Free The Company of Wolves by Peter Steinhart

federal control agents in the field. After 1940, when the Bureau of the Biological Survey was merged into the new Fish and Wildlife Service in the U.S. Department of the Interior, federal trappers put out traps and poison for predators. (In 1974, the program took the name of Animal Damage Control.) Federal agents developed new methods of coyote control. One was the “coyote getter,” a .38-caliber shell fixed to a firing-pin mechanism and mounted on a stake in the ground. When a coyote or wolf took the exposed end in its teeth, the device fired a charge of sodium cyanide into the animal’s mouth, bringing death within seconds. A later, spring-loaded version of the device was called the M-44, because it had a mechanical firing mechanism and an enlarged shell-bore of .44 caliber. Coyote getters were not always carefullyused. In 1952, PARC hunters set some at a rest stop along a major highway in Arizona, and several dogs were killed.
    The fate of the wolf in the West was sealed in 1948, when a new poison, sodium monofluoroacetate, came into use. The chemical had been developed by the Army during World War II to kill rats in Southeast Asia. Modified by U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service scientists to kill predators, the formulation they arrived at was the 1080th compound they tried, and it became known as Compound 1080. Agents injected the tasteless, odorless substance into a freshly killed horse or burro, where it diffused to the whole body of the corpse, and remained potent for months. It was said to be selective, to kill only canids when used in proper doses. But in the field it was impossible to use only proper doses, and it killed bears, bobcats, badgers, foxes, skunks, raccoons, and carrion-eating birds such as eagles, magpies, and condors. In 1950, Fish and Wildlife Service officials went to Mexico to show U.S. ranchers there how to use it. Before the end of the decade, U.S. officials claimed complete control of wolves in northern Chihuahua.
    These chemical predacides allowed predator-control programs to cover vast areas with little manpower. And though they didn’t eliminate coyotes, they eradicated wolves. The last wolf was taken from Utah in 1929, from Colorado in 1943. The last “documented” wolf in New Mexico was a dead wolf, probably the victim of poisoning, found in 1970. Two wolves were taken in southwestern Texas the same year. The last wolf trapped in Arizona was taken quietly for a bounty offered by ranchers around 1976. Nobody was willing to say when the wolf was taken, because by then the wolf was on the endangered-species list, and killing it would have been illegal.
    There was something both colorful and tragic about the era of wolf control—colorful because the stories the bounty hunters told romanticized the wolf and lent to the country a deeper mystery and a moral import, but tragic because the policy eradicated the wolf and damaged whole ecosystems. It also damaged the West’s view of itself as something new, innocent, and pure of heart. The trappers would lose more than anyone: with the loss of the wolf would come the loss of their own identities.
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    Dan Gish was one of the last of the wolfers of the Southwest. I visited him at his home, a low, earth-colored house on a dirt street just outside Mesa, Arizona. The house is shaded with palo verde and other desert trees, and three large saguaros grow in the yard. Outside, it is leafy and overgrown. Inside, the walls are paneled with composite. The name “Jesus” is spelled in large cutout letters on one wall, and old illustrations are framed on another. Gish lives on a small pension and the house makes little boast of the American dream.
    Gish has diabetes. Confined most of the time to a wheelchair, he loses sensation in his legs and feet. He gets up from the table in the living room and has walked across the room before he stops to look down and see if he still has his slippers. One of them has fallen off. “I’m not a failure,” he