She’s Game For Her Job As Warden Childhood Dream Of Working Outdoors Just Stayed With Her

A cold, moonless sky hunkers low over Little Boulder Campground.

Tanna Ragan, 35, sips from a mug of coffee and sucks on a cigarette to warm up and wake up. In a few minutes, two colleagues appear from out of the gloom driving a pickup bearing the hide and head of a bull elk mounted on a wooden frame.

It’s a fairly typical day in the life of a game warden. Ragan and the two men are setting out in an attempt to catch poachers.

Ragan, who was hired in 1987, is one of only two women among the Idaho Department of Fish and Game’s 100 conservation officers.

Idaho, like most states, has few women game wardens. “There is a pretty high demand for women who want to go into it around the country, and not a big supply,” said Jerry Conley, Fish and Game director.

Ragan’s beat is a sprawling reach of rural Idaho, bounded by eastern Latah County, Dworshak Reservoir, and the North Fork and Clearwater rivers. It’s all thinly populated woods and ranch country.

“I don’t deal with a lot of city people,” Ragan said.

Early in 1996, Ragan will take on a new assignment, enforcing salmon and steelhead regulations.

“On the river, she may be one of the first female officers again,” said Conley.

The Idaho wilderness is foreign to the life as a housewife her parents had planned for Ragan in Kokomo, Ind.

“Mama tried. I always tell her that,” she said.

“When I was a kid, I would always tell my dad I was going to live on a mountain and chase bears. As I got older, the story didn’t change. They explained to me that, no, women aren’t biologists.”

After stints as a wildlife biologist in Indiana and Missouri, Ragan ended up in Idaho by mistake. She was en route to a Forest Service job in Oregon in the mid-1980s.

“I stopped in North Fork, Idaho, and I didn’t leave. I tried every day to leave a town with three buildings in it, and I couldn’t get out of there.”

Before coming to Idaho, Ragan had worked nine months as a game warden in Missouri, where she primarily was a bounty hunter.

“I definitely handcuffed more people in that short time in Missouri than I ever will here.”

In Idaho, Ragan has worked undercover several times. She declines to have her picture taken for fear of being recognized as a Fish and Game officer. Unlicensed outfitters and illegal animal parts merchants never expect to see a woman game warden.

But generally she is like every other conservation officer, part wildlife biologist and part cop.

“She is very knowledgeable of her area,” said Conley. “She works a lot with the landowners there, and she has taken the tack of buying a little land in the district with an older house on it.”

In that way, she’s become like the people in the region she serves.

“I’m sure that’s appreciated there,” said Conley.

Ragan brings a cop’s toughness and pragmatism to her work, and something else: a wry sense of humor.

A few years ago, she and other officers were using a dummy deer to catch illegal nighttime hunters. Before dawn, a pickup came along the road next to the field where the deer was planted. The driver saw the deer and slammed on the brakes. The officers waited confidently for the man to pop out, shine a spotlight on the deer and start blazing away.

But nothing happened. He just sat and sat.

Finally, Ragan says, she went up to his truck and asked him what he was doing.

Well, he said, he was just waiting and hoping that deer wouldn’t move off before dawn.

“I get a lot of compliments from my poachers, because I don’t treat them bad,” said Ragan. “I listen to them. If they want to tell me a story, I let them tell me a story.

“One guy killed a turkey in a closed (hunting) unit up north, and he tried to convince me he had killed it legally in Latah County. He was telling me all the roads he had taken. Well, if you’d follow them all, you’d end up in my back yard. I said ‘You’re trying to tell me you shot a turkey in my back yard?”’

Ragan said she benefits from having an interest other than law enforcement - it’s the one part of her social education that endures.

“I go dancing,” she said.

That’s the influence of her mother, who was a dance instructor.

In the little towns that dot Ragan’s part of Idaho, though, there are so few places to dance that the conservation officer and the poachers show up at the same time. On the hardwood dance floors of country bars, something happens that may be unique in the game warden tradition.

“Sure, my poachers dance with me,” Ragan said. “So what if I wrote them a ticket the day before? I’m here to dance.

“Of course, there are some people, when I see them leave a dance I know it’s time to go to work.”