When he spoke at the Wolf Summit few of the state and even federal wildlife officials even considered Haber’s research. Fewer still seemed to grasp their own bias toward protecting hunters at the cost of the rest of the public, let alone of a balanced ecology. Among wolf biologists Gordon Haber was definitely in the minority at the Wolf Summit and throughout his four decades of research. His fearless and single-minded persistence made him often seem as much a pest to Alaska wildlife officials as the wolves themselves. Not only did Haber show up at every Board of Game meeting; he also appeared at cocktail parties thrown by Alaska’s most successful wolf hunter, a surgeon appropriately named Jack Frost. Calling himself a “mechanical hawk,” Frost tracked wolves in his plane, relentlessly chasing them down until the wolves could barely walk. Then he would land and shoot them. It must have been chilling for Haber at Frost’s parties to observe wolf pelts “hanging every three feet on bannisters” and wolf trophies “everywhere in Frost’s house.” But, ever the researcher, Haber’s inside information about Jack Frost’s aerial wolf hunts would help prove a case against the surgeon. In 1991 Frost finally pled guilty to illegal wolf hunting. Some of the most incriminating evidence were transcripts of Frost’s radio transmissions from his plane.
“The damn thing jumped up and bit my wing,” one of the transcripts recorded. A wolf that Frost had gunned down left his teeth marks on his airplane wing. “He wasn’t completely dead,” the transcript said. “We’ll go back later.”
Several times when Haber spoke at the Wolf Summit he was interrupted by men jumping up from the bleachers and swearing to shoot him. Someone even threatened an old-fashioned tar-and-feathering. Firmly, the gruff Haber continued his talk, barely a glance at the bleachers. With his graphs and charts he disproved the myth that wolves kill indiscriminately; instead, wolves were careful and subtle in their attacks on game animals, killing moose in only 5 percent of all hunts. That hardly made them a competitor for human hunters. Wolves did not kill more than they could eat. In winter wolves depended most on scavenging winter-killed animals, which made up three-fourths of their diet.
Haber was followed by the drone of wildlife officials, with their Orwellian doublespeak. No antiwolf speakers ever mentioned the word “kill”—the euphemisms were “lethal control,” “sustainable yield,” “harvesting the wolves,” or “caribou calf crops.” As I dutifully took notes, I felt dispirited. It struck me that when we talk about other animals, our language clearly shows our bias: if we celebrate wolves, we call them “noble” or “kindred” or “fellow creatures.” If we want to eradicate them, we must reduce them to quantifiable farming terms like “harvest” or “crop.”
Gordon Haber noted this reductive bias: “What leaves me shaking my head the most about all these predator control programs is the missing sense of wonder,” he wrote. “Listening to biologists… I am always struck by how blandly and matter-of-factly they talk about killing wolves. They seem to think being ‘objective’ in ignoring items like behavior and sentience is the mark of a good wildlife scientist. How sad and revolting that professionals entrusted with the management of these fascinating, important creatures view them in such shallow ways.… We are the ultimate losers from all this wolf killing.”
4. A TAXIDERMIST’S DREAM
After a day at the Wolf Summit my father invited me to join him and other wildlife officials at a Fairbanks bar. That night was a scene that has always stayed with me, and it reveals the hunting traditions in wildlife management that still dominate today. In the rustic bar I was surrounded by jovial wildlife officials—the same men who had fiercely taken the Wolf Summit podium to argue in favor of aerial wolf hunts. The camaraderie reminded me of my father’s hunting buddies and my southern grandfather’s dictum to all his grandsons: “I’ll teach you to hunt, shoot—and vote the Republican ticket.”
In the smoke-filled bar my father introduced me to the table of six men as simply his daughter. Without my press badge I could enjoy the banter among the guys as my father told one of his hunting stories, which I’d heard a hundred times. I was beginning to relax for the first time here in Alaska—and was also finally warm, parking myself nearest the robust fireplace. But soon the undercurrent of wolf-control conversation led to talk of how to convince the state and federal powers-that-be that renewed aerial wolf control was needed to assure higher populations of game for hunters. The Hunt Club atmosphere, the smoky backroom, the teasing cronyism and entitlement reminded me of a private game club where members played poker with other species. Wolves and other predators were always the top losers. After all, wolves didn’t buy hunting licenses to fund Fish and Game Boards.
