The Wisdom of Wolves

by Jim Dutcher

  THE FIRST LITTER, BORN IN 1991, produced the pack’s two most famous faces: the brothers Kamots and Lakota. Their markings were classic wolf: mottled gray fur with a charcoal gray mask, a light muzzle, and amber eyes. As pups, and as adults, the two were difficult to tell apart from looks alone, but their behavior left no doubt as to who was who. Because wolves had long held a place in the culture of many Native American tribes, we had decided to use words from various indigenous languages to name these wolves. We called one of the new pups Kamots, the Blackfoot word for “freedom.” He was a confident and curious young wolf. He held his head and tail high, and moved with a sure-footed lope toward any sound or perceived danger. By their second year, Kamots had solidified his position as the alpha—the top of the pack hierarchy.

  His brother was just the opposite. We called him Lakota, which means “friend” in the Lakota Sioux language. He was definitely friendly but also timid and insecure, and his lack of confidence meant that the rest of the wolves sometimes picked on him. When there was any current of aggression within the pack, Lakota often bore the brunt of it. He was also playful, though, and was usually the one to instigate a game of tag. It seemed to be in his best interest to keep the pack’s mood light, and he did this beautifully.

  In this first litter there was also a shy, mysterious female with a coat of black and brown, and piercing yellow eyes. We gave her the name Motaki, the Blackfoot word for “shadow.” Motaki was always the first to back down in any confrontation with her siblings—even more than Lakota—but she was also playful. For a time the wolves treated her as the pack omega, at the bottom of the hierarchy. She was timid, but she was also the one who could work the pack into a playful mood and get a game of tag going. Like Lakota, she could keep the pack’s mood light. Still, there were times when the other wolves would get a bit too aggressive, and when that happened, Motaki would go off by herself.

  I often wondered if she would ever be able to rise out of her omega stature, but I would never find out. One June evening when Motaki was just two years old, a mountain lion scaled the tall fence at wolf camp. The wolves’ territory was large enough that the mountain lion could attack silently without the other wolves or humans being aware. It was the only time that the fence was ever breached, but gentle Motaki’s death shook us to the core—as it did the others wolves. That incident convinced me that wolves feel the pain of loss as sharply as we do. They grieve and they mourn and they miss each other. Of that I have no doubt.

  The second litter of pups joined the pack just after the loss of Motaki. In looks and in personality they were as different as three wolves could be. We called one of them Matsi, the Blackfoot word for “sweet and brave,” and he fit his name perfectly. Of all the wolves he was the lightest in color. His fur was almost beige, and his face bore only a delicate mask. He had a sunny disposition to match his looks. He was seldom aggressive, and he didn’t stoop to fights over who ate first or who was slightly higher in rank. He just kindly and gently assumed the role of beta wolf, the second-highest-ranking member of the pack, dominant to all but the alpha. When we added new pups to the pack a few years later, Matsi took it upon himself to look after them. We also began to notice that Matsi subtly protected Lakota, who had been pushed into the omega position after Motaki’s death. Matsi was a peacemaker, a puppy-sitter, and a friend to all.

  The second of the trio was a dark wolf we called Motomo. As a young wolf he was almost completely black, and as he aged, his fur took on a dignified grizzle. His name was also a Blackfoot word, meaning “he who goes first.” Motomo didn’t actually go first—that was Kamots. But he didn’t go last either—that was Lakota. He just sort of did everything on his own terms. Strangely, Motomo seemed to take a keener interest in our human activities than some of the other wolves did. He was not interested in direct contact with us; he was just very observant. When the rest of the pack was out of sight somewhere, we’d notice Motomo sitting alone, watching us chop firewood or shovel snow with his keen yellow eyes, as though he were trying to figure us out. He was cool, smart, and enigmatic. Jamie often called him “a man of few words.”

