Of Wolves and Men

by Barry Lopez

  Plains Indians approaching buffalo.

  The difference between wild meat and tame meat to a hunting culture is a matter of monumental significance. It was a fundamental principle of life that, in the case of the Indian, the white man simply never noticed and the Indians did not know how to explain. I remember the first time I gave a penned wolf a piece of chicken. And I remember the feeling in a Minnesota clearing the first time I came on a wolf kill, picked up the moose skull, and turned it in my hands.

  Whether wolf and prey act according to some mutual understanding, or whether they only unconsciously participate in a fundamental drama, is something we shall probably never know. All we do know, staring up at the paintings of game animals on the cave walls at Lascaux, is that the belief that there was more to hunting than killing, and that dying was as sacred as living, was not something that one day just fell out of the sky.

  This is a good place to pause and look back, because, as I said at the beginning of the chapter, the two ideas I began with—that modern hunting cultures can tell us much about wolves from their own observations, and that by examining these and older cultures and suggesting analogies with wolf behavior we can make engaging speculation—these ideas can run together.

  We are basically finished at this point with the first idea, fleshing out the wolf modern biology has created by adding some observations made by Nunamiut hunters. As for the second idea, I have tried to make the point that hunting is a sacred activity among hunting peoples, the very basis of their social organization, and that it is not out of line to suggest the same for wolves. We should not be afraid—although we are, and profoundly so—to extend to the wolf and to the animals it preys on the physical and metaphysical variables we allow ourselves. It is, after all, not man but the universe that is subtle.

  From here on, I will try to do two things. First, to suggest other analogies, other ways in which Eskimos and Indians led lives like wolves, in the hope that as you read them you will wonder as I do at the possibilities for the animal. And second, I will try to create a feeling for wolves that we may once have had as a people ourselves but have long since lost—one in which we do not know all the answers, but are not anxious. An appreciation of wolves, it seems to me, lies in the wider awareness that comes when answers to some questions are for the moment simply suspended.

  Five

  A WOLF IN THE HEART

  ONE OF THE PROBLEMS that comes with trying to take a wider view of animals is that most of us have cut ourselves off from them conceptually. We do not think of ourselves as part of the animal kingdom. Indians did. They thought of themselves as The People (that is the translation from the native tongue of most tribal names) and of animals as The Wolves, The Bears, The Mice, and so forth. From here on in this chapter, the line between Indians and wolves may fade, not because Indians did not perceive the differences but because they were preoccupied with the similarities. They were inclined to compare and contrast their way of living with, say, the weasel’s way or the eagle’s way. They would say, “We are like wolves in that we …” They were anthropomorphic—and animistic. Highly so. We aren’t talking, really, about our wolf anymore. We are talking about their wolf. We are, in a sense, in a foreign country.

  The question the old Nunamiut man answered was an eminently sensible one in his view. The caribou-hunting tactics of wolves in the Brooks Range and those of the Nunamiut were similar. And similarity in hunting technique in the same geographical area was found elsewhere. Wolves and Cree Indians in Alberta maneuvered buffalo out onto lake ice, where the big animals lost their footing and were more easily killed. Pueblo Indians and wolves in Arizona ran deer to exhaustion, though it might have taken the Pueblos a day to do it. Wolf and Shoshoni Indian lay flat on the prairie grass of Wyoming and slowly waved—the one its tail, the other a strip of hide—to attract curious but elusive antelope close enough to kill. And if we have made the right assumptions at Paleolithic sites in North America such as Folsom, early man killed mammoths in the same mobbing way wolves did, because men did not yet have extensions of themselves like the bow and arrow. They had to get in close with a spear and stab the animal to death.

