In Praise of Wolves

by R. D. Lawrence

  Although visibility wasn’t great, I had no difficulty seeing the eight gray-fawn wolves that were dashing about over the ice, at times bunching up, on other occasions spreading out over an area of some four hundred square feet. The wolves were playing! Using the field glasses to confirm my first impression, I was immediately able to determine that a definite game was in progress. Seven of the wolves were chasing a large individual, clearly the pack leader, each trying to make body contact with him. The Alpha was dashing about wildly, at one moment running at full speed, at another coming to an abrupt, sliding stop that swivelled his hindquarters, much as an automobile skids around when braked abruptly on a slippery surface. The result of this manoeuvre was that the big wolf turned about, sliding sideways. This caused the pursuers to run right past him, all of them sliding also as they tried to stop in order to turn and continue the chase. Recovering his balance, the leader would then charge into the rearmost of his pursuers, hitting it with his chest and sending it rolling over and over, skidding helplessly on the snowy ice. When this happened, the seven chasers would bark shrilly, including the one that had been bowled over, as though registering their pleasure and amusement. Then the whole show began over again.

  The wolves were about 150 yards from where I was crouching, but although I had brought a telephoto lens for the camera, poor light and the snowy curtain precluded photographs. In any event, I was much too engrossed with the spectacle to run the risk of alerting the wolves by moving or making even the faintest sound, knowing that such things would cause the pack to disappear into the forest.

  I watched those wolves for seventeen minutes. They ran, skidded, rolled, and leaped over the ice in complete abandon, remaining in more or less the same part of the pond and behaving, it seemed to me, like children newly let out for recess. Quite suddenly, the leader halted in his tracks and stared directly at my place of concealment. I may have made some slight sound, or he may have scented me, or, more likely, his finely tuned senses registered my alien presence because of certain influences that my own dull faculties could not detect. In any event, after staring fixedly for a few seconds, an interval during which the other wolves became statue-still and also stared at my hiding place, the big wolf turned fluidly and led the pack across the ice and into the forest.

  Soon afterwards, I became aware that the wolves were regular visitors who seemed to find something of special interest in and around our cabin. Apart from the many tracks left in the snow, they always urinated on our walk and front step; if I left something outside, such as an axe, it would also be singled out for the same treatment. In effect, the wolves had turned our rustic dwelling into a giant scent station. This told us that the pack considered the land we had bought, including the location of the cabin, as part of their personal territory.

  When the wolves began visiting at night while we were in residence, I began buying food for them: stewing beef, bones and fat, commercial dog food; we also saved all our table-meat scraps. By now I had christened the leader Lobo, for no particular reason other than that the word is Spanish for “wolf,” and so I thought of the pack and wrote about it in my notes as the Lobo Pack.

  I always placed the food offerings on a bare rock that was about twenty-five yards from the east window of the cabin and in direct line of sight, for I was hoping to get a glimpse of our visitors. At first, however, they came only at night, the disappearance of the food and the big tracks left in the snow telling their own stories. Then, early one morning toward the end of winter, Lobo appeared on his own. The sun was not yet tipping the trees, although the eastern sky was flushed with its nearness. I had gotten up about fifteen minutes earlier, stoked the fire, and put the coffee water on the stove. Waiting for the kettle to boil, I walked to the east window to look outside, using field glasses to search the area around the food cache. It had snowed the previous day; there were no fresh tracks to be seen. The meat and bones were still there, except for a few scraps that the grayjays were even then filching from the pile. One of these charming and companionable northern birds had just landed on the ground and was hopping toward the frozen meat when it suddenly flapped up, settling itself high in the branches of a white pine and scanning the forest. Moments later I caught a glimpse of grey fur, then another. Lobo had come. He now stood peering at the cabin, most of his body concealed behind the trunk of a large poplar. I remained rock-still, my heart thumping with the thrill of the moment. Then Lobo stepped away from the tree and trotted to the food. After one more look in my direction (I suspected he knew I was there. but of course I have no proof of this), the wolf began to feed, at first standing astraddle, the frozen pile between his front feet. He was using his lower incisors to scrape pieces off the mass, but presently he lay down, occasionally digging at the hard meat with one front foot and in this way dislodging chunks that he chewed up. Ten minutes later Lobo had ingested all the meat and had left, carrying in his mouth a large beef knucklebone.

  Our acquaintance with Lobo and his pack ripened eventually into a sort of mutual trust, for, following that first daylight appearance of the big wolf, he came quite regularly to take the food we put out. But when visiting during the day, he always arrived alone, although whether he shared his meal with the pack, or more probably with the Alpha female, I do not know. Today, however, having seen Shawano feed his pack, I suspect that Lobo did share with at least his mate.

  Between 1963 and the spring of 1967, we saw Lobo and his companions on many occasions. Because I regularly travelled the wilderness, I sighted the wolves more often than Joan did, and as time went by, I was followed by the pack quite frequently. Lobo often showed himself at such times, and on occasion I also caught a glimpse of one or two of the other wolves. Then, in October of 1965, after an entire day in the wilderness, I had camped in the open, bedded on a mattress of evergreen boughs and sleeping fully dressed inside a down bag, a small tarpaulin spread over me as a cover to keep out moisture.

