Of Wolves and Men

by Barry Lopez

  James Gibson, in a book called The Perception of the Visual World, wrote of not just one but thirteen kinds of depth perception. Most of us remain oblivious to such distinctions. We don’t need them. The Eskimo does; if he is not aware of such things, he will not find his way home.

  What Gibson and Carpenter together suggest is this: he who reads the landscape without the aid of maps as a matter of habit becomes as sophisticated of eye as it is popular to believe the bat is sophisticated of ear. The Eskimo, in other words, probably sees in a way that is more analogous to the way the wolf sees than Western man’s way of seeing is.

  If you are trying to fathom wolves, it is important to know how they might see. Maybe they see like Eskimos. And we can converse with Eskimos.

  Recall the question asked of the old man. Who, at the end, knows more about the land—an old man or an old wolf?

  Amaguk is like Nunamiut. He doesn’t hunt when the weather is bad. He likes to play. He works hard to get food for his family. His hair starts to get white when he is old. Young wolves, just like Nunamiut, run around in shallow melt ponds scaring the ducks.

  And Amaguk is tough, living at fifty below zero, through blizzards, for months without caribou. Like Nunamiut. Maybe tougher. And Amaguk is smart. He sets up ambushes for caribou. He sleeps high up on the ridges when there are humans around. He brings his pups to a kill but won’t let them stay there alone. Grizzly bears. Young wolves do a lot of foolish things. Get killed.

  Amaguk used to kill Nunamiut sometimes. Now Nunamiut can reach out and kill Amaguk from a distance with a rifle. Now Amaguk leaves Nunamiut alone.

  Times change.

  Amaguk and Nunamiut like caribou meat, know the good places for caribou hunting. Where ground squirrels are good. Where to get raspberries. A good place for getting away from mosquitoes. Where lupine blooms first in May. Where that big rock is that looks like achlack, the grizzly bear. Where the creeks are still running in August …

  After a pause the old man looks up and says, “The same.”

  What aligns wolf and primitive hunter more strongly than anything else is that to live each must hunt and kill animals. In an area where both men and wolves hunt, they tend to hunt the same sorts of game. Given the same terrain, weather, food storage problems, and the fact that they are hunting the same prey, they tend to hunt in similar ways. The differences between them have more to do with the fact that one moves around on two feet and kills with such extensions of himself as bullets and arrows.

  The Naskapi, a seminomadic hunting people of northeastern Canada, live out a hard life in a bleak and almost barren landscape. For centuries they have hunted the same caribou herds the wolves have. I would like to turn to them now to illustrate some deeper ways in which wolf and human hunters are alike.

  Here is the anthropologist Georg Henriksen writing about Naskapi hunters:

  “On snowshoes, the hunters quickly shuffle away from camp carrying their rifles over their shoulders. The Naskapi walk at a fast and steady pace, keeping up the same speed hour after hour. When from a hilltop the men spot caribou some miles in the distance they set off at a brisk pace alternating between putting on their snowshoes when moving in deep snow, and removing them and hanging them over their rifle barrels as soon as they reach a hard and icy surface. No words are spoken. Half running, every man takes the wind, weather and every feature of the terrain into account and relates it to the position of the caribou. Suddenly one of the men stops and crouches, whistling low to the other men. He has seen the herd. Without a word the men scatter in different directions. No strategy is verbalized, but each man has made up his mind about the way in which the herd can best be tackled. Seeing the other men choose their directions, he acts accordingly.”

  Approach, observation, conservation of energy, and attack—it could not be more wolflike.

  It is said of the wolf that he is a deliberate hunter, that he does not wander aimlessly around the landscape but knows pretty well where prey animals are, even when he can’t see them. John Kelsall, a Canadian wildlife biologist, has seen wolves shortcutting cross-country in the taiga to intercept caribou two days ahead of them with almost pinpoint accuracy.

