by Barry Lopez
A wolfer with his hounds, near Atnmedon, North Dakota, 1904.
A popular kind of wolf hunting in the winter in Russia was done from a flat sled drawn by horses. A butchered calf or pig or a bale of bloody straw was trailed behind, or a live pig’s leg was twisted to make it squeal, until wolves fell in behind the sled. The wolves were then shot. Stories of sled hunting abound in Russia and the failure of this scheme—the horses tire or there are too many wolves or the wolves are too fast or the sled flips over in an icy turn—is a staple incident in Russian fiction. Commonly the hunters lose their driver and horses to the wolves and spend a harrowing night under the upturned sled, holding the wolves off in the manner of a wagon train surrounded by Indians until morning. The wolves drift off at first light, having killed their own wounded and eaten their own dead, and human help usually arrives in the person of distraught friends who feared the worst when the adventurers didn’t return.
The most exotic sort of wolf hunting involves the use of eagles. It has been seen only occasionally in Europe; its real home is Kirgizia, in south-central Russia. The specially bred birds—a subspecies of golden eagle called a berkut—are flown by nomadic tribesmen. The birds weigh only ten or twelve pounds but can slam into a wolf’s back and bind its spine with such force that the wolf is almost paralyzed. Often the bird binds the spine with one foot and, as the wolf turns its head to bite, binds its nose with the other foot, suffocating the animal or holding it down until the hunter kills it. The birds are deceptively strong; there is almost a ton of binding force in each foot and the blow of a thirty-six-inch wing can break a man’s arm.
Eagles probably never attack adult wolves in the wild; wolf hunting is something they have to be trained to. A former German military officer, F. W. Remmler, hunted wolves with eagles in Finland in the 1930s and later in Europe before moving to Canada. He trained his birds by first turning them loose on children. The children were dressed in leather armor and covered with a wolf skin, and raw meat was strapped to their backs. When the eagles were used to knocking the children down for the meat, Remmler put them in an enclosure into which he loosed wolves purchased from European zoos. It might take days for the birds to learn how to kill the wolves. (Remmler doesn’t say, but they were presumably muzzled.) The final step was to hunt wolves that had been turned loose on an island. Remmler and his friends would put themselves in position and the wolves would be driven toward them by dogs. When the wolves came in sight, the birds were cast off.
Writing thirty years later about one such hunt, Remmler recalled an afternoon when one of his eagles, Louhi, had killed two wolves in ten minutes. That night as Remmler and his friends sipped cognac around the fire they heard the howling of the other five wolves on the island. “First the female and then the pack stretched their noses toward the starlit heavens,” he wrote, “and both gave a howl so dreadful that my blood almost hardened in my veins. It may be that I had drunk too much that night, but the horror that filled me was very real. If I could have given the two dead wolves their lives back I would have done it immediately.”
Kirgizian tribesmen still hunt wolves in Russia with eagles, on horseback, with the aid of dogs.
Because he roamed so widely and more often than not avoided man, the wolf had to be routed out with dogs or eagles or drawn to a bait. Still hunting, where a sheep or goat was staked out, was never very successful, though a horse or cow might be slaughtered and its carcass dragged through the woods to leave a trail ending at a spot where the meat was hung in a tree and the hunter concealed himself. (Residents of rural northern Minnesota laughed up their sleeves when hunters from urban Minneapolis, threatening to wipe out wolves preying on deer herds in the early 1970s, bought steaks and lunch meat at local supermarkets, set it out on frozen lakes, and waited in blinds for the wolves to show up.)
The reasoning behind hunting wolves for sport as opposed to hunting them because they were hated or considered a menace to livestock was often confused. Consider the following hunt that took place near Tarnworth, New Hampshire, in 1830, described by Charles Beals in Passaconaway in the White Mountains.
“On the evening of Nov. 14 couriers rode furiously through Tarnworth and the surrounding towns, proclaiming that ‘countless numbers’ of wolves had come down from the Sandwich Range mountains and had established themselves in the woods on Marston Hill. All able-bodied males, from ten years old to eighty, were therefore summoned to report at Marston Hill by daylight on the following morning.