  The last of the new litter was a flamboyant wolf we called Amani. His name was also a word from the Blackfoot language, meaning “speaks the truth,” but it wasn’t a very fitting name. He was a showman full of bluster and bravado. Unfortunately, when he wanted to show off, he often did so by picking on Lakota, straddling and nipping at the beleaguered omega. For lack of a better word, he was the bully of the pack. On the other hand, when pups were around, Amani could be an absolute clown, indulging their every whim. A bully one moment, playful and endearing the next—Amani definitely embodied the complex and often contradictory inner life of a wolf.

  WITH THE SAWTOOTH PACK STABLE AND HAPPY, I found myself making the biggest and happiest change in my own life. On a cold day in late December 1993, I picked Jamie up at the airport and whisked her off into the Sawtooth Mountains to sleep in a tent next to a pack of wolves, and to be by my side for the rest of my life. It had begun with a simple smile seven years earlier, boarding a flight to Washington, D.C., from Heathrow Airport. The smile in question belonged to a striking young woman with jet-black hair, dark eyes, and a backpack slung over one shoulder. I noticed she wore a beaded necklace distinctive of eastern Africa, so I asked, “Have you been in Africa?”

  “Yeah, what gave it away?” she asked with good-natured sarcasm.

  Then she flashed that smile again. Thus began the richest partnership of my life. Although we were not sitting together, we talked a bit during the long flight. I told her I had been visiting my sister, who operated a tented camp in a remote area of the Maasai Mara in Kenya. She said she had been in Zimbabwe, on safari with a girlfriend, touring the national parks and photographing wildlife. I described the thrilling time I had spent photographing cheetahs as they hunted gazelles on the savanna. It was clear she was as passionate about animals as I was—in fact, she had just taken a job in the veterinary hospital of Washington’s National Zoo. It took me until we were at the baggage claim area to summon my courage and say I would be back in D.C. two weeks later—could I give her a call? To my surprise, she said yes.

  That spring and summer of 1987, I flew from Idaho to Washington every month to finish the beaver film. Each time I visited, Jamie and I met for dinner. Our conversations were lively and engaging as we tossed around ideas for future films, but I always felt that something was holding me back. I was still suffering from the sting of a divorce, and I thought I was not interested in marriage again. There was the issue of my two children and the age difference between us, and there was also Jamie’s established East Coast life. And so it did not come as a surprise to me when Jamie called at the end of summer to say that she had become engaged. I listened to her words from 2,000 miles away with the detachment of a condemned man. My entire being told me that I should say something—anything—to make her change her mind, but it seemed too far gone, with too many obstacles and so much distance. Years passed, and everything changed, in her life and in mine. Seven years after that first chance meeting, our shared Sawtooth Pack adventures began.

  From the moment Jamie arrived at wolf camp, her excitement was infectious. She kicked off a brand-new phase of work, a brand-new camp, and additions to the pack. This city girl from Washington, D.C., jumped in with both feet! Her arrival inspired me to reinvent wolf camp and begin an entire new phase of filming. My goal had always been to capture the wolves’ natural behavior on film by getting them as used to my presence as possible. Until that point, my tented camp was located next to but outside the pack’s domain, which meant I had to enter a double gate to film them. Wolves are incredibly curious and inquisitive. Although I tried to be inconspicuous, whenever I came through the gate, laden with gear, they would stop whatever they were doing to come investigate. Their curiosity was endearing, but it interrupted their natural wolf behavior.

  The solution was to end all the comings and go
ings and to merge our world with theirs. Essentially we created a small enclosure for humans within a vast territory for wolves. To keep the wolves from stealing our gear, we surrounded our camp with chain-link fencing. At the camp’s center stood an eight-foot-high platform upon which we erected a yurt—a large, round tent originally used by nomadic horsemen in Central Asia. With our human activities in full view of the wolves, we quickly became uninteresting. The platform itself provided a great vantage point for observing and filming without their even noticing what we were up to, and when we slipped quietly through a gate and into the pack’s territory, they often didn’t even bother to look up—which is exactly what we wanted. For me, this merging of our two worlds was the fulfillment of the Konrad Lorenz quote that had inspired me many years earlier. We were no longer observers of wolves. We had become their social partners, and they opened up their lives to us as never before. From that point forward, every second of film, every still photograph, every observation we made was richer and more intimate.

