A Wolf Called Romeo

by Nick Jans

  While trapping as a way of earning a full-time living is fading away, Juneau, like most Alaska towns, includes an active enclave of recreational trappers. The best among them are skilled, persistent individuals who claim they’re not just connecting to a vital frontier tradition, but contributing a community service by controlling pests and predators. They go quietly about their business and keep within their own circle. Properly placed snares or traps, either with a urine scent lure or fragrant food bait, are indeed the most effective way to catch and kill wolves, especially in rugged, forested terrain. The fate of the Douglas Island wolves and others, including those that may have been from Romeo’s pack, attests to the local efficiency of both trappers and methods. Contrary to lore, most wolves are quite susceptible to traps; consider that the steel-jawed leg-hold trap, essentially the same in design over more than a century, played a vital role in their eradication in the lower 48. Though such trapping (with the exception of small-diameter sets for hares) was prohibited in all of Dredge Lakes, and within a quarter mile of established trails or roads both within the Mendenhall Glacier Recreation Area and on adjoining Juneau borough lands, enforcement was lax. Several times over the years, Harry Robinson and other hikers found evidence of illegal sets near the glacier and along other area trails—not all intended for the wolf, but some that could at least cause serious injury, all the same. However, reports to authorities were met with inaction. Enforcement officers probably saw a full-blown investigation for at best a wrist-slap ticket on some local hobbyist as effort poorly spent. Filling that vacuum, some folks took to disarming or removing traps on their own.

  While there was never sure evidence that Romeo ever ran afoul of such a device, wolf watchers at least twice noted the sort of pronounced limp and lower leg injury that well could have resulted from a trap or snare (wolves escaping sets is common, due to their raw strength). In the winter of 2005–2006, the wolf had disappeared for nearly two weeks; not even Harry knew where he was. When Romeo finally materialized, ribs against hide and more bedraggled than anyone had ever seen him, people who knew the wolf breathed a relieved, collective sigh—hardly the first, or the last. Maybe he’d been caught in an untended set for days before finally pulling free; we’d never know for sure. Even if the black wolf never felt the snap of a leg-hold trap or the tightening noose of a cable snare, there’s little doubt he repeatedly encountered such hazards over the years and stepped around them. Through a combination of luck and that ever-broadening experience, he somehow managed to avoid the fate met by untold thousands of his kind.

  Like trapping, large game hunting wasn’t permitted in much of the recreation area. Bearing firearms, however, was legal; and while packing a gun never occurred to the vast majority of glacier visitors, a few availed themselves in the name of self-preservation. What constitutes a threat is, of course, a highly subjective matter. I’ve known lifelong Alaskans who considered any grizzly or wolf within sight to be a looming menace, and others who shooed bears off their porches as if they were outsized squirrels, and never felt the least twinge of danger from any wolf. One seventy-something Romeo viewer I encountered several times—clearly not of the latter camp—wore a holstered .44 Magnum stainless revolver on his Carhartt-clad hip on walks with his young grandchildren to view and take point-and-shoot pictures of the wolf. In my one brief conversation with him, in which I pointed out the questionable necessity of that sidearm and the danger it posed to other people on the lake if indeed he fired, he made it clear he owned the God-given right to protect his family as he saw fit. I skied off, knowing he was beyond convincing that he could have tied a pork chop to his head and lain down and been in no danger. And anyhow, if he felt that great a risk to himself or those kids, he should have been somewhere else, and surely not deliberately approaching the animal that worried him. All too well I could imagine Romeo loping right toward that guy, on his way to visit a dog pal on the far shore, and ending up in a ruined, bloody heap over nothing.