“Marston Hill was crowned by about twenty acres of woods, entirely surrounded by cleared land. Sentinels were posted around the hill and numerous fires were lighted to prevent the wolves from effecting a return to the mountains. All through the night a continuous and hideous howling was kept up by the besieged wolves and answering howls came from the slopes of the great mountains. The shivering besiegers were regaled with food and hot coffee furnished by the women of the country-side throughout their long lonely watch.
“All night long reinforcements kept arriving. By daylight there were six hundred men and boys on the scene, armed with rifles, shotguns, pitchforks and clubs. A council of war was held and a plan of campaign agreed upon. General Quimby, of Sandwich, a war-seasoned veteran, was made commander-in-chief. The general immediately detailed a thin line of sharpshooters to surround the hill, while the main body formed a strong line ten paces in the rear of the skirmishers. The sharpshooters then were commanded to advance towards the center, that is, towards the top of the hill. The firing began. The reports of the rifles and the unearthly howling of wolves made the welkin ring. The beleaguered animals, frenzied by the ring of flame and noise, and perhaps by wounds, made repeated attempts to break through ‘the thin red line,’ but all in vain. They were driven back into the woods, where they unceasingly continued running, making it difficult for the marksmen to hit them. In about an hour the order was given for the main line to advance, which was done.
“Closing in on the center, the circular battle-line at last massed itself in a solid body on the hilltop, where, for the first time in sixteen hours, the troops raised their voices above a whisper, bursting out into wild hurrahs of victory. Joseph Gilman records that few of the besieged wolves escaped. But the historian of Carroll County maintains that the greater part of the frantic animals broke through the line of battle and escaped to the mountains whence they had come. Returning to the great rock on which the commander-in-chief had established headquarters, the victorious warriors laid their trophies at the feet of their leader—four immense wolves—and once more gave thrice three thundering cheers.
“The little army then formed column, with the general, in a barouche, at its head. In the barouche also reposed the bodies of the slain wolves. After a rapid march of thirty-five minutes, the triumphant volunteers entered the village and formed a hollow square in front of the hotel, the general, mounted on the top of his barouche, being in the center of the square. What a cheering and waving of handkerchiefs by the ladies, in windows and on balconies, there was! General Quimby then made a speech befitting the occasion, after which the thirsty soldiers stampeded to the bar to assuage the awful thirst engendered by twenty mortal hours of abstinence and warfare.”
The paramilitary aspect, the mock nobility, and the odd air of gaiety were frequently the major themes of such hunts.
Saturday afternoon wolf killings were a popular social pastime in the Midwest at the turn of the century. Bounties collected on the dead wolves were pooled to pay for end-of-the-season parties. “In three ways,” wrote one participant, “does the most popular spring enjoyment of the prairie states—the wolf hunt—originate. The farmers may desire earnestly to rid the township of ‘varmints’; the men of the community may want a day of entertainment; an enterprising hardware dealer may wish to enliven the market for gunpowder and shotguns. With them all wolf hunts become increasingly numerous, not because wolves are more common, but because it is an occasion of healthful outdoor exercise and fun.” These farmers more often killed
a coyote than a wolf during these outings. Their casual attitude toward the hundreds of rabbits, prairie dogs, burrowing owls, gophers, and other small game killed in the process, and their habit of hanging the wolf’s carcass from a pole and parading it through the streets on a Saturday night, was part of the barbarism of the times. There were few, if any, misgivings. A contemporary writer, O. W. Williams, comments: “If the lobo has any useful qualities or habits I have not yet learned of them. If it destroys any noxious animal, reptile or insect in appreciative quantity, I have no account of it. It seems to be a specialist in carnage and to have brought professional skill to the slaughter of cattle. Possibly it has its uses—but it will require a skillful man with a very high powered magnifying glass to ascertain them.”
