Sandy Tolan

The cow lies butchered and quartered under a tarp in the flatbed of Jim Cook's pickup. It's a gray day with a bite in the air. Cook flicks Marlboro ash out the window, squeezes the wheel with one hand. The cowboys and their herds cover the land here in Catron County, on the western edge of New Mexico. Cows outnumber people ten-to-one; they graze millions of acres of public land. Cowboys like Jim Cook, foreman of the Pueblo Creek Ranch, have spent a long time trying to make the land safe for cows. In Catron County, wolves are not welcome.

At Jake's Butcher Shop, men in white lab coats hoist the bloody cow quarters Jim Cook's been hauling over to a hanging scale, then they're hauled into the cooler next to an elk hanging from a hook. A bear's head stares out from a box on the floor.

Reducing animals to harmless fur and meat, that's the custom here. Few people tell romantic stories about bears or mountain lions or wolves, especially not when the federal government comes down to the county seat to introduce its plan to put the Mexican wolves, or the lobo, back into the wilderness just west of here.

Standing here, you can understand how the lobo was nearly exterminated in the 20's, and you might wonder why anyone would bother trying to bring them back, but the men of Catron County, like ranchers across the Southwest, are now outflanked by city dwellers with different values.

Pamela Brown has ventured to the hearing in Catron County from her home in Santa Fe. She teaches grade schoolers about the value of wolves the wild.

For a hundred years, the cowboy way dominated politics in the West, but as people have come in in big numbers to Albuquerque and Tucson and Phoenix, new values have come in with them. Just south of Catron County, Silver City, old home of Billy the Kid, has grown by nearly a quarter in just five years. Now right around the corner from the old Buffalo Bar, you'll find the espresso bar.

Dutch Salmon is publisher of High Lonesome Books in Silver City and author of Home Is the River, a novel about placing wolves back in the wild.

Charmin Knapp Russell longs to hear the howl from her home outside of Silver City. She's the author of the book, Kill the Cowboy.

This ethic emerged not simply through shifting demographics but through an overall change in values away from the doctrine of eradication and control. But the old-line ranching values are hanging on for dear life.

At a Stop the Wolf barbecue up in Catron County, people say it's outsiders who are out to control and destroy, the government trying to control people's lives with more and more regulations, the environmentalists trying to destroy local culture and run ranching families off the land.

Al Schneeberger runs the New Mexico Cattle Growers Association.

Chimes call out from a front porches on an Arizona ranch, just across the border from Catron County. Sunflowers and yellow asters slope through the valley below. Cottonwoods and sycamores snake along the riverbed. This porch stands on middle ground. It's lonely ground, staked out by a pair of young ranchers, Will and Jan Holder . It's lonely ground, but pretty.

Just beyond the elk, stands the Blue Range where the wolves are likely to be reintroduced. Will is third generation rancher here. For awhile he and Jan were doing time in advertising jobs in Phoenix till Jan says she was nearly ready to climb a skyscraper with an Uzi. They moved back to the ranch but with a different philosophy - to ranch holistically, in tune with the entire ecosystem, and that means predators.

Their neighbors think they're crazy, fly by night, but they're tied here now. Last year they lost a baby girl in childbirth. They scattered her ashes on the ranch. Today, the memory of Will's grandfather from a different time, a different ethic, lives on in the name of their new baby boy.

Hear the conclusion

On the other side of the Blue Range, dusk. Back at the Pueblo Creek Ranch, two young men stake out a coyote.

This is not a wolf stakeout. Jason Driestaff and George Pennington say they wouldn't do that, but the hunt is in their blood; it's part of their culture. Last year, Jason and his high school buddies raised money for their senior trip by shooting coyotes and selling the pelts.

Now they crouch, poised in the juniper bushes, watching the bait they've laid out - the guts from this morning's butchered cow.

JASON DRIESTAFF: Just kind of set them in the clearing to where you can draw them out of the brush. See right now, there's the trees and the forest up there, and we're trying to pull them down off that ridge right there...

GEORGE PENNINGTON: ... the coyotes off the ridge, trying to bring them down in this opening to where we can get a better shot at them.

And from their pickup truck comes the recorded call of a wounded rabbit. The young men are still. In the pale, fading light, a coyote appears from behind a juniper bush. Skinny and alert, he sniffs the air. Jason draws a bead with his Remington .306. He misses. Then he whistles. The animal stops once last time and stares back. Jason misses again.

JASON DRIESTAFF: He come right down through that clearing, and I had a good shot at him. I just missed him.

And now darkness envelopes the hills. The coyote has disappeared into the forest, perhaps to appear again. And across the Southwest, in large holding areas, hidden from human sight, the Mexican gray wolf paces endlessly in captivity. Like the coyote, who's had his narrow brush with death, the destiny of the lobo is unknown.

A Catron County woman's wish.