A Wolf Called Romeo

by Nick Jans

  Strangely, that first public knowledge of a wolf in our midst scarcely seemed to alter the lake scene. Most Juneauites took his presence right in stride. This was Alaska, after all. If they saw a wolf, fine, and it became part of the outing, not a reason for coming or staying away, but an added bonus. Some people didn’t bother to look and didn’t care much if there was a wolf or not, as long as it didn’t affect them. Others, thrilled by the rare chance they saw, embraced it and became black wolf junkies—a steadily growing, ad hoc club whose members came in all ages, shapes, and sizes. A few of those qualified as outright worshipers, holding a crown of perfection above the wolf’s unsuspecting head. Others, including biologists, naturalists, hunters and trappers, professional and amateur photographers, and a wide net of citizens ranging from state legislators to store clerks to college students and mechanics, came with their own hopes to see or hear their first live wolf up close, and maybe collect a few pictures or some video footage. Overall, though, the recreation area was big enough to absorb both viewers and wolf, with room to spare. Yet another crowd perceived quite another wolf, and the first grumbles emerged: A wolf hanging around, so near to houses, kids, and dogs? You know damn well he’s up to no good. Dammit, something needs to be done. And what that something might be was a topic of ongoing discussion, both in public and private.

  Rounding out the cast of human participants at this point were the chronically oblivious. Years after the black wolf first appeared, after all the word of mouth and news features in the Empire and on KTOO radio, all the public hand-wringing and debate, I’d still occasionally meet local hobbits who professed their astonishment at seeing a black wolf on the lake, of all places. But people of all camps came to the lake all the same, saw or didn’t see, heard or didn’t hear, cared or didn’t, and word percolated outward through the community, slowly but steadily driving up the number of people who decided to swing by Mendenhall Lake on a given afternoon, especially if the sun was out, trails were set, and the snow firm. The palette of reactions that would swirl around Romeo his whole life was already mixing—complex and contradictory shades, often too blurred to sort, or even name. Love and fear are, after all, closer than we think; and I felt the stirrings of both, tangled in my chest, as I worried for his safety. I imagined old Clarence Wood shaking his head at me: his traveling partner, with whom he’d hunted wolves for years, now fretting over one. I could almost hear his breathy, low voice, close to my ear: Real nice skin. You could get ’im just like that. And I knew there were others out there who would think the same.

  Unconcerned, the black wolf trotted through whatever spaces we left vacant, off on an endless stream of lupine errands ranging from an ever-expanding agenda of dog greetings at one trailhead or another to hunting forays to naps in favorite spots to howling sessions in natural amphitheaters of his choosing, back and forth on the ice and up into the snow-drifted slopes rising above, the miles evaporating beneath those great, loose-wristed paws. His tracks led not only down well-traveled paths, but into frozen beaver swamps and alder-choked esker gullies, up dense-timbered slopes, places nobody would think of going—unless maybe following a fresh wolf trail, which is what I found myself doing with some regularity. I followed his signs stale and fresh through the willows, examined the spots where he’d bedded down, poked apart his scats, and spent long hours watching, sometimes with a wolf in sight, often not.

  Decades ago, Nelson Greist, an old Inupiaq trapper who’d been raised living in caribou skin tents and hunting ptarmigan with bow and arrow, had told me that wolves in their territory are regular in their rounds and favored spots, following routes so precisely that you could sometimes predict within inches where they’d step each time they passed certain choke points—ideal spots for a trap or snare. “Follow them trail.” Nelson nodded. “Then you gonna find out something.” My own experience up north had long ago confirmed Nelson’s rule. For example, one pair of wolves I knew by their trails but never glimpsed used to cross a certain gulley in the Mulgrave Hills north of Noatak village in the winters of 1982 to 1984 at exactly the same spot, at roughly two-week intervals. Another single animal, known to me only by tracks and scent posts (regular spots for urination), patrolled near the village of Ambler for an entire spring, and either it or a wolf with the same mental map returned the next couple of years, again in March and April, its trails intersecting my ski route at the same places every week or so.