  The correspondence in life-styles, however, goes deeper than this. Wolves ate grass, possibly as a scour against intestinal parasites; Indians ate wild plants for medicinal reasons. Both held and used hunting territories. Both were strongly familial and social in organization. To some extent both went to specific areas to hunt certain types of game. (Two or three wolf packs today come to hunt sheep at a place called Okokmilaga on the North Slope of Alaska’s Brooks Range. Various tribes, Ponca and Sioux among them, traveled to the same leks in South Dakota to hunt sage grouse.) Both wolf and Indian had a sign language. The tribe, like the pack, broke up at certain times of the year, and joined together later to hunt more efficiently. In times of scarcity, Indian hunters ate first; this also seems to be the case with wolves.

  Highly intriguing is the fact that white-tailed deer in Minnesota sought security from Indian hunters by moving into the border area between warring tribes, where hunters were least likely to show up, and the fact that deer do the same with respect to wolves—seek security along the border zones between wolf territories, where wolves spend the least time hunting.

  The most interesting correspondence between wolf and Indian, however, may be that involving the perception of territory.

  When Indians left their own country and entered that of another tribe—a group of young Assiniboin warriors, for example, sneaking off on foot into the country of the Gros Ventre to steal horses—they moved like wolves: in small packs; at night and during the crepuscular hours; taking advantage of ground contours to observe but remain hidden; moving in and out of the foreign territory quickly. Often on foot and in unfamiliar surroundings, they had to remain invisible to the inhabitants. Elusiveness, therefore, was a quality Indians cultivated and admired. It served them as well as it served the wolf who, in a hard winter, trespasses into neighboring packs’ territories to look for food, to make a kill, and to go home before anyone knows he’s been there.

  The definition and defense of home range was as important to the Indian as it seems to be to the wolf. The defense was mostly of food resources in general and of the physical area adjacent to the village in particular; under certain circumstances trespassers were killed. If a party of Flathead warriors was surprised in northern Idaho by a party of resident Kutenai, the Flatheads might be attacked and killed to a man. If it was bitter cold and storming, they might signal each other that it was too cold to fight (wolves probably wouldn’t). If the Flathead party was reduced to one man who fought bravely and was thought, therefore, to have strong medicine, he might be let go. Fatal encounters and nonfatal encounters between trespassing and resident wolves bear a striking similarity. In Minnesota, for example, in 1975, a small pack of wolves moving through the territory of a much larger pack was suddenly surprised by the larger pack. One animal in the small pack was killed, two ran off, and the fourth, a female, held ten or eleven wolves to a standoff in a river before they all withdrew and left her.

  Some tribes were stricter about boundaries and more bellicose about trespassing incidents than others, as are some wolf packs. The boundaries of most Indian territories, like those of wolves, were fluid; they changed with the movement of the game herds, the size of the tribe, the evolution of tribal divisions, and the time of year. For both wolf and Indian, where the principal game animal was nonmigratory, as deer and moose are, territorial boundaries were more important than they were in areas where principal game species were migratory, like caribou. There are instances where neighboring wolf packs have fought each other and then joined territories, just as some tribes established alliances—the five nations of the Iroquois, for example. And I mentioned earlier that the Pawnee and Omaha, traditional enemies, had an agreement whereby each could enter the other’s territory to hunt buffalo.

  The Indian practice of passing family hunting territories on to succeedin
g generations throws even more light on this interesting correspondence of territorial spacing, hunting rights, and trespassing. Family hunting territories were most important, again, where food could be found in the same place all the time. The salmon-eating tribes on the northwest coast and the Algonkian deer eaters in the northeastern woodlands both had appropriate family and clan hunting territories that were passed from one generation to the next. Among the Tlingit, a northwest coast tribe, each family had its own place on the rivers where it fished and an area where it gathered berries. No one else would fish or berry there unless invited to do so. In the eastern woodlands, especially in northeastern Minnesota, resident wolves seem to have a strong sense of territory as defined by the major food source (white-tailed deer), at least as strong as the family hunting territories that existed in that same country when the Chippewa lived there.

