Wolf Nation

by Brenda Peterson

  An interdisciplinary team of Montana State University researchers, including philosophy professor Sara Waller, is studying two thousand howls from thirteen canid species to better understand “how we can learn about the evolution of language.” Dr. Waller is studying how animals communicate with one another—and if that influences how humans see them. “Just howls can tell us who is out there,” says Waller. She wonders whether ranchers could play recordings of wolf howls to ward off wolves from their livestock. “Because I’m a philosopher,” she notes, “I work with the group on the big, broad questions.”

  These more philosophical questions belong not only to scientists but also to artists and all of us. And wolves and their music have claimed territories not just in the wilderness but also in our human hearts. Throngs of Yellowstone visitors are thrilled to listen to howling wolves. Social media, film documentaries, and nature channels have hugely popular soundtracks of real wolves howling in the wild. Any online search reveals many audio clips, like the PBS NOVA link “What’s in a Howl?” with sound sonography and recordings of a “Lonesome Howl,” “A Pup Howl,” “A Confrontational Howl,” and “A Chorus Howl.” Listen to these to help you identify the different qualities of wolf song. Hélène Grimaud has even recorded a “Wolf Moonlight Sonata” on YouTube accompanied by wolf howling.

  What do highly skilled musicians like Grimaud hear when wolves sing? What beyond any survival strategy are wolves creating in their chorus? Because wolves have a culture, what does their music communicate—if we could listen as fellow artists, with more than our scientific ears? I’m reminded of a New Yorker cartoon in which a huge whale is chasing a human on the beach. The human is waving his arms and screaming in terror. The whale wonders, “Is that a song?” We moderns, with such acoustic familiarity to wolves howling, are no longer afraid when we hear their singing. In fact, we often try to meet them on their same musical frequency. Does this mean that animals also seek to blend with or are attracted to our music?

  “When you practice your piano,” I ask Grimaud. “Do the wolves join in your music by howling along?”

  During her seasons when Grimaud lived next to the WCC in upstate New York, she didn’t notice any exact correlation between the wolves howling and her piano. “Their howling was random, coincidental with my playing,” she says with a laugh. “But there was one foster-wolf pup who seemed to react to violin music when she heard my recordings. She’d come out of her den and raise her head and howl along to the violin strings. There definitely seemed to be a relationship there.”

  Grimaud offers some anecdotal evidence of another animal’s musical appreciation. When she was living in Switzerland, every time she played Bach a cow would come close to her window. “As soon as I stopped playing and went over to the window to make contact with the cow, she’d disappear.” When Grimaud returned to practicing her piano, the cow would return. “But when I switched to Beethoven,” Grimaud says, “she had no interest. Who knows why?”

  Researchers have noted that animals do respond to our music. Cows produce 3 percent more milk when listening to calming music like Simon & Garfunkel’s solacing “Bridge Over Troubled Water.” Dogs in kennels relax, sleep, and seem less stressed when listening to classical music. Monkeys grow calmer and their appetites increase when listening to Metallica’s “Of Wolf and Man.” Elephants sway their trunks together to violin music, and there is even a Thai Elephant Orchestra that keeps a more stable tempo on drums than humans do. Cats, who seem to have little interest in our music, will relax when left alone for long hours listening to “Music for Cats,” compiled by another classical musician. Other experiments on how animals react to human music are fascinating and sometimes hilarious. There is the YouTube sensation, a cockatoo called Snowball, who dances in perfect beat and screeches along to the Backstreet Boys, or a captive sea lion, Ronan, who jives along to the disco beat of “Boogie Wonderland.”

  “If you were going to compose a concerto for a wolf audience,” I ask Grimaud, “would it be a love song, a requiem?”

  I am thinking about the elegy a composer might create for the Judas wolves, those solitary survivors of lethal hunts who are repeatedly radio tagged and then targeted again to betray the location of their next family for a kill. Imagine surviving so much loss.

