way, Niemeyer began to notice that some of the animals being blamed for depredations weren’t guilty. Wolves had begun to recolonize Idaho and Montana from the north, and ranchers there were claiming a lot of wolf kills. When Niemeyer determined them to be otherwise, his bosses and colleagues still pressured him to find and kill wolves. He found himself more and more on the side of the persecuted predators. In his old gang’s eyes, what Niemeyer is doing now—setting up and running a large-scale project to re-create two extinct wolf populations—is tantamount to treason. “Some of my bosses and contemporaries,” he would write in his memoir, Wolfer, “would have been happy to see every predator in the West slung dead over a barbed-wire fence.”
Mark Johnson seems as soft as Carter Niemeyer seems hard. Both those impressions on further examination will prove false, but they’re the ideas they have of each other now. Johnson thinks Niemeyer’s handling of the wolves is quite a bit on the rough side. “His excessive idealism got in my way,” Niemeyer would write. “I didn’t have the luxury of taking a wolf ’s pulse and temperature and putting an eyeshade on it when I had moments to get it out of a neck snare and make sure its airway was open.”
He goes on to describe an exchange with Johnson when he, Niemeyer, is on the phone with a reporter who is also a friend of his. “Johnson began whispering that I should hang up, shut up. He made slashing motions at his throat.
“‘Don’t talk to reporters!’ he said.
“‘Just a minute, Arthur,’ I said, smothering the receiver in my hand. ‘Shut the fuck up and don’t interrupt me when I’m on the phone!’”
Johnson remains acutely focused on the welfare of these wolves at this moment. His speech tends to be soft, there’s nothing aggressive in his body language—in contrast to Niemeyer’s pronounced swagger—but somehow he is always here, between the wolves and anything that might harm or frighten them: He is the one human being in this story who will be present in the wolves’ lives throughout the whole operation, the one they will come to recognize as an individual with a particular touch, a particular voice.
With the last kennel lashed to the floor, Johnson belts himself in and the Sherpa climbs into the overcast, on a bearing for Calgary and Canadian customs. But once again Calgary is socked in, and the Sherpa tilts north toward Edmonton. Then the radio crackles, Calgary has opened up. Johnson is as still and silent as his wolves, and equally resigned. They slip into Calgary under lowering clouds, and the Canadian customs officials rush them through, and soon they’re airborne again, this time for Great Falls, Montana, and United States customs, whence they are to fly on to Missoula. There they will meet a caravan of vehicles manned by park and forest rangers and be driven the last three hundred miles to Yellowstone.
Johnson oversees the unloading of the wolves to a heated hangar at the Great Falls airport and goes through the paperwork with the customs officers. Meanwhile he’s hearing yelling from inside the crew lounge—the pilots on the phone with their boss. It seems they’ve hit the limit of their statutorily allowed flying hours, and no, they will not be granted a single hour’s extension, which is all they need to get to Missoula. The caravan, still somewhere on the road, does have a cell phone, but nobody has the number. Johnson covers his mouth with both hands, then goes back to check on the wolves. In some of the ventilation slots there is fresh blood: The wolves have begun to try to chew their way out.
Johnson calls his colleagues, knowing that there’s nothing to be gained. The tranquilizers have long since worn off. The wolves have been handled with all the tenderness their handlers could muster, but think about it: Darted, drugged, blindfolded, poked, prodded, caged, boxed up, trucked, loaded, pitching and yawing for hours inside this noise machine, unloaded, reloaded, bombarded by the voices and noises and smells of their one great source of terror—humanity—the wolves are under inconceivable stress. It is not unusual for wild animals in the stress of no more than ordinary captivity just to drop dead. These wolves’ lives may be at stake.
Eventually the rangers reach Missoula and learn that they must drive on to Great Falls. At three o’clock in the morning, they arrive. The crew load the four wolves for Idaho onto a truck, and then the other eight into a long horse trailer. Mark Johnson follows them into the trailer, craving sleep, unable to find it even after twenty-four hours awake. Inside their carriers, the wolves lie still, eyes closed, withdrawn, beyond exhaustion.
It is dank cold and still dark as the caravan sets forth for Yellowstone. Patrol cars front and rear and several large National Park Service SUVs provide security. The rangers are packing serious armament, for anywhere along the way there could easily be some crank who would love to put a hole in a wolf, or for that matter in a wolf-loving G-man.
The wolf returns to Yellowstone in glory. Schoolchildren cheer and wave American flags. Camera lenses glitter in the morning sun in hundreds. Television news teams have descended on the national park from around the world, their logo-emblazoned vans tilting their dishes toward their relay satellites. Video crews are shooting video of other video crews. Part of the coverage is how much coverage there is.
Half a dozen just-polished ranger patrol cars flashing red and blue and, behind them, a long gray horse trailer containing eight wolves and their vigilant veterinarian drive slowly through the little town of Gardiner, Montana, in a surge of cheers. At the horizon looms the Roosevelt Arch, which commemorates the creation of the world’s first national park in 1872. The motorcade passes beneath it at eight thirty-five a.m., to the blare of band music and the roar of the hundreds gathered to welcome them. With a stop at park headquarters, the big brass join the parade: the park superintendent, Mike Finley; the director of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, Mollie Beattie; and the Secretary of the Interior, Bruce Babbitt. Following them come park service senior staff and the park’s own team of biologists, who will be taking charge of the wolves now.
On January 12, 1995, the gray wolf returned to Yellowstone. From left to right, project leader Mike Phillips, park maintenance foreman Jim Evanoff, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service director Mollie Beattie, Yellowstone Park superintendant Mike Finley, and Secretary of the Interior Bruce Babbitt brought the first of the wolves in its shipping kennel to the Crystal Creek pen.
Past this point, the park is closed to all but these few and a press pool. In solitude, therefore, the caravan makes its processional way some twenty miles to the south and east, to the lower valley of the Lamar River, where the last wolves of Yellowstone perished, in 1926, and where these eight wolves and another group soon to come are now to make their new homes.
The Lamar and the rolling grassland savannas below its confluence with the Yellowstone River constitute what is known as the Northern Range. It is one of the world’s great places for wildlife, comparable in richness to the Serengeti Plain of east Africa. The Northern Range this winter is home to perhaps eighteen thousand elk, about two thousand mule deer, five hundred bighorn sheep, several hundred antelope, two hundred moose, a few white-tailed deer, a few mountain goats, and five or six hundred descendants of the last wild bison left alive in the United States in the eighteen-eighties. In summer, most of those numbers roughly double. There are seven other herds of elk besides the huge Northern Herd. The wolves will have enough to eat.
The snow here at six thousand two hundred feet is about a foot deep, the wind raw as a whip. A truck-sized sleigh drawn by two sly-looking mules waits at the trailhead. On the rough board seat sit two impressively bearded mule drivers. Two wolf containers are lashed to the bed, and the sleigh lurches forward. It moves slowly up the narrow drainage of Rose Creek, to a sparsely forested hollow of aspen and lodgepole pine in which there stands a roughly round chain-link enclosure, one acre in size. The fence is ten feet tall with a further inward-slanting two feet of chain link at the top and an apron of chain link beneath the soil extending inward three feet—designed so that the wolves can neither climb out nor dig out. The pen cannot be seen