Aerial hunting for wolves in the modern age is a difficult practice to understand. It seems unfair and cruel. Wolves caught out in the open on the arctic tundra or on a frozen lake are approached with highly maneuverable aircraft and blasted with automatic shotguns. The plane lands and the trophy hunter picks up his prize. In Alaska, where the practice was widespread before it was outlawed in 1972, it was not uncommon for two men in a plane to catch ten or fifteen animals—the whole pack—in the open with no cover and methodically kill every one of them. In their defense pilots claim it was difficult to shoot a moving target from a moving plane, that in such low-level, low-speed flying it is easy to stall the aircraft, that a bad shot could blow away a wing strut, and that winter flying—in intense cold with a possibility of whiteouts and crashing in unpopulated regions—was dangerous.
The pilots were right. Planes were shot up, apparently chances to kill were missed, and people were killed when wolves turned to snap at the plane’s skis and caused it to crash. But, overwhelmingly, it was a case of dead wolves, healthy hunters, and pilots exaggerating the dangers to lure still more clients—and coming to believe their own exaggerations when an outraged public tried to stop the practice. Adding to the shabbiness of the episode was the fact that the hunter-clients were usually rich, urban men who knew nothing about wolves and nothing about the Arctic. They commonly believed all wolves weighed two hundred pounds and that any movement a wounded wolf might make once they were on the ground was an attempt to attack them. The illusions were encouraged by the pilots, who took the pelt and left the carcass behind on the snow. Back in Kotzebue or Bettles or Fairbanks the story was embellished and hunter and pilot congratulated for their bravery and daring. It is both ludicrous and tragic that the death of a wolf so cheaply killed confers such enormous prestige.
There is something deep-seated in men that makes them want to “take on” the outdoors, as though it were something to be whipped, and to kill wolves because killing a wolf stands for real triumph. In view of the way most wolves are killed it is hard to see how the image is sustained, but it is. Hunting is an ingrained male activity, especially in rural America, where few male children grow up not wanting to hunt. I hunted as a boy and I remember very clearly the first time I thought there was something wrong with the men I admired, something fundamentally backward about the kind of hunting that was held out to me as what men were supposed to do in the course of things. I was reading a book about big game animals in which Jack O’Connor, then the gun editor of Outdoor Life, described suddenly coming on seven wolves on a river bar in the Yukon. O’Connor dismounted and opened fire. “With considerable expenditure of ammunition,” he wrote, he killed four of them, and then said he was sorry he’d done it for two reasons. “For one it was August and the hides were worthless. For another, my shooting spooked an enormous grizzly bear.”
I couldn’t get over that.
O’Connor writes elsewhere that the greatest satisfaction he had in killing a wolf came in British Columbia while he was sheep hunting. A wolf was doggedly pursuing a sheep up a steep slope. When the wolf stopped for a breath, O’Connor leveled his gun. “It was a lovely sight to see the crosshairs in the 4X settle right behind the wolf’s shoulder. Neither ram nor wolf had seen me. The wolf’s mouth was open, his tongue was hanging out, and he was panting heavily. The ram, on the other hand, seemed hardly bothered by the run. When my rifle went off, the 130 grain .270 bullet cracked that wolf right through the ribs and the animal was flattened as if by a giant hammer.”
Magazine illustration, 1964.
O’Connor spoke for a generation of men who matured in the twenties, thirties, and forties in America. He shot at every wolf he ever saw, including the only one he ever saw in the lower forty-eight states. For all he knew about guns and camping he seemed to know next to nothing about wolves, which was also typical of his generation of hunters. He never questioned his own role as a predator, nor his right to kill another predator, like the wolf, in pursuit of its game. It was largely these sorts of hunters, smug and ignorant, weaned on stories of vicious wolves, innocent deer, and poor, starving Eskimos, who became the most righteously vocal defenders of aerial hunting. As a result, at the height of the craze its appeal was to a sense of duty (protect the defenseless herds and help the starving Eskimo), to violence (permissible in defense of the defenseless), and to a distorted sense of manhood. Argument over whether it was a sport disappeared. One hunter, promoting the activity to a sympathetic audience, wrote ecstatically of “not being more than thirty feet above the animals, so close I saw the hair fly from one of the black wolves as the hail of buckshot hit it. The wolf went down, rolling and kicking, biting at its side. Confused, the other wolves crouched, looking up at us. Tom, an enthusiastic wolf-hunter, who had once shot a cylinder off his plane trying to kill a wolf from the air, pulled the plane up into a jubilant chandelle, then let it drop off in a screaming, side-slipping dive that brought us in behind the wolves again.”
