by Nick Jans
From the earliest tales of The Last Frontier to last week’s news item, wolves drift in and out of the shadows, their looming presence adding a dark-bitter spice that many Alaskans seem to relish—including (maybe most of all) those who complain the loudest. While most of the hand-wringing centers on their predation of game animals, the supposed menace of wolves as eaters of human flesh is inevitably trotted out as justification enough for killing wolves in general, and especially animals like Romeo whose territories brush against our own. In semi-urban areas, such as the outskirts of Anchorage or Fairbanks, state-supervised culling of such animals is performed only after a string of incidents and complaints (usually, attacks against pets or human encounters with bold, fearless wolves in a given area). However, plenty of chest thumpers don’t hesitate to shoot first, and skip the part about questions later. Such killings are often illegal and unreported. Shoot, shovel, and shut up, the saying goes.
The perceived menace posed by Alaska killer wolves was amply dramatized in the 2011 survivalist-noir film The Grey. Liam Neeson plays a world-weary wolf biologist standing guard, rifle at the ready, to protect North Slope oil pipeline crews from the constant threat of all-out attacks. When the plane carrying Neeson and other workers crashes in the territory of a pack led by a black anti-Romeo digitized to nightmarish proportions and features, the puny, scruffy humans are hunted down relentlessly. A gripping tale to be sure, but one problem: the whole thing, start to finish, is a pack of Hollywood hooey. This film is also evidence that the fearsome wolf rooted in our collective subconscious, rather than fading into the past, is alive and well. In fact, several other recent mainstream films, including the Twilight series with its shape-shifting vampire/wolves and Peter Jackson’s productions of the Tolkien Middle-earth sagas, replete with horrifically proportioned, howling, orc-ridden Wargs, seem custom-designed to perpetuate the myth of malevolent killer wolves to a new generation.
So, what about the stories of man-eaters: “Peter and the Wolf,” “Little Red Riding Hood,” wolves chasing down travelers on the Russian steppe, and so forth? By far the greatest number of predatory attacks in this and the last century have taken place in remote areas of India, Afghanistan, and Pakistan, where dwindling natural prey, human poverty, incursion on wolf habitat, and the tradition of leaving young children to tend livestock seem to have contributed to several hundred deaths in the past two centuries, though substantiated official records are generally lacking. Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Book, with its central tale of the child Mowgli being adopted by a kindly pack (one of the few representations of sympathetic wolves in all human literature) apparently put a positive spin on a real-enough threat. Scattered cases of wolf predation on humans have also been recorded in Europe; most of these accounts are unverifiable, or wilt under serious investigation.
There is little doubt that wolves—avid, active scavengers—ate human dead during the waves of plague and wars that swept the continent, and horrified witnesses projected them as bloodthirsty man-eaters; the Old World werewolf legends may well have their roots there, as well. Conceivably, wolves that fed on bodies learned to associate humans with food, lost fear, and sought them more frequently as prey. However, concrete evidence of this progression is lacking.
As for North America, in 1944, a researcher named Young examined thirty cases of aggressive wolves on the continent before 1900, including six supposed human fatalities. In his introduction he stated, “Whether these stories are products of fertile imaginations, or are truth, is difficult to determine.” In other words, he allowed that all six deaths—startlingly few, given the number of wolves and humans colliding all across the pioneering sprawl of America—may not have occurred at all. However, documented aggressive incidents and attacks by wild wolves on humans have undoubtedly taken place, and relatively recent reports focus on Alaska. In 2002, state biologist Mark McNay assembled a case study of eighty interactions between humans and wolves from 1970 to 2000, all but several in Alaska and Canada. Just sixteen of the eighty encounters involved nonrabid wolves biting people or grabbing at their clothing. No injuries were rated as life threatening, though several were considered serious. Four of the six serious bite cases were children, including a well-publicized and much-discussed attack in 2000 on a six-year-old boy at a logging camp in Icy Bay, Alaska. In fact, this incident was the impetus for McNay’s report, he stated, in order to reexamine the danger of wolves to humans. The six-year-old was attacked while playing, bitten and dragged before a pet black Labrador and nearby adults intervened. The wolf, shot and killed, was proven by investigators to be a habituated, food-conditioned animal that had been known from the year before, and fed by camp workers in the weeks before the attack.
While McNay offered an incomplete analysis of the factors involved in wolf aggression toward humans, a careful reader can surmise what’s implied and add to what is stated. Food conditioning clearly ranks at the top of the list. Habituation to human presence, though not a direct cause in itself, creates more potential for proximity, which could only increase the odds of something going wrong. Also, appearing vulnerable and/or small—lying down, being alone, or being a child—seems to add to the risk of attack. In more than a dozen of the perceived aggressive incidents (most of which stopped short of physical contact) wolves appeared to be defending themselves, pups, pack members, or kills from humans. In other instances, wolves seem to have mistaken people for other prey and retreated when they realized their mistake. Only a small fraction of the cases seemed to involve wild, unhabituated wolves making an unprovoked, serious attack, and few of those involved human injury of any kind.
