Just when the raven and the wolf developed their relationship is impossible to determine, but the fact is, each appears to be at least equally fascinated by the other, even when food is not the issue. I have often seen wolves following the chattering black scavengers as they fly-hopped from tree to tree, talking in their many voices or uttering their harsh kwaawk. And the raven appears to be at least equally fascinated by the wolf.
The Indians and Eskimos of North America certainly recognized this strange affinity, for their legends often couple the bird and the mammal, both of which were also endowed with spiritual or even godlike qualities. More than a few clans adopted either the wolf or the raven, or sometimes both, as their special totems; individuals saw one or both animals in dreams induced by sweat-baths and fasting, and then accepted them as alter egos.
After my years of experience with the animals and birds of the North American wilderness, during which I have had many encounters with raven and wolf, I can sense the mystical aura that emanates from both, and I am always strangely moved after each encounter that I have with them, individually or collectively. Nothing is more haunting, spiritual, and primitive than the calls of ravens and wolves coming at the same time from the same location, a wild concert not infrequently heard during the breeding season of wolves and after a pack has made a kill. On the ground, lying, sitting, or standing, the wolves begin to howl, the throbbing, sweetly melancholy calls seeming to fill the entire evergreen forest. In the trees, the ravens respond, perhaps a dozen or more of them spread around the pack, each uttering its own particular repertoire of gurgling notes, bell-like sounds, and slurred chatter that to my ears is akin to human language. At such times the wolves seem to be spurred by the ravens and the birds appear to be stimulated by the lupine voices. I have been privileged to attend seven such concerts, the most recent being in the southern region of the Yukon Territory, in 1978, during a January morning when the temperature was sixty degrees below zero and the air was laden with ice fog, a magnificent northern phenomenon that occurs when the moisture in the air freezes. Experienced from within the cloister of a forest of black spruce during the fleeting time that the winter sun runs its flat race across the hidden horizon, and even though the sun does not show its orange face above the treeline, the display is truly magnificent; the ice fog glistens ethereally, each minute crystal casting off red, green, blue, and orange flashes as the weak sunlight sheds its evanescent glow over the deep-frozen land; not a whisper of breeze can be felt and the evergreens stand proudly and beautifully, each mantled in white, each showing pure green clusters of needles that peek from within sculpted, niveous adornments. To be in such a place at such a time, and then to hear the emotional outpourings of the ravens and the wolves that one has been quietly observing from a distance of some fifty yards, is an experience that awakens the primal emotions each of us carries deep within his being. And then, when it is all over and the wraith-like shapes of the wolves disappear into the forest on whispering pads, the ever-curious ravens come to examine the human observer; and they talk to him as they peer with one jet-black eye, head held sideways the better to see, and the great black beak, shutting and clacking softly. Unforgettable!
Tundra and Taiga sang with the ravens for about three minutes on that autumn afternoon, such timing being about average for wolves everywhere which, unlike coyotes, rarely call for prolonged periods. Afterwards, the pups came to me to be petted then went to lie down within their favourite stand of poplars. The ravens continued talking to each other for the next half hour, then flew away, heading in the direction from which they had come. But as they passed overhead, I, wondering if they would return if I induced the pups to howl again, gave my poor imitation of a wolf’s call – a rendering that, despite its definite shortcomings, invariably elicits a reply from the cubs. On this occasion, however, Tundra and Taiga merely screamed, uttering a few shrill calls from where they lay before falling silent. The ravens took no notice at all.
Unlike Matta and Wa, who refused to sing until they were about two months old and were unusual in that respect, Tundra and Taiga have always been great howlers. At first, if I whistled, however softly, they would call; then, when, without thinking about them, I began to sing to myself as I was picking up their droppings inside the pen, they howled in response. Now, often they will howl if we talk to them in an only slightly raised voice, but their best performances are given in response to my imitation howl, which stimulates them so greatly that they continue calling after I stop. If I howl while standing upright, the wolves go close together and howl either face to face or side by side, but if I call while crouching, they came up to me and get their muzzles as close to my face as possible. At such close quarters, their voices have the power to cause uncomfortable vibrations in my ears. Frequently, and especially at night, Tundra and Taiga enjoy sing-songs during which they may call for a minute or two, remain silent for several minutes, then call again. And when a wild wolf or a coyote calls from within the forest, our wolves always reply, but if a neighbour’s dog barks from its location a mile away, they ignore the sound. Likewise, when Mike brings his dog, Moose, to visit us and ties him near our entrance gate, Tundra and Taiga show very little interest in him; when he barks, which he does often, they pay no attention.
The howl of the wolf is for me the most haunting of all wilderness sounds, a deep, wonderfully primordial, and long-drawn song uttered for any one of many reasons, its cadence altered in response to whatever stimulus has triggered the call. No one, to my knowledge, has yet compiled a catalogue of these lupine variations.
