Wolf Country

by John Theberge

  In the summer of 1997, we confirmed that there were only these two adults, but again they produced pups — we heard them howl. Maybe this time the pack will persist, learn the land, avoid its dangers, stay out of the deer yard, survive.

  Southwest of the McDonald Creek pack’s lands, other wolves struggled to rebuild wolfness across a large sector of the former Foys Lake pack’s land, empty after the winter of 1990-91. We could sense the Foys Lake pack’s loss in the summer of 1991 as we drove through this incomplete domain from kilometre 14 to 40 on the Bonnechere road, or up the nearby logging roads. We never saw wolf scats or tracks, and our nightly howling excursions were uneventful. When we hiked the overgrown roads or portages, we felt the emptiness.

  In the fall of 1991, a young male from the Jack Pine pack initially named Basin 6 dispersed to the southwest and found this vacant tract. Later we learned that he was only on a foray away from home and really was born a Jack Pine wolf, son of Jack Pine 3. By early December he had found a mate. We called them the Jocko Lake wolves (and Basin 6 became Basin 6 Jocko) after the lake at the centre of their movements.

  Soon after they met, one December evening just at dusk we heard them perform a magnificent duet. Rapidly dropping temperature had caused cold air to settle over an expansive snowy bog. The cold pressed even the gentle, whispered forest sounds into silence. We stood on a logging road where the signal came in best, talking softly because the wolves were close. Suddenly one deep voice, then another, cracked the stillness, so close you could hold the howls in your hands. The two wolves, destined to found a new pack dynasty, sang on and on with the vigour of youth, their howls resonating from the hills across the bog. Bracketing each howl, making each a work of music, was the counter-point of complete silence, leaving the forest, and us, in breathless anticipation. This was their land now, and their howls an ode to joy.

  That winter the newly formed Jocko Lake pair spent much of its time down in the deer yard. As with the McDonald Creek wolves, when they returned in the spring we counted four sets of tracks where there only should have been two.

  From the time the spring peepers tuned up until the green frogs took over, we camped under the pines where Feely Lake lapped at the leatherleaf and bog laurel in front of our tent, a place that became a favourite in years to come. Often Basin 6 Jocko’s signal was audible from across the lake. He and another wolf, likely his mate, serenaded us morning and night, sometimes stimulating a resident pair of loons to join in and together make the hills radiant with sound.

  Besides the wolves nearby, that camp was memorable because of an abundant crop of oyster mushrooms that we ate with eggs in the morning, cheese at noon, and spaghetti or anything else at night. The mushrooms, growing on dead trees, came complete with their own little food web — pleasing fungus beetles with their red-brown thorax and squirmy rove beetles; we managed to pick most of them out, and the rest added protein.

  The night of June 22, 1992, was marked by a severe late frost that left its beauty mark on the hills for the entire summer. The soft, vulnerable, expanding leaves of red maples turned a crimson red, their chloroplasts permanently out of order. The afternoon of the frost, Mary, Michelle, and I canoed a string of lakes and howled our way back after dark. When we set out, the air was still and the afternoon sunlight translucent. In a picturesque bay, a feeding moose raised her head, mouth full of dripping potamogeton, and watched us paddle by. A pair of ring-necked ducks splashed off the water and beat their way to the far end of the lake.

  We reached our destination, Wenda Lake, by dusk, and sat under the shore pines to wait for dark. Slowly the temperature slid below the blackfly threshold, then the mosquito and spring peeper line; it was strangely quiet. When the stars were all lit we put out onto the lake, watching the dark shoreline slide along our port side. Subdued northern lights played across the horizon. Somewhere in one of the string of ponds we went wrong, and Michelle climbed ashore to find the portage. A thin mist rising off the water shortened the flashlight beam. She crashed around in the bush for a while and then called out to “backtrack”; we had come up the wrong channel. Eventually we poked our way through.

  When we were back at the first lake, ice was forming on the gunwales, and it was warmer to dip your hand in the water at each paddle stroke than to keep it out. We reached the truck at 1:30 A.M. to find it covered with frost. No wolves had howled, but an hour later as we crawled into the tent back at our Feely Lake camp, the Jocko Lake pair gave us a brief, conciliatory chorus.

