The Wisdom of Wolves

by Jim Dutcher

  I suspect that if the other wolves had been desperately hungry, they would have been more apt to take a chance on an unfamiliar meal. In general, though, wolves seem reluctant to try food that they have not eaten before. Young wolves will happily eat anything if they see an older wolf eat it, and their food preferences appear to develop out of these early experiences. The implications are certainly worth noting as we strive to find a way to live peacefully alongside wolves. I believe that if there are abundant deer and elk around, wolves will be as reluctant to kill a cow or sheep, as Makuyi’s packmates were to eat that steer. As a matter of fact, we’ve heard accounts from ranchers who have watched wolves wandering disinterestedly among their cattle. When it came time to hunt, the wolves targeted only the deer that had been grazing among the herd.

  Unfortunately, the converse situation has played out recently in the American West. The wolves who were reintroduced into Wyoming and Idaho in 1995 were mostly young wolves captured in Alberta. They had to start from nothing, building a new culture in a new land without elders to teach them. When we removed them from an established culture, we opened the door to them experimenting with unfamiliar domestic prey. In a few protected places we have permitted packs to mature and establish firm cultures, but by and large we continue to disrupt this development through hunting. It’s tragic for them, but it doesn’t do us any good either. Every time we kill a pack elder, we destroy the pack’s guiding culture and—critical for us—its predictable behavior, and so we willfully continue to undermine the very thing that could make coexistence between our two species possible.

  When wolves are allowed to maintain their pack cultures, they are so much more predictable. They hunt the prey they’re used to hunting in the places they know best. They tend to den in the same locations and use the same rendezvous sites year after year. But wolves who have lost their pack knowledge are desperate and unpredictable; their behavior can be random. Without the guidance of pack elders and without the memory of their hunting culture, they are more likely to enter human territory and prey on livestock. A large, stable pack is a far better neighbor to ranchers than a fragmented bunch of young wolves.

  We see this in other social animals as well. Young elephants that have lost their mothers to poaching and war become shell-shocked and aggressive young adults. Orphaned young bull elephants are frequently responsible for raiding crops, destroying property, and injuring people.

  There are human parallels. In areas ravaged by war, children lose parents, friends, and homes. Their education halts, and strife becomes their teacher. They learn to navigate in an unforgiving and unstable world. Long after the conflict has ended, they remain lost and unable to integrate. Such children become easy fodder for the false security of extremist groups, maintaining a legacy of violence.

  The chilling conclusion is that what we are doing to wolves, we are also doing to ourselves. When we marginalize the older generations, we lose the experience—their ledger of mistakes, successes, and lessons learned. We lose the map of the past that could help us navigate our future. If we don’t look to our elders, we ignore our history and shared experience, and we end up repeating the same mistakes over and over again. If we truly cherish the young and let our elders be our teachers, we can break the cycle of ignorance and grow together.

  THE SAWTOOTH PACK DIDN’T GROW OLD at wolf camp. We always knew that our film project would have to end, and that the wolves would have to move. So before the project even started, Jim had been searching for a site where he could build a permanent home for them. Staying in the Sawtooths was never an option. The Forest Service made it clear that it was under too much pressure from the anti-wolf community to continue to extend our permits. We met with representatives of the Nez Perce Tribe and reached an agreement to build a new enclosure and education center on the Nez Perce Reservation in northern Idaho. There, the Sawtooth wolves spent their remaining years. Although we didn’t get to see them every day, as we had before, we still made regular trips to renew our bonds. And every time we arrived, we would be treated to an excited greeting, as each wolf would jump up on us to lick our faces in a frenzied hello and, perhaps—or so we felt—ask the question, “Where have you been?” It broke our hearts that we couldn’t tell them how much we still loved them, even though we were far apart. Years passed, but they never forgot us.

