The Good Rain: Across Time & Terrain in the Pacific Northwest

by Timothy Egan

  Steve Kuntz has spent the last thirteen years of his life living with wolves; on the whole, they make better companions than humans, he says. His chief assistant, an earnest, bearded biologist named Jack Laufer, goes even further: “For me it’s easier to talk with these wolves than it is to talk with people,” he says. “They’re a lot more open and honest with their feelings.”

  They share their feelings with you?

  “When they howl, it’s vocalization, it conveys plenty. I can’t think of anything important that I can say which they can’t say.” Laufer speaks a few lines in English to Lucan, who says nothing. “What’s more,” he says, “wolves are a lot more compassionate than most humans. The pack—the community—is the most important thing to them. The pack always works together. They are monogamous. They breed for life. And they’re faithful. You won’t see a sadder thing than a wolf who’s lost a mate.”

  The two Wolf Haven leaders go through the numbers: wolves used to inhabit all of North America above the 30th Parallel, but now they’ve disappeared in every state but four; wolves were not only poisoned and gunned for bounty, they were set on fire; during the height of the cattlemen’s poison campaign, a thousand wolves a day were killed; Oregon does not have a single wild wolf; Idaho has six, and Washington has zero. I correct them: Last summer, while exploring a meadow near the moraine of the Carbon Glacier on Mount Rainier’s north side, I looked across the flower fields and saw a gray timber wolf, Canis lupus. His tongue out, tail down, the wolf strode across the meadow, moving at a fast clip. I snapped a picture, backpedaled, then headed for higher ground. Like everyone, I grew up with the myth of the man-eating wolf, the lecher with bad breath, a devil in disguise.

  The image problem, I think, has to do with the wolf’s appetite. There is no getting around their love of fresh, raw meat; after a kill, usually carried out by a pack closing in on a lame animal, a single wolf can eat up to a fourth of its body weight. They sometimes kill more than they can eat. The sight of eight wolves bringing down a deer—nipping at the thighs, then going for the jugular—is blood-spurting violence of the type seldom discussed at Audubon Society meetings. The Indians, for the most part, were not afraid of wolves and attributed spiritual qualities to them. Lewis and Clark ate wolves during the lean days of their cross-country expedition. It wasn’t until the wagon trains came west with livestock in the 1840s and ’50s—presenting an easy meal for the wolf packs—that Canis lupus became the homesteader’s worst enemy. In some counties of the West, it was against the law not to put poison on the fence post. Yet, as Kuntz and other neo-wolf lovers point out, there is not a single documented case of a healthy wolf ever attacking a human.

  “Of course, I’ve been bit a couple times—feels like somebody smacked you on the hand with a hammer—but that was from playing around,” says Kuntz.

  Wolves still are hunted in British Columbia, often from helicopters by sportsmen who’ve paid up to $15,000 in a lottery. The provincial government says the aerial hunts are necessary because too many moose, caribou and mountain sheep are being killed by the wolf packs of British Columbia, whose numbers may be as high as five thousand. Some biologists accuse the government of hiding their true intentions; they say the game managers who approve the wolf kill want to build up the herds of trophy animals in British Columbia, where hunting is big business. During Expo ’86, the wolf kills were stopped; 20 million people visited Vancouver with nary a peep heard about the helicopter hunting. In the years since, however, the kills have resumed.

  Much of the change in attitude has come about because of people like Steve Kuntz, who calls his captive wolves “ambassadors for their lost brothers in the wild.” A native of Trenton, New Jersey, he was the kind of kid who put a frog in his pocket and then kept it in his room until his mom forced him to get rid of it. He once had a snapping turtle for a pet, but preferred big dogs like German shepherds. On his own at age thirteen, he never finished high school, moved all over the Northeast, and then to the Southwest, where he lived for a while in a hippie commune. Working a construction job in Colorado, he saw an ad in the paper offering a stray wolf pup for sale. He took the pup home, named it Blackfoot, and became quite attached. It was a buffalo wolf, one of the descendants of the great packs that used to attack bison on the plains east of the Rocky Mountains. Kuntz treated Blackfoot like a dog, keeping it on a leash, taking it for walks. But something was wrong.

  In Washington with his wife, Linda, and Blackfoot, Kuntz looked up a man, Ed Andrews, who kept several wolves on his property. Andrews was having a hard time holding on to the property and the wolves at the same time, so he turned his pack over to Kuntz. Reluctant at first, Kuntz and his wife soon took on the manners and attitude of orphanage owners—bring us your stray wolves, your zoo rejects, your urban misfits. The early years of Wolf Haven were lean, but then they started the howl-ins. In an age of theme parks, the idea of sitting around a bonfire under spruce trees with a bunch of wolves and howling at the moon has terrific appeal. Tourists come by the carloads, entering the grounds as curious, usually neutral visitors and leaving as true believers, heads full of the new gospel of the wolf. The wolves inside the mesh-wired compound are their own best pitchmen. They play tag. They kiss each other. They bite each other’s ears.

  Before coming to Wolf Haven, I read a book by Barry Lopez, Of Wolves and Men. Devoid of sentiment, Lopez makes a good case for the wolf, decrying the national tragedy of our annihilation of this animal in the wild, stripping away the myths. But he brings up something that comes to mind now as I walk among Lucan and Rogue and Windsong, the half-moon overhead dipping in and out of the stretch clouds. “I do not wish to encourage people to raise wolves,” Lopez wrote. “Wolves don’t belong living with people.” I want to ask Kuntz about this. He’s howling away with the arctic wolf, a beautiful creature with its thick, pure-white coat; the animal seems like a spirit at play, jumping and yelping with Kuntz. I decide to let them howl, uninterrupted; such is the best language at Wolf Haven.

  Coastal Indian legend has it that the killer whale is a wolf that was stranded at sea. Like wolves, Orcinus orca are the top of the predator chain, are very smart, and travel in packs. Their sense of family would put a Mormon patriarch to shame; the offspring spend their entire life within their mother’s pod, a traveling unit of up to twenty whales. One pod of killer whales in Puget Sound includes an eighty-three-year-old grandmother; slow-moving and revered, she is the keeper of family secrets and tips on how best to ambush a harbor seal. Orcas don’t howl, but they communicate in dialects unique to each region. They use sonar to hunt and are capable of distinguishing one small species of fish from another at a distance of three hundred yards. After a few days’ absence, returning whales greet their pod mates with a showy ceremony. There is no documented case of an orca killing a human. But until a few years ago, they were considered black-and-white villains.

  To find an orca in the Northwest in the last few years of the twentieth century, you must get in a boat and go to the deep, clean waters around the San Juan Islands, a place of great hope for those who believe humans can get along with other creatures without clubbing or caging them. Whaletown on Vancouver Island has no such mammals off its coast; it’s a shell of a shore town, condemned to die by previous avarice. Blubber Bay, similarly named by the nineteenth-century men from Nantucket and New Bedford, is devoid of the animal oil that used to light the world’s lamps in the days before electricity. The blue whale, largest creature ever to inhabit the earth, has disappeared completely from Washington coastal waters and Puget Sound. For thousands of years, the Makah Indians chased various whales, looking for thirty-foot-high spouts in raging surf off the northwestern tip of Washington. They threw harpoons attached to sealskin floats at the flanks of the big creatures. Finally, exhausted after days of chase, the whales would be towed to the beach. The Makahs have not hunted any type of whale since 1913. The efficient whaling factory ships of the 1920s eliminated the blue whale from Northwestern waters. And you won’t f
ind a killer whale at the aquarium in Seattle, which was one of the first places in the country to put this twenty-five-foot mammal on display, inside a small cement tank. Prodded by a change in public attitude, the state of Washington has since outlawed the capture and containment of orcas, the only animal with a brain physiology comparable to that of humans.

  The current in Haro Strait is so swift during the twice-a-day tidal shift that it produces whitecaps which look like Colorado River rapids. Three pods of killer whales live year-round in Puget Sound, and once every few days most of them pass by Haro Strait, shared by the United States and Canada. From a whale’s point of view, it’s a great fish-funneling spot; in late summer, sockeye salmon come in from the ocean up the Strait of Juan de Fuca and pass this point on their way to spawning grounds in the Fraser River. The whales find the schools and open their mouths, straining out lesser edibles.

  Whale-watching requires the patience of a gardener in winter. I’m in a small boat, trying to hold the binoculars with one hand and the guard rail with the other as I scan the water around the northern San Juan Islands. The day is bright, as they almost always are during the warm months in this archipelago. People who come to the San Juans, no matter their background or degree of sensitivity to the earth, invariably fall in love with the natural world; in turn, the natural world repays such affection. Man is but one resident, in places a fairly insignificant one, in the habitat of the San Juans. The islands are fir-covered mountains with all but the summits buried by sea. Just offshore, the water is a thousand feet deep in parts; year-round, it stays at a temperature of forty-six degrees Fahrenheit. As species continue to die out in most other places of the world, the San Juans belong to creatures on the comeback—killer whales, harbor seals, bald eagles. Eighty-four islands in the San Juan chain are wildlife refuges; of those, humans are allowed to visit only three.

  We stop for a while to watch harbor seals. About six feet long, they sprawl atop rocks close to water, soaking in sun. As we approach, their personality quirks reveal themselves. Their heads are like those of fashion models—sleek and clean, with slicked-back hair. They have front-end flippers, and no external ears. For years, the harbor seal was considered an enemy; the state of Washington paid a five-dollar bounty for any seal snout brought into a game office. Hunters would motor to within a few yards of their targets, then shoot the seals from the boat. Between 1946 and 1960, about seventeen thousand harbor seals were killed this way. Now, they are protected by federal law. However, they do have a predator.

  We move on, out toward Canadian water, passing Spieden Island—a grassy, open isle with large madrona trees latched onto bits of hardened soil in the rock outcrops. In the 1970s, a group of investors purchased the island and imported to it a variety of exotic animals. They intended to have a sort of safari theme park here, a place where hunters with no sense of sport and deep pockets could sit on stools and shoot transplanted exotic animals who had little room to roam and no room to hide. When residents of other San Juan Islands found out about this, they orchestrated a publicity campaign that, at its peak, brought the crew from 60 Minutes to tiny, uninhabited Spieden Island. Under pressure, the investors shelved the idea of a safari hunters’ island and sold the property.

  In Haro Strait, not far from Lime Kiln Point, somebody spots a pod of orcas; few things set the human heart to racing as hard as the sight of black dorsal fins on the horizon. When they break the surface, jumping ten feet or more, the killers show the grace of ballerinas. Hearing them breathe, you find it hard not to feel a sense of mammal kinship. Through their blowholes they spout a blast as grand as a geyser gush—the sight and sound of large lungs exhaling warm air. Cleanly black-and-white, the orca would be ruined by colorization.

  One larger whale, apparently the bull, leaps high and crashes down, displacing enough water to flood a subdivision. They move fast. I want to get closer, but we can’t; it is against the law to come within a hundred yards of killer whales or to harass them in any way. From Lime Kiln Point, the nation’s only whale-watching park, the orcas can often be seen thirty to forty yards offshore. In the chill waters of Haro Strait, chasing fish, playing with each other, they seem like regal creatures. Later in the day, I hear a story from one of the naturalists at the Whale Museum in Friday Harbor on San Juan Island. A few harbor seals were sunbathing on rocks near a steep edge on one of the small islands when they were approached by a pod of orcas. One whale snatched a two-hundred-pound harbor seal, then the rest of the pack moved in, tearing the seal apart.

  The killer whale has had many friends in this part of the world for at least two decades. Most schoolchildren can describe the orca’s intelligence, its strong family ties, its sense of humor, its dorsal-fin size. Every killer whale in the waters of Washington and British Columbia has been identified and named; their pictures are published in a book, not unlike a high school yearbook. When Winthrop toured Puget Sound by canoe—passing the spot on San Juan Island where orcas play ’most every day—the killer whale was the most feared creature of the deep. Efficient carnivores, a pack of thirty orcas may attack a gray whale, for example, and tear the larger creature apart, shredding the tail flukes, then stripping away the blubbery flanks. Another type of orca attack includes the coup de grâce: forcing open the other whale’s mouth and ripping out its tongue. In such a case, the victim dies from shock and blood loss. The orca also eats dolphins, sea lions and occasional shorebirds.

  As recently as the early 1960s the United States government issued bulletins stating that the orca would attack and kill any human in the water. A National Geographic book published about the same time repeated the myth. This perception helps explain the worldwide publicity a man named Ted Griffin received when he purchased a killer whale in 1965 for $5,000 from a group of Vancouver Island fishermen. While press helicopters buzzed overhead and newspaper reporters sent daily dispatches from the sea, Griffin took eighteen headline-filled days to tow his caged orca five hundred miles south to Seattle. He named the whale Namu, put it inside a small tank, and charged admission from the curious who came to see him swim with a creature that was supposed to rip him apart. Soon, Griffin was a celebrity, invited by Pentagon brass to formulate a plan to put the orca to military use. In 1968, the Defense Department purchased two killer whales from Griffin, believing they could be trained as a sort of watchdog on the high seas. Meanwhile, United Artists had paid Griffin $25,000 for the rights to film Namu, The Killer Whale. When the picture was shot off San Juan Island in 1966, a fake whale manufactured in Hollywood was used in place of Namu, who had died in his cement pen in Seattle. The cause of death was listed as drowning brought on by sickness from polluted water.

  Griffin proceeded to catch a total of thirty orcas, selling most of them to places like Sea World in Southern California and Florida. By the early 1970s, the killer whale had become the world’s leading aquarium attraction. Nearly forty orcas, more than a third of the Puget Sound population, were captured by aquarium hunters in a ten-year period up to 1976. So, even after the landmark whale treaties of 1966 protected blue and humpback whales from further predation by man, the orca hunts accelerated. Killer whales were netted, sedated, taken from their families and put into tiny tanks for amusement purposes. In the open sea, moving at a top speed of thirty knots, they cruise up to a hundred miles a day. In the cement tanks, their range is usually just several lengths longer than their body size.

  Few Puget Sound orcas, conditioned to a stress-free life of roaming in forty-six-degree water with their families and friends of the pod, have lived very long in captivity. At Sea World, they have been taught to breach on command for their food and generally treated like circus dwarfs in the last century. One transplanted orca in Los Angeles was trained to wear sunglasses for a car dealer’s ad. Like the sea otter and the wolf, the orca is known to have a well-developed sense of humor in the wild, playing tag with friends, doing cartwheels and back flips. But at aquariums such as Sea World, their humor appears stiff and forced—Pavlovian routin
es of hoop-jumping and fin-standing in order to get their dinner. Some have rebelled and turned surly or refused to eat; a few captives have died of anorexia, baffling trainers who can’t understand why such an intelligent mammal would starve itself to death. Most of the captured orcas have died well before their natural life expectancy of seventy to eighty years.

  In the early 1970s, a onetime Vancouver Aquarium whale expert named Dr. Paul Spong led a worldwide campaign to keep the orcas free. While Spong fit the generational stereotype—during summer months, he lived in a treehouse off Blackfish Sound and played his flute to the whales as a way of communicating with them—his early research was gaining a foothold of credibility in the scientific community. Initially, Dr. Spong was laughed at when he talked about similarities between whale and human brains and claimed that orcas had a sophisticated way of communicating with one another. By comparing the evolution of human brain size with that of orcas, Spong concluded that the cerebral cortex—that part of the brain which houses language, abstract thought and logic—is strikingly similar in the two mammals; no other warm-blooded creatures have brains of such sizes compared to their body weight. In 1976, while Spong was speaking at an orca symposium at Evergreen State College in Olympia—a school whose official mascot is the geoduck, the “large queer clam” which so fascinated Winthrop—eight killer whales were captured nearby in Budd Inlet, just a few miles from the Nisqually Delta. The seizure, by hunters from Sea World of Japan, made front-page news for days on the West Coast. A few of the whales were released from their holding nets by midnight saboteurs. The others were ordered released by Governor Dan Evans.