Badluck Way: A Year on the Ragged Edge of the West by Bryce Andrews Read Free Book Online Page B

than anywhere else in the valley. At the top of the ecosystem, grizzlies and wolves grew fat, multiplied, and dispersed to new territories. In the parlance of biologists, the Sun Ranch was known as a “population source.”
    “In other words,” he said, “it’s extremely goddamn important.”
    By way of example, he told me how the first wolves to recolonize the Madison Valley after their 1995 reintroduction to Yellowstone had made a home on the Sun. They had come out of the park in search of a place with the right mix of prey, topography, and emptiness. Out of the immense landscape that surrounds the Madison River, they took up residence on the ranch, dug in, and began to multiply. The pack grew until it numbered somewhere around ten wolves. In time, a biologist from the department of Fish, Wildlife & Parks managed to dart and collar a member of the pack. From then on, something was known of the movements of the Taylor Peak Pack, which they named after a mountain not far to the north.
    With telemetry units clicking, ranch hands and biologists could follow the wolves across the drainages of the ranch and record the number, timing, and position of elk kills. A few of the elk got collars, too, as part of a study designed to explore predator-prey interactions.
    Things went well for a while. The radio collars recorded the Taylor Peak wolves’ perfect adaptation to a harsh environment. Researchers listened in as the pack followed elk into the uppermost reaches of the Lee Metcalf Wilderness. Occasionally a lucky intern or graduate student got to watch the ancient, evolutionary game of the hunt play out, the elk pounding across the open southern faces of the hills, the wolves in hot pursuit, straining their lungs and legs to keep up. Not far below, livestock continued to graze peacefully on the ranch.
    Then came 2003: As spring gave way to summer, the elk headed for higher ground. Instead of tagging along, the wolvesstuck around and crossed the river to Sun West, where hundreds of sheep were being used to control noxious weeds. One bloody night left a handful of carcasses on the ground. The wolves found sheep killing so easy they could not give it up. By the end of summer, the Taylor Peak Pack’s alpha female had been gunned down from a USDA helicopter, and her offspring had been scattered throughout the valley.
    The following summer was worse. Cows died. Wolves died. Attrition. In the end, the whole pack was wiped out with shotgun blasts from a helicopter door.
    After the extermination of the Taylors, the south end of the Madison stayed quiet for a year. When wolves began turning up again, people assumed that they had come across from Yellowstone. The Wedge Pack, Steve concluded, was a wholly different group of animals, and he hoped that they would come to a different end.
    “Enough about the wolves,” Steve said. “I’ll tell you about the movie star who owned that place before Roger.”
    He started in, suggesting that I take what I heard with a grain of salt, since most of the stories had been passed around the bars and kitchen tables of Ennis a few times. It was hard to say what had really gone on out there, since few people had access to the ranch until Roger bought it. Still, in a valley like the Madison, stories got around.
    The previous owner had made his fortune as the leading man in a series of early-nineties shoot-’em-up movies. The way Steve heard it, this action hero liked to fly his buddies in and turn them loose on the ranch. One of the regulars was especially fond of hot-rodding across the Sun in a lifted, tinted black Suburban—amonster truck. The guy rumbled across the North End, bouncing in and out of the old ditches and over the cairns built by Depression-era shepherds. He packed a handgun big enough to match the truck and blazed away at whatever caught his eye.
    The legal targets would have been bunchgrass, cow pies, cans rusted and new, occasional shed antlers, rabbits, old homesteads, and coyotes.