Wolf Nation

by Brenda Peterson

  That warmth and hope for the future survival of both the Mongols and their Chono is well drawn throughout both book and film. In the film, director Annaud employs real Mongolian wolves, not animation, to bring their story to vivid life. Annaud, who has often worked with live animals in his films, had to acquire a dozen wolf pups from Chinese zoos because wild wolf populations in China are dwindling. Animal trainers raised and worked with the Eurasian wolves (Canis lupus lupus) for two to three years. Annaud devoted several years to filming Wolf Totem because he believed “It’s more than a movie. It shows that one has to protect nature. And if China protects its nature, the rest of the world will follow.” Annaud has a particular interest in wolves. He noted that the Mongols, in conquering and creating their empire, “copied wolves’ technique. Observing. Being patient. Always being together.” After the filming the wolves were relocated to Canada because they only responded to English.

  Wolf Totem was filmed under strict environmental protections. Instead of using cars or trucks, which could ruin these fragile grasslands, the crews carried their equipment several hours a day to the mountain top. Film crews laid down cloth to protect grasslands and imported snow from miles away. In the twenty-first century, when films seem more populated by CGI and 3-D-enhanced superheroes with unattainable powers, it is refreshing to see that once again this wild-animal child and environmental story is attracting a huge audience.

  Instinctively children understand that as small, often defenseless creatures, they also have a lot to learn from wild animals about survival, escape, and even navigating their own peer group’s pecking orders. Children, even those raised in urban jungles, intuitively accept animals as peers. Psychologists tell us that 80 percent of children’s dreams center on animals, whereas only 20 percent of adults have animal dreams. This sympathetic identification with other animals in our childhoods—whether it is we who are raised by wolves or we who befriend wolves—offers us other vital ways of knowing ourselves and the wider, often dangerous world.

  WHEN WE TELL STORIES about other animals, we are often really talking about ourselves. When we make villains of wolves in our stories, we are often avoiding looking into what Joseph Conrad calls “the heart of darkness” within ourselves. It’s telling and disturbing that in a country like America, whose citizens own more guns than in any other country (88.8 percent), it is endangered species like wolves that are also so often in the crosshairs.

  In reading about American gun violence, it is revealing to notice the language the media uses. Media coverage of the 2016 Orlando massacre, for instance, incessantly referred to the murderer as a “lone wolf.” Even in our language we associate wolves with our own primitive violence. Not only does comparing a man who opens fire with a military-grade automatic weapon on a helpless crowd of people to a lone wolf betray our blatant prejudice against this most maligned animal; it also is not based in any biological fact. A real lone wolf has deeply diminished powers to hunt or kill. A solitary wolf must live off smaller ground prey like squirrels and rabbits. Without family for protection and alliance, the wolf endures the most endangered time of his life and will survive only half as long as the eight- to ten-year life span of wolves in the wild.

  Such respected news media as the New York Times are guilty of this pejorative language, as when it wrote, “The self-declared Islamic State underscored once again its favored weapon in its war on the West: lone wolves.” The Christian Science Monitor ran a headline describing a split screen showing an ISIS fighter set to behead a prisoner and a wolf’s head with the slogan: “The West has lone muscles; Islam has lone wolves.” Every time I hear this misnomer, I cringe. I noticed that in BBC radio and other foreign reporting on the Orlando murderer, the phrase most used was “lone actor.”

  Tellingly, American gun violence is the most widespread where wildlife recovery on public lands is fiercely opposed and where lethal management of wolves is usually the first, not the last option. The states most resistant to gun control are also the states where we have a long history of hunting wildlife. Four of the high gun-death states are Wyoming (number one), Alaska (four), Montana (six), and New Mexico (nine)—all states with a penchant for wolf killing. The top three states for gun-related suicides are Montana, Alaska, and Wyoming—again, states that favor wolf hunting.