  As I enjoyed unprecedented filming opportunities, Jamie developed a passion for recording the language of wolves. We knew that for people to care about wolves, they had to see them up close. We came to realize that it was equally important to hear them. Jamie’s pursuit grew into a passion. She delighted in the way the changing atmosphere of the mountains had such a profound effect on the sound of wolves howling, and she set about to capture all the different moods: flat howls on a foggy day, howls that echoed off the mountains on a clear winter night, the lovely dissonance of a group howl, and the mournfulness of a wolf howling alone. Of course the wolves presented her with a repertoire of other sounds that one would never hear without the benefit of proximity and a boom microphone. As the wolves spoke to one another, Jamie amassed a huge library of growls, whines, snarls, yips, and sounds she categorized as “Chewbacca noises”—their own verbalizations, uncannily similar to those of the Star Wars character. They always put a smile on our faces. Jamie’s meticulous recording of their language deepened the intimacy that we were able to achieve. I can’t imagine how we’d talk about wolves without that part of the story.

  With the new momentum that followed Jamie’s arrival, we decided it was time to introduce some new characters into our group of five males. Most important, the pack needed females to be complete. We brought three new wolf pups into the pack, two female and one male. By this point we had reached an agreement with the Nez Perce Tribe of northern Idaho to provide a permanent home for the pack once our Forest Service permit had expired. The Nez Perce were also slated to oversee the reintroduction of wolves to Idaho, so when it came to naming these three new wolves, we decided to use words from the Nez Perce language.

  Two of the pups were siblings, a male and a female. To the girl we gave the name Wyakin. In Nez Perce lore, a wyakin is a spirit guide that appears to children, teaching them life lessons and special songs. Our Wyakin was a feisty spirit, lively and full of mischief. She loved nothing more than rough-and-tumble play with her brother, Wahots. His name meant “likes to howl,” which seemed fitting for a wolf. He was a little more reserved than his sister, and later in life he relieved Lakota as pack omega. Even as they grew into adulthood, Wahots and Wyakin remained inseparable. The two were more than siblings—they were fast friends.

  The third pup was a black female. As we struggled to think of a name for her, a friend started calling her Black Lassie. Of course that wouldn’t do at all. In Nez Perce the word for black is chemukh-chemukh, and the word for girl (or lass) is ayet. Chemukh-Chemukh Ayet was not a name that rolled off the tongue, so we simply called her Chemukh. She was born to different parents than Wahots and Wyakin, and she had a very different temperament. She was timid, like Lakota, but where he merely lacked confidence, she was outwardly nervous and skittish. Early on, Wahots and Wyakin keyed in on her insecurity and often made a game of picking on her. Thus it was to our surprise—and probably to hers—when two years later she came into estrus and Kamots mated with her, making her the alpha female of the pack.

  Chemukh never assumed the alpha role gracefully. With newfound authority she got her revenge on Wyakin, paying back the other female’s prior harassment and more. The hierarchy of a wolf pack is generally divided along sexual lines—an alpha female is dominant over other females and an alpha male over other males—but Chemukh crossed the line and relieved her insecurity by picking on Lakota, a male three years her senior.

  Despite her shortcomings, Chemukh entered motherhood with the assurance of a proper alpha female. In a den she dug herself, in a location she had selected for reasons known only to her, Chemukh gave birth to three pups. By all accounts they were the first wolves born in the Sawtooth Mountains for more than 50 years. All three were dark, like their mother: a male, Piyip, and two females, Ayet and Motaki II. For us, and for the viewers of our film Wolves at Our Door, the birth of these three pups was timely. Just one year earlier, in 1995, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service had released the first wolves back into Idaho. These reintroduced wolves were probably digging dens and having pups a hundred miles north of us that very same spring.

