He was the alpha male of the first pack to live in Oregon since 1947. For years, a state biologist tracked him, collared him, counted his pups, weighed him, photographed him, and protected him. But then the animal known as OR4 broke one too many greedy Ranchers rules.
It’s the nature of the wolf to travel. By age two, wolves of both sexes usually leave their birth packs and strike out on their own, sometimes covering hundreds of miles as they search for mates and new territory. Whatever the reason, when wolves move, they do it with intent—and quickly. Humans don’t know how they decide which way to go, but the choice is as important as any they’ll ever make.
In Oregon, that male met another long-distance traveler from Idaho, a silver-gray female. This wolf had been collared by Idaho state biologists, who knew her as B300. She was born to the Timberline Pack, north of Idaho City, and it’s possible to trace her ancestry back to the state’s formal wolf reintroduction in 1996. Her great-grandmother was B23, a black wolf who was born in northern British Columbia and who dined as a pup on moose and caribou in the boreal forest. B23 was captured and moved in January of 1996 to Dagger Falls, in Idaho’s Frank Church River of No Return Wilderness. She would give birth to almost 30 pups before she was killed by federal wildlife officials in 2001 for killing a calf.
In the summer of 2006, when B300 was collared, she was probably already feeling restless. In September, two members of her pack were shot by wildlife officials after they killed a sheep and a dog. By late fall, she’d made the choice to strike out on her own. She too went west and crossed the Snake into territory as yet unclaimed by wolves.
The black wolf and B300 mated for the first time in December of 2006 or 2007—nobody knows when exactly. They settled in the high timber of the Wallowa Mountains, a kingdom of pines and wildflowers and cow pies that curves like a palisade around the agricultural communities of Joseph and Enterprise. They made a den inside a huge felled ponderosa and cared for their first round of pups, born blind and helpless in early spring. They were now officially a pack, the first to exist in Oregon for nearly 60 years.
The black wolf and B300 had been preceded by a few other wolves in Oregon, but they were the first to establish roots and start breeding. A male showed up in 1999, and its existence so perplexed state officials that they captured it, put it in a crate, and sent it back to Idaho. Still, everybody knew deportation wouldn’t work in the long run. Wolves were inevitably going to return.
Eventually, the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife (ODFW) hired a biologist to deal with this trickle of immigrants: Russ Morgan, a lifetime wildlife manager and backwoodsman based in La Grande. While the black wolf was busy slaying elk in the Wallowas to feed his new pups, Morgan was driving the back roads of eastern Oregon at night, literally howling into the dark, looking for wolves.
Morgan, now 54, is a tracker and a hunter, by trade and spiritual avocation. He grew up outside of Bend, going after lizards with a BB gun. His native ecosystem is the juniper and sage high desert of central Oregon, a beautiful place to learn the ways of nature. He would ramble all day in the bush and come home for dinner covered in juniper pitch.
Comments
Read this when it came out – just a touch hagiographic.
I’ve meet and I hope subtly influenced Mr. Morgan, with genetic innformation and other material. While his background is similar to many people who were also rural born ( most boys are curious about killing, and we all have been chhanged by doing it in the ages between four and 13 or so.
Some of us were not lucky enough to be influenced by relatives and/or mentors who helped us focus on the organism being killed, seeing that it too, had a life exactly like our own.
Mr. Morganreminded me of my older brother, who raised his power to kill to a right.
Yet, there remains something in Morgan that recognizes suchh imperatives as the balance of nature, however mistaken the idea of human monivores runing around withh guns.
I posted a comment with a scientific link the other day, that showed that wolves and other true predators are attracted to the smell of a molecule that’s present in all mammalblood (I am not sure if it’s in crustacean or other blood – some major parts of some blood is pretty far different tan that we know), and also used subtle nonconscious foot balance showing that humans, like any omnivore or herbivore, is repelled by it.
Anyway, Mr. Morgan’s wildlife management position is an extremely difficult one, caught between the “I wanna kill everything” relationsip to nature of many of the urban-dependent Euroamerican (nearly ALL of them are , as they make their money and living both getting it from tecnhological culture, and selling their products for a profit – an act unnatural to the original peoples of this continent.
(THe comment box here is tiny, so I” probably have many mistakes . Apology)
Dick Thiel, Dave Mech, and so many othher people I’ve run into, all walk the line , and all seem to necessarily have no indigenous-type recognition that the wolf is a highly social, intelligent animal who cares for their own, feels sorrow and loss (i’ll get to this, if not in this comment), and whose awareness largely differs from ours because deep deception and self-deception is not a part of their psyche, while being integral to the human.
Another difference, is in reciprocity; while the wolf is acutely aware of fairness, and may judge friendliness of intimates by it, they generally seem to have only a hierarchy of preference, while our kind will surreptitiously cheat and very sharply weighh from a point of view of ourselves.
THis is difficult to elaborate without reference to repeated actions of many different individuals.
But let suffice to say that we gauge relationship value on our private PRECEPTIONS of the weigt of what is givven by one to another, not just the fact that sharing occurs.
Anyway, Morgan’s job was profoundly difficult, and I do feel that he had some basic reverence for the lives of wolves, although as is usual, humans elevate their own economic, commercial interests over the actual lives of ANY nonhuman.
Russ did a pretty good job in the face of lies I heard by Eurogreedy humans who pulled out as much trash as did tat “Uh-thot-it-wuz-a kyote-AND-it-wuz gonna-kill-me-BANG!” 4-wheelin’ machine “hunter”)