  “I’ve never been asked that question before.” Grimaud is silent for a while, then says pensively, “Probably I’d choose music with a sense of longing. That’s always what I think when I hear wolves howling. Endless longing.”

  Who is not acquainted with the tender ache, the gravitational pull of longing? A yearning for something so intimate and yet so often beyond us. Like our reach for other animals, other ways of knowing them, other ways we might meet.

  “What if you played a concert for the wolf? What music most embodies for you the wild wolf’s spirit and struggle?”

  “Rachmaninoff,” Grimaud replies without hesitation. She is acclaimed for her impassioned and iconoclastic Rachmaninoff piano Concerto No. 2. This is also one of my very favorite concertos for Rachmaninoff’s brave, muscular musical strength and yet moments of sublime longing. We agree that Rachmaninoff’s music claims a vast emotional range—from Promethean struggle, like Beethoven, to utterly exhilarating transcendence.

  “There is such a quality of being uprooted in Rachmaninoff’s music. And, again, that intense longing,” Grimaud says. “Perhaps it comes from Rachmaninoff leaving his homeland and so becoming a hybrid—one who belongs everywhere but, at the same time, not anywhere.”

  This sounds very much like a wolf’s life—often uprooted in battles for territory, wolves must disperse to find another homeland, wandering and searching to belong again.

  “If you look at the artistic pendulum, Rachmaninoff was a throwback himself, because the musical movement had evolved, and he wasn’t part of that,” Grimaud continues with a palpable energy. One can hear her decades of musical devotion to these composers whose struggle and spirit she revitalizes and robustly embodies in every performance. “Rachmaninoff refused to compromise,” Grimaud says firmly, and she might as well be talking about her own individualistic work. “He stayed true to himself—even though he was nearly an endangered species himself.”

  Rachmaninoff’s music has the “full spectrum of human emotions,” adds Grimaud. “and at the same time there is something inconsolable about his work.” Grimaud pauses, then rushes on at her quick tempo. “It also has this primal quality… in German we call it urkraft—this vitality, this primeval power we feel so deep in our vital core. The force that enables you to make it through everything—even in spite of yourself.”

  Grimaud is talking about the elemental forces in both music and nature that shape us all. Like water, the subject of her latest recording. And like wolves, her lifelong passion. As she speaks I ponder how music, like life, always wants to live on and on, to make more of itself, to sing its own singular song—whether or not anyone else is listening.

  I ask Grimaud about her own life, especially her childhood, in which her parents fretted that she might be too feral for most peers, especially highly civilized French girls. In her memoir Grimaud writes that she has “little nostalgia for childhood” and that she felt her own profound longing for a “paradise inside me, buried.” Restless, excessively energetic, exuberantly extreme, enthralled by mountains and sea, Grimaud also discovered a “predilection for the tragic.” As a child she felt “joy at the outer edge of suffering,” a strange ecstasy that “cast a strange—and I would say, intensely satisfying—spell on me.” Music and the piano both captured her prodigious energy and freed her to “wash away from the soul the dust of everyday life.” In the 1990s Grimaud’s encounter with a captive she-wolf expanded her life’s repertoire to embrace the urkraft of another wild creature. “The wolf was life itself,” she writes, “more biting than the frost. Life itself, with an incredible intensity.”

  “Speaking of tragedy and ecstasy,” I ask Grimaud, “do you know the work of the French mystic Simone W
eil?”

  “Oh, yes,” she responds instantly. We talk about this Jewish-Catholic woman, half-saint, who starved herself to death in solidarity with those suffering in World War II by only eating the same limited rations as others in the war-torn era.

  “Simone Weil wrote that there are two ways to know truth,” I say. “Suffering—and beauty. Maybe that’s what we feel about the wild wolves. The beauty that balances their suffering and ours. What many people feel in this world—this broken-hearted, beautiful world.”

