During those early weeks I frequently stopped in at the park headquarters in Mammoth Hot Springs, where Mike Phillips and Doug Smith had their offices. I got to know them and filled them in on the wolf sightings I was having in Lamar Valley. Back then the official name of the reintroduction was the Wolf Restoration Project, but soon everyone was shortening it to the simpler Wolf Project, and that name continues to be used today.
WHILE I WAS having those early sightings of the Crystal Creek wolves, there was a major ongoing story involving the Rose Creek pack. The Rose trio spent their first week of freedom exploring the region near their release point, about five miles east of the Crystal Creek pen. Then the female yearling, wolf 7, broke off from the adults. On her own, she learned to be a master hunter and killed elk by herself. The following year she would join up with wolf 2, one of the black Crystal Creek brothers, to form the Leopold pack. I was to spend many hours observing the new pair.
After the young female left them, the Rose Creek pair moved east, then northeast, ending up out of the park near the town of Red Lodge, Montana, fifty-five miles from the Rose Creek pen. The alpha female, wolf 9, was nearing the end of her pregnancy and began to restrict her movements in that area. On April 24, 1995, Mike Phillips did a tracking flight and saw the pair together, just inside Custer National Forest. The alpha male left the den site later that day and went out on a hunt.
Doug Smith did a flight two days later and got the female’s signal from the same area. The male’s signal was not there, so Doug circled the surrounding area. When he finally picked it up, it was on mortality mode, indicating 10 was likely dead. Wolf radio collars have a motion sensor. If no movement is detected over a period of four hours, the beeps per minute double. His body was later found, and Chad McKittrick of Red Lodge was eventually convicted of killing an animal protected under the Endangered Species Act and spent time in jail. McKittrick shot wolf 10 on April 24.
On the day of her mate’s death, 9 gave birth to a litter of pups on private land, five miles from where the alpha male had died. Joe Fontaine of the US Fish and Wildlife Service discovered the den site ten days later and confirmed the presence of pups. He got a count of seven. The site was just a shallow depression under a tree. Carcasses were put out in the area to help the new mother survive. Newborn wolf pups cannot regulate their own temperature and must snuggle up to their mother to keep warm. If she became desperate for food and went out on a hunt, her pups might die from hypothermia before she got back to the den.
Since the den site was just four miles from downtown Red Lodge, Mike and Doug decided to recapture the mother and pups and put them back in the Rose Creek pen. On May 18, Carter Niemeyer of the US Fish and Wildlife Service caught 9 near the den in a padded leghold trap placed near some scat from her mate that he had collected from the Rose Creek pen. The crew then went to get the pups.
From his tracking flights, Doug knew that 9 had moved her litter to a new site. Joe walked uphill to that new location, then made low calls, hoping the pups might think their mother was approaching. He heard whimpering in response. He looked in the direction of the sound and spotted a group of pups. They all ran off, except for one that stood its ground and stared at him before following the others into a chamber embedded in a jumble of talus rocks.
Doug, with his thin frame and long arms, reached in and pulled out the three-week-old pups, one by one. There were seven. Seven was the original pup count, but on a hunch that there might be one more, Doug grabbed a stick, poked around, and made contact with something that felt soft. He pulled out the stick and saw a piece of fur caught on the tip, indicating one last pup might be at the back of the den. It was too far to grab by hand, so he got a pair of Leatherman pliers and reached in as far as he could. The pliers closed around something. Whatever it was, the animal struggled against Doug as he pulled it out. It was an eighth pup, a black male.
Mark Johnson, the project’s veterinarian, had examined the first seven pups (four females and three males) and determined they were all healthy. That eighth pup, the one that had struggled against Doug, was also in good shape. Mark, due to his years in veterinary practice and working with wild wolves, is very experienced when it comes to recognizing dogs and wolves as they get older. He later told me he believed that the eighth pup grew up to be wolf 21, the most famous male wolf in Yellowstone’s history. As an adult, 21 would weigh up to an estimated 130 pounds, but on that day, at an age of twenty-four days, he was just 5 pounds.
The mother and her eight pups were loaded into a helicopter and flown back to the Rose Creek pen. During the flight the pups were free to roam around the interior of the helicopter, but 9 was in a cage. I was out that day and saw the helicopter flying to the site. The wolves were scheduled to stay in the pen for six months, through mid-October, to allow the pups to grow larger and have a better chance of survival on release. Carcasses would be dropped off in the pen twice a week.
The birth of nine pups (eight to the Rose Creek pack and one to the Soda Butte wolves) that first spring was unexpected. No one with the project had thought the wolves would breed while in captivity. But the death of the Rose Creek alpha male so soon after release canceled out much of the excitement over the birth of the pups. However, wolf 10 had made a major contribution to the Yellowstone gene pool before losing his life, and he would live on through the pups he fathered and through the many wolves descended from them. He was the founding father of a dynasty that continues in Yellowstone today.
4
The Little Wolf and the Big Grizzly Bear
ON MAY 18, 1995, the same day the helicopter brought the Rose Creek wolves back to their acclimation pen, I saw one of the three Crystal Creek black yearlings on a fresh elk carcass. Then I spotted the other five pack members on another new carcass. The small gray yearling went to one of his brothers as the black walked off with a piece of meat in his mouth, and the two had a playful wrestling match. 8 snatched the meat away from his brother and ran off with it. He stopped, put it down, and played with it as the black watched. The wolves were so full that day it did not matter who ended up with that piece of meat. There was still plenty left on the carcasses, more than enough for all of them.
One of the law-enforcement rangers who had patrolled the Crystal Creek pen site the previous winter told me the three black yearlings had mercilessly picked on their smaller sibling throughout their captivity. She said they would chase 8, tackle and pin him, then nip at him for a long time. Since there was not much else for the yearlings to do during their confinement, harassing their gray brother was one of the three blacks’ favorite pastimes. Usually the bullied wolf would bed down away from his brothers, but they would creep up and pounce on him as he slept. 8 would either run off without fighting back or stand up to them for a moment, then run away.
Since he was the smallest wolf in the pen, the rangers patrolling the area called him “the little guy.” The ranger also told me the gray was normally the last to eat when new meat was brought into the pen, a sign of his lowly status. As she told me those stories about 8’s hard times in the pen when he was a pup, I recalled the famous quote from philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, “That which does not kill us, makes us stronger.” Would getting picked on and beaten up enable him to cope better with adversity and challenges now that he was growing up?
Knowing the hard times 8 had had in the pen for the ten weeks of the pack’s captivity, I was glad to see that his life was becoming more normal. His three brothers had plenty of things to do now that they were free roaming and less time to pick on him.
Later that day, when one of the black yearlings was at one of the new carcasses, a grizzly mother and her two yearling cubs approached. A cub charged the wolf four times. Each time, the black ran off just a few steps, correctly guessing the cub was only bluffing. After a while, the wolf walked toward the carcass, ending up