Mortality Signal (first three chapters)

SYNOPSIS: In a state where federal funding is tight and lesser crimes go ignored, a wolf pack vanishes in the closing days of deer season in Porter County, a region familiar to the terrors of poaching.

Two months later, when sparse evidence comes to light suggesting the pack had been shot and killed by poachers, Wolf biologist Tim York insists on calling his lost wolves a criminal case.

But with one conservation warden on indefinite unpaid leave, another too overworked, and a sheriff who seems to look the other way at illegal hunting, York must take matters into his own hands until something, anything, gives law enforcement a reason to raise an eyebrow.

CHAPTER 1
LAST JANUARY
(19 months ago)

They met in the northeast corner of Porter County.
He was accompanied by his brother and sister when they met; she was a trespasser through their territory. To the biologists who relocated her, she was known as Laura. He was Greg.
Laura was frail and weak when the strange siblings confronted her. She longed for companionship, but if they wanted to, the pack could attack and kill her and she wouldn’t give them a fight. If she did not have a pack to run with soon, she would surely die.
Her birth home was miles away, in which direction, she didn’t know. She had been captured and taken by humans and moved to this deep forest far from the fields of fluffy white grazers that roamed near her birth home.
Her memories of the capture were made of blurry images, memories she did not care to remember clearly anyways. The experience had left her feet sore, her head heavy and her neck grasped in some kind of human device.
At the mercy of the pack, Laura crept across the cold forest floor, allowing the snow and leaves to soil her white belly. Her thick winter coat could insulate her against the most tormenting of winter nights, but the chilly January breeze contributed to her fear of the pack and made her shiver with uncertainty. She made herself look as defenseless as possible, whining, moving her body in shifts one pair of legs at a time, showing no fight.
Like a gang defending their territory in the forests of L.A., the pack of siblings approached her with curiosity and territorial defense. With heads lowered, backs arched and legs straight, the pack surrounded Laura, unsure of what to make of her. She had no intention of backing down; she had been tracking the pack of three from a safe distance and she wanted their acceptance.
Greg, the dominant male, upstaged his siblings and exhibited his broad chest, perked his ears, raised his head and smelled the air, growling dominantly at Laura. Laura slowly raised her head and, with her ears perked upright, responding with a whiney woof. Greg approached her and she immediately rolled onto her back to expose her belly and continue whining. The submissive siblings lurched to attack, but Greg denied them the pleasure with a growl that bellowed stay back!
Greg was nearly two years old and he was ready for a mate. Laura was the first female he had seen since he and his siblings had begun traveling as a pack and her scent was hypnotic.
He liked Laura the moment he saw her.
Laura rolled onto her back and rested patiently on her side to let Greg’s nose travel across her soft winter coat. Her throat bellowed a desperate whine. He licked her soft fur and cautiously but lovingly, Laura licked him back.
• • •
CHAPTER 2
Saturday, February 3rd
(Present Day)

Jack Stratus peered into the white out ahead of him.
He had been driving north on Highway 44 when the weather had suddenly turned ugly. The front wipers of Stratus’s DNR truck swung madly at the snowflakes, beating down on the wet glass. Stratus found himself driving at an agonizing 25 miles per hour to keep up. He wouldn’t have chosen today to conduct his search had he known the weather would be this unpredictable.
Stratus glanced quickly from the road ahead to the GPA unit in his lap.
He was almost to the spot.
On Friday, Stratus had gotten a surprise call from the DNR’s conservation pilot Tom Reed with the news that gray wolf 405F’s collar was on mortality signal. According to Reed, the signal was coming from an open marsh along 44. Any other animal and Stratus would have waited until Monday to recover the body.
But this wolf was special.

