The Company of Wolves

by Peter Steinhart

  Frontier Alaska still lives. Greg Neubauer, a placer miner who grew up in the Alaskan bush, sits in his living room in Fairbanks and tells stories of his youth in a mining camp. His father drove a Caterpillar bulldozer from the railhead near Denali one hundred miles across roadless country to Iditarod one winter, with temperatures sixty below zero, in order to make the machine available for him to dig river gravels in the summer. Another year, he caravanned three Cats three hundred miles cross-country into the Brooks Range, a three-month trek in the dark of winter. The paths he cut are both established trails today. Neubauer’s mother shot twenty-seven bears in camp, bears that simply came too close and thereby seemed to pose a risk to her children. When Neubauer was a child, a neighbor was killed by a black bear. The neighbor had heard something outside his cabin and opened the door, and there the bear was. When they found the neighbor, his chest was eaten away. Neubauer recalls wolves breaking into the camp cookhouse one day when his father left the door open; they destroyed everything and urinated on what they didn’t eat. On the wall behind Neubauer is the coal-black skin of a bear he snot after it damaged his airplane and broke into a case of oil cans, biting into every one and spilling their contents onto the ground.

  Such stories advertise Alaska as a place where one may confront a vast and elemental nature. The promise of adventure draws young men and women from the tame and possessive cities of the lower forty-eight to the wilds of Alaska. There is a powerful desire to lead the life of the wilderness family; the young settlers talk about it, dream about it. A few of them even try it.

  Not many stick with it. Living off the land in Alaska is not easy: game doesn’t wait around for hunters, winters are hard, and subsistence life-styles are lonely. Most of the new arrivals usually end up living in the cities, where the jobs are.

  But there is still a powerful desire to lead this life. Though Dick Bishop lives in Fairbanks, he still gets 90 percent of his family’s protein from the woods. “There are a lot of people that have a foot in each camp,” he says. “They have jobs and live in cities, but they hunt for food, they pick berries and fish.” Each fall, they try to shoot a moose to feed them over the winter. Says Bishop, “They feel self-reliant. The part of their lives they appreciate the most is a sample of that life, but they can’t devote themselves to it.”

  Those who hunt say it is harder and harder to stock their winter larder, and many say wolves are to blame for the hard times. Bill Waugaman, a hunter from Fairbanks, complained that in 1992 he tramped an area he had hunted for years and saw thirty-eight sheep and only one bull moose. “I used to see this much game out of the window of my cabin,” he says. “We have an emergency there.” Says Archie Miller, who has trapped for twenty-eight years on the Upper Yukon Flats: “The wolf population is extremely out of hand. The result is, we’ve got hardly any caribou, hardly any moose, and hardly any sheep. Take wolves down a peg or two to the point that we can have game for a generation or two. Do it until it gets back the way it was in the fifties.” Jim Roland of Fairbanks says, “The predators are taking 97 percent of the game, and the hunters are getting 3 percent. The land will hold ten times what’s out there. We just need a new philosophy in Fish and Game.” Bill Hager of Fairbanks urges, “Bring back equal allocation: one-third to the bears, one-third to the wolves, one-third to the humans!”

  But there is a competing view. Only forty thousand of Alaska’s six hundred thousand residents live in rural areas. The vast urban majority consists largely of recent migrants from other states, where, as urban boundaries expand, fewer and fewer people grow up hunting. Today, fewer than 20 percent of Alaskans hunt. The urban majority sees nature less as a pantry than as a spiritual and recreational resource. Says Nicole Whittington-Evans of the Alaska Wildlife Alliance, “Wolves are a part of a natural system. They in fact allow a system to be a healthy system. One of the reasons people move to Anchorage is to be near a system with large predators.” In a poll taken by the Alaska Wildlife Alliance and Wolf Haven in 1992, only 8 percent of the responders supported an increase in the number of wolves being killed. Declared an Alaskan woman, “Nature does things really well. We don’t have to do better. Living within the limits set by nature is the lesson we have to learn for the future. Wolf control should be a method of last resort.”

