I must have walked a mile down the snow-covered road before I noticed. There was so much else to watch for besides what lay at my feet: on the right, icy slopes rising to a girdle of pines and craggy summits beyond; on the left, Yellowstone's Lamar Valley, plunging down to the unseen river before rising through snowy wastes and clumps of naked aspens to yet more forests and mountains. And there was the howling.
The first wolf howl is special. It certainly makes you look up. I won't claim that it made the hair stand up on the back of my neck. I will say it was eerie and beautiful and utterly unforgettable. A second howl came, and maybe a third. And the sound echoed off the valley sides before it died away in a mournful diminuendo.
That was when I glanced down and saw the tracks. If there is no mistaking a wolf's cry, there is certainly no possibility of error when it comes to the creature's footprints. I squatted down, put my hand on the snow and found the print was both longer and wider. We were going in the same direction, too. A little further down the road, the valley was closing in and I saw deep tracks running down the hillside on the right, lots of them, all clearly wolves. On the left side of the road there was fur lying in clumps: grey crinkly hairs with a reddish tint – elk colour. The tracks, all confused and deep, continued down the hillside towards the river.
I scanned around with my binoculars. Back along the road, now a mile-and-a-half away, were the vehicles and the rest of the group. I could make out the figures stooping over the tripods that carry the wildlife-watching scopes, but not their direction of interest. A half-mile up ahead, however, where the road turned and disappeared around a rocky cornice, I could see two men with scopes trained on the hillside to my left across the river.
I began to scan that hillside methodically: each aspen clump, each rock, each ridge in the snow. It took a full five minutes before I finally saw my first wolf. It was at least half a mile away, sitting very still, a dog-shaped dot, apparently staring directly at me. As I watched, a second animal appeared, a black one, and bounded effortlessly up the hillside towards some rocks, where I then spotted a third, silver grey like the first. For a second or two, the black wolf was motionless and I saw the flash of red around his jaws. Bloodstains. Then he vanished.
They do that. Wolves are in your sights. They play like puppies. They sit and lie. Then, quite abruptly, they step away and are gone. A week later you might hear of the animal many miles away. Yellowstone wolves have turned up in Colorado and Utah, 400 miles from home. It is perhaps this mercurial nature, at once doggedly familiar and dangerously unpredictable, that fascinates us. Barry Lopez who wrote the classic wolf book, Of Wolves and Men, recounts a tradition of the Bella Coola Indians from British Columbia in which a magician tries to change all animals into humans but only succeeds in giving the wolf a human stare.
Yellowstone, the world's oldest national park, is the best place to see wolves in the wild – as well as many of the other iconic American animals such as bison, coyote, moose and elk. And in winter the wolves are at their most visible, stark against the snowfields, and also engaged in travelling around to meet possible mates. When I say most visible, I mean to the trained eye: drive through the park unprepared and you may well see nothing.
That was why I chose to spend a few days with Linda Thurston and Nathan Varley, two highly experienced wildlife researchers who run wolf and wildlife retreats. These combine spotting the animals with lectures and showshoe forays away from the roads. Its a remarkable package, giving unprecedented access to wildlife, particularly wolves. Participants stay deep in the park in a group of old, but very cosy, log cabins that were once on a buffalo ranch. Each night I stood on my veranda, watching the moonlight twinkling on the snow and listening to the howling of wolves.
Nathan was born and brought up in Yellowstone – his parents were both park rangers; Linda studied Canadian wolves and became the person who, in 1995, opened the gates to release the first batch of wolves back into the Yellowstone wilderness after an absence of 70 years.
That seminal moment was the climax of a century of agitation and complaint against the policy of lupine eradication, a brutal campaign begun almost as soon as white men arrived in America. Early settlers had brought with them an antipathy bred in the dark European forests of myth and legend, plus a long record of extermination.
In Britain that policy was still not yet quite complete – the last Scottish wolf being killed by all accounts in 1743 on the upper reaches of the River Findhorn, the last Irish one in 1786 at Mount Leinster. English wolves had not been a problem since the 10th century and the days of King Edgar the Peaceable, when criminals could pay fines in wolf tongues.
With New World colonisation, however, came a war on wolves: an estimated 2 million were killed in the last 30 years of the 19th century, mostly by strychnine poisoning, some by the deliberate lacing of carcasses with mange. The peoples whose land was being simultaneously stolen also found themselves lumped together with the wolf as a threat. In Massachusetts in 1638 a law forbade the discharging of guns in the towns, unless to kill a wolf or an Indian.
When, by the 1920s, Yellowstone's wolves were finally gone, an explosion in elk population quickly damaged Yellowstone's delicate eco-system of willow beds, forests and meadows. As for the tribes who had fitted into this scene so seamlessly for centuries, the US cavalry had chased them off 40 years earlier – even as the first tourist groups arrived.
