by Nick Jans
It’s one thing to have black bears wandering neighborhoods, snitching birdseed and scattering unsecured garbage like outsized raccoons; in Juneau, even downtown, black bear sightings are so common that most locals are alert but scarcely alarmed to find a bruin on their back porch, and far more likely to reach for a camera than a gun. Almost nobody bothers to call the cops or Fish and Game. In the history of Juneau, I can find no record of anyone ever being injured, let alone mauled, by a black bear. Brown bears, as the coastal variation of grizzlies are known, are far more dangerous, especially when surprised up close. Gus’s previous owner, Lee Hagmier, had in fact lost his sight back in the late 1950s as a teenager in a brown bear attack, just four miles from our house. However, Juneauites tolerate them near the edges of town in small, polite numbers. A mother and half-grown cub had been hanging around in the Dredge Lakes area the previous two autumns with no issues beyond a couple of abbreviated bluff charges, despite dozens of humans and their dogs moving through each day. There was seldom outcry or call for any bear to be killed as a public menace.
The very word wolf, though, triggers waves of unreasoning, primal fear. That pervasive dread seems hardwired into our collective subconscious, from some dim, half-recalled past: They eat us. No matter that the phobia is built far less on fact than emotion, fanned by those who have spent little or no time observing wolves, except maybe through a rifle sight or on the end of a trap chain. But regardless of our own experience with wolves, there’s something about them that pushes some rusty button in our collective psyche. Such a reflex must come from somewhere. Perhaps, millennia ago, or even further back, things were different. Added on to this fear is the economic and emotional threat to creatures we count as rightfully ours: livestock, pets, and animals we hunt for food or sport.
Immaculate predators, the very symbol of pure, uncompromising wildness, wolves and what we call civilization seem to be, in the cold terms of logic, mutually exclusive circumstances. While our mythology, folktales, and children’s stories are full of kindly and beloved bears, from Winnie-the-Pooh to Yogi, their lupine counterparts are all but nonexistent. “Little Red Riding Hood,” “The Three Little Pigs,” and barroom stories from Montana to Ukraine paint wolves as malevolent presences, lurking on the edge of nightmare. Driven by largely apocryphal tales of man-eating packs chasing down travelers, snatching babies, and the like, wolves in most of Europe were well on their way to eradication by the time of the Pilgrims. Wilderness was a dark, evil, and fearful place, the dominion of Satan; and wolves were his minions. No surprise either that, as our forebears made their pioneering progress across the new continent, they continued in the New World where they’d left off in the Old.
Lewis and Clark, on their early-nineteenth-century march across the continent, found hoofed animals and wolves in incredible abundance, coexisting with native hunter-gatherers who revered rather than cursed the wolf. Lewis and Clark themselves described the unaggressive wolves they encountered on the great western plains, and clearly regarded them as no threat to human safety. Despite the hordes of inexperienced pioneers that soon flooded westward (no doubt taking potshots at every wolf within range), reports of wolves attacking or threatening humans were conspicuously few, even given the melodramatic liberties commonly taken in accounts of the period. However, with prey numbers dwindling due to human hunting and habitat loss, some of the remaining wolves fed on newly introduced livestock. Homesteaders and ranchers launched an all-out program of eradication, supported without question from grassroots to federal government as a great and necessary good. And apparently, simply killing wolves by all efficient means possible, including guns, steel traps, and broadcast poison bait, wasn’t enough; they were often subjected to the sort of inventive torture reminiscent of the worst episodes of human genocide. Wolves were burned alive, dragged to death behind horses, fed fishhooks inside meat, set free with mouths and penises wired shut.