  In early July we caught Basin 6 Jocko’s mate and named her Jocko 3 — a sharp-featured, dark-faced lactating female. Later genetic analysis showed that she was the daughter of Annie Bay 3 and had dispersed some thirty kilometres from her natal pack across one other existing territory, about the same distance Basin 6 Jocko had come from his natal pack. Over the following year and a half, rarely were these two wolves more than one hundred metres apart. Theirs was one of the close alliances we have often recorded between mated pairs.

  We also caught what must have been the other two wolves that had come back with the Jocko Lake pair from the farmlands. Both were transient yearlings, possibly orphans or dispersers from other packs, who soon left the Jocko Lake territory. Both these wolves lived charmed lives, after a fashion. One was the wolf we later extracted alive from the snare in the deer yard. The other one, dubbed the “Jesus Christ” wolf, arose from the dead. On a telemetry flight with volunteer pilot Hank Halliday, I heard the fast pulse rate of mortality mode and located it down below, but, a few hours later when Mary flew with Hank, the wolf, still “dead,” was a few kilometres away. The next day he was even farther away, and we realized his collar had slipped onto mortality mode. Soon the collar failed completely.

  Lying in our sun-speckled tent one morning we heard the tiny, weak voices of pups and knew that this part of the Bonnechere Valley was beginning to heal. By midsummer we were able to confirm that the Jocko Lake pair had three pups. The pack spent much of its time in a large complex of bogs tied together by a beaver-impeded little stream that wound its way through the hills east of Loonskin Lake.

  Tragedy struck the new pack, as it did so many packs, down in the farmlands that winter of 1992-93. When the Jocko Lake pair returned to the park in spring of 1993, only one pup was left. That pup, eventually collared as Jocko 10, would eventually take over as the alpha-male.

  That summer they produced another litter destined to die. It was Jocko 3’s last litter. On a grey mid-December day in the heart of her territory, Mary and I were disappointed to hear her signal on mortality mode. She was just a skeleton when we found her, lying on top of sodden leaves. Her fur lay in a pile a metre or so away, not under her skeleton, showing that her body had been disturbed. Strangely, the radio-collar, still bolted up, lay another metre away, not around her neck, although her skull was still attached to her vertebral column. It seemed unlikely that a small animal could have pulled the collar off because pulling on one side would lodge it sideways and prevent it from going over her head. All we could surmise was that a bear had skinned her by everting her pelt over her head, removing the radio-collar in the process.

  Basin 6 Jocko was without a mate until early January. Then we discovered that Mathews 6 had joined the pack. Rarely after that were these two wolves apart.

  Mathews 6 Jocko (last name now added) had been collared the summer before, two territories to the north. Her adoption into the Jocko Lake pack may have been simple because Basin 6 Jocko was the only mature wolf; the others in the pack were pups of the previous summer, plus one immature yearling.

  She was destined to make a heroic and eventually successful effort to stabilize the Jocko Lake pack. She produced pups every summer from 1994 through 1997. We saw her 1995 pups, three of them, one day as they wandered unconcerned along the hydro-line road in front of our truck. The largest pup, very reddish behind its ears, picked up a flat, run-over frog and threw it up in the air a couple of times. The pack had chosen an extensive system of bogs for its re
ndezvous site.

  Each year she denned in a different place, twice in different uncut forest patches surrounding a rock fault or a bog. Both these places were remnants in logged-over shambles where half the trees had been cut the previous year. Both places showed the dramatic environmental alteration that wolves can accept.

  While she was tolerant of logging effects, she was not tolerant of humans near her den. In early May 1996, an Algonquin Forest Authority supervisor phoned to ask if there were any dens they should avoid. Pleased by the AFA’s concern, we drove to Pembroke and showed them the location of the den on a map. The supervisor tentatively agreed to keep their tree-planting crew out of the area, but wanted to check with the MNR. Unfortunately, an MNR biologist in Whitney advised them that one kilometre was excessive, and that a few hundred metres would be enough. (In other parks the distance, established by policy, varies from two to fifteen kilometres).

