Free The Company of Wolves by Peter Steinhart Page A

says in answer to a question he has asked himself. “I succeeded in everything I undertook,” he says. But it’s clear he’s struggling.
    Gish has small, tight blue eyes set in a broad, beefy face. His hair is still full, dark, and wavy, graying only at the sides. Gish can be offhand, but he is not a man who smiles easily. He is watchful, perhaps apprehensive; he asks if I mind if he tapes our interview. Though he is passionate about his ideas, his sentences tend to swirl off into eddies of anger and bitterness.
    His life, as he recounts it, runs a trail like that of a wolf pursued through a hard and unforgiving world. As a young man, Gish had trapped foxes, skunks, and weasels in the Midwest. When he worked in a factory in Milwaukee, he saw in it only an affirmation that humankind is greedy and corrupt. He joined the service in World War II, and at the end of the war he went west and found a job as an information officer for the Arizona Department of Game and Fish. Within a year, he was putting out strychnine drop baits to kill coyotes, in an effort to restore the deer population in the White Mountains. And in the course of that project, he started working with wolfers.
    In the 1940s, wolfers still bore a tinge of romance. They worked alone in remote areas. If they were skillful, ranchers valued them highly. Stanley Young would write of them in
Last of the Loners
, “Dogged in a hunt, untiring in upbuilding of communities, quiet, high-powered, these men have been the bulwark of western progress.” Gish still wears across his ample midsection a silver beltbuckle given to him by a Sonoran rancher, General Alfonso Morales, whom he helped to dispatch wolves.
    He speaks of the other trappers he knew as a select group of men. “These old trappers were peculiar individuals,” he says. “They were cocky about themselves. They wouldn’t share information. Dore Green, the head of PARC in Chicago, would try to get these guys together for meetings to demonstrate methods that were successful, and they would not do it. They would be squatting around a campfire at night, and if anybody tried to get them to share their method, they would just disappear.”
    In 1945, Gish began to work with Bill Casto, who had been trapping wolves since 1909. “He was an incredible naturalist and a loner and the best man at the job. It was an unbelievable education. He dragged me down into Sonora and Chihuahua. I participated with him in the capture of twenty-six wolves, all of them Mexican.”
    Canis lupus baileyi
, the Mexican wolf, is the subspecies of gray wolf that ranged from southern Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona south into central Mexico. “These Mexican wolves have longer ears than the northern wolves,” says Gish. “A Mexican wolf has longer legs. They’re rangy. They have a deep but narrow chest, and the shoulders are very close together. From what I have observed in the field, with Casto and on my own, I think the range of a Mexican wolf extends three or four times more than a wolf on Isle Royale or up in Alaska, where the vegetation is contiguous and prey factors are different.
    “Most of the Mexican wolves we found in Arizona were young, and most of them were males. But almost no reproduction. No denning. We only found one den, and that was on the east side of the Huachucas.” Wolves then were highly migratory. The resident wolves had been exterminated, but, says Gish, “There was quite a bit of migration up out of the northern third of Mexico into this state. The movement of these wolves was in the vacuum created by the lack of wolves here. And they were exploratory and circuitous. Those that survived the trappers and ranchers followed a path back into Mexico.
    “Bill knew the routes of these wolves. When word came of a kill, Bill went to where they would travel next. Wolves on the move will travel the highest ridges, the kind we called ‘military ridges.’ In thearea here, the mountains were islands, and the desert