Ranchers frustrated as wolves run wild Loren Giem's ranch manager, Ken Wigen, first heard the howling Sept. 20 near a pasture in the Big Hole River valley. The wolves' chorus made the hair on the back of Wigen's neck stand up. His dogs went nuts. Giem was nervous. But like his father and grandfather before him, Giem is a rancher and rotates almost a thousand head of black Angus cattle through the pastures they use on 20,000 acres here. Most of it is Giem family land, bought throughout the years since his grandfather moved here in the early 1900s. Last week, slowly bouncing his Dodge truck east down the ranch road toward his pastures, Giem pointed toward the mountains. Up ahead, in a corner of one of his pastures about a mile off the main road, the sagebrush was trampled into dirt and the fence is pushed outward. “The cattle were balled up on the fence. We were sure we had wolf activity,” Giem recalled. They called Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks' wolf management program, looking for advice, and a site visit turned up wolf tracks. Three days later, on Oct. 9, Wigen found the first dead mature cow. A government trapper, Graeme McDougal with the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Wildlife Services, confirmed wolves took it down. “Numerous wolf tracks, various sizes indicated a pack, i.e. adults with YOY (young of year) at carcass and immediate area,” McDougal wrote in his report. “Torn and uprooted sagebrush, several areas of blood indicate a struggle, attack, of approximately 30 yards in length. “Canine marks present on external surface of hide on left front elbow region and right rear above fetlock Hindquarters and internal organs totally gone from feeding and scavenging. All signs consistent with wolf predation.” Within two weeks, Giem lost five more cows to wolves, and one was seriously injured....