  Again, Henriksen says of the Naskapi:

  “The hunting grounds of the Naskapi do not teem with caribou. The Naskapi have to search for the animals, moving their camps and hunting over a wide range of country. In this search, they use their knowledge of the country and experience with the animals and their behavior under different circumstances. They take into account features of the terrain such as how hilly it is and whether it is forested or barren. They must consider the snow and ice conditions and relate them to the feeding and moving patterns of the caribou. They have theories about how other animals and insects such as wolves and warble flies affect the behavior of caribou. For example, when no caribou are found in an area where it was reckoned there would be plenty, they explain this by the presence of wolves. They said the caribou probably fled into the forest where the deep snow would keep the wolves at a distance.

  “They make use of this knowledge and do not decide randomly where to search for caribou.”

  It does not require two men, any more than it takes two wolves, to kill one caribou, but the Naskapi are social hunters anyway. Even when they hunt alone they are social hunters, because whatever meat they get is shared. The social fabric of the Naskapi tribe is the result of an acknowledgment of dependence on each other for food. The young, the old, the sick, they cannot hunt. The social system of the Naskapi bestows prestige on the successful hunter; that is what is exchanged for meat. Each man hunts as he chooses, calling on personal skills, but with a single, overriding goal: to secure food. The individual ego is therefore both nurtured and submerged. A man’s skills are praised, his food is eaten, his pride is reinforced.

  I think a similar sense of social pressure and interdependence operates to hold a wolf pack together. Old wolves and young pups can eat only because the middle-aged wolves are good hunters. During rendezvous season the wolf, hungry himself, having eaten at the kill, returns home from ten miles away with a haunch of meat in his mouth. And he is besieged with as much affection as the successful Naskapi hunter is by his family. In this, perhaps more than anything else, we find a basis for alpha wolves—the hunters, whose prowess is encouraged for the sake of survival. Pack survival.

  We now embark on a plainly metaphysical consideration.

  The focal point of the act of hunting among the Naskapi is the preparation of a ritual meal, called Mokoshan. Caribou meat and bones are carefully prepared and consumed by the hunters. Not a morsel of meat or a sliver of bone may touch the ground. The function of the meal for the Naskapi hunter is to ingratiate himself with the Spirit of the Caribou, to indicate respect for his food, to honor the tenuous balance that keeps him alive by asserting that there will be no waste of whatever meat is secured in the hunt.

  It is not hard for Western minds to miss the seriousness of this ritual: the link between hunter and hunted (symbolized in the meal) lies at the very foundation of every hunting society. It is, literally, the most important thing in the hunter’s life. To fail in the hunt is to fail to eat. To die. To be finished. The ritual preparation for the hunt, therefore, acknowledges a perpetual agreement: the game will be given to the hunter by dwellers in the spirit world as long as the hunter remains worthy. The hunt itself is but an acting out of the agreement, the bullet or arrow loosed but a symbol of the communication between hunter and hunted.

  The agreement is mythic in origin, made with an Owner of the Animals. In the Naskapi world this is the Animal Master of the caribou because the caribou is the mainstay of the Naskapi diet. The Animal Master is a single animal in a great mythic herd. He is both timeless and indestructible, an archetype of the species. It is he who “gives” the hunter the animal to be killed and who has the power to keep the animals away from the hunter if he is unworthy. In the foundation myths of every hunting culture there is a story of how all this came
about.

  One time the people had no food—only berries and roots, no meat. A shaman steps forth and says he will go and find the food to make them strong. After a long and difficult journey he himself is on the verge of despair when he encounters the Owner of the Animals. The Animal Master challenges the man to show his power. He does, by bringing back to life a human being the Animal Master has struck dead. The Animal Master honors the feat by saying he will release the animals to be hunted, but under the following conditions: the hunters must treat the animals with respect, seeing that their flesh is not wasted and that their spirits are not insulted by acts of arrogance or ridicule; and the hunter must regularly perform a ceremony to commemorate this agreement. If this is done, the animals’ spirits will return safely to the Animal Master and he will give them new bodies and send them out again and again. In this way there will always be enough food.

