A Wolf Called Romeo

by Nick Jans

  And, like any celeb, the black wolf attracted his share of buzz and speculation, including the same questions we’d been asking ourselves all along. His backstory posed the central mystery. Most folks reckoned, logically enough, that he was indeed related to that black wolf killed by the taxi near the Mendenhall Glacier visitor center in April of 2003. Witnesses had heard howls from more than one wolf in the woods after she’d been struck. The dead female was carrying four pups, just weeks away from birth. Couldn’t Romeo be a heartbroken mate stuck in time and space, searching endlessly for his Juliet, as one woman later cooed? Many Juneauites assumed this supposed relationship was the inspiration for the name that followed the wolf. And maybe that link explains why Romeo stuck, after all. It fit well enough and tied up the tale in a plausible, anthropomorphically pleasing bow. That may not have been what Sherrie had in mind when she murmured that word, less a name than an offhand thought; but we knew by then that the story had taken on its own life, traveling far beyond any of us, and the wolf himself.

  Research and eyewitness anecdotes show that mated wolves do indeed form till-death-do-us-part monogamous bonds that equal any in the animal kingdom and put many human commitments to shame. Wolf researcher Dr. Gordon Haber reported a case of a male wolf finding his dead mate (killed by airplane hunters in a state-sanctioned predator control operation), burying her, and lying on top of her body for ten days. Once, nearly a decade before, I returned to the carcasses of two wolves Clarence and I had skinned, a huge black male and a gray, almost certainly alpha male and female of a pack, to find a circle of tracks and imprints, marking where a family had sat with their dead—a hard realization that haunts me still and shoved me farther along the trail I was already traveling.

  As a more immediate window into the closeness of wolf relationships, consider domestic dogs and the countless recorded examples of unconditional loyalty, love, and sacrifice toward human companions: rescuing babies from fires, refusing to leave the graves of dead masters, wandering hundreds of miles to find home, and all the rest, trailing back in legend, history, and literature. The generic Latin-based appellation Fido (“I am faithful”) was bestowed with good reason, and the source of that tendency to form, hold, and act upon such strong social bonds is rooted deep in the lupine genome. The complex group behaviors of hunting, raising young, and defending territory—the three central tasks of any successful pack—require the same close-knit dedication to family that we honor so highly in our pets. When we gaze into the adoring eyes of a canine companion, we’re staring at the carefully muted and shaped soul of a wolf. A key difference between the two is that through the process of selective breeding, we’ve convinced domesticated dogs to transfer their allegiance to our species—not just serve us, but love us as equals, or above themselves—a trade-off, one could suppose, for our assuming dominant pack roles as suppliers of stability, food, and leadership. Many dog behaviorists subscribe to the theory that we’ve engineered dogs into a state of arrested adolescence—a necessary condition to effect this transfer. Wild wolves, meanwhile, look only to each other, as they always have, and we in turn look toward their shadowed forms with mingled admiration, suspicion, and dread.

  The fountainhead of the wolf’s incredible social cohesion is the intense tie between the mated pair that forms the nucleus of the pack; these two are, in fact, considered a pack in and of themselves. In human terms, they’re family, a far more accurate descriptor than “pack,” with its connotations of a loosely organized mob. Though variations and exceptions have been documented by researchers, most often there is only one reproducing pair in a pack, the dominant male and female. There’s no mistaking the solicitous affection the two often show toward each other—nuzzling, gentle play, resting together, and mutual grooming. The rest of the pack, if any, is made up of nonmating pups from previous litters, with perhaps an adopted disperser mixed in. These younger animals, themselves all highly bonded to their parents and to each other, fall into a pack hierarchy from most dominant to most submissive, an order that sorts itself out in daily interactions—play, fighting, hunting, feeding, traveling—according to prey availability, pack dynamics, physical size, and personalities. Larger wolves generally trump smaller ones; in fact, the largest adult wolf in a pack is most often the dominant, or alpha, male. Despite receiving the doting, coparenting attention of the entire family group in early life, only a small fraction of pups will ever reach breeding age, which is around a wolf’s second year, with actual mating often being delayed for several years more, depending on fate, opportunity, and an individual’s drive. Younger, smaller wolves are often the first to succumb when times are hard; since wolves are fast breeders and recover quickly from population crashes, adults are more biologically valuable than young. A pup’s inexperience leads to errors in judgment and dooming injuries; if it brushes near humans, its natural, sometimes bold curiosity leaves it especially vulnerable to traps and rifles. Too, it may be killed in fights with neighboring groups, and starvation exacts a heavy toll.

