The Company of Wolves Read Free Page A

in her pack to die off. Perhaps she was chased out of her pack by more aggressive siblings. Perhaps she was simply not social enough to stick with the pack and one day drifted into the pines and never looked back. No one can say what may have led her south. Wolves tend to go where wolves have gone before. There are den sites and trails in the Arctic that have apparently been used continuously for centuries. Her journey may have followed paths taken by generations of wolves, or she may have followed the borders of existing wolf territories until she stopped where there was no fresh scent of other wolves. Perhaps she was led by an ingrained ability to recognize good country, by some inherited mental pattern of the relationship between slope and tree cover and meadow and lake surface that over the millennia programmed wolves to settle where deer or elk or caribou or bison would also find sustenance. For whatever reason, she came into the drainage of the North Fork of the Flathead River, on the northern edge of Montana, and there she stayed.
    Why a lone wolf should have arrived in 1979, and not ten or twenty years before, may be easier to guess. Wolves had been persecuted in southern British Columbia and Alberta until the 1970s. They were poisoned until the 1960s, and no game laws restricted the hunting of wolves until the 1970s. In Alberta alone, more than fifty-four hundred wolves were destroyed in a rabies-control operationbetween 1952 and 1956. Wolves had been exterminated even from Banff National Park. But the poisoning stopped, and by the 1970s wolves were beginning to reappear there. It is likely that the gray female came from at least as far away as Banff. Habitat change might have helped draw her south. When logging companies clear-cut large swaths of forest in southern British Columbia and Alberta in the 1970s, they opened up new habitat to white-tailed deer. The deer proliferated, offering the wolves a food source they may have found newly sustaining. And in northern Montana, a series of mild winters gave an additional boost to the white-tailed deer population.
    For fifteen months after the wolf was trapped, the radio collar beeped out the solitary wolf’s locations in Glacier National Park and north of the border, in Canada. Skiing in winter or flying in small airplanes in summer, Boyd would locate the radio signal and plot the wolf’s movements on maps. Ream named the wolf Kishinena, after a creek in the northeastern corner of the park. From the airplane, Boyd occasionally saw the wolf, a gray shape loafing in the snow or heading for the cover of trees to hide from the airplane. “She was extremely elusive,” Boyd recalls. “Nobody ever saw her from the ground.
Nobody
. In winter, a lot of wolves, when they hit your ski tracks, will walk for a while in them, because it’s easier travel. She would never do that. When she hit your tracks, she would go back the way she came and go around them. Or she would jump over them.”
    Still, Boyd was getting to know the wolf, and getting a feeling for her engagement with the wider world. One winter day, Boyd happened onto her tracks in the snow. Usually she backtracked such trails, lest she scare the wolf or accustom it to human presence. That day, she followed the tracks and came upon the carcass of a moose calf minutes after Kishinena had killed it. She didn’t see the wolf, but the carcass was still steaming. The wolf had gnawed a small hole between the ribs of the moose and was starting to pull the entrails out when it heard the skidding sound of Boyd’s skis and darted into the pines.
    Realizing she had frightened the wolf away, Boyd took a quick look at the kill and left immediately. She waited four days before going back to the scene. When she got there, it was clear that Kishinena had not returned. Smaller tracks in the snow indicated that coyotes had eaten the moose calf.
    She found that coyotes often trailed the wolf, and even urinated on the same rocks and