Wolf Country

by John Theberge

  It was useless. Neither facts nor reason were relevant. Their minds were closed. Joe was almost speechless as we left. He mumbled, “They’re no good. I’ll kill them. No good.” His eyes glistened with the fervour of hate.

  After that day, Pretty 4’s signal was never heard again.

  At a sideroad one snowy day, we were getting a bearing on a collared wolf when a short, round-faced man drove up in a Jeep. He got out, aware of what we were doing, and was quick to make his opinions known. He had no use for wolves or for us. In an aggressive manner he explained how he had seen wolves get into a bunch of deer and kill the whole lot and just leave. When I asked where and when that had happened, he responded, “Oh, over in Quebec a few years ago.” This observation served as convincing evidence that wolves are wanton killers, whether accurate in itself or not. I asked him how often he had seen this sort of thing, and rather than answer he began to raise his voice. Mary tried to explain that what he saw was an extremely rare event, but he got more and more worked up, so finally we got back in the truck and drove away. During the exchange he had revealed that he was a retired schoolteacher, a frightening admission considering the way his emotions overrode any ability to weight evidence.

  Friends of the Wolf is an activist organization with chapters in Ontario, British Columbia, and the Yukon whose volunteers, according to its newsletter, “have logged thousands of unpaid hours, travelled thousands of kilometres, and faced very real danger in defence of the Wolf Nation. Arrests, death-threats, job-loss, frost-bite, and the glare of publicity are all part of the job description.” For its members, civil disobedience is a legitimate weapon for policy change. It brings assured media attention and at times is effective. But daily, international news portrays the consequence of not abiding by laws, so, despite our appreciation for the organization’s concern over the plight of Algonquin wolves, we distanced ourselves from it.

  The public perception did not notice the distance. Anybody who speaks for the wolf is, as a township reeve told me, “a wolf lover or a Greenpeace guy.” So when Friends of the Wolf angered local people, we were blamed. Anger them it did with a flyer posted on bulletin boards in grocery stores, nailed up on telephone poles, and put in rural mailboxes. Below a picture of a wolf was written in bold capital letters “HOW DARE YOU!!” and then: “On behalf of this and other citizens of the Wolf Nation, Friends of the Wolf hereby order human citizens to immediately cease and desist on all attacks and plans of attack on the Algonquin and all other Wolves. Any further violence against wolves in these areas will be met with prolonged and diverse resistance.”

  I telephoned the president, Bill Hipwell, to point out that so far most residents appeared to be respecting the wolf-killing ban. The poster, instead of doing any good, was bound to infuriate people.

  Then, on March 12, 1993, an event occurred that changed the whole temper of the wolf controversy. Unwittingly involved was adult male McDonald Creek 4, radio-collared the previous July. He had disappeared the day after capture. In October, Quebec student Stephan Beauregard learned from the Montreal office of Ministère du Loisir de la Chasse et de la Pêche that someone had seen a radio-collared wolf on the east side of Gatineau Park, beyond Ottawa. Stephan knew the frequencies of our wolves, having worked for us the summer previously, and he borrowed a receiver from the Quebec government. He located the wolf, McDonald 4, 170 kilometres southeast of his capture site. The wolf had crossed the wide Ottawa River before freeze-up either by swimming or crossing the one long bridge at Pembroke.

  By mid-December, McDonald 4 surprised us by turning up again, this time on the periphery of the deer yard. Then he went missing until mid-January when he showed up again in the Bonnechere Valley just outside the park. He seemed to be alone, travelling back into his home territory in early February, then back out to the periphery of the deer yard. Our last fix for him was on February 16.

  On Saturday, March 12, his severed head appeared, with radio-collar underneath, mounted on a telephone pole at the main intersection in Round Lake Centre just across from the church. Above his head was one of Friends of the Wolf’s posters, and below in large letters on a board was painted “DO NOT DARE US.” A reporter from the Barry’s Bay newspaper was telephoned at 6:30 A.M. The township reeve was there an hour later, and so was the parish priest and conservation officer Blake Simpson. A photograph of McDonald 4’s head was featured on the newspaper’s front page.