  I was awakened at dawn the next morning by a sound that I at first thought was made by falling rain, but when I raised my head from its concealment within the sleeping bag, it was to see Lobo in the act of lowering one of his back legs after he had urinated on the foot of my bed! My immediate impulse was to yell at him, for I do not like being piddled on by anything! But I controlled the urge, completely fascinated by Lobo’s behaviour. Had I raised my head quickly, I might well have startled the wolf and caused him to run; as it was, I looked up slowly, still half-bemused by sleep. Lobo now gazed directly into my eyes from a distance of about six feet. Then he backed away slightly, scratched vigorously at the ground, and turned around. At this point I noticed that six members of his pack were clustered among the trees about fifteen feet away, every wolf watching the action with thoughtful gaze.

  Lobo next trotted toward his pack, reached the group, turned, and gave me one more glance. The wolves then disappeared, silent as drifting feathers.

  In the spring of 1967 we bought an additional 350 acre farm eight miles north of our seventy-five acres. By early summer we were living there full time. We thought that we would only see the Lobo Pack on those rather rare occasions when we visited our woodland cabin. But Lobo found us.

  I spent most of July and part of August exploring our own wilderness and some of the many thousands of acres of government forest that lay at our back door and stretched to the north and east of our new location. During the course of these explorations I found many wolf tracks and droppings; on three occasions I discovered the remains of old hunts, but I did not see a single wolf. Then, in the autumn, as Joan and I were strolling through our large stand of sugar maples, we heard some faint sounds at our back. On turning, we spotted Lobo, who was standing beside an exceptionally large maple. As we looked at him, he backed away, concealing most of himself behind the big trunk, but keeping his head out, giving us that intense wolf stare. Moments later he trotted away.

  We started putting food out once more, this time just on the edge of the m
aple woods, at a place we could watch from our kitchen window and about two hundred yards from our house. Again the Lobo Pack came routinely, but at irregular intervals. By this time, however, the adults of the pack had been reduced, consisting now of the leader and his mate, a rather small, light-coloured wolf, as well as one adult male and a dark grey female who had always been of low rank. Trapping, I knew, had reduced the adults. But five young wolves, born that spring, almost made up the losses.

  When we took up full-time residence at the farm, we bought a malamute pup, Tundra. By autumn he was six months old and as large as the young wolves in Lobo’s group. The pack now showed considerable interest in the dog’s tracks and urine deposits, in variably covering these with their own. Tundra always accompanied me in my wilderness wanderings, a guide whose keen nose and ears frequently led me to make discoveries I would have missed had he not tugged me off my own course in order to investigate sight or sound. In this way, during the breeding season of 1968, Tundra dragged me to a height of land, a large upthrust of Cambrian granite on which grew only a cover of blueberry bushes and a few tenacious pine trees. One of these was a giant, a squat tree of massive girth that grew on a sharp drop-off overlooking an expanse of meadow, which many years earlier had been a large beaver pond but was now abandoned by its builders and covered in rushes, stunted willows, and alders. From this vantage I was able to see Lobo’s pack trotting northward in single file; but there were only three adult wolves. The low-ranking female was missing. The pack was about five hundred yards away, aiming for a second granite rise almost opposite the one on which Tundra and I stood. Watching through the field glasses, I noticed that Lobo and his mate often looked behind them, but although I scanned their back-trail with the glasses, I could not see anything out of the ordinary.

  As the pack began to climb the rock rise, however, Lobo stopped, turned around, and began running down-slope, followed by his mate and the rest of the pack. It was then that I saw the grey bitch. She had just entered the beaver meadow and was walking slowly toward the pack, her entire being showing total submission. Her tail was tucked between her legs, her spine arched, her ears held flat against her head, and her mouth open in a submissive grin. I turned the glasses on Lobo. His hackles were up, his ears erect. His mate copied his actions. When the wolves reached the grey bitch, Lobo and his Alpha ganged up on her, ignoring her submission as they knocked her down. I couldn’t see clearly, but it became obvious they were biting her. Tundra, whose ears were so very much better than mine, could obviously hear the growling that was beyond my senses. He howl-barked. This caused Lobo and his pack to turn away from the bitch and to streak for the shelter of the forest. The unfortunate female, meanwhile, got up swiftly and disappeared in the same direction from which she had emerged.

  From tracks and occasional sightings of the Lobo Pack as well as of the ostracized female, I learned that she remained in exile until after the birth of that year’s cubs, a time during which she often followed the pack at a respectful distance and even managed to eat leftovers from some of the kills after Lobo and his group had departed from the sites of the remains.

  At first, I felt sure that the grey female had been forced right out of the pack, but in June, when I found the place where the weaned cubs had been relocated (there were only two pups in the litter that year, both males), I discovered that the grey wolf had again become an active member of the pack and was, in fact, babysitting the cubs when I found their rendezvous.

