A Wolf Called Romeo

by Nick Jans

  Then, from farther down the West Glacier Trail, just a few hundred yards from where we stood, just inside the trees, a distinctive, drawn-out, and emphatic howl rose. Harry, who happened to witness at close range Romeo’s response to the intruders, recalls, “I’d never heard him howl like that. He had his feet spread out, his back hair and tail up, and sort of huffed before each one, like he was pumping himself up, and just bellered back.” But if the strangers were indeed coming for him with hostile intent, and homing in on the howl, it would be the cry of the doomed. At an instinctive and perhaps learned level as well, Romeo must have sensed the peril. At least he held the advantage of being an exceptionally large male wolf with an imposing voice, at the heart of his own territory.

  Before and during Romeo’s time, there had always been other wolves passing through—individuals that he must have known at least by scent and call, and vice versa. There was, of course, the black female, presumed pack mate of his, hit by the cab around the time of his first appearance. In late summer of Romeo’s second year, three gray wolves had been spotted at the huge gravel mine across from our house. We can only guess whether they passed through quietly or made contact, sociable or otherwise. And despite the fact that never once did I identify wolf tracks on the lake other than Romeo’s, now and then on quiet nights I’d heard his howls answered by distant replies—sometimes obvious human imitations (perhaps Harry attempting a late rendezvous), but others distinctly lupine and seeming to emanate from the surrounding mountain slopes.

  In 2006, in ghostly ice fog along the lake’s northwestern shore, I’d glimpsed Romeo trotting along the tree line less than one hundred yards away, with what I took to be a large, almost-white husky mix that I didn’t recognize; when I skied closer, the light-colored animal seemed to evaporate, and there was no accompanying human. I still reckoned I’d seen a dog, until, the following November, at the Juneau Public Market, I met an elderly Eskimo woman who’d grown up in a remote western Alaska village. She studied the framed wildlife photos in my booth, which included, of course, a number of Romeo images. “I saw that one,” she said, pointing with her chin, “with a white wolf.” It was in her backyard, close against Thunder Mountain. When I suggested that it was probably some loose mutt, she fixed me with a withering glance that dismissed my impertinence. “I know a wolf,” she said. The matter wasn’t subject to debate. We could well have seen the same animal—a wolf after all. That possibility was strengthened several years later by occasional, confirmed-by-photo sightings of a bold, nearly white wolf in the upper Mendenhall valley.

  There were other sightings of other wolves in country Romeo frequented, including Spaulding Meadows and those already noted near Amalga. All hinted that Romeo, far from being as isolated from his kind as most had assumed, might have had another life interacting with other wolves, in ways we scarcely imagined. Let’s say Harry spent four hours a day with him, 365 days a year; Hyde, another two; everyone else put together, another six: twelve hours a day with people around. That average, including the many times when he was less visible for one reason or another, is surely an overgenerous total. But even twelve hours would still mean the wolf remained unobserved at least half of each day—and during his periodic absences and seasonal movements, far more than that. All we could claim to know is what he did and where he went when we were watching; the balance of his life would remain wrapped in mystery. And that was the part of the wolf I loved best: not what I knew, but all that I didn’t.

  Romeo could well have been one of those wolves that maintained loose ties to a pack but chose to spend large chunks of time alone. For all we knew, he might even have sired litters of pups in his time and played the unusual but not inconceivable role of absentee patriarch. Even dominant wolves have been known to wander from their family group, temporarily, periodically, or even permanently; the intense lure dogs held for Romeo may have been reason enough for such atypical behavior. In fact, our pets may have been closer to chosen social alternates than surrogates. Or maybe the wolf was indeed a pariah cast upon our strange shore, brushing against occasional visitors of his species that never remained, and facing down repeated, hostile probes from others—the latest of which was upon him.

