(2 of 3)
When Askins speaks, the setting can resemble an old-style western movie, several scenes before the shoot-out. She has blue eyes and long brown hair, and her manner is that of the pretty, courageous schoolmarm standing up for truth and decency in words the fearful townspeople would just as soon not hear. Yes, she says, wolves get their living by killing. No, they are not sweet and docile. Yes, stockmen are having a hard time economically. "But if we can't preserve wildness in Yellowstone, where can we preserve it?"
Hunting outfitters and stockmen scuff their cowboy boots in the dirt, unconvinced, as Askins talks. Some of them like to draw a line between Eastern ecobabblers, who puff wolves as gallant symbols of wildness, and true Westerners, who know them as cruel and cowardly and who can be relied on to "shoot, shovel and shut up," as the brag goes in the cowboy bars. But, Brad Little, a stockman from Emmett, Idaho, concedes, "It's not so much wolves we're afraid of, it's wolf managers." Exactly. The wolves themselves, though they are sure to range beyond park boundaries, are likely to be more an annoyance than a danger to farmers. In northern Minnesota, where some 1,200 wolves forage in a cattle-ranch and sheep-farm area, the highest annual payoff by a Government program set up to compensate stockmen for wolf kills has been a modest $21,000. (Problem wolves there are killed by federal hunters, as would be true around Yellowstone.) There have been no documented cases in modern times of wolves attacking people in the U.S. But it is taken as a home truth that wolves will bring federal wolf bureaucrats, whose regulations will drive honest ranchers nuts. Carl Haywood, legislative assistant to Idaho Republican Senator James McClure, says voters fear that the wolf will be used as a surrogate by environmental extremists, whose real agenda is "getting ranchers, miners, loggers and motorized recreationists off public lands."
U.S. Representative Wayne Owens, a Utah Democrat, has 76 cosponsors for a bill calling for wolf reintroduction, but its chances are dodgy unless lawmakers from the Yellowstone states change their minds. This may happen; polls show that voters favor the idea. Wyoming Republican Senator Alan Simpson, once an antiwolf diehard, talked like a moderate at a recent hearing on Owens' bill and says only, "Let's take care of grizzlies first." He means get the bears off the endangered species list and out from under federal protection, so they can be shot beyond park boundaries.
The wolf's listing as an endangered species is the important difference between a Park Service plan and one floated by Idaho's Senator McClure. McClure has a problem, which is that wolves have been sighted frequently in central Idaho. If packs from Canada establish themselves in Idaho, as they have in Montana's Glacier National Park, they will be protected as an indigenous endangered species. Instead, McClure's plan would de-list wolves immediately, and let state game laws treat them as predators, outside designated havens in Idaho's Selway-Bitterroot Wilderness and in Glacier and Yellowstone parks. Environmental groups support the park strategy, which would de-list wolves only after ten breeding pairs are established in Yellowstone and Glacier parks and the Idaho wilderness.