Of Wolves and Men

by Barry Lopez

  Of Wolves and Men

  Barry Lopez

  FOR WOLVES

  Not the book, for which you would have little use,

  but the effort at understanding.

  I enjoyed your company.

  We need another and a wiser and perhaps a more mystical concept of animals. Remote from universal nature, and living by complicated artifice, man in civilization surveys the creature through the glass of his knowledge and sees thereby a feather magnified and the whole image in distortion. We patronize them for their incompleteness, for their tragic fate of having taken form so far below ourselves. And therein we err, and greatly err. For the animal shall not be measured by man. In a world older and more complete than ours they move finished and complete, gifted with extensions of the senses we have lost or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear. They are not brethren, they are not underlings; they are other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time, fellow prisoners of the splendour and travail of the earth.

  —HENRY BESTON, The Outermost House

  Presumption is our natural and original disease. The most wretched and frail of all creatures is man, and withal the proudest. He feels and sees himself lodged here in the dirt and filth of the world, nailed and riveted to the worst and deadest part of the universe, in the lowest story of the house, trapped worse than bird or fish, and yet in his imagination he places himself above the circle of the moon, bringing heaven under his feet.

  By the vanity of the same imagination be equals himself to God, attributes to himself divine faculties, and withdraws and separates himself from all other creatures; he allots to these, his fellows and companions, the portion of faculties and power which he himself thinks fit.

  How does he know, by the strength of his understanding, the secret and internal motions of animals, and from what comparison between them and us does he conclude the stupidity he attributes to them?

  —MONTAIGNE, The Defense of Raymond Sebond

  The only real revolutionary stance is that “nature” is the greatest convention of all. Perhaps there are no natures, no essences—only categories and paradigms that human beings mentally and politically impose on the flux of experience in order to produce illusions of certainty, definiteness, distinction, hierarchy. Apparently, human beings do not like a Heraclitan world; they want fixed points of reference in order not to fall into vertigo, nausea. Perhaps the idea of nature or essence is man’s ultimate grasp for eternity. The full impact of the theory of evolution (the mutability of species—including man) is thus still to come.

  —JOHN RODMAN, The Dolphin Papers

  Contents

  INTRODUCTION

  I: CANIS LUPUS LINNAEUS

  1. Origin and Description

  2. Social Structure and Communication

  3. Hunting and Territory

  II: AND A CLOUD PASSES OVERHEAD

  4. Amaguk and Sacred Meat

  5. A Wolf in the Heart

  6. Wolf Warriors

  III: THE BEAST OF WASTE AND DESOLATION

  7. The Clamor of Justification

  8. Wolfing for Sport

  9. An American Pogrom

  IV: AND A WOLF SHALL DEVOUR THE SUN

  10. Out of a Medieval Mind

  11. The Reach of Science

  12. Searching for the Beast

  13. Images from a Childhood

  14. A Howling at Twilight

  Epilogue: On the Raising of Wolves and a New Ethology

  Afterword: A Reacquaintance with Wolves

  Acknowledgments

  Bibliography

  Index

  Illustration Credits

  A Biography of Barry Lopez

  INTRODUCTION

  I AM IN A SMALL cabin outside Fairbanks, Alaska, as I write these words. The cold sits down like iron here, and the long hours of winter darkness cause us to leave a light on most of the day. Outside, at thirty below, wood for the stove literally pops apart at the touch of the ax. I can see out across the short timber of the taiga when I am out there in the gray daylight.

  Go out there.

  Traveling for hours cross-country you see only a few animal tracks. Perhaps a single ptarmigan or a hare. Once in a while the tracks of a moose. In the dead of winter hardly anything moves. It’s very hard to make a living. Yet the wolf eats. He hunts in the darkness. And stays warm. He gets on out there.