  How we tell stories about ourselves and other species profoundly affects our ecology and our treatment of other predators. As with the “lone wolf” stand-in for a human murderer, our very language and stories can positively or negatively affect our wildlife policies. There’s an old adage: “thrown to the wolves.” The reality is that it’s wolves who are “thrown to the people.” And those people have firearms—over 300 million guns. With all these easily accessible firearms, Americans routinely and almost daily not only exterminate wolves and other wildlife but also kill our own.

  In such a dangerously violent and gun-toting country, our children being trained and raised by wild animals in their stories might actually be a survival skill they sorely and sadly need. The savage jungle is now in our schools, where kids can be gunned down as brutally as any endangered species. We would all do well to apprentice ourselves to the keen senses of other animals: the stealthy camouflage ability to blend and hide, the sharp hearing and night vision to see in such darkness, the hypervigilance in public spaces that once were safe. Feral children are, most of all, survivors, especially when abandoned by their human village. Why not be adopted, taught, and raised by wolves so we can survive such a terrifying wilderness of human nature?

  WHENEVER I TEACH wildlife conservation and ecology in schools I always ask the children to adopt and apprentice themselves to their favorite animal—and then try to learn that animal’s real “superpowers.” Kids are shape-shifters, easily morphing from human to animal points of view. In their new world animals still talk, adopt humans, and train us. Kids return instinctively to their imagined animal allies. Their identification with and ease of inhabiting another species portends some hope for our own species’ survival. To a child nature is not just “out there”—the green world is still in their dreams and imaginations. That instinctive identification with other animals can shape our ecology as much as science.

  In my wildlife ecology classes both boys and girls often choose the wolf. They tell stories in which their heroes are raised by a wolf family. But their stories are not always what we expect. One middle-school girl, Sarah, whose best friend had recently been killed right in front of her by a drive-by shooter, told her tragic story to my class on the first day. Sadly, the kids showed no shock at her friend’s murder. After all, “Weapons-Free Zone” signs adorned their middle-school hallways and metal detectors blocked the entrance of their library—and this was even before the Sandy Hook massacre and other US school shootings. After Sarah told her story I had no choice but to change my lesson plan for the week. I let the children lead the way.

  It was to the animals, not superheroes, the kids turned to get justice for Sarah’s loss and to solve the murder of her friend. Each child chose to become an animal in an imagined landscape of the Amazon jungle. Every day for a week we gathered to develop a group narrative in which the child-animals tracked the murderer. We made animal masks with wide, night eyes and grew imaginary claws; we raced at recess with the breathtaking speed of big cats.

  All through the group storytelling I watched Sarah, whose expression changed from flatly detached to suddenly alive with purpose. She claimed the sleek power of a jaguar, prowling around, urging us on to find her friend’s murderer, who the children decided must be a drug lord. The group finally found him hiding deep in the jungle and took action: Fish, with her “truth-telling Soul Mirror,” capsized the killer’s canoe and forced him to confess his crime. Then all the wild children growled and screamed out their demand for his apology. Just as the killer was crying out that he was sorry, so sorry, Fish leapt out of the black water and devoured him, body and soul. Then all the young animals cawed and roared and howled out in triumph. Behi
nd their masks shone eyes as dark and satisfied as any wild animal after a kill. For animals have their own ethics. As do children.

  The child’s imagination is a primal force, as strong as lobbying efforts and boycotts and the Endangered Species Act. When children claim another species as not only an imaginary friend but also as the animal within them, they are shaping a cultural ecology. They are restoring something we’ve forgotten. In our adult environmental wars the emphasis has been on saving species, not becoming them.

  At the end of our week together many of the kids, like Mowgli, were reluctant to return to simply their human selves. On the bus home they stayed in costume and character. Sarah took her leave of me with only a deep-throated purr and very quick cat-like tap on my arm. Later she wrote me that she was going to become a poet. “I can still see in the dark.”

