widowed, heavily pregnant and far from home, had gone missing.

It fell to a biologist named Curt Mack to find B36. in the month following the death of B36's mate, Mack, the soft-spoken scientist who heads the wolf-recovery project in Idaho, and members of his staff flew over western Idaho in a chartered Cessna, trying in vain to pick up a signal from the missing wolf's radio collar. The absence of a signal could be interpreted any number of ways, from a simple transmitter malfunction to the unlikely possibility that B36 had somehow traveled out of the airborne biologists' range. They did come across the two yearlings who'd been relocated with B36, only to find that they, too, had not followed the prescribed plan, having separated and crossed the border into Montana, evidently leaving behind their mother, who was due to drop her new pups any day.

Since radio telemetry collars are rigged to emit a quick-pulsing "mortality signal" when a wolf stays still for more than eight hours, Mack remained hopeful that B36 was still alive, that she'd found herself an out-of-the-way den site, perhaps under a rocky outcropping that blocked the radio signal. "The question is whether she's managed to keep any of her pups alive," said Mack in early June. "That's the tougher thing to guess." In the meantime, news of the White Cloud pack's demise had ripped through Ketchum, the outdoor-jock mecca of 5,000 that serves as the municipal center of Sun Valley. If relations between Blaine and Custer counties were previously strained, they were now disastrous. One ticked-off Ketchum newspaperman devoted his column to a ruthless takedown of ranching, calling cattle "the most worthless, destructive, misplaced, dumb creatures ever to be introduced into the American West." A conservationist named Lynne Stone collected signatures on a "cease fire" letter, accusing the Fish and Wildlife Service of "slaughtering" a thriving wolf pack to make up for the loss of a few cows. Bereft Ketchumites, said Stone, were stopping her in the aisles of the grocery store, anxiously asking for news of B36 and any surviving pups. "Single moms do sometimes make it," an embattled Ed Bangs, Fish and Wildlife's regional wolf-recovery coordinator, told a local newspaper.

Reassurances from Bangs did little to soothe the residents of Ketchum, nor did comments from Curt Mack regarding the better-than-decent odds that B36 was alive. For many in Blaine County, the issue was a philosophical one: as much as the ranchers feel there are too many wolves in Idaho, many in Sun Valley believe fervently that there are too many cows. For years, local environmentalists have agitated, with mixed success, for the government to limit cattle grazing on publicly held property, citing trampled riverbanks, contaminated streams and soil erosion caused by overgrazing. And where more directly affected species like the imperiled salmon and the bull trout have failed to galvanize widespread public support for these efforts, the wolf -- mysterious, soulful and photogenic -- makes an excellent poster child.

Accordingly, Idaho ranchers often complain of feeling powerless -- not just against calf-snatching wolves and the federal government that reintroduced them, but against the out-of-staters who stuff the pockets of powerful prowolf advocacy groups. In what may be viewed as a classic bit of retaliatory legislation, Representative Mike Simpson of Idaho recently wrote a bill calling for the reintroduction of wolves in the Catskills. His colleague, Representative Helen Chenoweth, has suggested they belong in Central Park. And even with control actions designed to allay some of the ranchers' helplessness, antiwolf sentiment in Idaho still periodically bubbles over into vigilantism. In the last year, several wolves have been found poisoned by Compound 1080, an F.D.A.-banned substance. "I see no way around wolves dying," said Carter Niemeyer, the Fish and Wildlife Service wolf-recovery coordinator for Idaho, who condemns vigilantism but supported the decision to relocate B36 and ultimately kill off her pack. "Plain and simple, they're going to be acceptable in some places and not in others."

Yet as 4,000-square-foot log cabins pop up on secluded mountaintops and thousands of cows ramble across public land all over the West, the line between wilderness and civilization has become increasingly scumbled. And as wolf populations escalate, as the number of mountain lions multiplies in many states and with the government moving forward in its plan to restore the grizzly bear to parts of Idaho and Montana, the boundaries appear to be more and more permeable. Anyone who has lost a flower bed to marauding deer or unwittingly sacrificed the family cat to coyotes knows the conflict in its most suburban incarnation: wild animals are bound to trespass. They simply can't be expected to know better. Or can they?

