Her dogs slept outside, even at minus forty degrees, but her skidoo and everything else mechanised stopped working in the cold, so she skied to check the fox traps, towed by her ever-enthusiastic dogs. By late January the frozen landscape was incredibly quiet: even the bears had mostly gone elsewhere as the dogs’ food had dwindled. At noon there was a glow in the southern sky but Linda could still see the stars overhead; then came a storm bringing more than a metre of fresh snow in an hour and almost burying her dogs in their kennels. While she was working hard to collect and melt almost a ton of snow for drinking water, the side of the store collapsed and dumped burning wood on the cabin’s floor. In a wooden building with such deadly cold outside, fire is a greater threat than any number of bears. Luckily she heard the stove break and was able to put out the flames.
One morning she woke to find two polar bears mating outside her window and soon afterwards the eider ducks returned: ‘The fjord is completely calm … it is like time is standing still. It might be lonely up here, but at least we have the most beautiful choir.’
She had been on her own for a month and was craving company more than she had expected: ‘Sometimes when I woke up in the morning I did not want to get out of bed … In my dreams there were people, so I just wanted to sleep and have company.’
In the far north the light returns astonishingly quickly and by mid April Linda realised it was already light at midnight. She found it hard to believe how dark it had been just a few months earlier, and ‘that we had to dress up in four layers of clothes just to go out and have a pee.’
Spring came a month earlier than the year before – no wonder the Arctic terns had seemed nonplussed when Steinar and I were filming them – and by Midsummer Day the eiders and terns had started nesting. On the solstice Linda put her Christmas tree on the fire. Her time at Mushamna was coming to an end: ‘My last week was full of feelings and impressions … even chasing polar bears for the last time felt sad … I guess a part of me will still be among the terns, eiders and floating ice.’
Since then she has had a little boy. Steinar is his godfather. As a reminder of the time she spent with the bears she has put one in her son’s name: Sigbjørn. Linda is looking forward to him growing up in the high Arctic.
‘I think the everlasting changes are the reason why people love Svalbard so much: fear and joy, darkness and sunlight, changing seasons, happiness and excitement. All in one.’
– TWO –
HUNTING WITH WOLVES
The difficulty of filming polar bears made me appreciate the importance of belonging to a good team, like ours in Svalbard. Teamwork proved vital on another shoot the same year, for a series about Yellowstone National Park, where I was asked to film wolves hunting elk. This is something rarely seen, let alone filmed.
The sun breaks the horizon of the Lamar Valley, adding little warmth. The sky has been clear all night and the air is crystalline with cold. Flowers of frost bloom on dead stems and diamonds flash on every surface. Cottonwood trees make dark shapes, cut from a sparkling field of snow. The last of the water vapour freezes into angel dust – specks of ice, glittering and spinning like mayflies. When the light strikes them they form a rainbow. The air smells of gunpowder and tasting it is like touching a battery’s terminals with my tongue. The valley is colder than anywhere I have ever been and when I blink, my lashes freeze closed. A line of elk glows golden as they wade through the deep snow. They are keen to leave and I am not surprised. On the hill above us the female wolf, Dull-bar, howls and far away a lone grey male replies.
National Parks have been called America’s best idea and Yellowstone was the first. The park covers 9,000km2 (more than 2 million acres) in the Rocky Mountains of Wyoming, Montana and Idaho. It encompasses high peaks, forests, meadows, hot springs and geysers, and it was established so long ago that as many of its visitors have been killed by Nez Perce Indians as they have by bears.
By the 1870s America had been settled from coast to coast and the first transcontinental railroad had shortened the journey from the eastern cities to the western state of Oregon from six months to six days. The country was undergoing immense change when an unlikely idea surfaced: that some remnant of its vanishing wilderness should be preserved, ‘for the benefit and enjoyment of the people’. Wilderness, though, means something different to everyone and ever since the National Parks were set up there have been arguments about how they should be used. Recently these differences have come to a head in Yellowstone, not least because of wolves.
