Wolf Country

by John Theberge

  It was not curiosity that Nahma 1 exhibited towards us early in the summer of 1988 when we found her at Mujekiwis Lake. It was dramatically different behaviour. On this occasion, she was the most aggressive wolf we have faced. That summer, the wolves were not around Nahma Lake. Graham’s flights showed their movements centred on a big beaver pond-marsh complex near Mujekiwis Lake about nine kilometres away. We set out with two objectives: to radio-collar more wolves in that pack and to collect wolf droppings (scats) from a spring den and early-summer rendezvous site. The scats would provide evidence about the importance of moose calves in wolf diets when calves are small and vulnerable.

  I flew with Graham to plot a route into Mujekiwis Lake. We took off in a float plane from Kawawaymog Lake, and in only a few minutes we were over the pond-marsh complex with Nahma 1’s signal booming up to the antennas attached to the wing struts. Down below was a typical rendezvous site with a wet, post-beaverdam meadow, an eye of water still in the centre, and tall grasses and alders around its edges. It was a good place for pups to explore and adults to watch for an unwary deer or moose coming to drink. Down below, too, stretched beautiful Mujekiwis Lake with rocky, pine-clad points, no canoes or people, and the Nipissing River to the south meandering out in wide sedge flats. The river was the obvious route in.

  No people; no wonder! If you spot Mujekiwis Lake on the map of Algonquin Park, don’t go there. Not unless it is early spring after a huge snow melt and it has rained for a week. Conditions were the opposite. The mighty Nipissing River, up there near its source, turned out to be a thin veneer of water on mud. We (Mary, Michelle, and I) put in, paddled, poled, hauled out around a beaver dam, put in again, got stuck, got off, stuck again … with supplies for a week, twenty-five heavy traps, drug kit, radio-collars, receiver, antenna. Early the second day, Mary, inconsiderate considering the circumstances, tripped and fractured her ankle while struggling along under her big voyageur pack. Michelle and I graciously relieved her of a jacket or two — we did not know her ankle was fractured then — and she hobbled on.

  Finally at Mujekiwis Lake we made camp under the pines close enough to the pond-marsh to hear any wolves howl. Nahma 1’s radio signal came in from a distance. That night the wolves did howl, seeming to make the water shimmer in the moonlight, stilling the bullfrogs along the shore.

  The next day, hot and sunny, Michelle and I left Mary with her oversized ankle at camp and canoed down the lake. Striking through the bush, by good luck we found an old logging road going our way. We reached the pond-marsh and scanned it from a fringe of spruces. No wolves were visible, so we spent the afternoon and evening scouting the area back from the marsh, collecting scats and looking for the bones of kills.

  Then suddenly, in the hush of early evening, we were challenged by a wolf — the most distraught wolf we have ever encountered. We were sitting on a log. On a rise above us, no more than fifteen metres away, a wolf shattered the stillness with a sudden burst of deep, throaty barks. Looking up, startled, we saw radio-collared Nahma 1 racing back and forth along the edge of the rise. She was so close and the evening so quiet we could hear her throat rattle as she sucked in air between each series of barks. No attempt at concealment, this wolf was aggressively challenging us.

  Hurriedly we stood up. We faced her, talked to her, tried to quiet her down. Our voices often calm wolves when we are collaring them. But she continued racing back and forth and barking. Slowly we backed down the old road. When we were around a bend, we turned and walked away. Nahma 1 stayed where she was, barking less frequently. Finally she stopped.

  Why so different from the previous October? We may have genuinely startled her. She may have been almost upon us before detecting us. Upon later inspection we found small pup scats on the rise. The situation was similar to an experience I had in my student days on Baffin Island when three adult wolves barked at me from close range while I was near their pups at a den. It was also reminiscent of a wolf who barked at student Paul Joslin while he stood with his back against a tree. Another wolf at Annie Bay in Algonquin Park once confronted Doug Pimlott, barking at him. Gradually it moved back to rejoin its pups and pack across a clearing. (That barking was recorded on the stereo record The Language and Music of the Wolves, narrated by Robert Redford, Columbia Records, 1971.)