  To settle conflicts over the uses of wildlife, most states established governor-appointed fish-and-game commissions, like Alaska’s Board of Game. Commissions are supposed to take the politics out of wildlife decisions, eliminate the influence of market hunters and commercial fishermen, and free the legislature and the governor from having to wade through tedious biological reports in order to make decisions. They are supposed to put wildlife questions into the hands of citizens.

  Alaska went other states one better by establishing local advisory committees to report to the Board of Game on local conditions and interests. These committees give a strong voice to the older rural citizens, seldom admitting newcomers or people likely to introduce a contesting view; women are almost completely unrepresented on them. Urban residents often find these committees exasperating. Says former Board of Game member Joel Bennett, “That whole advisory system is poisonous—it’s impossible to work with, it’s stacked. There’s no way they will allow environmentalists to be represented. They’re elected by existing members, and whoever shows up is who votes. They view themselves as experts. And, to some extent, the biologists and the board are stopped.”

  For example, when moose populations crashed in the 1970s, it was probably due in general to overhunting and cold winters. But in the Nelchina Basin, the local advisory committees were convinced that the crash was due to hunter harvest of cow moose. When the moose population recovered and threatened to outstrip the carrying capacity of the land, biologists in the department urged the Board of Game to initiate a cow-moose season. The local hunters, however, managed to get the legislature to pass a law stipulating that the board could not initiate a cow-moose season without concurrence from the local advisory committees. And they would not concur.

  The issue is complicated by the sense many rural Alaskans have that environmentalists in the lower forty-eight and the United States government threaten their way of life. Kelleyhouse says the reason the wolf issue came about in the first place was that in 1980, when the federal government set aside a hundred million acres in parks and refuges, and in the process closed them to hunting, it was a blow to the rural life-style. Closure of all these areas has concentrated the hunters more heavily on the remaining areas. Meanwhile, game populations are declining, as is hunter success. The number of hunting licenses sold in Alaska has also been declining, because buying a license doesn’t guarantee a hunter the chance to hunt. After buying a license, one must get a permit for a specific hunt, but subsistence rights guaranteed by federal legislation give native Americans priority on most hunts. Kelleyhouse, recalling the setting aside of these federal lands, says he is “bitter at the way it was done. Suddenly people are being told they can’t hunt where they hunted all their lives.”

  The state’s tourist industry is now geared more to wildlife viewing than to big-game hunting, and the conflict between the new tourism and the old subsistence life-style is plain to see. At a 1991 Board of Game meeting, when one commissioner suggested that one of the state’s management objectives for wolves ought to be wildlife watching, another replied, “If they want to look at wildlife, they can watch it in my freezer.” When Al Manville of Defenders of Wildlife first appeared before the Board of Game to argue against wolf controls, a board member addressed him as “the goddamned conservationist from Washington, D.C.”

  When Walter Hickel ran for governor in 1990, he reviled the federal government and appealed to rural Alaskan tradition. Hickel won, and his appointments to administrative positions in the Department of Fish and Game reflected rural Alaskan values. When Kelleyhouse was elevated from district biologist in Tok to head of the Division of Wildlife Conservation in Juneau, many saw it as an effort to resurrect wolf
control. Concluded David Cline of the National Audubon Society, “They’re going back in time. They are trying to manage the state as it was in the 1930s and 1940s.” Two years later, five of the seven members of the Board of Game were Hickel appointees. In November 1992, not only was the Department of Fish and Game ready to recommend wolf controls; the Board of Game was ready to approve them.

  The day after Kelleyhouse and Haber debated wolf control in the Westmark bar, the board authorized wolf-control programs in the area of the Delta caribou herd, the area of the Fortymile caribou herd, and the Nelchina Basin. Department officials would conduct the wolf hunts from helicopters in the Delta and Fortymile areas, but would issue permits to selected private individuals to do the killing from airplanes in the Nelchina Basin.