The park’s campsites and lodges close for the winter. In a gas station that’s about to turn off its pumps, I ask the checkout girl about her plans: ‘I’m going back to the real world,’ she says, but for a growing number of people Yellowstone in winter is the real world. Many come here for the same reason as I have: to see the wolves.
As well as filming them hunting I have been asked to reveal the subtle relationships within a pack. There is nowhere better in the world to do this, but filming them will still not be easy. Even in the National Park wolves are wary of people and by midwinter they will be able to move more easily than I can, through the knee-deep snow. It will be impossible to follow them on foot, and anyway it is against the law to disturb an endangered species, so most of the filming will have to happen from the roadside. There is one thing in my favour: when the wolves’ breeding season starts some of them might try to find mates outside their own packs and that might bring them within range of the camera, perhaps even giving me a chance to film them hunting.
When Nathan, the film’s director, and I drive into Yellowstone, we take the only road to be kept open by snowploughs all winter. It’s a 90km (56-mile) journey through the park’s north-east corner, ending in Cooke City, where we’ll be staying for the next month. The road crosses a bridge high above the Yellowstone River and in the middle we meet a herd of bison. We are not sure what to do so Nathan turns off the engine and the bison approach in a dense mass. The bridge is narrow and they pass on both sides of the car, brushing its wing mirrors with their curly hair. Their down-curved horns are level with our heads and dark liquid eyes roll sideways to look at us. Their breath steams in the cold. The females weigh half a ton and the single bull almost twice as much. A calf prances down the road behind them, with its shadow projected onto its own exhaled breath. The bridge vibrates in time with their hooves. Nathan and I sit completely still until they have gone. The rules are different here. In the world outside, animals seldom have the right of way.
Yellowstone is the only place in the United States where bison have lived continuously since prehistoric times, but by 1903 there were just twenty-three of them left in the park and they were not breeding successfully. The continent’s once vast herds had already been shot to oblivion. A few captive survivors were brought to join the small wild herd here and they made a crucial difference. Since then Yellowstone’s bison have slowly recovered.
The wolves had an even harder time. There were once more than a million grey wolves in North America and they killed animals from the settlers’ herds as readily as they hunted elk or bison. Killing wolves to protect cattle was seen as a matter of pride and necessity for ranchers and the government. Even living in a National Park was no protection. When the Secretary of the Interior protected most of the park’s animals from hunting in 1883, the regulations did not apply to wolves and everyone shot them, including the army. The last two wolves in Yellowstone were killed in 1926 and, with their main predators gone, the park’s elk boomed. They overgrazed the plants, suppressing other herbivores, such as beavers. To redress the balance, and amidst great controversy, in 1995 and 1996 a government agency brought thirty-one wolves here from Canada and released them in the Lamar Valley, close to Druid Peak.
Our journey takes us past this mountain, which gave its name to the first pack of wolves to live in its shadow in seventy years. The Druid Peak wolves thrived here, among the naïve herds of elk. In time the elk numbers started to fall, of course, but there are still
plenty here and this morning we can see their tracks in the snow, as though they have been writing their stories on a page: stories about their search for food and shelter during the night, about their urge to seek safety with others and sometimes even the story of their death. All the valley’s recent history is laid out for anyone to read, until the next snowfall wipes it clean. Most of the female elk and their calves are high on the hillside, digging with their front feet to expose sparse, dry grasses. Perhaps they feel safer up there, where the snow is not too deep to run away. Even so they are barely scratching a living, becoming weaker every day and a little easier to catch. By the end of the winter some of them will have had to absorb the marrow in their own bones.