I forced myself to remain quiet, gazing up at a bar adorned with so many elk, moose, and caribou antlers that it looked like a taxidermist’s dream workshop. But I found myself privately riffing on the word “game”—that our English language had named wildlife after a sport, a hunt. In our very words we’d clearly betrayed the bias that other animals were to be played with, won or lost.
One of the wildlife managers, outfitted for the Far North in a Filson plaid hunting jacket and Russian fox fur hat, frowned as the talk turned to wolf advocates. “They just don’t get it,” he sighed with exasperation. “Hunters are the wolves’ best friends up here. We don’t want to kill all the wolves, like ranchers down in the lower forty-eight. We want wolves here in Alaska.”
“Yeah, without trapping and hunting regulations… oversight… wolves would be hunted illegally and poached into extinction,” a man added as he raised his beer in a quick toast to the gathered guys. “Without management, there would be no wolves left at all in Alaska.”
“Or elk or caribou or deer, for that matter,” a slim man in down-bib overalls and an impressive red beard noted drily.
His words reminded me of a chilling fact about the first centuries of hunting in this country in Elizabeth Marshall Thompson’s Hidden Life of Deer: “By the middle of the nineteenth century, remorseless, nationwide, year-round hunting had all but eliminated every kind of deer, from the moose in the North to the mule deer and the elk in the West to the whitetails in the East. Only the caribou remained, too far north to be available to most hunters.” It was the game biologists and government officials—like those sitting at this Fairbanks bar table—who finally began to conserve and manage deer. “No other mammal in the world has been so heavily managed,” Thomas concludes.
The problem now was that the managers’ traditional bias toward hunters often inflated wolf population statistics and deflated game prey populations, as Gordon Haber had pointed out at the summit. These prejudicial stats justified bounty hunts, wiping out entire wolf families in the unproven hope for more game. Now the deer in many states were out of control, overgrazing.
When talk turned to caribou “crops” and wolf hunt “quotas,” I tried to imagine a future in which this roundtable was evenly balanced by nonconsumptive wildlife voices. What might happen if top predators were actually managed for everyone and the environment, not just hunters? But like the Game Boards, very few other points of view were represented here. In fact, I’d just learned at this summit from an ex-Game Board member that in the 1990s Game Board appointees were required to hold a hunting license—a rule that obviously excluded nonhunters from finding a seat at the table on any wolf-control discussions.
At our bar table a trim, muscular man with a Jack London mustache now added with a shake of his head, “Those wolf people don’t know wolves… not the real animals.”
Another man nodded in agreement. “Wolves don’t just cull the sick and elderly in a caribou herd,” he said. “I’ve seen wolves kill an entire sheep herd, much more than they could eat. Wolves also kill just for sport.”
“Like us,” someone admitted. And everyone laughed and pounded the table so hard that it shuddered.
“You know, the way that Wolf Fund gal talks,” remarked a hefty guy in a white wolf-skin cap, “you’d think she believed wolves had souls or something!” In the scoffing that
followed I couldn’t help but reach into my down parka for my Navajo wolf necklace. If I’d had the courage to speak up, if I didn’t want to expose myself as a spy, I would have said, “Well, Eskimos and other Native Americans certainly believe animals have souls—and yet they still hunt them to survive. It’s mutual respect.”
But then I remembered how shocked I’d been during the summit when a Native Alaskan man, arriving by snowmobile, had received a standing ovation from the bleachers as he’d raised his fist and shouted, “Alaska for Alaskans! These wolves belong to us!”
Fingering the necklace beads like a rosary, I glanced up at the red EXIT sign near the pool tables and calculated how fleetly I could disappear, like a deer from a hunter’s scope. Just the past winter I’d tried to give the wolf necklace for safekeeping to a Cherokee friend of mine who was a curator of Native American Art at the Smithsonian Institute.
“How did you come by this medicine?” she asked gravely.
I told her the story, and she listened attentively.
