“Then one time Hayden and I were watching the Cottonwood pack on an elk kill. The wolves had eaten and were mostly just lying around when I saw a coyote trying to sneak in. I got Hayden on the scope and said, watch this—I knew what was going to happen. The coyote appeared in the scope and then a blur of two wolves shot out of the grass, chasing the coyote away. For a moment it was quiet, and then Hayden said, Dad, that was amazing.
“I want this experience to be available for everyone. There’s nothing like it, anywhere. And Hayden’s picked up on that too. He’ll go looking for people who haven’t been able to see the wolves or the bears, and offer them a look through our scopes.”
I lean into his scope and look again at the grizzly. Her cubs are not in sight. She lifts a paw to her mouth, chews, shakes her head. She could kill me with the swipe of a paw. Could tear me apart in seconds. Would kill anyone, anything, do whatever she had to do to protect her cubs.
A dozen years ago I received as a gift a cookbook titled Wild Women in the Kitchen. A collection of recipes and stories and folklore, it’s packed with brief tales about infamous women throughout time, from Joan of Arc to Sarah Bernhardt to Cher. I ignored the book for years, mainly because cooking is not one of my passions. Five years ago—long after Bob and I divorced—I decided to open it and read some of the stories. Who were considered wild women, and how are they different from me? The recipes I skimmed or ignored, but I read one, then another, then a dozen of the biographical paragraphs before I paused to contemplate. These women dared to be themselves, they made decisions based on their own needs and desires. They moved across countries and oceans, they followed their hearts, they lived bravely, their lives affected others. They spoke up. They trusted their paths. From Jane Austen, who dared to wittily write of society’s conventional restrictions upon women, to Alice B. Toklas who in 1907 fell in love with Gertrude Stein and later published a cookbook with a scandalous recipe for hashish fudge, to Eleanor Roosevelt with her famous Sunday evening salons. These women were courageous. True to themselves. I considered my own life, realizing how far from wild I was. Not only were these women wild, most seemed to have found—or created—their own tribes.
It rains during the night, and in the morning I discover I’d planted my tent on top of a natural drainage. My sleeping bag, on top of a pad, is damp. I tug a hat over my hair, some pants over my long johns, a jacket over my top. Mark and Kirsten are already at the splintering wooden picnic table. Water boils. Coffee is imminent.
“Sleep well?” Mark asks.
“Mm-hmm, you?”
“Good, great,” they nod.
I don’t tell them I woke up in midnight dark, remembering the artificial sugar packets in my duffle bag, terrified a bear would sniff them out and I’d be exposed as a fool. A maimed or possibly dead fool, who couldn’t follow simple rules. I’d slept poorly after that.
We drink coffee. Kirsten makes oatmeal. Mark jots in his journal, I open my own and try to pluck thoughts from the ether and write them down. I can’t. I expand here, and my mind is a galaxy filled with words, concepts, ideas, possibilities. But I can’t pin one down. I belong here, I’m of this land, I share a trace of origin with these creatures—the crane, the grizzly, the wolf—yet I am foreign, out of place. When those wolves, almost twenty years ago, were released here in the park, they stepped into the unknown. Transplanted, they were allowed time in one-acre pens to adjust to the climate, the smells, the air. And when the gates fell open, some clung to the familiar and wouldn’t leave. But eventually, all the wolves left wire fences behind and ranged over the 3,400 square miles of the park. They mated, formed packs. They created families. They explored new land. Attacked prey. These early wolves were invited interlopers, running free, carving out territories in land taken from them decades before. In the pens they’d been restrained. Released, they struck out and reclaimed everything they’d once been.
Mammoth Hot Springs was once an army post. In the park’s early years, poachers, souvenir hunters, and entrepreneurs who set up camps and tours, outmanned and outmaneuvered the park’s gamekeepers and wardens. Park administrators sought federal help to protect the beauty and stability of the ecosystem. The army arrived in 1886—fourteen years after the park’s official opening—and stayed for thirty years. Mammoth, now, is soldier free, but remains Yellowstone’s official hub. Mark, Kirsten, and I walk past log cabins, graceful two-story brick and frame buildings, a sandstone chapel constructed by Scottish masons, all built during the army’s tenure. We head to the Yellowstone Center for Resources, to see Doug Smith, head of the Wolf Project.
Doug Smith is a Paul Bunyan. His stride is twice that of mine, and were we not inside a grand building constructed in 1897 he’d be ducking as he passed through doorways. He is a man larger than life, his energy traveling in an aura disturbing electrons and protons throughout his environment. Jumping and sizzling, they mix and reform and change the air, the furniture, those around him, me. As with the teacher who magnetically engages his student and the actor who hooks and hypnotizes his audience, Doug captures his visitors’ attentions and I sit, mesmerized, noticing little of his office other than a wall of bookshelves to his right and a huge map of the park replete with hand-drawn odd-shaped circles and ellipses delineating wolf pack boundaries, labeled with pack initials and written in dry erase marker, pinned to the wall directly behind him. A plaid shirt on a hanger is hooked to a high shelf of his bookcase. A large computer monitor sits on a credenza behind his back, and at times during our discussion he turns to it, locating visual aids to illustrate his words.
A scientist, Doug relies on observation and its resultant charts and graphs. But Doug is anything but dry and didactic; his tall, tightly muscled form is in constant motion, and his voice moves from exultation to solemn respect in split seconds. Doug eats an unpeeled carrot while we talk, occasionally dipping it into a pot of grainy brown hummus—lunch. His blue eyes flash and his chiseled jaw and cheekbones are unsettling in their rawness. A pure, male energy seated behind a desk, munching a carrot and explaining bar graphs. Although his intensity makes my nerves flutter, I wouldn’t miss this for the world. This man knows more than anyone about the reintroduction of wolves to Yellowstone National Park.
“I’d always been light on the enjoyment aspect,” Doug says. “But lately I’ve shifted from a wholly scientific view to seeing the human piece, the gift of nature to man and our need for that.”
We discuss the story Doug and Gary Ferguson write of in Decade of the Wolf, about a wolf crossing the road one morning in Lamar Valley that stopped to stare at a park visitor who was sitting, roadside, in his wheelchair. Watching the interaction through his scope, Doug saw the wolf pause and make eye contact with the man, who, Doug says, was visibly moved. The inquisitive wolf, the curious human visitor, coming together in a moment that is likely to have forever changed the human. This, Doug says, is what national parks are all about. They are places created for human enjoyment, places where humans are offered the possibility to explore the magnificence of the natural world.
“Wolves are totemic, iconic. They are intelligent, capable, complex. There’s much about them we don’t know—we can’t know—and we’re intrigued by that. We have a desire to access this understanding.”
Doug meets my eyes with his own, and his energy overwhelms me. Yet he has that plaid shirt hanging in his office. He’s a plaid shirt guy.
I’ve known, ever since Bob and I divorced, that I have a love out there somewhere, and that he has a plaid shirt. Not a thick wool but a soft, well-worn flannel. A shirt that suits his gentle manner. In marrying Daniel I had decided he was that love—maybe not exactly my