  Several mornings later, my friend Vic Walker and I stood just off the West Glacier Trail parking lot, peering into fog and a spattering cold drizzle. “There,” Vic murmured, and lifted his camera. Romeo drifted into the open and lay down, facing us; and minutes later, a second wolf followed: a smaller but still broad-chested light gray animal with distinctive dark mask and saddle markings. It stared toward us, head low, ill at ease. Romeo glanced around, ears perked, relaxed as ever. It was as if he were playing handshake host between species, reassuring both that all could be well. He’d been leading the new wolf out onto the lake each morning, at about the same time; and at least once, it had appeared by itself, lying out on the ice, and overall seemed skittish, but curious all the same, and obviously drawn to Romeo. Fingers fumbling like my mind, I blew the focus on a series of rapid-fire shots before both wolves faded back into the trees. What the hell was going on? Was this a mate, after all these years? And where was the rest of the pack?

  The smaller gray proved to be a male, as I’d initially suspected from his chunky head and build. Someone spotted him lifting a leg later on, effectively peeing on the happier-ever-after Juliet scenario (just as well; hard to imagine that a mated pairing with pups in this same limited territory could work). Instead, he seemed to be a lonely young wolf on the edge of dispersing, trying to figure out what next, and was accepted by his ever-affable senior. The two wolves and their tracks were observed both together and apart for a week or so, ranging at times into Dredge. No surprise, really, if the young gray were unable to adapt to Romeo’s singular world; and sure enough, one day he was gone, either traveling alone or still following the pack. And we found what had probably brought them all: the wolves had taken down a pair of goats a half mile up the forested slope of Mount McGinnis and stuck around a few days, eating and digesting and socializing until the carcasses were cleaned down to hair and bone. Then it was time to move on in search of the next kill. Exactly what had transpired between Romeo and the others would never be known. Harry had glimpsed and heard them close by but never observed any direct social interaction between any other wolves except the gray male. The good news was, the black wolf showed no signs of combat—no limp or wounds. His peaceful, if brief, sojourn with the young gray, and the fact that he remained, hinted that they’d all managed at least some sort of truce, and perhaps more. Romeo led Harry and Brittain to the kill site several times that spring of 2009 and gnawed on bones with the same smug, look-what-I’ve-got satisfaction many a dog owner would recognize, though impossible to say whether he’d taken part in the hunt or was merely lording over a good find. Once more, the wolf had demonstrated his ability to survive against steep odds.

  Meanwhile, our years living in the last house before the glacier, with a wild wolf in our backyard, had wound to a close. With an eye toward the future, we’d sold the house we’d built and moved to the opposite end of the Mendenhall valley, downsizing with reluctance into a more suburban ambiance. Despite the occasional black bear strolling through our yard, and still being only a ten-minute drive from the lake, life for us, in Juneau or anywhere else, would never be the same. Of course we knew what we were giving up, and grieved the loss, even as we looked forward to a new start several years ahead in the mountain-framed wilds up the Chilkat valley—coincidentally, one of the places Fish and Game had considered relocating Romeo. It was as if we’d sensed the coming darkness and taken leave before it fell.

  We often made that drive back toward the home ground that would never be ours again. Sherrie, the dogs, and I went together; more times I traveled alone. There we met the same Romeo, loping across the lake, that wolfy grin and his head-on approach requiring no translation. He knew there wouldn’t be any play or even a sniff-around with our short-leashed dogs, but he wanted to say hello all the
same. He’d trot up, tail high, keening that high, soft whine of his, then circle behind to sniff our tracks. We’d settle in, and he’d lie down a dozen yards away, everyone—dogs, humans, wolf—relaxed and content to hang out together for a few minutes, like old friends on a park bench. Eventually Romeo would rise, stretch and yawn, survey his surroundings, and trot off on his evening errands. Sometimes he’d pause once or twice, looking back as if asking why we didn’t follow along.

  It was the same even when Sherrie and I walked out without dogs one mid-April evening in 2009. The black wolf trotted from across the lake to stand near us, across from the Big Rock; together we watched as shadows lengthened and pink alpenglow brushed the high peaks. We’d first met six years before, just yards from that very spot, in a moment that seemed then as it does now: caught like a leaf in glacial ice, each serration and vein frozen in perfect symmetry. If it had to end, it should have been there; but the fates had spun a different thread.