  Surviving young will typically disperse sometime between one and four years after birth, on occasion wandering huge distances in the process of seeking mate and territory. One study found that roughly 15 percent of wolves at any given time are solitary, though, of course, the percentage of lone animals may vary greatly from one population to another, according to local dynamics. Most of these lone animals are those young dispersers; the rest, survivors from human-decimated packs or the rare wolves that inexplicably choose life alone, as either a temporary or (far more rarely) a permanent strategy. No matter their origin, the level of mortality among these outliers is much higher than that of wolves living within an average pack, with the same dangers looming on all sides, and none of the protection that a larger, bonded group may afford. Biologist Haber once observed that a lone wolf is a dead wolf—perhaps a bit of an overstatement, but not by much. The odds stacked against Romeo were steep and always had been.

  Given the timing of the taxi-struck female black wolf’s death near our house, just a few weeks after mating season and several before denning and the highly cooperative, all-absorbing business of raising a litter, the dead female’s mate would likely have been one of those nearby wolves that were heard in the woods after her death; or, if temporarily separated, he would have searched for her by howling and checking scent posts and rendezvous sites for days, if not weeks. Circumstantial evidence seemed to fit the lost mate theory: Romeo appeared in the Dredge Lakes area that following summer, just a mile or so from where the female wolf had been killed. However, his age made that scenario less likely. Few second-year male wolves get the chance to breed within an established pack; that’s the hard-won right of older, more dominant animals. On the other hand, a young male seizing the chance to breed isn’t out of the question, under certain circumstances, which, in fact, might have applied in this case. According to Fish and Game records, three wolves had been legally trapped in the Nugget Creek basin area (a steep-sided, high-country drainage between Bullard and Thunder Mountains, on the south side of the glacier) the prior year. Due to proximity, they were likely members of the same pack, and one could have been the female’s original mate. In his absence, a younger wolf may have become king by his own paw and sired the pups she was carrying. Researchers have recorded just such fluid dynamics in disrupted packs. The urge for a wolf family to produce pups runs strong, from a genetically imprinted point of view; a pack that misses a litter year risks decline, if not extinction. Romeo’s size, too, supported the notion that he could have gained sudden dominance over smaller wolves and become the black female’s mate of opportunity.

  There were other possibilities. Romeo could have just as easily been not a stand-in mate, but simply the taxi-struck female’s pup from the previous season, or maybe her sibling. And, while most likely he was indeed a member of that same pack, it’s also conceivable he was an unrelated wolf that appeared in the months after her death, perhaps to fill a territorial vacuum after the surviving wolves scattered
, as members of a disrupted pack may do. One male, a hundred-pound wolf fitted with a satellite collar by National Park Service biologist John Burch on a tributary of the upper Charley River in February 2011, traveled an astounding 1,500 miles in four months after his mate died—from north-central Alaska into Canada’s Yukon Territory, as far northeast as the MacKenzie Delta, then west again into Alaska, to within twenty miles of Deadhorse and the sprawling oil fields at Prudhoe Bay. In the process, he crossed dozens of streams and rivers, including the powerful Yukon when it was running ice, the broad Porcupine River, and a rugged portion of the Brooks Range. No one knows what compelled that walkabout, but surely he could have found a mate or territory in fewer miles. Think of that wolf: a social, territorial, highly intelligent creature, traveling utterly alone through hard, unknown country. Wolves do this as a regular part of their hardwired species strategy, but it doesn’t mean it’s easy, exacting an inner toll that can never be quantified. While we have GPS points to track the lone male’s meandering journey, and studies with which we can correlate or compare data, we can’t chart the shape of his memories and experiences or accurately project his emotions through the lens of our own. But if a dog can sense the weight of profound loss in a way humans have long recognized, safe to say a wolf can at least equal that emotional complexity.

