to Birgitta, who owns a bike and might know more about that kind of thing. I left her a message, and an hour later received a call from a young man at the local bike shop, who helped me map out my route. Most of it was on the old Yellowstone Highway. Red-winged blackbirds burst from fields, flapping and coasting high above my head as I pedaled. A line of cars waited to pay admission fees and drive through Bear World. The Snake River flowed wide and opaque as I rode over it, grateful for the fact that everyone isn’t like me, and every place isn’t like my own neighborhood. The entire way, I’d been gifted with a tailwind that smelled, at times, of baking potatoes. I arrived in Rexburg sweaty and starved.
The next morning we’d flown to Bozeman, Montana, rented the Dodge Durango, and driven to the park, and now we stood, gazing at the immense valley known around the world for its wolf-viewing.
This morning’s wolf has left the baby bison. She is headed east. She trots across the shrub-dotted land and up toward the road, a good half mile from us, where she crosses the tarmac and lopes up the hillside, north, to her home. Everyone at the pullout watches, electricity charging the air, until her tail disappears from view. Then the valley becomes again an immense expanse of earth, speckled with bison and cranes. An eagle soars high above, scouring the land for movement.
Absence. Void. My teeth chatter and under my skin, muscles echo the vibration. My legs tremble so hard my feet jump in the footrests. The nurse wraps another blanket over me, hot from the warmer, its waffled texture under my fingertips up and down, here and gone.
I woke to drizzle, angry drops slipping down the window, nothing but gray. From the bare trees lining the hospital drive, to rooftops and high-rises five miles away, to the foothills of the Oquirrh Mountains on the far edge of the valley, their peaks hidden, perhaps stolen during the night.
My belly is empty. Bob walks alongside as the nurse pushes me from the outer edge of the hospital to a room in its heart, a room dangerously close to the spot where I, six hours before, gave birth to two boys, one alive, one dead, each connected to the other by a meandering blood vessel woven through their shared placenta. We pass through wide wooden doors that open at the press of a square metal button. My legs jump. I clench my jaw. I am wheeled down a hallway of shiny linoleum. I press down against my legs. This void is larger than me.
He lies on an open table, lights hot and bright eighteen inches above his body. He has no fat, cannot keep himself warm. Eyes covered by a strip of cloth, he is naked but for a miniature diaper. He is attached to machines by wire leads and a tiny pulse oximeter around his foot. Heart rate, respiration, oxygen saturation, temperature. Each vital has an acceptable range, and the machines shriek an alarm when a limit is breeched. His Apgars, three and seven, are not terrible for a thirty-two-weeker, and he is, at three pounds thirteen ounces, one of the largest preemies in the room. I tuck my index finger into his hand, which curls loosely around it, and tears spill. I cannot look at Bob. Beeps assail me, assorted volumes and pitches. Lights—green, blue, red, soft white—flash, or hum steadily. For a moment my body is calm—my jaw relaxed, my legs at rest. Jake looks nothing like any baby I’ve ever seen. No chubby cheeks, just scrubby skin over toothpick bones. His head too large, his nose a dot, the skin of his feet and hands translucent. An IV sticks in his left hand, the needle as fine as thread.
It’s mid-morning and the day is warming, though the wind holds a chill. We’ve erected our tents, tossed sleeping bags and pads inside, stored our food in the bear-safe lock boxes, and come back into the valley. Wolves are crepuscular animals, hunting at dawn and dusk. We may not see a wolf, but black bears, bison, and deer are abundant. The park itself, its towering conifers, massive walls of stone, thundering rivers, gives me more than enough to ponder, and I am silent as we drive back along the Lamar Valley road.
Mark parks by twenty other cars, and we join those who stand where grass meets pavement. I recognize a woman from earlier, the one with short gray hair, a Swarovski scope.
“Any wolves?” I ask.
“No,” she says, “but the calf’s body is still there. A coyote’s been eating. Would you like to look?”
I peer out into the valley, see the concave body, then look to the right where mama bison stands over the other dead calf.
“I’m Kris,” she smiles. “I love the wolves. You watch long enough, you get to know some of their personalities. They all have stories. We watched 06 for years—she was amazing, dynamic. Our rock star.”
“She was killed in December?” I ask.
A wince, a nod. Kris’s eyes spark green. “She was born back in 2006—that’s why the name—and became the alpha female of the Lamar Canyon pack, which has been so visible, most everyone who watches wolves knows of her. She had her first pups in 2010, and a second litter the next year. She was so charismatic, just beautiful, full of fire. Thousands of people watched her, took pictures, read about her. Then last December, 2012, she left the park, probably on a hunt, and was killed by a hunter. Legally. She was fifteen miles outside the park.”
Kris is silent as we search the valley before us. I imagine 06, think of her daughter tearing at the bison calf carcass this morning.
“The alpha male’s brother had been shot just weeks before she was, and the pack has struggled. It’s fallen apart. If people knew the stories of these wolves, that they are parents, children, that they teach their pups, play with them. That they’re beings, filled with life, history, families. They could never kill these wolves, not if they knew.”
Jake was born in April of 1991, when wolves were, for most of us, creatures of fairy tales and magazine articles. Gray wolves, at that time, claimed territories in upper Wisconsin, on Isle Royale in Lake Superior, and in the wild hills of northwestern Montana. Every other state in our nation—except Alaska—cleared them out a century ago. Wolves had been vilified by early settlers, and this wild canine that had inhabited land across all but the Southeast was virtually extirpated by the 1920s. However, while Jake lay in the hospital biologists and politicians were working to legislate the reintroduction of wolves. The proposal took form in the 1970s, shortly after the Endangered Species Act was signed into law, and after nearly two decades, was moving closer to a congressional vote. The gray wolf was to be returned to its former home, beginning in the central Idaho wilderness, and in Yellowstone National Park.
Opponents argued against this reintroduction—bringing wolves from across the border in Canada, letting them acclimate, then setting them free under legislative protection—by pointing out that wolves were already recolonizing, reestablishing themselves in America. Making their way down from Canada a few at a time, settling in the high hills. In 1986, a wolf den was discovered in Montana’s Glacier National Park—the first wolf den found in the West in over fifty years. This example of recolonization, a natural process, became an argument against reintroduction, an artificial method of reestablishing wolf populations in their former territories. Proponents of reintroduction countered that recolonization would take an unpredictable, lengthy journey, while suitable habitats could benefit from wolves right away. The latter argument prevailed, and the reintroduction was set to begin as soon as plans were solidified, and the right people signed the right forms. It was only a few years away.
Just a mile down the Lamar Valley road, we stop again. The viewing area is filled with cars and we squeeze into a spot half gravel, half weeds. A bear of a man wearing a thick mustache and bright yellow fleece taps on my window.
“Come look,” he says. “I’ve got a grizzly in my scope; she’s over on the hill up there.” He points across the valley to a hillside thick with massive clumps and stretching fingers of snow.
I squint, the dusky
