The Company of Wolves (6 page)

That long childhood leads to strong social bonds, affection, loyalty, self-sacrifice, and the love of touch. Twenty-nine of the thirty-five canid species have been studied well enough for us to understand how they rear offspring, and in all twenty-nine the male helps the female rear the young. In nine of them, other individuals are also involved in the rearing. Red foxes may have an individual other than the mother or father feeding the young. Unmated jackals of either sex act as nannies while the parents go off to hunt. Both male and female domestic dogs have a propensity to adopt orphaned pups.

All that tightly knit sociability also leads to more complex forms of communication. Canids develop languages of gesture, posture, voice, and scent, and these languages are most complex among the
most social carnivores. Wolves are extremely expressive. Their faces are designed to convey quick and subtle changes of mood. The color and shape of their bodies allow them to transmit messages with changes in posture. They have supracaudal glands which secrete substances that impart information about an individual’s readiness to breed, and anal glands which impart odors to feces that indicate the individual’s identity and probably a great deal more. They constantly urinate and defecate around their territories, and other wolves are presumably able to smell in these scent markings indications of the depositor’s sex, age, physical condition, and emotional state. So they are able thereby to share with one another and intruding canids essential information about who they are, what they are eating, how healthy they are, perhaps even how they feel about strangers walking into their territories. They have a variety of vocalizations—barks, howls, growls, whines, and whimpers—each of which may have subtle and complex meanings.

Predatory habits led also to strong emotions. Predators must be a balance of calculation and action. The action must be intense, moved at times by desperate need, and emotion is what triggers such action. In the wolf, emotion seems to run strong. Some individuals get carried away with rage or aggression, some can be paralyzed with fear or resignation. To see wolves at play, leaping over one another, backs arching sinuously, bodies almost hovering in air, with necks craned and eyes sparkling, is to see clear expressions of joy. Several observers have concluded that wolves howl in a particularly mournful way when a beloved companion has died.

Social predation also led to strong tendencies toward individual variety in temperament and character. When wolves hunt, they make use of disparate special abilities. Some wolves are good at finding prey, some at reading the strengths and weaknesses of prey, some at chasing prey, some at killing prey. A wolf pack is a collection of individuals. At the Folsom City Zoo in California, curator Terry Jenkins built a life-sized caribou out of cardboard and crepe paper for a wolf celebration at the zoo. She put the creature into the wolf enclosure. Each of the zoo’s four wolves treated the caribou differently. Sage, the big white dominant male, focused entirely on the caribou’s antlers, and seemed oblivious to the rest of it. Onyx, the black dominant
female, sneaked up behind the caribou and bit mouthfuls of crepe-paper hair out of its flanks. Terra, a subordinate female, came over to Jenkins and jabbed her with her nose to ask for help. And Lupine, the lowest-ranking female, lunged at the caribou and knocked it down. Jenkins has since put out two more cardboard caribous for two more wolf celebrations, and the roles remained the same. Lupine made the knock-down and Terra asked for help.

Those who study wolves today see them as a collection of different personalities. There are gentle wolves and rough ones, shy ones and outgoing ones. There are clowns and scholars, bullies and pals. A pack is well served by having such variety. Whereas one wolf’s aggressiveness may be valuable in bringing down large prey, another’s timidity may serve the pack if the moose and caribou vanish and the hares and birds it has sharpened its skills on must feed the pack. There is probably call, too, for different styles within the pack—for nurturing wolves to bring pups along, for aggressive wolves to keep neighboring packs off the hunting territory, for studious wolves to read the prey better, for friendly wolves to stimulate the greater solidarity of the pack. “Wolves are individuals,” says Boyd. “There are playful wolves. There are smart wolves. Some are born to be leaders. Some are not. It’s just the same as people.”

The wolf Diane Boyd observed was, at first glance, very much in the mode of this new ecological view, and a creature of more complex and intriguing character than the beast of Young and Goldman’s views. But Boyd’s experiences with wolves pushed her even further, into realms the more cautious scientists regard at best as softheaded and at worst as perilous.

Boyd talks about experiences she can’t explain. Sometimes they are merely ironies. For example, she says, she may spend a long day crawling through tangled thickets of lodgepole pine without seeing a wolf or locating a radio signal. “Then you come home and find wolf scat outside your cabin door.” At times she suspects wolves are laughing at her.

Sometimes, however, she has the impression the wolves are talking to her. Time and again, wolves have come to her cabin on the
North Fork and sat there, watching. She recalls a wolf that came down to the river near her cabin and sat there in plain sight howling, while she approached and took photographs. Whether it meant anything, and if so what, she cannot say.

Boyd tells a story she would not share at scientific meetings. For two of the early summers while she was trapping wolves, she would occasionally dream at night of trapping one. “When I woke up in the morning, I knew I had caught a wolf. I knew the color of the animal I’d caught, because I’d seen it in the dream.” She would tell Mike Fairchild that she had had the dream, and they would go out to the trap line and find that she had indeed caught a wolf. She believes that 90 to 95 percent of the time she caught wolves those two summers, she had had such dreams. But it happened only during those two summers, and then stopped. “It sounds so wacky that I don’t tell people about it,” says Boyd.

To some extent, the ground on which such experiences fall was prepared by Barry Lopez. In
Of Wolves and Men
, Lopez dashed the myths of wolf rapaciousness and savagery, and showed that most of what people said and wrote about wolves consisted merely of deflected views of humans. The wolf “takes your stare and turns it back on you,” he wrote. “People suddenly want to explain the feelings that come over them when confronted with that stare—their fear, their hatred, their respect, their curiosity.” Lopez dealt especially with mythic and spiritual—sometimes even mystical—connections with wolves. He drew much from Eskimo and Indian views, in which wolves were spiritual, even supernatural beings. He focused a great deal on the fear and hatred in those who had defined the wolf before, and he showed that the real wolf bore little resemblance to the wolf of their views.

