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[excerpt]

Chapter Eight: Valley of Fear

In its meandering path across the northern tier of Yellowstone National Park, the Lamar River emerges from a mountain canyon upon a lofty valley of grass and sage. There it flows through what many eyes perceive as the premier wildlife panorama of the Lower 48. The Lamar Valley is the place to find the grizzly pawing through the summer grasses, to hear the bison bulls bashing heads in the September rut, to scan the sere valley plains and hillsides flashing yellow with the rumps of grazing elk. The coyote pouncing for voles in the grass, the pronghorn antelope galloping over the sage flats—the reasons the asphalt two-lane that snakes across the Lamar terrace so often crawls with sightseers—had little to do with Robert Beschta's astonishment upon his first visit in the spring of 1996. A hydrologist from Oregon State University, Beschta had walked straight from the tour road to the banks of the Lamar, eyes fixed on the river itself. Or rather, from Beschta's frame of reference, what was left of it.  

“I was dumbfounded how bad it was,” said Beschta. “Just dumbfounded.” The banks of the Lamar were barren, steep, and saw-edged. Soils that had been building for millennia had in recent decades been sluicing seaward with every rush of spring snowmelt and summer cloudburst. Few trees, no underbrush, no canopy, no shade, meant lost habitat for birds. It meant no more beavers that had once built ponds there, nor the flush of life that typically followed. “The stream,” said Beschta, “was falling apart.”

In better times and places, such streamside bands of life, the ecological community called riparian, otherwise constituted the bulls-eye of biodiversity in the arid West. Comprising a mere 1 percent of the landmass, riparian ecosystems harbored eighty percent of the West's faunal diversity. That at least was the healthy riparian's reputation. The river Beschta was watching in Yellowstone was something decidedly different. Something had happened to the Lamar over the last century that hadn't happened there for many years before.            

Beschta and many others believed that something was elk. The Northern Range of Yellowstone had for decades harbored one of the densest, most pampered populations of unfenced elk on the planet. Cervus elaphus , the Rocky Mountain elk, is an open-ground grazer and giant member of the deer family, some of the more massive bulls topping seven hundred pounds. For nearly a century in Yellowstone they'd been protected from hunters and stripped of their native predators by federally backed trappers. The elk had responded by filling the Northern Range with a winter herd of twenty thousand, one of the densest populations known, whose ecological footprint had crushed the river bottoms and upland aspen groves, where the shoots and saplings of the forest's next generation were perpetually pruned to the ankles.

In his travels Beschta had seen the same sort of dissolution throughout the overstocked range of the American West, where more than a century's excess of cattle and sheep had pounded so many of the arid land's foremost oases to dust. It had become so wearisomely familiar: mile after mile of rubbled streamsides, willow thickets rendered to nubs, denuded banks calving like miniature glaciers, the birds and beavers of yore all but gone. But it was especially unsettling to find the same sickness here in the heart of the nation's flagship bastion of nature.

What Beschta could not see, even then as he stood vowing to return someday and unveil the unraveling of the Lamar, was a new order about to descend upon Yellowstone's ecology.

Coming Home

Seventy years before, near the spot where Beschta stood, two young wolves had simultaneously stepped, side-by-side, into steel-jawed traps. They were the last of at least 136 Yellowstone wolves killed during the nation's eradication campaign. With their elimination in 1926, Yellowstone had become wolfless for perhaps the first time in the twelve thousand years since Canis lupus trotted in behind the retreating front of the Pleistocene glaciers.

Soon after ridding themselves of the wolf, the Park Service discovered another pest on their hands. Elk, the park's antlered showpieces, amassed like locusts, chewing their way across the Northern Range. In times past, many among the great herds would migrate out of the park every autumn, descending from the Yellowstone Plateau to the valleys beyond, where the winters ran shorter and the snowpacks shallower. Many of those timeworn paths had since been blocked by ranch fences and gauntlets of hunters lining up just across the border. The elk began bottling up inside the park. Willow, cottonwood, and aspen, the arid West's triumvirate of ecosystem-anchoring trees, began bearing the herd's full weight.

By the late 1920s, biologists were voicing concerns that critical browse plants were disappearing, that soils were eroding, that unpalatable grasses were proliferating. “The range,” reported a team of scientists after visits in 1929 and 1933, “was in deplorable conditions when we first saw it, and its deterioration has been progressing steadily since then.”

The Park Service responded by trapping and transplanting and—when those labors fell short—shooting Yellowstone's elk. Off and on for the next forty years the park's administrators culled the Yellowstone herds, though to no discernable improvement of the range. Occasionally there came voices from without suggesting a more holistic approach, involving a more experienced class of hunter. Aldo Leopold obliquely broached this unmentionable in 1944, in a biting critique of the book, The Wolves of North America . The book had ended on a disingenuous note from its co-author Stanley P. Young, a career predator exterminator suggesting the country's few remaining wolves be allowed a few places “to continue their existence with little molestation”—at which Leopold fairly detonated:  

Yes, and so thinks every right-minded ecologist, but has the United States Fish and Wildlife Service no responsibility for implementing this thought before it completes its job of extirpation? Where are these areas? Probably every reasonable ecologist will agree that some of them should live in the larger national parks and wilderness areas; for instance, the Yellowstone and its adjacent national forests. ... Why, in the necessary process of extirpating wolves from the livestock ranges of Wyoming and Montana, were not some of the uninjured animals used to restock Yellowstone?