  The cabin where I am writing sits a few miles north of the city, in Goldstream Valley. This valley came briefly into the news a few years ago when wolves killed a lot of domestic dogs here. Goldstream Valley is lightly settled and lies on the edge of active wolf range, and that winter wolves got into the habit of visiting homes and killing pet dogs. A dog owner wouldn’t hear a sound but the barking and growling of his dog. Then silence. He would pass a flashlight beam through the darkness and see nothing. In the morning he would find the dog’s collar or a few of its bones stripped of meat. The wolves would have left behind little else but their enormous footprints in the snow.

  After the wolves killed about twenty dogs like this, a petition turned up in local stores. Sign one sheet and it meant you wanted the Alaska Department of Fish and Game to kill the wolves. Sign another and it meant you didn’t. The plan was defeated, five to one, and the Department of Fish and Game, for its part, declined to get involved. Some residents set out poisoned meat and steel traps on their own. The wolves went on killing dogs until spring, when the toll was something like forty-two.

  When it was over some biologists, pressed for an explanation, told residents it had been a hard winter, that wolves had simply turned to dogs for food. Athabascan Indians living in Fairbanks said with a grin that that might be true—they didn’t know—but wolves just naturally hate dogs, and that’s all it had been about. The owner of a sled-dog team argued that the wolf was a born killer, like the wolverine and the weasel. Some creatures God put on earth to help man, he said, and others to hinder him, and the wolf was a hinderer.

  The dog-killing incident in Goldstream Valley brings together the principal threads in this book. What wolves do excites men and precipitates strong emotions, especially if men feel their lives or the lives of their domestic animals are threatened. Explanations for the wolf’s behavior are rampant. Biologists turn to data. Eskimos and Indians accept natural explanations but also take a wider view, that some things are inexplicable except through the metaphorical language of legend. The owner of a dog team is more righteously concerned with the safety of his animals than with understanding what motivates wolves. And everyone believes to some degree that wolves howl at the moon, or weigh two hundred pounds, or travel in packs of fifty, or are driven crazy by the smell of blood.

  None of this is true. The truth is we know little about the wolf. What we know a good deal more about is what we imagine the wolf to be.

  Alaska is the last North American stronghold of the wolf. With Eskimos and Indians here, with field biologists working on wolf studies, with a suburban population in Fairbanks wary of wolves on winter nights, with environmentalists pushing for protection, there is a great mix of opinion. The astounding thing is that, in large part, it is only opinion. Even biologists acknowledge that there are things about wolves and wolf behavior you just have to guess at.

  Let’s say there are 8,000 wolves in Alaska. Multiplying by 365, that’s about 3 million wolf-days of activity a year. Researchers may see something like 75 different wolves over a period of 25 or 30 hours. That’s about 90 wolf-days. Observed behavior amounts to about three one-thousandths of 1 percent of wolf behavior. The deductions made from such observations represent good guesses, and indicate how incomplete is our sense of worlds outside our own.

  Wolves are extraordinary animals. In the winter of 1976 an aer
ial hunter surprised ten gray wolves traveling on a ridge in the Alaska Range. There was nowhere for the animals to escape to and the gunner shot nine quickly. The tenth had broken for the tip of a spur running off the ridge. The hunter knew the spur ended at an abrupt vertical drop of about three hundred feet and he followed, curious to see what the wolf would do. Without hesitation the wolf sailed off the spur, fell the three hundred feet into a snowbank, and came up running in an explosion of powder.

  The Nunamiut Eskimo of the central Brooks Range speak of wolves as hunters something like themselves. They believe that wolves know where they are going when they set out to find caribou, and that perhaps wolves learn from the behavior of ravens where caribou might be. They believe certain wolves in a pack never kill, while others in the pack specialize in killing small game. Always, to requests for generalizations, they say that each wolf is a little different, that new things are always seen. If someone says big males always lead the pack and do the killing, the Eskimo shrug and say, “Maybe. Sometimes.”