  From the Department of Fish and Game’s point of view, the board’s action boiled down to a commitment to intensive management. The department’s Robert Stephenson said, “We had to do this. I mean, why are we here? To manage low-density populations forever? We’re not just here to sit and monitor. It doesn’t make much sense to spend $12 million a year on monitoring.”

  Said Governor Walter Hickel: “You can’t just let nature run wild.”

  But few people outside the department saw it that way. “This is single-species management at its worst,” said Melody Bankers of Wolf Haven. Former board chairman Douglas Pope called the department’s decisions “myopic” and ascribed them to “upper-echelon wildlife officials … lobbied intensively by interest groups in the hunting community.” An Alaskan native activist said, “It’s an outrage the way they intend to kill them from airplanes and helicopters.” Said Tom Dowling, who delivers the mail on a 240-mile round trip between Tok and Delta Junction, “These people have an agenda that they feel our countryside is supposed to be a meatlocker and provide them with unlimited resources for moose. What they’re up to is extinction of wolves, is what they’re up to.”

  Outside Alaska, criticism burgeoned into outrage. “How dare you spend my tax dollars to harvest wolves so that hunters can have more game to kill!” wrote an Arizona woman, who added, “Such practices enforce the image of Alaskans as barbaric, stupid, ignorant, backward people.” The National Parks and Conservation Association canceled plans for a 1993 conference in Alaska and urged its members to defer travel there. Defenders of Wildlife asked its members to boycott the state until the wolf issue was resolved, and announced plans to sue Alaska and seek a congressional ban on aerial wolf control. The department and the board received forty thousand letters on the issue, some of them threatening board members with violence. When a study by the Alaska Tourist Council predicted that if the wolf-control program was carried out, it would cost the state as much as $235 million in lost tourist revenues, Governor Hickel suspended all aerial wolf-reduction efforts.

  Newspapers accused the state of seeking the extinction of wolves. The charge was ill-considered, for the proposed hunts covered only 3.5 percent of the state of Alaska. But the heart of the controversy was not the possibility of extermination—it was the issue of killing.

  Much of the outrage expressed against the Alaskan hunts was directed at the proposal for the Nelchina Basin, where hunts were to be carried out by private individuals, not yet named, selected by the Department of Fish and Game. Department officials argued that the arrangement would save them money, but there were hints that there was more to it. During the board’s deliberation, board member Jack Didrickson said the arrangement would provide local people with a fine opportunity to harvest wolves.

  Sport hunting of wolves is controversial in Alaska. People disagree as to whether it is proper to take the life of so sentient a creature, and debate whether it is proper to take the lives of animals that aren’t eaten.

  There is also controversy over the methods used to hunt wolves. The wolf is so wary, so likely to flee at the scent or sound of humans, and so dispersed in the vast Alaskan landscape, that it is a rare hunter who can find and approach one on foot. The only way to locate and approach wolves consistently is to use an airplane. But it is a violation both of state law and of the federal Airborne Hunting Act of 1971 to shoot at animals from an airplane or to use aircraft to herd, drive, or chase animals. For years, holding that it is consistent with the Airborne Hunting Act, Alaska has permitted “land-and-shoot” hunting, in which the hunter uses the airplane to find the wolves but must land nearby, get out of the airplane, and approach the wolves on the ground.

  In fact, land-and-shoot hunting has often been abused. Hunters shoot wolves from the air, or taxi after them on the ground until they are exhausted—both violations of the Airborne Hunting Act. Sean McGuire, a Fairbanks resident, has witnessed aerial wolf hunts. In one, a pilot tried to drive a wolf out of forests on a hillside into the open valley below, where he might shoot at it. “The wolf wanted to go up, and each time the plane would try to move it down, it would circle back. The plane finally gave up.” On another occasion, he heard a four-hour battle on the other side of a mountain ridge—the whining and circling of the plane and gunshots over the sound of the engine. But proof of such hunts was hard to come by. Alaska is a land of open spaces. In winter there are no backpackers or fishermen to question what an airborne hunter is doing in the back country. Says Bennett, “It’s a place where you can do things that you wouldn’t be allowed to do in other places, or do things without much chance of being caught.”

