Amaroq also shared with me a darkly comic video produced by herself and her husband, “One Determined Husky Takes on the Planet’s Most Pressing Environmental Problems,” in which her Siberian husky, Captain Miranda, play-attacks Republican congressional leaders disguised as endangered species. Posing as a BBC America reporter, Amaroq details the charade. “Some Republicans appear as salamanders,” she narrates in her perfectly serious Brit accent. “Others appear as picture-winged flies or rare but dangerous parasites. No one yet knows their motive, but one suspicious-looking wolf approached a reporter and said, ‘We’re doing just fine, thank you! We don’t need further legal protection. No sireee, bob!’”
Enter eco-warrior Captain Miranda. Exclusive video footage shows Miranda pouncing on brightly colored yellow and pink play toys, shaking them into submission, then racing around to destroy more ESA enemies. Growling and howling, Miranda “explains her plan of action” against those who would delist wolves and halt their recovery with punitive legislation. “Inside sources reveal that Captain Miranda flew into action and made quick work of the Republican imposters,” Amaroq’s faux-BBC reporter explains, “After an exhaustive search, Captain Miranda tracked down Senator James Inhofe, posing as an endangered Southern California mouse.”
The dramatic outcome of that encounter shows an image of Minnie Mouse all but buried alive under a fence, her stuffed animal body shredded and torn to pieces, utterly destroyed—just as Senator Inhofe’s attacks on endangered species would destroy our country’s wildlife. After the 2016 WAG meeting Amaroq would be able to report that the group agreed that in order for WDFW to choose lethal removal, there must be four qualifying wolf depredations in one calendar year or six in two consecutive years. And in order for that depredation by a wolf or wolf pack to count as a strike against it, the rancher must have removed all attractants, such as bone piles or carcasses, and have used at least one method of nonlethal deterrence at the time of the wolf attack.
“These agreements on things that must have been in place before lethal removal of wolves can even be considered are essential. Because on-the-ground studies and experience have shown that removing attractants and using deterrent measures—particularly a human presence—are effective means at reducing or altogether preventing livestock conflicts with wolves,” says Amaroq. But she is realistic about the work ahead. “The figures agreed to by the WAG on numbers of depredation events and numbers of years are purely social compromises, without taking science into account. People may feel better about each other because they have worked hard to find common ground and come to agreement. And they should feel good about finding common ground—we don’t call it the ‘Wolf Wars’ for nothing. But when science is ignored, wolves frequently lose out. So stakeholder processes can be a double-edged sword, and whether the specific agreements reached in this case will actually aid wolf recovery remains to be seen.”
For Amaroq the goal is not just to find a social and political compromise but also to develop protections based on science and the law that will bring lasting benefit to wild wolves.
“What’s the most important thing you’re doing for wolves, besides these essential lawsuits to stop wolf hunts and your educational programs?” I ask Amaroq.
“When we can bring a lawsuit on behalf of an endangered animal like the wolf, it means they will not be killed for a while longer. And the people living on the land near them will have to use more prevention measures to protect their livestock. It also means that the level of hysteria on each side can calm down while we wait for court decisions.”
With her trademark smile and firm nod, Amaroq concludes, “Winning for wolves is really finding ways to give them more time.”
11. RAISED BY WOLVES
The stories we tell will profoundly shape the fate and future of the wild wolf. There are new stories that are beginning to balance and defy the Big Bad Wolf myths we’ve recycled for centuries. The “lethal take” graphs of a government’s official wolf-culling campaigns or the wolf-trapping trophy tales told around cowboy campfires have been shifting. As wolves begin to repopulate our wild lands, they also roam the most spacious and evolving territory of all: the human imagination.
