Catching Luna, Part One

One day, I caught a wolf.

This week's victim: day planner. Also,
I can evidently only draw things looking
to the left. 

All my life, I have loved wolves. I ate up wolf documentaries when I was growing up, ran around on my hands and knees pretending to be a wolf, wrote silly little fiction stories featuring talking wolves, and doodled wolves all over every spare piece of paper that ever passed beneath my nose. Even now, when I'm having an important phone conversation with a coworker or supervisor, my right hand is usually doodling a running wolf or a mysterious wolf face or a vicious snarling wolf or wolf paw prints. Or sometimes just paws. Or noses. Or eyes. Disembodied wolf heads, or headless wolf bodies (with a random Lion King portrait thrown in). Usually,  it's a mess of all of the above, like wolf eyes on wolf legs and wolf noses sitting precariously atop Simba's mane. Sometimes this occurs on very important paperwork that must then be re-printed, re-filled out, and then put away before someone else calls me and I do it all over again.

In short, I was a "Wolf Groupie": probably one of the most common trendy wildlife-groupie societies, along with polar bears and killer whales.

I suppose you could say wolves are the reason I got into wildlife biology. To summarize four years of practical and emotional education at the University of Idaho, I very quickly discovered that a) wolves, though beautiful and intelligent, are not quite the romantic spiritual beasts we Wolf Groupies made them out to be, b) it is extremely difficult to actually make a career out of studying them, and c) a very wide swath of western American society hates them. Passionately. This swath also tends to have the opinion that the only people who care about wolves are city folk who know nothing about what it's like to live with them.

Sadly, I fell into this category. My first day of college I received the nickname "Wolfgirl" from the Idaho/Alaska residents in the dorm, and it wasn't a compliment.

me with Amani at WERC

But over time, my naivete was assuaged by full immersion into a good education and the realities of Idaho culture. In 2004, I applied for an internship at the Wolf Education and Research Center in Winchester, Idaho, which I described in the previous post; and after that my interests expanded into other carnivores and even non-carnivores (gasp!) like woodpeckers, bats, and bighorn sheep. It's extremely difficult to get jobs with pointy-toothed critters because every other bright-eyed city-girl-turned-wildlife-biology-student wants them, and for many years after I graduated, I took whatever wildlife jobs I could get.

However, I still harbored this insatiable desire to work with wolves. Thus, in 2007 I gave up a high-paying, somewhat stable job with the US Geological Survey working with bobcats and coyotes in southern California to move to Alpine, Arizona and help with Mexican wolf recovery. All for $15 per day, a free room in a trailer, and the oh-so-prestigious title of "volunteer".

I described one of these experiences in this post, where I hiked in to a radio-collared wolf to see if she had any pups. This was the female of the Luna Pack. The Luna Pack had been around for a while - that is, the project personnel had always had at least one pack member collared - but when I got on the job, the collared alpha male had disappeared and nobody knew what had happened to the rest of them. We wanted to get at least one other collar out there, so we spent some time surveying the area to find "hot-spots" where we might set some traps for Luna.

And then one day, in the dry, sandy Indian Creek streambed within the old Luna territory, I found tracks.

Other volunteers visited the site every few days to check again, and sure enough, the tracks kept on appearing. About a week later a couple of my coworkers set some traps. Another volunteer named James spent the first few days on the trapline, unsuccessfully, and then it was my turn.

 They came just in time to keep me
from turning savage

For a week I lived out in the Gila Wilderness, about two hours from the nearest "town" of Mogollon (and I use the term "town" very, very loosely here; the place had a cafe that served pie, and pretty much nothing else). I stayed in a little cabin at a Forest Service campground called Willow Creek. The cabin had no running water or electricity, only leaky propane lights on the walls and a semi-functioning propane stove. To avoid the fumes I pulled a bunk bed over to an open window and tried to stick my nose out of it every night while I was sleeping.

It was pretty boring, to say the least. Occasionally a camper might show up in the nearby campground, and one of my supervisors and his wife showed up to keep me company for a day. But the for the most part, I checked the trapline every morning and every evening, and spent the rest of my time reading, walking around in the hills, and nursing the 3-hour battery life on my laptop to type or watch a video. The actual Willow Creek flowed just beyond the parking area for the cabin, and I'm not ashamed to say that it became my bath. It's the only time I've ever skinny-dipped.

Boring it might have been, but it was beautiful. Elk came through every day. I heard them bugling, and the strange call a mother elk makes to find her calf; I heard owls, and whip-poor-wills, and a great variety of other amazing birds. Maybe it was partially due to the propane, but I got some good thinking done there at Willow Creek.

But around the time I began to lose my sanity, my luck on the trap line changed.

(To be continued...)