in that group: an adult male, an adult female, and two pups. The pen we had helped prepare last fall in the Blacktail Plateau area would hold two adults, one male and one female. They would eventually be named the Lone Star pack. The fourth pack, known as Nez Perce, was put in a new pen near Madison Junction, about twelve miles north of Old Faithful. There were six wolves in that group: two adults and four pups.
Those seventeen wolves from British Columbia, along with the fourteen that had arrived from Alberta in 1995, added up to a total of thirty-one. The park had authorization to bring in more wolves, but those original ones did well enough that no additional wolves from Canada were needed. I checked the weight of the seven male pups in the two batches of wolves and 8 was still the smallest. Of the eight female pups, only one was smaller than him. Another one outweighed him by 28 pounds.
Wolf 8 and his new mate were seen breeding in late February, and 9 gave birth to three pups in April. 8 was just two years old, equivalent to a man at age twenty, when those pups were born. He was now responsible for protecting and feeding his mate, her seven yearlings, and the three newborn pups he had fathered. That added up to eleven wolves. It would be a big job for a small wolf.
I FINISHED UP my third winter in Big Bend and began my long drive north to Yellowstone. I arrived in the park on May 12, 1996, a few days before my job started. The first thing I did was drive out to Lamar Valley to look for the Crystal Creek wolves where people said they were denning, a few miles east of the Yellowstone Institute. I knew the alpha pair in that pack well, and I was anxious to see how the family was doing. I did not see them or the newly released Druids.
Early the next morning, I returned to Lamar and climbed the steep hill above the confluence of the Lamar River and Soda Butte Creek to look out over the valley. I soon spotted 8’s mother, wolf 5, about a half mile away. She raised her head and howled several times. Then she walked off slowly, limping on her front left paw. I spotted one of 8’s black brothers out in front of her. Now two years old, he was the only one of the original four brothers who was still in the pack.
The female frequently stopped to howl and look around. I figured she was looking for the pack’s alpha male. The young male, wolf 6, was traveling at a normal pace, and the limping female was having trouble keeping up. She bedded down, and I sensed something more than a sore paw was wrong with her. 6 turned around, went back, and sniffed her. She got up and followed him when he trotted off.
The male went to the bank of the Lamar River, saw two Canada geese in the water, jumped in, and dog-paddled toward them. They easily outswam him and got away. Swinging away from the river, the wolves headed toward a small group of cow elk. The male picked one out, chased her, and easily caught up, even though he was running at only half speed. The cow had something wrong with her, and 6 had detected her vulnerability. He ran alongside her for a few moments, then leaped up and bit into the side of her neck. She stopped and stood still as the wolf balanced on his hind legs, maintaining his grip on her throat. A wolf has four sharp canine teeth and 1,500 pounds of pressure in its jaw. A bite to the throat of an elk can kill it in a few minutes.
In what seemed like a gentle move, the wolf twisted his jaw and upper body and forced the elk to the ground. She did not resist. As he maintained his hold, I could see through my scope she was still breathing, but the force of his grip was slowly suffocating her. When he let go, four minutes after beginning his chase of the cow, she was dead.
The young wolf started to tear into the elk’s underside, but soon walked off to check on the alpha female, who was watching a cow bison with a newborn calf. When the cow moved toward her, she had to retreat. 6 returned to his kill and the female followed. They both fed, but 5 walked off after only a minute, another indication that she was either injured or sick.
6 pulled a choice part off the carcass and carried it toward the female. She excitedly trotted to him. I lost both in a gully, then saw that she was eating the prized tidbit. The male was standing a few yards away watching her eat. It looked like he had brought her food because she was hurting. He returned to the carcass and fed. Later both wolves walked off to the south. The female did a squat urination next to a tree, and the male did a raised-leg urination over it. That double-scent mark would usually be done by the pack’s alpha pair.
The Crystal alpha male, wolf 4, was nowhere in sight, and I now wondered if something had happened to him. I noticed one more thing about the female. She had distended nipples, a sure sign she was nursing pups. Perhaps her mate was at the den while she took a break and went out hunting with the young male. But why was she limping?
Later in the day, I went to the Wolf Project office to tell the staff what I had seen. Doug told me that he had talked with a visitor who had seen a wolf pack chasing a single black wolf near the Crystal den a few days earlier. Black was the color of the alpha male’s coat. Then Doug discovered 4’s radio collar was transmitting a mortality signal. Doug and a crew hiked out to that area and found his body. They determined he had been killed by other wolves, probably on May 7, and the Druid wolves were the prime suspects. Apparently, the Druids wanted Lamar Valley as their territory, even though the Crystal Creek pack had claimed it a year ago. The Druids must have found the Crystal den site, then attacked and killed the alpha male. The alpha female’s injuries had probably been inflicted by the Druids at the same time.
But what had happened to the pups? Doug and other Wolf Project staff searched the likely den area, but never found a den or any pup remains, nor were the pups ever seen with the two surviving adults. But the female’s distended nipples and the fact she had been based in that area suggested that she had a den and pups there. During her field work in Glacier National Park, longtime wolf researcher Diane Boyd twice saw a mother wolf bury a dead pup. Might the female have done that if her pups had been killed by the Druids?
Wolves do not normally breed with close relatives, and 5 was understood to be the mother of the young male. What would happen to the pack in the next breeding season? Mother and son might split up to seek out unrelated mates.
All these developments were difficult emotionally for those of us who had gotten to know the Crystal Creek pack so well over the past year. They were our home team. Now the pack was in danger of going out of existence, because the last two members were mother and son. And it was all due to the newly arrived Druid wolves. People began to refer to them as the bad wolves of Lamar. To us, it was as if a band of outlaws had ridden into town and taken over.
When I later had sightings of the five-member Druid pack, I concentrated on watching their big male, the one who had torn apart his metal cage. He had probably killed the Crystal Creek alpha male. As a park ranger, I tried to restrain my natural inclination to dislike 38, but it was hard to be objective. The Crystal Creek wolves had a high-quality territory with large numbers of prey animals. The Druids had outnumbered and outfought them, killed their alpha male, and taken their territory. There was no biological reason to object to that. Like countries waging war against each other over territory, these wolf packs were doing what other wolves had done for thousands of years. As the Wolf Project later documented, aggressive territorial behavior tends to limit the number of wolves in a given region to the area’s carrying capacity.
The Crystal Creek wolves soon traveled twenty miles south to Pelican Valley and claimed that area as their new territory. They had discovered that lush valley in the summer of 1995 and frequently returned to it in the fall and winter. Now the two remaining members of the pack made it their year-round home. In the following years, I documented the dramatic story of the Crystal Creek wolves, their return trips to their ancestral home in Lamar Valley, and what happened when they encountered their enemy: the Druids.
8
A New Pack Is Formed
I
