The Fierce Green Fire

Now here is the most important story on this whole road — a small, quiet thing that happened right in these mountains over a hundred years ago and changed the way an entire country sees wild land. It is the story of a young man, a dying wolf, and a fierce green fire.

Around nineteen-oh-nine, a green young forest ranger, barely out of school and full of himself, was posted here to the Apache National Forest. His name was Aldo Leopold. He was twenty-two, back east educated, and he had come out to run a piece of country bigger than some states.

And in those days everybody KNEW about wolves. Not thought — knew. A wolf was vermin. Predators were a plague on the deer herd and a menace to cattle, and the job of a good ranger was to see them dead. The federal government paid men to hunt them full time. Nobody debated it any more than you would debate rats in a granary.

So one day Leopold and his crew were eating lunch up on a rimrock, looking down at a river below, and they saw what they took for a doe fording the current. Then she climbed out, and it was a wolf — and half a dozen grown pups came boiling out of the willows to meet her, tails going, tumbling over each other in plain animal joy.

And the men did what men did. They emptied their rifles down into the pack. Leopold admitted later that they were shooting with more excitement than accuracy, and that in those days no one would have passed up a chance to kill a wolf.

When the shooting stopped, he scrambled down the rimrock to have a look at what they had done. One pup was dragging a shattered leg into the rocks. The old mother wolf was down, and she was still alive.

And he got there in time to watch her die.

He wrote about it decades afterward, and the line is one of the most quoted sentences in American conservation: he reached her in time to watch a fierce green fire dying in her eyes. He said there was something in that look, new to him and known only to her and to the mountain, and that he realised then that neither the wolf nor the mountain agreed with the young man's view that fewer wolves meant more deer.

It did not change him that afternoon. That is worth saying plainly, because we like our conversions instant. He went on killing predators for years. But the thing lodged, and he watched what happened afterward — watched mountains where the wolves had been cleaned out fill up with deer, and the deer eat every seedling and every shrub down to the roots, and the browse line rise as though somebody had trimmed the whole slope with shears, and then the deer themselves starve by the hundred in a range eaten bare. He saw ranges wrecked by the very safety he had helped provide.

And out of that came the idea he is remembered for: that you have to learn to think like a mountain. Not like a hunter counting deer, or a rancher counting calves, or a ranger counting board feet — like the mountain, which has all the time in the world and knows that the wolf, the deer, the grass and the soil are one working thing, and that pulling out the part you dislike breaks the parts you love.

That young man became the father of wildlife management in America and wrote the book that the whole conservation movement stands on. He got the first designated wilderness area anywhere in the world set aside just west of here. And every wilderness in this country traces back through him.

It began on a rimrock in these mountains, with a wolf that a young man shot and then had the honesty to be changed by. You are driving through the birthplace of the wilderness idea.

Stay with me, though. Because I am not finished with the wolves.