  Regurgitation. In cooperative hunting families, both human and wolf, hunters bring food back for those who do not hunt.

  Hunting is holy. It is not viewed in the same light as an activity like berry picking. Game animals are holy. And the life of a hunting people is regarded as a sacred way of living because it grows out of this powerful, fundamental covenant.

  THE SEA WOLF

  One time a man found two young wolf pups on the beach. He took them home and raised them and one day after they were grown the man saw them go out into the ocean and kill a whale. They brought the whale back to shore so the man could eat. Every day it went like this. The wolves would go out and kill whales and bring back the meat. Soon there so much meat lying around on the beach it was going bad. When the Great Above Person saw this he made a storm and brought down a fog and the wolves could not find any whales to kill. The waves were so high the wolves could not even find their way back. They had to stay out there. Those wolves became sea wolves. Whale hunters.

  —A story among the Haida of British Columbia

  The killing of animals, then, entails tremendous spiritual responsibility. In the case of the Naskapi, as Frank Speck writes: “Failure in the chase, the disappearance of game from the hunter’s districts, with ensuing famine, starvation, weakness, sickness and death, all are attributable to the hunter’s ignorance of some hidden principles of behavior toward the animals, or his willful disregard of them. The former is ignorance. The latter is sin. The two together constitute the educational sphere of the Montagnais-Naskapi.”

  Two more ideas are necessary here to complete our vision of the hunter and his food: that of the strength you gained from eating sacred meat (as distinct from what was gained spiritually and physically—virtually nothing—from other meat); and that of spirit houses as dwelling places for the spirits of the game animals, where you sometimes had to go in appeal during famine.

  Hunting tribes called meat “medicine.” The word has two meanings. One is that meat is sacred because it comes from a sacred ceremony. The other is more literal in meaning and indicates why some native Americans did not care to eat, for example, the flesh of wolves. Hunting tribes understood the vegetable world as a pharmacopoeia; to some extent each tribe tried to cure its ills and ailments with herbs and plants. By taking the plant indirectly, concentrated in the form of meat from herbivorous animals, the hunter also indirectly partook of the plant’s power to cure and soothe. One of the reasons most native Americans avoided eating wolf meat was that it was the meat of a meat eater, not a plant eater. It was still meat—you could survive on it—but it was inadequate as food. Even worse than eating wolf meat was to eat meat from a domestic herbivore, like a cow. Cattle had no Animal Master. It was not sacred to hunt them, and on that food you could perish. (This, of course, was not a consideration until the coming of the white man.)

  When a sacred animal was killed, its spirit went to a spirit house. For the Naskapi this was Caribou House. Caribou House was a real place. It lay in a mountain range west of Ungava Bay in present-day Quebec. The mountains there were white, not from ice or snow but from centuries of caribou hair falling on the ground. The caribou entered and left this place each year, passing through a valley between two high mountains. The caribou hair on the ground was several feet deep and for miles around the cast-off caribou antlers formed a layer as high as a man’s waist. The caribou paths were worn so deep a calf going along one would only show his head.

  The Animal Master lived at Caribou House, together with the living caribou and the spirits of slain caribou. Animals in the surrounding area were fierce, larger than their normal counterparts, and much feared by the Naskapi. Yet in time of famine a tribe either had to conduct a ceremony of propitiation or someone had to go into this fearful land and deal directly with the Animal Master for release of the game.

  That, briefly, is what hunting large game was for men. How does this touch on wolves? Can hunting be regarded as a sacred occupation among wolves? Is there a mythic contract acknowledged when wolf meets prey? Do wolves have a sense of Caribou House to which they raise mournful howls in times of famine?

