by Nick Jans
Though I scarcely came from a hunting background, my own culture’s input hadn’t really been that much different. The son of a career diplomat, raised in Europe, Southeast Asia, and Washington, D.C., I’d been glued to Outdoor Life magazine since I was eight, and graduated to the hunting tales of Ruark and Hemingway. It never occurred to me that there might be another way to relate to wild creatures besides killing them, and no one pointed me in another direction. Small surprise that my first job in Alaska was working for that hunting guide, learning the whole business from the ground up: how to find, stalk, shoot, skin, and butcher game animals, large and small. Though I soon enough discovered that guiding wasn’t for me, I continued onward down my hunting path, with a developing skill set under my belt. Along the way, I picked what amounted to graduate-level seminars from the older Inupiaq men with whom I often traveled. While never an expert tracker or ace marksman, I had good eyes, strength, and persistence on my side, and always, it seemed, incredible luck whenever it came to killing. The carcasses and hides piled up over the years, more than I could count. Their flesh merged into my own. I wore and slept on their skins. Their bones and antlers decorated my cabin.
In time, Clarence became my hunting partner and close friend. Early on he told me that black wolves were different—smarter, tougher, harder to catch. And true or not, the first wolf I ever shot, nine years into my Alaska life, was black: a ninety-pound female, she and I each traveling alone on a cold, bright April afternoon in 1988, on the shoulder of Ingichuk Mountain. From the moment she fell, excitement and triumph mingled with a bitter undercurrent of self-recrimination. Back in the village, my Eskimo friends nodded quiet praise and corrected my skinning cuts. Part of the hide, tanned and sewed by aana (grandmother) Minnie Gray, became a parka ruff and trim that shielded my face from the Arctic cold. I gave Minnie the rest of that skin, that gift further cementing a traditional bond that had begun when I first brought her caribou meat and helped with chores. Though now a teacher at the village school, I had also become a hunter, sharing the lifestyle of the Iviisaapaatmiut—the People of the Redstone.
Minnie and Clarence both believed that animals give themselves willingly, and with the proper acts of propitiation, such as nigiluk (slitting the trachea to let the soul escape), are born again, in an endless cycling of souls. None of my neighbors understood my misgivings; the burden of killing what I loved—not once, but again and again—was one I would carry alone. I proved to be neither a good wolf nor a good adoptive Inupiaq—though Minnie called me “son,” and introduced herself to my parents, when they came to visit, as my Eskimo mom.
But I kept going out, roaming the country on snowmobile and skis, by canoe and skiff, and on foot—tens of thousands of miles, sometimes in the company of others, often alone. Though I continued to hunt for most of what I ate and part of what I wore, more and more often I set my rifle aside and simply watched, or stalked wild creatures with a camera instead. One day I realized I couldn’t remember the last time I’d fired a shot at a living thing. My time as a hunter was over. I gave away guns and hides; if I could have, I would have taken back most of my bullets. I kept a few tokens of that past life, including a row of skulls to remind me of who I’d been.
No accident, I suppose, that I ended up marrying Sherrie, bunny-hugging, card-carrying member of PETA. To give you an idea of her commitment to her beliefs, she’d dropped out of high school at age seventeen rather than dissect a pithed frog in biology class, and taken an equivalency exam instead. While I stopped far short of her eat-nothing-with-a-face ethos, I couldn’t help but admire her unswerving dedication to principle; and besides that, I was smack-upside-the-head in love. I left my Arctic home and moved to the capital city of Juneau, where she worked and lived—a metropolis compared to the far country I’d roamed for two decades. With a sigh, she accepted my cooking the caribou meat my friends shipped south to me, and I her unyielding animal-rights polemics. We were united by our love of all life and the wild expanse of Alaska; now, all that seemed distilled into this flesh-and-blood wolf at our door. Though I couldn’t rewrite my past, his very presence offered some sort of redemption.
