Free The Company of Wolves by Peter Steinhart Page B

between them didn’t provide much food. Wolves also have a tendency to want to look down on the area they are in. Bill would determine where a wolf was likely to trail and he would set traps.”
    Gish trapped with Casto and on his own. When he got a wolf in a trap, it would act with submission and resignation, “as if it was almost in a trance.” He would walk up to the trapped wolf and club it to death.
    There were no biological studies of wolves in the Southwest, and no resident populations for a biologist to examine. Gish was asked by Charles Voorhies of the Izaak Walton League to do a study of the characteristics of these transient Mexican wolves. He was to accompany trappers like Casto, for they were the reigning authorities on wolves. It was an era in which old PARC trappers were cashing in on their experiences by telling tales to magazines of great wolf hunts and supernatural wolves. Charlie Gillham, who had poisoned a wolf that inhabited the low desert along the Gila River, turned that wolf into a legend in magazine articles about the Gila Wolf. “Every wolf was about forty feet high and consumed tons and tons of cattle and sheep, chickens, snakes, and acorns,” says Gish.
    Gish prided himself on being able to distinguish between story and lore. “These Mexican wolves never would try to pull down a cow on a range unless they turned it around and stampeded it. They almost always attacked its flanks.” He guesses he has seen “maybe half a hundred” wolf kills, largely in Mexico, and all were of livestock. Most of the reports wolfers got of wolves were complaints from livestock owners, but they also followed up on other reports. “I’ve got a report of an old woman sitting on a privy in an outhouse in the rain and a wolf came and bumped the door open.” In another report, “a male and a female wolf came down to a ranch down in the Chiricahuas, a couple of years ago. Their dogs barked at the wolves. Then the dogs ran. One of them lost its tail to one of the wolves, and hid under the porch of the house, where it died.” In another, “a guy walked up to Big Lake in the spring, when it was still muddy. He saw a wolf jumping up and down in those thick weeds that come with the rains, jumping up and down, catching mice.
    “Even when you’re hunting wolves, the admiration for the animal’sactivities is tremendous. They have something no other animal has. They actually challenge you. They can come out with things that will astonish you.” A trapper might pursue one wolf for months and see nothing more substantial than its tracks and the bones of its kills. Wolves would dig up the traps and leave them sprung and empty, as if to spite the trappers. “Bill Casto gloried in it. And he got a big kick out of it if they got the best of him.”
    Wolves back then didn’t exactly thrive: Gish found that, when wolves managed to den, they had an average of five pups, but only an average of two survived the first six months. The rest, he guessed, starved. “I got the sense not all attacks by wolves were successful, even on domestic cattle. I think that the wolf’s fear of being put out of commission entered into a lot of decisions in preying situations. I saw very little evidence of ruthless attacks. They just didn’t take many chances.” He describes seeing tracks indicating that wolves came upon cattle at a watering place at night and “walked around and around just keeping the cows restless. You could see where one of ’em would tramp around in one spot and circle and circle and circle. Then you can see where the steer kicked out and ran and the wolf followed,” and made the kill.
    The more he talks, the more Gish’s face softens, the more his mind takes his body back to the days when it did not betray him. He recalls a wolf that killed cows in the Canelo Hills, and as he recounts finding the wolf’s track and following it into the hills, he seems to rediscover an old truth, and he breaks into the story to