Ninemile Wolf stories
By SHERRY DEVLIN of the Missoulian
Ninemile residents share their views on the wild, graceful creatures that
have affected their valley – for good and ill
NINEMILE – Tony Chinikaylo has a smile to match the big, golden meadow he
tends in the upper Ninemile Valley. As his story unfolds, so do his arms.
He came to America, he says, the same year the wolves came to the meadow.
He can barely believe everything that’s happened since.
At first, they were timid – Chinikaylo, the young immigrant from Belarus,
gleeful at the good fortune that landed him a $10-an-hour logging job, so
much more than the $4-a-day he earned in Russia; the wolves, an orphaned
litter of 4 month olds, bounding across the meadow to a biologist’s howl,
startled when he was not their kind.
Then, a year or so later, two friends laid flooring in the house a movie
star was remodeling on one end of the meadow.
“Those Russian guys work like a tractor,” the foreman bragged. “They work
hard and never break.”
“Do you think you could find me a tractor?” asked Paul Qualley, the
husband of the movie star – actress Andie MacDowell.
So Chinikaylo landed a job at the ranch, doing chores, then helping to
remodel the ranch buildings, then tending cattle and eventually running
the place. And the wolf pups grew up, got in trouble for killing cows,
were shot for their transgressions until there was but one left, attracted
another and then another wolf to the Ninemile, and did all the things that
make wolves incongruously powerful, yet vulnerable.
“The boss, he likes the wolves,” says Chinikaylo, who works now for Tony
Audino, the Microsoft millionaire-turned-venture capitalist who bought
High Meadow Mountain Ranch from MacDowell and her husband when they
divorced and left the valley several years ago.
“The boss says, ‘Tony, do everything you can to keep the wolves on our
place. Don’t scare them away.’ They love it when the wolves howl. They get
so excited, and call everybody outside to listen.”
One night, in the early years when Chinikaylo and his wife lived at the
ranch, he woke and looked out the window to see a half-dozen wolves in the
yard. “I got chills on my arms,” he says, stretching his arms in the cool
springtime air.
Of course, there’s always a little trouble when the wolves are around, he
said. Over the years, they’ve killed two dogs. And every year, they take
two or three calves. And some chickens.
Once, the Audinos ran smack into a group of wolves as they walked along
the edge of the woods, and beat a hasty retreat home.
Chinikaylo’s smile widens until the sun finds his golden, top-row teeth.
“In Belarus, the government paid you $100 for shooting a wolf. Here, they
say, ‘Don’t shoot. You’ll go to prison.’ ” He’s happy to leave them be.
He’s heard all the hubbub about the wolves in recent weeks. How they
killed three pet llamas at one lower Ninemile house, then injured a llama
and killed another a few miles away, then killed two ewes at a third
place. How a biologist and a trapper for the federal Wildlife Services
shot four of the wolves, hoping to push the pack away from the knot of
homes and hobby herds.
In another couple of weeks, a hundred pair of cattle will arrive at High
Meadow, Chinikaylo says. If nothing else, that will probably lure the
wolves out of the lower Ninemile into its less-crowded, more remote upper
reaches.
“They will try to sneak and get some of my calves,” he says. “The wolves
will know when we have something to eat, and I will know when they are
back.”
The first time Mike Jimenez saw the Ninemile wolves, they were babies and
he was sitting in a patch of willows. The moon was full and bright.
A year earlier, on Sept. 14, 1989, a pair of adult wolves and two pups had
been taken by truck to Nyack Creek, a remote tributary of the Middle Fork
Flathead River – far north of the Ninemile. The pack was in trouble,
blamed for cattle killings near Marion and sentenced to relocation.
Only one of the wolves survived – a black-coated adult female that woke
from a trapper’s tranquilizer drugs and ran away, leaving the pups to
starve and the other adult – a male injured by a trap – to be shot after
it developed gangrene and could not walk.
For months, until early January 1990, the female wolf ran panic-stricken,
it seemed, around western Montana. It traveled deep into the Great Bear
Wilderness, swam across Hungry Horse Reservoir, skirted Swan Lake, headed
into the Mission Mountains west of Condon, came within a block or two of
downtown Bigfork, ran along the shore of Flathead Lake and wound up high
in the Rattlesnake Mountains.
Federal biologists kept track of the wolf by way of signals from its radio
collar, literally holding their breath when a woman in the upper
Rattlesnake Valley called to say she had seen a wolf in her back yard on
the outskirts of Missoula.
Eventually, after zig-zagging its way back to Seeley Lake, then almost
into the Bob Marshall Wilderness, then to Lindbergh Lake, the wolf found
Evaro Hill and the Ninemile Valley where there was another wolf, mottled
gray and a bit mangy, heretofore unknown to the biologists.