  We know painfully little about wolves. We can only ask the questions and guess. Communal hunting probably is the social activity that makes wolves hold together in packs. Sacred is not the right word, but hunting may have overtones for wolves that we cannot appreciate. We seem to sense them, though, when we speculate on the reasons for group howls after a successful hunt. I do not know if wolves have a sense of Caribou House. They do howl in time of anguish. The existence of Caribou House implies a rule of conservation and, in general, wolves are not wasters of meat.

  We don’t know. But I am reluctant to let the idea pass unexamined. The wolf is a hunter. There is order to his world. It is not necessary that either wolf or his prey be conscious of this; a cursory examination of human hunting societies suggests that formal relationships between hunter and hunted are part of the order of the universe. It is reasonable to assume that some of these elements exist, even if they are unconscious or appear in another guise.

  In the preceding section on hunting I merely touched on that moment of eye contact between wolf and prey, a moment which seemed to be visibly decisive. Here are hunting wolves doing many inexplicable things (to the human eye). They start to chase an animal and then turn and walk away. They glance at a set of moose tracks only a minute old, sniff, and go on, ignoring them. They walk on the perimeter of caribou herds seemingly giving warning of their intent to kill. And the prey signals back. The moose trots toward them and the wolves leave. The pronghorn throws up his white rump as a sign to follow. A wounded cow stands up to be seen. And the prey behave strangely. Caribou rarely use their antlers against the wolf. An ailing moose, who, as far as we know, could send wolves on their way simply by standing his ground, does what is most likely to draw an attack, what he is least capable of carrying off: he runs.

  I called this exchange in which the animals appear to lock eyes and make a decision the conversation of death. It is a ceremonial exchange, the flesh of the hunted in exchange for respect for its spirit. In this way both animals, not the predator alone, choose for the encounter to end in death. There is, at least, a sacred order in this. There is nobility. And it is something that happens only between the wolf and his major prey species. It produces, for the wolf, sacred meat.

  Imagine a cow in the place of the moose or white-tailed deer. The conversation of death falters noticeably with domestic stock. They have had the conversation of death bred out of them; they do not know how to encounter wolves. A horse, for example—a large animal as capable as a moose of cracking a wolf’s ribs or splitting its head open with a kick—will usually panic and run.

  What happens when a wolf wanders into a flock of sheep and kills twenty or thirty of them in apparent compulsion is perhaps not so much slaughter as a failure on the part of the sheep to communicate anything at all—resistance, mutual respect, appropriateness—to the wolf. The wolf has initiated a sacred ritual and met with ignorance.

  This brings us to a second point. We are dealing with a different kind
of death from the one men know. When the wolf “asks” for the life of another animal he is responding to something in that animal that says, “My life is strong. It is worth asking for.” A moose may be biologically constrained to die because he is old or injured, but the choice is there. The death is not tragic. It has dignity.

  Consider the Indian again. Native American cultures in general stressed that there was nothing wrong with dying, one should only strive to die well, that is consciously choose to die even if it is inevitable. The greatest glory accrued to a warrior who acted with this kind of self-control in the very teeth of death. The ability to see death as less than tragic was rooted in a different perception of ego: a person was simultaneously indispensable and dispensable (in an appropriate way) in the world. In the conversation of death is the striving for a death that is appropriate. I have lived a full life, says the prey. I am ready to die. I am willing to die because clearly I will be dying so that the others in this small herd will go on living. I am ready to die because my leg is broken or my lungs are impacted and my time is finished.

  The death is mutually agreeable. The meat it produces has power, as though consecrated. (That is a good word. It strikes us as strange only because it is out of its normal context.)

  I have been struck, considering these things, by the difference between captive and wild wolves, and I think that much of the difference—a difference of bearing, a dynamic tension immediately apparent in a wild wolf and lacking almost entirely in captive animals—lies in their food. The wolf in the wild subsists on his earned meat. The captive is fed on the wastes of commercial slaughterhouses and food made in factories by machines. Wolves in zoos waste away. The Naskapi, to this day, believe that the destruction of their people, the rending of their spirit, has had mainly to do with their being forced to eat the meat of domestic animals.