I had never met Levi, but I had spoken to him on the telephone and told him I would like to go across to Idaho and study. He said that was fine but since it was a scientific program and I had no qualifications, I would have to do an internship so they could be sure I knew how to record data correctly and be able to support the biologists in the field. Then he told me what it would cost and mentioned a figure that audibly took my breath away. It was several thousands of dollars, and Levi picked up my reaction down the line.
“What’s the matter?” he asked.
“I’ve sold everything,” I said. “I barely have enough money for the airfare.”
“So what are you going to do?”
“I hear you have a captive pack that you use as ambassadors to teach people about wolves. I’ve worked in wildlife parks with captive wolves and maybe I could help out with them and that would pay my way through the internship.”
“There are only so many hours in the day,” he said. “How are you going to do it?”
“How about if I work all day and study at night?”
“Hang on a second,” he said. “Let me get this right. You want to come over here and work all day and study all night for your internship?”
“Yes.”
The phone went dead for what felt like hours while he went away to consult with colleagues.
“Okay,” he said. “Buy your ticket, come over, and we’ll see what we can do.” It wasn’t until later that I discovered how much they’d laughed at this mad Brit who was prepared to come over on a wing and a prayer on the promise of nothing but a tent to sleep in, but my idiocy had appealed to them.
A week later I was on the plane, and I admit I was terrified. I didn’t know what I had let myself in for. I had sold my car, my trinkets, my knives, most of my equipment and clothes, and had scraped together the money for the fare. If it all went wrong, I had nothing to return to.
I flew into Boise, the capital of Idaho, which lies in the southwest of the state, where I was met by a tall Texan cowboy named Rick who was married to Cathy, a volunteer at the Center with Levi. I was to spend the night with them and the following morning she would drive me up to Winchester. After a very pleasant meal and a comfortable night at their home, Cathy and I, and a friend she took along for company for the return journey, set off at first light for the reservation. Rick stayed behind to look after their young child. It was a drive of about 250 miles, and the slight flurry of snow we left in soon became a more serious storm. We stopped several times along the way to put snow chains on and take them off again when the road was clear, but by the time we hit the Rocky Mountains we were into deep snow and the chains were on permanently. We were now into wolf country—rocky terrain, lodge-pole pine forests, and snow-capped mountains—and most of the traffic on the road was associated with the logging industry: huge lorries driving back and forth moving timber. We were in the car for most of the day and as we drove, Cathy explained the work that was being done at the Center and how the release program worked.
This program had been a political hot potato for many years, ever since the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, which was responsible for protecting endangered species, proposed a recovery plan for the wolf in 1980. The wolf was officially classified as endangered in forty-eight states in 1978. The plan was to reintroduce wolves in northwestern Montana, central Idaho, and Yellowstone National Park, but it had been thwarted again and again by legal action, largely by farming communities afraid that wolves roaming wild would kill their livestock. Finally, in 1994, after much argument, the secretary of the interior signed the release plan, which called for state agencies to manage the wolves once they had been released, but all three states declined to cooperate. Finally, the Nez Percé came up with a management program for Idaho, and in January 1995, after fifteen years of debate, fifteen Canadian gray wolves were released into about thirteen million acres of national forest in the Rockies. Two years later they released another twenty and they were doing so well that the biologists were already predicting that it would take no more than seven years before they could be taken off the endangered species list.
We arrived at the Center just as it was getting dark and everyone came out to welcome us. I think they were keen to take a look at the madman who had traveled all the way from England. It was about half an hour’s drive out of the town of Winchester up a windy mountain track. The whole area was breathtakingly beautiful, with mountain trails through forests of giant ponderosa pines and Douglas firs. The main attraction was a big lake that brought tourists to the area as well as eagles and fish-eating birds. In summer the lake offered canoeing and water sports and in winter, ice-skating and ice fishing. The population of this little town was less than three hundred people and the facilities amounted to a canteen, a pub, a grocery store, and a gas station, and that was where we went each week to stock up on supplies and to have a shower and launder clothes.
There was no running water in the camp and no electricity; drinking water had to be carried in and cooking was all done on propane gas appliances. One of the biologists showed me around. The accommodation comprised a cluster of individual tepees, one smaller one that was the toilet, and one larger tent, set apart from the main living quarters, which was the kitchen and canteen, where there was always a big pot of coffee available. It was set apart because bears frequently came out of the forest in search of food, and any food had to be either buried or hung up to try to prevent them from taking it. The tepees were allocated in order of seniority, those at the heart of the camp being the most prestigious. There was one, I noticed, that couldn’t have been farther away. It was right on the edge of the forest; it had a hole in the roof, moss growing up the sides of the canvas, and a door that was hanging off. Pity the poor devil who has to live in that one, I thought to myself. And yes, I was that poor devil.
The tepees were semipermanent. Each one had a wooden floor, a wooden platform bed about three feet off the ground, and a little wood-burning stove, which was essential in those temperatures. That night I sat in my tent listening to the wolves that I would meet in the morning, and stoked the fire with logs. I was broke, I had none of the right equipment because I’d had to spend everything I had on airfare, and I had borrowed a friend’s sleeping bag that was far too short. I had no pillow and no creature comforts like those that adorned the other tepees, but by the time I put my head down, my nerves had dissolved and I had a very good feeling in the pit of my stomach. I felt that this could be what I had been searching for.
The next morning I was awake before anyone else, too excited and too uncomfortable to sleep. I pulled on my army boots, put on fewer layers than I would have liked, and stepped outside into the cold of first light; it must have been about minus fifteen degrees. I thought that I could compensate for poor-quality clothing by my knowledge of survival, the golden rule for which is to be aware of your body temperature and resist the temptation to put on every garment you have. If you warm up and sweat, everything becomes wet and then icy cold. As the sun started to rise over the Sawtooth Mountains, I could see the full beauty of my surroundings. The snow was two to three feet deep and crisp underfoot and lay heavily on the tops of the trees—the most magnificent trees with huge trunks that rose more than a hundred feet above my head and smelled faintly of vanilla. It was so silent you could have heard a pin drop; I had arrived in paradise.
The wolf enclosure was at the center of the camp, near the visitor center, where members of the public came to see the wolves and learn about them and the history and culture of the Nez Percé. It was one of the main tourist attractions of the area, but also very useful as a way of countering the fear and prejudice that so many people held toward these creatures. They had eleven timber wolves in captivity living in forty-eight acres of forest that was double fenced with a strip between the two fences. It became my job to walk around between the fences in the early morning looking for breaches or for frozen drifts of snow that could bring the ground high enough for the wolves to escape over the top.
After the small enclosure at Sparkwell it was good to see these wolves had so much space to roam, although