Robert Millage poses with his wolf.

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Leaving camp in the middle of the night, Robert Millage put his SUV in low gear and crept up the jeep road that follows the Nez Perce Trail in Idaho’s Clearwater National Forest. Stopping a few minutes later, he listened out the open window. Then he turned the engine off and uncased his rifle. He switched the red LED light on in his headlamp and began to climb down a steep mountainside, following the echoes of howling wolves

History had been penned in this country in the journals of Lewis and Clark, who followed the Nez Perce Trail in their quest for the Northwest Passage during the autumn of 1805. It was among these steeply folded ridges—described by expedition sergeant Patrick Gass as the “most terrible mountains I ever beheld”—that the Corps of Discovery almost perished from hypothermia and were reduced to eating their horses.

Now, on a Labor Day morning, Sept. 1, 2009, history was being written once again. This was opening day of Idaho’s wolf hunting season, the first state-sanctioned hunt for wolves as a big-game species in the lower 48 states. Millage, a 34-year-old real estate salesman from Kamiah, had bought a tag the day licenses went on sale. “I felt it was my duty to help predator control,” he says of his decision to hunt wolves. When he sat down behind a fallen aspen in a rockslide, the tag was in his backpack. His Tikka .243 rested across his knees.

Only hours before, Millage wasn’t sure he’d be hunting at all. Environmental groups had brought suit to block the proposed wolf hunts in Idaho and Montana. Millage had spent the eve of opening day in his office at Idaho Land and Home, checking websites for news. When the U.S. judge reviewing the case declined to file an injunction, Millage had driven directly from work up Old Forest Service Road 500, which twisted back and forth to follow the route the Nez Perce had used to access the vast bison herds to the east. Built by the Civilian Conservation Corps in the 1930s, the road had been little improved. The rocky three-hour drive passed through country where Millage saw not a solitary soul.

Before wolves were reintroduced into central Idaho, this stretch of road, on the evening prior to the opening of the archery elk season, would have been clouded with campfire smoke. But in recent years, Millage had seen fewer and fewer camps as the wolf population grew and the elk herd began to shrink. The behavior of elk that remained had changed drastically. Millage had guided for an outfitter here the prior September but had failed to put a hunter on a single bull. Wolf tracks had peppered the dust of the trails. The few elk Millage had heard were bugling in the cliffs where no man could follow.

As he drove toward his hunting grounds, Millage heard no elk. But the wolves weren’t so bashful. Millage was listening to Johnny Cash sing “Sunday Morning Coming Down” when the chorus from the car speakers was joined by a wolf pack, their howls floating out of a basin to the north. He turned the vehicle around and idled back down the hill to a level place off the road. Camp was a hastily erected pup tent. Dinner was forgotten.

But then, so too were his troubles.