Lamenting the situation with B36, Curt Mack says he often wishes for "more tools" to deter wolves from preying on cattle. Along these lines, the government is considering several ways of conditioning wolves to avoid livestock -- from harassing them with rubber bullets to warning them off with sirens. In Montana, after one pack of wolves helped itself to a few calves outside of Yellowstone this spring, their lives were spared by none other than Ted Turner, who consequently opened up his Flying D Ranch near Bozeman for an experiment in "aversive conditioning" sponsored by several environmental groups and the Fish and Wildlife Service. There, three of the misbehaving wolves have been outfitted with electric shock collars and put in a pen with a healthy beef calf, where they now are learning, the hard way, to live side by side with cows.

To some environmentalists, the contradiction here is rich. It's not the wolves who need a good-neighbor lesson, they argue, but rather the humans who should learn to live with wolves before trying to tame them. "What's wrong with us, when we're putting shock collars on wolves?" said Jon Marvel, an Idaho conservationist. "They're wolves, for God's sake! If we're going to do that, why don't we just put Purina out for them?"

One day in early July, an independent pilot named Bill Stewart was flying along the north fork of the Salmon River, not far from the Idaho-Montana border and a good 70 miles from the spot where B36 had been relocated, when suddenly the missing wolf's radio signal started to ping, rising like a pulse from the deep timber. Stewart, who was carrying a scanner as a favor to the wolf-recovery team, immediately called Curt Mack. Mack then dispatched a 31-year-old biologist named Marcie Steiger to find the wolf on the ground, check on her health and see if any pups had survived. Steiger remained skeptical about the possibility of pups, knowing the burden B36 would have faced, hunting alone with additional mouths to feed. "Just the fact that she turned up alive was like, wow!" Steiger said. "We thought we'd lost all of them." Steiger spent nearly a week listening to B36's signal from the top of an abandoned fire tower north of Gibbonsville, a small town, but could not pinpoint her location. The wolf eluded her.

In the meantime, a forest fire had started to burn just 10 miles to the south, scenting the air with smoke and casting an eerie gray haze over the horizon. Late one afternoon, after another fruitless day of trying to spot B36, Steiger and a volunteer left their lookout at the fire tower and started back down the mountain. Midway down the deserted gravel road, inspired by some vague impulse, the biologist flipped on her radio scanner. "B36's signal just started to boom in," said Steiger. "I thought, Hmm, that's weird. Then we came around a corner and there she was, lying in the sun, right on the road. She was huge. She looked like she stretched from one side of the road to the other. It blew me away." Even more startling was Steiger's secondary discovery, made as B36 quickly disappeared into the woods. Against all odds, she had two pups with her. "And she looked healthy," said Steiger, still excited a number of weeks later. "She looked really good, and her pups did, too." B36 had been missing just about three months. During that time, Rick Williamson, the trapper who'd killed her mate, reportedly received a death threat on his answering machine, presumably from an angry wolf supporter. A group of Sun Valley environmentalists had begun plotting to physically interfere with future government control actions on wolves.

On the other side, a group calling itself the Central Idaho Wolf Coalition had formed with the express intent of running the wolves clear out of Custer County. Not long after, the Idaho Republican convention passed a unanimous though largely symbolic resolution calling for the immediate removal of all reintroduced wolves. Despite Idaho wolf recovery's many successes, the future of the state's wild wolves is hardly guaranteed. And though she couldn't have known that, B36 left Idaho sometime late this summer, crossing the Continental Divide and taking up residence in Montana, in a wide green valley known as Big Hole. Miraculously, she and her two pups have been reunited with one of the yearling wolves from her original pack. But there's some bad news, too.

According to the biologist Kent Laudon, who recently spent a week at Big Hole looking for B36, it seems that Idaho's great she-wolf has jumped from the frying pan into the fire, for Big Hole has traditionally proved to be just that for wolves -- a big hole. In the last three years, the government has moved two wolves out of the area and shot two more after conflicts with livestock. The last signal he picked up on B36, Laudon said, put her within about half a mile of a privately owned ranch. "She's back where she started, really," he said, sounding somewhat dejected. "She's right back in cattle country."