Turning away from my hillside of wolves, I walked back towards Nathan. He told me which packs had been present that morning.
"There were three up there on the right, out of sight from where you were," he said. He pointed to the left. "The four you saw were two females from Agate Pack and two males from Molly's Pack. Those females were with a wolf called Big Blaze yesterday, and so there's a possibility that these new males killed him."
A seasoned wolf-watcher like Nathan can recognse individual animals and packs, but researchers from the Yellowstone Wolf Project can home in on animals that carry numbered radio collars. As we chatted, Rick McIntyre from the project drove up and asked if anyone had spotted 691, a young female from Druid Pack – possibly the most famous pack of wolves in the world after various television documentaries about them. (Bob Landis, the cameraman on many such films, would be one of the expert speakers during our stay.)
"The signal is in this area," said Rick, "but we can't pinpoint it. I think the animal might be dead."
No one had any news. I was aware of how the wolf drags you into its story. Like some much-loved but wayward relative, they are tender and playful, but also make sudden changes and get into terrible scrapes. They can be utterly loyal, mating for life, or they can run away and never be seen again. The observer is caught up in the narrative. What will happen next?
The four-day course wasn't all about wolves, though. Each afternoon we did a snowshoe expedition, a chance to get the real flavour of the wild backcountry in winter. Nathan pointed out tracks: weasels, squirrels and voles.
Coyotes bounded away; elk eyed us warily; a woodpecker carried on burying his stock of pine seeds in a dead tree, oblivious to my presence.
One afternoon a few of us went to Pebble Creek, a jewel-like canyon where we snowshoed over the mountain river, invisible beneath ice and snow, yet audible. "This is mountain lion [or cougar] territory," Nathan told me, "not wolves." There are an estimated 20 lions in Yellowstone, but they are so rarely seen that Nathan has, in 41 years, seen only one. The landscape was utterly still, the trees laden with snow, nothing moving.
Further up Lamar Valley, we passed steaming rivers and fumaroles, the air thick with sulphurous gases. Buffalo were nosing in the snow for tussocks of grass, while on the surrounding crags bighorn sheep grazed on cliff ledges.
That night our lecturer was another seasoned star of the wolf world: Doug Smith, who guided the animal's reintroduction to Yellowstone. As he pointed out, the success of the wolf has led, in the winter of 2009-10, to a development unforeseen by environmentalists. "We now have a situation where Montana, Idaho and Wyoming have restarted wolf-hunting, and some of our Yellowstone individuals were killed in the last few weeks on the park boundary."
In Wyoming, where wolf-hatred runs high, state and federal laws are at loggerheads, one declaring the wolf vermin, the other calling them an endangered species. In Yellowstone, home of the geographic continental divide, the splits in American society are also evident.
Nobody was pleased to see our last day arrive, but we had been blessed with wolf-sightings every morning and afternoon. "We don't guarantee wolves," says Nathan, 'But we do see them a lot."
Not everyone was happy, however. Rick McIntyre had still to locate his lost wolf. "The signal is up near your ranch," he explained when we bumped into him on the road. "She's up there somewhere."
It was late afternoon when we got back to the camp from our last session of wolf-watching. People were chilly. Everyone was looking forward to another great dinner from Zac, the chef. That was when a shout went up.
"Hey! Come over here!"
One of the Yellowstone Association volunteers, Don, was crouching down looking under a cabin next to mine. We all ran up. Lying in the two-foot space between cabin floor and frozen earth was a wolf.
She was long dead and quickly identified as 691, the lost individual. What could have made a human-shy creature crawl into the heart of a camp and lie down to die under a cabin? Like with all compelling stories there was an element of mystery to this one. Only when Rick and the park rangers arrived did we get a preliminary assessment: wounds to the throat suggesting death by other wolves. It was not a happy ending for this creature, but at least she had avoided death at the hands of humans, the fate of most of her kind.
Later that night I woke and glanced at my clock – 3am. Outside I could see moonlight. I got up, pulling on my boots and jacket, then went out and stood on the veranda. It was a perfectly still night, the air sharp as a knife. I listened and then it came, the howl, a sound full of the desolation of a lonely animal on a snowy mountain. No voice from the animal world can touch us like that of the wolf, I thought, and despite the cold I stood there another five minutes. The wolf has made a welcome return to Yellowstone, but its future, as ever, is intricately intertwined with our own. Simply by being present each and every wolfwatcher demonstrates a commitment to wolf survival that helps in the conservation effort. Eventually the cold drove me back into the cabin, back to the blessed warmth of the sleeping bag. But as I lay down ready to sleep again, the sound came: that slow rising moan that swelled, then faded.
