Status Updates From The Rise of Wolf 8: Witness...

If the Crystal Creek wolves had good pup survival for another year or two, they could come back north and try to reclaim their original territory. That would involve a rematch against the Druid wolves, and meant Wolf 21, now the primary defender of the Druid pack, would have to fight his uncle, Wolf 8's largest brother, who at 141 pounds was the largest wolf in Yellowstone.

Wolf 41 was often the pack's main grizzly deterrent. When spotting a bear, she would charge, run off when chased, then circle back to continue harassing it. She would get behind the grizzly, nip its read end, then come back and do it again. Able to outrun any bear, the long-suffering wolf, who was picked upon by her aggressive older sister, seemed to relish those as though she was showing off.

Those of us on the hill looked at each other with stunned expressions, then talked about the incredible sighting we just witnessed. The victory of the undersized Wolf 8 against his huge opponent was the most amazing thing any of us had ever seen in the wild. A classic underdog, Wolf 8 went from being the smallest of all the male wolves brought down from Canada to being the champion of his region of Yellowstone.

When I later had sightings of the five-member Druid pack, I concentrated on watching the large, alpha male, the one who had torn apart his metal cage. He had probably killed the Crystal Creek alpha. As a park ranger, I tried to restrain my natural inclination to dislike Wolf 38, but it was hard to be objective.

As the wolf packs became more settled in the park, then aspen trees near the original wolf pen were producing tens of thousands of surviving shoots each spring, which soon formed a forest nearby as dense as a bamboo thicket. Willows also began to flourish along Crystal Creek, and beaver, which need aspen and willow trees for food and building materials, moved in and colonized the area.

That evening I saw three species that were on the endangered species list at that time: grizzly bear, bald eagle, and wolf. Neither the bear nor the eagle paid any attention to the wolf, but I would later see both species greatly benefit by having wolves back in the park. Both are scavengers, and we realized that the increase in their Yellowstone populations came partly from the free meat they got from wolf kills.

Thoreau mourned he had to live in an incomplete land. He went on to say, "I listen to a concert in which so many parts are missing." The most prominent of those missing sounds was the howling of wolves. Yellowstone in 1994 was the same as Thoreau's native land of Massachusetts. There was an unnatural silence in the park, a silence uninterrupted by the sounds of those wolves. But that silence was about to be broken.