by Nick Jans
Though wolves are best known as predators, Romeo, like all of his kind, was an adept and avid scavenger; there’s no better meal than one that will neither run off nor fight back. Patrolling wolves are ever alert for a free lunch of any size, and they may go to surprising lengths to glean rather than kill. Gordon Haber monitored one Denali National Park pack that spent more than a week digging out two moose buried deep in an avalanche. Just detecting the carcasses beneath twenty feet of hard-packed snow was a feat to make a bloodhound proud. And, as anyone who’s ever dug avalanche-packed snow might attest, the excavation was itself a major feat—all for two frozen-solid carcasses that would test the teeth of any wolf. Expending all that effort was apparently a more inviting prospect than searching out, chasing, and dragging down two live moose. That single example illustrates the scavenging drive of Canis lupus. Consider, too, that this drive is precisely what trappers depend on: wolves are most often lured into a trap by scented bait that promises food for the easy taking. While Romeo had no moose to scavenge, no doubt he found steady opportunity, from winter-killed goats and deer to nasty old salmon carcasses. In thin times, he probably branched out into omnivorous endeavors, as many wolves will (scat analyses sometimes show surprising quantities of nonanimal matter, including berries, various plant parts, and insects).
A persistent rumor had followed the wolf from the start—one that offered an explanation for not only his apparent tameness, but his presence in the first place. Some murmured worriedly, while others groused: Someone’s feeding that damn wolf. If so, a potentially dangerous case of food conditioning in the making. And a 2004 analysis of several Romeo scats by Fish and Game biologist Neil Barten indeed proved he’d ingested measurable quantities of dog kibble. Case closed, it seemed. If not being deliberately fed (one morning, handfuls of dry dog food lay scattered in the Mendenhall Glacier visitor center parking lot), he must have been snitching from backyard bowls. Not good news, either from a wildlife management or wolf lover’s perspective. A quick shuffle through documented cases of what might be called friendly wolf-human interactions, including those recorded by McNay, links many such instances of amicable behavior—ranging from play invitations to fearless, inquisitive encounters—to wolves somehow getting food from humans. Food conditioning tends to occur in exactly the places you’d expect: at wilderness area campgrounds, along remote highways, around logging camps, and so on. No matter if the feedings are deliberate or accidental. The more they’re repeated, the more likely some, if not all, involved wolves will become food conditioned; that is, they learn to associate people with food and, as a result, become increasingly tolerant—in fact, may actively seek out human contact. This tolerance sometimes broadens out to include stealing and chewing nonfood items like backpacks and shoes, or investigating camping gear and people themselves. In a number of instances, likely including the Icy Bay attack of the boy and Kenton Carnegie’s death, and possibly that of Candice Berner, this fearless behavior has been linked to aggression. Even low-level fearlessness is viewed as troublesome enough that the wolves involved are often killed. Thus, the old line “A fed bear is a dead bear” applies at least equally to Canis lupus. Romeo the wolf seemed at high risk for a similar fate; friendly, playful behavior and toy stealing could well be symptomatic of food conditioning rather than social nature. It was just a matter of time, some figured, before things escalated.
What to make of these claims? Romeo almost certainly took advantage of deer offal and freezer-burned halibut or salmon that careless residents habitually dumped along roadsides and in parking lots as a means of avoiding either an expensive, odiferous trip to the dump or bears in their trash. Perhaps, too, he filched dog food off of back porches now and then; and it’s possible he was deliberately fed by folks who didn’t know any better. I heard my own name, as well as Harry Robinson’s and photographer John Hyde’s, connected to such rumors. How else to explain such close contact between the wolf and certain individuals? Respected naturalist and retired Fish and Game biologist Bob Armstrong told me that he once found dog treats scattered around the bases of willows along the Dredge Lakes shore, though he saw no evidence that they were left for the wolf or that he had eaten any. One woman who lived near Dredge Lakes admitted to me, years later, that during a hard spell of winter weather, she and a friend had left a deer head and some frozen fish where Romeo could find them. That was the single admission, from dozens of people I questioned, of an attempt to deliberately feed the wolf. Meanwhile, I never once saw the wolf approaching people as if he expected food, nor anyone offering him any. Nor did I ever find anything except wild prey remains in his scat. Of course, I didn’t have the luxury of a testing lab, which brings us to the matter of that dog kibble Fish and Game found in his droppings.