  Hunting for hares and waterfowl was allowed in certain small, remote areas of Dredge (not coincidentally, game-rich locales frequented by the wolf) and many of the hunters were local neighborhood kids, walking or riding bikes from their homes. Hard for an inexperienced, young buck out on a hunt not to yank the trigger at pretty much anything that moved, from mink to beaver, let alone a target as man-making as a wolf. One autumn day, Harry and Brittain had an object lesson in the dangers Romeo (not to mention the rest of us) faced from such budding sportsmen. Walking off-trail in Dredge one autumn twilight, hoping to hook up with Romeo, they found themselves instead on the wrong end of a poorly aimed 12-gauge slug, which thudded into a tree above Brittain. When Harry called out, a teenager appeared out of the brush, flustered and apologetic, while his friend broke and ran. Sorry, they’d thought that dark shape was the wolf. Doubtless there were other incidents. From my house and yard, I often heard single shots at odd hours emanating from Dredge or the surrounding slopes, and often I wondered if one of those would be the last sound Romeo would ever hear. And who knew what might go on in the adjoining upper Montana Creek valley, the high muskeg-draped forests of Spaulding Meadows, and beyond to the Herbert River, areas the wolf almost certainly traveled, where hunting and trapping in season were perfectly legal?

  What, too, about backyard encounters—some guy opens his back door, and there’s the wolf nose to nose with the family pet, and maybe his kids nearby? One of my neighbors, a crusty, lifelong Juneauite, informed me with a sardonic leer that the first time the wolf stepped on his property—a scant hundred yards from one of Romeo’s favored trails—would be the last. Another local from a nearby subdivision, a woman who walked and skied with her young children near Skater’s Cabin, told me she didn’t want a wolf anywhere near her children—though she still went out on the lake, by far her best bet to ensure that proximity. The obvious message: something ought to change, and it sure as hell wasn’t her. Such attitudes reflected more than a status quo from Romeo’s early days; attitudinal lines that had been drawn seemed to be spreading ever farther apart. Folks who didn’t like the idea of a wolf in the first place now pointed to the beagle incident, far from forgotten, as proof positive that Romeo constituted a danger to the community that shouldn’t be tolerated, while his supporters maintained that we lived in Alaska after all, and people, not the wolf, were to blame for whatever had happened, or might.

  You didn’t need to be anywhere near the glacier or the wolf to sense the enmity simmering. At my photography booth at the annual Thanksgiving craft fair, a man smirked to his sons in a stage voice I was obviously meant to hear, “Hey, boys, doesn’t that wolf in those pictures look like that one we skinned out this spring?” And as I stood in a checkout line at Fred’s one winter afternoon, I overheard one rugged-looking, rangy guy confiding to another that a buddy had “taken care of” that damn black wolf; no one would be seeing him again any time soon, heh-heh-heh. However, Romeo, apparently unaware of his own demise, continued to trot across the lake on his daily business. Of course he was lucky, but far more than that. The black wolf was hardly a passive presence, subject to our whims. He moved among and around us, a formidable melding of intelligence, power, razor-honed reflex, and sensory input, constantly interpreting, reacting, and making decisions on which his life depended. He obviously had learned to read nuances of human posture and scent, and to fade into the shadows when danger whispered.

  But even if he dodged humans of ill will time and again, dogs, the very creatures the wolf had come to adore, had ironically become the greatest threat to his existence. Any scuffle, even involving some out-of-control, poorly mannered, aggressive, or fear-reactive mutt, might trigger a deadly response—not from canines, of course, but their keepers. And such bad encounters, while rare, were inevitable, as they had been since the first days—no surprise, considering the sheer number of dog-wolf contacts on any given day, and the cluelessness, carelessness, or, in rare instances, the calculated intentions of some owners. Now and then dogs still approach
ed the wolf with teeth bared and hackles raised, not knowing they were bringing a knife (and a dull one at that) to a gunfight. The wolf continued to dodge snarky dogs with grace and seemingly endless patience. Every now and then, though, Romeo would signal enough already, as when he shoulder-slammed a huge, persistently belligerent Malamute, then stood over him in a dominating wolf pose without making a further move, though he could have easily gone for a killing throat hold. I once saw him hook his snout under the chin of an overweight golden retriever—one of a trio that sometimes pursued him with more than playful zeal—and send the surprised dog somersaulting hard onto its back with a toss of his head. Another confrontation involved a male wire-haired pointing griffon that lake regulars knew to be sometimes aggressive toward dogs. Harry and others watched the griffon talking dog smack to the wolf and getting smacked down and pinned instead; though again, the dog was uninjured in the exchange. By the time the owner reported the incident to Fish and Game, however, the wolf had become the attacker, and the griffon an innocent bystander—one more black mark added to the wolf’s record under questionable circumstances.

