The Company of Wolves Read Free

researchers had already turned aside centuries of folklore and apprehension of wolves. And while Boyd was at the University of Minnesota, Barry Lopez’s
Of Wolves and Men
had edged American and European views of wolves into spiritual and ethical realms.
    It was a time of change for wolves, too. Since 1973, Dr. Robert Ream, a biologist at the University of Montana, had been collecting reports of wolf sightings in Montana and Idaho. Wolves had been declared an endangered species in all the United States outside ofAlaska. They had not reproduced successfully in Glacier National Park for fifty years, and in that time there had been only sporadic sightings of wolves in Montana. The closest known breeding population was 150 miles away, in Canada’s Banff National Park. Ream believed wolves might return to Montana. In April 1979, Joe Smith, working with Ream and with Canadian bear-researchers, had trapped a female wolf in British Columbia, not far from Glacier. Smith put a radio collar around the wolf’s neck and released her. The presence of a radio-collared wolf was a fresh research opportunity for Ream, and he wanted the animal watched. When Diane Boyd enrolled as a graduate student at Montana, Ream hired her to work on the Wolf Ecology Project.
    Tall and blonde, with the high cheekbones and pale complexion of her Nordic ancestors, Boyd would become an anomaly in the world of wolf research, a woman in a field dominated by men, and a person of searching curiosity in a science often dominated by reductionist skepticism. The job might have gone to a male researcher had others than Ream believed that this might be the beginning of a return of wolves to Glacier National Park. Other wolf scientists pointed out that the one radio-collared female did not constitute a breeding population. They saw it as an outlier, an oddity that would probably disappear.
    Boyd proposed to study the relationship between wolves and coyotes and to write a master’s thesis on the results. She intended to track radio-collared coyotes, the radio-collared wolf, and any other wolves she could find. There were wolves just north of the international border, which hunters and timber cruisers saw now and then. She would collect and analyze scats and search for carcasses of wolf-killed elk, deer, and moose, find out what coyotes and wolves were eating, and judge whether they competed for food.
    Boyd caught dozens of coyotes, but she didn’t see signs of another wolf. The lone radio-collared female she sought to study was a traveler, a crosser of ridges and rivers, a consumer of distances. Wolves don’t stay in any one place; motion is their characteristic state. They must move around as packs in search of prey, or move as individuals to new locations in search of unoccupied ground or a pack hospitable enough to welcome them. The long-legged, loose-jointed trot of a moving wolf is as much a defining quality as the creature’steeth. A wolf traveling across the landscape bounces slightly. Its big, splaying paws glance off the earth and curl as they rise, and they seem to whip the body forward. The lithe backbone coils and releases like a spring, but the bend is almost unnoticeable, so fluid is the motion. The hind feet tread in line behind the forefeet, unlike dogs, whose hind feet slap down
beside
the forefeet. When a wolf is walking, its hind feet step right into the impressions left by the forefeet; the movement is spare and economical. A wolf effortlessly travels thirty miles in a day. David Mech followed a pack on Isle Royale that covered 277 miles in nine days.
    The gray female was a disperser, a wolf that had left her natal pack somewhere far to the north and gone wandering. In this mountainous environment, wolves may disperse as far as five hundred miles. It is still not well understood why they sometimes leave their packs. Perhaps this wolf was driven south by some inherited longing to breed and have her own pack, and couldn’t wait for the older females