  As a new act was beginning for wolves in America, the curtain was coming down on our wolf project in the Sawtooths. Our Forest Service land use permit was expiring, yet we planned to provide for the Sawtooth Pack for the rest of their lives. It was against the law to set them free, and, more important, they had lost what they needed most to survive in the wild: a fear of humans. On an August evening in 1995 we loaded eight carefully sedated adults and three wide-awake, curious pups into transport crates. In the cool of darkness we made the seven-hour journey north and carried them to their new home.

  WOLVES SELDOM LIVE LONGER THAN 10 YEARS. It is now more than 20 years since we released them into their new home. The visits we made from time to time were full of joy and tears in equal measure. The wolves always remembered us and rushed to greet us as old friends, whining, sniffing, and showering us with licks, even awkwardly trying to sit in our laps, perhaps remembering their days as pups a long time ago. As years went by we would receive heartbreaking news that one had passed, then another: feisty Wyakin, fearless Kamots, gentle Matsi. Piyip, one of Kamots and Chemukh’s three pups, was the last to die, in 2013. In one day 98,000 people shared his passing with us over the Internet. Emotional messages poured in. The Sawtooth Pack had touched the hearts of people around the world.

  We had given them names, but those were only for human ears. We never attempted to teach the wolves their names or call them to us. We only had contact with them if they initiated it. Often they did choose to approach us, and we would sit quietly, welcoming their company. They were free to ignore us or engage with us on their terms, just as they were free to sort out their own issues, establish their own hierarchy, and simply be themselves. This made the moments of connection that we did have with them all the more precious.

  We will never know for sure how they looked upon us. Were we members of their pack or familiar friends? We asked them to be ambassadors for their kind, to help people understand their ways. We asked them to speak for past wolves who had been feared and persecuted, and for new wolves taking their first steps into an uncertain future. The Sawtooth Pack rose to this challenge with more grace than we could have hoped for. We gave them our pledge that we would care for them, respect their space, and honor their message. In return they gave us their trust. We will never forget that gift.

  Sawtooth pups Piyip and Ayet

  CHAPTER TWO

  FAMILY FIRST

  JAMIE

  THE RHYTHMIC BEAT OF A RAVEN’S WINGS stirred my senses. The sound faded into the whisper of wind in the treetops and the gentle rustling of canvas. Slowly I began to remember where I was. I opened my eyes to the dull morning light and the familiar interior of our tent: the oil lamp on the small table beside our cot, the woodstove dark and cold. I could see my breath, but the cold wasn’t as biting as it had been in weeks past, and the air
had the slight smell of damp earth. It was late April in Idaho—a restless in-between time when winter was over but spring hadn’t shown up yet.

  Next to me, Jim was beginning to stir. I turned my attention to the world outside and listened for the sounds of morning at wolf camp—paws crunching through snow and cheerful voices speaking an unknown language. Since we’d moved our tented camp into the wolves’ territory, we’d grown accustomed to hearing them as they shook off the chilly night and said good morning to each other just a few yards from where we slept. Strangely, this morning I heard no such sound. I slipped out of bed and opened the tent flap, looking toward the edge of the forest where the pack usually spent the night. There were depressions in the snow where they had repeatedly bedded down, but the wolves themselves were nowhere to be seen.

  Normally Jim would be busy getting a fire started in the woodstove, but he could tell something was different that morning too. He was already dressed for the cold and was assembling his camera gear. We didn’t have to guess what was going on; we’d been preparing for this day for the last two months, and we knew the wolves have been anticipating it just as much.

  We pulled on our boots. There was no need for snow-shoes, as the cold night had frozen the snow to a hard crust. We headed uphill, past the meadow, to where bare willows gave way to a grove of mature spruce trees. There we found the pack in a mass of energy, gathered around a hollow at the base of a fallen tree. They shifted left and right almost as if they were dancing on tiptoe. With their noses thrust forward they sniffed the air and whined to each other in excitement, pausing every so often to cock their heads and listen. We didn’t want to interfere with their moment, so we kept our distance, but every so often we could hear a sound above the commotion: a faint birdlike chirp rising out of the dark hollow beneath the tree.