The subordinate females of the Druid Peak pack killed their own alpha in the spring of 2000. It was the first documented case of intra-pack killing in the history of the Yellowstone wolf reintroduction.
The alpha they killed was 40F, and she had been running the Druid Peak pack through violence since the day the pack was released into the Lamar Valley in April 1996. The original Druid pack was captured near Fort St. John in British Columbia and consisted of five wolves: an alpha pair, 38M and 39F, and their three daughters, 40F, 41F, and 42F. Within the first year, 40F had driven her own mother out of the pack. 39F left and became a lone wolf. 41F followed shortly after, likely forced out by the same pressure. 40F installed herself as alpha female, and the pack she ran from that point forward was governed by sustained, targeted physical abuse directed primarily at one animal: her sister 42F.
Yellowstone researchers nicknamed 42F "Cinderella." The name was not sentimental. It was descriptive. 40F attacked her sister routinely and without obvious provocation. The beatings were documented over multiple years by wolf biologists and the hundreds of visitors who watched the Druid pack daily from the roadside pullouts in the Lamar Valley. 42F was frequently observed with visible wounds and fresh blood from her sister's attacks. In 1998, 42F denned and produced pups. None survived. In 1999, 40F attacked 42F directly in her den. She produced no pups that year either.
In the spring of 2000, three females denned: 40F in the traditional Druid den, 42F to the west, and a subordinate niece, 106F, to the east. All three had been bred by the pack's alpha male, 21M, a black-coated wolf from the Rose Creek pack who had joined the Druids in 1997 after their original males were illegally shot outside the park.
Sometime in May, the subordinate females turned on 40F. The exact sequence was not directly observed, but the result was unambiguous. 42F and several of the pack's younger females, nieces of both 40F and 42F, attacked and killed the alpha. Researchers found 40F dead, covered in bite wounds inflicted by her own pack. It was the first confirmed intra-pack killing in Yellowstone since reintroduction.
What happened next is the part of the story that researchers still talk about.
42F moved her pups from her own den into 40F's now-empty den. Then she took in 106F and her pups as well. Three separate litters, twenty-one pups in total, consolidated under one female who had spent years being beaten by the animal she had just helped kill. Under the leadership of 42F and 21M, twenty of those twenty-one pups survived the year. The Druid Peak pack grew to thirty-seven wolves, one of the largest packs ever recorded in Yellowstone or anywhere else.
42F and 21M led the Druids through what researchers and wolf watchers consider the golden years of the pack. They were visible daily from the Lamar Valley road. Over a hundred thousand visitors watched them hunt elk, contest territory with rival packs, and raise successive generations of pups in full view of spotting scopes. The pair was featured in three National Geographic films. Yellowstone biologist Doug Smith described them as a classic couple.
42F was killed in February 2004 by wolves from the Mollie's Pack in a territorial attack on Specimen Ridge. 21M died four months later of old age, on the same ridge, overlooking the Lamar Valley he had dominated for six years. One of the pups 42F had adopted after killing her sister eventually produced a daughter who grew up to become one of the most famous wolves in Yellowstone history: the wolf known as 06.