Authors, artists, and musicians are creating a rich habitat for wolves in their work. It’s not just natural history classics like Farley Mowat’s Never Cry Wolf or Barry Lopez’s Of Wolves and Men or popular memoirs such as Nick Jans’s A Wolf Called Romeo that use science to tell a truer and less biased story of wolves. Wolves are also compelling our attention in live-action fictional 3-D films such as China’s hugely popular Wolf Totem, in the 1972 and 2016 Disney homages to Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Book, in enduring children’s classics like Julie of the Wolves by Jean Craighead George. Wolves also find their voices echoed in rock music, like guitarist John Sheldon’s elegy for Yellowstone’s 06 or the haunting Celtic ballad “Winter Wolf.” As wolves again take up residence in our wilderness and our storytelling, we return to a more fully imagined kinship with them. One story that returns to captivate each new generation is that of human children raised by wolves. As Shakespeare writes in The Winter’s Tale:
Come on, poor babe
Some powerful spirit instruct the kites and ravens
To be thy nurses! Wolves and bears, they say,
Casting their savageness aside, have done
Like offices of pity.
The legend of twin brothers Romulus and Remus, who were suckled by a she-wolf and survived to become the founders of Rome, is echoed in fiction such as the 1919 novel Shasta of the Wolves about a boy adopted by a wolf pack; the popular Through the Wolf’s Eyes, Firekeeper series by Jane Lindskold, whose heroine is rescued by wolves and reluctant to return to her own kind; or the 1970s television series Lucan, set in Minnesota, in which a boy is raised by wolves and needs ten years to learn to adapt to so-called civilized society.
Perhaps the most famous of all the stories of a child raised by wolves is Rudyard Kipling’s “Mowgli’s Brothers,” collected in The Jungle Book. This story of a lost Indian child and his wolf-pack family captured the hearts of generations of adults and children and inspired several films. In her 1988 foreword to Kipling’s The Jungle Book, children’s book author Jane Yolen notes the many stories of feral children—from the eighteenth-century naturalist Linnaeus’s scientific definition of a feral man to the Indian news sensation in the 1920s of “a pair of sisters who had supposedly been found by a missionary in a white ant mound along with a she-wolf and her litter of cubs.”
Kipling’s own father had written stories of Indian children raised by wolves in his 1891 book, Beast and Man in India. In many of these accounts the human child, unwanted and abandoned by his parents in the jungle, was nursed by a mother wolf and thrived. But once captured and returned to humankind, the wolf-child was still savage, inconsolable, and unable to adapt. Often, as with the Indian wolf sisters, they died from depression over the loss of their wolf family, even in the care of British missionaries.
Mowgli adapts more successfully, both with his wolf family and after he returns to the human village. As a baby lost in the jungle, Mowgli is accepted into a wolf family by the leaders, Mother Wolf Raksha and Father Wolf Akela. They are called “The Free People” and teach their man-cub Mowgli the Law of the Jungle, which “never orders anything without a reason.” This jungle justice forbids all animals from killing man unless that man is showing his own children how to kill animals. Kipling explains that if the animals kill humans, “everybody in the jungle suffers.” Mother Wolf accepts the man-cub because he is never afraid and finds his proper place nursing alongside her other pups. Soon he is swinging through the vines, much like his later imitator Tarzan, and racing through the dense and mysterious jungle with the Seeonee Wolf pack.
Bagheera, the majestic panther in Kipling’s story, notices the unique characteristic of this young human: “If he stared hard at any wolf, the wolf would be forced to drop his eyes.” The man-cub’s direct and unflinching gaze is so powerful,
explains the panther, that “Not even I can look thee between the eyes and I was born among men, and I love thee, Little Brother.”
The original Jungle Book hews close to real wolf biology. As it is with wild wolves, when the leader grows old and too feeble to hunt or command, he can be pushed out or even killed by a younger rival, a fate that soon befalls Kipling’s Father Wolf Akela. Once Akela’s own pack has voted to kill him, he is allowed to speak on behalf of the adopted boy-cub, Mowgli. He argues, “He has eaten our food. He has slept with us. He has driven game for us. He has broken no word of the Law of the Jungle.” Akela honorably offers that if the Wolf Council spares his man-cub, he will not fight off any attack from any next-in-line young wolf.
The pack responds to the doomed leader’s cry for mercy for Mowgli, a being who has the fierceness of the wolf and the inventiveness of humankind. Having just witnessed the death of Akela, Mowgli makes a promise to the Wolf Council: “I will be more merciful than ye are. Because I was all but your brother in blood, I promise that when I am a man among men I will not betray ye to men as ye have betrayed me. There shall be no war between any of us in the pack.”
