Curse, bless me now with your fierce tears,
I pray.
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Dylan Thomas

t was fall on the Kaibab, Buckskin Mountain, the high forested plateau north of the Grand Canyon. Three thousand cattle, crowding the extensive mountain meadow at Crane Lake, bellowed forlornly as night approached. Fifteen tired cowboys, hired to herd the animals north to Utah, slept under tarps under the cool mountain sky. A few mules grazed peacefully, their tinkling cowbells adding semblance of melody to the herd’s restless complaining.
The wolf’s icy howl shattered their pastoral slumber. Fifteen cowboys bolted up from under their tarps. Cowbells stilled. Cattle froze silent. The howls continued as many wide eyes vainly searched the inky black forest beyond the meadow. The frightened cook sought refuge in a nearby, manure-filled salt shed. The wolf was back.
A year passed while many deer and a few cows died. Cowboys, the cow’s archetypal guardian, grew furious. Wolves were scary, evil creatures whose foul habits included eating cows. As tradition and manly pride demanded, primal fear transformed to hot pursuit although the inevitable chase began in an unusual way. “Uncle” Jim Owens, a scary, evil creature whose foul habits included killing most of the mountain’s predators, lost control of his lion hounds near Bright Angel Point. The dogs discovered the wolf’s scent and left Jim in the dust. Four days later, the exhausted, thoroughly pummeled hounds returned. The wolf escaped to temporary refuge on the Paria Plateau a few miles east of the Kaibab.
Once a robust grassland, the Paria and the adjacent Houserock Valley rapidly deteriorated under intense grazing by domestic stock. The wolf stumbled into this remote region littered with cows, cow pies and little else. Now the wolf, being a wolf, immediately cultivated culinary tastes which conflicted with the local culture’s world view—cows would be eaten by humans but not wolves. Soon the cowboys fearlessly returned, this time in daylight, to defend their vulnerable cattle. The Paria Plateau is a vast if not endless expanse of rolling sand dunes and slickrock surrounded by thousand-foot cliffs and sliced by the deep, extremely narrow canyons of the Paria River. The relentless chase ended with the wolf trapped between riflemen and a slender canyon hundreds of feet deep and, in places, less than twenty feet wide.
The cowboys knew the frightened, desperate animal had run out of tricks and places to hide. All its cunning and strength could not elude the bullets nor leap the abyss. A single cowboy followed the animal along a steep ridge leading to the inevitable chasm. There was no way out. His rifle ready, the cowboy slowly rounded a ledge separating the two. A few final steps and before him, in eery silence, lay a 16-foot bridge of juniper logs and rawhide spanning the canyon. The wolf was long gone.
These cowboys made two important discoveries that day. They found the mysterious route the Robbers Roost Gang used to move rustled cattle out of the area. The second discovery was a grudging respect, maybe a little admiration for the lone timber wolf.

By the late 1920’s, when the Crane Lake cowboys leaped from their bedrolls, the wolf was banished from the Kaibab. Ever since Europeans arrived in the Southwest in the seventeenth century with cattle and sheep, many wildlife endured similar persecution. Elk and pronghorn antelope were slaughtered, at first for their meat and later to reduce competition with domestic stock. Stockmen killed virtually any creature, from prairie dog to bighorn sheep, thought to compete with domestic animals. No group of animal suffered as much from their wrath as did predators, and none so completely as the grey wolf.
This was particularly true in Arizona where the livestock industry and government hunters launched in the 1890’s total war against the wolf. The exterminators gave no regard to the important role predators played in nature, largely because little regard was given nature at all. Cattle and sheep mattered most. Period. The complete extermination of the wolf in Arizona took 60 years and cost millions of tax payer’s dollars. In the process two subspecies, the Arizona and the intermountain wolves became extinct.

The wolf at Grand Canyon endured the same fate for additional reasons. In 1906, Theodore Roosevelt signed into law a bill establishing the Grand Canyon Game Preserve on the Kaibab and Coconino Plateaus. Lacking insights into the ecological role of predators, the government immediately hired hunters to protect “harmless” game animals, such as deer and bighorn sheep, from predators such as cougars and wolves. Between 1906 and 1923 government hunters and others reportedly killed hundreds of cougars and bobcats, thousands of coyotes, and 30 wolves. The slaughter of most of the mountain’s predators, including every wolf, contributed to the explosive increase of deer on the Kaibab Plateau.
The deer population peaked in 1924 somewhere between 30,000 and 100,000 animals. Overgrazing by deer and cattle, combined with a severe drought, brought disease and starvation. Thousands of deer perished. Incredibly, predator extermination continued.
The Kaibab Plateau, the mountain through which the Colorado carves the Grand Canyon, rises over six thousand feet above that river. Stately, ancient conifer forest once covered much of its three quarter of a million acres. Ponderosa pine and periodic fire created open forests of giant trees and abundant wildlife. A natural regime of fires produced a diverse mosaic of forest and grasslands. Frequent, low intensity ground fires cleared smaller trees and shrubs, leaving the fire-resistant old growth surrounded by thriving grasses and forbs. The highest elevations consisted of pristine meadows and dense forests of spruce and fir. All wildlife, prey and predator, flourished. Clarence Dutton, a seasoned explorer and geologist, describe the mountain in 1880 as “the most enchanting region it has ever been our privilege to visit.” Theodore Roosevelt, equally impressed, designated the Grand Canyon Game Preserve and laid the foundation for establishing the adjacent national park.
The ancient forest is virtually gone from the Game Preserve, although there are plenty of trees. Extensive logging wiped out most of the old growth and converted a diverse ecosystem into a marginal, species-impoverished tree farm. A spiderweb of logging roads covers the Preserve, resulting in frequent human disturbance of wildlife. Gone is the natural diversity of vegetation, especially old growth, and much of its abundant, diverse wildlife. Gone is the sanctuary for big game, predators, and other sensitive species. While old trees still survive within Grand Canyon National Park, even here we threaten the ancient forest. Decades of well-intentioned fire suppression allowed miles of dense thickets of smaller trees and shrubs to grow beneath and between the older giants. These dense stands compete for moisture and nutrients, weakening and sometimes killing the older trees. When wildfire inevitably comes, the thicket transforms into an inferno as flames leap to the highest trees incinerating the forest, old growth and all.
A thoughtful, intelligent, determined effort would renew health to Grand Canyon’s old growth. Restore the natural role of fire and the Kaibab’s diverse forest would return. Heal the roaded scars and all wild creatures would find sanctuary within the plateau’s verdant forests and meadows. And if we willed it, if we passionately pursued it, wildness would heal the refuge. The wolf would return to the mountain.

We reached the old wolf in time to watch a fierce green fire dying in her eyes… I was young then, and full of trigger-itch. I thought that because fewer wolves meant more deer, that no wolves would mean hunter’s paradise. But after seeing the green fire die, I sensed that neither the wolf nor the mountain agreed with such a view.
Aldo Leopold

Kim Crumbo