  Increasingly, the black wolf was fitting into just such a homebody pattern, though in a minuscule range—much smaller than I’d ever known or heard of. It centered on Mendenhall Lake’s western shore, ranging up the slopes of Mount McGinnis, and its outskirts extended a mile or so north up the Montana Creek valley. The core area spanned eastward across Dredge Lakes, with its labyrinth of human and animal trails winding through beaver swamps and reclaimed gravel pit ponds, and along the abrupt slopes of Bullard Mountain and the three-thousand-foot ridge called Thunder Mountain (named for the rumble of winter avalanches down its furrowed north face). At the southwest corner of Dredge Lakes, just across the Mendenhall River, lay another patch of marshy young woods interlaced with Forest Service campground lanes and paths. And just beyond that lay the first line of houses, ours among them, bordering on the campground or the upper Mendenhall River. Draining the lake, cutting down through the heart of the valley, the cold, gray-green rush of the Mendenhall and the bordering Dredge Lakes and Brotherhood Bridge parklands offered a wooded corridor extending seaward through development—a grid of neighborhoods, schools, churches, business parks and malls, and finally, an industrial zone near the Juneau airport, bordering a rich tidal wetland. All in all, the wolf’s core winter territory in those days totaled seven square miles or so. Hundreds, even thousands, would have been more usual.

  Though such an area may seem vast from a human perspective, hardly so for a wolf. Then again, this was a single animal, not a pack, and newly moved in, so maybe limited territory made sense. Within it, his comings and goings were indeed predictable, with exceptions defining the rule. Now and then he’d disappear for a day, or several. Just when we thought he’d moved on, there he’d be, back in his same hangouts. He seemed less and less likely to hold near cover, with an escape route behind him, the way a transient wolf might do.

  A wolf in new country had better be cautious. One of the leading causes of death in wild wolves is what biologists call interpack strife—a wolf being killed by wolves of another family group, on whose marked territory the outsider has trespassed. Think of the lens through which the black wolf must have seen us: an enormous, strange pack on whose ground he was encroaching, on penalty of death. By any measuring stick, ours or his, his behavior scored bold. On the other hand, single dispersing animals, if not killed or driven off, do sometimes become satellite wolves, living on the edge of a pack, scavenging not only its kills, but perhaps an aura of belonging. Or, over a period of time, a satellite wolf may gain the opportunity to sneak in and mate, or become a member of the group outright. Or perhaps the outlier entices a ready-to-disperse wolf of the opposite sex to go off to start their own pack. Bold behavior in new territory is thus biologically rewarded often enough that the trait carries forward. Exactly how each situation works out boils down to a matter of personalities, timing, and circumstance—nature again, rolling those dice. Maybe, in some strange, scrambled, or stylized way, that’s what was playing out here, as it had thousands of years before, at the edge of that ancient fire: our future ally, waiting to be invited forward.

  If I took dogs with me, it was usually just one—sometimes tomboy-tough, ladylike Dakotah, sometimes gentle Gus. Regardless that we’d been somewhat reassured by the wolf’s forbearance with our youngest, Chase had richly earned a place on the end of a leash. I began to go out of my way to find wolf-less stretches for exercise with all three dogs, separate from my own outings. I didn’t have any doubt that taking all the dogs along increased my odds of a close pass with the wolf; the more hoopla, the better he seemed to like it. I hoped, tho
ugh, for more than a photo op in the midst of a bunch of gallivanting canines. Mesmerizing as it was, I wanted to know about this wolf beyond that strange scene, and know him as well. Besides, the idea of using dogs as a lure seemed somehow wrong, even if it might prove harmless with some dogs and owners; others might not be the same, and I didn’t want to set an example for others to follow. A single dog, kept close, seemed a good compromise for a gradual weaning away from canine intermediaries; and, as time passed, I’d often choose to go solo to seek the wolf, on skis or foot. As it was, time alone with the wolf was already more difficult to come by.