An indication of the unreasoning and unmitigated hatred that drove this antiwolf pogrom is captured in an 1814 account involving famed bird naturalist John James Audubon. In his travels, Audubon encountered a farmer that had caught three wolves in a pit trap he’d dug, after some of his livestock had been killed. As Audubon watched, the farmer jumped into the pit armed only with a knife, slashed the leg tendons of the wolves (who, much to Audubon’s astonishment, cowered and offered no resistance), trussed them with rope, then loosed his dogs to rip apart the helpless animals as the farmer and he looked on. The lack of aggression by trapped or wounded wolves comes hardly as a surprise to me or anyone who’s witnessed them in such circumstances. Far more telling is Audubon’s lack of comment at the farmer’s sadistic treatment of the three wolves; his tacit acceptance—from a man who would become renowned among conservationists worldwide—offers a window into the mindset of that period. In the words of social historian Jon T. Coleman, “Audubon and the farmer shared a conviction that wolves not only deserved death but deserved to be punished for living.”
The slaughter continued. The last holdouts in the West were wily, notorious “outlaw” wolves with colorful names, bounties on their heads, and legendary abilities to evade capture; nonetheless, they were hunted down one by one. By the early 1940s, the carnage was all but complete. The few minor islands where wolf populations survived, including patches of northern Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Michigan, served as faint reminders of a range that once included virtually all of North America.
From the 1970s to the 1990s, rekindled interest in preserving our dwindling wild, along with our abiding fascination with wolves, led to successful reintroduction of wolves into shrunken fragments of their former range, most notably Yellowstone National Park, though not without bitter-edged controversy that shows no sign of diminishing—in fact, seems to be on the upswing at the dawn of this century, as wolf numbers and ranges expand. A vehement antiwolf message continues to be driven by contemporary western ranchers and large-scale agribusiness and supercharged by sport-hunting interests that scream wolves, left unchecked, will devour everything in their path (including themselves) until nothing is left—of course, begging the question as to why this endgame, wolf-created wasteland didn’t arise many thousands of years ago. There is precisely zero scientific evidence demonstrating wolves, unlike ourselves, have ever driven any species to extinction. Of course, no antiwolf advocate points to the unrestricted slaughter and habitat reduction, not by wolves but by humans, that speeded the demise of those great herds of bison, deer, and elk reported by Lewis and Clark.
Modern, well-documented research demonstrates that apex predators such as wolves play keystone roles in keeping prey populations healthy by culling the weak and infirm. They also keep ungulate numbers in balance with habitat; wolf reintroduction into Yellowstone resulted in a stunning transformation of overbrowsed, depleted river and stream corridors, to the benefit of many species, from aspens and cottonwoods to beaver to songbirds to cutthroat trout. An added bonus was a natural form of predator control: a huge reduction in coyotes, which prey heavily on young game animals as well as livestock. But despite such positive benefits, fear-mongering and misinformation continue to drive the war on wolves in the lower 48—and Alaska, The Last Frontier, is no different.
Wolf management has long been the state’s most controversial wildlife management issue, the sort of topic that leads to hard feelings, finger-jabbing, nasty letters to the editor, and occasional bar fights. Two opposing philosophies define the argument. Position A: Wolves constitute a looming predatory menace to the game animals on which the people of Alaska depend—not to mention a threat to human safety. Keeping their numbers under control by whatever means (including shooting, snaring, leg-hold trapping, blasting them with shotguns from low-flying aircraft, and even gassing pups in their dens) is a commonsense necessity. Left to their own devices, wolves will multiply and hoover every moose and caribou out of the country. People come first, and Alaskans have a right and legal mandate to manage wildlife for their own maximum benefit. Any oppositio
n to such a plan obviously comes from greenie-weenie, barely Alaskan, nonhunting city slickers and out-of-state, radical, pinhead lackeys of animal-rights groups.
Position B: Wolves, as top predators, are a natural part of healthy, complex, self-regulating ecosystems, and removing most of them (the plans call for 80, even 100 percent reduction in certain management units) is only bound to screw things up. Without wolves, deer and moose numbers explode in unsustainable numbers, then crash, over and over. Wolves, too, are a valued resource on which trappers and subsistence hunters depend, and a multimillion-dollar cash cow attracting throngs of ecotourists and photographers. Their presence also offers inestimable aesthetic value to many residents, even if they never manage to see one. Besides that, shooting wolves from airplanes is just plain wrong and reflects horribly on the state’s image. Anyone who doesn’t see things that way is a nearsighted, beetle-browed, knuckle-dragging redneck.