  April 2009

  13

  The Killers

  September 2009

  Harry Robinson lay awake, the edge between waking and dreaming swept away. “I felt Romeo scream,” he said. “I could hear it inside my head. He was in agony. I saw him turn to bite at his side, and at that moment, I knew he’d been shot.”

  It was the third week of September 2009. He and Brittain had met Romeo as usual two mornings before and spent hours traveling, playing, and resting together. But when Harry pulled into the West Glacier Trail parking lot before dawn the next day, there was no wolf waiting. Neither did he respond to Harry’s howls, or show up on the long hike he and Brittain took expecting to find him, or him to find them. There were times before when the wolf went missing for days or even weeks, but Harry, feeling that dream, was sure something wasn’t right. Maybe Romeo lay wounded, or caught in an untended trap from the year before, and was waiting for their help. He and Brittain combed through Dredge Lakes and across the mossy woodlands above the West Glacier Trail—all the game traces and rendezvous points they’d followed over the years. They found nothing, not a single track or fresh scat to mark his passing. Harry widened his search, putting in long hours, eating and sleeping little, pushing through work and going back out again and again. Autumn colors glowed and faded; the first snows dusted the high country. The wolf he loved had simply vanished.

  During those same few days, a similar dream came to my friend Vic Walker. Vic, a local veterinarian who had found his own quiet connection with the wolf over the previous three years, describes the scene: “Romeo was wounded, over near the visitor center. He’d been shot in the jaw. The bone was totally shattered. Harry was there. He said, ‘He’s done’; I told him, ‘No, no, I can fix this.’” The words fall hard, and three years later, Vic’s eyes still aren’t right when he tells the story—less dream than haunted vision, so vivid it seems merged with the past. He didn’t know about Harry’s dream until years later—in fact, only knew the man by sight, out on the lake. Their only connection at that time was through the wolf. Of course, dreams could be just that—echoes of our fears, nothing else. Chances were Romeo would rise from the dead, as he had done before.

  Meanwhile, I was traveling rivers a thousand miles to the north, my old home country of the western Brooks Range, straddling the Kobuk-Noatak divide—a place far from Romeo and the glacier, but enfolding one of the last strongholds for his species: a far expanse of mountains and tundra plains scarcely brushed by roads, none that lead outside. At least, not yet. One dawn in that same stretch of September, I woke from a hard sleep to sloshing just above camp, at a wide spot in the river—moose or caribou, maybe a bear, I thought. I slid barefoot out of my sleeping bag and out of the tent without camera or rifle, crept downhill toward the water, and nestled behind a clump of autumn-burned willows, wanting only to see. Less than fifty yards away, a gray wolf stood on the bank, framed against a sky of metallic turquoise and rose-tinted cirrus, the whole scene mirrored in water so clear that the reflection seemed to come from the river’s bottom. I held my breath as the wolf, a young female with a delicate, thin face, probed a scent; then she lifted her head to find my gaze fixed on her. “Hello, wolf,” I whispered. She stared back, her bright yellow eyes boring into me. I may well have been the first human she’d ever seen, though probably not the last; just over the next range lay three villages, all within fifty miles—home to Inupiaq hunters, some of whom I once knew as neighbors and traveling companions. She’d learn of them, with their hundred-mile-an-hour snowmobiles and assault rifles, soon enough. She turned and trotted off without a glance back; I watched her go, each of us complete in the moment, knowing nothing of what lay ahead.

  When I returned to Juneau in early October, I scarcely had time to catch my breath before I was off again for weeks in the lower 48, making presentations about wolves and the politics of their management, in country bereft of any. Then Sherrie and I were off on a long-planned winter hiatus in her home state of Florida. She and I fretted about Romeo, along with Joel, Vic, Harry, and others who passed along updates. Our own fears were darkened by distance, but there didn’t seem to be anything to be done. Maybe the wolf had finally taken that last wrong step into a trap or a rifle’s crosshairs, or perhaps he had succumbed to any of the natural perils a wolf faces. No wolf lives forever, and Romeo, at least into his eighth year by then, was an old man by wild Alaska wolf standards. Maybe it just had been his time.

