The Company of Wolves

by Peter Steinhart

  It seems to me that we make a similar abstraction when we talk about the roles or effects of wolf predation. Biologists ask us to overlook the individual suffering of prey species for the sake of the ecosystem and the ongoing process of evolution.

  But there are people who cannot easily sublimate the suffering in the numbers. So while some of us out there in the snow are puzzling out the unfeeling facts of predation, others cannot look upon the carcass of a deer without confronting its suffering. It is fine to argue that the deer died with dignity, that this was nature’s way, that predation is part of the plan, that starvation is not necessarily any better than being dragged down in the snow by a pack of wolves. But not everybody can make that abstraction. Thus the regret, the uneasy glances away from the kill on the ground, to the trees and chickadees and life.

  It’s the discomforting end of humankind’s bargain with consciousness. We empathize with other beings and imagine we feel their pain. Either the empathy blinds us to the mechanics of life, or we shut the empathy off.

  Some people have no qualms about looking upon death, or about taking the life of a deer or a wolf. Some feel the taking is a blessing that gives them food, or that taking the life of an animal is a measure of their own competence and deserving effort. Others feel the taking of any life brutalizes both the victim and the killer. Killing is something we don’t agree upon. We find our own private understandings, and we shall probably never have a shared understanding of killing, never find an intersection between biology and spirit where predation makes real sense.

  And because of that, we shall forever argue about wolves.

  4

  THE VOICE OF THE WOLF

  It is late at night in Algonquin Provincial Park in Ontario. The moon is a pale glow behind the rainclouds driving in from the west. The night is full of messages. Maple leaves rustle, and the wind sighs through spruce boughs. Green frogs twang like loose banjo strings. Spring peepers shrill like police whistles. Mosquitoes whine. John Theberge steps quietly out of his battered blue truck. He is tall and rangy, with a salt-and-pepper beard and bushy black eyebrows. Behind his thick eyeglasses, he has a faraway look, as if he is dreaming. His wife, Mary, a petite, sharp-featured, energetic woman, slips out the passenger side. Both are dressed for the field, socks pulled up out of their boots and over the cuffs of their trousers to keep the blackflies out. They are careful not to slam the doors. The lights are turned off.

  Theberge stands quietly, adjusting his ears to the small noises of the night. Then he tilts his head back and howls. It is a loud, straightforward unmusical howl, in slightly descending notes—not deep and melodramatic, not a movie sound-track version of a wolf, but more like the long steamwhistle shift call at a steel mill. He doesn’t bother to cup his hands to direct the sound. He has been doing this so long that he knows it is unnecessary.

  From off in the darkness comes the yipping, and then the crooning, of wolf pups howling back. Next a deep, throaty adult voice joins in, rising slowly and then descending, howling repeatedly, its refrain something between a moan and a song. It is the sound Stanley Young held was “so frightfully piercing as to go through your heart and soul.” The Theberges are transfixed by the performance.

  The voice of the wolf is the only aspect of the animal most people have any experience with. They have heard wolf howls, if not in the forests of Minnesota or British Columbia, in the sound tracks of television movies. Because this sound lodges in an older, less tutored part of the mind, it is the most emotional point of contact we have with the creature. If wolves clicked or burped or brayed or wheezed, they would be, in our minds, a far different animal.

  The Theberges spend their days setting traps in order to radio-collar wolves. They spend their nights howling. The wolves’ responses give some idea of whether they’re breeding and how many are out there without collars. “Usually when you howl,” says Theberge, “you get the pups answering first. Then the adults answer.” Often they get no howls back, but one wolf howled back a hundred times before tiring of the game. Sometimes a wolf creeps up to them in the darkness, hidden in the bushes. “It will whimper, as if wanting to come along,” explains Theberge, “but it doesn’t have enough incentive to come out of the bush.”

  Says Theberge, “Mary and I have undoubtedly howled at wolves more than anybody.” Indeed, he has been howling at wolves and listening to their replies for more than thirty years. But he still can’t say what the return howls mean. “I don’t know if that means they think we’re insane or it’s a note of pleasure.” What the howl means is a question he has been pursuing in one way or another for most of his life.

