Yellowstone

By John Skow

Wolves roam through our racial memory, howling beyond the firelight, scaring the hell out of us. But they no longer roam in Yellowstone National Park, except as rare transients, prowling south from Canada. The last resident wolves in the big park were exterminated by Government hunters by the late 1920s. That was a time when animals were thought to be good (elk and bison, for instance) or bad. Wolves had been pursued in the West as if they were not merely bad, but evil. Cattlemen lost entire herds to harsh winters, then spent enormous, irrationally large sums of money taking vengeance on wolves. Barry Lopez, in his haunting book Of Wolves and Men, tells of wolves drenched with gasoline and set afire, wolves pulled apart by horses. You can't dismember an April blizzard.

Should the gray wolf, today an endangered species in most of the U.S., be re-established in Yellowstone? An old stockman at a meeting at Laramie, Wyo., shakes with rage at the notion; the idea is like reintroducing smallpox. But to wolf partisans, the bedrock argument is a brooding, circular truth: without wolves, there are no wolves. These complex, mysterious animals are their own justification. Beyond that, biologists see predators as balance wheels in ecosystems. No wolves mean too many elk, which is what Yellowstone has now, starving by the thousands in winter die-offs.

Yellowstone can seem grand and wild, or it can resemble a big, hokey theme park, an example of what happens when man meddles too much with nature. Policies shift with political winds, and under former National Park Service director William Penn Mott, a wolf enthusiast, Yellowstone officials pushed hard for the wolf's reintroduction. Now Mott has been replaced by fence-sitter James Ridenour, and political pressure is reaching Yellowstone. Two weeks ago, a traveling Park Service slide show on wolf reintroduction was canceled. An elaborate study asked for by Congress seems certain, when it is released at year's end, to recommend the return of wolves, but political maneuvering has blocked the drafting of the necessary environmental-impact statement. The major national environmental groups support wolf reintroduction, and one, the Defenders of Wildlife, is raising $100,000 to reimburse stockmen in the northern Rockies for livestock the wolves might kill. Last month Defenders agreed to pay $1,700 to cattlemen for kills by a wolf pack that had migrated from Canada into Montana.

Natural migration probably cannot restock Yellowstone, which is why the political jostling goes on. Big, burly Dave Mech, widely accepted as the world's leading authority on wolves, says Yellowstone is ideal for Canis lupus. Alston Chase, the cantankerous philosopher who wrote Playing God in Yellowstone, thinks the U.S. has a moral obligation to return wolves to the park. But the wolves' most effective ally may be Renee Askins, 30, of Moose, Wyo., a wildlife ecologist who stumps for an advocacy group she founded called the Wolf Fund.

When Askins speaks, the setting can resemble an old-style western movie, several scenes before the shoot-out. She has blue eyes and long brown hair, and her manner is that of the pretty, courageous schoolmarm standing up for truth and decency in words the fearful townspeople would just as soon not hear. Yes, she says, wolves get their living by killing. No, they are not sweet and docile. Yes, stockmen are having a hard time economically. "But if we can't preserve wildness in Yellowstone, where can we preserve it?"

Hunting outfitters and stockmen scuff their cowboy boots in the dirt, unconvinced, as Askins talks. Some of them like to draw a line between Eastern ecobabblers, who puff wolves as gallant symbols of wildness, and true Westerners, who know them as cruel and cowardly and who can be relied on to "shoot, shovel and shut up," as the brag goes in the cowboy bars. But, Brad Little, a stockman from Emmett, Idaho, concedes, "It's not so much wolves we're afraid of, it's wolf managers." Exactly. The wolves themselves, though they are sure to range beyond park boundaries, are likely to be more an annoyance than a danger to farmers. In northern Minnesota, where some 1,200 wolves forage in a cattle-ranch and sheep-farm area, the highest annual payoff by a Government program set up to compensate stockmen for wolf kills has been a modest $21,000. (Problem wolves there are killed by federal hunters, as would be true around Yellowstone.) There have been no documented cases in modern times of wolves attacking people in the U.S. But it is taken as a home truth that wolves will bring federal wolf bureaucrats, whose regulations will drive honest ranchers nuts. Carl Haywood, legislative assistant to Idaho Republican Senator James McClure, says voters fear that the wolf will be used as a surrogate by environmental extremists, whose real agenda is "getting ranchers, miners, loggers and motorized recreationists off public lands."

U.S. Representative Wayne Owens, a Utah Democrat, has 76 cosponsors for a bill calling for wolf reintroduction, but its chances are dodgy unless lawmakers from the Yellowstone states change their minds. This may happen; polls show that voters favor the idea. Wyoming Republican Senator Alan Simpson, once an antiwolf diehard, talked like a moderate at a recent hearing on Owens' bill and says only, "Let's take care of grizzlies first." He means get the bears off the endangered species list and out from under federal protection, so they can be shot beyond park boundaries.

The wolf's listing as an endangered species is the important difference between a Park Service plan and one floated by Idaho's Senator McClure. McClure has a problem, which is that wolves have been sighted frequently in central Idaho. If packs from Canada establish themselves in Idaho, as they have in Montana's Glacier National Park, they will be protected as an indigenous endangered species. Instead, McClure's plan would de-list wolves immediately, and let state game laws treat them as predators, outside designated havens in Idaho's Selway-Bitterroot Wilderness and in Glacier and Yellowstone parks. Environmental groups support the park strategy, which would de-list wolves only after ten breeding pairs are established in Yellowstone and Glacier parks and the Idaho wilderness.

+ When will Yellowstone hear wolves howl again? Later than sooner, probably, but sooner than never. Askins, meanwhile, weary of fighting and fund raising, insists that wolves will be re-established not because of political wrangling but because Westerners respect wild things. "And the wolf," she says, "is one of the wildest of things. At its heart, the real issue is one of making room. There is still a little room in the West for outfitters, for livestock, for wildness, for wolves."