“Navajos are more ambivalent about wolves than your tribes in the Pacific Northwest,” she explained. “Navajos believe there are real wolves who are good and part of nature. But there are also witches who disguise themselves as wolves.” Now she did fix me with a sober expression. “You never know who you’re dealing with. This wolf medicine necklace with its real teeth can protect someone from those Skin-walkers.”
She carefully handed the wolf necklace back to my reluctant hands. Touching my shoulder as if in benediction or direction, she advised, “This wolf medicine has some work to do—and just maybe so do you.”
Although I was silent in that Fairbanks bar surrounded by wildlife managers, I would not be silent when I reported on what I’d witnessed at the Wolf Summit. As just a daughter, a woman, I was not recognized here as a stakeholder in any discussion of wildlife. But I was a witness—a wolf in sheep’s clothing.
On the final morning of the Wolf Summit there was a small earthquake in Fairbanks. The aftershocks made the ice rink often tremble beneath our frigid feet. I decided to brave the riotous but much warmer bleachers with some of my wolf-advocate friends rather than take my place at the press table.
“What we do here at this Wolf Summit isn’t just about Alaska and its wolves. The whole world is watching us,” one of the summit speakers concluded and the crowd quieted down. “In the end, in the future, it will not be all the programs we put into place as wildlife officials that determine the fate of wild wolves.” He paused and adjusted his glasses. “What will determine how wolves and all wildlife in this country are managed is public perception.”
This Wolf Summit prediction would prove true over the next decades as more humane and nonconsumptive voices would join the very public conversation about how to manage our shared wilderness and wildlife. As the US Humane Society recently noted, “Ultimately, the public will drag the wildlife departments along with them as they demand that the system change for the benefit of the non-hunting majority, and most importantly, for the animals themselves.”
The very last afternoon of the Wolf Summit I took a field trip with a Far North friend of mine, Alaskan poet Peggy Shumaker, in her tiny but intrepid truck. She drove us through ice-rutted switchback roads way up into the expansive Brooks Mountain Range. The brief Alaskan sunlight had given way to a rather rugged-looking moon. According to the Farmer’s Almanac, this fading New Year’s moon was called a Wolf Moon. Below us, crossing a frozen valley, was a vast herd of caribou. I couldn’t hear the hooves crunching in the deep snow below us, but I was awestruck by the pulsing, headlong movement. With my binoculars I could make out the blur below of their thick tan and buff fur, the syncopated stride of powerful legs. We felt a faint rumble as the elk herd trotted together in a slow-motion stampede. Their jagged, curved antlers, like bone antennae, were raised high as they scented the chill wind for wolves.
Were wolves also watching this slow wave of prey below us—the throbbing heat of fur and bodies so tightly packed together for protection? Perhaps a starving wolf family was poised nearby and calculating the risks of tackling any caribou straggler in such a huge herd. How much stamina to chase and take one down? Worth the risk of life and family?
“Amazing,” I murmured. My breath haloed the air with a quick warmth.
“It’s good to get up here,” Peggy nodded with a faint smile, her face blister red and chapped with the cold. “You can see a lot farther.” Her poem “Caribou” describes what she saw.
Hoof—
one hoof
enters powder, sinks
through fresh snow
touches,
breaks
the light crust
pushing deeper
to hard pack. Haunch deep.
Only then
can she
move on.
The change we
need so delicate
so crucial
it might be
silent, it might
be this quiet
step, breath
“We can see what the wolf sees,” I said, regarding the herd below with narrowed eyes like a predator. Here in the Brooks Range it was the wolves who were aerial hunters.
Our own aerial view of the caribou throng was like that of a small bush plane—the kind Jack Frost had used in his illegal hunts when a wounded wolf leapt up and left teeth marks on his wing. Or like government planes that Fish and Game officials would employ to harass—then land and shoot wolves—for the next two decades. From this same perspective Gordon Haber had flown over the Denali wolf families—a guardian shadow. Wolves often recognized his bush plane, howling as Haber circled them, making his notes, taking endless photos. The wolves never ran away from Gordon Haber’s plane. The year after the Wolf Summit Haber said in an interview that each time he flew over to study a wolf family, “I wondered if it would be the last time. I knew they would start disappearing right before my eyes.”