  For me, it was especially heartwarming to see Lakota, the wolf with whom I had the closest bond of all, make the graceful transition into a pack elder. He had spent most of his younger years as the omega, but after the age of six or so, that appeared to change. He didn’t have some great breakout moment. And I never saw him dominate another wolf to demonstrate that he had moved up in the social hierarchy. Rather, the other wolves just seemed to allow him to retire into the role, so to speak. It was as if he had lived long enough and had enough experience that the other wolves—especially the youngest ones—treated him with a type of reverence.

  I took so many photographs of Lakota as a three- and four-year-old, when he was enduring life as the omega. I remember how back then his yellow eyes often betrayed the anxiety that came with his low status. When I saw him in his later years, I was happy to see that anxiousness gone from his eyes. In its place was a calm look of wisdom and, I think, a little bit of weariness.

  Cared for by humans in a safe environment, Lakota lived to the old age of 12, even longer than his brother, Kamots. Younger wolves outlived him, but for me, when Lakota left this earth, I understood that the Sawtooth Pack we had loved was but a memory. He had been there from the beginning, living his life beneath the towering peaks of the Sawtooth Mountains, experiencing every moment and every season as deeply as any wolf can. He never had the responsibility of an alpha, but I believe that his kind and playful spirit held the pack together every bit as much as Kamots, the alpha, did. From his playful youth to his graceful aging years, Lakota guarded the heart and the wisdom of the Sawtooth Pack.

  Motomo, watchful and curious

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  STAY CURIOUS

  JIM

  KAMOTS SAT BESIDE A FIR TREE and eyed us quizzically as we went about our work. We trudged back and forth through the snow, wheeling heavy bales of straw to a clearing in their territory. As we arranged the bales in a rectangular shape, Motomo and Amani trotted over to watch. We stacked a second, smaller rectangle of bales on top of those, and then an even smaller level on top of that. By the time we were halfway through with our job, every wolf in the Sawtooth Pack was quietly observing us. At times like these I wondered what they thought of us—always scurrying around, busy with some chore or other, never appearing to take time to play. We must have been baffling creatures to them.

  Our preoccupation at this moment was the construction of an artificial hill to enhance the wolves’ territory. It was early in the project, and I was still experimenting with visual ideas for the film I was creating. I was trying to solve a geographical problem. To the eye, the scene was dramatic, with a 10,000-foot mountain as a backdrop, but the peaks were too close for me to get both the wolves and the mountain in the same shot. To do that, I needed to find a way either to make myself lower or make the wolves higher. A friend had suggested that a small hill might add an interesting perspective. Wolves love to climb up on boulders and fallen tree trunks to survey their surroundings, and they seem to enjoy getting a little bit of height when they are howling. Their territory was a gentle slope rising toward the Sawtooth Mountains. If a wolf climbed the little hill we were creating, I could film from below and cast the wolf against the alpine backdrop. I imagined how regal Kamots would look howling from the top, with the first rays of morning sun lighting Williams Peak with an orange fire. It would be a marvelous image, so why not give it a try? The worst that could happen is that it would look phony and we’d take it down.

  I purchased a supply of straw bales from a local rancher, and after the first few snows had fallen, my small team and I stacked them
into a pile that resembled a six-foot-high Maya temple. To give our creation a natural appearance we shoveled snow onto our structure, trying to create an irregular shape. Then, for good measure, we doused it with buckets of creek water so it would freeze overnight. The project took an entire afternoon. As the sun disappeared behind the Sawtooths and the temperature began to plummet below zero, I took a step back and admired our creation. Once we got a good snowfall, it would look like a huge snow-covered boulder. The wolves’ attention had waxed and waned throughout the afternoon. But now they seemed to sense that our project was complete, and they all trotted back and stared at this giant mound that had suddenly formed in their home territory.