While he may indeed have been the original consumer, I’m sure that much of it was secondhand. With so many dogs in the area every day, it was bound to be littered with clumps of stool, especially when a month’s worth of snow melted down and a month’s worth of leavings emerged. Not uncommonly, I noted wolf tracks leading from one to the next patch of brown-stained snow, and the piles conspicuously absent, with no sign of human cleanup. John Hyde saw the same thing. “No doubt about it,” he told me. “[The wolf] scrounged his share of shit, especially his first year or two.” The technical name for fecal consumption is coprophagia—a fairly common practice among many species domestic and wild, including members of the dog family. My own observations dovetail with Hyde’s. The wolf ate feces but seemed to outgrow the behavior, or maybe it came and went, a fallback in thin times, when every calorie counted.
Whether by design or coincidence, Romeo’s highly generalized, small-prey strategy at the glacier scored huge in the survival sweepstakes. First, the black wolf had gained exclusive, convenience-store access to most of his hunting areas. He not only avoided direct competition from others of his kind on his human-made trails, but also found reduced exposure to deadly territorial fights—our collective, surrogate pack presence helping to deflect human-intolerant wolves. He also cut actual hunting stress to a minimum. Unlike moose, salmon and beaver don’t kick in your ribs, require time-intensive, exhausting hunts, or present massive, tooth-wearing bones to gnaw—the latter, a serious issue. Aged wolves with worn and broken teeth are among the first to starve; Dr. David Mech recorded a case of just such a wolf, apparently unable to feed from a frozen, scavenged moose carcass, while his younger, stronger-toothed pack mates survived.
The black wolf’s food also came in readily handled portions—a huge, energy-saving advantage. One well-regarded theory among wolf biologists explains why wolves evolved into group hunters: not as much to tackle big, high-value prey as to beat would-be scavengers to the punch. Browns/grizzlies frequently usurp wolf kills, and smaller mammals such as foxes and wolverines pilfer as they can. Birds are often the worst looters of all—in Alaska, chiefly ravens, gulls, eagles, jays, and magpies. One study showed that ravens alone can consume 60 percent of a single wolf’s deer kill before it can eat it all, great for the freeloaders, not so much for the wolf. Thus a pack is able to keep more of its hard-won meat by virtue of being able to consume it so much faster. A dozen wolves can polish off a moose carcass—say, six hundred to a thousand pounds of edibles—in two or three heavy feeds just hours apart, leaving only a scattering of well-gnawed bones, tufts of hair, and a dark pile of rumen in a trampled circle. I’ve come across many such recent, stripped-down kills, where every bone that can be has been snapped for its thread of marrow, and every scrap of bloodstained snow eaten—more a testament to necessary efficiency than voraciousness. Even if a solitary wolf like Romeo did knock down a moose, he would probably lose more than half his kill just to ravens and magpies, whether he ate as fast as he could, tried to guard it, or cached leftovers. By focusing on prey he could chomp down in a single sitting, combined with the other advantages he’d gained, Romeo the wolf kept his energy currency in his own pocket. If his ethos had inspired those in charge of cutting government wast
e, we’d be turning a surplus in a finger snap.
In the end, no one can say with certainty whether the black wolf received food from humans, and if he did, how often or how directly. No one who spent much time around the wolf believed he was steadily fed. His behavior seemed too subtle, too consistent, and too relaxed to be anything but a natural expression of who he was. For all the complex, close situations that streamed toward the wolf we called Romeo, there had been zero reports of aggression to humans, and scarcely a curled lip so far toward our dogs. But whether or not the wolf was in fact receiving food from people, a time of trouble lay just over the horizon.
Romeo and Jessie
7
What’s in a Name?
February 2005
There went Tim and Maureen Hall’s female border collie, Jessie, racing across the lake, and Romeo, all 120-plus pounds of him, bounding toward her at top speed. They met in an ecstatic pas de deux, like two long-parted lovers—Jessie wriggling and fawning as the wolf leaped and whirled, tail high, both of them carrying on in pure celebration of each other’s company.