  Theberge began in 1959, when he was just a high-school student, working for the Canadian biologist Douglas Pimlott, who had begun that year to study wolves in Algonquin Provincial Park. Pimlott had seen that hunters and farmers were pushing the wolf toward extinction all over its range, and he felt wolves belonged in the ecosystem. “It might be said that the wolf was one of the last natural resources to be included in the great modern movement toward conservation,” Pimlott wrote. He wanted to see Ontario’s bounty on wolves eliminated, and he knew that the development of an argument that would convince hunters, livestock owners, and the politicians who listened to them would require the study of wolves.

  No one had studied wolves in a forest environment like Ontario’s. Murie had done his study in the open landscape of Alaska; Ian McTaggart Cowan had done his in the Canadian Rockies, where wolves were more visible. Here, in Algonquin Provincial Park, the forest of oak, maple, birch, poplar, fir, pine, and spruce has a thick understory. Pimlott had started with little idea of how to see enough of wolves to learn anything in this leafy environment. He hadn’t the luxury of radio collars, which hadn’t yet come into wide use. He did have a Labrador retriever, which he let run loose in the woods. “It actually did come back with two wolves one night,” says Theberge. “But it didn’t work out as a research tool.”

  Pimlott wanted to know how many wolves were in the park, and decided that getting wolves to howl would help locate them. He had found that captive wolves would reply to recordings of their own howls, so he mounted huge, trumpet-shaped speakers on the hood of an old government truck and proposed to drive the truck down logging roads in the park, broadcasting recorded howls. His first recording was of three timber wolves, three coyotes, and a coyote-dog, all howling together, which he thought sounded like a mixture of adult and juvenile wolves. He would crank up the big speakers, play the recording, and wait to see if other wolves responded.

  On one of their first tries, Theberge recalls, they drove out into the woods. “I was about to play the tape of wolves howling. Doug said, ‘I’m going to go to the top of this hill to see what happens. Give me five minutes and turn on the tape and blast it out.’ ” Theberge waited the requisite five minutes and turned on the tape. Immediately, wolves began to howl all around him. It was an unexpected and unnerving reply. And almost as immediately, there came a crashing in the bushes, and Pimlott, breathless and frightened, came running to the safety of the truck. “He didn’t know what we had stimulated,” says Theberge. “None of us knew what we were doing in trying to trigger the howls ourselves. We wondered if we were triggering aggression.”

  Having only studies by Murie and Cowan to go by, Pimlott and Theberge knew almost nothing about wolves, and the weight of centuries of folklore hung upon their imaginations. “We all believed that wolves were safe,” says Theberge, “but we had a few exciting encounters.” Wolves would sometimes run toward the researchers when they howled them up. Once, three wolves came toward them at a gallop, not howling back. “If you didn’t know what was going on, you’d be scared,” he says. “The whole experience is open to misinterpretation. I knew that no one had been attacked by a wolf, but I thought, ‘Who’s the most likely to be the first?’ ”

  Paul Joslin was a student of Cowan’s at the University of British Columbia when he joined Pimlott’s Algonquin Park study. “I didn’t know anything a
bout wolves at that stage,” he recalls. Today, Joslin is director of research and education for Wolf Haven International, a wolf rescue-and-education center in Tenino, Washington. Beneath his white hair and beard, he is placid and soft-spoken, and he has a broad, outgoing curiosity. “Doug wanted to use howling as a way to census wolves,” he says. Joslin would pack the big speakers on his back and spend the whole night walking miles into the woods along a railroad right of way, stopping now and then to play Pimlott’s recorded howls and listen for responses.

  Like Pimlott, Joslin was unsure how the wolves would respond to him. Finding himself nervous about being out alone in the woods, he thought he might be experiencing an ancient fear of predators, something ingrained in the human psyche by millennia of life in the woods. “I found in those early weeks that there wasn’t a sound that you didn’t right away identify as friend or foe.” A beaver slapping its tail on the water in the gloom of night a few yards away would just about put him into the air. “If you had a slap right beside you, you would suppress the impulse to leave the ground before you consciously heard the sound. And then it would hit you: ‘It’s a beaver.’