That’s just the CliffsNotes summary. The unabridged version gets far nastier and multilayered, replete with biologists, managers, politicians, wildlife advocates, and hunters flinging mud balls made of statistics and rhetoric in each other’s faces. Add in the extremists—old-schoolers who consider wolves four-legged cockroaches, and the animal-rights types who worship Canis lupus as imperiled überbeings—and you have the makings of a full-scale brouhaha that spills over state and even international boundaries. Wolves, by virtue of their innate canine charisma and endangered status through most of their former range, are a big deal. People far away care what happens here, a fact that rankles the many Alaskans who believe wolf control is no one’s business but their own. Ex-governor Walter Hickel, decrying the interference of wolf advocates (many of them Outsiders) in the issue two decades ago, put it best, with this unintentionally comical, landmark statement: “You can’t just let nature run wild.”
Alaska’s wolves are unique in at least one respect. At the dawn of the twenty-first century, they’re still here, in meaningful (albeit human-reduced) numbers—statewide, somewhere between that seven and twelve thousand figure, according to state biologists. Thanks to the elusive, no-paparazzi nature of the species and the scale and roughness of the country, these are educated estimates at best, with a huge amount of slack built in. Some biologists figure it’s more like seven thousand. But whatever the number, some folks—especially those associated with the big-dollar sport-hunting and guiding industry, who consider every hat rack–antlered moose a walking paycheck, and rural residents living in temporarily or perennially game-poor areas—think it’s too many. No matter that many of the guides and rich sports who raise the most ruckus aren’t even Alaska residents.
At least half of all Alaskans, whether rural or urban, native or white, bear no enmity against wolves; in fact, consider them an asset. However, those Alaskans who wield power most often, and seem to shout the loudest these days, fall into the good-wolf-is-a-dead-wolf camp. Federal exterminators conducted a no-holds-barred wolf eradication program in the territorial days of Alaska, with traps, aerial gunning, poison, and bounties. From statehood in 1959 through the 1990s, wolf-killing programs continued, but not without sometimes fierce debate and opposition. Two citizen ballot initiatives in the 1990s (my friend Joel Bennett led both) and three gubernatorial interventions brought temporary halts to the killing; but in 2003, wolf control programs resumed under newly elected governor Frank Murkowski and soon expanded to include aerial gunning by private pilot-hunter teams in areas the size of midwestern states. Southeast Alaska, where we lived, wasn’t one of those enormous kill boxes—not yet.
Against the tableau of this history, I skied out from my house one day and found a huge black wolf almost in my backyard—an animal not only tolerant of humans and dogs, but almost (for lack of a better word) sociable. But odd and ominous as it all seemed, I had no way of knowing, over the ensuing months and years, just how strange the tale would turn.
Wolf kill, Brooks Range
2
Rules of Engagement
It’s 1981, a mid-August evening on the spine of the Kobuk-Noatak divide, deep in the western Brooks Range: hard, wind-scraped country, gray-blue mountains and tundra valleys webbed with caribou trails, rolling away beneath a wide sky. A lean young man climbs into a sharp north breeze, a .35 caliber lever-action carbine slung over one shoulder, a second-rate film camera over the other. On a brush-verged bench on the mountain slope above him, a grizzly and a lone gray wolf skirmish in silver, slanted light—the wolf circling, dashing in to snap at the bear’s rump, the bear whirling and swatting, its roars lost in the wind. The bear can’t catch the wolf, and the wolf can’t hurt the bear, and neither will back off. Maybe they’re arguing over a kill, or the wolf might be defending a den or just deviling the bear on general principles.
