The Shark and the Albatross Read online

  We watch the Druids for some hours, hoping that the lone wolf might return. Alongside us is a local cameraman, Bob Landis, who has worked here for years. He has an uncanny knack of being in the right place to film wolf behaviour. Like everyone else, Bob is generous with his knowledge. He says an essential skill for filming in Yellowstone is being able to find one of the few parking spots, and nipping into it quickly. It is an offence to stop anywhere else.

  A couple of visitors arrive and tell us they have been watching a black wolf teasing a bison, just around the corner. The grey interloper joined it and they played together in the snow before the black wolf waded into the river. For twenty minutes it chewed a carcass in the water. We know all this because the visitors photographed every stage and kindly came back to show us, once the wolves had gone. There can be few places in the world where more natural drama happens, and hardly any others where you know so precisely what you have missed.

  Snowflakes settle on my sleeve: ephemeral hexagonal beauties, melting away but soon replaced by larger clumps of snow, millions of tons of it, falling from the sky across the Rockies. It accumulates overnight and covers the bison where they sleep, as if they were boulders. We have yet to film any interesting wolf behaviour and the clock is ticking. We hope the heavy snow might keep the wolves in view a little longer, by making walking difficult, but when we see Rick the next morning he has bad news. Three of the radio collars are out of range and the signal from the fourth is so faint it could just be an echo bouncing off a mountainside. It seems the wolves have moved far away, despite the snow. This is what we have been dreading, that they will leave the valley and the area’s only road.

  The snow has made the tarmac treacherous. We drive slowly and come across several cars stuck in ditches. The bison are taking things slowly too, all of them are still asleep under the snow, except for one big bull who is almost invisible in the hole he has cleared to reach the grass, sweeping the snow away with his head while ice cakes his muzzle and his lashes.

  By the afternoon there’s a gale blowing. The sky, the ground and the trees have all turned white but it doesn’t matter, because the wolves are back. Perhaps they found the drifts were too deep to cross. The blizzard clears enough for us to glimpse them bedded down on the mountainside and showing no sign of moving. Even through a telescope they are easy to miss. It is best to look at them slightly askew, like searching the sky for a faint star. They have not left us after all and we may have another chance.

  That chance comes when the storm blows through. It’s Sunday morning and quiet on the road. Rick’s car is parked again at Round Prairie and so is Laurie’s. Nathan and I are the only other people there. It’s still almost dark. The forest is a shapeless mass whose shadows lie like blue icicles on the snow, but the radio collars’ signals show that all the collared wolves are hidden among the trees. Perhaps the whole pack is there.

  Rick is the first to see them: two wolves dart from the shadows and run across the flank of a small hill, almost a mile away, and merge with the dark shape of the rest of the pack. It is hard to see what is happening until a single large form breaks free and plunges down the slope into deeper snow: it’s a bull elk, dauntingly solid, deep-necked and fast, but the wolves are faster still. The whole pack streams after him, stretching out in huge bounds and disappearing to their bellies with every leap. The yearlings lead the chase, fast and light across the soft surface. In seventy metres they have caught up with the elk and are holding his neck, his flanks and rear. He wheels and bucks, trying to break their grip, sweeping them away with his antlers, but as each wolf leaps clear, more bind on.

  Beside me Rick’s soft voice calmly records the time and describes what is happening: ‘The bull’s head is down, a black wolf has him by the throat.’

  The elk stumbles twice and recovers but the third time there is no coming back. His head sinks, his antlers move with less force and the pack merges into a seething pool of darkness.

  ‘The killing grip: 302 on the throat,’ says Rick, emotionless. The tide of wolves rises and the elk vanishes as completely as if he had dissolved.

  None of us cheer the wolves’ success. We would look askance at anyone who did. A feeling, thinking animal has lost its life but the wolves have to kill in order to eat. In our past we have been there too: both as predators and as prey, though in the latter case only very rarely of wolves. Nathan and I had both hoped the elk would escape, even though filming a hunt is at the top of our list. Its last minutes were sanitised by the half-light and the distance, so we were spared the snapping teeth, the blood on the snow and the rattle of its dying, but we can too easily imagine being chased and pulled down by the pack.

  In a year only a handful of people will see a wolf pack catch an elk, and fewer still will ever film it. Today we are not among them: it was too dark for the camera. Rick notices that we are subdued and asks, ‘How was the light? Ah, I see – I’m sorry.’ We tell him how privileged we feel to have seen the hunt and his reply surprises us: ‘Many people would have cussed their luck instead of making the most of being here. You are setting a good example.’

  He turns back to his telescope, to record who gives way to who. It’s valuable data about the pack’s hierarchy, which may change as the younger wolves mature. He points out that while the others open the carcass and feed, 480 and 302 are waiting to one side: ‘Perhaps they have broken teeth or maybe the alpha male just figures he does not need to peel his own potatoes. He could be waiting for the best food.’

  Wolves are built like Olympic athletes and they carry almost no reserves of fat: otherwise it would be impossible to chase and bring down animals so much larger and stronger than themselves. The elk’s meat will be very lean too, which makes its fatty internal organs the wolves’ favourite parts.