Through the snow-blind, Stratus could see the roadside forests thin out into a wide open space of naked branches protruding from the flat white ground.
Stratus parked on the shoulder and zipped up his winter parka. The snow didn’t seem as wild now as it did when he was moving. From the highway, he could see a small stream winding through a flat, marshy area, its presence nothing more than a smooth white trail leading into the shrubs and trees growing in the marsh. The marsh ran about 50 yards along the highway and extended at least twice that much inwards.
Stratus brought out his radio telemetry equipment: a radio transmitter, an antenna and a pair of headphones.
He checked his pocket notebook for the coordinates, turned a dial on the transmitter, and extended the antenna into the air. Within moments the transmitter began screaming a frantic two beeps per second; mortality signal.
The normal tone was one beep per second. Mortality mode sets in when the collar has stopped moving for five hours.
Wolf 405F had been missing for two months.
The signal was close.
Stratus climbed down the steep snow covered ditch to the bank. The stream itself was frozen solid, but the snow on the surface was unstable and his boots sank into the untouched layers. The marsh was eerily silent as the snow fell around him. No birds sang; the occasional sound of vehicles sloshing through the blizzard broke the gentle, snowy air. Behind him, the pulse of red emergency lights was all that Stratus could see of his truck.
To his surprise, the signal remained relatively strong as he stood over the stream.
As Stratus lowered the antenna to the ground, the signal was so loud in his ear that he threw off the headphones, abandoned the antenna and transmitter and began scratching through the snow with his bare hands. After a few minutes when his hands began to numb, Stratus ran back to the truck for an ice hatchet.
The remains of wolf 405F were under the ice.
He hacked desperately at the ice, expecting to find wolf 405F’s frozen remains encased in the bed of the stream. Did she die here? Stratus thought to himself. Her final location alone was a mystery. Stratus knew this wolf’s rocky history up until her sudden disappearance in November. He had personally attached the collar to wolf 405F two years ago, before transferring her from Cedar County to the Cartier National Forest, where she had lived for 19 months prior to her disappearance.
In the field they named her Laura.
This swamp which stood beneath Stratus was more than 25 miles from Laura’s last location in the Cartier National Forest. Even though a wolf could travel much more than 25 miles in two months, her journey would have covered privately owned land, highways and the Manawa River, all without being seen by humans. It was extremely risky and dangerous.
But not impossible.
After ten minutes of digging and chopping, Stratus’s ice pick struck something soft and leathery. Stratus was on his hands and knees in seconds to brush away loose ice and snow. Something brown was sticking out of the ice. Scratching and pulling, he exposed the object from its frozen tomb.
It was not a wolf.
It was Laura’s radio collar. With a firm tug, Stratus managed to break the collar out of its icy hold. Once loose, Stratus could see that the band had been cut off the animal.
The collar was equipped with a radio receiver the size of a cigarette carton. The device was lightweight, designed to be comfortable for the animal, yet durable. Stratus ran his fingers along the jagged incision. It appeared the band had been cut with a sharp knife, a messy and time consuming job. The band was extremely tough and the cutter apparently had a difficult time, probably giving up at some point.

Stratus went back to his truck to grab his camera and snapped a few pictures; of the hole he had made in the ice, of the collar and of the marsh from the road, although the snow made most of the shots white washed. Stratus jotted down the coordinates of the location and drove off with more questions about Laura’s disappearance than when he had arrived.
Now the only evidence that the Glen Lake Pack still existed was the ice crusted collar Stratus held in his frozen hands.
He wondered what Tim York would think of this news.