WOLVES ARE STILL DISAPPEARING in Alaska. Republican governors in Alaska have escalated wolf hunting after Democratic governor Tony Knowles’s two terms (1994–2002) had somewhat curtailed it. A brief ban on aerial wolf hunting voted in by a public initiative in 1996 was overridden by a Republican state legislature. Official and public aerial wolf control by wildlife officials returned under nine years of Republican governors determined to revamp the Game Board and increase lethal wolf control—even though 70 percent of Alaskans oppose it. Under Governor Sarah Palin wolves were shot from helicopters and wolf dens were gassed to kill pups, and in 2007 her office “offered 180 volunteer pilots and aerial hunters a $150 cash prize for turning in the legs of freshly killed wolves.”
Over twelve hundred wolves were still killed each year in Alaska from bounty hunts, snares, and continued aerial shooting. This widespread and lethal wolf-control method continued, despite mounting evidence that such aerial gunning was not actually increasing caribou or game populations as predicted by wildlife managers. “The lack of accurate population estimates has led to over-harvest of wolves,” one report concluded. “State wildlife managers have failed to provide adequate justification for their controversial programs.” In the summer of 2016 the Obama administration’s USFW banned aerial hunting of wolves on the 76 million acres of Alaska wildlife refuges—for the first time in decades “handing hunters, the National Rifle Association and the state’s own Board of Game a huge defeat.” But the new rule still allows wolf hunting in Alaska’s sixteen wildlife refuges, just not the longtime “intensive predator management” of aerial hunts.
As of 2015 Alaska’s wolves were classified as big game and as furbearers and open to trapping with snares and shooting by anyone with a license. In 2015 the Denali Park wolves—once so admired and protected by Gordon Haber—were now at a “historic low.” Denali used to be one of the most likely places in the world to witness wolves in the wild, but in 2001 the Board of Game had removed a no-kill buffer around Denali Park, allowing for an average of four or five wolves killed alon
g the boundary every year. Conservation biologist Richard Steiner points out that “most of the killing of Denali wolves is conducted by just one or two trappers or hunters for sport, not subsistence purposes.” Denali tourism brings in $500 million yearly to Alaska, but the chances of seeing wolves in the park has dramatically decreased. In a 17,640-square-kilometer area of Denali National Park in 2015 there was the lowest-ever recorded density of wolves—just fifty-one wolves in thirteen packs. This is “the lowest number since wildlife biologists began counting them 30 years ago.”
Depending upon the governor, the wolves have had short-term reprieves and long-term attacks. In 2014 state wildlife officials gunned down the entire radio-collared Lost Creek pack—eleven wolves killed in a single day, which wiped out twenty years of research. The National Park Service biologist who had studied the Lost Creek pack, John Burch, said about Alaska, “There’s no negotiations anymore. They kill almost all the wolves they can find. These last two winters, they’ve pretty well gotten most of them.”
In the summer of 2016 the watchdog group Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER) reported that “the state of Alaska has gunned down so many radio-collared wolves outside the Yukon-Charley Rivers National Park that the National Park Service has dropped a 23-year study of the predators.” Losing so many radio-collared wolves meant that scientists could no longer track wolf populations and observe dens. The report notes that “intensive management”—state-sanctioned aerial hunting of wolves by Alaska’s Department of Fish and Game—has killed ninety wolves, including all twenty-four members of the Seventymile pack. Alaska maintains that such lethal management is necessary to protect rural subsistence hunters. But caribou calf survival in Alaska has not increased. “We are aware of no other instance in which a state has so extensively compromised the ecological integrity of a federal conservation area,” PEER board member Richard Steiner said. “The State of Alaska is foolishly, almost vindictively, squelching a generation of invaluable scientific inquiry into predator-prey dynamics.” Park superintendent Greg Dudgeon adds that Alaska’s lethal management has resulted in a wolf population that has drastically changed “from a self-sustaining population to one reliant on immigration of wolves from outside the area… the wolves are no longer in a natural state.”
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