A raven passes overhead, flying high and direct. We follow its line across the river and it leads us to the wolves. The whole Druid pack is gathered in a clearing on the forest edge. We watch them intently, studying how each wolf fits into its extended family. Some are curled up asleep. One stands off to the side, leaping again and again, trying to bite a dangling pine cone from a tree. When it succeeds it immediately drops the cone and starts to chase its own tail. A dark wolf, clearly subordinate, greets the palest one, wagging his tail and squirming as low as he can, to lick her muzzle. This is how the hierarchy works, each pack member is in its own place below the pale wolf and her mate: the alpha pair. It’s fascinating to see this played out, but there are sixteen wolves to keep track of and there’s a kilometre or so between us. To the naked eye they are not much more than dots. To film them closer than this we will need to find and follow them every day, but wolves can travel enormous distances in just a few hours and for two-thirds of our time here it is going to be dark.
Each year since the wolves were reintroduced, scientists have fitted some of them with collars carrying radio transmitters. Rick McIntyre is a biological technician for the Yellowstone Wolf Project. His job is to monitor the radio collars in this part of the park and to record as much as he can about the behaviour of the Druid Peak wolves, and several other packs too. We find him by the roadside, surrounded by a large group of people with telescopes on tripods. Rick is staring through his own telescope and patiently describing exactly where the wolves are, using rocks and trees as landmarks, so the visitors can find them too. He raises an aerial, turns it this way and that, while listening for the collars’ beeps, then changes the orientation and listens again. He speaks into a pocket recorder: ‘OK, 569 is there right now and so is 480; 302 is out of sight somewhere to the right.’
On their way here, other people have seen different wolves. Like Rick’s, their descriptions are a jumble of numbers. Nathan and I meet Laurie, a visitor who has spent years watching Yellowstone’s wolves. She explains to us how to tell the sixteen Druid wolves apart. Eight of them are black and eight are ‘grey’ (actually a sandy and dark mixture, quite like a pale German Shepherd). Four are collared and known by numbers: 569F is the beautiful alpha female, so pale she is almost white. Her mate, 480M, is the black alpha male and his brother is 302M. The other collared wolf is also a male. Laurie says male wolves are collared more often than females because they stop to look back at the helicopter carrying a biologist with a dart gun, instead of making straight for the trees. Once the scientists have collared the unconscious wolves they move them to the centre of their territory and revive them together. It’s safer than waking up alone, feeling groggy, with another potentially hostile pack nearby.
Laurie carries on listing the Druids. It’s a dizzying mass of information. There are six yearlings, some with marks on their fronts and sides, like the grey bars that separate the black wolves known as Light-bar and Dull-bar. Most of these yearlings are the alpha pair’s pups from two summers ago, which the whole pack helped to raise. They are all female. There are seven younger wolves too, the most recent pups, now fully grown. None of them have names and even Laurie finds them hard to tell apart. She recognises this group by the ruffs on their necks, which look like raised hackles, and because they behave like pups too: it was probably one of these we saw jumping for the pine cone. Identifying the wolves is the vital first stage in predicting what they might do. It could make all the difference between being in the right place or the wrong one when it comes to filming. There’s a lot to learn and we have a month in which to do it.
The visitors have come from a wide range of countries. Many have seen and been captivated by these wolves on television or on the internet: the Druids are the most famous wolf pack in the world and the most watched. The male numbered 302 is everyone’s favourite. He was nicknamed Casanova when he was young, for the daring liaisons he had with females from other packs, under the noses of their own males. He even has his own blog, run by someone in Florida. Since the demise of the Plains Indian tribes, a century or more ago, people have rarely connected so strongly with wild wolves. Such empathy is possible only because Rick, Laurie and many others have spent an immense amount of time coming to know individual wolves and their stories. During our time in Yellowstone, Rick passes his 2,555th consecutive day – that’s every day for seven years. When Laurie introduces us he hides his dedication with a joke:
‘I once caught a cold in 1997 but I came in anyway.’
Rick welcomes us and explains that the pack usually moves every few days, but this year the heavy snow has kept them in the Lamar Valley for an unprecedented six weeks. Although they have often been visible from the road, they could decide to leave at any time.
