SIERRA VALLEY, Calif.  — Standing among his cattle in a broad green pasture, beneath a brilliant blue sky about an hour north of Lake Tahoe, rancher Dan Greenwood surveyed the idyllic landscape and called it what he feels it has become: a death trap.

Behind him, a 3-month-old calf that had been mauled by wolves the night before lay in the grass with deep wounds on its flanks. Two of its legs were so badly injured they could barely support the calf’s weight when it tried to stand. The animal’s agitated mother paced a few feet away.

Greenwood wrapped his hand around one of the calf’s ankles and gently rolled it onto its back to inspect the savage bite wounds.

The first wild wolf monitored by scientists via an electronic collar crossed from Oregon into California in 2011. Today, there are seven established packs in the Golden State.

(Malia Byrtus / California Wolf Project/UC Berkeley)

He was trying to decide whether to give the calf another day to see if it could recover enough to keep up with its mother — or put it out of its misery before the wolves returned to finish the job.

“If I can just walk up and grab him, then so can the wolf,” Greenwood said with a pained look on his face. “That’s not a challenge for them at all.”

What is a challenge in the rugged expanse of the Sierra Valley right now is keeping up with all the calls coming in from ranchers whose cattle have been mauled by wolves. Across the valley, which straddles Sierra and Plumas counties, there have been 30 confirmed wolf attacks since March, 18 of them fatal, said Sierra County Sheriff Mike Fisher.

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That doesn’t include a deer that was attacked in a subdivision just outside the small town of Loyalton as stunned residents looked on in disbelief, or the massive, frenzied elk that was chased onto a front porch in the middle of an April night and slaughtered by two wolves. A terrified 21-year-old stood on the other side of the front door, clutching a pistol and wondering if someone was trying to break in.

Once the “ruckus” died down enough for him to open the door and peek outside, Connor Kilmurray said, he saw “blood everywhere, it was smeared on the walls and the door. … It was definitely a massacre.”

When Fisher arrived to investigate, he was relieved that the desperate elk, which weighed hundreds of pounds, hadn’t crashed straight through the front door and into the living room with two snarling wolves on its heels.

Sierra County Sheriff Mike Fisher shows where wolves slaughtered an elk late at night on the front steps of a home in Loyalton.

“If it had just been a foot over, two feet over, that would have been quite an awakening,” Fisher said.

For ranchers, the solution to the growing problem in California’s rural northern counties seems obvious: They want to shoot the wolves preying on their cattle.

But while wolf populations are large enough that hunting them is allowed in much of the American West — in Montana, Idaho and Wyoming — they are still listed as an endangered species in California. Killing a wolf here is a crime punishable by a fine of up to $100,000 and up to a year in prison.

Local authorities say there have been 30 confirmed wolf attacks on cattle in the Sierra Valley since March, 18 of them fatal.

Whether Sierra Valley ranchers would face such consequences is another question. The wolf attacks feel so out of control, said Sierra County Dist. Atty. Sandra Groven, that she would not pursue charges against a rancher who kills a wolf caught preying on cattle.

Groven cautioned that she was not giving carte blanche to poachers to engage in “outrageous conduct,” or issuing a license for anyone to “go on a killing spree.” But given the frequency of wolf attacks in the valley recently, she said, she doesn’t see how she could bring charges against one of her neighbors for defending themselves or their property.

“Bottom line, I would not prosecute,” Groven said. “What are they supposed to do? Run up and wave their arms and say, ‘Go away’?”

The struggle between ranchers and wolves is as old as herding itself, and nobody interviewed for this article wanted to repeat the sins of the past: By the early 20th century, wolves in the United States had been hunted to near extinction. Only a small pack remained in northern Minnesota when then-President Nixon signed the Endangered Species Act in 1973 and wolves were added to a list of protected animals.

With their numbers still low two decades later, government biologists reintroduced wolves from Canada to central Idaho and Yellowstone National Park. In the years since, they have prospered and slowly migrated across the West.

“We feel like our hands are tied,” rancher Dan Greenwood says of his efforts to protect his cattle from wolves. “We’re exhausted, and there’s zero help.”

(Andy Barron / For The Times)

The first wild wolf monitored by scientists via an electronic collar crossed from Oregon into California in 2011. Today, there are seven established packs in the Golden State, with an estimated population of about 70 wild wolves.

State wildlife biologists and other conservationists excited at the prospect of a wolf comeback assumed the predators would target their natural prey, mostly deer and elk. But decades of logging and climate change have vastly altered the forests and terrain in much of Northern California, leaving deer and elk in short supply. Instead, many of the wolves have taken to hunting the lumbering, docile, domesticated cattle grazing in plain sight on wide-open pastures.

When that happens, ranchers say, it’s like someone coming into your store and stealing from the shelves. Nobody pretends cattle are pets — they’re bred and raised to be slaughtered. But no business can survive for long without some way to protect the merchandise.

To defend the livestock, the state Department of Fish and Wildlife promotes non-lethal “hazing” of the predators, which can include firing guns toward the sky, driving trucks and ATVs toward wolves to try to shoo them away and harassing them with noise from drones. But according to local ranchers, none of that seems to work, at least not for long.

