Wolf Nation

by Brenda Peterson

  Seton noted that King Lobo allowed his mate to run in front of him, taking the lead. If any of the other formidable wolves in his family dared try this insurrection, Lobo would have disciplined them with a bared fang, one terrifyingly guttural growl, or even a blood fight. But Blanca often trotted ahead of her mate, taking the forward position that is always the riskiest in any pack. Like a soldier walking ahead of his patrol scouting for danger, Blanca’s authority was no challenge to Lobo. (It would be another century before wolf researchers recognized that a female could also be the leader of a family or share alpha status alongside her mate.) Seton figured that Blanca or one of the smaller wolves might be tricked by a trap buried inside a cow’s head. So he placed this type of beef-head trap away from the poisoned bait that Lobo immediately focused on as fatal. As always, Lobo led his family away from the danger. But Blanca, a smaller wolf, strayed to investigate the cow’s head, as most wolves do any dead animal. Slam! The trap snapped shut on her delicate legs.

  Seton found Blanca galloping in terror, the fifty-pound trap dragging her down, the horns of the beef head snagging on branches and brambles as she ran. Finally she fell, exhausted and vulnerable. “She was the handsomest wolf I had ever seen,” Seton wrote. Her blazing white fur, eyes wide, teeth gnashing, now useless. Blanca let out a desperate howl. Lobo answered. Then Blanca turned to face her destroyers. Old-West style, Seton and several cowboys on horseback circled the beautiful white wolf. Each tossed a lasso over her neck. Seton writes, “Then followed the inevitable tragedy, the idea of which I shrank from afterward more than at the time.”

  Straining their horses, the men rode off fast in different directions, their ropes strangling Blanca “until blood burst from her mouth, her eyes glazed, her limbs stiffened and then fell limp.” A brutal, torturous way to die—for any animal or human. Why not a simple gunshot to the heart? As the wolf hunters rode home, they were followed by the haunting howls of Lobo for his lost mate. Lobo’s cries were “sadder than I could possibly have believed,” Seton writes. “Even the stolid cowboys noticed it, and they said they had ‘never heard a wolf carry on like that before.’”

  Lobo’s end after losing Blanca was inevitable. His grief, Seton notes, made him “reckless.” Love was Lobo’s tragic flaw. Did the mighty wolf simply allow himself to get trapped in 4 of the 150 steel traps that Seton set out for him? As Seton dragged Blanca’s body along the trail, the intimate scent of his beloved mate drew and doomed Lobo. The loyal wolf followed the scent of his lost mate, just as he’d followed Blanca when she ran strong and confident far ahead of him. Soon the several traps sprung and seized Lobo. For two days and nights he struggled against those piercing metal teeth, just as deadly as any other challenger he’d ever faced.

  By the time Seton found him Lobo had lost his struggle with the wolf traps. Exhausted and blood-soaked, Lobo summoned up enough energy and pride to lunge at his hunter. “Each trap was a dead drag of over three hundred pounds,” Seton wrote, “and in their relentless fourfold grasp, with great steel jaws on every foot, and the heavy logs and chains all entangled together, he was absolutely powerless.” Lobo let out one plaintive howl for his family. No answer.

  Instead of strangling Lobo with his lasso as he had Blanca or shooting him, Seton lashed the wolf’s jaws shut and removed the traps. Then he heaved him onto his horse and slowly brought his massive trophy into town. There he tried to feed Lobo and observe him more closely. The wild wolf refused to meet Seton’s eyes or acknowledge his existence—or power. Lobo gazed past anything human to the “great rolling mesas… his passing kingdom, where his famous band was now scattered.” Lobo also refused food. Seton believed the wolf was dying of “a broken-heart.” The next morning he discovered Lobo dead, “in his position of calm repose.” Seton and a cowboy unchained Lobo and laid him beside Blanca. “There, you would come to her,” the cowboy spoke to Lobo respectfully. “Now, you are together again.”