Lopez based his work on good science and close personal observation of wolves. He pointed out that many of the things wolf defenders said weren’t true, either. He maintained that wolves did kill more than the old and the weak, that they sometimes killed more than they would eat, and that they had indeed been known to make unprovoked attacks on humans in North America. Readers sympathetic to wolves often ignored such statements, because, when it comes to wolves, we see what we want to see.

Lopez offered a wider context, in which views other than science
might obtain a hearing. He wrote, for example, that there was more to hunting than killing, and that, in the context of hunting for food, dying might be as sacred as living. Because science could not respond to such an idea, he asked us to view the creature with our hearts as well as our minds. Many scientists, old trappers, and ranchers, people who based their view of wolves on the old understanding, did not like the book. Environmentalists and city dwellers who felt something was very wrong with the way humans approached nature embraced it.
Of Wolves and Men
threw the subject of wolves open to new approaches. And into the opening rushed a new generation of controversy.

Scientists would still claim the high ground in debates about wolves, but there would be other voices in the fray, voices informed by other kinds of perception. Says Boyd, “In the early years, I was careful to have no feelings about wolves on the outside, and to keep them as data points. Now I don’t have to worry about that stigma any more. Now I know it with my heart and my brain.”

Boyd is no less a scientist for recognizing that there are different ways of seeing wolves. She is careful to limit her scientific papers to observations and conclusions that other scientists can reproduce, and she is at least acquainted with her biases, whereas many more “objective” scientists have no idea how much their eyes are trained by culture. Moreover, she believes that keeping her mind open keeps her eyes open to unexpected possibilities in the lives of wolves.

In 1989, the Camas Pack denned in a hollow log in a stand of lodgepole and ponderosa pines, but the pups all died. Boyd guessed from the fact that the adults spent less time at the den that some disaster had befallen the litter, but she didn’t want to endanger any surviving pups, so she waited a month before going in to inspect the den. Not far from the den, she found a scrape where an animal had dug something out of the soft duff of rotted wood and soil. The excavation was five inches deep, with the excavated earth piled to the side. In the excavated dirt she found some skin and part of the jawbone of a wolf pup. “It was apparent that it had been buried,” says Boyd. “And it was apparent that something had come along and dug it up.” Boyd returned the next day with her dog Max and followed Max’s nose around the site; it led her to five similar scrapes, one of which held the remains of a pup. Max responded to all the scrapes
with the same keen interest. Blood samples taken from trapped wolves that year showed that the wolf population had been infected with canine parvovirus. Boyd concluded that the pups had probably died of parvovirus and that some solicitous wolf had buried them. No other evidence of wolf burials has ever been recorded. Humans are the only species supposed to bury their dead. If a wolf inters her pups, what does that say about wolves? What does it say about us? Boyd reflects, “You can take that and run with it forever.”

Boyd has become one of the rare researchers who are capable of encompassing the wide range of views about wolves. She hunts deer and elk for food, because she feels hunting allows a deeper relationship with the landscape than one may find shopping at Safeway. “Why would I want to eat a cow any more?” she says. “They don’t have any spirit. A deer is a gift from the land.” And the land holds secrets to our own nature. Watching wolves has made her more aware. “When I’m out there, I can track a wolf and see where they paused and looked out over a valley at something, and I’ll do the same thing.” She has learned to listen more carefully to what people say, and to be more tolerant of opposing views.

At the same time, she cares deeply about the wolves. In December 1992, Phyllis, who had been the alpha female of the Magic and Sage Creek packs, was shot to death by a hunter who had often seen her before and who knew her status in the pack. Phyllis had been an alpha female for seven years. She was an old wolf, wise in the ways of the wild and matriarch of a large and dispersing clan that might one day repopulate Montana’s wilderness with wolves. “Of all the wolves,” says Boyd, “I felt strongest about her.” When she heard that Phyllis had been killed, Boyd grieved. She was angry. “I felt this no-good jerk went and plugged her.”

But a year later, on her Christmas vacation, Boyd went into Canada and visited the site of the shooting. She spent half a day talking with the hunter who had shot Phyllis, and she came away feeling better. “The hunter is neither a bad person nor a wolf hater,” she says. “I wish he hadn’t shot her. I’m not saying what he did was right or wrong. But after talking to him and thinking about the ideas he grew up with, I understand why.”

The new science struggles to be wholly empirical, objective, based entirely on the eye. But, however its practitioners may trim the
heart out of their writings, they are still moved. It’s a shadowy world out there, and unseen things murmur and scuttle under the leaves of fact. Those who understand this are better able to understand their own vision, and understanding our vision is part of understanding wolves.

It is hard to talk about wolves in North America without talking about the campaign of eradication we waged against them. But other views of wolves preceded the era of organized slaughter, and the mania for wolf control, laid against the broader backdrop of human experience, appears to be an aberration, a temporary sickness that afflicted only some of our species, and which even some of the most avid wolf hunters came to regret.

Earlier cultures looked more favorably upon wolves. Among North American Indians, clans were identified with particular animals, and a member of the bear or badger clan might look to that animal for guidance or inspiration. A clan member might be prohibited from killing his or her totem animal, lest the animal spirit take offense and abandon the mortal. Wolves were often the totems. The Moquis of the American Southwest, for example, divided into wolf, bear, eagle, and deer clans and believed that at death the spirit of the departed returned to the body of a living bear or wolf or eagle or
deer. The Niska of British Columbia divided into wolf, bear, eagle, and raven clans, and all had specific prohibitions connected with the totem animals.