  These incidents were not attacks, as if we were prey. They were displays of angry, defensive behaviour, of a kind most likely directed towards natural dangers such as bears or threatening non-pack wolves. Wolves, like many other species, usually express ritualized aggression intended to cause the threat to withdraw. Such rituals are less risky than an actual attack and fight.

  Michelle and I felt guilty for sneaking around the rendezvous site. Nahma 1 had a right to be angry. Den sites and the rendezvous sites where wolves move later in the summer deserve respect. We have a rule now for all our crews that nobody enters a rendezvous site to collect scats until the pack has moved on.

  Three so-called “wolf attacks,” as reported in newspapers, have occurred in Algonquin Park during our study. Like none of the foregoing, they all involved wolf-human physical contact. One of these wolves frequented the Pog Lake public campground week after week and often was seen trotting alongside the paved highway. One night it put its jaws around a girl’s arm as she sat by a campfire. She received only a scratch from an animal that, if it wanted to, could have broken the arm into splinters with those same jaws in the same length of time.

  Another night a little boy was bitten on the side by a wolf when he left the tent to visit the backhouse. Again, only a minor cut resulted. Nearby that summer, MNR and Algonquin Forest Authority (AFA) employees had unwisely habituated a wolf to approach them and eat doughnuts.

  The third incident was different in that a little boy’s nose and face were badly bitten. The child, sleeping outside a tent, was dragged a few metres in his sleeping bag. His calls, and the presence of other people, broke off the encounter, but the wolf was reluctant to leave and had to be chased away.

  In these incidents, the wolves displayed neither angry challenge, defensive behaviour, nor vocalization such as we had experienced, so the same emotions probably were not involved. In none of these cases were the animals rabid. Nor were the humans regarded as prey, or the wolves would have been far more violent. Preceding all three contacts, the individual wolves had become nuisances to campers in the area. Perhaps the wolves were social outcasts. In all three cases, the wolves appear to have been more curious than aggressive. None exhibited the apprehension that normally prevents actual contact.

  Wolves, like dogs, commonly mouth unusual articles out of curiosity, or each other in play. They grab foreign objects. Once, when Jenny was a child, a wolf took her jumper suit from where it was hanging beside our truck and carried it off to its rendezvous site. Maybe the sleeping bag was like this, the object of investigation, and the child in it a surprise.

  Whatever the wolves’ motives, these encounters represent rare, aberrant behaviour. To a wolf, we are neither prey nor competitor. They do not realize that in the latter case they are so wrong.

  Where wolves rarely see humans, as in remote arctic places, or experience our lethal forms of aggression, they may exhibit more curiosity than fear. In 1997 on Banks Island in the western arctic, a white wolf approached our canoe to within a few metres, and was reluctant to leave. On Baffin Island in my student years, sometimes we found a wolf walking along behind us. At the other extreme, a wolf biologist working in Romania tells a story of a wolf that followed him when he left the forest and trotted behind him along a busy city street. Possibly at times European wolves exhibit fearlessness not through lack of exposure to humans, but excessive exposure, as long as they are not being persecuted.

  Captive wolves are different, stripped of a wild environment, without any opportunity to disperse, hunt, or roam, all of which are needs encoded in genes. Sometimes with neuroses, always with artificial dependence forced upon them by humans, on occasion they can be unpredictable.


  We followed Nahma 1 periodically for two years, learning a little more from each glimpse she gave us into her life. When I pull her records up on the computer, I find 185 entries, each with date, map coordinates, method of location, and a description of events. Most of the entries are from Graham’s aerial fixes over two winters: eighty-nine entries for her first winter, twenty-one the next. Only once was she seen from the air, trotting along the edge of a frozen lake with two other wolves. Other times she was hidden in the trees. From tracking her on the ground, we knew her pack consisted of at least six wolves.