The fact was, they saw each other all the time. Jessie lived two doors down from us, and all she had to do was slip out of the yard and across fifty yards of woods onto the lake. Or the wolf would show up at the edge of the Halls’ backyard and wait, tail curled across his toes, the way he once did for Dakotah. This unlikely pair, a thirty-pound sheep-herding dog and its antithesis—a huge, wild wolf that would (at least in theory) stalk and eat the sheep the other might safeguard—disappeared together for hours at a time, and at least once, overnight. No doubt Jessie and Romeo were a tight, yin and yang item.
Of course the wolf wanted to hang with dogs. By the second winter, he traded pleasantries with pretty much every mutt that was willing to come his way—the usual tail-wag, sniff, and play-invite thing, sometimes leading to elaborate hijinks that lasted until the dogs got distracted, humans butted in, or the wolf spied a more interesting opportunity and went dashing toward wherever that might be, including a mile across the lake. On a busy day, he might have as many as three dozen canine meet and greets, most only a minute or two long, but a few that lasted an hour or more. With a few rare and notable exceptions, the wolf just plain dug his domestic cousins—apparently more than the company of other wolves, more than a meal of fresh beaver, and more than pretty much anything else, far as we could tell. In a number of cases, that attraction extended past fun-loving affability to the sort of personal bond you might expect of an ultra-intelligent, family-oriented animal on his own, trying to fill a void—not for purely biological purpose, like reproducing, or seeking hunting and patrol partners (the better to kill with, or defend territory). The dog-wolf social interplay offered no apparent survival benefits, and often the contrary, judging from the energy and time he expended. But the degree to which they mattered to the wolf indicated some complex need, no less real than food or shelter. Hard not to label these ties with certain dogs as social contact for its own intrinsic value: friendship, as we understand the word. As with human relationships, these bonds came in all categories, from strong interest to outright adoration, sometimes for reasons others might find inexplicable.
Though once upon a time such ties were dismissed as the products of wishful imagination, myriad cases of interspecies friendship—including such improbable pairings as a cat and an iguana, a lion and a gazelle, and a dog and an elephant—are well documented, from YouTube to formal journalism and, increasingly, research. A number of accessible books on the subject come to mind. Unlikely Friendships, by National Geographic senior writer Jennifer Holland, and The Emotional Lives of Animals, by biologist Marc Bekoff, serve as examples of a rising wave focused on animal behaviorism: the recognition that animals of not only identical but different species, some wild, others domesticated, possess the ability to establish filial and affectionate bonds, sometimes at astoundingly complex levels. Consider Holland’s example of a cat that led around and protected an elderly dog for years after it went blind (one of several such documented “seeing-eye” pairings between animals of different species, from a variety of sources). So, a wolf and dog, friends? From a dispassionate, left-brain point of view, far more difficult to dismiss than accept the notion. All that’s left to debate is the nature and depth of what we don’t know.
This much for sure: Romeo didn’t settle on his favorites due to lack of choices. Dozens, even hundreds of dogs of all sizes and forms came his way in any given week, brought by us as if at his command. Juneau is a dog city as much as it is an outdoor town, and the two are a natural mix. Going for a brisk ski loop with buddies, or sledding with the whole family? Catching up with a friend over a long walk, or just out for a few minutes at lunch? The glacier was the perfect spot—gorgeous and sprawling, wild yet accessible—and of course the pooches came along, part of our own pack thing.
Once again, our own, species-specific shaping of the landscape and its rules played perfectly for the wolf. Not only was the Mendenhall Glacier Recreation Area ideally shaped for Romeo’s hunting needs; unlike most surrounding city land, the recreation area allowed dogs off leash, a big attraction for those who wanted to give their guys some room to run free without risking a ticket or dirty looks. The end result a grand outdoor soufflé, well seasoned with dogs—mostly loose and under shaky voice control. All perfect for a lonely wolf hoping to pry away the creatures we thought ours, if not permanently, at least for some face time with what they once had been.
As affable as the black wolf was, and always open to making new buddies, he knew what he liked most—often, it seemed, at first sight and ever after. Dakotah and Jessie were just two of the dogs he adored, and who could say one more than another? He harbored at least a dozen such intense attractions over the years, and though he seemed totally smitten in the presence of any one, he could switch to another without any apparent inner contradiction—more a Don Juan than a Romeo (though still curiously lacking that let’s-make-pups component that would have wrung some hardwired biological sense out of the whole thing). As curious as the pull to Dakotah or Jessie may have seemed, it did make some sense. Both dogs were, after all, cute and sociable females that seemed as smitten with the wolf as he with them. You could argue they filled the role of surrogate mates, anyhow.