• • •

CHAPTER 3
TIM YORK

Tim York gazed over his audience, counting 25 green tractor caps, 15 blaze orange caps, 10 gray heads, seven shiners and four women. On the table before him were three furs, a wolf, a coyote and a mink. He also brought a wolf skull, and plaster casts of a coyote print and a wolf print.
He stood at the front of a conference room lined with cream colored wallpaper at the Northwoods community college. Today’s presentation was on wolf deprivation.
None of these people were college students, York noted. Instead his presentation had attracted a majority of cattle and sheep farmers, deer and bear hunters, a few old timers interested in ecology and a handful of fuzzy sweatered professors. It was the audience he feared would be here.
York asked someone in the back of the room to flip off the lights; the room went dark and York’s slide projector came to life, presenting a giant photograph of a wolf lying on the back of a brown DNR pick up truck.
“This is Laura,” York explained. “She was a two-year-old female living in northwestern Cedar County near a sheep farm. After a sheep farmer called and complained that a wolf had eaten his sheep, we investigated the case as a possible deprivation.”
York pressed a button on his remote to display the next picture: a dead sheep. The animal’s entrails were hanging from the body and the head was partially detached from the torso.
“This is a picture the farmer had sent me. This clearly shows the sheep had been mauled and chewed on by a large carnivore. The state of Wisconsin compensates farmers for their livestock if there is overwhelming proof that a wolf had killed the animals.”
York flipped to the next picture: a close up of a wolf scat. Lying near the pile was a neon green ruler. The feces had been broken up to expose a collection of white hair and bone.
“One of the things we did to determine if the sheep was in fact killed by a wolf was look for wolf sign, and scats are one of the things we look for. A wolf scat is larger than a coyote scat. Both have similar diets, but the primary difference between a wolf and a coyote is that the wolf will eat every part of the animal whereas the coyotes will pick out the good stuff, the meaty parts and leave behind the rest.”
York returned to the slide of the dead sheep. “After a week of studying the area and searching for sign, we determined that this animal was killed by a pack of coyotes, but we also believe a lone wolf had salvaged what the coyotes had left behind, giving the wolf a taste of sheep, and making the wolf a potential hazard to the local farmers. We set up traps in the area, and relocated the animal to another county.”
York spent the rest of his speech explaining the history of wolves in Wisconsin and how his efforts with the DNR had currently brought the wolf population up to almost 500.
When York joined the department eleven years ago, there were forty known wolves in the state; a drastic change from the 1960’s when they were eliminated completely. Now, there were almost enough wolves to change the status to threatened, one step closer to more morbid measures against a depredating wolf.
“What are you doing to keep wolves from overpopulating and killing all the deer?” A hunter asked after York had finished his speech.
“Well, put it in perspective. Right now, there are more than 450 thousand deer in the state. One wolf can eat about 15 to 18 deer in one year and humans kill about 150 thousand deer, 140 thousand during the hunting season, and 10 thousand by motorists. If you add it up, 500 wolves could never eliminate the deer population. In fact, wolves generally target the slowest deer, the oldest and the weakest, which is better overall for the population.”
“Then why are so many hunters coming back empty handed?”
“It’s the luck of the draw, I guess. Deer hunting takes patience.”
“Where do you get the numbers of deer and wolves from?”
“The DNR conducts surveys every year to determine how many deer are in the state.”
“How do you know the numbers are accurate?”
“Well, the DNR does tracking surveys and counts up the numbers of deer they find every year. The total number is estimated but we’re confident our estimates are accurate.”
“What about wolves?”
“I myself and other biologists out of Hazel trap and collar wolves and closely monitor the animals from the air to track their actions and count their numbers. We also have volunteers that help us with winter tracking surveys.”
“Is it possible that you’ve underestimated the numbers?”
“The number of wolves and deer we’ve estimated this year is accurate to what we believe is living in the wild. If you’d like to see some data charts afterwards, I’d be happy to show them to you.”

After the question and answer session, York took a seat among the audience. As he relaxed and ate the container of yogurt he had brought with him, a terrible feeling came to him as he realized someone had spat chewing tobacco into his yogurt.

It was late in the evening when York staggered back into his motel room, exhausted from a long day of listening to and giving speeches, drinking cheap coffee and answering questions. His stomach still hurt from the yogurt earlier. It hadn’t caused him to throw up, but he had wished it had so he could get rid of his stomach ache.
He wanted to call his daughters but the clock radio read ten thirty. He was divorced; his ex wife and daughters Laura and Katie lived hundreds of miles away.
York had been working for the Wisconsin DNR for 15 years— 11 out of the Hazel office. The first four he spent at the Appleton office where his ex wife and daughters still lived. It had been a tough decision to move up north, a decision he had chose to make on his own.

York opened his notebook computer and checked his email. He had more than 20 messages and most of them were junk. The economical world had a way of finding you when you didn’t want to be found.
The message marked “mortality signal” from Jack Stratus caught his eye.

Tim-

This morning at 11:00, I found the collar of wolf 405F, the alpha female of the Glen Lake Pack.

The collar was in a small stream (North Branch Creek) on the west side of Hwy 44 by a bridge crossing the marsh.

It seems as if the collar had been cut off with a sharp knife strong enough to cut through the antenna cable. The collar was under several inches of snow and frozen in the ice which was about 3" thick. The collar was sending out a good signal and was clean, with no matted hair or tissues. I have the collar in my possession. I took pictures of the collar at the site and will develop them ASAP.

There’s still hope that the pack is alive. Have faith.