  The next morning, after a quick breakfast, we set out to put the finishing touches on our creation. When we arrived at the clearing, we let out a collective gasp. Our hill was gone, flattened. In its place, a vast beige smear sullied the fresh snow. Evidently, after we had gone to sleep, the wolves had intensified their investigation. From the way it looked, I imagined that they had dug through the snow that we had painstakingly shoveled into place, then chewed through the twine holding the bales together, and, in what must have been the most fun ever, they had shredded, chewed, rolled in, and scattered the straw far and wide. I never did get that perfect low-angle shot of Kamots howling with Williams Peak in the background. On the other hand, I gained a greater understanding of a wolf’s boundless curiosity. So I consider that a success.

  THIS ILL-FATED LANDSCAPING PROJECT was born in our imaginations and nurtured by our curiosity. What could we make? In what ways would it benefit the film? How would the wolves react to it? I wanted to find out, and although the results were not as I had anticipated, it was an illuminating and amusing discovery nonetheless. Curiosity had led us to try something we hadn’t done before, to imagine the possible outcomes and to put the plan into action. The complexity of our undertaking may have been undeniably human, but the drives that set it into motion were not—at least not exclusively so. In fact, the reason it failed was because my subjects—the wolves of the Sawtooth Pack—were just as gripped by curiosity as I was. As we were building, they were wondering: What’s this thing? Why does it smell different? What’s it made of? Why are these two-legged creatures fussing over it? Is there anything worth finding inside of it? They wanted to find all this out.

  Every day the Sawtooth Pack greeted their world with the same curious and slightly mischievous spirit. As much joy as this project brought me, I often awoke at wolf camp with a pit in my stomach, consumed by worries of the day. There were expiring permits to renew, suspicious ranchers to appease, and, looming above everything else, the search for a permanent home for the pack. I was consumed with worries, but not the wolves—how differently they behaved as they awoke on a winter morning. They’d rise from the little hollows of snow in which they’d slept; stand and shake off the night’s ice from their fur; have a long, luxurious stretch; and happily greet each other. They seemed genuinely happy to find themselves in this world again and eager to embrace whatever the new day would bring.

  Every new experience prompted joyous investigation. As winter tightened its grip, the little stream and pond that graced the wolves’ home iced over. The wolves seemed to anticipate this event, eager to carry out what I liked to imagine were their own playful science experiments involving the states of matter. I first noticed their fascination with the frozen pond in their early years. In any season, the pond was one of their favorite places to play, so I was not surprised to see Kamots, Lakota, Matsi, Motomo, and Amani all gathered there one cold winter morning. They all seemed to be fixated on the pond’s surface, and every so often one of them would bounce on his forepaws the way they would when catching mice in the meadow. I didn’t want to disturb their activity, so I took my time getting close enough to see what they were up to. The surface of the pond had frozen fast but was still thin enough to be transparent. As I got closer, I realized that the wolves were chasing the little air bubbles that were being carried along under the ice. It occurred to me that the phenomenon of a solid but transparent object was altogether new to them.

  This phase of their experiment was short-lived, because after a few pounces the ice broke and the tantalizing air bubbles instantly vanished. But then the wonder of shattering ice became their new object of investigation. I watched Motomo go through the process from start to finish, first cracking the ice with his paws and then bending down and gingerly picking up a thin piece of ice in his jaws. He appeared to find a sense of achievement in successfully picking up a large chunk and having it stay in one piece as he held it between his teeth, because he began prancing in a small circle, wagging his tail like a pup and showing off to the others. After enjoying that moment, he let his prize fall to the hard surface of the pond and shatter. He watched the little shards of ice skid in every direction. Each wolf conducted some variation of this experiment, getting particular pleasure out of the experience of taking a single solid object and smashing it into dozens of pieces.

  WATCHING THE WOLVES engaged my own curiosity, and I think they felt the same way watching us. I often found myself wondering who was observing whom. Long after our ill-fated mini-mountain of straw had decomposed and Jamie had joined me at wolf camp, we began a more substantial construction project. I had been looking for a way to become a less obtrusive presence in the pack’s life. Jamie’s arrival, and her new energy, sparked the idea to move our camp inside the wolves’ territory so we’d disturb them less as we entered and exited the enclosure and—we hoped—fade into the backdrop of their lives. But before that could happen, though, we had to do some very visible construction in the middle of their home.