  Wolves vary their hunting techniques, share food with the old who do not hunt, and give gifts to each other. They can live for a week without food and travel twenty miles without breaking stride. They have three systems of communication—vocal, postural, and olfactory. Their pelages range from slate blue to almost pure white, through chocolate brown, ocher, cinnamon, gray, and blond. And like primates they spend a good part of their time with their young and playing with each other. I once saw a wolf on the tundra winging a piece of caribou hide around like a Frisbee for an hour by himself.

  You can look at a gray wolf standing in the snow in winter twilight and not see him at all. You may think I’m pulling your leg—I’m not. Sometimes even the Eskimos can’t see them, which causes the Eskimos to smile.

  Perhaps you already know some of these things, or have heard that wolves, especially in the time before the responsibility of hunting is upon them, chase through caribou herds for the fun of it. In the past twenty years biologists have given us a new wolf, one separated from folklore. But they have not found the whole truth. For example, wolves do not kill just the old, the weak, and the injured. They also kill animals in the prime of health. And they don’t always kill just what they need; they sometimes kill in excess. And wolves kill each other. The reasons for these acts are not clear. No one—not biologists, not Eskimos, not backwoods hunters, not naturalist writers—knows why wolves do what they do.

  The wolf exerts a powerful influence on the human imagination. It takes your stare and turns it back on you. (The Bella Coola Indians believed that someone once tried to change all the animals into men but succeeded in making human only the eyes of the wolf.) People suddenly want to explain the feelings that come over them when confronted with that stare—their fear, their hatred, their respect, their curiosity. Wolf-haters want to say they are born killers, which isn’t true. Wolf-lovers want to say no healthy wolf ever killed anyone in North America, which isn’t true either. They have killed Indians and Eskimos.

  Everything we have been told about wolves in the past should have been said, I think, with more care, with the preface that it is only a perception in a particular set of circumstances, that in the end it is only an opinion.

  To be rigorous about wolves—you might as well expect rigor of clouds.

  I have looked for a wolf different from that ordinarily given us in the course of learning about animals. I have watched captive wolves in Barrow, Alaska; in Saint Louis, and in Nova Scotia. I drove across the Dakotas and Montana and Wyoming, speaking with old men who killed wolves for a living when they were young. In New York I read in libraries like the Pierpont Morgan what men thought of wolves hundreds of years ago. I read in the archives of historical societies of outlaw wolves and Indians. I went out with field biologists in Minnesota and Alaska and spoke with Eskimos. I spoke with people who loved wolves and with people who hated them.

  I remember sitting in this cabin in Alaska one evening reading over the notes of all these encounters, and recalling Joseph Campbell, who wrote in the conclusion to Primitive Mythology that men do not discover their gods, they create them. So do they also, I thought, looking at the notes before me, create their animals.

  One

  CANIS LUPUS LINNAEUS

  One

  ORIGIN AND DESCRIPTION

  IMAGINE A WOLF MOVING through the northern woods. The movement, over a trail he has traversed many times before, is distinctive, unlike that of a cougar or a bear, yet he appears, if you are watching, sometimes catlike or bearlike. It is purposeful, deliberate movement. Occasionally the rhythm is broken by the wolf’s pause to inspect a scent mark, or a move off the trail to paw among stones where a year before he had cached meat.

  The movement down the trail would seem relentless if it did not appear so effortless. The wolf’s body, from neck to hips, appears to float over the long, almost spindly legs and the flicker of wrists, a bicycling drift through the trees, reminiscent of the movement of water or of shadows.

  The wolf is three years old. A male. He is of the subspecies occidentalis, and the trees he is moving among are spruce and subalpine fir on the eastern slope of the Rockies in northern Canada. He is light gray; that is, there are more blond and white hairs mixed with gray in the saddle of fur that covers his shoulders and extends down his spine than there are black and brown. But there are silver and even red hairs mixed in, too.