  “I had the odd time where I accidentally got too close, and I howled, and the pack was right next door to me, and they came to check me out. They sounded like dogs coming. They came crashing through the bushes. I could hear them shuffling around me. I couldn’t see anything. And the moment they were downwind of me, they were gone.

  “But one night, I was howling back and forth with some wolves down a valley, then I hear crash, crash, crash!” A wolf was coming toward him through the bushes. “This wolf stopped in the brush and started to bark and growl. It kept moving back and forth, growling and barking. I put my back against a tree, then moved to another tree and put my back to it. I went from tree to tree, all the way up the hill. It carried on for twenty-some minutes, by which time I’d already gotten to the top of this small mountain and back to my trail.

  “It’s one thing if I have a moose encounter. Then you go around the problem. But here the animal I’m working on has threatened me. It’s like falling off a horse: you’ve got to get back on, you’ve got to deal with it. I went back the next day with the only weapon I had, which was an ax. I didn’t find any wolves, but there was a freshly killed deer there. That was enough.

  “I talked to Doug and said, ‘I need one of three things: an assistant, a pistol just in case as a backup, or a dog as a companion.’ Doug came up with a high-school student. He was built like an ox. That solved the problem.” Or at least it made Joslin comfortable enough to see that there wasn’t really a problem. Wolves never attacked him, the student, Pimlott, or Theberge. He and Theberge would find that, even if they approached wolves feeding on a kill, the wolves would run off before they got within two hundred yards of them.

  At first Joslin got few wolves to howl back at him when he used the speakers. On a whim, he tried howling himself. “After some time, I finally found a wolf pack. They howled back. For a time I tried a combination of the recorded howling and my howling to get them to respond. At the end of the summer, I had 15–percent better results howling myself than using the recording.” He believes his own howls got more replies because the wolves took the recorded howls for the boasts of a strange pack suddenly turning up in their territory and were intimidated. Also, the recorded howling broadcast the sound farther, and a pack miles away might have responded, beyond the reach of Joslin’s hearing, and exhausted its will to reply before Joslin got within hearing range. Once wolves have howled, they will typically remain silent for twenty or thirty minutes. Perhaps they are listening for other packs, or they are musically sated—no one knows why.

  When Joslin heard howls, he would record the compass bearings from which the sound came and plot them out on a map, then, in daylight, go in to look at the site and perhaps find dens. Sometimes he would find something unexpected. Once he found a dead wolf near a den in a rotted-out tree. When he took her into camp and necropsied her, he found she had more than ten broken ribs. He went back to the den. Looking it over carefully, he found bear hairs on the opening of the den.

  So little was known about wolves that discoveries came quickly. They found that there were two peaks in wolf howling—one in the winter, when they are courting, and one in the summer, when the pups are out of the den. Joslin found that, after they left the den, wolves would move to a meadow in the forest, where adults would leave the pups while they hunted. They would keep to that meadow a few days or weeks, then move to another. “I thought, ‘What am I going to call these things?’ I looked at Murie. He said they rendezvoused together. I said, ‘Fine, we’ll call it the rendezvous site.’ ” As radio collars came into use, Theberge began trapping and radio-collaring the wolves, and the researchers could spend their nights riding the logging roads, radio receivers in hand, trolling the airwaves for wolves.

  Pimlott, Theberge, and Joslin were growing comfortable with wolves. The ones they caught in traps or snares seldom offered any resistance, displaying instead “a total fear response,” says Theberge. “We’ve hardly ever had one lunge at us. In some, the parasympathetic nervous system kicks in and they’re quiet, basically fatigued.” He and Mary once followed a radio-collar signal to a wolf caught in a snare. “It was alive,” he says, “but it was cartwheeling and strangling itself. We didn’t have any drugs or equipment. We went up to it and it just went into shock.” Theberge put a snowshoe over it to restrain it while Mary released it from the snare. The wolf lay in the snow passively until they left, then scampered off. “We could do a lot of this work without drugging the animals,” says Theberge. “But holding them down stresses them, so it’s better to have them out.”

