A Wolf Called Romeo

by Nick Jans

  Beyond instinctive twinges, none of us had known what to expect in those first encounters. Yet each side had put a foot forward, and a strange, almost eerie truce had passed between us. Though some arm-flappers might claim otherwise, the wolf was the one risking his life. If he could have sensed the skulls and hides of his kind that lay inside dozens of houses stretching before him—including mine, from that other life—he’d have run, tail out, for the horizon. Instead, here he was, tagging around, trying to chat up our dogs, and meanwhile radiating an incredibly laid-back, predictable demeanor toward us, the brokers of canine companionship. The word polite came to mind, as if he were a foreigner trying to figure out our rules of social engagement, and doing his best to avoid the least faux pas.

  We kept doubling back, searching out some sort of explanation for his behavior. Was he a lamebrain, dropped on his head as a pup? An ambassador sent by the wolf nation to spy or negotiate? A shape-shifting alien? One-liners aside, we couldn’t overlook a real possibility: he could be a captive wolf or part-wolf hybrid, grown into too much to handle and turned loose by his owner. While captive wolves do surely exist in Alaska, they’re few in number and legal only with a difficult-to-obtain permit, issued only to a handful of wildlife parks. Wolf-dog hybrids are illegal in the state under any circumstance, subject to immediate confiscation. Either would be hard to hide in a town as small and close-knit as Juneau. Anyhow, he didn’t act like a tame animal gone wild; if anything, it was the other way round. I’d seen plenty of captive wolves and several wolf hybrids, and even in their familiar enclosures, they tended toward high-strung skittishness. They just didn’t act or move like the animal we saw before us—confident, at home in his world. A recently released wolf or wolf-dog cross, used to its confined routine and keepers, screened from the wild world since birth, would likely be a basket case. Then, a key point: this wolf wasn’t approaching us as if expecting food, and seemed in fine condition out on his own. The most likely explanation was the simplest: Mother Nature loves to roll the dice, and out of the nearly infinite genetic combinations possible came this one-of-a-kind wolf—not the wolf we expected, maybe, but a wolf all the same. Biologist Dr. Vic Van Ballenberghe (whose studies over thirty-four years primarily as a moose biologist have of course included a great deal of overlapping wolf research and observation) observes, “All animals are individuals, with their own distinct personalities. . . . The differences between wolves are especially striking. Some, regardless of how many times you encounter them, will keep their distance. Others, from the same pack, are quite relaxed and tolerant from the start and remain so.”

  Ironically, it’s just this kind of ultra-tolerant animal, the one that lay down at the edge of our firelight millennia ago, that’s most likely to tweak human fear receptors. Why isn’t he afraid? He should be. If not, he’s dangerous, just too close. Maybe he’s got rabies. Look at the size of that damn thing. What’s he thinking? Wolves and people have never mixed well, except, paradoxically, when they have. It’s a weird, dysfunctional union, considering that we invited the shadow of our fear into our homes and came to call it our best friend—all the while maintaining an ingrained, fearful distrust, sometimes verging on hatred, of its free-ranging forebear that lives beyond our will.

  Whatever this wolf’s story, and no matter how hard we tried to keep his presence under wraps, the news was bound to leak out. According to Ben Franklin’s adage, three can keep a secret if two are dead, and we were already way over the limit. Besides, we couldn’t very well tell a wolf to stay in cover, not to leave tracks, not to howl—and the latter he did, sometimes for long minutes at a time, day or night. Like people, not all wolves belong on American Idol. Some yip or yodel, or just don’t project. Predictable though it sounds, the voice sure as hell matched the wolf’s physical presence: a drawn-out, sonorous note rising to a falsetto break, then trailing to hollow overtones, a cry as big and haunting as the country itself.