  Musings regarding that complex inner, emotional landscape lead toward questions regarding comparative intelligence between dogs and wolves. In pure physical terms, domestic canines’ brains (in proportion to body size) are 25 percent smaller than their wild ancestors’; that substantial figure alone points to some sort of diminished capacity. However, researchers conducting experiments in this field agree that comparing intelligence across species is a dicey business at best. The consensus among the Inupiaq elders I knew—people who had worked with sled dogs all of their lives; hunted, trapped, and observed wolves; and inherited experience-based lore about both, passed down through generations—was that the average wolf is far smarter than the average sled dog. By that they meant on the wolf’s own terms, out in the country: finding and killing prey, avoiding traps, learning from experience, innovating and solving problems, and so on. On the other hand, any Inupiaq dog musher understood that a wolf pup or a wolf hybrid was “too wild” to learn to pull a sled or learn to cooperate with humans. Most dog-wolf mixes tended to be high-strung, difficult, and even dangerous, though their genetic input into a breed line was considered valuable. I recall one such wolf-dog in Noatak, a large, rangy animal belonging to my neighbor, an old traditional Inupiaq named Dwight Arnold. The hybrid waxed feral and jaw-snapping aggressive, unapproachable by anyone except Dwight, and was staked away from the other dogs in his team. Careful breeding and selection for several generations would be necessary to produce useful work dogs from such a cross. In short, wolves and dogs of the northwest Arctic region, so similar genetically, were viewed as quite different by the people who knew them best, especially in one key respect: their willingness and/or ability to interact cooperatively with humans.

  Scientists at work on the subject, comparing problem-solving abilities and learning patterns between hand-raised wolves and domestic dogs, concur that dogs rely on humans as partners in problem solving. Wolves, even those imprinted on people from an early age and affectionately bonded to their handlers, tend toward independent thought and action. Furthermore, wolves seem to possess a more sophisticated understanding of physical cause and effect, while dogs (especially herding breeds such as border collies and blue heelers like Chase) are much more able to pick up, somehow translate, and respond to nuances of human language. However, arriving at some sort of statistically meaningful comparison of overall intellectual ability between the two species is an elusive goal. The only experiments addressing the issue involve comparing bright dogs (most of the subjects seem to have been highly trained and intelligent individuals, from a human point of view) to captive wolves, environmentally and socially impoverished in comparison to their wild brethren, and quite possibly dumbed down further by nonselective breeding. As any astute breeder will tell you, all dogs are far from equal in both innate intelligence and willingness or capacity to learn; most would agree to the same sort of intellectual range that exists among humans. It’s fair to assume that a similar variation occurs in wolves—though natural selection in the wild, which would presumably weed out the dunces from the gene pool, is absent in captivity, further contaminating any firm research conclusions based on captive-raised wolves. Then we have the further issue of parsing out the differences between genetically transmitted, ancestral knowledge, and active, adaptable cognition by the individual, and the degree to which the former constitutes intelligence, rather than what Victorians (including Darwin—himself a hard-core dog lover—who praised the moral and intellectual superiority of dogs over wolves) would have dismissed as brute instinct. All we can say with relative certainty is that the two species, though so similar in so many respects, possess overlapping but divergent intellectual abilities, each shaped by its unique environmental necessities. My own belief, based on experience and study, is that an average wild wolf is at least the equal of a brilliant dog in pure, sentient, problem-solving intelligence, and probably its superior. And Romeo certainly proved in his time among us to be, at the very least, one damn smart wolf.