  The morning the tree planters arrived, John Pisapio flew at 6:30 and found Mathews 6 Jocko a few hundred metres from the den. He dropped us a note from the airplane where we were camped twenty kilometres away, and we quickly drove to the site. When we arrived we found the branches hauled off the road and the tree-planting crew spread out through the forest, calling to one another, within three hundred metres of the den. When the AFA supervisor showed up, he explained what had happened, but by then it was too late. The signal told us that Mathews 6 Jocko was at the den, but she stayed only a half-hour. Then she abandoned it.

  For some weeks we could not determine the fate of her pups. She centred her activities three kilometres away along an alderchoked stream, but often we found her elsewhere. Finally, when we were camped on the edge of a large bog-marsh at the foot of Jocko Lake, we heard the pups howl and so confirmed that she had moved some or all of them successfully.

  It was there we saw her for the first time after listening to her signals for more than two years. One sunny afternoon as we sat in the truck overlooking the bog-marsh, her signal became louder and suddenly she trotted out of the trees, a big light-tan wolf. She slipped down into the sedges, not slackening her pace despite the difficult footing, crossed a small beaver dam and loped up a bank into a stand of red pines. For a few metres she paralleled the stream, then turned in and was gone. She appeared to be intent upon some task, probably bringing food back to the pups.

  Many nights we set the antenna on top of our dome tent, pointed it towards the wolves, threaded the coaxial cable in through the door and plugged up the small gap around the cable with a sock to keep the mosquitoes out. We had three wolves collared. Periodically we would wake up and scan to see which of the collared wolves were there. We never howled at them, just listened as is our practice when camped near a rendezvous site. Some nights they howled a lot, all duly noted. Other nights they were completely silent although their signals showed that at least some of them were present.

  Despite the wolf-killing ban, the Jocko Lake pack suffered its share of losses. In the winter of 1995-96, we tracked the mortality-mode signal of a young male collared the previous summer to the fenceline of one of Round Lake’s most bitter wolf critics, a man we know only from his repeated exhortations in local newspapers to ignore the wolf-killing ban. We went in the long way to avoid trespass and found the wolf stretched out full length, frozen stiff, on a knoll in a recent maple-birch cut-over. No blood, no obvious injury, no human tracks, no signs of a struggle, but the wolf’s face wore the contorted death mask of pain we were used to seeing on wolves who had strangled in snares.

  We tied a rope around his legs and dragged him the kilometre back to the truck, and he was delivered to the post-mortem room at the University of Guelph. Doug Campbell, who performed the autopsy, could find no obvious cause of death. The wolf had plenty of body fat, no sign of disease, no abrasions, and by elimination he had to consider poison. Tissue was sent to the University of Michigan because of a strike that closed the provincial toxicology lab. Diagnosis — strychnine.

  Conservation officer Blake Simpson interviewed the prime suspect as well as others he considered capable of such an act, but the case was never solved. The Jocko Lake pack, like others after losing a family member, returned a few days later to the park.

  In the spring of 1997, the Jocko Lake pack consisted of six wolves, despite the deaths of various yearlings and adults, rising slowly from a founding pair in 1992. Recovery had been slow and, reviewing our data, one of the main reasons was loss of pups in their first year: all the 1992 crop, all but one of the 1993 crop, all but one of the 1994 crop, all but two of the 1995 crop. Finally three pups survived to yearling age in 1997 to bring the pack up to six.

  When we succeeded in collaring these three yearlings, we found that we could examine their surprisingly complete paternal lineage from a cross-confirmation of field evidence and genetic analysis: father Jocko 10, grandfather Basin 6 Jocko, grandmother Jocko 3, great-grandmothers Jack Pine 3 and Annie Bay 3. Mother Mathews 6 Jocko. They were great-nieces and -nephews of Jack Pine 7, Jack Pine 6 Zigzag, and Acorn 1, and second cousins of McDonald 9, McDonald 10, and Jack Pine 12. Their relations lived in four packs.

  Over the recovery years, both founding alpha wolves died and were replaced, the female by an immigrant, the male usurped and expelled by his son. Two members of the pack were killed illegally and one killed legally in the ban area.

  In the winter of 1997-98, for unknown reasons, the pack dropped to just four.