It has been suggested recently that wolves howl to confuse neighbouring packs that may have hostile intentions, a theory stemming from the fact that when a pack calls in unison, the varying pitch of their voices may deceive a listener into believing that the number of wolves in the group is greater than it actually is. This argument also proposes that when pups call on their own during the time that they spend in a summer rendezvous, they deliberately deepen their voices to give the impression that adults are actually doing the howling, thus deceiving neighbouring wolves that might be tempted to kill them.
These theories are farfetched. They imply that wolves are always at war with one another, which is not the case, and they fail to take into account that lone pups would be much safer if they kept quiet. Most important, the theorists are interpreting the calls of wolves from a purely human standpoint. It is true that to the human ear the combined voices of wolves often make it extremely difficult for a person to determine the number of animals in the pack. But the hearing of wolves is capable of fine acoustical discrimination, and for this reason I do not believe that they would fail to recognize the calls of cubs, no matter how modulated these might be, for the voices of adults.
Wolves sing when they are happy and when they are sad. They howl when they are excited, especially during the breeding season; they do so together, as humans do around a piano. Wolves almost always howl before they set out on a hunt, probably because they are excited at the prospect of the chase, which I believe is as important to them as the actual kill. Then, too, wolves call to each other to keep in touch and to communicate with neighbouring packs; and lone wolves howl to attract a mate, or merely to “talk” to other loners or packs that may be within the sound of their voices. An important reason for howling is to advertise their presence in a given locale, in this way reinforcing the messages left on the many scent stations upon which wolves urinate, such as particular logs, stumps, trees, clumps of grass, or rocks that are scattered within the boundaries of the land they occupy. Wolves probably howl for a variety of other reasons, one of which, I am convinced, is that they enjoy doing so.
There are doubtless times when the very volume of pack howling may serve to inhibit neighbouring wolves that might have hostile intentions, but such occasions are probably the exception rather than the rule and are most likely to occur during periods of heightened stress, as was the case with the wolves of Isle Ro
yale. I base these conclusions on the data that I have so far gathered, which strongly suggest that at least three different kinds of interaction may take place between wolf packs: the first is friendly coexistence; the second, which may be termed a state of armed neutrality, occurs when neighbouring wolves merely tolerate each other: the third is characterized by out-and-out aggression because of scarcity of food or disruption of the environment by human abuses and probably by other, unknown causes.
Ten days after I had heard Tundra and Taiga sing with the ravens, the moon became full and hung overhead at about midnight, bathing our property and the surrounding forests with light, and coaxing me outside. As I walked toward their enclosure, the young wolves ignored me, their attention centred on the north, an area of dense wilderness that comes within one hundred yards of the enclosure. Because the yearlings never ignored our presence unless they were particularly interested in matters of their own, I stopped walking. As I stood, I heard the call of a wild wolf, its volume suggesting that the animal was about a mile away. Tundra and Taiga replied immediately, their voices rising and falling in unison with the call of their relative. The three wolves continued to howl for about one minute, then became silent.
I walked to the enclosure and entered it as Tundra and Taiga came to greet me, but when the wolf called again a few minutes later, somewhat closer now, they dashed to the bottom end of the enclosure, howling as they went. This time the calls were sustained for a longer time, perhaps three minutes, before the stranger became quiet. As I waited for more, it suddenly occurred to me that if it was possible for wolves to recognize bloodlines in humans, it must also be possible for them to recognize these among members of their own kind. If this should turn out to be the case, it would explain why some packs are friendly toward their neighbours and why others are merely tolerant or actually hostile.
Lone wolves often leave a pack to seek mates elsewhere; if it so happens that a male of one pack should meet a female of another pack and form a third group in the same general region, these two will probably be welcomed by both of their parental groups in-as-much as the pheromones emitted by at least one of the animals will be recognized by each neighbouring pack. It would also follow that any issue of the newly mated pair would carry a combination of pheromones that would make them acceptable to their related groups. Such a genetic scheme may well account for the fact that wolves do not normally make war on each other. The more I thought about this, the more convinced I became that my conclusions were correct, at which point my musings were interrupted by the realization that I had been standing in the enclosure for some ten minutes, though the wild wolf was no longer calling. Taiga and Tundra had changed position and were now looking toward the northwest, but were not sniffing as eagerly as before. I gathered from this behaviour that the wolf had moved away and was even then travelling through the most heavily forested section of our land, behind the northern boundaries of which lie many thousands of acres of government wilderness in which live deer, moose, coyotes, and a variety of other animals and birds.
Bearing in mind the tenor of my earlier thoughts, I wondered whether the wild wolf that had been howling was a loner and might be searching for a mate, which would account for the fact that his visits appeared to be motivated by interest rather than by aggression. On the other hand, the animal might be a member of a local pack that was initially attracted by the odour of the pheromones discharged by our wolves.