  Lobo’s death profoundly changed Seton. Seton evolved from wolf killer to wolf champion. His books were read by millions and gave him a voice to protect wild animals. Seton helped create the first national parks in North America; as founder of Boy Scouts of America, he inspired generations to learn wilderness skills and respect nature and other animals. “Ever since Lobo,” Seton writes, “my sincerest wish has been to impress upon people that each of our native wild creatures is in itself a precious heritage that we have no right to destroy or put beyond the reach of our children.” Lobo’s pelt is still on display in the Earnest Thompson Seton Memorial Library and Museum near Cimarron, New Mexico.

  In his “Note to the Reader” in Wild Animals I Have Known, Seton sounds his lifelong note of remorse over Lobo’s death: “The life of a wild animal always has a tragic end.” He hopes that readers still find “a moral as old as Scripture—we and the beast are kin.” Certainly Lobo and Blanca’s tragedy reminds us what researchers have finally documented in best-selling books such as bio-ethicist Marc Bekoff’s The Emotional Life of Animals: animals have deeply emotional lives, complex family dramas, and stories that mirror our own. Those who observe wolves closely often comment on the drama both within wolf families and around their existence. Power struggles, devotion, fear, gratitude, self-sacrifice, generosity, betrayal—watch wolves in the wild and recognize how familiar their family dramas are to ours.

  IMAGINE LOBO AND BLANCA’S tragic death repeated 2 million times, just in North America between colonization and now. Yet throughout this animal genocide there were still others who planted seeds of acceptance for the wild wolf. Aldo Leopold, the visionary father of wildlife conservation in America, began his US Forest Service career in the Southwest in government “wolf control”—a euphemism for wolf killing. As a boy Leopold felt “an intense sympathy” when he read Seton’s story of Lobo. Nevertheless, Leopold wrote in an unpublished foreword to his posthumously published masterwork, A Sand County Almanac, “I was able to rationalize the extermination of the wolf by calling it deer management.”

  In 1909 young Leopold graduated from the Yale School of Forestry and landed a job with the US Forest Service in Arizona on the Apache National Forest. In those days the US Forest Service would kill any wolves within rifle range, and forest service employees managed national forests and public lands with “game production” most in mind.

  In a 1915 editorial, “The Varmint Question,” Leopold urged a “more satisfactory bounty law” against wolves and other top predators. He helped forge a powerful antiwolf alliance between the government’s Biological Survey agency, cattlemen, hunters, and sportsmen that still exists today. So intense was the young Leopold’s zeal to wipe out wolves that by 1920 he could proudly report in “The Game Situation in the Southwest” that in New Mexico they had officially reduced wolves from three hundred to just thirty. This extermination took only three years. Leopold concluded that the Biological Survey “is making splendid progress in eradication work.… It is going to take patience and money to catch the last wolf or lion in New Mexico. But the last one must be caught before the job can be fully successful.”

  Leopold’s evolution from zealous wolf killer to astute wolf advocate is a great conversion story. An avid student of history as well as nature, Leopold well understood their intimate connection. An essay, “The Historical Sense of Being in the Writings of Aldo Leopold,” notes “Leopold often touched on topics like history and wilderness that he felt had the potential to affect human character.” Certainly Leopold’s character was shaped both by his early years on the Mississippi River in what was then a fairly wild Burlington, Iowa, and by his early work as a predator-control agent with the US Forest Service.

  Over the decades Leopold worked in and out of the US Forest Service. In 1922 he had the foresight to propose that New Mexico’s Gila National Forest be designated a wilderness area. In 1935 Leopold left government service to become a professor of game management at University of Wisconsin. Leaving the US Forest Service for an academic career made it possible for Leopold to see beyon
d the government’s antiwolf agenda of wildlife management. He would soon found the Wilderness Society.

  It was a matriarchal wolf who startled Leopold into a new relationship with wildlife. In the unpublished foreword to Sand County Almanac Leopold reflected upon his younger self: “I was young then, and full of trigger-itch.” Remorsefully he wrote, “my sin against the wolves caught up with me.… I had… played the role of accessory in an ecological murder.”