This was not a suggestion the managers of Yellowstone were racing to embrace, given how proudly they'd just ridded their park of its predatory vermin. Instead they redoubled their culling of elk, which lasted until the late 1960s, when local hunters raised hell and their Congressmen threatened to pull the plug on the park's funding. Yellowstone, in response, adopted a politically expedient form of non-management, marketed as “natural regulation.” Old reports of elk damage were replaced with new ones blaming the failing aspen on changing climate and fire frequencies. The claims of overbrowsing and erosion were reexamined and declared exaggerations. The role of top predators was again dismissed as “a nonessential adjunct to the regulatory process.” Henceforth the naturally regulated elk went on an extended bender, multiplying to stratospheric new densities, and mowing down Yellowstone's woodlands.

In 1973, Congress intervened again in the park's ecological affairs, by a far more roundabout route. That year, President Richard M. Nixon signed the Endangered Species Act, a law calling for protecting and restoring species facing extinction. The gray wolf of the Lower 48 was one of the first species named. And when biologists started listing those few special places that might still make a viable home for such a large, wide-ranging, pack-hunting carnivore of hoofed animals, one particular piece of real estate—with its 19,000 square miles of public land, centered by a national park bloated with thirty-five thousand elk—invariably rose to the top.

On January 12, 1995, after nearly a decade of environmental impact statements, court injunctions, raucous town meetings from Boise to Bozeman to Cheyenne, and nearly two hundred thousand letters and public comments, eight wolves—captured from the Canadian Rockies of Alberta and caged in aluminum shipping crates—were escorted by a caravan of patrol cars through the north gate of Yellowstone National Park. They rolled past a roadside of cheering schoolchildren, past TV crews and reporters, and onward out of sight, arriving at secret chain-link enclosures hidden in the hills above the Lamar Valley. Six more wolves arrived the following week and were taken to a third pen above the Lamar. After a two-month acclimation period, the pens were opened. Within a week of leaving its pen, the Soda Butte Pack had pulled down an elk calf. Wolves had come home to Yellowstone.

Biologists and wolf disciples of all stripes had long been waiting for the resurrection. The air above Yellowstone's Northern Range droned with the propeller of a Piper Super Cub, radio antenna drawing daily fixes on the wolves in their wanderings. Crews of wolf researchers cruised the winding highway of the Lamar Valley, tracking the electronic blip emanating from the collar of every wolf in the park. Amateur wolf-watchers gathered in flocks upon the hillside, monstrous scopes piercing the distances to the daily spectacles on display in the valley. Yellowstone had instantly become the wolf-watching capital of the world.

One of the hints of the daily miracles to expect came the wolves' first year back in the park, when, with biologists watching and a movie camera rolling, two members of the Crystal Creek pack and a herd of elk put on a classic predator-prey clinic, from start to finish. The wolves' pace was at first unhurried—a loping exploratory gait that was later likened to “sifting through the elk as a shepherd would through sheep.” One of the wolves found what it was looking for and sprinted headlong for a lone cow elk that was limping on a bad hind leg. The elk hobbled for the cover of the herd, but by then both wolves had singled her out. They cut the ailing elk from the herd, and the three took off across the valley flat.

A wolf is a long-legged endurance runner known for interspersing extended chases with sprints exceeding thirty miles per hour. And a healthy elk, as natural selection had decreed, tends to be yet a stride-length faster. But this was less than a healthy elk, and the wolves soon drew alongside, lunging for the neck. The elk shook them off, with forehooves flailing, trampling one of the attackers as she went. The wolf rolled and rejoined its packmate harrying the flanks, leaping and locking on with a bite force of sixteen hundred pounds per square inch. The elk faltered and fell, two wolves on its throat. She struggled to her feet, then fell again for the last time. Next day, biologists examined the kill, finding the elk's ankle arthritic and “swollen like a melon”—an inherited flaw perhaps, which had just been weeded from the gene pool.

It was a textbook enactment of the wolves choreographed dance of death with their prey—the casual scanning of the herd, the targeting and testing for weakness, the escalation of the chase, the flailing of hooves and locking of teeth on hide, and the wrestling to submission.

The wolves had rapidly assuaged the biologists' first concerns: They were feeding and mating and multiplying like mad, filling the predator void as fast as anyone had hoped or feared. Over the next ten years the Yellowstone wolves spread to all corners of the park and spilled across the borders, south to the Grand Tetons and Wind Rivers, west to the Gallatin Canyon, east to the Absaroka Range, the population building to more than 300 wolves across the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem.