by Nick Jans
One further question: After all these centuries of no human fatalities in North America, why these two, at the start of a new century? Is it just coincidence, or an inevitable by-product of increased human-wolf contact? Or are wolves, encountering less human persecution, losing their fear of us? Of course, the sample size is too small to allow for meaningful generalizations. Too, wolves across their North American range are subject to sport hunting, trapping, and predator control at high levels. Modern snowmobiles and ATVs allow unprecedented access to remote areas, and chasing wolves down with such machines is currently legal in Alaska. Meanwhile, sport hunting of lower-48 wolf populations, until recently protected under the Endangered Species Act (including in Montana, Idaho, Wyoming, Michigan, Minnesota, and Wisconsin), has exacted a heavy toll. By the principles of natural selection (bold, unafraid wolves must run an exponentially higher risk of human-inflicted death), they should be as wary of us as any wolves in history. Consider that roughly one in ten Alaska wolves is killed each year by humans—and that’s just the recorded take. The actual figure may be double or triple that. I know that in the small Arctic native villages where I lived, a wolf hide bearing the required plastic Fish and Game recording seal was a rare sight, and two dozen or more were taken every year. Extrapolate that lack of registered take to similar communities in the region and across Alaska, and the total must pile into the hundreds each year. Thus, the persecution wolves currently face in Alaska should indeed be shaping their behavior toward increased avoidance of humans. However, there is no sign that contact between the two species is diminishing in The Great Land; and most of it goes badly for the wolves.
That Romeo avoided being shot that first winter, just for being close to so many humans, was a minor miracle. If hunger had trumped cross-species social impulses as anyone might have expected, he’d have been whacked in those first few weeks. Even if his early dog and human contacts were friendly or neutral, people knew the Alaska backstory and those darker tales of myth and legend. Unlike most wolves, Romeo presented an easy target for the most casual of killers: drive into the West Glacier Trail parking lot at the right moment and squeeze off a round, or throw out some poisoned bait in the nearby brush, or maybe set a cluster of snares on one of his trails. Too, the odds kept increasing that the wolf would wander into the wrong yard and be offed in imagined or fabricated self-defense. The sight of Romeo trotting across the lake may have been thrilling, but it also swept many of his watchers with tidal worry that ebbed and flowed but never quite ceased over the years that we knew him. For the most part, keeping alive was up to him, and to the fates that spin, measure, and cut every thread of life. We could no more safeguard him than we could have kept him secret. Though some master of philosophy and spiritualism might have been able to open a clenched hand and release the fear of that seemingly inevitable future, I never quite managed.
Matters weren’t helped by the wolf’s occasional wanderings. He, or another black wolf, or several that looked and acted one hell of a lot the same, started popping up here and there about the Mendenhall valley with increasing frequency: in Thunder Mountain neighborhoods, on the Mendenhall wetlands less than a mile from the airport, and even near Amalga Harbor, twenty-seven miles to the north (on Juneau’s double-dead-end main highway, a fifty-odd-mile-long coastal artery known variously as Egan Drive, Glacier Highway, or The Road). Though Romeo’s home base near the glacier was a no-hunting area, all he had to do was cross an imaginary line a quarter mile off the West Glacier Trail or wander up Montana Creek into free-fire zones. And, at times, he apparently went far beyond that. A prime, large hide like that beckoned as an impressive trophy, one plenty of self-styled sportsmen would jump at taking, legally or otherwise. Juneau’s black wolf would have disappeared out of the country and reemerged on someone’s den wall, teeth bared in a comic-book, glassy-eyed snarl, and few would have ever known his fate. But against all odds, the black wolf not only survived, but prospered.
Very seldom does a single animal become a social issue all to itself, but over his life, Romeo paradoxically divided and united a community: a living, breathing focal point for the broad, ongoing topic of wolves and people in Alaska. As with that larger issue, there weren’t really two camps when it came to the black wolf. A truer model would be a continuum with a few ardent, prowolf advocates on one end, a small number of equally impassioned voices pulling toward the opposite extreme, and the vast majority falling along a sliding scale that covered every possible shade of reaction, up to and including indifference. But even those who knew little about this wolf, and never would glimpse him, would offer, if pressed, some sort of opinion regarding his presence. Regardless of the division, Juneauites who bore deep enmity toward the black wolf held back, either out of respect for fellow citizens or unwillingness to risk the ire of neighbors and community. Without that restraint, the wolf would have been unlikely to survive.
Considering the lay of the land, a wolf as a centerpiece civic issue made perfect sense. The Juneau Borough, totaling 3,255 square miles, stretches nearly one hundred miles south to north, and eastward across deep tidal fjords to include a number of sizeable islands (notably, nearby Douglas) plus a portion of huge, remote Admiralty Island, known for its numbers of outsized coastal brown bears. The actual road-serviced area ranges roughly fifty miles along a narrow coastal shelf caught between mountains and sea. In total area, Juneau ranks as the largest-in-area incorporated city not only in Alaska, but in the entire United States—Los Angeles, Chicago, and New York included. Thinking big was apparently a ploy by Juneau boosters in the 1890s gold rush era to keep as much incorporated land as possible (and as many future mining claims) within the city’s jurisdiction and revenue base. The population density works out to just ten inhabitants per square mile, but even that sparse statistic doesn’t give a true image. While some Juneauites live beyond hollering distance of neighbors, and a handful are wrapped in wilderness isolation, most of the thirty-some thousand residents cluster in a narrow, twenty-mile stretch along the coast and along loop or spur roads that dead-end up densely populated valleys.
Development is bounded on one side by avalanche-swept slopes too steep for building, and tidewater on the other. Most of Juneau’s incorporated area consists of wild, uninhabited territory, cheek by jowl, in places, with fairly dense development. Even the most urban-seeming portions of the Capital City, including state office buildings and the main street row of tourist gift stores and eateries, lie within a mile or less of prime wildlife habitat—often much less. Black bears pad at night just yards from the state senate office building; killer whales stalk seals near beachfront houses. State capital or no, by deliberate thought or accident, Juneau is far more mingled with the wild than most cities its size, whether in Alaska or beyond. So sure, why not throw a wolf into the mix?
In fact, the appearance of Romeo wasn’t the first time that the presence of wolves had stirred controversy in Juneau. In the spring and summer of 2001, a pack—two adults and a litter of pups—appeared on Douglas Island, which lies just across Gastineau Channel from downtown Juneau. Even at high tide, scarcely a half mile away, easy swimming distance for a wolf. No wolves had been seen on Douglas in decades, and they thrilled tourists and locals alike by making regular appearances on a rocky beach on the island’s remote back side, showing a relaxed tolerance for viewers who watched them from boats and kayaks. That following winter, a local trapper snared, killed, and skinned seven (probably all) of the half-grown young. His actions were entirely legal and cheered by some local hunters who claimed the wolves would have decimated the island’s deer population. But the resulting furor was decided not in human but lupine favor. Notwithstanding a great gnashing of teeth among the fervent antiwolf crowd, wolf trapping was banned on Douglas. Part of the forbearance shown Romeo was almost surely due to reverberations from that civic battle, just two years before.
More than a dozen years earlier, a single, far less publicized and almost forgotten incident cast a shadow at least as large.
On a late-winter day in 1988, Judith Cooper, a local dog musher, was taking a walk up the West Glacier Trail with three of her Siberian huskies. Not far up the trail, her dogs cued her to something ahead; then she heard an odd clanking. Just a few yards off the trail lay a black wolf, with three of its four paws caught in steel traps, its eyes glazed with pain. The pummeled, blood-spattered snow and the wolf’s emaciated condition indicated the young male had been there for days. Instead of retreating or hurrying past, Cooper moved closer. The wolf had wandered into an amateurish but obviously effective-enough trap spread: several deer forelegs hung from trees, surrounded by a cluster of Newhouse number four leg-hold traps chained to those same trees. The wolf had followed the West Glacier Trail down from the high country, making frequent scent posts as he went; Judith later saw these, along with his tracks. As he meandered downhill, his nose led him into trouble. The first steel jaws snapped high on a front wrist. Struggling to free himself, he’d stepped in two more traps and become hopelessly tangled. Wolves caught in such devices—unchanged in design for more than a century—have been known to wring off paws or chew through bone and sinew to free themselves; many have left toes behind, or lost feet to freezing. The young black wolf’s struggles had torn and gouged hide and flesh around the trap jaws, and probably broken some bones. Twenty-three years later, Judith, by then in her seventies, squinted back, remembering. “There was frozen blood everywhere. The wolf could barely move. He didn’t snarl and wasn’t aggressive at all. It was like looking into one of my own dogs’ eyes,” she told me.
Cooper didn’t hesitate. She hurried back down the trail to her car, and returned with two men, one of them a local vet. Though they deployed a noose-mounted restraint pole while they worked to release the powerful trap jaws, they hardly needed it. “The wolf never struggled or snapped at us,” Cooper said. “He seemed to understand we were helping.” With the animal freed, Cooper and her companions backed off and waited, but the exhausted wolf didn’t rise. Finally the three decided to go around the bend, then move up the trail, making as much racket as possible. It worked. Startled to its feet, the animal limped off into the trees. As a result of snapshots Judith Cooper took of the scene and her testimony regarding the potential danger to the dozens of domestic dogs that regularly used the trail, the Alaska Board of Game, spearheaded by Joel Bennett (then a member), prohibited trapping within a quarter mile of any trail in the Mendenhall Glacier Recreation Area—the same trails that, years later, Romeo would range on an almost daily basis. In saving that young black wolf’s life, Cooper may well have saved Romeo’s, years later, and who knows, perhaps in another sense, as well. It’s entirely possible that injured wolf, limping off into the late-winter afternoon years before, lived to be part of the bloodline and pack that gave birth to the wolf we called Romeo.
6
The Survival Sweepstakes
November 2004
I sat on the snow-covered ice, peering into my camera’s viewfinder as flakes sifted from a low sky. Gus curled next to me, patient as always. Twenty yards away, Romeo stood against the Big Rock, and I waited, finger on the shutter, for him to lift his muzzle and howl. The afternoon lay quiet, the ice so new, so thin that it creaked and bowed underfoot. Winter had drifted down from the high country, again, and with it the black wolf—returned for a second winter among us. Miracle enough that he had stayed the previous winter and into spring, even more that he would disappear one April evening—gone, as we knew he would be one day—and return months later. Of course we had worried ourselves sick that he’d been killed, but we’d also celebrated his possible survival, and perhaps a home with a new pack. There had been no way of knowing which was true, and either way, we had no choice but to let go as best we could. Now he was back, and for all the solidity of his dark shape against the snow, and the insistent lines of tracks, he seemed more apparition than ever. Our first season of the wolf may have been chance; now we knew he’d chosen this ground not once, but twice, deepening the mystery of this solitary wolf and his bond to this place.
Harry Robinson was the first to encounter Romeo that autumn of 2004 as he hiked the West Glacier Trail, on the shoulder of Mount McGinnis. Thinking he heard a distant howl higher up the mountain, Harry replied several times, bad wolf accent and all. On his return down the trail, along the lakeshore, there was Romeo. “He saw us, his tail went up, and he came running right over,” Harry remembers, brushing back the years. “There was no doubt he was happy to see Brittain [Harry’s dog]. I’d like to think me, as well.” In fact, his hiking partner, attorney Jan Van Dort, commented that the wolf seemed to greet Harry. Harry figured Romeo had followed Brittain’s scent, and perhaps his own howls, down the West Glacier Trail. Harry isn’t much for emotional displays, but even years later, his eyes soften at remembering.
At first, the wolf came and went, as if wrapping up business elsewhere. Sightings swelled as lake and wetlands froze, again transforming brushy morass into firm-footed arena. If any of us doubted this was the same animal, uncertainty evaporated as he bounded toward the dogs he favored, keening that same high whine of invitation. We marked, too, the same grizzled streak on his chin and left shoulder, and the tiny white vee on one jowl. Of course this was the same wolf, but not the same. Those of us who knew him saw the filled-out neck, chest, and haunches. As sleek as he’d been before, this year’s winter coat had come in even glossier. He’d not only survived his summer hiatus, but flourished. And now, at least a three-year-old, less teenager than adult, he approached his prime: the explosive resiliency of youth combined with mature thickening of muscle and bone.