  “I love the way you say it,” Grimaud responds warmly. “Maybe that’s why wolves generate so many emotions, good or bad, in people. That makes them both controversial and fascinating. Something beyond all the explanations that makes us respond so profoundly to wolves.”

  Many scientists, we agree, are wary of speaking about the often deeply emotional connections we feel with wolves. They are afraid of being discredited or losing their research grants if they speak out about the very sensory aspects of this bond. The earthy human-wolf bond relations are explored most in our myths and music. A territory beyond science and logic.

  We talk about whether the wolf’s life is essentially tragic. After all, wolves in the wild rarely live more than ten years. Every day for a wolf is life and death; their deaths are most often violent at our human hands, the teeth of their rivals, or even their family, much like our Greek tragedies. Simone Weil’s tragic vision celebrated the poetic beauty of Greek tragedies. In a book on Weil’s philosophy, author Alexander Nava explains that Weil regarded tragedy as a truth of our human condition that “refuses to ignore the dark and brutal forces in human experience. And for those who suffer, artistic expressions of tragedy—in poetry, art, or music, e.g., the blues—just possibly makes life endurable and even beautiful.”

  As Grimaud and I continue to talk about Simone Weil’s vision and how it illuminates how we understand the fate of wild wolves, I remember the most tragic day of my own life. A sunny morning in 1981 that still haunts me. I discovered a dear friend, dead by her own hand. Gunshot. I dropped my warm, neatly folded, clean-scented laundry. Falling down on all fours beside her silent body, I felt the chill from her draped window. A dark light. As I waited for the ambulance, all I could do was lift my head and wail, a wretched cry that my neighbor’s dogs also joined, their voices blending with mine. A human and canine Greek chorus. We all howled together in dissonant harmony—until drowned out by sirens. Their high, plaintive howls accompanying mine made that moment bearable.

  Maybe wolf howling, like our human music, is really a lament, soulful and also sorrowful. As one of my cellist friends says, “Maybe tragedy to us is the most beautiful—because then all things are possible.”

  LIKE SIMONE WEIL, many other writers have tried to balance a tragic vision with a sense of a dark, divine comedy—every being, animal or human, stumbling along in our brief, surprising fates. Like those picaresque characters in literature. Literary ecologist Joseph Meeker, in his classic The Comedy of Survival, writes that in our literary culture the “tragic hero pits man against nature—both his own and Nature itself.” He argues that the Greek tragic tradition has led us to the brink of ecological catastrophe—because tragic heroes are bent on transcending the natural order (and thus life itself) to consciously choose their own moral order. This sounds to me a lot like wildlife managers in their endless attempts to control and impose their own moral values on wolves. Maybe it is we who are the tragic actors and the wolves are just trying to survive us.

  Hélène Grimaud reminds me, “We really know so little about wolves. There’s still so much mystery about wolves and our relationship with them.” She pauses, then adds in a musing voice, “I think understanding wolves is all about acquaintance… like when I met Alawa, the first wolf to enter my life.”

  In Algonquin, Alawa means “sweet pea.” When Grimaud first encountered this she-wolf she felt “a shooting spark, a shock, which ran through my entire body… and filled me with gentleness… which awakened in me a mysterious singing, the call of an unknown, primeval force. At the same moment the wolf seemed to soften, and she lay down on her side. She offered me her belly.”

  Such trust is extremely rare for a wolf, especially with a stranger. Once, when the wolf was howling, Grimaud realized, “Alawa isn’t howling—she’s calling.” Alawa was “one of the great presences” of Grimaud’s life. Soon more wolves called to Grimaud and inspired her to study wolf behavior and biology with the same intensity she’d given her music. She visited wildlife reserves in America and took a degree in ethology. Grimaud’s bond with Alawa endures still in her work with the Wolf Conservation Center, where one of the ambassador wolves is also called Alawa. Like her namesake, this Alawa and her brother, Zephyr, which means “light” or “west wind,” help educate people as part of WCC’s education programs.