  Some watchers still believed Romeo must be a released dog-wolf hybrid. That would explain, they said, his inexplicable attraction to canines and his high-level tolerance of humans, and eliminate the confounding notion that a fully wild, adult wolf could exhibit that sort of—well, dammit, friendly behavior. However, a number of people with well over a century of combined wolf experience with hundreds of animals pointed to the inconsistencies that suggested an alternate history. Not only Joel Bennett, but my longtime friend and fellow writer/photographer Seth Kantner, who’d been born and raised in a dirt-floored homestead in the Brooks Range, where wolves ebbed and flowed past with the caribou, stood beside me on the lake on a visit south, watched the black wolf, and agreed this was a creature of the wild, plain and simple. My neighbor Tim Hall, who hailed from northwestern Canada and had seen his own share of wolves, said it best. As he and I paused to regard Romeo along the lake edge on a still, sun-dazzled March morning, Tim leaned against the handlebars of the big Ski-Doo snowmobile he used to set the skiing track on the lake. “Nope,” he said, nodding toward the wolf, “that’s the original machine.”

  In the absence of a scientific test comparing the dead female’s DNA with Romeo’s for a possible link (and though such a test was discussed, none was ever attempted) all theories regarding the wolf’s origins were just that. We’d never have a sure answer to any of our questions, and perhaps such mystery, added to a growing pile, suited the story best.

  Regardless of where the black wolf had come from, we could all agree on one thing. There was nothing to match this spectacle anywhere on the planet. No pack interaction, it was true, but still a wolf, right there, more accessible and dependable in his appearances than anyone had ever heard of. Even in those early days, and with the same easy grace with which he moved, Romeo became part of the Juneau scene, one of the wrinkles that defined us. To some, he was no more than a curiosity; but to the ever-growing crowd of watchers, he was a new neighbor and a natural, charisma-loaded mixer—the sort everyone wanted at their party. He was well on his way to becoming the town’s de facto mascot.

  Paradoxically, now that the black wolf was no longer a secret, he somehow stayed one in the larger sense of the word. Sure, whatever ran in the Empire got picked up by the Anchorage and Fairbanks papers, and I spun the first installments of the unfolding tale in my Alaska magazine column. But no one tipped off CNN or the Today show. YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter didn’t exist in those days. If they had, the phenomenon of Romeo the wolf might well have exploded into viral mode with the help of a few smartphone videos. And, though up to a million cruise ship tourists funneled through Juneau annually, and more than a third of them ended up at the glacier on their
Gilligan-style three-hour tour, these masses were a May-through-September phenomenon. The dark, storm-lashed rain forest winter was strictly for locals and their wolf. What happened in Juneau stayed in Juneau, at least for the time being.

  5

  Shoot, Shovel, and Shut Up

  April 2004

  I woke from a hard sleep to a sound I knew too well: the crash of a large-caliber handgun, close enough that the thud of the muzzle blast shook the double-paned window and drawn, insulated blinds of our bedroom. Then another. Sherrie, earplugs in, stirred and murmured. The dogs’ heads were up as I staggered for the window. I knew damn well what was going on. Some stupid bastard was letting fly with a hand cannon less than two hundred yards from our back door, from the beach near Skater’s Cabin, a popular party spot where locals sometimes let their yee-haws loose, oblivious to the fact that the area was far less wilderness than it had been a dozen years before.

  But suddenly, this was far more than a matter of home-owner outrage at the disruption and threat to family. At the first rolling crack, I’d been yanked into a new world where my first thought, more of an image than a word, was this: The wolf! I’d yanked on jeans, boots, and jacket before I realized the futility of running out into the darkness, now ringing with silence. Whoever had fired those shots was gone—probably jumped in his truck and roared off before my feet hit the floor. I dialed up the police dispatcher, who sounded decidedly uninterested in sending a unit out into the boonies to investigate a little Alaska-style fun. I slid back into bed beside my sleeping wife and lay awake until Sherrie’s alarm kicked on, wondering what I might find lying out on the ice in the gray light. Raising the blind, I reached for binoculars and discovered I didn’t need them. There lay Romeo, curled up a half mile out, head up and alert, waiting for his first dog fix to appear. To this day, I don’t know if those shots fired were mere drunken mayhem or an illegal, calculated attempt on the wolf’s life. They weren’t the first or last I’d hear at odd late hours, echoing across the lake.