As I thought about 8, I was reminded of something said to the hobbit Frodo in J. R. R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings trilogy: “Even the smallest person can change the course of the future.” 8’s physical size was not his defining feature. What mattered was the size of his heart. He had the big heart of an athlete who may have modest skills, but never gives up.
That was the first time we documented a case of an unrelated male joining an existing pack after the death of its alpha male and adopting and raising the pups as if they were his own. For most predator species, the normal behavior for a new male would be to kill the young of the prior male, breed the female, then help raise the young he sired. That is the custom in African lion prides, for instance, but male wolves are different. In all the cases I later witnessed, new alpha males helped raise the pups born to the previous male.
That behavior was likely a key reason for the successful domestication of wolves by early humans. Nearly everyone knows of a family with a big male dog who is gentle with toddlers and young children, even when they tug on the dog’s ears and tail. That tolerance, along with dogs’ desire to play with kids and protect them, comes directly from their wolf ancestors.
While writing this section, I was struck by the sequence of events when 8 first came across the Rose Creek wolves. He initially met and befriended the two pups outside of the pen and only later met their mother, who was to become his mate. That meant that his bonding to this new family began with those two pups, not the adult female, an important distinction. When 9 and the remaining six pups came out of the pen, 8 went through the same bonding process with them. For all those pups, 8 would be the only father figure they would ever know. When I later watched the family interacting together, I came to think the emotional attachment and devotion the pups had to 8 would have been no different from the relationship they would have had with 10 had he lived.
ONE WEEK AFTER 8 joined the Rose Creek pack as its alpha male, Mike Phillips and Bob Landis witnessed an event that forced 8 to make a critical decision. Mike saw the five remaining Crystal Creek wolves (the alpha pair and 8’s three black brothers) at the eastern end of Lamar Valley. They were trotting west at a fast pace with their alpha male in the lead. Mike was getting signals from the Rose Creek wolves to the west, toward Jasper Bench. Doug Smith had flown the day before and had seen the Rose Creek wolves on a bison carcass in that area. The Crystal wolves continued trotting west. Then the three black yearlings broke into a run, probably because they had picked up the scent of the carcass. The alpha pair, however, immediately turned around and fled back to the east. They must have realized that they were approaching the larger Rose Creek pack.
Meanwhile, when the black yearlings spotted their gray sibling, they ran to him and had a friendly reunion. The eight Rose pups then joined the four brothers and all twelve wolves enthusiastically greeted each other, wagging their tails and licking each other’s faces. The group began to move off toward the Crystal alphas. Mike spotted 9 downhill from her family and what to her were three strangers. As she watched the unknown wolves interacting with her pups, she barked in alarm. When they heard her, the group stopped, and one of the black yearlings started to approach her. 8 followed his brother. The pups stayed behind, probably reacting to the warning calls from their mother.
At that moment, 9 ran up to the black yearling and attacked him. 8 did not hesitate. He jumped in and fought his brother to support his new mate. The Rose Creek alphas were now on either side of the black and both were biting him. The pups stayed a short distance away and did not get involved. When the black ran off, 8 and 9 chased him. All three ran at top speed. After about four hundred yards, the alpha female gave up the chase, but 8 continued to pursue his brother. He gained on the black, before letting him go and returning to his new mate. The alpha pair then trotted to the pups and the family had a big, happy reunion.
Bob filmed that interaction. His footage shows the pups licking 8’s face and 9 putting her paws affectionately around his head as she sits up in front of him. She looks like one of the pups greeting the pack’s alpha male after he has vanquished an enemy. I thought about how 8 had reacted when he saw her charge at his brother only a few minutes after he had that friendly reunion with him. 8 was now her partner and had to take her side. He turned on his brother and helped her drive him away from her pups. Without question, 8 was now a Rose Creek wolf.
I wanted to stay on in Yellowstone to follow what was happening with 8 and his new family, but there were no winter jobs for me, and I had committed to the lecture tour of Japan. I left the park on October 15. I landed in Tokyo and spent a week in the city speaking on wolves and the reintroduction in Yellowstone. Then I traveled around the country for another week, including the island of Hokkaido, and gave additional talks in those areas.
During my time in Japan, a host took me to a wolf temple. In the shogun era, peasant farmers were forbidden to own any weapons that might be used to rebel against the rulers. The native deer species would come to their farms and feed on the crops. Without any weapons, the farmers had a hard time keeping the deer away. As a clever solution, temples were built throughout the countryside and dedicated to wolves. Farmers would walk to the nearest temple, leave a symbolic food offering to the wolves, then pray that they would come to their farm and kill the deer.
On the way back to the States, I stopped in Hawaii and gave talks on wolves at Hawaii Volcanoes National Park on the Big Island and at Haleakala National Park on Maui. When I returned to Big Bend, I went through my field notes from the summer and found that I had had 138 wolf sightings. I counted each wolf as a sighting, so if I saw all six Crystal Creek wolves, that would be six wolf sightings. During the long summer days in Yellowstone, I would be out looking for wolves by 5:00 a.m. When they were out of sight or inactive in the middle of the day, I would work, rest, or do other things, then come back out in the evening. If I found the pack again, that would count as another six wolf sightings.
I kept track of how long the wolves were visible during each sighting, and that added up to thirty-nine and a half hours. Doug Smith did wolf research for nine summers and two winters at Isle Royale National Park in Lake Superior. In a typical summer season, Doug would hike about five hundred miles through the park’s forests and marshes. He said it was a big accomplishment to see one wolf per summer and a sighting averaged less that one minute. Doug saw wolves only three times from the ground during his time there.
I spoke to forty thousand park visitors that summer about wolves, both during Park Service programs and while doing roving interpretation, and I had helped many of them to see wolves. The media had taken a great interest in the reintroduction program, and I was able to get the wolves’ story out to an even wider audience through over thirty television and newspaper interviews. I also had 255 grizzly sightings in Lamar Valley. 1995 had been a very good year.
7
The Arrival of the Druids
I WANTED TO RETURN to Yellowstone for a winter visit to see what the park was like at that time of year and hopefully spot wolves. I signed up for a late January class at the Yellowstone Institute in Lamar Valley entitled “How Animals Survive the Winter,” taught by Dr. Jim Halfpenny, a local carnivore ecologist and wildlife expert. The dates of the class coincided with the planned arrival of the second batch of wolves from Canada. To ensure enough genetic diversity, this time wolves would be captured in British Columbia, in the Williston Lake area, 750 miles north of Yellowstone. That was an area where biologist John Weaver had found bison remains in scat at a wolf den, so this second set of wolves had experience hunting bison.
THERE WAS ANOTHER major event that began to play out before I got back to Lamar Valley. In December, one of 8’s black brothers, wolf 3, had left the Crystal Creek pack and traveled to Paradise Valley, about twenty-five miles north of the park border. A few days later, he was spotted near a pack of captive wolves in that area that included several females