  In the early days in the dense Algonquin woods, howling proved to be the best way to locate wolves. Since the team heard wolves more than they saw them, they grew especially interested in the meanings of wolf vocalizations. They found that wolves make a complex and varied array of sounds—howls, barks, growls, whines, squeaks, and combinations of these noises. Traditional peoples and modern writers alike have held that these vocalizations constitute a language that conveys specific information. Jason Badridze thinks his Georgian wolves have distinctive howls to inform other members of the pack when they have killed something. He believes wolves can even convey numbers vocally. Farley Mowat wrote in Never Cry Wolf that an Eskimo told him that wolves passed on news of moving caribou herds from one pack to another. People who keep captive wolves frequently say the wolves know who is coming to visit and convey this to other wolves many minutes before the guest arrives.

  Whines and whimpers are soft, high-pitched sounds that humans generally regard as plaintive or begging, whimpers usually being described as short bursts of sound, and whines as longer, more drawn-out vocalizations. Both can start as squeaks at the upper ends of the human ability to hear. Dr. Michael Fox, who has done extensive studies of wolf behavior at Washington University and the St. Louis Zoo, reported “undulating long whines” by an adult as it brought pups out of a den. Pups whine in pain, but they also whine or whimper to adults during greeting ceremonies after the adults return to the rendezvous site or the den. Joslin was once howling near a den when a pup howled back at him and then rushed toward him, whining.

  Adults also whine when greeting or submitting to a higher-ranking adult. A captive wolf will go from growl to whine and back again if a human handler tries to take its food away. It will lay its ears back and wag its tail and whine and attempt to lick, then bare its teeth and flare its ears and growl, then lay the ears back again and whine and wag its tail submissively.

  Barks are short bursts of sound lasting less than a tenth of a second. Humans interpret them as alarms or warnings, something like our shouts of “Fire!” or “Scram!” Joslin feels that single barks are alarms and seried barks are threats. A growl ending in a bark by an adult may send pups running into the den. Often a sharp bark ends a howling session. When researchers have approached den sites or rendezvous sites too cl
osely, they have heard one or two sharp barks and a drawn-out bark in a series of lower pitches. Joslin once heard such barking repeated for twenty-seven minutes, with growling between the barks, and felt it was a warning. John Fentress, of Dalhousie University, could make a captive adult bark by entering the cage and howling while it was howling. When Murie heard wolves bark, he could usually see them, and they seemed to him to mean to be seen. Once he attempted to get close to a den and adults came toward him barking. Barking may have other meanings as well. In captive wolves, barking has been observed in animals trying to solicit play. Pimlott heard two wild wolves howl and bark as they approached each other, then go off into the woods howling together.

  Growls are deep-throated sounds which humans universally interpret as threatening. A wolf may growl at another wolf when its tail is high, its legs are stiffened, and its hackles are raised, and follow with an attack. Growling is usually heard among wolves of higher status. Very subordinate wolves seldom growl; typically, they whine in submission. In a dominance fight at the Folsom City Zoo, Lupine, the lowest-ranking wolf, was attacked by all three of the other wolves. While they mauled her, they growled. But she neither growled nor whined; she curled her lips and showed her teeth and snapped her jaws loudly and repeatedly. Growling is the least recorded of the wolf vocalizations, probably because it is usually directed at fellow wolves. Observers watching den sites are usually too far from the wolves to hear a growl if it is uttered, for growls do not carry long distances. Rabid wolves attacking humans have been said to growl and snarl.

  The howl is the form of expression that most fascinated Theberge. To human ears, the howl is the wolf’s masterpiece. A drawn-out, continuous sound, sometimes lasting more than ten seconds, in which the wolf’s voice rises and falls melodically, the howl is produced by vibration of the animal’s vocal cords. Just as a violin string vibrates at several different frequencies—at halves or thirds or quarters of its entire length—when it is plucked, wolf vocal cords vibrate at more than one frequency, and thus produce complex tones. Theberge’s studies showed that, whereas human ears hear only one tone, the howl actually consists of a fundamental tone and a number of harmonic tones, usually only one, two, or three, but sometimes as many as a dozen.