  It is early September, an easy time of year, and he has not seen the other wolves in his pack for three or four days. He has heard no howls, but he knows the others are about, in ones and twos like himself. It is not a time of year for much howling. It is an easy time. The weather is pleasant. Moose are fat. Suddenly the wolf stops in mid-stride. A moment, then his feet slowly come alongside each other. He is staring into the grass. His ears are rammed forward, stiff. His back arches and he rears up and pounces like a cat. A deer mouse is pinned between his forepaws. Eaten. The wolf drifts on. He approaches a trail crossing, an undistinguished crossroads. His movement is now slower and he sniffs the air as though aware of a possibility for scents. He sniffs a scent post, a scrawny blueberry bush in use for years, and goes on.

  The wolf weighs ninety-four pounds and stands thirty inches at the shoulder. His feet are enormous, leaving prints in the mud along a creek (where he pauses to hunt crayfish but not with much interest) more than five inches long by just over four wide. He has two fractured ribs, broken by a moose a year before. They are healed now, but a sharp eye would notice the irregularity. The skin on his right hip is scarred, from a fight with another wolf in a neighboring pack when he was a yearling. He has not had anything but a few mice and a piece of arctic char in three days, but he is not hungry. He is traveling. The char was a day old, left on rocks along the river by bears.

  The wolf is tied by subtle threads to the woods he moves through. His fur carries seeds that will fall off, effectively dispersed, along the trail some miles from where they first caught in his fur. And miles distant is a raven perched on the ribs of a caribou the wolf helped kill ten days ago, pecking like a chicken at the decaying scraps of meat. A smart snowshoe hare that eluded the wolf and left him exhausted when he was a pup has been dead a year now, food for an owl. The den in which he was born one April evening was home to porcupines last winter.

  It is now late in the afternoon. The wolf has stopped traveling, has lain down to sleep on cool earth beneath a rock outcropping. Mosquitoes rest on his ears. His ears flicker. He begins to waken. He rolls on his back and lies motionless with his front legs pointed toward the sky but folded like wilted flowers, his back legs splayed, and his nose and tail curved toward each other on one side of his body. After a few moments he flops on his side, rises, stretches, and moves a few feet to inspect—minutely, delicately—a crevice in the rock outcropping and finds or doesn’t find what draws him there. And then he ascends the rock face, bounding and balancing momentarily before bounding again, appearing slightly unsure of the process—but committed. A few
minutes later he bolts suddenly into the woods, achieving full speed, almost forty miles per hour, for forty or fifty yards before he begins to skid, to lunge at a lodgepole pine cone. He trots away with it, his head erect, tail erect, his hips slightly to one side and out of line with his shoulders, as though hindquarters were impatient with forequarters, the cone inert in his mouth. He carries it for a hundred feet before dropping it by the trail. He sniffs it. He goes on.

  The underfur next to his skin has begun to thicken with the coming of fall. In the months to follow it will become so dense between his shoulders it will be almost impossible to work a finger down to his skin. In seven months he will weigh less: eighty-nine pounds. He will have tried unsuccessfully to mate with another wolf in the pack. He will have helped kill four moose and thirteen caribou. He will have fallen through ice into a creek at twenty-two below zero but not frozen. He will have fought with other wolves.

  He moves along now at the edge of a clearing. The wind coming down-valley surrounds him with a river of odors, as if he were a migrating salmon. He can smell ptarmigan and deer droppings. He can smell willow and spruce and the fading sweetness of fireweed. Above, he sees a hawk circling, and farther south, lower on the horizon, a flock of sharp-tailed sparrows going east. He senses through his pads with each step the dryness of the moss beneath his feet, and the ridges of old tracks, some his own. He hears the sound his feet make. He hears the occasional movement of deer mice and voles. Summer food.

  Toward dusk he is standing by a creek, lapping the cool water, when a wolf howls—a long wail that quickly reaches pitch and then tapers, with several harmonics, long moments to a tremolo. He recognizes his sister. He waits a few moments, then, throwing his head back and closing his eyes, he howls. The howl is shorter and it changes pitch twice in the beginning, very quickly. There is no answer.