This anecdote ends with embarrassing self-parody. “ ‘If I could afford it,’ said Tex with satisfaction as we landed to pick up the pelts, ‘I wouldn’t do nothin’ but fly around an’ hunt them varmints. Every time I kill one it makes me feel good.’ ”
When such “hunters” stood before national television cameras in sunglasses and flightsuits and pretended to eat raw the flesh of wolves they’d just killed, they only exposed their own foolishness and the mockery they had made of traditional hunting ethics.
The sport hunter and the roustabout do-gooder came together in an interesting character in Alaska in the 1930s. During the Depression, a number of men drifted north in hopes of making a living as trappers. Most didn’t. Some who did wrote about their experiences with wolves in magazines like The Alaska Sportsman. These men were mostly ignorant of the woods when they arrived; their stories are full of errors and cruelty to wolves and are punctuated by a righteous hatred for the animal. They believed wolves attacked and killed men in the north country, and they seemed barely able to control themselves when they told you what the wolves did to deer. “I knew what I’d find,” wrote one, “deer hair and crushed bones, rent tissues and blood,” as though wolves might have left something else. Stories with titles like “Wolves Killed Crist Colby,” “I Match Wits with Wolves,” and “I’ll Get Old Club Foot Yet!” were unconscious parodies of frontier yarns in which the trappers played the role of the sheriff going for his six-shooter or shootin’ iron whenever he saw a wolf.
The men who wrote these stories passionately believed they were serving humanity in the lower forty-eight states from this distant outpost. One of them, as if writing home to his family, said, “While I do my best to destroy all the wolves in the Ward Cove Game Refuge, the other animals go unmolested. On the roof of my cabin at Third Lake, the martin jump at night and the deer, unmolested, have become very tame, seeming to sense that there are few wolves and that man bears no ill will.”
An Alaskan trapper named Lawrence Carson tracked a wolf that had dragged one of his traps more than twenty miles and found him hung upside down by the dragline on a steep hillside. He disentangled the wolf for the purpose of taking pictures, then shot him in the head. “Lobo died as he had lived, in defiance of all things that would dare to con
quer him. His bloody career was ended, but even in death his fiery eyes and truculent jaws opened in a look of unremitting hate. Lobo, king of his domain—and rightly a king he was called—was dead.”
But Carson’s thoughts reveal the ambivalence in some of these men, for he continues:
“As I looked at his lifeless form, a feeling of condonation came over me. Even though he had been a wanton destroyer of wild life and ill-deserving of mercy, somehow I felt sorry that he was gone. I wondered if the great mountains and deep silent valleys that had been his range would miss him. I wondered if at night, when the moon hung low like a great ball of fire, the dark shaggy spruce trees would miss his wild, deep-throated call. Something has been taken away that would never be put back in the scheme of things. Somehow I felt as if there was an irreparable loss. The well-known axiom had again asserted itself; the sport and fun were not in the kill, but in the chase.”
Those who stayed on in Alaska eventually wrote for the very same audiences of their fondness for the wolf, debunking the old stories of wolves killing people, and saying not much at all about how cute the deer were. One ended his story by saying he would like to spend his last years with wolves. He wrote, “I think I could enjoy the companionship of that magnificent creature more fully than any other creature on earth.”
The O’Connor-type hunters whose hatred of wolves was gospel gave way in the 1960s to a more “enlightened” hunter, who spoke of the beneficial value of the wolf in balancing wild ecosystems, but who still wanted to kill him. The president of the Boone and Crockett Club, a national hunters’ organization, said: “If more factual information can be widely disseminated to the general public as well as to sportsmen and conservationists perhaps this magnificent animal can yet attain his well-deserved status as a useful and highly important big game trophy animal.” He was no longer a varmint; he was big game. The justifications are endless.