  Our winter funding had just run out so none of us were there. I was telephoned about the incident and later sent a colour photograph and newspaper clippings. MNR area manager John Johnson was quoted saying, “This incident portrays a sadistic image of Round Lake residents that is a real shame.”

  The barbarism of the event shocked the community and made many people take stock. For a while it seemed to cause such a revulsion that people just wanted to forget it, forget wolves, concentrate on other issues. For some months, even a year, we could not gauge its impact, but in retrospect, it was a turning point in public attitudes. Gradually, press coverage declined.

  As months went by, an acceptance of wolves seemed to grow. Some people befriended us, even tried to help us understand their neighbours or relatives who see the wolf as evil. Beside a field one day, the landowner pointed to a crew stacking bales of hay on a wagon behind the baler and said, “You see that fellow on top of the load? He’s my brother-in-law and he hates wolves. But he’s never lived away from here. That other fellow lived down south for a while and has come back, like me. He can live with them.” A local newspaper editor told us that a silent majority either valued the wolf or did not care.

  Something had happened to the psyche of the community. People started thinking about their environment, so easily taken for granted, and why they lived there. In our subsequent newspaper articles designed to keep people informed of our results, we referred to the accumulating evidence that wolves and people could live in peace. Despite the ban, there were still deer in the hills, no livestock had been lost, no humans endangered. In our daily contacts we often asked people why they did not live in Ottawa or Toronto? They did not have to answer; they knew why. There is a peaceful wildness to the forest-farm interface, one you can sense when the moonlight floods the fields and outlines the distant trees, one that is richer because of the presence of wolves. What the wolf issue did was force people to face themselves.

  Once, an anonymous person phoned the MNR to say he had killed a wolf in the ban area with an ice pick and thrown away the collar. As well, Blake Simpson was told about a collared wolf shot beside a road, and he shovelled in the ditch to find it. But, in the end, almost everybody obeyed the ban.

  Looking back now, community hostilities towards us seem to be over, notwithstanding some continued illegal killing and the occasional newspaper article to the contrary. The MNR did the right thing, for wolves, for conservation, for Algonquin Park, and for people with a sensitivity towards nature both close to and distant from Algonquin Park. It was not enough — Ontario still has the most disgracefully exploitive wolf policy in Canada — but it was something. We had hopes that the park population could rebound.

  STRUGGLING REOCCUPANTS OF THE BONNECHERE VALLEY

  A FRACTURED wolf society is memory-impaired, order-attenuated, adrift like a hockey team that has traded its veterans and fired its coach. What remains is only what has been coded in genes, still the essence of the species and its way of doing things, but without the same synergy, cohesion, or breadth of learned skills.

  The Bonnechere Valley greened up in the May sunshine, and the passerine birds flooded back. The songs of white-throated sparrows rang through the forest at daybreak, and the fluted hymns of the veeries softened the gathering dusk. Olive-sided flycatchers swooped from spruce spire to spire, and woodcocks danced in the clearings. In the years after the wolf killings nothing seemed different, but that was an illusion. The population of the summit predator was in disarray. Gone were the wolf footprints that once had sutured the high hills in the upper end of the v
alley to the plateaulands lower down. Instead, gaping, wolfless wounds separated the tracks of one pack from another. Silence replaced wolf howls that normally reverberated from the dark hills as pack members sought each other for direction and solace.

  Foys Lake supra-organism might have come and gone without human notice except for the five radio-collars we put on pack members. But human notice is no requisite for relevance. The land knew them well — the ridges and game trails they followed, the beaver dams they crossed, the granite outcrops where their pups had played. The McDonald Creek supra-organism, too, might have lived out its days in anonymity centred on the wide McDonald Creek marshes where few canoeists ever go — not much water over the mud — and departed, unknown by any humans. But the forest, without wolf influence on its herbivores, would have written a different signature across the land.