  Whether we wanted her to be or not, Dakotah was a born wolf magnet, and we could scarcely keep the two apart. From the standpoint of human aesthetics, she just plain glowed, flat-out gorgeous: deep chest, slim waist, and sculpted muscle topped off by a velvet-soft coat and thick otter tail. Her delicately dished face bore natural black eyeliner around soft brown eyes. Of course, we all think our dogs are perfect and beautiful, but to prove we weren’t totally love-blind, ’Kota had been chosen from a casting call for a modeling stint on an Eddie Bauer catalog shoot in Juneau a few years before, where she got paid in treats and hugs to cavort at the glacier with equally perfect humans, and we got passed a check besides.

  Beautiful as she was to us, a biological attraction didn’t make much sense. Dakotah had been neutered young and was almost age nine by the time of her first encounter, hardly pumping out the come-hither pheromones on which canine mating ardor hinges. No matter how close the genetic match, she stood a species apart, her resemblance to the lupine form general at best, and a third smaller than an average female wolf. Meanwhile, there were plenty of younger wolfish husky mixes, some hunky shepherd types, and a scattering of Malamutes available that you’d think would have been far more alluring to a wolf.

  But as inexplicable as it was, the connection between the black wolf and our dog was instant—one of a series of overlapping friendships, verging on romantic interest, that the wolf would carry on with a dozen or more canines over the years. Whatever he was or wasn’t, his behavior echoed that dated meaning of the word wolf, stopping short of that leering, cartoon whistle.

  If the black wolf caught sight of Dakotah, even at a distance, he’d bound over and commence to make a damn fool of himself—whining, pacing, and striking come-hither boy dog poses, standing tall, narrow-eared, tail up and tip waving gently. And from a distance that varied, according to the wolf’s mood and the day, Dakotah would reciprocate with rapid wags, flirty play bows, and whines of her own. If we let her go, the two would bounce and prance around like hormone-addled twelve-year-olds at a junior high dance. Like chaperoning parents riding herd on hot blood, we’d call ’Kota back after a brief, occasional visit, which we allowed only with much reluctance and discussion, having given in to pathetic pleas on both sides. Afterward, the wolf would often pace behind us on our way home, gradually fall back, and stand alone on the ice, howling to the sky.

  There are few sounds more naturally mournful than a wolf’s cry, but the black wolf’s howls at those times seemed to carry an undercurrent of utter desolation. Sometimes he seemed so desperate that he didn’t stop as usual and followed us all the way home, loping ahead and angling to drive us back away from the house. Of course, the wolf recognized both us and our dogs; but now, for better or worse, he surely knew our strange, towering, wooden den as well. Sherrie said it broke her heart to shut the door with him whining and pacing at the edge of the yard. I’m sure if she’d had her way in some imaginary peaceable kingdom, she’d have coaxed him in, given him a bath and some ear rubs, and let him sleep at the foot of our bed, along with the rest of our little pack. And the way he paced and whined, seemingly pining for companionship, gave you the idea he just might go for it.

  Of course, not everyone shared my wife’s big-good-wolf outlook. One crusty old-timer I met one snowy day squinted at Romeo out on the ice, looked down at his spaniel, spat, and said, “Hell, I trust any wolf about as far as I can throw him,” and went the other way. A woman stopped our friend Anita, coming in off the ice, and inquired whether she’d seen “that rogue wolf,” in a tone that suggested it had been snatching children. Small doubt that a groundswell of pushback was building.

  One morning, Sherrie pulled up the bedroom blinds, and there lay the wolf out on the ice, alone in the gray dawn, staring toward the house. Well, there’s that Romeo wolf again, she murmured. And though at first she didn’t intend it as a name, it fell into private usage and stuck because it fit. After all, she said, we knew him well enough and long enough that we needed to call him something besides “the wolf.” She repeated our personal tag among co-workers and patients at the dental office, and it spread, then went viral—at least, in the pre-social-media, Juneau sense of the term.