  The Mendenhall Glacier Recreation Area was a daily destination for several dozen local dog-walkers, hikers, and skiers; and, on weekends, its six-thousand-acre expanse was Juneau’s favorite winter playground, attracting everyone from families pulling toddlers in sleds to technical ice climbers. Though it abutted near-vertical, trackless wilderness, the area’s core was cut by a network of paths, ranging from meandering animal trails to wheelchair accessible to steep mountain routes to a groomed four-mile cross-country ski loop. On a mild, snow-bright Sunday, several hundred people over the course of the day might visit from any of more than a dozen access points. The combination of big snows and deeper-than-usual cold had temporarily blunted that tide, helped muffle the howling, and sifted over tracks, but we couldn’t hope to keep a wolf secret, any more than kids in some fantasy could hide a unicorn in a closet. And even if we could have, he wasn’t ours to hide.

  The wolf did hold one card in his favor. Juneau is different from most Alaska cities, as most residents will tell you, with either an approving nod or a scowl. It’s ranked as one of the greenest and most liberal-leaning towns in the entire state, the kind of place where Sarah Palin would get thumped if she ran for mayor (and where, even at the height of her statewide popularity, she lost the local gubernatorial vote). An amalgam of capital city, fishing port, and mining boomtown dating back to territorial days, Juneau seems infused by a freethinking, old-Alaska egalitarianism. It’s the sort of place where people are used to ideas being hashed out in public without permanent offense being taken, and state commissioners shoot the breeze with third-generation commercial fishermen in line at the Super Bear grocery store. A deckhand for the Alaska State Ferry is as apt as a college professor to share similar environmentalist views on clear-cut forestry, permits for a new gold mine, or a black wolf roaming the forested outskirts. Historically, a strong majority of Juneauites had supported management policies favoring wolves, and opposed state-sponsored predator control. The Capital City indeed may have been the only sizeable town in the entire state where a wolf might have been tolerated by enough people to afford him half a chance at survival. At ease as he was around humans, this wolf couldn’t have lasted roaming the margins of the mall-spangled, helter-skelter sprawl of greater Los Anchorage, population three hundred thousand. How about Fairbanks, far to the north, way more frontier Alaska–feeling and a quarter the size? Fuggedaboudit. In fact, near most of the dozens of cities and villages scattered across the subcontinental vastness of the state, his survival would have been measured in heartbeats. Still, a solid 40-plus percent of Juneauites lean anywhere from right to hard right on the issue. Far as they were (and are) concerned, a wolf is at least a nuisance and unwanted competition for the deer, moose, and mountain goats they hunt for sport and food, if not a downright menace. So, even if a majority of residents who had an opinion saw this wolf as a good thing, or at least no cause for concern, there was a solid contingent that held opinions to the contrary.

  On a clear January morning, Sherrie, the dogs, and I walked up the west shore, and instead of just us and the wolf, we found a cluster of bright parkas and cavorting dogs at the north end of the bay. And there was the wolf, not on the edge looking in, but mixing with the crowd. Anyone watching from a distance would have taken him for one of a gang of dogs playing. We leashed up and watched from seventy-five yards. The three women, all locals, shook their heads, grinned toward us and shrugged, flabbergasted. One pointed a pocket camera at the spectacle and snapped away, as if she were trying to prove to herself what she was seeing. The wolf had stepped out of the brush, one shouted, and before they even knew what it was, or there was any time to panic, everyone was wagging and chasing around. Dogs weren’t listening and wouldn’t come, but it all seemed fine, they said.

  At least as far as canine body language went, the women were right. Though he towered over his ill-sorted counterparts, the black wolf projected all the ferocity of a pup. He whined, play-bowed, and let himself be chased, his own tail tucked low, exuding the gentle, exuberant goofiness of a yearling Lab merged into that M
ichelangelo-sculpted wolf body. When the women and dogs moved off down the lake, the wolf raised his tail in greeting to us, and trotted out, closer than he’d ever come. And though the fetch game went on with no ball-grabbing or dog-wolf contact—nothing as close as with the women who had just left, because we pushed back to maintain space—the wolf stopped twice as close as we were used to. Fifty yards, sometimes less than half that. If we waved our arms or took a few running steps in his direction, he’d turn and bound back a few paces, stop, and eventually drift closer. The whole scene was thrilling, of course, and great for photos (I finally got a few worth keeping), but worrisome. We weren’t talking about the least flicker of aggression or discomfort—no hard stare, bristling, or lip-curling. But what if he crowded the wrong person, someone who couldn’t read body language, had never met a wolf before, or took mere proximity as an excuse for self-defense, or launching a complaint to the U.S. Forest Service, or the Alaska Department of Fish and Game?

