By Benjamin Alva Polley EBS COLUMNIST
The surrounding white-capped, gray-ribbed mountains swallowed the late summer sun like a piece of lemon drop candy. Darkness crept from behind boulders, trees and ravines where it hid all day, slowly conquering the last open space. It was mid-August, and I sat on Sunset Ridge along the Highline Trail in Montana’s Glacier National Park. From the shadows of the subalpine fir trees in front of me, two deep, guttural woofing sounds rumbled out a warning, followed by the most ferocious snarl I could imagine.
Fear pooled on my neck as I rushed to gather my things and hurried back to where my tent and trail crew were stationed. As I retreated, I kept looking back to see what sort of monster might pursue me down the trail. That night, my senses were aware of every sound outside the tent, but nothing ripped through the nylon wall and devoured me.
I told my backcountry trail crew about the previous night’s encounter during breakfast the following day. All three feigned interest in joining me after work to investigate the source of the snarl. I thought it might be a grizzly, but I wasn’t planning to rummage in the bushes to find out. I just planned to sit on the trail and see if something decided to reveal itself.
After dinner and dishes, only Vin, one of my crew members, was motivated to climb the mile back to Sunset Ridge with me. We sat quietly for an hour in the exact spot where I’d heard the animals, watching our surroundings as the sun dipped and faded in the west.
Just as we were getting ready to head back to camp, I glimpsed movement out of the corner of my eye. There, under the glaciated horns of the Livingston Range, loping down the trail, was a wolverine. Its c-shaped pads, five toes and extended claws imprinted its signature in the soft, pliable mud, the tracks resembling a small grizzly. Mud squeezed upwards between its toes.
I couldn’t believe our luck. Here was a fleeting phantom, almost mythological in its rarity, flesh, and blood in front of us. I had studied these mysterious creatures for four winters and had become obsessed with this ghost that lived high in the mountains, but I rarely saw them. And here we were.
This time, instead of cautiously retreating as I’d done the night before, my nervous system triggered the opposite reaction, and, without thinking, I grabbed my bear spray and sprinted toward the wolverine, not to harass or harm, but to observe it in all its glory. Something deep inside sparked me to run down wildness itself.
After the wolverine came around the corner and saw us, the coffee-colored creature, streaked with tannish-blond flanks, screeched to a halt. Then, with its broad head, small onyx eyes, short and rounded ears, long neck, muscular body and bushy tail, it turned around, scurrying away in bewilderment. Normally fearless, this relentlessly tenacious animal was probably more puzzled than anything and scrammed at the sight of us. Like an elongated grizzly cub, its short legs pounded the earth as it lunged away. After so many bounds, it stopped, then glanced back three times before loping off into the dusky night.
Wolverines have many nicknames, including phantoms, ghost of the Northern Rockies, skunk bear, carcajou, demon beast, Indian devil, and glutton.
The federal government announced Wednesday, Nov. 29, that wolverines in the Lower 48 are threatened by climate change and habitat fragmentation and will finally be listed under the Endangered Species Act.
An estimated 300 wolverines remain south of the Canadian border, primarily in Montana, Idaho, Washington, and Wyoming, with a combined handful maybe in Utah and California’s High Sierras. For the wolverine population to remain stable and viable, they need to be connected to populations in southern Canada. Recent studies show that these southern Canada populations are declining due to fragmented habitat from the development of roads, mining, urban sprawl, and industrial logging, preventing females from dispersing south. Scientists discovered low genetic diversity in the populations living south of the border. The impacts of backcountry recreation like snowmobiling and backcountry skiing also affect wolverines.
Wolverines are the Rocky Mountains’ poster child for climate change. They need high, rocky, and snowy mountainous areas with average temperatures not rising above the mid-70s. Female wolverines den on north-facing slopes that hold snow into late May and June.
Activists and conservation groups have been fighting to put wolverines on the Endangered Species list for the last 25 years with little to no luck.
Early settlers hunted and trapped wolverines to near extinction by the 1920s, but their populations have slowly increased due to protections for other animals placed on the Endangered Species List, and trapping numbers being limited.
With this new protection, public lands managed by the Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management must now consult with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service for activities like logging, building roads and trapping other game species that could harm or endanger these creatures.
At Sunset Ridge back in Glacier, Vin and I continued watching the wolverine in silence, awe, and reverence. We were relieved when it cantered off. It was exhilarating, but we were both surprised by my wild reaction to run at the creature. I couldn’t explain it.
A day or two later, I mentioned the incident to a Granite Park Chalet maintenance worker, who told me he’d found a dead mountain goat kid a few days before, perhaps chased off cliffs by a golden eagle. The beast, the color of winter, has one of the highest mortality rates of any animal. In the first year of life, 60 to 70% of mountain goats die, and the second year only offers a 50% chance of survival. He said he dragged the goat off the trail and into the trees so it wouldn’t attract a sleuth of grizzlies to the path, closing it to hikers.
Now, thinking about it, I realized the deep woofing I’d heard belonged to a bear, and the crazy snarling belonged to that wolverine, and they were discussing the ownership of the goat carcass.
A Native American story Douglas Chadwick described in his book, “The Wolverine Way,” came to mind: A sow grizzly had a litter of four cubs. One of them was a runt the larger ones always picked on. At the appropriate age, the sow chased them off so they would live by themselves. The runt became the wolverine, wily, fearless, and ready to take on the world.
Two decades on, I still don’t know what got into me and led me to chase a creature that could easily have torn us limb from limb. Maybe something in me wanted to see if it was indeed the devil my colonial ancestors believed, or perhaps I just wanted to bask in the wildness it represented a bit longer while I still could.
Now protected federally as an endangered species, wolverines stand a better chance of keeping their wildness and succeeding with a changing climate.
Benjamin Alva Polley is a place-based storyteller with stories published in Outside, Adventure Journal, Popular Science, Field & Stream, Esquire, Sierra, Audubon, Earth Island Journal, Modern Huntsman, and other publications at his website www.benjaminpolley.com/stories. He holds a master’s in Environmental Science and Natural Resource Journalism from the University of Montana.