  But why not another ending? He could have joined the pack he’d met that spring and returned to ranging the country; or found a mate on his own, and was raising a fat litter of pups in a perfect den—a granite alcove just below the tree line up some secret valley, a freshwater spring nearby, with a network of trails leading to meadows where marmots whistled, and down into a valley rich in beaver and salmon. Harry, after his nightmare, had been visited by such a dream, similar to my own waking vision. Romeo appeared, and he reached out and stroked his hand along Romeo’s dark back, trailing through his thick, long-stranded mane, as he could have many times but never once did; then the scene dissolved and he saw a female gray wolf, giving birth to a black pup. Together and alone, we sought the same refuge in a world that should have been.

  Harry continued his search as autumn deepened, his quiet persistence never wavering, even as hope withered with the leaves. His efforts to find his friend, whether in life or death, filled the space that had once been theirs together. Beyond the physical searching of the wolf’s territory, he launched a tireless, single-handed investigation. Juneau was too small a town to hide such a secret; sooner or later, someone would give in to the urge to talk. And within weeks of Romeo’s disappearance, a friend passed on an overheard snippet of conversation at Rayco Sales, a local outdoors and gun store: the wolf had indeed been shot. Of course, we all knew the rifts between talk and truth when it came to the black wolf. Harry posted flyers around town, offering a $1,500 reward. Turning to cyberspace—a realm he navigated with fluency in his professional work and as a beta tester for software—he strained through hunting blogs and websites, sending out pings like a submarine’s sonar operator and listening for echoes. At last, he came across a chilling response, buried in the comment section of a YouTube tribute to Romeo: “He’s dead, skinned, and stuffed. . . . Get over it people.” The commenter went by an online alias, as is common in such venues. Using a cyber-sleuthing technique known as skip tracing (basically, following electronic bread crumbs to their source), Harry discovered the identity of the man through a surrogate email address and sent a veiled query his way. In an exchange with someone he took to be an interested hunter, and shielded by what he assumed to be online anonymity, the commenter replied, “I know the person that harvested the wolf. He is not from AK. I saw his photos from his trip up there. Romeo is currently at an Alaska taxidermist. This is not internet blah blah, . . . it’s the pure and simple truth. If you’d like I’ll send a photo of the mount when he receives it.”

  The note implied a direct acquaintance with the killer, rather th
an some faceless electronic contact. Harry knew he was closing in, but he didn’t want to press so hard that his unwitting informant shut down. Though burning to know, he bided his time. Then, just days later, he received a call from Libby Sterling, a reporter for the Capital City Weekly (a free Juneau paper, sister to the Empire). She’d been contacted by a Pennsylvania man who said he knew Romeo’s fate. Instead of chasing down the story (surely a huge local news scoop), she decided to pass on a phone number to Harry; in exchange, he assured her she’d be the first to break the story—if the lead proved out—when the right time came. Harry made the call that evening and met Michael Lowman.

  Lowman hadn’t known of the online commenter’s exchange with Harry; the timing may have been coincidence, but not the connection. Lowman happened to know the man from their work at R.R. Donnelley & Sons, a printing company in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. And they both knew another company employee, Jeff Peacock—a man whose last name suited his apparently uncontrollable urge to strut and squawk about his hunting exploits. Peacock had made a number of trips to Alaska since 2004, visiting a buddy who once worked at the plant and had moved to Juneau. Anyone who knew Peacock had been offered the opportunity to admire his dead zoo through images he kept handy on his cell phone, or through a work computer. As Nancy Meyerhoffer, another worker at the plant—and a self-described “dedicated hunter, trapper, and taxidermist”—later added, “All of Jeffs [sic] hunts have to be about the biggest and the best. He wants one of every majestic species to be tanned or mounted in his living room, so as he says, he can look around his room and people will see a great hunter.”