  From another database, I can pull up on the screen a map of Algonquin Park with lakes and rivers shown in blue and coloured dots representing the locations of specific wolves. The first winter, Nahma 1’s territory encompassed 110 square kilometres of prime moose and beaver habitat, with Nahma Lake towards its west side and the Nipissing River forming a southern boundary. Half the Nahma pack’s territory fell in especially dense moose range, based upon Graham’s analysis of winter data collected over a fifteen-year period by MNR biologist Mike Wilton and others. The second winter, her territory appeared to be smaller, but this is likely the result of fewer telemetry fixes.

  The Nahma Lake rendezvous site where we first found her was used only temporarily. Maybe the pack had moved the pups there to be near a kill. In contrast, the site near Mujekiwis Lake, with a system of well-used trails, was used longer and probably included a den that we did not find. The two sites were only nine kilometres apart, a short hike for a trotting wolf.

  We collected sixty scats in the Nahma pack’s territory, all duly bagged and brought with others to the ecology lab at the University of Waterloo. Each scat was heated in an autoclave to 120°C for twenty minutes, then washed through a sieve. The remaining hair and bones were dried and put in an envelope for later analysis. Colleagues and students working in the west wing of the Environmental Studies Building knew without asking when scat preparation was taking place. When windows were open, they even knew two floors above.

  Our analysis procedures involve randomly selecting three hairs from each scat, laying them on pieces of clear acetate, sandwiching the acetate between two microscope slides, and heating it in an oven for five minutes at 80°C. Heating produces a hair impression on the acetate through which light can pass, allowing microscopic examination. As a concession to help researchers identify hairs, evolution long ago decreed that each species of mammal possess a different pattern of tiny scales on the outside of its hair. By analysing the hair, we can figure out what the wolves have been eating.

  For the Nahma pack, moose and beaver were represented about equally in the summer. Deer didn’t show up much, as expected because of their scarcity. Beaver dropped in winter, when they spend most of their time in their lodges.

  Wolf deaths figure prominently in our research; too many amber eyes into which we looked did not look back. On March 5, 1989, Graham phoned me at the university to say that when he dialled the wolf’s frequency that morning from the airplane, the signal had come in at twice its normal pulse rate. Circuitry in the radio transmitter responds by altering the pulse rate when the collar has been motionless for eight hours. Nahma 1’s signal was on mortality mode.

  I rearranged my lecture schedule, and we drove north to the town of Sundridge stretched along the shore of Bernard Lake seventeen kilometres west of Algonquin Park. Graham flew over from the town of Whitney to the east. In a restaurant he pinpointed the location of the signal on a topographic map. The wolf was in a narrow valley about two kilometres east of a lake known to local fisherman as Carmichael. Nothing was unusual about the topography. She was, however, outside her territory, farther west by ten kilometres than she had ever been, even beyond the boundary of the park.

  Jenny and I crammed in with Graham, the pilot, our snowshoes and some survival gear, and we taxied out beyond the ice fishermen’s huts. Sun slanted in through the windshield as the engine revved for take-off. With the temperature a few degrees above freezing, wet snow lengthened our take-off run, and the pilot shouted in my ear that he hoped the snow wasn’t too wet on tiny Carmichael Lake or we might be there until spring.

  Nothing distinguishes the park from land next to it on the west side, at least from the air. Snowy lakes and bogs of all shapes and sizes, hardwood hills spreading like choppy swells on a grey sea, dark conifers stencilling the low places, rivers tracing out the valley bottoms. Only when you get to the ground do you notice the more heavily cut-over forests and a scattering of cottages around the lakes.

  We circled over Carmichael Lake, sloped down, and landed. Jenny and I climbed out. Graham and the pilot taxied off to complete a circuit of other radio-collared packs to the east. The plane gained just sufficient altitude on its run down the lake to clear the spruces at the far end.

  Before we landed, Nahma 1’s rapid signal was coming in clearly through the earphones. Down on the lake, however, we could not hear it. We walked to shore, snow clinging to our snowshoes, pushed through the alders, and came upon an old snowmobile trail heading east, our way, which made walking easier.

