One Nation, Under Ted (Cont.)

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Outside Magazine December 2001

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One Nation, Under Ted (Cont.)

ON THE FLYING D, as at Avalon, Beau can look out the window at any view of the land and strike up a natural-history yarn. Throughout the morning, wildlife passes by as if we were on safari. An elk bugles, a coyote runs through, then a fox. The outsize shield of a bison's head slowly turns and regards us as we enter every slope or vale.

Given all this, I ask, what is the point of allowing wolves to thrive in a near-paradise of bison grazing lightly on the land?

"First off, deer and elk wouldn't be dying of chronic wasting disease," Beau says, mentioning the illness borne of overpopulation and lack of predation. "So there'd be less disease in the landscape." Then Beau and Phillips start riffing about the land out the window, citing some of the advantages they've seen and others that have been theorized around wolf introduction elsewhere.

With deer and elk populations in check, there'd be fewer coyotes and thus more mice and rodents and voles. Meaning more raptors and foxes. Hence a greater variety of carrion, so scavengers would benefit. Wolverine distribution, for example, is directly related to winter carrion supply.

"If ungulates behave differently because of the presence of wolves, then the plants experience a different fate," Phillips says. "There might be more aspen saplings that make it to adulthood. So then there'd be more beavers, and that might alter your water regime. We don't know how it will play out after that, but we want to discover, or rediscover, that effect."

How long will it all take? And who might it piss off along the way? We are all sitting on a little wooden bridge over Cherry Creek, far off from the wolf pen. Here the Turner ethic has already run afoul of many different interests. The Montana Fish, Wildlife & Parks agency, working with the Turners, would like to stock the river with westslope cutthroat trout. Sounds simple enough, but all hell has broken loose. The westslope cutthroat trout is an imperiled, though not listed as endangered, fish. It's native to Montana, but not to Cherry Creek. Actually, no fish is native to the creek, at least not the 70- to 80-mile portion in question, which stretches between a fountainhead lake and a waterfall. Because it's perfectly isolated and impossible to breach without the hand of man, it would be a great place for this delicate trout to dwell. The problem is that, years ago, rainbow and brook and Yellowstone trout were all stocked in this creek, and they now dominate the isolated section. To ensure that these tough trout won't drive off any reintroduction of westslope cutthroat, the state agency wants to chemically kill the invasive trout.

Naturally, there are plenty of environmentalists who see this as self-defeating madness. Since part of the creek flows through public lands, the public has standing to sue to halt the plan. A federal suit was withdrawn earlier this year due to overlap with other cases. But a state suit against Montana Fish, Wildlife & Parks and the Montana Department of Environmental Quality is still pending, charging violations of the state constitution and Water Quality Act. "The poison they want to use will also kill off the insect population and the amphibians," says Bill Fairhurst, spokes-man for the Public Lands Access Association and the petitioner in both lawsuits. "They are not killing fish, they are killing an entire ecosystem."

"They have a point," says Beau. "They say, ÔIf you guys are all about historical conditions and the wisdom of nature, then the place was fishless in the first place.' True, but it's a dandy site for trout. And we're not willing to take a sense of environmental history to an absurd level if it means we'll lose a native fish."

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