Such speculation returned me to my original postulate because it suddenly occurred to me that there might be a flaw in my reasoning. If bloodlines are chemically advertised and kinship proclaimed by them, thereby encouraging friendly interaction between related packs, how could I explain the hostilities that had taken such a toll among the wolves of Isle Royale, which were almost certainly interrelated? This question seemed to blow a hole right through my theory. But then I recalled the exceptionally negative effects of stress that my own species has repeatedly demonstrated. Apart from having waged war on one another for many thousands of years, some of today’s emotionally distraught humans continue to make headlines by killing their immediate relatives, including their own children. If stress can cause people to commit such dreadful acts, why should the condition not affect wolves in similar ways?
By the time I left the wolf enclosure that night, I was once again convinced that my pheromone theory was eminently defensible and that it, furnished one more reason why Isle Royale research should be better funded.
During the following week, a number of events occurred that so occupied my attention that they caused me to set aside further pheromone enquiry. The first involved Tundra, who had buried a four-inch-long piece of flank meat and, after we returned from our daily walk, proceeded to dig it up, an action that hardly merited more than a casual glance from me at first because it occurs with such regularity. But then I noticed that he was walking about the enclosure, holding one end of the meat with his incisors and simultaneously shaking his head abruptly up and down and then left and right. I wondered why he was behaving in such a way and then realized he was offering me a wonderful example of applied intelligence. The damp meat had been buried in the ground, so it was covered with earth; Tundra was shaking it to get rid of the adhering soil, and I could actually see the bits of earth flying off each time the wolf shook the strip of meat. There was absolutely no doubt that Tundra was demonstrating conscious behaviour, for when he and Taiga were younger and had buried pieces of meat, they had later eaten them without shaking them first. As a result, they had always sought to clean their mouths afterwards, spitting out bits of dirt and grass, moving their tongues around their mouths, and drooling brown spittle. Now the wolf was cleaning the meat before eating it, and he was doing it remarkably well, for by the time he settled down to chew, very little earth was sticking to his food. Later, I was to see Taiga do the same thing, a practice they both stopped when snow fell and they could bury food in that natural refrigerator, where it remained clean until it was reclaimed later.
On November 10, Murray Palmer came to help me enlarge the wolf enclosure, our project having been too long delayed and now being most urgent, for winter was already upon us and the ground would soon be too hard for digging. Busy with a variety of jobs, I was not able to help Murray as much as I would have liked and I am most grateful to him for the way in which he tackled a hard, wet, and very muddy job. But I did spend time with pick and shovel, and between us, in pouring rain mixed with sleet, we completed the digging. When Murray returned home, I hired two workmen to help me complete the job, which they managed to do by November 19. By now, the snow was on the ground and the temperature had fallen to twenty degrees. When the last section of fence wire was stapled in place, I breathed a sigh of relief, for the wolves now had a large section of forest in which to play and shelter, a total of 52,000 square feet of territory.
The next morning, I opened several sections of the original fence and allowed Tundra and Taiga to enter their new range, which was something that they did with their usual caution, exploring new ground a little at a time, although by that same afternoon they had made themselves completely familiar with the land and had already started to remodel, it in places by removing branches, chewing logs, digging under roots, and making a new entrance to a structure of cut trunks and evergreen boughs that I had asked Murray to make in the centre of the wooded part of the enclosure so that the yearlings could find sanctuary inside it during winter storms.
The next morning, Sharon and I were greeted by two very active and enthusiastic young wolves when we arrived with their breakfast snack. Later, as we entered the pen and bent down to greet them, each kissed us on the mouth, causing me to realize for the first time that only wolves and Western humans love each other in this way. I also wondered: Who taught whom? This was later to remind me of the many other social similarities that exist between humans and wolves. And it caused me to wonder why those who seek to understand the nature of man do not study the wolf and compare
their findings with the results of those researches into the behaviour of humans and primates that have already been conducted. It appears that because primates are the animals most like us physically, students of the antecedents of mankind have become infatuated with these distant “cousins” of ours to the almost total exclusion of all other species.
There is probably much still to be learned by continuing to observe the behaviour of apes, but those who concern themselves with the social interactions of humans cannot do better than to study the wolf, whose family system is more like our own than are the loosely knit group relationships of the primates. To the best of my knowledge, wolves have not yet been studied with this aim in mind. Jane Goodall and Hugo van Lawick did study hunting dogs, hyenas, and jackals in Africa, but it seems that they failed to seek, and thus to make, comparisons between the social regulations of these animals and those of chimpanzees, the study of which Goodall has pioneered. In any event, although the behaviour of the hunting dog can be compared with that of the wolf, that of hyenas and jackals is notable more for its dissimilarities than for its affinities.
In Praise of Wolves Page 22