  Instead of a love steeped in destiny, it came to this: Sherrie and I dragging Dakotah, moaning and straining at the end of her leash in the half dark, the wolf pacing along parallel to us, fading in and out of the trees all the way back to the yard, and me hurling snowballs to send him away from us. I wish we could have explained why to him. All the more heartache, when care wears the mask of cruelty. With wolf-grumbling neighbors around the corner, and some cars hitting fifty-plus down Skater’s Cabin Road, we couldn’t allow him to remain, nor choose the boundary where he’d turn back. We’d steeled ourselves and made the only choice we could: keep the two apart. For that matter, Sherrie pointed out, maybe we should stop going out ourselves, or at least draw back. Just because the wolf put up with us, and this growing influx of people and dogs, didn’t make it right. We debated the point over and over and reduced our forays still more, as others pushed forward to take our place.

  For all his seemingly amorous advances, the black wolf never attempted the least hanky-panky of that nature with any of the hundreds of dogs I saw him interacting with, though he was a big male with (you’d suspect) the usual urges, and he must have met at least a few receptive females in season. Nor did I ever hear one report of randy behavior, even when some misguided woman that first season brought her in-heat husky out on the ice, hoping for a union and a batch of hybrid pups. Over the years, that was always one of the big puzzlers—no romantic overtures out on the lake, no sniffing and end-licking, and seldom any mounting, not even as a play or dominance posture—though rude dogs attempted the latter on occasion, yet remained unchallenged. True, wolf mating season is just once a year, a brief window from late winter into early spring, but male wolves and wolf hybrids are known to respond year-round to dogs in heat. Not this guy, though his intact equipment was obvious (though far less visible than a dog’s due to the wolf’s dense, multilayered coat). Whatever the reason for that suppressed mating drive—it may have been an instinctive or hormonally triggered response as an outsider, trying to fit within the framework of a pack that generally has just one litter a year, born to a ranking pair—it reduced one source of possible tension over the years. A good thing, in a situation loaded enough as it was.

  4

  The Original Machine

  March 2004

  I skied north toward the glacier in slanted, late-afternoon light—my second five-mile loop of the day. Earlier, I’d run the dogs in the temporarily wolf-less campground, and I was on a lone speed run—as good an excuse as any to see how things were going out beyond the point. Up ahead about a mile, I spotted an already-too-familiar scene on the ice: people standing on their skis, watching as dogs raced back and forth, with the wolf alternately standing back or interacting. As I drew closer, I recognized some dogs and owners as part of a regular crew, with maybe a newbie or two mixed in. Other folks and dogs, one here, two there, far across the lake, were converging on the same spot. I’d seen my share of wolf parties by then and knew this one would probably last anywhere from a few minutes to a half hour. That’s how things were going those mid-March days of 2004, just four months since we’d first met the wolf.

  Romeo the wolf had progressed from fresh news to full-blown celebrity statu
s, and we had a ringside seat as lengthening days and a stretch of postcard weather lured Juneauites to the glacier area in force. The mountains glistened white against a deep, cirrus-flecked sky; miles of ski tracks and walking trails beckoned. And there waited the black wolf, like a computer-generated effect. Surely we’d blink, and the image would shimmer and fade. But the wolf was real as the steam of his breath and his palm-sized prints etched into the snow, alive as the strange amber fire in his eyes.

  He lingered in any of several locations—the Big Rock, of course, plus back toward the West Glacier Trail parking lot and several spots to the east, from the river mouth along the Dredge Lakes shore. Each place served as the sort of rendezvous area any pack might recognize, encompassing wolf-friendly features: vantage points, both visual and olfactory; access to a web of known trails; handy escape routes into dense cover; good hunting grounds and travel routes nearby. These were the arenas he had chosen as places to meet our dogs and, by default, us. Though we might have understood those same areas as our territory—we’d built or shaped them and made our marks on the surrounding land—they’d become the wolf’s as well, defined by scents we couldn’t detect, and howls with meanings we could only guess. Ready or not, the totally improbable scenario of on-demand, all-access, and even drive-up, from-the-parking-lot wolf viewing had arrived in the Capital City. Tagging along with the package came the reality-show recipe: throw a big, black wolf and a city of thirty thousand into the same pot, stir, and step back.