  The Foys Lake pack had occupied most of the Bonnechere Valley, where, like a firefly, it glowed for a moment — three years in our data — and went out. Then, up in the void of the valley’s northeastern corner, the McDonald Creek pack blinked on and off over the course of another three years. In a more appropriate evolutionary time scale, difficult to discern even with a “long-term” study such as ours, this transitory nature of wolf packs may be natural, but not at that rate. Pack turnover, like species extinction, is a normal process. The impact of humans is speeding it up.

  In the summer of 1993, we continued working the McDonald Creek area to be sure the pack no longer existed. We lurched over the haulroads and skid trails, the man-made venous system used over the preceding few years to drain the lifeblood of pine from the land and transform some of the most noble stands into “shelter-wood” skeletons.

  Ironically, logging improved the habitat for chestnut-sided warblers, magnolia warblers, black-throated blue warblers, redstarts, all birds of second growth. Each June morning as we bounced along, windows open, we recorded the number of singing males per kilometre: white-throated sparrows, hermit thrushes, winter wrens, pounding sapsuckers, drumming grouse, all part of, and responding to, one of the most dramatic pulses of productivity on Earth. Farther south in warmer climates, the pulse of spring growth is diffused over a longer time; farther north, productivity is limited by short growing seasons and permafrost. But here in the middle, the energy machine reaches a late-May and June six-week high. In logged-over forests, the pulse beats strongest.

  That summer of 1993 the McDonald Creek pack’s territory was not wolfless, just packless. Two of the wolves we radio-tracked stayed in the vicinity, others wandered widely, and still others were just passing through, unfettered by bonds to the land. Still threading the same forest pathways, remembering, was dark-faced Basin 9 McDonald, who Mary and I had collared by the same patch of sweet fern where we had collared her now-dead father the summer before. In June, the student crew caught a medium-sized adult male, McDonald 1, genetically unrelated to any former residents. Occasionally over the following nine months we located him with Basin 9 McDonald, but the association was infrequent, and by the following summer they had separated. That winter, Basin 9 McDonald picked up at least two other wolves in the “singles bar” down in the deer yard and then shifted her range northwest into the old Grand Lake West territory. McDonald 1 left too, carving out a new territory in former Mathews land.

  Other wolves caught in the McDonald Creek area showed even weaker bonds. McDonald 4, for example, whose head ended up on the post at Round Lake Centre, had wandered across the Ottawa River to Quebec and back before he was killed. Skinny little McDonald 2, a twenty-kilogram (forty-five-pound) yearling male, left the park within two weeks of capture and showed up in the farmlands south of the town of Wilno, his home turf for the next four years.

  We came to think of the McDonald Creek area as a social wasteland for wolves. There were just too many unpredictable wolf movements, temporary alliances, and weak territory associations. We found an uncommon number of landless refugees, not just young dispersers looking for new land and a mate, but adults. A lone, wandering, middle-aged wolf implies something has gone wrong. Basin 4 McDonald, the biggest wolf in our study, had been one of those when he was joined by Grand 3 in the summer of 1990. Similar cases were McDonald 4, McDonald 1 Hardwood, Basin 9 McDonald, McDonald 8.

  Elsewhere in other persecuted packs we found the same thing: Mathews 11; Travers 8; Redpole 5; Pretty 6; Jack Pine 7 after she lost her entire pack one year and her new mate the next. The land across eastern Algonquin Park lacked beautiful, coordinated wolf supra-organisms like it had when Foys Lake, McDonald Creek, Jack Pine, Grand Lake, and other packs had practised their synchronized magic there. The contrast was disturbing, making us talk a lot about pack integrity, not just numbers.

  A lanky young female we named McDonald 5 finally administered first aid to the wolf-impaired McDonald Creek lands. Students Joy Cook and Mark Hebblewhite collared her first in May 1994. Just as we found elsewhere, recovery here centred on one or two key wolves possibly with survival skills, or social skills, or tenacity that exceeded others. Good news emerged after we caught and collared McDonald 5; genetic analysis showed that she was the granddaughter of Foys 3, the medium-sized male who had died of rabies in March 1991, so at least the Foys Lake lineage lived on.