He first spotted them with binoculars over a mile away, stripped off his pack, and ran toward them, across braided river channels and over cotton-grass tussocks, up the mountain through bands of frost-red dwarf birch and patches of loose shale. Sweat-drenched and shivering, he slowed as he closed the last two hundred yards through head-high willows, camera at the ready and a bullet in the chamber, though shooting wasn’t his plan. He knew, too, the odds of getting a picture were thin. Neither was he answering a self-imposed dare. Of course he was afraid—alone, on the start of a solo 350-mile canoe trip, farther from another human than he’d ever been, and approaching not just a riled grizzly, but the first wolf he’d ever seen. If something went wrong, no one would miss him for weeks. He had no way of hailing the outside world, and only the bush pilot who dropped him off had any idea of where to find him. But still he moved uphill toward the bear and wolf, drawn by his heart.
I squint back through the weathered lens of three decades and smile as I watch myself scramble up that mountain, alive as I’d ever be. That one moment, reckless or not, was reason enough to have come to Alaska; I knew it then, and even more now. I’d read about and watched big carnivores in my sleep since I was a kid, growing up in a procession of landscapes where such creatures didn’t exist outside zoos. Rural Maine, where I moved as a college student, learning and honing outdoor skills, still wasn’t far enough. I’m going to Alaska, I told family and friends. And I headed straight toward one of the wildest chunks of country I could find on the map: the northwest Arctic, in the upper left-hand corner of the state, hundreds of miles off the road grid—a landscape defined by wolves and grizzlies, and all that came with them. There was no decision. I just went.
By the time I went loping up that hill, I’d lived in a remote Kobuk River Eskimo village for two years—still green around the edges, leaning on luck and youth to help balance out all I didn’t know. Instead of going back to school as I’d intended, to become a wildlife biologist, I’d found work managing a trading post and packing for a big-game guide and had already traveled thousands of bush miles by snowmobile, skiff, and canoe and on foot. But this trip, going off by myself into deep wilderness to meet this country I’d come to love, was another step outward. The sheer aloneness of it all—not for a few days or miles, but many and far, through a landscape roamed by apex carnivores—changed the way you heard a twig crackle, appraised an eddying scent, caught the shine of something moving on a far ridge. Then, within minutes of being dropped off, the wolf and bear materialized out of the land, like a welcoming committee. Of course I ran toward them.
By the time I reached the bench where I thought I’d find the scuffle, they’d disappeared. I wasn’t even sure it was the right spot. I’d underestimated the thickness of the brush, so dense I couldn’t see more than a few yards. I stood, trying to hold down my breathing, straining the world through my senses. When I finally spotted the wolf, it had been watching me for some time. It stood fifty yards above me, perched on a rocky knob in its ragged late-summer coat. It lifted its muzzle and howled, less a challenge than a disgusted announcement that the klutz everyone had been smelling and hearing for the past half hour was right here. Then the wolf trotted away up the ridge, lean-ribbed and light-
footed, without wasting another glance my way. I watched gray wolf merge into gray rock, then remembered: somewhere there was a pissed-off bear—maybe just beyond that alder clump. I hunkered against a rock, wide-eyed, cheap camera and peashooter rifle at the ready.
Meanwhile, the unseen grizzly had circled to get above me and downwind. When I first heard a low wuff, the bear was at my back, thirty feet away, sniffing the spot where I’d just stood. At my first motion, he raised his head and stared straight at me, barreled chest contracting with each huff. As I fumbled back and forth between camera and rifle, he snorted and crashed uphill and away, sparing me a decision, and perhaps a good deal more. I never did come close to getting a picture, but it doesn’t matter. The moment where I met my dream is right where I can see it—now and always.
I went on from there to meet many more wolves and bears over the years, sometimes so close I could have glimpsed my reflection in their eyes, and stood wrapped in their wild scent. I lived among Inupiaq Eskimo subsistence hunters like Clarence Wood: men with frost-scarred faces, attuned to sensory nuances I could scarcely imagine, steeped in knowledge passed down across generations. They weren’t just close to the natural world, they were part of it. I followed them when they allowed me, and learned what I could. I wanted to know how someone could glance at a wolf trail and declare, Real fresh. Three of ’em. They eat good little while ago. And more, I wanted to not only know, but feel the same seamless connection to the land, and to the animals they sought: to hunt and kill as a wolf does.