  12. WOLF MUSIC

  We mostly encounter wild wolves not by sight but by sound—that otherworldly yet eerily familiar head-thrown-back, heartfelt howling. It begins with one voice, a wolf solo lingering in rich, lonely mezzo, rising up higher octaves to tremble on falsetto or haunting, tenor half notes. Then an echoing wolf chorus joins in with ultrasonic whines, staccato barks and yelps, yipping counterpoints, cello-like bass moans, and a braided, beautifully dissonant harmony, slow to fade. Listening to wolves sing changes us in ways that we can’t fathom but still recognize. When we hear wolves, we know some wild companionship still survives—for we are no longer alone in these dark woods.

  Why do wolves howl? And do these complex vocalizations have a purpose? Howling is one way wolves bond, locate, celebrate, and communicate themselves to one another and the world around them. Howling can be a call to community, a signal claiming territory to alert a rival pack not to trespass, a dinner call for other family members to come share a kill. The University of Cambridge led a team of international researchers to study the howling repertoires, or “vocal fingerprints,” of wolves in diverse, geographical populations. The scientists discovered that at least twenty-one different dialects and accents could be identified. By studying sonograms and sound-wave patterns of wolf howls, researchers realized that, like whales and birds, wolves were “controlling their singing and subject to cultural influences.”

  As one of the researchers, Holly Root-Gutteridge of Syracuse University, noted in her fascinating essay “The Songs of the Wolves,” this means that animals “can be used as a model for humans, allowing us a window into an otherwise cryptic part of our own evolution.” She explains that animals often vocalize in complex codes distinct to their own species. For example, a prairie dog’s alarm calls can encode the color and shape of a threatening predator; humpback whales sing across hundreds of miles to signal not only their location but also to identify their family group. The study asked the question: Is there a shared culture of howl meanings among wolves? They discovered that wolf howls can transmit intent and meaning, like a musical language. This is a sure sign of culture in any species. Root-Gutteridge concludes that wolves are “like music bands with preferred styles of playing: riff-filled like jazz or the pure tones of classical.”

  Despite the difficulties of following wolves in the wild, scientists in this study have recorded six thousand howls from both wild and captive animals throughout the United States, Europe, India, and Australia. They have found, for example, that red wolves and coyotes have similar howling vocabularies. Now near extinction, red wolves have crossbred with coyotes in their only remaining North Carolina habitat. That “may be one reason why they are so likely to mate with each other,” says University of Cambridge’s lead scientist, Dr. Arik Kershenbaum. Does this mean wolves are attracted to howls similar to their own?

  When studying other animals, scientists search for evidence that is observable and quantifiable, but signs of culture can be more subtle. There are quite a few scientists now who are beginning to discuss the idea that other animals—such as whales, elephants, chimpanzees, and wolves—all have a culture. In The Culture of Whales and Dolphins, biologist Hal Whitehead says, “When culture takes hold of a species, everything changes.” The late Alaskan wolf scientist Gordon Haber pointed out that wolves, with their strong family bonds and cooperative hunting skills passed down through generations, were “perhaps the most social of all non-human vertebrates,” mirroring many of our human traditions. Every wolf group develops “its own unique adaptive behaviors and traditions; taken together, these can be considered a culture.” Wolf howling also has meanings we can interpret only through our own use of language and, yes, music. Musicians—those who have spent their lives listening—can help us understand the culture and howling of wild wolves.

  In my search for musicians who are listening to wolves, I was delighted to encounter French classical pianist Hélène Grimaud, who in 1996 cofounded the Wolf Conservation Center in New Salem, New York. I asked this gifted musician why we respond so profoundly to a chorus of howling wolves. Is it woven into our ancestral DNA that we once listened for and located wolves on a kill so that we could hungrily follow and survive on eating their scraps? Perhaps our human ears are warily perked to help us understand that we’ve entered territory shared by other top predators. Is it an attunement in our muscle memory and even our aesthetic sense that allows us to recognize a more ancient culture, another mesmerizing music?

