Wolves roam through our racial memory, howling beyond the firelight, scaring the hell out of us. But they no longer roam in Yellowstone National Park, except as rare transients, prowling south from Canada. The last resident wolves in the big park were exterminated by Government hunters by the late 1920s. That was a time when animals were thought to be good (elk and bison, for instance) or bad. Wolves had been pursued in the West as if they were not merely bad, but evil. Cattlemen lost entire herds to harsh winters, then spent enormous, irrationally large sums of money taking vengeance on wolves. Barry Lopez, in his haunting book Of Wolves and Men, tells of wolves drenched with gasoline and set afire, wolves pulled apart by horses. You can't dismember an April blizzard.
Should the gray wolf, today an endangered species in most of the U.S., be re-established in Yellowstone? An old stockman at a meeting at Laramie, Wyo., shakes with rage at the notion; the idea is like reintroducing smallpox. But to wolf partisans, the bedrock argument is a brooding, circular truth: without wolves, there are no wolves. These complex, mysterious animals are their own justification. Beyond that, biologists see predators as balance wheels in ecosystems. No wolves mean too many elk, which is what Yellowstone has now, starving by the thousands in winter die-offs.
Yellowstone can seem grand and wild, or it can resemble a big, hokey theme park, an example of what happens when man meddles too much with nature. Policies shift with political winds, and under former National Park Service director William Penn Mott, a wolf enthusiast, Yellowstone officials pushed hard for the wolf's reintroduction. Now Mott has been replaced by fence-sitter James Ridenour, and political pressure is reaching Yellowstone. Two weeks ago, a traveling Park Service slide show on wolf reintroduction was canceled. An elaborate study asked for by Congress seems certain, when it is released at year's end, to recommend the return of wolves, but political maneuvering has blocked the drafting of the necessary environmental-impact statement. The major national environmental groups support wolf reintroduction, and one, the Defenders of Wildlife, is raising $100,000 to reimburse stockmen in the northern Rockies for livestock the wolves might kill. Last month Defenders agreed to pay $1,700 to cattlemen for kills by a wolf pack that had migrated from Canada into Montana.
Natural migration probably cannot restock Yellowstone, which is why the political jostling goes on. Big, burly Dave Mech, widely accepted as the world's leading authority on wolves, says Yellowstone is ideal for Canis lupus. Alston Chase, the cantankerous philosopher who wrote Playing God in Yellowstone, thinks the U.S. has a moral obligation to return wolves to the park. But the wolves' most effective ally may be Renee Askins, 30, of Moose, Wyo., a wildlife ecologist who stumps for an advocacy group she founded called the Wolf Fund.