  Leopold’s epiphany was vivid, heartbreaking. He poignantly recounts the moment in his signature essay, “Thinking Like a Mountain.” Leopold imagines the wild wolf from the point of view of the mountain. Instead of asking what the cowman or the hunter believes about the wolf, Leopold wonders: What does the deer, the coyote, and the mountain perceive when the wolf howls her haunting song? Then he tells this story: One day Leopold and some friends are lunching on a high rim-rock, the jagged pastel perch that defines the Southwest. Below them they believe they see a deer paddling across the river. The animal emerges from the fast water, shakes herself dry on shore. Surprisingly she’s a mother wolf, happily greeting her six grown pups.

  Anyone who has ever witnessed a wolf parent play with their pups knows the fond abandon, the affectionate nuzzles, the faux fights and feints that one day will determine family structure, loyalty, and responsibility. Today video and visits to national parks or sanctuaries have given us the privilege of witnessing a wolf family romping together as if we—or the mountain—had never lost them.

  But Leopold and his fellow hunters have “never heard of passing up a chance to kill a wolf.” They take aim. The mountain echoes with the ricochet of their rifles. The family scatters, one pup dragging his leg and disappearing. The mother wolf, wounded, lays on the ground. Does she look up at the rim rock in shock at so many snipers? Or does she, like King Lobo and so many wolves before her, simply stare flatly in full knowledge of her fate? As the men scramble down to the riverbank perhaps she focuses on the solace of rushing water, the rustle nearby of any pups who might have survived her. What is left of her family may have howled out for each other. Or perhaps they hushed and kept a wary silence, as wolves always do when humans come near.

  The wounded wolf looks up at Leopold as he leans over her to catch the “fierce green fire dying in her eyes.” In that eye-to-eye with the wolf the man is changed forever. He recognizes “something new to me in those eyes—something known only to her and to the mountain.” What does the mother wolf see in this young man’s eyes at the moment of her death? The man will never again kill another of her kind. Her death will become legend—a rallying cry for those who work to save wolves for new generations.

  Anyone who has sat vigil with the dying knows that in an instant—when the eyes fiercely focus, then fix, then extinguish their light—that last sight can last a lifetime. The old mother wolf’s green eyes may have haunted Leopold for as long as he lived. She transmitted to him another way of seeing his and her world. After her death, when Leopold considered “the newly wolfless mountain” as “state after state extirpate its wolves,” he realized the wild without wolves meant defoliation by “deer herd, dead of its own too-much.” Leopold at last fathomed that “just as a deer herd lives in mortal fear of its wolves, so does a mountain live in mortal fear of its deer.” When humans destroy wild wolves, it is because we “have not learned to think like a mountain. Hence we have dustbowls, and rivers, washing the future into the sea.” Like the deer, humans have not yet learned the lessons of our own “over-much.” Left unchecked without predators like the wolf, the deer overgraze and basically eat themselves out of their habitat. The wild wolf is their balance—and ours.

  Leopold’s story of this dying wolf was later published only in 1949—the same year Leopold died. She lives on, just as does Leopold’s “Thinking Like a Mountain.” The “green fire” in the old wolf’s eyes had transformed and tempered Leopold from antagonist to hero of what would come to be called “ecology.” Or of what Leopold himself termed as “the land ethic.” This new and more communal way of seeing the land and other animals possessed Leopold; his philosophy was “the end result of a life journey.”

  One of the most important lines Leopold ever wrote is this: “For one species to mourn the death of another is a new thing under the sun.” We mourn those we know and love. As we tell and listen to more stories of wolves we have known—like Seton’s King Lobo or Leopold’s mother wolf—we recognize wolves as kin to us. Finally, we might even ponder the world from the wolf’s perspective—to “see the world truly,” as the Hopi Indians, First People’s of the Southwest, have always taught.

  GROWING UP in the Forest Service, I had witnessed firsthand the tensions between Aldo Leopold’s legacy of ecology and the more utilitarian, pragmatic conservation of Gifford Pinchot. Leopold, Pinchot, and Sierra Club founder and author John Muir—these were the icons of nineteenth- and twentieth-century conservation. Leopold was Pinchot’s pupil at his mentor’s family-founded Yale Forest School. After Pinchot became the first chief of the US Forest Service, he hired his former pupil, and Leopold began his Forest Service tenure. Pinchot was passionate about conserving forests and natural resources for the future. Under his guidance and with help from his friend, President Theodore Roosevelt, millions of acres of wilderness were set aside for wilderness.