  The centerpiece of one-sided aggression, though, involved two adult German shepherd dogs that launched an unprovoked surprise attack and ripped open a gash on the black wolf’s back that third winter, an event witnessed by John Hyde. Romeo knew the dogs, and I’d observed them interacting with him without incident on several occasions over at least two years. But this time was different, who knows why. “They ran up to him, no warning, and literally tore hunks of hair and a piece of hide off of him,” said Hyde, who picked up some of the loose fur and a chunk of skin. The injured wolf stood his ground, teeth bared, and the shepherds backed down as their owner scrambled to reel them in. The resulting wound on Romeo’s back, and the reddish-blond, sun-bleached hair around it, was viewed by Fish and Game biologists and their veterinarian (who weren’t aware of the attack) as possible signs that the wolf had contracted lice from domestic canines and now might spread it to other wolves in a potentially deadly and devastating epidemic—one more reason to consider taking action on the wolf. Such an outbreak had occurred on the Kenai Peninsula, south of Anchorage, a decade before, resulting in the decimation of local wolves. But over the course of weeks, Romeo’s wound slowly healed; instead of spreading bodywide, as lice would have, the ratty-looking spot shrank, then disappeared, and Fish and Game once again held off.

  There was another random, constant danger hanging over Romeo. Wolves, like bears, infrequently but steadily fall victim to vehicles wherever habitat is cut by roads; both are active in low light conditions, travel widely, are hard to see, and are prone to bolt at an angle to dodge a suddenly approaching threat—a proposition that may take them across an oncoming car’s path. Locally, the threat was real enough; the reminder stood in that glass case at the Mendenhall Glacier visitor center: the black wolf struck by the cab on Glacier Spur Road, around the time Romeo had first appeared. Glacier Spur, and several other almost-highways where drivers often drive much faster than they should, bisected wooded areas where the wolf wandered. Then there was Egan Drive (aka Glacier Highway, or The Road), Juneau’s heavily traveled main highway along the peopled coast, with skeins of drivers going sixty-plus, and of course, the grid of neighborhood lanes, avenues, and streets that crisscrossed the Mendenhall valley. We knew from sightings that Romeo traversed those major roads and plenty of others on a semiregular basis; he (or a lupine doppelganger) popped up here and there across the Mendenhall valley, and sometimes twenty or more miles to the north or south. No doubt the wolf was streetwise, in the literal sense. A guy I know happened to spy Romeo along Back Loop Road, north of the Montana Creek bridge, standing by the roadside. He pulled over to watch as the wolf, like some well-trained schoolkid, looked twice in each direction before trotting briskly across the blacktop and into the trees. That sort of caution would serve him well. Harry witnessed one driver, on the narrow, snow-bermed road between the West Glacier Trail and Skater’s Cabin, take aim at the wolf and accelerate in an obvious attempt to run him down. Romeo leaped over the snowbank and out of harm’s way—another narrow escape in a seemingly charmed life.

  But one bright summer day in 2006, all that luck and grace came to an end. Part of me had known it had always been just a matter of time, but foreknowledge in such matters offers more curse than comfort. A woman out berry picking found a male black wolf carcass on the south end of town, bullet-riddled, throat cut, and dumped by a roadside turnout like a two-bit punk in some gangland execution. I sat listening, phone clenched in my fingers, staring out across the rippled surface of the lake toward the glacier, seeing nothing.

  He’d been killed several times over. The slit throat, plus the carcass being ditched where it was bound to be discovered, seemed a pointed message. State wildlife biologist Neil Barten conducted a necropsy. The photos showed a large, black, young, and very dead male wolf. Just by those facts, it had to be Romeo, though I had trouble recognizing the face I thought I knew. This head was narrower, muzzle thinner. And a white blaze on his chest seemed different—larger and higher up. Well, a wolf in short, ratty summer coat could look totally different from a winter animal, and markings, even a wolf’s color, can change with time. Death, too, transforms features. I didn’t want to believe it was Romeo, but I didn’t have a better explanation. Sherrie, I, and hundreds of others went about our business half-dazed and gut-punched, knowing it was over.

