Distinctly Montana Magazine

Winter 2011

Distinctly Montana Magazine

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Wolverines: Ghosts of the Backcountry BY DOUGLAS H. CHADWICK AN EXCERPT FROM THE WOLVERINE WAY Fine snow streaked the air, riding side- ways on a gale. Biologist Rick Yates led the way, breaking trail on skis through the powder. Great cliffs striped with avalanche tracks rose on all sides. Somewhere higher up among the clouds stretched the icefields that gave this valley—Many Glacier—its name. We crossed two frozen lakes and finally passed into an old-growth spruce for- est that took the edge off the storm. Beneath the branches, half-buried in snow, stood a large box made of logs six to eight inches thick. It looked a little like a scaled- down cabin. But it was a trap, and there was a wolverine inside. DISTINCTLY MONTANA | DIGITAL Watch Douglas Chadwick’s nature video featuring rare wolverine footage. Go to www.distinctlymontana.com/wolverine111 The animal had entered during the night. We knew from its radio frequency that this was M1: M for male, Number 1 because he had been the first wolverine caught and radio-tagged during a groundbreaking study of the species underway here in Glacier National Park, Montana. Sometimes the researchers called him Piegan instead, after 20 a 9,220-foot mountain at the head of the valley. To me, he was Big Daddy, constantly patrolling a huge territory that straddled the Continental Divide near the heart of the park. His domain overlapped those of several females, and he had bred with at least three of them over the years while successfully keeping rivals at bay. We paused a short distance from the trap to listen. M1 was silent. Predictably, he began to give off warning growls as we drew nearer. They rumbled deep and long with a force that made you think a much larger predator lay waiting inside, something more on the order of a Siberian tiger —or possibly a velociraptor. I lifted the box’s heavy lid an inch or two to peer in. The inside of the front wall underneath was freshly gouged and splintered, its logs growing thin under Big Daddy’s assault. Raising the lid another notch, I could finally make him out as a dense shadow toward the rear of the trap. Wolverines have dark brownish eyes, but in the light from my flashlight those orbs reflected an eerie blue-green color that glowed like plutonium, surrounded by the rising steam from his breath. The next things I saw were white claws and teeth and stringers of spit all flying at me with a roar before I dropped the lid shut and sprang back. Inside the trap, the roaring and growling continued— wolverine for “Hope you won’t be needing your face for anything, Tame Boy, because I’m going to take it off next DISTINCTLY MONTANA • WINTER 2011

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