  In the lower Bonnechere Valley, the Basin Depot pack gave us a workout over the years, right back to the first wolf collared by Graham and Jenny in 1988. Part of the pack’s territory was accessible along the Bonnechere and Basin Lake roads, and we often heard howls from the vicinity of a restored log cabin that in the mid-1800s had been part of a thriving logging camp and depot farm. The rest of the pack’s territory, however, was difficult to reach, lying across the Bonnechere River in a roadless area a long hike from anywhere. Boundaries shifted over the years, but much of its territory was in forested land outside the park, which is probably one of the reasons for the high turnover it experienced.

  We worked the Basin Depot pack from a beautiful campsite in a slowly healing log landing beside fast-flowing Basin Creek. Head-height pines obscured the edges of the clearing, thinning to a grassy eye in its centre. In early spring, overwintering mourning cloak and anglewing butterflies danced through the clearing on their way to find the oozing sap from holes made by yellow-bellied sapsuckers. By early summer, yellow and orange hawkweed brightened the clearing, taken over later by goldenrod and asters. Hermit thrushes were common there, singing from the forest around, and red-breasted nuthatches cranked out their repetitive calls.

  We never slept late at that campsite no matter how long we worked the night before. The morning sun slanted into the clearing and soon our tent heated up like an oven. The heat always drove Mary out first; I would hear her starting breakfast on the tailgate of the truck and talking to the dog.

  The Basin Depot pack originated as an offshoot of the Foys Lake pack, the two packs amalgamating each winter to form a large hunting unit of twelve to fourteen wolves. In the early years, we radio-collared three Basin Depot wolves. One was hit by a car only a few months after capture, one integrated with the Foys pack to become the alpha-female, and the third, a scrawny little three-year-old weighing only eighteen kilograms (forty pounds), provided our first record of starvation. Since then we have recorded four other starved wolves, all in late summer or early fall. That may be a stressful time, with hungry, growing pups, and with young deer and moose fast on the hoof and beavers rarely on land.

  With the demise of the Foys Lake pack in the winter of 1990-91 came the demise of the Basin Depot pack for a time, although genetic evidence later told us that one breeding wolf with no mate and one yearling had survived. The summer after the killing, 1991, the territory was packless, and just as in other such territories, we caught wandering dispersers. One wolf never found again after collaring was shot more than two years later beyond the
west side of the park, 125 kilometres from its capture site.

  After only one summer of vacancy, however, the remaining adult found a new mate and a new Basin Depot pack became reestablished in 1992. Between then and 1997, it struggled to survive. Both alpha animals changed, the new alpha-male coming from within the pack and the new alpha-female an immigrant, just as in the Jocko Lake pack. Like the Jocko Lake pack, human-caused and natural mortality were barely offset by pup production because of low pup numbers by the end of each summer and heavy pup losses in their first winter. Pup survival to yearling age was only two in 1992, possibly four in 1993, none in 1994, two in 1995, none in 1996, and three in 1997. (We know of another five pups that vanished before they were ten months old; presumably they died.)

  In addition to these eleven pups that reached yearling age, we know of three immigrants. One of them was a tiny but feisty sixteen-kilogram (thirty-five-pound) animal with a narrow, coyote-like nose. Its genetics showed no affiliation with any Basin Depot wolves, so it was an immigrant. Here, yet again, was an example of a coyote-like animal invading the park and coming into a vacant or fractured pack territory.

  Two wolves collared the summer of 1993, sisters, paid the price of territorial overlap with the park border. Much of the time the pack used a rendezvous site south of the Bonnechere River, barely beyond the protection of the park. From two sources we learned that hunters shot them. The hunters must have smashed the collars although the November hunting season preceded the annual wolf-killing ban.

  Another female showing signs of false pregnancy was in poor condition, extremely skinny when she was caught in early August. After capture she travelled to the north part of her territory, then returned to the rendezvous site, where she died. Concerned that their handling had been involved, John Pisapio and Mark Hebblewhite hiked into the rendezvous site, normally something we never do, to collect her carcass. Upon autopsy, Doug Campbell found severely atrophied muscles and concluded she had been starving for at least three weeks before capture.