  After about seven hundred metres, a faint signal registered on the receiver. Encouraged, we followed the trail that ended at a derelict cabin on the edge of a clearing. Past that the valley narrowed, and we followed a small stream, gurgling with muted voice.

  Crossbills were in the air, tossing melodious notes into the wind. A raven or two cruised the treetops, and an all-white snow-shoe hare hopped out from beneath a snowy spruce branch and posed for pictures, white on white. Two sets of fresh wolf tracks ran our way. Clouds had obscured the sun, and the thought crossed my mind that if it started to rain, the pilot might not risk a landing back on Carmichael Lake at our designated time, two hours later.

  The signal strength increased. Then, abruptly as we walked over a small rise, its direction changed, indicating that we had just passed the collar. The signal led us out of the conifers to the base of a hardwood hill. By turning around and pointing the antenna towards the snow, we located the spot to dig.

  The snow was unbroken except for the wolf tracks a few metres away. The wolves had not paused, unaware or uninterested in what lay below. We began excavating an area about one and one half metres wide with our shovel, taking turns at the heavy work.

  The collar lay about forty-five centimetres beneath the surface — but no wolf was in it. Its bolts were still fastened. The leather strap and acrylic casing around the radio parts had been heavily chewed. A small piece of frozen flesh stuck to it, and a spot of blood was frozen to the acrylic — nothing more. We dug farther, carefully excavating an encrusted layer shaped like a wolf’s body. A few guard hairs were frozen in, but no carcass.

  For the next hour we excavated a huge area right down to last year’s fast-frozen ferns and bunchberry leaves without uncovering any more clues. The body could have been nearby without our knowing it.

  Time was running out, so we packed up and snowshoed back along our tracks to Carmichael Lake, passing the snowshoe hare again, and the derelict cabin. The plane came in low to the west end and taxied to us. We climbed in and held our breath as the pilot took us back out. This time, by keeping the skis in their former tracks, he gained more speed, and we cleared the trees with ease.

  We were left having to draw a most probable, instead of a definite, conclusion. Nahma 1 had been faithful to a defined territory until mid-December of that second winter. Then she went missing despite repeated flights over her whole territory On January 3, Graham found her in an area where he had not been searching, south of the Nipissing River and well south of her territory. She disappeared again on three subsequent flights, neither on territory nor to the south. Sometime after early January, she had moved west to the place where she died.

  She was a mature adult by then, three and one-half years old. While old for a wolf to disperse in search of a mate, she could have been doing that. Or, she could have been on an extra-territorial foray with other members of her pack. Alone or with others, ho
wever, she had been trespassing on land occupied by another pack. The evidence suggested that she had met a violent end. Humans could not have killed her or the collar would have been unbolted. Black bears, which at times kill wolves, were in hibernation. The verdict? Most likely she had been killed and dismembered by the resident pack. One wolf carried the collar off, lay down in the snow, chewed at it, then got up and left.

  Nahma 1 and her pack illustrated something about wolf attitudes towards us, and especially their forbearance. They also showed us that harsh rules exist in wolf societies. In years to come, however, Nahma 1’s death at the jaws of other wolves began to stand out as unusual. Based on the observations of other researchers, and the large amount of trespass we later recorded, we expected to find more wolf-wolf killing. That lack of killing eventually led our research in a different direction.

  We left the Nahma area after that season, except for annual spring scat collections and moose-browse surveys. The old railway bed has had more years of reabsorption into forest, and so has the old logging road near Mujekiwis Lake. Maybe by now beaver have rebuilt their dam and flooded the Mujekiwis rendezvous site again. A new generation of wolves living there doesn’t know us, and if any wolves are still alive from back then, they have forgotten. That is the way it should be.

  CAMP AT THE RAPIDS

  Limited Wolves

  Wolves, like other large carnivores, live in low densities. Their numbers are limited by a set of environmental conditions that apply to all species, and are then limited further by their position as a summit predator.

  The adage that “no population can expand indefinitely in a finite space,” variously worded, shows up in most books on population ecology. If any population even came close, just once, it would quickly commandeer all the energy available on Earth, and global extinction would result.