Eventually the maturing boy must leave his wolf family for a life with humans. But he first begs a promise from his wolf mother, Raksha: “Ye will not forget me?” Mowgli asks. Raksha promises, “Never while we can follow a trail.” She hopes her man-cub will come back soon, “little naked son of mine, for, listen, child of man, I loved thee more than ever I loved my cubs.”
The timeless appeal and what the New York Times called “immortality” of Kipling’s Jungle Book in its 2016 cinematic resurrection suggest that multitudes of children—and many adults—have never really left the jungle for the man-village. Many readers easily imagined ourselves part of Mowgli’s wolf family—especially those of us raised in rural or wild areas.
Such positive and intimate stories of our historic bond with wolves—both in the territories of our stories and our wild lands—help reverse generations of hatred and negative stereotypes. Of course, the real life of wolves is not like Disney’s. But such hugely popular stories offer hope for a new generation’s more charitable attitude toward sharing public lands with them.
A more realistic book, informed to some extent by wolf biology, is Julie of the Wolves, published in 1972 and still widely read. Julie, a thirteen-year-old Inuit girl, runs away from her boy-husband and her Alaskan village and gets lost on the tundra. She is adopted by a wolf family and learns how to survive and navigate a dangerous wilderness. She builds her own den and begs food scraps from the adults like a wolf pup by licking the face of the alpha wolf, just as our domestic dogs do with us—both a greeting and supplication.
In many subtle ways readers learn wolf biology—the “sweet odor of ambrosia” in a wolf’s scent, the leaps and jumps in the complex body language of the “wolf code,” and the facial expressions so critical for fitting into wolf family hierarchy. Julie is given the wolf name “Miyax” and allowed to follow the wolf family, led by her wolf father, Amaroq, as they hunt and share the meat. The wolves teach her to howl and sing, to outmaneuver grizzly bears, to find water, and to hide from the human hunters who shadow the tundra in planes. These hunters finally gun down Amaroq and his son, Kapu. There is a bounty on Amaroq’s magnificent head, yet when the hunters land their plane, they don’t even bother to take their trophy. Kapu is grievously wounded, but the wolf-girl, Miyax, tends him, and he slowly heals to become the new leader. Miyax and Kapu help restore the devastated wolf family after the loss of their leader.
Again, as in all the stories of children raised by wolves, there is grief when Miyax must finally return to her own species. But in Julie of the Wolves, unlike The Jungle Book, she well and fondly remembers her father, whom she believes is lost at sea, as well as her village. When she hears that her father is still alive, Miyax returns to her village to reunite with him. Yet her father is disturbingly changed. He has taken on the ways of the white man, and he too now hunts wolves from airplanes. This man, Miyax realizes, is “after all, dead to her” like her wolf father, Amaroq. But unlike her human father, Amaroq’s wiser spirit still dwells within Miyax and guides her. Again Miyax runs away into the tundra, where she hopes to live with what is left of her wolf family. Miyax sings an elegy for both the soul loss of her father and the real death of the wolf who raised her with much more devotion and constancy:
Amaroq, Amaroq, you are my adopted father.
My feet dance because of you.
My eyes see because of you.
My mind thinks because of you…
The theme of humans also befriending and helping wolves survive is the companion story to tales of our children being raised by wolves. It is also the more common tale told throughout the world about wolves. In China Wolf Totem is considered the best-selling contemporary Chinese novel. The popularity of this autobiographical novel by retired professor Lu Jiamin (pen name Jiang Rong) was unexpected in China, not known for its environmental stewardship or wildlife conservation. Both the book and the movie of Wolf Totem were huge successes in the West as well. Their conservation message was very well received by American audiences, who live in a country that leads the world in reintroducing wolves to their native habitat.