  Now the ravens are coming, ten of them, black, like flakes of the night. Today is the thirteenth anniversary of the wolves returning to Yellowstone.

  As we learn more about the Druid pack and become better at identifying individuals, it’s satisfying to add our sightings to everyone else’s. Like all visitors to the park we must strike a crucial balance: watching the wolves but not changing what they do. Drivers can separate them by hurrying to intercept the pack when the wolves cross the road. This can leave some of the youngsters isolated, howling for the others, wasting precious energy and unable to hunt.

  More days go by, cold days spent scanning the hills but seeing little. We have one or two close encounters with the lone grey male who is still hanging around the fringes of the Druids, but the other wolves keep their distance. Ravens, perched like black pears in a tree on the far side of the valley, show us where the pack has killed during the night. They make up for the paucity of other birds in the winter by calling in a hundred voices. One crouches with his nape ruffled and knocks like a wooden glockenspiel, his wings jerking with the effort. He is calling others to feed.

  Since the snowstorm the wolves have not tried to leave the valley. After so many weeks trapped in the same place the elk must know them very well, but their knowledge does little to protect them in the dark.

  Spending our days by the roadside, looking for wolves, means we are meeting more people than I usually would when I’m filming wildlife. Some have little to say, except perhaps that they need the bathroom, ‘not imminently but, like, soon, you know?’ Others have strong opinions, like the rancher towing a snowmobile, who stops to ask what we are looking at.

  ‘There is a pack of wolves over there on the valley side.’

  ‘Darn things. Our ancestors tried real hard to be rid of them. Should never have been brought back.’

  Many people share his feelings. One of the first pairs of wolves to be released here soon left the park, and the male was shot by a man opposed to the reintroduction. He beheaded and showed off the corpse to make his point. When the heavily pregnant female denned nearby and gave birth to their pups, a team of biologists searched for the family and brought them back inside. One of those pups became the a
lpha male of the Druid pack.

  Some of my ancestors would most likely have agreed with the rancher. There is a place near my home in Scotland called Wolf Island. It has not seen a wolf in more than 400 years and most of the livestock farmers who have lived there since would have been glad about that, if they even knew. People wiped out Britain’s wolves by much the same means as they did in America, yet we have more in common with wolves than we care to admit: like us they live in extended families, showing great loyalty to their group and even cooperating to raise each other’s young. We share their darker side too, sometimes unleashing violence to defend or feed our families. No wonder the hunting tribes of North America admired these consummate predators, and no wonder herdsmen have always hated them. The earliest farmers found they could best protect their flocks by turning the wolves against themselves, taming and converting them into domestic dogs.

  Attitudes have been gradually changing and now, for many of us, wolves epitomise what wilderness means. People have discovered that they care whether wolves exist, not just to manage the elk population but for the same reason it’s good to know that Yellowstone exists: wild places and wild lives like these are ideas to cling to. In a fast-changing, man-made world they offer us the possibility of escape, even if we never take it up.

  Later, someone else pulls over on the roadside and tells me that she sometimes takes a captive-bred wolf into schools, as an ‘ambassador’ for his species. Before one such visit a class had drawn what they imagined the wolf would be like – all sharp teeth and snarls, like the wolves they knew from fairy tales. After meeting him the children drew quite different pictures: a wolf whose fur was soft, with bright eyes and enormous paws.

  The weather is bad again and Rick can see all the Druid wolves bedded down on a distant ridge. There is no more data for him to gather so we talk about his work. He describes it as being more like anthropology than zoology, as if he has come to live among a tribe in order to work out, just by watching them, why they behave the way they do. Wolves are profoundly affected by each other and they are so adaptable that on different days the same animal may make different choices, when to us the circumstances seem identical. This makes them endlessly fascinating to Rick. To show me what he means, he describes Dull-bar’s dilemma: as a junior female she has to choose between mating within her pack or looking outside. An outsider would be less closely related to her, so he’d make a better mate, especially if they could stay together and set up a new pack of their own. Her problem is that, in Yellowstone, all the territories are full and the established packs will attack new settlers. It would be safer for her to mate and then come home to have her pups, but playing safe also has its downside: to ensure that their own future pups won’t go hungry, the alpha pair will hound the pack’s other females, even their own daughters like Dull-bar, to prevent them giving birth to pups of their own.

  A few days later the wolves show us exactly what Rick means about their adaptability. Bob Landis has found a black wolf where the visitors had photographed one chewing the elk carcass in the river. By the time my assistant, Kathy, and I arrive the wolf has gone but the remains of the elk are still there, just one antler and a few bones. The channel is a few metres wide and at first glance it seems quite ordinary, then Bob points out other antlers showing above the water. Several elk have died here. There is something else unusual about this river: although the air is so cold it’s freezing the fingers inside our gloves, the surface is not completely iced over. Bob explains that the water is kept warm by a plume of magma underlying the park. There is less heat here than at the hot springs and geysers around Old Faithful, but it’s enough to keep the ice at bay. While we wait Bob describes how he has seen the park change since the wolves came back. The artificially high elk population has fallen by a half and the wolves’ numbers are now being limited by competition for food and by packs fighting over territory.