So it was that our Mexican vacation took a slight curve north. Instead of sipping margaritas under a palapa and lounging on sun-bright sand, we spent the week after the winter solstice bundled in parkas and snow boots, shivering in the shadow of the Mendenhall Glacier. Days had waned to just a few hours of thin light. The mountains leaned in and waves of weather washed over us—deep, clear cold alternating with snow, sometimes hurling out of the twilit sky so fast we could watch it cover our tracks. At first, we skied; when the drifts piled too deep for touring skis, we plodded on foot, breaking trail with the dogs porpoising along behind us in powder over their heads. Higher up, the big snows fell. In between storms, the mountains emerged, cast in a luminous pall. The glacier itself seemed half-buried.
And the black wolf drifted in and out of view, a dark beacon of life in a still, white world. Though we’d changed plans on his account, we hardly changed our off-work routine, which included daily exercise with the dogs, usually straight out the back door, out onto the lake or adjoining trails. From the first, we decided to limit our contact—once, at most twice daily, and generally no more than a half hour at a time. After all, he had other business to attend to—not the least of which was making a living, a tough job for a single wolf. I couldn’t imagine he saw us as anything more than a brief curiosity, and we wanted to keep it that way. But we did want to see this thing that would never pass before us again.
The wolf seemed to be waiting for us. When we headed out for the Big Rock, a half mile from our back door, he ghosted out of the brush, tail out and level with his back—a neutral, confident signal. As we moved up the west shore, he trotted parallel to our path, stopping where we stopped, moving when we moved. As long as we kept the dogs close, he didn’t come within a hundred yards—a distance that worked for all three species. Wolves and dogs traded scent marks at a discreet distance with little eye contact, like Japanese businessmen exchanging cards. Who knew what each read of the other? We followed the curve of the sheltered bay along the lake’s western shore, in the dark-curving shadow of Mount McGinnis—a less-traveled area, away from the eastern lobe of the lake with its web of trails. We tucked in behind Tern Island, just past the Big Rock, which offered a screen from most passers-by. To keep the dogs busy when we stopped, we played the game they loved best: fetch with flingers and tennis balls. Each dog had its own ball and understood taking turns. They were all so locked on to the chase that most of the time they forgot their people were watching a wolf, and a wolf was watching us back.
From the edge of the alders, the black wolf narrowed his ears and keened a piercing, fast-pulsed whine you could have mistaken for the call of some unknown bird. Dakotah perked her ears toward the dark stranger, whined back, and bounded in his direction, sometimes more than halfway; but when we called, she returned, and the wolf would follow only so far. Waving arms would bring on a startle reflex and turn him away. Fine. No matter what we’d seen, we didn’t want to invite him closer. Chase informed the universe in no uncertain terms that her opinion of the marauder hadn’t altered one damn bit, and wasn’t about to. Gus let slip a quiet, worried mutter now and then but mostly ignored the dark shadow of his past, lurking in the brush.
When our friend Anita joined us with her two dogs, Sugar and Jonti, two more run-and-fetch maniacs, the group swelled to a crowd—three people, five barking dogs, madcap dashing around. My friend Joel tagged along a couple of times, lugging his big tripod and professional movie camera. We both knew what we had before us and, at the same time, were conscious of trying to do the right thing, the right way. No crowding or displacing. If he moved off, we’d let him go. If he came closer, we’d sit tight. The wolf would make the call.
The black wolf watched from the lake edge, seemingly puzzled but intrigued by this odd pack and its antics. When we moved farther out onto the lake, away where he wouldn’t fo
llow, and circled toward home, he trotted out behind us to sniff the dogs’ scent marks and make his own replies—messages that would be read and understood by all who knew the world through their noses. Then he lifted his muzzle and howled to the sky, the long cry of a wolf alone.
Sometime early on, maybe the third time Sherrie and I and all three dogs went out, the balance of our understanding shifted. We’d moved in behind the island and brought out the flingers. The light was so crappy I hadn’t even bothered to bring my camera pack. Sherrie was peering through the viewfinder of her camcorder, getting home-movie footage of the whole crazy scene—the wolf pacing back and forth along the shore, watching and whining as the dogs cut loose. A few minutes in, one of my tosses for Dakotah went awry, hit a patch of hardpack and kept rolling toward the shore. As we were wondering how to get the ball back, damned if the wolf didn’t dart in, pounce, and make off with it. He pranced along the shore, tossed it in the air, batted it with his paws, and pounced again—movements any dog would understand, though the wolf added his own lupine accent. But he sure as hell knew about toys: objects with no food or direct survival value that become, through social agreement or individual whim, the focus of play.