  Controversy about how to best manage those national forests led to a split between mentor Pinchot and his protégé, Leopold. Pinchot was the progressive but “ever practical idealist” whose forest ethics focused on “Wise Use,” or the “efficient, utilitarian-based management and development of the nation’s public and private forestlands.” In the 1930s Leopold began to reject Pinchot’s environmental pragmatism in favor of his own belief that the land was alive and animals were part of a community that included but did not just exist for human use. These tensions were not only played out between Pinchot and Leopold but also between conservationists across the nation.

  An article Pinchot published in 1908 compared North America to a family farm: “On the way in which we decide to handle this great possession hangs the welfare of those who come after us.” I often heard forest service employees talking about managing the forests for “multiple use” or with “the twin virtues of beauty and utility” in mind. Think of Pinchot as utility and Leopold as beauty—there you have the tense balancing act between what are now called conservationists and environmentalists.

  The environmental movement of the 1960s and 1970s marked a time of upheaval and change in our national forests. In 1978 my father was appointed chief of the US Forest Service and I had recently left my editorial job at the New Yorker magazine to live and work a ramshackle farm my mother had inherited near Boulder, Colorado. While working as fiction editor at Rocky Mountain Magazine, I also commuted to the Southwest, where I worked as a writer-in-residence at Arizona State University. It was in these vast deserts—where Seton and Leopold had their own Canis lupus encounters and epiphanies—that I often traveled deep into Native lands of the Hopi and Navajo.

  One day I got lost on the Navajo reservation and wandered into a dilapidated trading post. I stumbled from the relentless sun into the trading post, looking for more water. Perhaps it was dehydration or sun stroke, but once inside the shack my head was throbbing painfully. The closer I came to one glass counter, the more intense the headache. I thought I might faint, and the world seemed to tilt. For balance I leaned against the glass case of inexpensive trinkets—earrings, bracelets with cheap turquoise chips, bead strands frayed and broken.

  When I placed my hands on the cool glass I felt an almost gravitational pull. “Something’s… here…” I stammered.

  A Navajo woman in a purple velvet blouse and strands of silver wound around her neck and wrists walked over to the case. With some surprise, she studied me closely.

  “Yes,” she said after some time in her rich, low voice. “Something is here.”

  She reached under the shabby trinket tray and lifted up an astonishing necklace of spider-w
eb turquoise, a huge 1921 silver dollar, delicate coral fish, dimes pounded into rounded beads, teeth carved of antler bones. It was a museum-quality medicine necklace. What was it doing buried under faded velvet and cheap trinkets in a trading post that seemed lost in time?

  Holding the extraordinary necklace, the Navajo woman said simply, “It is awake.”

  I had a dim memory of someone once showing me animal teeth he’d found in the forest. “Are those…?”

  “Wolf teeth,” the Navajo woman finished firmly. “Wolves used to live here with us.” Sighing and with obvious regret, she held the necklace out to me. “It is wide awake again… you must take it.”

  I dared not touch the necklace she offered. I felt too young to be even in the presence of such sacred medicine. I didn’t recognize it as a traditional Skin-walker necklace that Navajos used to ward off evil spirits, but I did sense its power. If I had known its frightening shape-shifter traditions and darkly authoritative magic, I might have turned and quickly fled that trading post.

  “My father made this many years ago, ” the woman explained. “To protect someone… but he never came back from the war. So my father told me, ‘Hide this medicine, until someone recognizes it is here.’”

  She reached out and laid the necklace in my hand. I fingered the impressive and still-sharp wolf fangs, darkened by age and decay, the roots deep.

  “Lobo,” the woman breathed.

  I recognized the word: Mexican gray wolf, long hunted into extinction in the Southwest. Holding the necklace, I felt no sense of ownership or possession or that it belonged with me. I did not possess this Skin-walker wolf necklace. It possessed itself—and now me. At last my headache vanished. I felt clear-eyed and somehow steady, though still afraid of this beautiful and useful medicine necklace. What did it want with me?