  Acquaintance, as Grimaud says, is one vital way to speak with those who resist the wild wolf’s return, who even want to deny again their right to exist. This approach is confirmed by the rather counterintuitive polls that show when wild wolves share our territories, there is more hope for coexistence.

  “It’s all about acquaintance and true cohabitation,” she says. “In Europe, especially in Spain and Italy, where wolves were never totally eradicated, the farmers have a higher threshold of tolerance. That’s because they never lost their knowledge of living around wild wolves. But, you know, in France, when wolves came back from nearby Italy, it was just as bad as in the worst places. After wolves have been removed, people’s opposition to them seems to grow even stronger at the idea of wolf reintroduction. Because farmers feel threatened, unfamiliar about how wolves truly function, and unaware of how unfounded their fears are. Everything grows out of proportion in absence. So wolves fare better in places they’ve never been eradicated. Acquaintance is everything. What people are afraid of, they have no reason to protect.”

  “People protect what they love,” as Jacques Cousteau says. Perhaps the hope for future coexistence is to keep wolf populations thriving in our wilderness and never let them be disappeared again. At the Wolf Conservation Center teaching kids about living with wild wolves in our wilderness is crucial. “One child at a time,” says Grimaud. “You never know if that child seeing and loving wolves will grow up to be an environmental lawyer or a wolf biologist. One is never too small to have a role to play and spread the message about wolves.”

  Knowledge about wolves’ lives can lead to tolerance and even caring. Beyond wolf politics and pro- or antiwolf arguments, there can be a more harmonious conversation when talking about the sense of a moral order that both humans and wolves share in their complex societies. Grimaud brings up the concept of ethikos, the Greek word for habitual excellence and a philosophy centering on morals and responsibility—what is right and wrong.

  “Wolves follow the laws of their nature,” Grimaud says. “They can seem merciless, but what wolves do makes sense. While so much of what we do doesn’t make any sense.”

  Unlike humans, wolves do not kill entire groups of their own kind. One or two kills in a trespassing family or even a few ferocious fights are usually enough to make a wolf’s territorial point. Ethologist Marc Bekoff writes about animals’ moral intelligence and sense of fair play in Wild Justice: The Moral Lives of Animals: “wild canine societies may be even better analogues for early hominid groups—and when we study dogs, wolves and coyotes, we discover behaviors that hint at the roots of human morality.” Even Darwin believed that animals “would acquire a moral sense of conscience.”

  “What might happen if more artists like yourself also devoted their time and talent to other species?” I ask Grimaud.

  “Well, nature is the ultimate muse and the source of inspiration for all art forms,” Grimaud answers with her characteristic passion. “And nature doesn’t need much of a chance to prove its resiliency. Nature is always there.”

  We talk about how being with animals is a respite from our own humanity, sometimes even a relief. “At some po
int,” Grimaud says with an audible smile, “we desire to have something in our lives that’s not just a human relationship.”

  Grimaud concludes our interview with a poignant story of a group of business people who recently visited the Wolf Conservation Center. When the wolves began their communal singing, “everyone could feel the energy… it was so powerful. You could see it in the reaction of the people, even though they were all being official and dignified. But listening to the wolves’ howl, you could see softness in them. Once people are touched, that’s how they become motivated to make a difference.”

  “Resonance” may be the best word to explain this effect. “Resonance” is “sound produced by a body vibrating in sympathy with a neighboring source of sound.” This natural law of resonance echoes throughout nature, physics, and music. Water, as Grimaud portrays in her latest recording, has tidal resonance—each cascading wave has a ululating length and width that excites the spacious ocean; a tuning fork once struck will set another tuning fork vibrating at the same exact tone; and acoustic resonance matches pitches, amplifying sound at the same frequency. German jazz musician Joachim-Ernst Berendt writes about “the temple of the ear” and explains that “particles of an oxygen atom vibrate in a major key… blades of grass sing.” If grasslands and microscopic atoms are singing to us, how much more do we resonate with the wild, compelling harmonics of wolf music?