Jack Stratus
Conservation Biologist
Wisconsin Bureau of Endangered Resources

Stratus was a part time assistant biologist and technician for the DNR and Tim’s second hand man in catching and tracking wolves. In college, he dropped out before he could receive his master’s degree in natural resources and instead took up two years of technical college to earn a degree in business management. He still landed a job with the DNR, but not before buying and restoring an old single room movie theater in the city of Hazel. In the summer Stratus ran the trap lines and in the winter, he did tracking surveys.

The tobacco in York’s stomach began to draw attention as he read Stratus’s message. Finding a collar this way was bad news to the department and a burden on their hard work.
As York reported in his presentation, coyotes had killed the sheep, not Laura. But the coyotes left plenty of leftovers—enough to give a young, curious lone wolf the chance to splurge on the fruits of a barnyard delinquency. What York hadn’t explained in his presentation was that a total of three sheep had been killed on that farm and two of them were unmistakably coyote, but for the third – there was nothing left but clumps of wool blowing in the spring breeze.
Laura had cleaned up after the coyotes.

Early April was almost 60 degrees and overcast in Cedar County as York and Stratus walked through the sheep farmer’s field. The air smelled like dry straw and manure as they followed the perimeter of the sheep pen which extended a quarter mile from the barn. On the far reaches of the grazing pen was a forest where the farmer had claimed wolves killed two of his sheep while they were in this field.
“I came out here, and found da blood trail going under the fence into the woods,” the sheep farmer had told Stratus and York the first day they walked the scene of the crime. “I found the body right here.” He had pointed to a spot in the woods. Now, there was nothing left of the sheep but blood and clumps of fur.
The ground was wet and spongy as they followed the trail towards the forest. The trees were just beginning to bloom and the forest still looked washed out from the cold winter. York stopped to look at a cluster of canine tracks in the wet soil.
“Looks like coyote,” Stratus said as York laid his green snap bracelet ruler next to one of the tracks and snapped a picture. The track was almost three inches long.
It was only the second day they had been looking for sign on the farmer’s property and the biologists were still skeptical that a wolf had eaten the sheep. Up until day two, all evidence suggested a pack of coyotes.
Until they found the wolf scat.

York took a picture of the droppings, which he noted had the distinctive remains of sheep.
“Looks like we’re going to have to relocate this animal,” York said, snapping another picture.
Stratus kept walking along the trail as York picked apart the droppings with a stick.
“The sooner the better,” Status said. “If this wolf gets too used to this area, she’s going to get into the habit of killing sheep herself. From the looks of these tracks though, she’s alone.” York looked up from the wolf scat. Stratus was standing over a single pair of canine tracks, five inches in length.
A week later Stratus laid eight foot traps along the trail leading out of the woods and past the sheep pen.
Unfortunately for the sheep farmer, a third sheep was killed a few days after the trap line was set.
There was nothing left of the animal.
Another two weeks went by before Stratus caught and collared a female along the trail in the woods before the sheep farm. Wolf 405F was skinny and weak when Stratus caught her. She weighed less than 60 pounds, but 405F wasn’t infected by mange, a deadly and contagious disease that caused hair loss in canines. Had she been infected, they wouldn’t have released her in Porter County, 75 miles away.
Stratus, a certified rehabilitator, weaned 405F back to health before releasing her in Porter County.
A month earlier, Stratus had set a trap line in the middle of the Cartier National Forest in Northeastern Porter County inspired by reports that three wolves roamed the area. He caught an alpha male which he collared and named 464M, a.k.a. Greg.
In early May, Laura was ready to return to the wild. Hoping to play matchmaker, Stratus and York released Laura less than 20 miles from Greg.
For the long months between May and December, Greg and Laura kept their distance, probably studying each others habits, York had speculated. But as hoped, Greg and his pack eventually accepted Laura, and every week since their union in January, Reed regularly reported seeing them together from the air.
The success of Laura and Greg was somewhat of a miracle for York and the wolf program. Yet every time Reed reported on the Glen Lake Pack’s location, York feared their sudden absence. In his eleven years with the department in Hazel, there had never been a breeding pack in the cursed forests of Porter County.
Then one day, right after deer season, York’s fears came true. Laura and Greg had gone missing from both aerial view and radio signal.

• • •