As the hot August day faded to dusk on the Blackfeet nation in northern Montana, clouds with bellies full of lightning came thundering eastward off the Rocky Mountains. It promised to be a lively night here at the start of the Great Plains, especially with Dave Ausband waving a metal antenna around. He was trying to locate signals from radio-collared swift foxes. While the University of Montana graduate student homed in on one, his wife and research partner, Liz Ausband, swept a spotlight ahead across rolling hills of buffalo grass. The beam caught three sets of eyes bouncing over the prairie like disembodied green sparks: an adult male with two young kits. A larger set of eyes glowed close by: a badger, traditional enemy of the fox, looking back. At just four to seven pounds, fully grown swift foxes weigh less than house cats. Badgers tip the scales at 15 to 25 pounds and have a formidable set of teeth to go with their long claws. Despite these lopsided statistics, one of the kits edged closer, as if taunting its nemesis. Earlier in the year, the Ausbands saw a swift fox dash up and nip a badger on the nose. But maybe this young fox just wanted to see what prey might be flushed from the burrow where the bigger predator was digging. Before the Ausbands could find out, the kit lost interest and started to chase its father. With their long tails held straight behind like plumes, the foxes became streaks of fur and eyeshine playing across a boundless plain like the wind. Scenes like this, once common on the North American prairie, hadn't been witnessed in Montana since the 1950s, when the last swift foxes disappeared from the state. In 1998, the Blackfeet tribe and Defenders of Wildlife started a joint project to reintroduce the species on the tribe's 1.5-million-acre reservation. The Ausbands spent the past three years studying the reservation's new residents and, according to Dave's final report, released in December, the results all point to success. "The swift fox population on the reservation is growing," he concluded. "Not only have the Blackfeet tribe and Defenders of Wildlife reached their goal of restoring an extirpated species to tribal lands, they have also potentially initiated a comeback of swift fox along the Rocky Mountain Front in Montana." The swift fox is North America's smallest wild canine and also one of its fastest. It has to be. Active mainly at night, the fox must prove swift enough to catch hares, prairie dogs, ground squirrels, mice and voles before these creatures can disappear into burrows. At the same time, this lithe, little carnivore needs its top speed of nearly 40 miles per hour to outrace coyotes, bobcats, raptors and other predators—at least for long enough to reach the protection of its own underground dens. One threat the species named Vulpes velox (as in velocity) couldn't outrun was the westward spread of settlement. Swift foxes once flourished throughout the short-grass and mixed-grass prairies, from Texas far into Canada. But trapping, poisoning and loss of native prey struck the carnivore community like a hurricane that wouldn't leave. Then the prairies themselves began to vanish, replaced by plowed fields. By the 1930s, swift foxes were extinct in Canada and missing from most former range in the lower 48 states. They rebounded somewhat in the southern plains once poisons were better controlled but remained rare farther north, possibly because they no longer had carcasses from throngs of bison to scavenge during winter, when many rodents hibernate. In the early 1980s, Canada began reintroducing swift foxes to southernmost Alberta and Saskatchewan. As Canada's wild population grew toward its current total of more than 900, animals began colonizing an adjoining portion of north-central Montana. But they remained absent elsewhere in the northern prairie states, and nobody tried actively reintroducing swift foxes in the United States until 1998. That year, Defenders secured 30 from the Cochrane Ecological Institute, a private captive-breeding facility in Alberta, and with assistance from the tribe, released them onto the Blackfeet Reservation. Another 92 foxes were turned loose over the next four years. I accompanied biologists from the Blackfeet Tribal Fish and Wildlife Department on outings to capture, measure and place radio transmitters on foxes as part of the follow-up studies funded by Defenders. Each time we handled these canines, I wondered whether they weren't actually part feline. When cornered in a live trap, they let loose ear-splitting screeches that would make an alley cat proud. Later, as I tracked a vixen through her range with Adrian Costel, a tribal researcher, he pointed out how swift foxes creep catlike through the grasses and wildflowers, almost on their bellies, until they are close enough to surprise prey with a lightning rush. The foxes will also leap high in the air like bobcats to snap at horned larks taking flight. I watched kits do the same to catch grasshoppers and moths. Another Blackfeet researcher, Spencer Momberg, told me, "Our elders remember the foxes being mostly around prairie dog towns. In the old days, those stretched 50 miles some places." Once an abundant food for many grassland carnivores, prairie dogs have been shot and poisoned to the point of scarcity across most of the Great Plains. Fortunately, the reservation still produces ground squirrels in impressive numbers. This may partly explain why the survival rate of kits from spring to fall, when they begin to disperse from their parents' home range, has averaged nearly 75 percent, higher than studies have typically found elsewhere. Dave Ausband pegs the reservation's 2005 swift fox population at about 100. Though fewer than the total introduced, that number is considered encouraging, since small mammals released into unfamiliar territory typically suffer high losses from predators and other causes. "One hundred is only the number we actually observed," Ausband added. "There could be twice that many out there." When researchers distributed posters offering $100 to anyone who reported a previously undiscovered swift fox den with kits, the reward did more than generate new sightings. It helped raise awareness among tribal members that a long-missing resident had returned to the Blackfeet nation. The Blackfeet have always viewed this small but incredibly fleet prairie hunter as an equal in the great circle of life. "The tribe had a swift fox society with special songs and ceremonies," said Momberg. He showed me a historical encampment called Ghost Ridge and described a deadly winter of disease and starvation after the tribe was first confined to the reservation. Although he never said so directly, I sensed that he and other Blackfeet feel a strong connection with species pressed to the brink of extinction—and with attempts to restore their vitality. In 2005, the Ausbands showed me a swift fox family living near the ranching town of Augusta, Montana, 55 miles south of the nearest previously known den and well beyond tribal lands. "Here's proof that this isn't just a reservation population any more," Dave said as we fitted one of the kits with a radio collar. "It's becoming a Rocky Mountain Front population." Encouraged by the Blackfeet project, the Turner Endangered Species Fund reintroduced swift foxes to one of media mogul Ted Turner's ranches in South Dakota during 2002. More were turned loose in Badlands National Park, South Dakota, the following year. And the Lower Brule Sioux are considering restoring the animals to their South Dakota lands. This is not to say that northern swift foxes are spreading like prairie wildfire. Far from it. They face many obstacles, including continued loss of native grasslands and competition from red foxes, which adapt better to agricultural areas. Canada no sooner upgraded the status of Vulpes velox from "extirpated" to "endangered" than the provinces of Alberta and Saskatchewan reinstated trapping and predator poisoning within recovery areas. Coyotes thrive despite persecution in many areas, and they rank as the leading cause of death for swift foxes. But this is largely because wolves, the foxes' greatest ally, are missing and no longer fulfill their role of keeping coyotes in check. Saving wild creatures is often complex, expensive, time-consuming and controversial. Yet the Blackfeet swift fox project, undertaken on a tribal reservation with assistance from a nongovernmental group, shows how a comeback can speed right past bureaucracy and politics. "Think of all the uproar associated with the return of another canid—the wolf," points out Minette Johnson, Defenders' northern rockies representative. "Here, we re-established swift foxes in a short time with no controversy, and for about $30,000 a year. Not bad." Douglas H. Chadwick's ninth book on natural history, The Grandest of Lives: Eye to Eye with Whales (Sierra Club Books/University of California Press) will come out in late spring. Visit WWW.DEFENDERS.ORG for more information on wildlife.