Through the end of June last year, we got along fine
with the wolves. I was working on a ranch in Montana’s Madison
Valley, where the wolves ran elk to exhaustion in the high country
while yearling cattle fattened on the lower pastures of the ranch.
Peaceful coexistence with predators seemed within our grasp, and
that was our goal, just to stay out of trouble.
Near the
middle of July, we gathered 780 heifers from the grassy flats by
the river and drove them onto the Squaw Creek Allotment, a crumpled
tablecloth of tree-covered draws, bare ridges and seeps at the base
of the Madison Range. We settled our herd and left them munching
Forest Service grass.
Within 24 hours, we were in
trouble. On the first morning, a heifer stood apart. As I walked
her up the fence, I saw the bloody stripes just under her tail,
gaped at the rip in her bag that opened to darkness with every
step. From then on, life accelerated to a blur. What I recall
clearly is that the animal corpses appeared with maddening
frequency. One lay bloated in a stream. Two others were gnawed to
bare bone. I couldn’t help it: My rage grew with the body count. I
thought of Aldo Leopold’s famous line about a fierce green fire in
a wolf’s eye, and I wanted to see it die.
After
performing an autopsy on one of the cows, Montana’s Department of
Fish, Wildlife and Parks issued a shoot-on-sight permit for two
wolves. A few days later, with a borrowed 30-30, I filled half of
it.
I killed the wolf at South Squaw Creek, which begins
as a quagmire of thick undergrowth, fallen trees and shadow.
Through this, deft and massive, came the wolf. We saw each other
simultaneously, and then I fired and watched his hind end go limp
and collapse. He dragged doggedly toward shelter. I shot again and
hit a tree. I shot a third time, and he tumbled out of view. I
found him breathing out his last in a clearing not 10 feet across.
He seemed to fill it. A moment, and he was gone, leaving me
heartsick with the shot ringing in my ears.
I’d killed
the alpha male. The following day, another ranch hand shot a
half-grown pup. Afterward, it took a while to restart my mind. When
I closed my eyes, the scene appeared, the trigger-pull, impact. I
heard again the hiss of air from punctured lungs and wondered if
something that felt so wrong could be positive in any sense.
Removed from the moment, I take solace in our success.
Within days of the shooting, the rest of the pack retreated to the
mountains. We killed two wolves, but by ending the string of
depredations, spared 11. Other ranchers in the valley took notice.
For these reasons, I consider the killing of the wolf to be the
most effective conservation act of my life.
I wish the
story ended there, with a moderate example set and the wolves
dining permanently on elk. It was so until Sept. 18, when an early
winter storm pummeled the valley. After the snow stopped flying,
and the fog lifted, I found two limping heifers with their
backsides chewed away. We put the cattle down, and, caught
shorthanded in a busy season, turned the wolf situation over to the
government hunters. They trapped and radio-collared a young male
feeding on one of the carcasses. As we gathered and shipped our
heifers, an aerial gunner killed the collared pup and two others.
Achieving equilibrium with wildlife on the margins of a
domesticated world is an imprecise and sometimes violent
undertaking. Wolves and cattle die. Ranchers lose sleep, money and
their tempers. But so long as places like the Madison Valley remain
open and undeveloped, there’s hope in the turning seasons. We can
try to do the whole thing over, wiser for the lessons of a troubled
summer.
This April, I crouched with a friend near a wolf
den. It was dug into a steep hillside, its entrance framed by the
roots of a pine. We thought the den was empty, but when our
conversation lapsed, the pups mewled faintly from the dark. I
thought of the heifers that would graze here in a month, and I
recalled the depredations and the rage I felt last summer. Here was
a new generation of culprits. In a year they would be grown and
hungry. They would maim and then vanish. We might have killed them
if not for that muffled sound. When we stood to go, it rose above
the wind, fragile, and something like a howl.
Bryce Andrews lives in Seattle, Washington, and begins
graduate school in environmental studies next month at the
University of Montana, Missoula.
This article appeared in the print edition of the magazine with the headline Living precariously with wolves and cattle.
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