  Which leads to another thought, more abstract, about trespassing. It was often assumed that Plains Indians went out intending to kill their rivals. This was not true. They went out to deliberately face rivals in a very dangerous game. The danger itself, the threat of death, was the thrill, not killing; and to engage in it repeatedly was recognized as a way to prove strength of character. Analogously, it might be valuable to consider the encounters of rival wolves as a similar kind of deadly recreation. Just as intriguing is the idea that some game animals assent to a chase-without-death with wolves. Caribou and yearling wolves, for example, are often seen in harmless chases getting a taste of death. Building spirit. Training. Wolf and caribou.

  That wolves and Neolithic hunting people in North America resembled each other as predators was not the result of conscious imitation. It was convergent evolution, the most successful way for meat eaters to live. Conscious identification with the wolf, on the other hand, especially among Indians on the Great Plains, was a mystical experience based on a penetrating perception of the wolf’s lifeway, its gestalt. And it could, on occasion, become conscious imitation.

  Native American perceptions of the wolf varied largely according to whether or not a tribe was agricultural. It was naturally among the hunting tribes that the wolf played the greater mythic-religious role because the wolf himself was a great hunter, not a great farmer. He was retained for a while in the mythology of agricultural tribes and regarded by them as an animal of great power and mystery, but his place there was slowly eclipsed by anthropomorphic gods of the harvest.

  In the native American cosmology, insofar as it can be regarded as the same from tribe to tribe, the universe was perceived in six directions: the space above; that below; and the four cardinal divisions of the world horizon. Frequently on the plains the bear represented the west, the mountain lion the north, the wolf the east, and the wildcat the south. They were regarded as the creatures with the greatest power and influence in the spirit world.

  It should be understood, however, that the Indian did not rank-order animals. Each creature, from deer mouse to meadowlark, was respected for the qualities it best seemed to epitomize; when those particular qualities were desired by someone, that animal was approached as one who knew much about that thing. The animals assigned the greatest cosmological significance—the bear, lion, wolf, cat, and eagle—were not regarded as the “best” animals. They were chosen primarily because they were the great hunters. The stealth of the cats, the endurance of the wolf, the strength of the bear, the vision of the eagle—these were the qualities held in high esteem by human hunters.

  The Pawnee of present-day Nebraska and Kansas differed from most other tribes in that they divided their world horizon into four semicardinal points, assigning the wolf to the southeast. In the Pawnee cosmogony the wolf was also set in the sky as a star, along with the bear and the two cats, to guard the primal female presence, the Evening Star. The Wolf Star was red—the color associated with the wolf by virtually every tribe (red did not signify blood; it was simply an esteemed color).

  In time, the wolf became associated among the four seasons with summer, among the trees on the plains with the willow, among the great natural forces with clouds (the others being wind, thunder, and lightning).

  Like the Nunamiut, most Indians respected the wolf’s prowess as a hunter, especially his ability to always secure game, his stamina, the way he moved smoothly and silently across the landscape. They were moved by his howling, which they sometimes regarded as talking with the spirit world. The wolf appears in many of their legends as a messenger in fact, a great long-distance traveler, a guide for anyone seeking the spirit world. Blind Bull, for example, a Cheyenne shaman, was highly respected among his people before his death in 1885 as one who had learned about things from the comings and goings of wolves, from listening to their howls. The wolves, for their part, took Blind Bull’s messages to various places in the real and spiritual world. The wolf as oracle, as interlocutor with the dead, is an old idea.

  The wolf was also held in high regard because, though he was a fiercely loyal familial animal, he was also one who took the role of provider for the larger community (for carrion eaters like the fox and raven). This was something that tribal Indians understood very well, for in difficult times a man had the dual responsibility of feeding his own family as well as others. An Hidatsa man named Bear in the Flat acknowledged this lifeway of the wolf when he took as one of his sacred medicine songs the “Invitation Song” of the wolf—the howl the wolf used to call coyotes, foxes, and magpies to the remains of his kill. (The situation is neatly imitated among Bella Coola hunters, who sing a song to call the wolf to one of their kills—a bear. They would take a bear’s hide but believed bears did not wish to be eaten by humans.)