  Bennett believes the Department of Fish and Game ignored, and even condoned, such violations, because it viewed the sport hunt as a back-door wolf-control program. He recalls one board member saying, “Hey, if you eliminated land-and-shoot, what are we going to do for wolf control?” Bennett believes, “It was incredibly effective in some areas. In Nelchina, they could send one family of hunters out and be fairly sure of getting one hundred wolves a year.” But those who did the hunting publicly denied any wrongdoing.

  And then, in March 1989, two national-park rangers overheard a radio conversation between aerial hunters over Kanuti National Wildlife Refuge. They took notes, and produced a transcript of the conversation:

  “Shot at wolves twice … let him go for now.”

  “We had five on the run, shot two.…”

  “Jimmie got one.”

  “He wasn’t completely dead.… We’ll go back later. The damn thing jumped up and bit my wing.…”

  “It’s always fun!”

  “Jimmie stuck three arrows in him.”

  “The wolf was still blinking his eyes at us, so I didn’t want to take a chance of getting bit, so we’ll go back a little bit later.”

  “He had an arrow up his a—— and he didn’t like that one bit.”

  Investigator Alan Crane later found five skinned wolf carcasses near Old Dummy Lake, inside Kanuti National Wildlife Refuge. One of them contained an arrow shaft and three arrow wounds. In the same area, he found wolf tracks with abrupt changes in directions, including sharp reversals in course, periodically intersected by aircraft ski tracks in a snaking pattern, atypical of a normal landing, taxiing, or takeoff pattern, and with occasionally greater depth of one ski track on the outside of turns, indicating high-speed taxiing. The wolf tracks showed a wolf falling down occasionally, and between leaps were spots of urine, indicating that the wolf was stressed and exhausted. Crane found aircraft and wolf tracks of this nature at five different sites, and all indicated someone had been chasing wolves in a taxiing airplane.

  An Anchorage orthopedic surgeon, Jack Frost, and a licensed guide, Charles Wirschem, were charged with violation of the Airborne Hunting Act by using a plane to herd the wolves, with using their airplanes’ radios to hunt wolves, and with violating the federal Lacey Act by transporting a wolf that had been illegally killed. The government seized a photograph of Frost and Wirschem on the lake in question in front of their planes, with Wirschem shooting at a wolf. Frost was vilified in the press, which printed transcripts of the radio transmissions. He signed a plea bargain in which he admitted using his aircraft to “disturb” a
wolf. He was fined $10,000, his airplane was confiscated, and he lost the right to hunt wolves for two years.

  Originally, Jack Frost had settled in Alaska for the hunting. As a boy in State College, Pennsylvania, he tramped the hills outside town, hunting rabbits. The first week of deer season, he remembers, school closed so that fathers could take their sons out into the woods. In winter, when a fresh snow fell, he’d go out and track rabbits and foxes. He came to Alaska in the service, and he stayed.

  At forty-seven, he has blond hair framing his bearded face in tightly curled ringlets. He speaks with cautious deliberation. When I met him at a San Francisco hotel, his reserve struck me as a form of apprehension. He seemed to be trying to make sense of a shadow that had fallen over his view of life.

  He has hunted moose and caribou all over Alaska, has taken the grand slam—all four kinds of North American wild sheep—and, above all, has hunted wolves. On winter days, he would range in his airplane far from Anchorage. When he found tracks in the snow, he would follow them until he came upon a pack of wolves.

  Wolf hunting is not a pursuit for novices. “It’s not an easy thing to do to go out and find a wolf in an airplane,” says Frost. “It’s a skill that takes a long time to learn, and some people never can learn it.” Reading tracks from the air while traveling at seventy miles per hour and watching for mountains and treetops is demanding. When snow is soft and deep, the wolves walk in old tracks or stay under the trees, where the going is easier. When wind settles and compacts the snow, the wolves travel on lakes and rivers, but the compacted snow may not reveal their tracks.