And that has led to near rebellion in California’s northeastern counties, including Sierra, where local authorities have declared a state of emergency and are begging state officials for permission to more aggressively “remove” problem wolves.

The reason hazing doesn’t seem to work, according to ranchers, is that the wolves appear to have no fear of humans. And the cattle, which have gone generations without having to deal with these apex predators, seem to have forgotten how to defend themselves by sticking together in herds.

Turning such naive, docile cattle loose in sprawling pastures is a little like turning “me loose in downtown L.A.,” said Cameron Krebs, a fifth-generation rancher in eastern Oregon who has been dealing with aggressive wolves for years. “I might get hurt, might run into the wrong person, might get run over by a car, just because I don’t have the sense to look both ways,” he said with a laugh.

Krebs has become something of a hero in environmental circles for his dedication to finding non-lethal ways to co-exist with wolves, which boil down to making sure the animals in his herd stick together — the way wild buffalo and elk do — so it’s harder for wolves to single out and separate one of them.

But that takes a lot of time and manpower, and there are inevitably wolves that outwit even the most well-intentioned efforts. “At that point, you need to be able to shoot them,” Krebs said. “It’s just one of the tools in the toolbox.”

UC Davis researchers Tina Saitone, left, and Ken Tate mount a camera to capture wolf activity.

A camera attached to a fence port monitors wolf activity.

Back in the Sierra Valley, Greenwood said he saw his first wolf in 2018, from his living room window, standing over a calf it had just killed. “It was just taunting me,” Greenwood said in disbelief.

But things didn’t get really bad until 2022, when he lost nearly two dozen animals to the increasingly brazen wolves. Since then, he said, he has been fighting an exhausting, losing battle.

“I felt really, really bad as we were shipping cows in here in May,” Greenwood said, standing in an immense pasture on a portion of his ranch in nearby Red Clover Valley. “It’s beautiful up here; there’s plenty of grass growing. Everything’s right for them, except there’s wolves circling in the hills just waiting for those trucks to get here.”

He’s versed in the non-lethal techniques promoted by environmental advocates and embraced by the Department of Fish and Wildlife, but his shoulders slumped and his eyes searched the horizon as he explained how impractical they seem to him now.

“Profit margins are so, so thin,” he said, noting that some people seem to think all ranchers are as rich as Kevin Costner’s character on “Yellowstone.” But his reality is nothing like TV.

“It’s just me and another guy running 1,200 acres of irrigated hay and 600 cows,” Greenwood said. “I could maybe get all of these cows into a corral at night if I had six guys on horses helping me,” but there’s no money for that.

“We feel like our hands are tied. We’re exhausted, and there’s zero help,” Greenwood said.

UC Davis researcher Ken Tate points to wolf fur caught on a barbed-wire fence.

In 2021, the state set up a $3-million pilot project to reimburse ranchers for cattle lost to wolves and help pay for non-lethal deterrents, such as flags tied to electrified fences and lights affixed to fence posts.

But Greenwood said by the time he finished filling out all the paperwork for the cattle he lost in 2022, the state money had run out. “I still haven’t seen a dime,” he said.

Arthur Middleton, a professor of wildlife management working with UC Berkeley’s California Wolf Project, said he’s been taken aback by how bold the wolves are becoming in the Sierra Valley.

In April, while a TV news crew from Sacramento was filming an interview with the sheriff in a cattle pasture, two gray wolves appeared in the background stalking the livestock, Middleton recounted. The sight of them so close to the road in broad daylight, with a noisy news crew filming nearby, was like nothing he has witnessed in many years of working on wolf recovery.

“That just goes to show what an incredible challenge ranchers and wildlife managers have on their hands,” Middleton said.

For many Sierra Valley residents, the question is no longer whether problem wolves are going to be forcefully removed, it’s who is going to do it. Pissed-off ranchers? Or environmental professionals working with an eye to eliminate the most prolific cattle killers while preserving the rest of the pack?

There’s a joke circulating in the valley this spring: “Shoot, shovel and shut up,” Groven said. She added that she doesn’t think any of the ranchers have followed through on the implied threat, but said it would be hard to blame them if they did.

Fisher, the sheriff, said he would like the authority to shoot a wolf he believes poses a risk to human safety — like the pair that chased the elk onto someone’s front porch. But he thinks the Department of Fish and Wildlife should be responsible for “removing” wolves that habitually attack cattle.

“They’re very patient,” rancher Dan Greenwood says of using non-lethal methods to scare off wolves. “They just outlast you.”

Greenwood said he’s not advocating for the elimination of the wolves. He just wants to be able to protect his livestock.

He saw the wolves moving among his cattle the night the 3-month-old calf was mauled and another one was killed. Following the law, he kept his hands off his gun and revved up his ATV, chasing the predators more than a mile away, hoping that was far enough to keep the cattle safe.

It wasn’t. “They’re very patient,” Greenwood said. “They just outlast you.”

The 3-month-old calf? It died of its wounds before the wolves could return.