  “Wolves are uniquely individual, so why would we assume that the language is not? You can hear it. Every wolf has a distinct howl,” Grimaud tells me in her quick, rhythmic French accent. “No two howls are the same. You can easily imagine that there are some wolf dialects that are pack or region specific, which develop from isolation or geographical location. And then it becomes a behavioral and cultural difference as well. How wolves treat their neighbors, for example, or handle family dynamics. So their howling is an expression of those differences.”

  Grimaud speaks in thoughtful bursts and riffs, as if following some musical score in her mind that is scrawled over with notes on wolf science. Grimaud is an internationally acclaimed musician, often known for practicing complex piano concertos in her head, not just on the keyboard. Her memoir, Wild Harmonies: A Life of Music and Wolves, traces her musical development, interwoven with the natural history of wolves, and her own two decades of work with captive ambassador wolves at the Wolf Conservation Center. This not-for-profit education center is one of the best facilities in the eastern United States and a leader in the Species Survival Program. Since 2003 WCC has helped to breed and release Mexican and red wolves into the wild. They are deeply involved in the Northeast Wolf Advisory Coalition, which works with the public and federal, state, and local organizations.

  WCC’s education and outreach programs draw over fifteen thousand visitors a year, says director Maggie Howell. Their live webcams have a devoted audience. “Unbeknownst to the wolves, they have a huge, global fan base,” Maggie explains. “The wolves are creeping into our homes via these web cams.” Some of WCC’s most popular on-the-ground events are “Howl for Pups of All Ages” and “Howl for Adults,” where people can blend their voices with wolves. WCC founder Grimaud has spent years listening to wolves.

  “Why do wolves answer our human howls?” I ask Grimaud now.

  “Perhaps wolves are generously nondiscriminating,” Grimaud says wryly, then adds, “One of the things that makes working with any wild animal so interesting and humbling is that you have to interact with them on their terms. Often they are quite forgiving of our bumbling attempts to connect in a proper and dignified way, in wolf terms. It could just be that the wolves interpret humans howling as an invasive threat from another pack. So the wolves want to advertise that this territory is already occupied.”

  In the same way that wolves mark territory by scent, they also set sound barriers that other wolves trespass at their own peril. It’s intriguing to imagine what an acoustic map of wolf country would sound like—growls, guttural bluffs and rubato boasts, fortissimo barks, possessive, snarling arpeggios, a mournful undertone like a walking bass. Sometimes th
e sound map would rise to the sonorous pulse and operatic range of howling wolves. Do wolves ever just sing to make complicated music, as we do?

  “One of the most intriguing elements of wolf howling is what scientists call social glue,” explains Grimaud. “This spreading of good feeling like humans singing around a campfire, feeling closer to one another—it’s that same idea: you howl or harmonize and so reaffirm your social bonds with one another. That’s not surprising. Any pack animal really depends upon the other to survive.”

  Certainly humans are social pack animals. We are also profoundly moved by music, especially by making music together. That’s why the word “harmony” relates both to music and to relations between people, groups, even colors. When we hear human music, we physically attune to that vibration; when we sing together, we blend our voices, matching thirds and fifths and sometimes deliberate, clashing dissonance. We try to fit and find our part in the greater chorus.

  Wolves actually harmonize their voices with ours. “Have you noticed,” Grimaud asks, “that when a human—who is less naturally gifted in that wolf language—joins in a howl and his pitch lands on the same note, the wolves will alter their pitch to prolong the harmonization? It’s very interesting. If you end up on the same pitch as a wolf, he will scale up or down, modulating his voice with yours.”

  If you listen to wolves singing, you’ll hear that wolves rarely howl alone for long before the whole chorus is cued. That chorus is not just about harmonizing; it’s also about survival. There’s a phenomenon called the Beau Geste effect, in which howling together makes it impossible to identify a single wolf’s voice or how many wolves are in concert. Even a family of two wolves can raise a mighty chorus to disguise their small size and create the illusion of a larger group’s voice. In declaring their acoustic territory, the wolf chorus can travel long distances, giving the group the expansive space it needs to survive and thrive.