The Return of the Lobo

So you have heard how a young Aldo Leopold helped kill the wolves of these mountains, and how it turned him around. Now let me give you the other half of it — the half with an ending — because it is happening out there in that blue country while you drive past.

The wolf Leopold watched die was a Mexican gray wolf. El lobo. The smallest and most southerly of the gray wolves, a lean, long-legged desert animal, and for a long stretch of the last century the most thoroughly doomed large mammal in North America.

Because the campaign Leopold had been a small part of was ferociously effective. This was not casual hunting. The federal government ran an organised extermination — professional hunters on salary, bounties, and above all poison, strychnine baits scattered across the Southwest by the thousand, which killed the wolves and also the coyotes, the eagles, the bears and anything else that came to a carcass. It went on for decades and it was meant to finish the job.

It very nearly did. By the nineteen seventies there was not one Mexican gray wolf running wild in the United States. Not a pack. Not a pair. Not one. Where there had been howling in these mountains for ten thousand years, there was nothing. The fierce green fire, put out across an entire range.

And then a strange, last-minute thing happened. The same government that had spent fifty years killing them turned around and hired a trapper — one of the best predator hunters alive — to go into Mexico and catch the last of them ALIVE. He found and caught a handful. Four or five animals, depending on how you count, and a few already in captivity. That was the entire species. Every Mexican gray wolf on earth today descends from that tiny group of survivors, which is a thin thread to hang a species on.

They bred them, carefully, in captivity, for twenty years, keeping the bloodlines apart and waiting.

And in nineteen ninety-eight the day came. Right HERE. In the Blue Range, in the country off your left window, in the very forest where Leopold shot that mother wolf — they brought the crates in and opened the doors and let the lobo go home. First wild Mexican wolves in the United States in a generation.

Now I will not tell you it has been smooth, because it has not, and the people who live down in that country would call me a liar. Wolves have been shot illegally. Wolves have killed calves, and for a rancher running a thin margin on hard country that is not a philosophical matter, it is his year's income walking off in the night. There have been lawsuits, and political fights, and genuine anger on all sides, and it is not settled now.

But the wolves have held on. From those few animals in crates, there are now something over two hundred Mexican gray wolves running wild across these mountains and the ones next door, denning, raising pups, and doing what the mountain has been missing.

So here is the picture I will leave you with. Tonight, somewhere out in that blue distance you are looking at, a lobo will put her head back and howl, and another one a ridge over will answer her. In the same forest. On the same ground where a young man once watched that fire go out of a wolf's eyes and spent the rest of his life trying to explain what he had done.

It went out here. It got lit again here. Not many stories get to finish like that.