The wolves mated, and the female widened an old coyote den on a sandy
hillside in the upper Ninemile. The den’s entrance was no bigger than an
adult human’s shoulders. The rounded hollow inside was 3 feet wide, just
right for six monkey-balled pups.
“Everybody was kind of, ‘Holy mackerel, what are they doing in the
Ninemile? They’re a half-hour from Missoula,’ ” remembers Jimenez, who
spent much of his life in the early 1990s watching over the Ninemile
wolves and is now the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s wolf recovery
project leader for Wyoming.
“I mean this was 1990,” he says. “There weren’t any wolves south of
Glacier Park. It was before reintroduction. Before Yellowstone. Everything
we knew said that wolves wanted to live in places where they wouldn’t be
bothered by people. And here was this female, digging a den a quarter-mile
from a logging road.”
Quickly, biologists learned it would be humans – not wolves or biology –
that would determine the pack’s future in the Ninemile. On July 4, 1990, a
holiday fisherman found the female wolf’s radio collar floating in a
nearby creek. Neither the animal nor its presumed human killer was found.
The pups were 2 months old when they were left to the care of the male
wolf. It did well, killing wild game and toting it to the den site in
manageable chunks. In August, the big wolf killed a German shepherd – the
pet of a longtime Ninemile family – while leading the pups to a kill site.
A month later, on Labor Day, it was killed by a semi-truck while crossing
Interstate 90.
Over the winter of 1990 and 1991, the orphaned pups became celebrities –
unseen, but well-known to western Montanans through newspaper accounts.
Jimenez saw them first a few days after the male wolf was killed. They
were in the big meadow at the upper end of the Ninemile. He howled, deep
and low, as he had heard the big male call. The pups, no doubt anxious
about their parents’ disappearance, came bounding through the grass and
into the willow thicket where the biologist sat.
“Dad’s back,” Jimenez later surmised.
He stood, startled, never expecting such an enthusiastic response. The
babies stopped, startled, never expecting such a howl to come from a
human.
It was Jimenez’s assignment to help the pups through the fall and – maybe,
if it were possible – to encourage them to be “real” wolves. So he carried
road-killed deer to the meadow and stood them, propped against rocks and
logs, so the little wolves would have to push over the big deer.
His reward came on Dec. 23, when he found the pups’ first kill – a deer,
stripped nearly clean of meat. He carried the animal’s leg back to town as
proof. “They did it just like wolves do it,” he said.
Then, as now, the Ninemile Valley was alternately in love with and enraged
by the wolves. Few people, then or now, ever changed their mind. And every
time the wolves killed a cow or a pet, emotions flared.
But humans have an amazing ability to be tolerant, says Jimenez. “Some
very nice people live in the Ninemile. There are some real strong opinions
about wolves, but nobody was ever anything but friendly and gracious. Even
the people who didn’t like the government or what I did would ask me in
for coffee.”
Every spring, Jimenez thought the wolves were doomed. As the groundwater
seeped into the meadows, the Ninemile blossomed with new life. The deer
and elk kept their young hidden in the timber. The ranchers had no choice
but to keep their calves and lambs out in the open.
“There was just a lot that the wolves could bump into,” Jimenez says.
Geri Ball calls her big, gangly pet Starry and says he is conceited. When
they visit nursing homes in Missoula, the llama loves looking at himself
in the mirrors. Last year, one of the little ladies had a cockatoo that
would yell at Starry, “Get out of here!” The llama never knew what to make
of the loud-mouth bird.
This year, Starry won’t be making the rounds; Ball’s not sure she’ll ever
be able to take him around people again. When visitors ask why, she shows
them the meat on Starry’s haunches. It is chewed and raw, the result of a
wolf attack late last month.
A week later, “always on a Monday night,” the wolves returned, this time
killing a big male llama named Catalyst – “Cat-man” for short. When Ball
heard the llama’s screams, she ran out of the house, then ran back inside
when her flashlight found the wolf’s yellow-green eyes.
“It scares you,” she says, “never knowing what will happen next. I know
there are lots more wolves than the government claims. You hear them all
the time, howling from three different directions. The dogs are nervous,
and a lot of people don’t feel safe walking alone or jogging down the
road.”
Geri and Gene Ball have owned a boggy patch of ground in the lower
Ninemile for 34 years. They didn’t care much one way or the other when
they first heard about the wolves. They lived a good 10 miles away. Then
Geri started raising llamas as pets and show animals, and – about four
years ago – the wolves started coming down the valley.
“These aren’t the wolves that were native to this area,” she says. “These
wolves are not afraid of you.”
The recent killings – of both pets and wolves – have Ninemilers taking
sides. A few want the pack removed, and say so loudly. Some say pet and
livestock owners need to take more responsibility for their belongings.