As for wisdom, that must have grown as well over the time since we’d last seen him, and would continue to increase as long as he breathed—as life span itself would depend on that ever-rising curve of knowledge and judgment. According to biologists, a ripe old age for a wild wolf is between seven and ten years, though most never live that long, and a few exceed that mark. A young, solitary wolf like Romeo stood at far higher risk. Having had fewer chances than many wolves to learn a territory and hunting tactics from senior pack members—which ridges to traverse, which niches of habitat held marmots or goats, what paths to take across alpine ice fields, the boundaries of neighboring packs—he had by necessity forged his own way. If the black wolf’s choice of hanging near humans for half the year had seemed odd, its soundness had been proven by the feat of his survival. I’d argue beyond mere soundness toward brilliance, based on the unique, proactive decisions he made on an almost daily basis. Even within the boundaries of Denali National Park, where all human hunting and trapping is banned, one study found the average life of a wolf spans just three years, subject to the usual natural forces: accidents, disease, starvation, and fights with other packs—the latter the leading cause of death, at 25 percent annually, of the total Denali Park population. Despite less apparent protection—certainly lacking the defensive umbrella of a family to help fend off invading wolves, and a far narrower area excluding human hunting and trapping—the black wolf had already broken even.
Even more than the first winter, how well his gambit worked could depend on forces beyond his horizon. He’d moved beyond rumor, even to those who’d never seen him and never would. Attention fixed like a spotlight the instant he reappeared, and our own cycles of elation and angst began anew. Among the watchers sat those wielding the power to shape his fate—what little that meant to a wolf.
Though Romeo had returned, not all his friends waited to greet him. Dakotah, who had always been in the health you’d expect from her sleek, muscled form, had wakened us in the dark one early-summer morning, her brown eyes pleading. A few hours later, our vet diagnosed ileus, a dire bowel malady triggered by an unknown cause. She survived emergency surgery, and we breathed again when we knew she was awake and should be able to come home the next day. But she died alone that night, without us to comfort her. Why doesn’t matter, even if we knew. Loss lies beyond cause or effect, a hard, hollow country all to itself. There was nothing to
do but travel its expanse for a time, bearing the weight of grief—Sherrie, whose heart is too gentle for this world, most of all. The subdued dogs searched on and off for their lost companion. Years later, they still perked ears whenever they heard her name, and whined when they spied a light-colored Lab that could have been her rounding a bend in a trail. When Romeo approached us that winter, he seemed to be searching and wondering as well, scanning in all directions for our missing pack member. But the dog that helped give the wolf a name was gone, as if she’d never been. A few of us cried, and the world moved on. And through that world, a dark shape still moved, carving out a life at the edge of us.
Inexplicable as it had first seemed, Romeo’s choice of a winter territory made perfect sense. Viewed from above, the lake served as the hub of a great wheel, with human-made and animal trails and natural corridors radiating outward in every direction. Wolves, even more than some creatures, seek the path of least resistance. Survival hinges on a brutal imperative: more energy must be gained than lost, across endless hard miles. To fail is to die. A hunting pack in tough going moves single file, commonly covering fifteen to thirty miles a day, with different animals taking turns in the taxing lead position. This isn’t a matter of wanderlust, but necessity—covering the empty distance between meals. Research shows that wolves far more often fail in their hunts than succeed and, even when hungry, don’t bother to study, let alone attack, the vast majority of animals they see, apparently recognizing that the price of a meal—precious calories burned in the chase and kill, as well as risk of injury—might be too steep. Though healthy adult moose, caribou, and deer may fall prey if caught at a disadvantage, the high percentage of animals seen but not even tested, let alone attacked, by hunting wolves (more than 90 percent in one study) bears testament to the fact that wolves take primarily the sick, weak, and injured. Without the benefit of scientific studies, Lewis and Clark seemed to understand the relationship, calling the prairie wolves they saw “shepherds of the buffalo”—caretakers that strengthened the herd, rather than scourges. A moose that stands its ground and can’t be compelled to break into a run is virtually never taken down. But such culling requires nearly endless travel, often in hard conditions. Biologist David Mech quotes a Russian proverb that sums up the essence of lupine existence: A wolf lives by its feet.