Here was a chicken-or-egg conundrum. Was the wolf following the dogs’ lead, or were our dogs engaged in a behavior inherited from their not-so-distant ancestors? After all, chasing and fetching rests just a shade away from predatory instinct, say, pursuing and catching a hare. Entirely logical to figure it’s a game any wolf in the right mood would understand. Too, play makes total sense for complex social creatures like wolves, if viewed from a purely evolutionary stance. Tussling, toy play, and chasing provide development of vital survival skills for young animals and help cement the social structure vital to a successful pack.
And what are dogs but our custom-tweaked, toned-down versions of wolves, shaped through generations of breeding to suit our varying whims? One recent study shows a scant .02 percent difference between the genetic packages of wolves and dogs. As recently as the 1990s, studies accepted by mainstream science, as well as the archaeological record, pointed to a divergence of the two species in China or the Middle East as recently as 15,000 years ago. Since then, other studies and evidence (including a 35,000-year-old dog skull found buried in a Siberian cave along with human artifacts and a dog skeleton buried with a bone in its mouth) support canine divergence as a much earlier event, from 50,000 years to more than 125,000 years before present, and raise the strong likelihood of multiple points of domestication, spanning several continents.
Hard to imagine, but Dakotah herself was 99.98 percent wolf, including, you might suppose, the part of her that loved pursuing and catching things over and over at breakneck speed and delivering them back to her pack, in a faint echo of the chase. I’ve wondered if some dogs may feel a higher level of drive for such games, since it’s their only outlet for genetically programmed catch-and-kill hunting behavior. A wolf in the same situation seems more relaxed, more purely at play—certainly the case with the black wolf just then, and with other wild wolves I’ve seen. After all, wolves hunt to live, on a daily basis; fooling around with a toy is more of a break, quite separate from the serious business of living—having fun for the sheer sake of it. To high-drive Labs and border collies, fetch is often more than just a game; it’s their job, a dead serious business.
Granted, precious few wolves have regular access to tennis balls. But wolves of all ages, from captive to totally wild, do engage in play, together or alone, and often with objects that fit the definition of toys—an old antler, a ptarmigan wing, whatever suits the moment. I’ve been lucky to watch a few bouts of wolf play in the wild, but one stands out. About fifteen years ago, while on a solo late-winter trip into the upper Noatak valley, several wolves from a pack of twelve had approached my camp. I’d spooked two of them by trying to get a better camera angle when I should have held still. I was trudging back toward the tent, disgusted with myself, when I realized, with a start, that I had company. Half-hidden by a clump of brush, head up and relaxed, a reclining gray male stared off down the slope toward the others, pointedly ignoring my all-too-obvious presence, an underhanded stone’s toss away. Finally he yawned, rose, stretched, and made casual eye contact as if to say he saw me, and couldn’t possibly care. When I circled, trying to get around the brush between us, he moved off at a leisurely gait, no sign of stress.
Suddenly he stared, gathered, and pounced—on a ground squirrel or marmot, I was sure. I was witnessing my first-ever wolf making a kill! Instead, he came up with an ordinary hunk of scrub willow, two inches thick and a couple feet long—exactly the sort of stick any Lab might pick up and lug around. The wolf turned and gave me a sidelong glance, shaking his head and the stick with that familiar canine look-what-I’ve-got posture, an invitation to a round of keep-away. Then he paraded off down the slope like a drum major, the branch crosswise in his jaws. I sat there open-mouthed, the camera forgotten in my hands.
Toy-oriented play? No doubt of that, but something more. By virtue of my proximity (which, I think, triggered the event) and that sidelong glance, I’d been included in the game, if just for a moment—in play as a social gesture between species, like ravens and wolves playing tag. It was a foreshadowing moment that would be completed years later, in the form of the black wolf.
The tennis ball incident was far from the last time that wolf would cross into dog-human playtime—whether party crasher or welcome participant depended on perspective. Either way, he was just warming up. A few days later he snitched another ball from us that he carted off, and every now and then over the next months and years, stories would make the rounds involving the wolf, games of fetch, and episodes of toy-filching. His pattern of larceny proved what some had maintained all along: you just can’t trust a wolf.