Most don’t like it when the wolves are so close, and no one wants to lose
a pet. Don’t kill all the wolves, those people say, just manage them more
closely.
On one thing all agree: There are a good many more wolves in the Ninemile
than the government’s letting on. The packer at the Forest Service’s
Ninemile Remount Depot figures there’s at least a couple dozen animals,
not the five estimated by the Fish and Wildlife Service. Residents up and
down the valley put their guesses at anywhere from a dozen to 50 wolves.
Joe Fontaine, a wolf biologist for the Fish and Wildlife Service in
Helena, says he’ll send a trapper to the Ninemile to get a better estimate
of wolf numbers and whereabouts. He knows people are anxious, and
understands why.
“Is the Ninemile a good place for wolves?” Fontaine asks. “It is great.
The prey base is very adequate.”
“Is it a good place for wolves in relation to humans? No. There’s a lot of
potential for interaction, and interaction typically means trouble.”
Since 1990, the human population of the Ninemile has almost doubled, from
396 to about 650. Where Jimenez once worried about wolves wandering into
cattle herds, Fontaine now worries about wolves in subdivisions with names
like Piney Meadows.
For his doctoral thesis, Jimenez studied the interaction of wolves and
humans in the Ninemile and found wolves surprisingly tolerant of the full
range of “people disturbances.” Wolves key in to game – deer and elk – far
more than they avoid humans.
But as more people moved into the Ninemile, wolves ran into more trouble,
Jimenez says. “They use the entire valley, from one end to the other, and
it’s all a minefield anymore. There’s a lot they have to avoid.”
And while people are tolerant, they also expect something to happen when
wolves cause problems. “Most of the time, the wolves don’t cause much
trouble,” he says. “Our worst fears are almost never realized. But when
something does happen, people don’t just want the wolves running loose.”
Wolf recovery – the federal government’s attempt to restore healthy wolf
numbers in Idaho, Montana and Wyoming – only stays sound and credible if
trouble-making wolves are removed, Jimenez says.
Of course, he says, “when you have to kill wolves, your friends start
calling you names. But wolves are resilient. We’ve seen it over and over
and over again. As long as we let them, the wolves bounce back.”
Ralph Thisted came to the Ninemile Valley with his family in 1938, in the
summer after sixth grade. “We dried out in eastern Montana,” he says.
“When my parents saw running water, that was enough for them. It was just
as tough to make a living here, but at least we had water.”
Thisted and his brother, Bruce, have never left the Ninemile. For all of
their working lives, they ranched – sheep until they tired of chasing away
the bears, then cattle until they sold their big, grassy meadow and much
of their timber land to actress MacDowell.
Now they live on smaller pieces of ground, three miles apart. Ralph has
married; he and wife Bette saw one of the wolves on a game trail behind
the house not long ago. Mostly, though, they watch a little brood of wild
turkeys that run out of the woods when Bette “gobble gobbles” from the
deck.
The Thisted brothers were the first in the Ninemile to see the wolves.
“It was a year, maybe two, before anyone else saw them,” says Ralph. “We
were fixing fence and there was this big, silver wolf. I had the .22 with
me to shoot gophers and used the scope to get a better look. It was way
too big to be a coyote; it had to be a wolf.”
In January 1990, when the female from Marion ended its flight in the
Ninemile, it denned on the Thisteds’ property. When the female was killed,
the male wolf used the brothers’ meadow for a rendezvous site where the
babies played while the parent hunted.
From the window of their barn, the brothers watched the little wolves, first
with a scope, then with a newly purchased video camera. Their first, shaky
home movies show the pups chasing grasshoppers and playing a “king of the
hill” game on a tree stump.
At night, they watched the road below for anyone who might dare to stop or
bother the pups. After the male wolf was killed, the brothers’ watch took
on more urgency. “They were on our land,” Ralph says. “They were orphans.”
A dozen years later, Thisted is no less protective of the wolves. He is
angry at suggestions that the pack be eliminated, angry that wolves would
be killed because they attacked pets. He doesn’t understand why people
move to the Ninemile to live near the wilderness, then howl for help when
a wolf comes around.
Thisted lost his own dog to a wolf attack. He was sad for the loss, but
undeterred in his devotion to the wolves. When he was ranching, he lost
hundreds of sheep and cows to bears, coyotes and mountain lions. But he
always figured that losses were part of the livestock business – and part
of life in the Ninemile.
Bette worries that the recent depredations will tear apart the community
she loves so dearly. “There’s just got to be room enough here for everyone
and everything,” she says. “We’ve got to make room for the wolves.”
Ralph can’t find the words to explain why it’s important to keep wolves in
the Ninemile, but he knows it is. “It’s just that they’re here is all,” he
says. And that if they were gone, something would be missing.