  One morning before dawn, the wolf’s tenor howls woke us in our bedroom, reverberating through foot-thick insulated walls and double-paned glass. We found tracks fifty yards from our back door, along the Forest Service campground road and nearby beach, by the public warm-up shelter called Skater’s Cabin. In the cover of darkness, he seemed to be probing right to the edge of our neighborhood. Investigating? Hunting? True, snowshoe hares, beaver, mink, and other prey frequented the marshy ponds and second-growth woods nearby, but the howling seemed practically an announcement: I’m here. Whatever had prompted him, the wolf that had once held back to the lake fringes below Mount McGinnis had inched closer and showed less and less sign of leaving. Moving in was more like it—expanding the territory he’d claimed as a wolf, and exploring what it held. Whether we liked it or not, those rules of engagement were shifting beyond our control.

  Waiting at our house

  Spring 2004

  3

  Romeo

  Over the next few weeks, I skirted the edge of a waking dream. I’d look up from my first cup of coffee in the predawn light, and there the wolf would be, trotting across the frozen lake or curled on the ice, a dark speck of life that filled the land to overflowing and redefined its very nature—as well as my own understanding of where I stood in the world, and of what might pass through it, if only I looked in the right direction. One thing to know there were wolves out there somewhere, roaming the country you called home; totally another to see one from where you ate and slept, the walls between you and the wild suddenly gone thin. Who the hell brushes his teeth while watching a wolf? More than once, I decided I must be imagining rather than seeing.

  But sure enough, there was a wolf, right there and then, rather than the mere idea of wolves. And far more than the usual tokens of their passing—wind-blurred tracks, weathered bones, or a flicker of here-and-gone motion. I gazed full upon what photographer Edward Weston called “the thing itself.” No wonder I spent ever more time staring out whatever window I passed, and even less wonder that I so often dropped whatever I was doing, threw on camera pack, binoculars, and ski gear, and was gone for hours at a time. Up to this point, almost all of my encounters with wildlife, from moose to wolverines, had been with strangers—unknown animals, a handful of which were temporarily willing to accept humans nearby. Often the truce lasted only seconds, as with a pine marten regarding me from a stream bank with relaxed, curious eyes; sometimes for hours, as when I lay on the fall-bright tundra of the upper Redstone valley, surrounded by dozens of bull caribou taking their afternoon siesta, those great-antlered heads nodding in and out, fully aware of my presence and accepting it without alarm. The world transforms itself in those moments, harks back to a past when we included ourselves in the natural world and it included us. We’ve long since morphed into an outlying presence that most wild creatures know as a high-level threat, either from experience or genetically programmed instinct. In rare instances, that perceived threat triggers a defensive-aggressive reaction; by far the most common response is avoidance, which may range from quiet, watchful retreat to outright panic.

  Whatever the situation, and whether the connection was brief or prolonged, gradual or immediate, I’d never had the chance to get to know a large wild predator on a daily basis over a period of time—not as an anonymous organism, but an individual. Not only was I beginning to recognize specific traits and behaviors, but a distinctive, all-his-own personality; and I didn’t know of anyone except a few full-time researchers who’d been dealt such a hand. Even so, biologists working with wild, free-ranging wolves conduct most of their studies from low-flying planes or at staked-out den sites, with the help of satellite or radio collars, inside a few parks and preserves or in ultra-remote areas, almost always with packs neutrally habituated (that is, nonreactive, neither afraid nor aggressive) to the scientists’ presence. This was something else again. It wasn’t Yellowstone or Denali National Park, not the remote Brooks Range, where I’d lived almost half my life, and not Banks Island in the high Canadian Arctic—all places where people go as I had, hoping to find wolves, often with scant success. Instead, the wolf had initiated the contact every bit as much as we had and had opened a door to another world. We hadn’t dreamed of such a thing when we bought that lot overlooking the west shore of the lake in 1999, and I shoveled away wet spring snow and glacial till to pour the first concrete footings. I’d always reckoned that the best reason to build a house is a view, and we damn sure had one: full-on of the glacier rising above the lake, mountains forming a soaring, ragged frame—as it turned out, around a single, singular wolf. Just seeing him from my window had been almost reason enough to go through the ordeal of construction. Now we’d moved past that into some uncharted realm where we seemed to be as much the investigated as investigators, and what passed back and forth between us less observation than a wordless conversation between species. Without doubt, we each recognized the other, and were feeling our way forward over uncharted ground. The question was the shape of that relationship, and how far it would, or should, go.