Wolf Totem is set in the grasslands of Inner Mongolia, where the wolves are thought to be one of the reasons the great Mongol warrior, Genghis Khan, was so successful in his conquests. The Mongols, once a great nation and now a minority, live in China’s far north. They believe their original ancestor was abandoned in the wild and raised by a fiercely maternal mother wolf. Because of this wolf-human ancestry, the Mongol herdsmen both revere and struggle with the wolf, called Chono. Sometimes they must also cruelly kill these powerful and otherworldly animals—even the pups in their dens—to protect their livestock. This harsh balance between Mongols and these ancient wolves is threatened when the Chinese Communist government, under Chairman Mao, orders all Mongolian wolves exterminated to make space for massive farming projects. The Mongol culture, like their wolves, is endangered. Soon imported Chinese farmers will overwhelm the traditional herdsmen’s vast open lands. Into this troubled mix of Chinese encroachment and Mongolian survival enters a young intellectual Han student, Chen Zhen, who has been “sent down” by the 1960s Cultural Revolution to learn herding from the nomadic Mongolians.
Zhen is from Beijing and marvels at the breathtaking beauty of the steppes and wild grasslands of Inner Mongolia. While apprenticing himself to an elder herdsman, Zhen is fascinated by the wolves. He is deeply troubled by his Mongolian mentor’s ritual killing of a newborn wolf litter—by piling the puppies in a bag and then hurling them skyward to plunge down to their deaths. Zhen manages to save the last pup. Secretly Zhen hides his cherished wolf pup from the herdsmen and the Communist official in charge of developing the land for farmers. But as the young wolf grows strong under his care, Zhen’s treasure is discovered. He, the Mongols, and the wolves suffer from the encroaching Chinese. When the wolves hide their carcasses in deep snow to save for summer, the frozen sheep are dug up and stolen by a greedy Chinese official—setting off the wolf-human conflict.
The Chinese eradication of the wolves destroys the natural predator-prey balance, so the wild sheep overgraze the grasslands to dust, and rats plague the people. Jiang based the book on his own decade in Mongolia when he too was sent down by the Cultural Revolution. In 1989 he participated in the Tiananmen Square protests and was thrown in jail for a time. His novel is controversial because he intended it as a “critique of thousands of years of Chinese culture” when officials expected a public to be “obedient as sheep.”
In Wolf Totem the wolves are the heroes of another kind of revolution—the Mongolians’ fight for sovereignty and cultural survival—and the wolves’ own struggle to survive the original invaders, humans. These lean and fleet grassland wolves are the symbol of a whole people and their fierce spirit—in the face of modernization and rapacious development. The book was translated into t
hirty-nine languages. In China it was so popular that it sailed past the censors. Amy Qin of the New York Times wrote, “Political dissenters found anti-Communist messages in the novel… while corporations gave it to employees to encourage them to work together like wolves.”
In a moving interview Jiang explained the traditional Mongolian ritual of offering bodies at death to feed wolves. “They do this because they believe wolves return to heaven,” he said. “So when wolves die, they bring the human souls with them to heaven.” The venerable role of the wild animal as psycho-pomp—one who crosses over and helps other souls to cross over—is echoed in other cultures, like the ancient Greek dolphins who carry souls to the next world or in Tibet, where vultures lift the dead souls into the sky.
When I saw the gorgeous 3-D film adapted from Wolf Totem, directed by French filmmaker Jean-Jacques Annaud, in a Seattle theater, every seat was filled. Here on the Pacific Rim the audience included many Asian viewers. One of my Chinese American students was amazed and delighted at both the book and the film’s strong condemnation of wolf killing.
“China is responsible for buying so much of the illegal traffic in wildlife,” she told me. “From paying poachers for endangered rhino horns to elephant tusks to Moon Bear bladders to capturing marine mammals for Chinese aquariums.” She really didn’t expect such a rapturous and sympathetic portrayal of the Mongolian wolves. Or the powerful ecological message about saving wolves.
The book and the film have very different endings. In the book the young hero kills his cherished wolf pup because he “doesn’t want the wolf to become a servant to man,” explains the author. Because the wolf pup is ill and the Chinese occupation of his ancient territory threatening, the wolf must “die like a soldier, not die like a dog.” Jiang understands why, in the film version, the wolf pup must be set free in a wrenching scene between man and wolf. “Westerners would not be able to bear this,” he told the New York Times. “So having the main character release the wolf, this provides a little warmth and hope to viewers.”
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