  Family cohesiveness, the key to life in hunting families. A father is flanked by two generations of his family-pups to the left, yearlings to the right.

  The interrelationships between one’s allegiance to self and household on the one hand and one’s duty to the larger community on the other cannot be overemphasized; it was a primal, efficient system of survival that held both man and wolf in a similar mesh.

  Consider again the Indian’s perception.

  Each of the animals—mosquitoes, elk, mice—belonged to a separate tribe. Each had special powers, but each was dependent on the others for certain services. When, for example, the Indian left his buffalo kill, he called out to the magpies and others to come and eat. The dead buffalo nourished the grasses; the grasses in turn fed the elk and provided the mouse with straw for a nest; the mouse, for his part, instructed the Indian in magic; and the Indian called on his magic to kill buffalo.

  With such a strong sense of the interdependence among all creatures and an acute awareness of the ways in which his own life resembled the wolf’s (hunting for himself, hunting for his family, defending his tribe against enemy attack as the wolf protected the den against the grizzly), the Indian naturally turned to the wolf as a paradigm—a mirror reflection. He wished directly for that power (“Hear me, Great Spirit! I wish to be like the wolf”); and he imitated him homeopathically by wearing his skin. He wished always to be as well integrated in his environment as he could see the wolf was in the universe. Imagine him saying: “Help me to fit, to be valuable in the world, like the wolf.”

  To fit into the universe, the Indian had to do two things simultaneously: be strong as an individual, and submerge his personal feelings for the good of the tribe. In the eyes of many native Americans, no other animal did this as well as the wolf.

  The wolf fulfilled two roles for the Indian: he was a powerful and mysterious animal, and so perceived by most tribes; and he was a medicine animal, identified with a particular individual, tribe, or clan. In the first role he was simply an object of interest, for reasons already given. He might be marginally so in the eyes of some (most California tribes, where there were no wolves, thought little of the wolf) or of major importance to others (Cheyenne, Sioux, Pawnee).

  At a tribal level, the attraction to the wolf was strong because the wolf lived in a way that made the tribe strong: he prov
ided food that all, even the sick and old, could eat; he saw to the education of his children; he defended his territory against other wolves. At a personal level, those for whom the wolf was a medicine animal or personal totem understood the qualities that made the wolf stand out as an individual; for example, his stamina and ability to track well and go without food for long periods.

  That each perception contributed to and reinforced the other—as the individual grows stronger, the tribe grows stronger, and vice versa—is what made the wolf such a significant animal in the eyes of hunting peoples. The inclination of white men to regard individual and social motivations in themselves as separate led them to misunderstand the Indian. The Indian was so well integrated in his environment that his motivation was almost hidden; his lifeway was as mysterious to white men as the wolf’s.

  This is obviously a complex thought, but in the light of it, the Indian’s preoccupation with wolves becomes more than quaint. The wolf was the one animal that, again, did two things at once year after year: remained distinct and exemplary as an individual, yet served the tribe. There are no stories among Indians of lone wolves.

  This association with, and imitation of, the wolf among American Indians was absolutely pervasive. The two great clan divisions of the northwest coast tribes were the wolf and the raven. One of the three divisions of the southern Arapaho were Haqihana, the wolves; one of the ten Caddo bands were Tasha, the wolf. A Cherokee setting out in winter on a long journey rubbed his feet with ashes and, singing a wolf song, moved a few steps in imitation of the wolf, whose feet he knew were protected from frostbite, as he wished his to be. Nez Perce warriors wore a wolf tooth pushed through the septum of their noses. Cheyenne medicine men wrapped wolf fur around the sacred arrows used to motion antelope into a trap. Arikara men wove wolf hair and buffalo hair together in small sacred blankets. Bella Coola mothers painted a wolf’s gallbladder on a young child’s back so he would grow up to perform religious ceremonies without making mistakes as a hunter. An Hidatsa woman experiencing a difficult birth might call on the familial power of the wolf by rubbing her belly with a wolf skin cap.