Wolf takes leading role in real-life drama
Tale about death of beloved O-Six at the hands of a hunter stirs debate about preservation
Novelists dream of creating a character like O-Six.
Noble, ferocious, maternal, the alpha-female heroine of Nate Blakeslee’s “American Wolf ” all but vaults off the page — haunches poised, teeth bared — as she and her pack roam the territory around Yellowstone National Park’s picturesque Lamar Valley. Admirers have likened his 2017 book (recently out in paperback) to “East of Eden,” “Game of Thrones” and, perhaps most telling, a modern-day Jack London novel.
But every word here is true. Since the federal government first reintroduced wolves into the park in 1995, the fate of mankind’s ancient canine rival has become one of the most heated debates west of the Rocky Mountains. In recounting O-Six’s story, “American Wolf ” brushes against a bushel of contentious issues regarding hunting, environmental politics, wildlife conservation, even the rapidly expanding field of leisure known as ecotourism.
And for Western politicians, “being against wolves has become sort of like gun control,” explains Blakeslee. “It’s a way of signaling to voters what kind of candidate you are, and what you stand for. As long as it’s useful in that way, it permits us from moving beyond the debate and reaching some sort of resolution that everyone can be happy with.”
All this from an animal whose death in December 2012, during Wyoming’s first official wolf-hunting season in decades, made headlines worldwide. Her obituary, as it were, ran in the New York Times, where it caught Blakeslee’s attention. He flashed back to his college-age summer jobs around Jackson — where he first fell in love with the area — and then to the week he spent “wolf-watching” at Yellowstone in 2007.
Reading about O-Six’s demise “put the hook into me,” he says.
“Who could have anticipated that one of the very first animals killed in that first legal wolf-hunting season, (which) people had been fighting over for 10 years, that when it finally occurred it would be one of the park’s favorite animals (and) arguably one of the most famous wild animals in the world?”
A writer at large for Texas Monthly, Blakeslee captures certain scenes in “American Wolf ” — wherein O-Six and her kin warily eyeball nearby grizzlies, or rend the flesh of a rival pack — in such fine detail readers can practically smell the fear oozing from a panicking elk. This he credits to hundreds pages of notes taken by the park rangers and amateur observers who made O-Six, at the time, perhaps the world’s most-documented wolf.
“It really was like reading the diary of a wolf pack; there was all this amazing material,” says Blakeslee of this vast trove of wolf-related data. “I mean, there was a lot of really mundane material in there, too; wolves spend a lot of the day just sort of lying around sleeping. But if you were willing to read through the whole thing, there was some amazing behavior in there, too.”
Blakeslee’s book comes along at a time when, however precariously, the tide of public opinion seems to be turning back in the favor of wolves, sworn enemies of farmers and ranchers for centuries.
“Every gain that humans have made in the last thousand years in the Northern Hemisphere has come at the expense of gray wolves,” he says, “and that’s mainly because human civilization, as it spread, became dependent on raising livestock. Wolves were perceived as the main threat that had to be overcome in order for that type of civilization to spread.”
Among the homo sapiens, the hero of “American Wolf ” is unquestionably Rick McIntyre, a ranger who came to Yellowstone after years of studying wolves at Denali National Park in Alaska. Present from the beginning of the reintroduction project, McIntyre spent so much time watching Yellowstone’s wolves, writes Blakeslee, that whether he was wearing his uniform or not was pretty much the only way to tell if he was on or off duty.
In the process, he quickly became recognized as one of the world’s leading wolf authorities, whose enthusiastic way of communicating his wealth of lupine knowledge to the park’s visitors became legendary. Blakeslee chuckles when considering this otherwise retiring, enigmatic man.
“I’m not sure I really cracked the nut that is Rick McIntyre, but I did my best,” he says.
“He is this endless fount of wolf folklore,” adds the author. “He can point to almost any wolf you see in the park and tell you where that wolf was born, who its parents were, where its parents were born, these signature milestones in its life. He’s become adept at weaving these amazing stories by the side of the road, just talking to visitors about things that he’s seen.”
A maverick from the word go, McIntyre’s activities — such as actively helping Yellowstone’s visitors seek out wolves rather than simply spouting off a bunch of facts about them — frequently baffled or even rankled the park’s higher-ups. The park’s wolves have now joined Old Faithful and Tower Falls as part of the Yellowstone must-see tour.
Wolf-watching became “such a rewarding and amazing thing for visitors that I think (officials) realized that it wasn’t gonna go away, and gradually, they accommodated them more selves to that,” says Blakeslee.
“And now Rick is a valued member of the team,” he adds. “He’s someone that not only helps visitors find wolves, but he helps the biologists spot wolves when they’re doing studies. When they’re trying to count wolves (or) collar wolves, Rick is part of that team.”
Bonus tourism notwithstanding, the original reason for wolves’ reintroduction was simple enough: federal wildlife officials were looking for a more efficient way of keeping the park’s elk population under control. Restoring a more natural predator-prey relationship touched off a phenomenon known as a “trophic cascade,” a series of chain reactions that has resulted in a more balanced ecosystem — less damage to trout and beaver habitats, for example, or the sharp increase in both rodents and the birds of prey who eat them that appeared when wolves began chasing off the park’s coyotes.
But the region’s greater wolf numbers also inevitably attracted the attention of its sizable population of big-game hunters. One such individual is the man who shot O-Six in December 2012. Blakeslee pseudonymously calls him Steven Turnbull; this man emerges as the book’s antihero, if not an outright villain. He’s just an experienced hunter who “couldn’t remember the last time he bought beef at a grocery store,” Blakeslee writes.
Eventually Blakeslee arranges a meeting with Turnbull (or vice versa, accurately) at the hunter’s cabin outside Crandall, Wyo., not far from where he shot O-Six. Its walls are filled with impressive photos of elk, moose, antelope and bear kills, Blakeslee notes.
Turnbull is polite but unremorseful, saying of O-Six, “She didn’t tell me she was famous before I shot her.”
The hunter tells Blakeslee about the pistol he carried for protection after getting word of the considerable backlash against the wolf ’s death and the surreal scene that played out as he watched O-Six’s pack mourn their fallen matriarch. Eventually he brings out the wolf ’s pelt and tells his guest, “Now, that’s a trophy.”
“I reflected on it later,” says Blakeslee. “He and I were both standing there in that cabin, and then he was looking at this pelt and feeling very proud, and I was looking at it and feeling very dismayed.”
That’s also when Blakeslee realized just how ripe O-Six’s story really was.
“It’s a bigger story than just a man shooting a wolf,” he says. “It’s about values, it’s about how people think about wildlife, it’s about how people think about the West in general and what it’s for.”
The half-decade or so since O-Six’s death have been marked by a long string of federal court decisions and state-level challenges alternately extending and retracting rules safeguarding America’s wolves. The Yellowstone reintroduction program has been a resounding success, but only because these animals have been extended certain protections that could all too easily evaporate, Blakeslee cautions.
“I would say the northern Rockies population is stable,” he offers. “But I think that’s partly due to pressure from environmentalists trying to make sure there are limits on hunting and limits to how many wolves are taken to protect livestock. Absent that pressure, I’m not sure how stable that population would remain.”