  Initially she showed erratic movements, like the others. For a time in 1994, she associated with Basin 9 McDonald in that wolf’s new territory to the northwest, even travelling back and forth with her to the deer yard occasionally from the early snows of December until the cold of late January. Then they separated permanently, McDonald 5 embarking on a month-long excursion north of the Petawawa River, where, from the air, we found her with a former Petty Lake wolf who had dispersed to form a new pack there. Then she turned southwest into the new territory of the Hardwood Lake pack, where, again from the air, we found her with a probable past associate that lived there. Finally, after her “fling,” she returned and settled for good in her old McDonald Creek territory.

  Mary and I recaught her on a May day in 1995, when the hazel was still in red brushcut flower. Unexpectedly, she was with three other wolves of unknown origin, all who left big footprints in the sand up the road. Singles bar shenanigans?

  One of the wolves with her was McDonald 8, caught a few days later, a handsome, dark wolf with black rings around his eyes. He was destined to become her mate, but not that year. Although a full adult, he wandered even more widely than McDonald 5. We dubbed him a “wild card,” one of three such wolves in 1995, because he seemed free to trespass in any pack’s territory — either that or he was stealthy and never caught.

  McDonald 5 centred her activity at an extensive bog south of the Spectacle lakes, as shown by aerial tracking. Later that summer of 1995, we took a three-day canoe trip to reach the bog. She had moved again, but we found the tracks of pups along its muddy edge. That winter the pack consisted of eight or nine wolves, an abnormally high pup production and survival unless unknown older wolves immigrated into the new pack.

  After a year of wandering, McDonald 8 began to centre his movement back in the McDonald Creek territory and was with McDonald 5 more frequently. From the spring of 1996 on, he became her constant companion. In August 1996 again we canoed to the Spectacle lakes. Hot days forced us to lay over rather than make the long portages in this region of the park where few people go. On the way back, as the wind blew us down Lower Spectacle Lake, we picked up the signals of both wolves. We circled back for cross-bearings, blew back down the lake again, and made camp in the pines behind a rocky outcrop that sloped to the water. While waiting for dusk, we cooled off with a swim.

  The signals showed that the wolves were southeast in the McDonald Creek marshes. As the sun left the water, we canoed across the foot of the lake and paddled through a high-walled rocky channel that connects to the slow-moving creek. Rounding a point, McDonald 5’s signal became much louder, too loud, so we stopped paddling and let the canoe float back. We pulled up in a little arrowhead-choked cove surrounded by high grasses to wait for dark a
nd whatever the wolves would tell us. Soon, a howl broke the evening hush. It was McDonald 5, confirmed by the bearing on the signal. She howled half a dozen times, her voice echoing off the hills to the west, hanging over the marsh for a moment, then fading like the mist.

  At dusk we slipped past her, paddling silently, tracing the stream’s convolutions through the marshland, and putting her signal behind us. Suddenly we heard a splash and the sloshing of running feet and caught a fleeting glimpse of a wolf. It must have been hunting beaver or muskrat along the water’s edge. Around another bend where the stream wound close to a hillside, another wolf shattered the stillness with a series of short howls. Maybe it mistook the noise of our paddles for a packmate. We heard it enter the water and splash towards us, then at twenty metres pause, realize its mistake, and plunge back to the forest. Seconds later, a full pack responded from off in the distance. We sat quietly in the canoe and listened, pleased that for the second consecutive year there were pups and the land was again well stocked with wolves.

  But it wasn’t for long; something happened to the McDonald Creek pack — again. We do not know what. In the winter of 1996-97, both collared wolves, McDonald 5 and McDonald 8, spent much of the early months in the Round Lake deer yard close to the highway and people. Our tracking consistently failed to show them with a pack. In February they returned to the park, and on repeated flights John Pisapio reported either seeing them alone or just their two sets of tracks. At first we hoped that they were only temporarily separated from their pack, but as time went on, that possibility became less likely, and by the end of the winter we were forced to conclude that tragedy of some form had struck again.