  While Lobo’s pack ranged the wilderness that lay to the west of the central portion of my farm, a second, smaller pack occupied a territory to the east, its western boundary overlapping the Lobo Pack’s eastern limits. Later I was to theorize that this East Pack, as I named it, was related to the Lobo Pack, for on three separate occasions I was fortunate enough to witness meetings between the two groups, all of which, although beginning with raised hackles and aggressive body postures displayed by the two leaders, ended with tail-wagging and a general intermingling. Some of the younger members even played together.

  The following February, I discovered that one of the three females belonging to the East Pack was also chased away during the breeding period, this information again being determined by tracking and some sightings. But I did not manage to locate the rendezvous of this group, so I was unable to determine whether the ousted female had, as in the previous case, acted as a cub-sitter. Nevertheless, in July of 1969, I saw the entire East Pack travelling along a granite ridge within some seventy-five yards of where I was sitting. Aided by the field glasses, I saw that the outcast bitch had been readmitted to the group.

  My studies of these two wolf packs ended soon after this sighting, for Joan had died in June of that year and I was unable to continue living at the farm, which I sold in 1970.

  Now, kneeling in the snows of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula and watching Brigit, I realized that the harassment to which she was being subjected by Shawano and Denali was the result of the wolf’s strong and inherent need to keep its numbers balanced with the food supply, a natural form of birth control inherently exercised by the species, which, in the wild, prevents overpopulation and continues to assert itself even in captivity. This characteristic of wolves has been known for some time, but more recently scientists have begun to argue about the mechanisms that combine to inhibit breeding by subordinate females. Later I will examine this important part of the biology of wolves in detail. Here I will note only that Brigit’s continued harassment long after the estrous period occurred because she had no option but to remain with the pack; she could not leave for a time and return after the pups were born, when she almost certainly would have been made welcome in a wild state. As it was, I learned later from Jim Wuepper that Brigit’s persecution ended when the pups were born, and after these had been weaned, she appointed herself their guardian, a task at which she excelled and which was approved of by Shawano and Denali.

  Having reached these conclusions, I began to take careful note of the way in which Brigit was carrying herself, reading what George Wilson would have called her “body English” and which I have long thought of as body language.

  Brigit moved in a semi-crouched position; her head and neck were carried low and her back legs were slightly bent, a posture that caused her spine to arch. Her tail was tucked between her thighs, almost pressing against the stomach, her ears were flattened backward, and her lips were parted in a solicitous grin. She studiously avoided eye contact and she whined constantly, but softly.

  In human terms Brigit would have appeared pathetic, but within the strictures of wolf hierarchy, her behaviour advertised her total submission. Such voluntary and sustained subservience should have been sufficient to defuse the aggressive behaviour of the Alphas, but for the fact that her continued presence within the pack contradicted the messages that her posture and manner were telegraphing. For these reasons, Shawano and Denali continued to punish her.

  Denali (black), Shawano (right) disciplining Thor. Photo by Jim Wuepper

  This feeding wolf may have been part of a pack that had to chase 13 deer before they were able to kill a weak, or sick one on which to satisfy their hunger. Wolves must work hard to survive. Photo by Jim Wuepper

  Thor photo by Jim Wuepper

  Toivo photo by Jim Wuepper

  I seek acquaintance with Nature – to know her moods

  and manners. Primitive nature is the most interesting to me. . . .

  Henry David Thoreau, The Journal

  3

  Jim Wuepper’s fascination with wolves and the wilderness began while he was still in high school in Lower Michigan, when he became influenced by the writings of James Oliver Curwood. Four years later, when he was twenty-one and working as a photographer in Marquette, he happened to print some negatives for George Wilson: but it wasn’t until the pictures were finished and examined under the light that he realized they were portraits
of wolves.

  His reaction was immediate. Stimulated by the photos, Jim went to meet George, whose apartment is full of wolf photos, lupine souvenirs, and filmstrips, an organized clutter further accentuated by cinematographic equipment and by stacks of cans containing processed wolf footage, some fifty thousand feet of it! In the photographic studio that Jim now owns and operates in Negaunee, a town some twelve miles west of Marquette, I interviewed him. George Wilson was there taping our conversation.

  Describing his first impressions of the Wilson apartment, Jim looked at our mutual friend, aimed a thumb in his direction, and said, “You know what it’s like in George’s pad . . . wherever you look, you see wolves, or stuff dealing with them, and those labels pasted on his cupboard from outfits like Disney Studios, the BBC in England, and all that . . . I left in awe!”

  Some months later, Jim went to Shawano, Wisconsin, to visit Larry and Joan Gehr, a couple who at that time kept some eighteen wolves.

  “It was just unbelievable! I can still remember driving up to this guy’s house and seeing better than a dozen wolves trotting around this enclosure. Light grey, beautiful creatures. It was April, and there was no snow on the ground; a great spring afternoon. And those wolves just looked gorgeous! It was at that point that I knew I was going to do something like that.”