  The wolves greeted this week-long project with the same inquisitiveness as they did our other activities. By this time I had learned how their curiosity could easily turn to mischief whenever we weren’t around to keep an eye on them. Still it was difficult to keep track of every tool and every bit of lumber.

  Our new tented camp consisted of a raised platform upon which our big, round yurt was to stand. From the surrounding forest we cut dead lodgepole pines for the large primary support posts of the platform. We bolted smaller diagonal braces to reinforce the structure, then added a frame on top and nailed planking to it to form a deck. All the while the wolves observed our work. I knew the moment we turned our backs one of them would sneak in to seize a hammer or spill a box of nails, but I was surprised to discover they also took our natural building materials. The pack spent every day surrounded by the same lodgepole pines from which our support posts and braces had been created. The branches and logs that littered the ground failed to spark the slightest interest, but once a human had touched an object, it became something special. If something seemed important to us, it became fascinating to them, even if it was something as simple as the scrap from the end of a saw-cut log. It seemed as if they wanted to learn as much as they could about what we were doing.

  Once the platform was built, we constructed a steep staircase. The steps were open, so you could see the ground below as you climbed to the yurt—a bit too precarious for a wolf to try coming up the stairs, we thought. Then Jamie and I began setting up the big canvas yurt on top of the platform. We planned to enclose the new camp in chain-link fencing before moving any food or personal belongings inside, so the wolves wouldn’t steal our things. But during the earliest phase of construction, we had no barrier. One day, we were inside the yurt, building our storage and cooking area when a huge shadow appeared backlit on the canvas wall—like Little Red Riding Hood’s worst nightmare. It made us both jump. Kamots, always the most brazen, had scaled the eight-foot staircase and was exploring the foreign structure.

  I have since read that in cognitive experiments between wolves and domestic dogs, wolves scored higher on pure problem-solving ability, whereas domestic dogs scored higher on their ability to communicate their needs to a human and get help solving the task. It stands to reason: Dogs have evolved alongsi
de the best problem solvers on the planet, so learning how to talk to us got them better results than struggling on their own. I don’t think a dog could have climbed those precarious stairs without Jamie’s or my showing it the way. But a wolf is a different beast.

  To me the more interesting question isn’t how Kamots climbed it, but why. The eight-foot stairway must have been a struggle for him. There was no food at the top, no tangible reward of any kind. I finally decided that he did it simply because he was curious. His desire to know what was up there was motivation enough. To complete his investigation, he stole a trash bag of building debris. After that, we quickly removed the first half dozen steps of the staircase to prevent further invasion.

  WOLVES ARE NOT THE ONLY SMART, inquisitive creatures. Animals from primates to pigeons to octopuses have been studied for their ability to solve problems and manipulate their immediate environments. On the surface, human beings have more in common with other toolmaking great apes than with a canine species. But I feel we share a certain kind of curiosity more deeply with wolves than with any other creature on Earth. Wolves and humans are both great explorers.

  Some 125,000 years ago, our African ancestors gazed across the Red Sea and wondered what was on the other side. As humans spread into Asia, we encountered Canis lupus, another smart, curious, expansive species. Gray wolves once populated most of the Northern Hemisphere because they, like us, were wondering, seeking, and moving.

  As instinctual explorers, both wolves and humans possess the same inner contradictions. We are creatures of community and family. We have a strong sense of place, of home, and we’ll defend our territory to the death. Yet within both our species burns a desire to break away and see new places. We want to know what lies just over the next mountain or around the next river bend. This may be yet one more reason why wolves and humans forged such tight bonds. As human beings pushed ever farther into new territory, wolves joined us on the adventure.