  Investigation of the case fell under the jurisdiction of the State Wildlife Troopers. The killing had been illegal on two counts: shooting a game animal out of season, and wasting the carcass without salvaging the hide (which, given the time of year, was worthless, either as a trophy or for sale). But without any witness or lead, the odds of finding the killer seemed minuscule. Even if they wanted to, the State Wildlife Troopers were stretched too thin to spend much time on the case. A request for phoned-in tips was the best they could do.

  My longtime filmmaker friend Joel Bennett, who’d always held a protective interest toward wolves in general and Romeo in particular, dragged me into action. “Let’s get to the bottom of this,” he said. Though far from hopeful, I went along with him to meet the woman who’d first found the dead wolf. She led us to the spot, but beyond an arc of flattened grass on the steep, brushy hillside, there wasn’t much to see—no shell casing you could match to a certain gun or exotic-brand, traceable cigarette butts like in the movies. Footprints and blood had washed away in the rain. Joel and I knocked on a few doors along that stretch of road and made calls; a commercial fisher named Paula Terrell, who lived in the area and had first alerted us to the killing, pitched in and made inquiries. Some folks had glimpsed a black wolf at dusk, trotting through the neighborhood two days before. Suspects? Well, a small, totally circumstantial handful: folks who were known to have a mean or wolf-hating streak, others who kept chickens they might have worried about, whatever offered a hint of motive. I felt like what I was, a second-rate gumshoe bumbling along a stone-cold trail. Joel was more determined. He, Lynn Schooler, and several others pooled in for a reward for information leading to a prosecution. “All right,” I said, and added to the pot, then volunteered to make a poster. We started off offering $3,000. Several days later, Sherrie and Joel had plastered dozens of western-style reward announcements on bulletin boards all over town. Some were immediately ripped down; others became discussion forums. On one, someone scrawled Shoot all wolves. Below it, someone printed in ink, How about shooting you instead?

  My phone kept ringing—a steady flow of people who didn’t have information but were anywhere between shaken and enraged. Some were hunters, others glow-in-the-dark greenies, but all united around a dead wolf, shot in our town. Though at first we hadn’t been looking for contributions, the reward swelled as Juneauites chipped in amounts ranging from $10 to $100, then jumped to $9,000 as a local dog-mushing tour owner pitched in $5,000 of his own—in part out of insult because he’d been pointed to as a potential suspect, and also because
he was a Romeo supporter. Then we were over $11,000 and counting, so fast that we didn’t bother to change the posters.

  Meanwhile, I kept studying the necropsy photos, comparing them to the hundreds of images I’d taken of Romeo over the years. My certainty wavered. Several people who knew Romeo close up weighed in with differing opinions: it surely was him, or it wasn’t. Harry Robinson was convinced it was not the same wolf, and yet, no one had seen him alive since the dead wolf had been discovered. I kept getting stuck on the same point: What are the odds of two different black, male wolves being killed inside Juneau city limits?

  A month and more passed. Whatever thread of hope we’d held was frayed to a single strand when the first quiet report came in, perfectly tuned to the turn of leaves, and the salmon run in Steep Creek: someone had glimpsed a black wolf crossing the road near the visitor center. And soon after, Harry reported that he, Brittain, and the wolf found each other, and all was as it had ever been. Romeo had once again risen from the dead. In late August, the remaining mystery dissolved in equally miraculous fashion. Acting on an anonymous tip, the State Wildlife Troopers charged two men in the shooting of the other wolf. They’d been overheard bragging in a Douglas Island bar. The animal wasn’t killed in Juneau after all, but near the mouth of the Taku River, a dozen miles south by boat. The men admitted to troopers they’d shot it when it had appeared along the shore, loaded it in their skiff, and cut its throat when the wolf, which they’d mistaken for dead, had stirred. They brought it back to town, then dumped the carcass by the road when they realized (so they said) that they’d shot it out of season and didn’t want to risk getting caught with their illegal take. In the end, one man pled guilty to a misdemeanor and received a minor fine; the other went to trial, where a jury of his peers found him not guilty on the basis of his claim that he wasn’t aware that wolf season was closed, despite the fact that ignorance of the law is technically not a valid defense. The whole business just went to show how little the life of a wolf was valued in Alaska; and Romeo, though still alive, was just another.