In the evening there is a fight in one of Cooke City’s bars and afterwards we hear engines roaring, as boys from Idaho play chicken with their huge snowmobiles on the icy main street. We had an early night, not to avoid the fighting, but to be up at 4.30 and ready to drive into the park. A dog barks as we leave town. In the Roman world, where wolves were common everywhere, inter canem et lupum (‘between the dog and the wolf’) meant twilight. Cooke City’s dogs must be early risers: there is not a hint of light in the sky as we drive towards the park entrance.
Dark mountains crowd close to the road: Abiathar Peak, Mount Norris and the Thunderer. There is nowhere in Yellowstone lower than the top of Britain’s highest summit and these mountains are more than twice that high. Through gaps in the trees we glimpse snow-covered prairies, where streams trickle between hummocks as smooth and white as iced cakes. How should we search for a single pack of wolves in so much space? As we near the Lamar Valley the light comes up and we stop to search for wolf-shapes moving on the snow. We study the elk closely, looking where they are looking. They seem relaxed and nothing moves, so we drive on and try again. In each place we listen and finally we hear the Druids howl.
America’s early settlers described wolf howls as mournful or blood-curdling, a projection of their own fears onto the sounds made by wolves to keep their packs together and their neighbours away. For a wolf pack to thrive they need the exclusive use of a large territory with plenty of prey. Advertising their numbers by howling together is a show of strength. To us, without any livestock to lose, they sound beautiful, like a choir singing in close harmony. Each wolf joins in with the others at a different pitch, to give the impression of a stronger pack: one to leave alone. Their voices carry astonishingly far, echoing from the face of the Thunderer and sustained by the distance, long after they have lowered their muzzles. It is wild music I do not want to end.
We find Rick at a place called Round Prairie, checking the signals from the radio collars. He says there are wolves close by, somewhere in the trees, so we set up the camera and wait, hoping they will show themselves. There are seven bull elk in the meadow: enormous deer with pointed antlers, spanning more than a metre (3ft) on either side. They seem very wary, eyeing the shadows. Perhaps the wolves are just checking them, staying out of sight rather than facing one down, as Rick says they sometimes do to test its resolve; daring the elk to make the first move.
The signals fade. The wolves are moving away down the valley, hidden by the trees. We follow along the road until they appear on the far side of the river
, trotting in a line: first the alpha pair then 302 and a few of the others. While the adults have been away another wolf has used their absence to introduce himself to the younger pack members. He’s a lone grey male. The yearling females are particularly pleased to see him and there is a great deal of sniffing and tail wagging. The lone wolf knows he is taking a risk and when he’s spotted by the returning Druid males, 480 and 302, he immediately breaks into a run. They give chase but the alpha male soon stops. His brother 302 runs on. He has more to lose because he’ll be able to mate with the young females in his pack, as long as he sees off the competition. The interloper runs in a loop, knowing his pursuer will follow his trail by scent rather than cutting the corner, which allows him to check whether he is still being followed. He is, and 302 chases him into the distance.
One of the young females, Dull-bar, leaves the others and, nose to the ground, she follows the lone wolf’s tracks. Where I would just see a set of prints in the snow, her sensitive nose can pick up a far richer story, of exactly who has passed, when and sometimes even why. The drawback with smelling footprints is that she cannot immediately tell which way the male has gone, and she trots in the wrong direction for a while before returning to lie in his tracks with her ears pricked. Her father, 480, comes to sit beside her and a silent message passes between them. Laurie speaks it out loud: ‘What are you doing here, young lady?’
Dull-bar has the most to gain if she can meet the interloper. He is a potential mate with different genes to the males in her own pack, but while her dad and her uncle are on guard she may never have the opportunity. When 302 returns he is walking stiffly. At eight years old he is getting on a bit for a wild wolf, so perhaps Dull-bar will have her chance after all. Except for the alpha pair, most adult wolves try to mate outside their pack and some, like 302, even manage to change packs and keep the rare ability to move through others’ territories without being killed. There is clearly a good deal of politics among wolves.
The Shark and the Albatross Page 4