Now, consider the case of our friend Anita’s big, black neutered male Newfoundland-Lab mix, Sugar. The dog was a total galoot—big-headed, goofy-eyed, slobber-jawed, given to hysterical fits of barking, and so incorrigible he seemed a sitcom prop: the sort of dog that bowls over little kids to steal their toys, rolls in rancid bear crap and chomps porcupines for fun, and nearly poisons himself to death by gobbling coagulated oil paint that couldn’t possibly have tasted anywhere close to okay. I know, because I witnessed all the above. But wait—it gets worse. We’re talking about a dog that serially humped an enormous stuffed-bear toy Anita dubbed Teddy Precious, in an obscene daily ritual best left to imagination. Anita had rescued Sugar as a gangly adolescent; no doubt he’d been ditched by someone who finally threw up his hands. Even kindhearted Anita, who loved him dearly (and in return was lavished with kisses often redolent of rotten salmon carcasses), agreed that the Big Shug must have been last in line for brains and been slipped a pair of dice instead. So, what does a galumphing nitwit of a dog have to offer the übercanid? A continuance of our good question, but here an already odd story shifts even stranger.
Sugar held one great passion beyond ingesting all things foul and making whoopie with Teddy Precious: chasing objects and bringing them back, over and over, to be flung again—sticks, toys, balls, whatever. He would have fetched in his sleep if he could have figured a way to keep one side of his pea brain awake. Much of Anita’s bonding time with Shug, and by default with her border collie mix, Jonti, amounted to long walks and fetches out on the lake, right out the back door of the apartment we rented her. Anita and Sugar both needed the exercise, and dog and human were nuts about each other, one more case illustrating the point about inexplicable
attraction. All in all, it was a perfect arrangement.
We’d taken Anita to see the wolf the previous year, within days of our very first sighting. It wasn’t long after that she and her dogs were walking up the lake one cold afternoon, dogs coursing back and forth, the crunch of footsteps echoing in the silence between Sugar’s earsplitting yelps for another throw, strained through Anita’s own diminished hearing and her winter hat, that she realized she wasn’t alone. She turned, and there was the wolf, trotting along behind them, whining his high-pitched come-hither serenade. Of course, she just about jumped out of her boots, as anyone would, especially out alone. But the wolf, grinning and tail waving, radiated body language that reassured her; and she and her dogs had already been introduced to the wolf by us. When she turned to face it, the wolf stopped; when she turned her back and walked, it kept pace about thirty feet behind her. Meanwhile, Sugar continued on his endless go-and-get mission, oblivious to the stranger; as long as the wolf didn’t hijack his saliva-matted tennis ball, all things were good. Jonti, who had a tendency toward antisocial lip-curling—no offense taken by the wolf—ended up on a leash, just in case.
And so an odd, several-times-a-week quartet formed: bookish, not-so-outdoorsy, forty-something Anita with her two dogs out front, and a big black wolf trotting along a dozen yards behind, whine-whine-whining, apparently thrilled to be going somewhere, anywhere with Sugar, who couldn’t possibly have cared less. I don’t think I ever saw that damn dog notice, let alone react to Romeo. He might as well have been invisible. For her part, Anita seldom looked at the wolf either and never locked eyes; her movements, too, stayed measured and predictable—a message I’m sure the wolf understood in the spirit in which it was offered. He must have appreciated the break from all the staring and jabbering he endured on an almost daily basis. Anita accepted the wolf as she did Sugar, without conditions; and, unlike just about everyone else the wolf encountered, she sought nothing in return. She never carried a camera, invited others along, chatted up her forays, or made any overture to the wolf. Sometimes I watched from afar for a few minutes with binoculars; other times I ran into our friend and her gang out on the lake, traded pleasantries, snapped a picture or two, and skied on. Cast in the slanted winter light, their circular pilgrimage in the glacier’s cathedral presence, ever-shadowed by the dark wolf, seemed a living, breathing Salvador Dalí canvas, fraught with symbol and dream.