  We stop talking instantly: the lone grey interloper and a black female wolf have appeared from the trees. The male waits on the bank and watches her wade out to the sunken elk. A magpie flies to perch on its antlers, looking down as she chews the shoulder bone, but the wolf drops no scraps. Through the lens I can see her whiskers, covered in frost, and her amber eyes. She turns to look directly at me. It’s the first eye contact I have had with any of the wolves. After twenty electrifying minutes she wades ashore and they leave together.

  All this time I have been gripping the tripod’s handle. It is made of very cold metal and my fingers feel like icicles when I try to warm them inside the neck of my shirt. The nights here are much colder than this and the wolves spend them outside. Their fur must be superb. It’s a relief to pack up and put some warmth back into our legs by walking back to the cars, which is when we see what a terrible mistake we have made by leaving: a bull elk breaks from the forest, with the whole Druid pack hard on his heels. He makes it to the river just ahead of them, splashes into the water and lowers his antlers to hold them at bay. He is standing exactly where we were filming just now. The dead elk were not in that bend of the river by chance.

  We rush back up the road, furious with ourselves for giving in to the cold. The elk is still there, standing his ground with water up to his belly. The wolves are on both banks, surrounding him, but whenever they enter the river he thrashes the water with his hooves and lowers his antlers to stop them reaching his throat. The adults recognise the stalemate and move off to rest a few hundred metres away, but the yearlings and pups are reluctant to leave while there is such a large deer close by. Although they feint and rush at him, he always spins to present them with a face-full of antler tines. The alpha female rests her head on her paws and watches. It is easy to imagine that she has done this before and that she knows the elk will not be able to stand in the water for ever. He is chilling fast and when he leaves he will be weaker: so she waits.

  Gradually the yearlings lose interest until only one grey is left, lying on the bank. The elk judges his chance has come and he starts to walk slowly downstream, stepping absurdly high, as though he is tiptoeing away and hoping not to be noticed. When it seems that none of the wolves have seen him, he climbs the bank and makes for the trees. The grey yearling springs up and the other young wolves join her. They turn the elk and he bolts back to the river. Fifteen minutes later he tries again and this time most of the wolves barely raise their heads as he runs. Only the grey yearling chases him into the trees. The rest of the pack rouses and follow the same line until they disappear, far away. It’s all over.

  A group of visitors has accumulated around us during the drama and now we all stretch and blow on our hands. The others drift back towards their cars but this time Kathy and I linger, despite the gnawing cold. I can’t think what else to do and I still wish I had been here when the elk ran into the river. It would have been the perfect beginning to our sequence about how flexible and intelligent wolves are when they are hunting.

  The others have reached the cars and I am starting to wonder how much longer I can take the cold when the entire scene is played out again: the same bull elk charges from the trees, directly opposite the river, and the whole pack chases him straight towards the camera and into the water. It’s exactly the shot I had hoped for.

  This time the adults rest immediately and most of the younger wolves join them. The cold water saps more heat from the elk’s belly and legs. When the last young wolf drifts away he climbs out stiffly. There is ice glinting on his fur. To my surprise the wolves watch him go, until he reaches the forest and disappears. Only then does the alpha female lead the others to the river, where she sniffs the elk’s footprints thoroughly. She chooses the most recent set among the confusing mass of tracks and follows them, with her nose to the ground and her pack close behind. They enter the woods exactly where the elk did and this time they do not reappear.

  An event like this is almost impossible to predict, but with help from many people and a bit of luck we have managed to film the wolves hunting after all, and they have show
n us how adaptable a pack can be when it has a clever leader. Trapped in the valley, the elk have been learning to hold their dangerous neighbours at bay, but the wolves have been learning too. The alpha female especially seems to be playing a long game, testing the elk for weakness and coming to know many of them individually. Who knows what clues her extraordinary sense of smell has gathered about this bull’s condition, after his long spell in the water? Perhaps he will survive this latest test, but the wolves now know exactly how weak he is and where he is most likely to run next time.

  Snow starts to fall as we leave the valley, gently erasing the record of the drama by the river and wiping the page clean for tomorrow’s news.

  My last sight of the Druid pack is of the alpha male leading the way up a steep slope. He moves powerfully through the snow. At this range the wolves could be a line of people, with a father breaking trail for his family: fourteen of them following him, stepping exactly in his footprints. The whole pack apart from Dull-bar.

  She is on a different hillside with the lone male. They are bounding together through the powder and coming up for air like dolphins, in showers of white spray. Somehow the interloper has called her out from her pack, under the noses of her father and her uncle, much as the young 302 used to when he was known as Casanova. They chase each other along the skyline, pausing at a single pine to check it for scents. The male wags his tail and follows Dull-bar onward. Mountains fill the space beyond them, fresh cast in white metal and sharp in the intensely cold air. Every shadow is filled with reflected light.