Whatever passed that day, we have a token to call us back. Years later, that yellow, fist-sized orb that the wolf stole and eventually dropped rests among Sherrie’s keepsakes, bearing the puncture of a single tooth. Next to it, a tuft of Dakotah’s tail hair, and a hand-sized paw print from the wolf, cast in plaster. We hold what little we have, as if it were enough.
As much as our vision of the wolf had altered, just a few minutes after the tennis ball incident it shifted once again, thanks to Chase, our then-yearling blue heeler. We had two mild-mannered, beautifully behaved Labs. Then there was Chase. Heelers (officially known as Australian cattle dogs, not to be confused with Australian shepherds) can be, well, problematic. Engineered from wild dingoes mixed with livestock dogs just a century ago and recognized by the AKC in the 1960s, they’re a new breed, with plenty of variation. The most difficult examples wear their feral hearts on their sleeves without apology. No matter how close an average dog’s genetic ties to wolves, heelers, by dint of their dingo heritage, and just a few generations separating them from life in the wild, take it to another level. The official breed description includes the phrase “a suspicious glint in the eye,” and the AKC National Specialty show for Australian cattle dogs includes a contest in which dogs are judged for having the “most ancestral” physical traits—which leads to musings about inner, lupine remnants as well. Without doubt, many heelers are affable companions, and they’re a wonderful, dynamic breed. But throw a few too many of those ancestral traits into the mix and you get a dog with issues.
Chase was one of those—a work in progress on a good day, a train wreck on the worst. We’d worked on her from when we’d gotten her at eight weeks. Though hideously bright, quick to learn tricks and all sorts of complex behaviors (how many dogs do you know who, when asked “Who’s been good?” sit up on their haunches and raise a single paw, and on command, put their toys away one by one in a basket?), we hadn’t yet been able to corral her borderline-psychotic tendency to rush unknown dogs with a reactive, teeth-bared charge. In her mind, I’m sure she was defending us from impending onslaught. Any canine, from a Boston terrier to a Great Dane, that came too close would get the same bum’s rush. Chase, desp
ite her blustery façade, usually ended up in abject retreat when the objects of her attack took exception—not that it stopped her the next time. Sure, she’d grow three-quarters out of it eventually, but keeping our miscreant teenage mutt leashed under those circumstances was a given. No self-respecting wolf could be expected to put up with her guff.
So there we were, minutes after the wolf’s tennis ball grab—Sherrie still pointing her camcorder; me chucking balls for the Labs; the wolf trotting back and forth, watching and whining. I needed both hands for a moment and had Chase’s leash end firmly under my boot—or so I thought. A sudden, unexpected tug and off she went, a snarling blur flying straight for the wolf like some thirty-pound hound of the Baskervilles, ignoring the fact she was outweighed four to one and outmatched by a factor of twenty. The wolf picked up the charge and came bounding to meet her full-on. I sprinted toward the impending collision, though I knew I couldn’t get there in time. Through her viewfinder, Sherrie saw the outgoing dog and the incoming wolf, dropped the camera, and screamed for Chase. She might as well have asked a meteor to stop short of impact. The two met in an explosion of snow, the wolf wide-jawed, bounding, paws slamming down to pin our dog. In that heart-rattling instant, Chase completely disappeared under the wolf. He lowered his jaws. Just like that, our dog was gone. Dead. And I’d screwed up, in a way I could never forgive myself.
Then a blue-gray shape exploded out of the snow, headed back as fast as she’d gone in, yelping all the way. Lips pulled back in a grin any dog owner would recognize, the wolf bounded along behind her a few feet, then trailed back as Chase neared us, coated in loose snow. Though she was quivering, and her fur stiff with frozen saliva, we went over every inch and couldn’t find the least ding or bruise. He could have crushed her throat with a single bite and carted her off for a snack, or administered a well-deserved disciplinary butt-whupping that would have put her in intensive care at the vet’s. Instead, the black wolf, all soft paws and gums, had met force with the sort of good-humored forbearance an uncle wolf might show to pups of his own pack. Even Chase seemed to understand the break she’d been dealt. Not that she got much chance, but she didn’t mess with the wolf again for years, though she continued to complain, on and off, from a safe distance.