  Of course, the wolf had come to us, but that fact didn’t eliminate responsibility. He was supposed to have gone weeks before—felt some distant urge, lost interest, drifted back to his world. Did he stay on because of us, or would he have chosen to stay regardless of what we did or didn’t do? Could we, and should we, do what we could to send him away? Staying here, within our collective shadow, could well be a death sentence. Sherrie and I took a deep breath and acted. We ran at him, yelled, waved, and threw chunks of hard snow, which he dodged with easy grace. The next day, there he’d be again, as if nothing had ever changed. Perhaps if every person who had contact with the wolf had done the same, it might have driven him off; but in any case, the wolf showed no sign of leaving.

  I found some comfort in this reflection: as far as practical matters went (and wild creatures tend toward the intensely practical, as a matter of survival), he wouldn’t likely starve himself to socialize, especially with animals not his species; he must have found country to suit his needs and enough prey nearby to not just sustain himself, but make a good living. Hungry wolves, like all living things, can’t afford the luxury of play, and, like humans in that same situation, do desperate things—eat dogs, who knows, maybe even attack someone. Instead, this animal appeared well fed, thick-coated, sociable, and relaxed as a wolf could be. But neither his ability to survive nor his desire to interact with dogs was less an issue than where he’d chosen to do it.

  Without doubt, the wolf had become more bold and visible. He soon adopted the early-morning habit of curling up on the ice, a few hundred yards out from the Big Rock, less than a half mile from our door—a perfect, central vantage point for watching all comings and goings. Dogs and skiers appeared from parking lots and trails radiating out from that end of the lake, a steady trickle or flow of people, depending on the day, doing what they’d always done in the recreation area: play hockey in front of Skater’s Cabin with the kids, train for a cross-country ski race, hook up for a dog wal
k with a friend. But now things had changed. There was a wolf—sometimes unseen, or a distant shape, but at other times, a huge, wild presence folks couldn’t ignore, trotting out to exchange pleasantries with the family pooch. Though so far there hadn’t been a whisper of trouble, it could change in the blink of a raven’s eye.

  When a picture of the black wolf was splashed across the front page of the Juneau Empire, the jig was officially up. With the flick of a camera shutter and the thunk of a printing press, whispered secret and rumor morphed into a howling, breathing, flesh-and-blood reality. The glacier wolf, as some called him, suddenly swirled into a citywide topic of conversation in checkout lines at the Super Bear grocery, the Alaskan Bar, and Thunder Mountain Café: Yep, a wolf . . . big black one . . . out on the lake . . . went out there and saw it myself. . . . What’s with that? . . . I dunno, but he sure is a big bastard.

  Now that the cover was officially blown, people started talking. We discovered we’d scarcely been so singularly sneaky; a few others had been biting their tongues just as we had, imagining themselves as guardians of their own secret wolf. He’d actually been around on and off for at least six months, a fleeting vision to most, and an increasingly regular sight to a few. A patient of Sherrie’s said he’d seen a black wolf on the Dredge Lakes trails that previous late spring, trailing him and his dog. A wolf had been spotted that fall crossing the nearby shooting range, of all places, and along Montana Creek Road, a mile or two as the wolf trots from our house. Fellow Juneau writer Lynn Schooler had watched him along the lakeshore in mid-November, a couple of weeks before our first sighting. A guy I met skiing told me the wolf often had shadowed him and his two Labs on their early-morning walks. Then there was that woman down the street who had watched a dark, large husky-shepherd mix of some sort cross her yard—now she realized, not a dog at all. And we already knew of at least two other contacts besides ourselves. The stories continued to pile up, and for every one we heard, there must have been dozens more.