Six of the total thirty-nine aggressive incidents, including the Icy Bay case, involved humans accompanied by dogs. While McNay stopped short of identifying domestic canines as a contributing factor or a trigger to wolf aggression against humans, he suggested the possibility of such a link—rooted, one might assume, in the enmity wolves of a given pack, defending territory, show toward all canine interlopers. Unknown wolves, coyotes, foxes, and domestic dogs are usually chased and killed on sight, and often eaten. If true, Romeo’s countless peaceful interactions with people and dogs alike stand out as all the more remarkable.
Threats, whether real or perceived, and the odd bite aside, in the entire recorded history of Alaska, there has been just one confirmed fatal attack by nonrabid wild wolves on humans, and that occurred only recently. On March 8, 2010, a young, first-year teacher from Pennsylvania, Candice Berner, was killed two miles from the remote Alaska Peninsula village of Chignik Lake. Since there were no eyewitnesses, the exact circumstances will never be known. Berner was last seen around 4:30 P.M. at the village school after telling a co-worker she wanted to get some exercise. As she set out on the one narrow, curving, brush-lined roadway leading out of the Alutiiq Eskimo community of seventy-three residents, blowing snow hurled sideways on a west wind gusting past thirty-five miles an hour. She walked or jogged outward from the village, listening to music on her headphones, no more worried about her surroundings than any suburban jogger. An hour later, four villagers on snowmobiles found one of Berner’s mittens and bloody drag marks on the road and discovered her torn and partially eaten body several dozen yards downhill, in a patch of willow brush, surrounded by animal tracks and signs of struggle. Three of the party went for help. Circling the area on his snowmobile, the remaining young man saw a wolf step out of the brush and fled. Berner’s body was dragged some yards before her remains were recovered by an armed party and taken to the village. Alaska state troopers arrived the next morning to investigate a possible human crime scene (fingerprint dusting, fiber samples, rape swabs, and the rest). But given what they regarded as almost certain evidence of wild animal involvement, the state troopers turned the case over to Fish and Game, which conducted its own investigation. Though hampered by bad weather, department personnel in a helicopter tracked and killed two wolves, followed up by two privately contracted, expert aerial wolf hunters, who scoured the area and managed to k
ill six more within a fifteen-mile radius of the village over the following three weeks.
News of the apparent attack blazed across the state; here was proof of the danger, the antiwolf crowd said with grim, I-told-you-so satisfaction. But many Alaskans, including some notable biologists and wildlife experts, remained skeptical. Couldn’t the killers have been local dogs? After all, hundreds of Alaskans are assaulted by domestic canines each year, and such events, some fatal, are unfortunately all too common in bush villages. I’d known a couple of kids who had been severely injured by sled dogs, and had myself once fought off a big husky mix that could easily have killed a smaller or panicked individual. Perhaps Berner had encountered such an animal. Or had the wolves involved been fed by villagers, either by access to garbage or deliberately, and so learned to link humans with food? Maybe she’d been murdered by a human and dumped out of town, and wolves or dogs had fed on her already-dead body. Persistent rumors continued to circulate, fueled by the fact that a year after Berner’s death, Fish and Game had yet to release their final report on the incident and remained tight-lipped (some would say downright secretive) with any details. Finally the department’s report was released, and I interviewed both State Trooper Dan Sadloske and Fish and Game area biologist Lem Butler, point men in their respective investigations. Each was helpful, and candid. Though minor inconsistencies were apparent between the two reports, and with earlier media releases, I found nothing to refute the official conclusion. Candice Berner had been killed by wolves, perhaps as few as two or as many as four, judging from the tracks and later DNA analysis taken from the body. DNA from one of the last wolves killed was a positive match with those samples. Berner had suffered numerous bites, including fatal punctures to her neck, and portions of one buttock, shoulder, and arm had been eaten. If her body hadn’t been recovered, it would likely have been consumed down to hair and bone fragments, like any wolf kill.
There were a number of unique factors that helped explain why Berner might have fallen victim. The weather had been poor, and in flat light and blowing snow, shapes can be difficult to recognize, distances distorted. She was attacked on a narrow, winding, brush-lined portion of the road. Wolf tracks in the willows suggested she hadn’t been stalked; instead, wolves and human probably surprised each other as they met on a blind curve bordered by dense brush, just a few dozen yards apart. Statements from one of the villagers who discovered her body indicate Berner’s tracks seem to have reversed direction back toward the village at that point. She may well have turned and run in panic, and the wolves, in hunting mode and anticipating usual prey (a moose calf, perhaps) locked on to a dark, fleeing shape. Berner’s size—she was four feet ten inches tall—may have made her appear even more vulnerable. Flight response triggers pursuit and predatory behavior; perhaps if Berner had stood her ground and given the right physical message, the wolves would have stopped, gotten a good look, and either held off or retreated—which isn’t to fault her understandable response or cast any blame her way.
But even given this synergy of factors, there is no final explanation for why this one encounter escalated into an all-out predatory attack, when the vast majority of wolf-human interactions—untold tens of thousands—have ended without a hint of lupine aggression. The one killed wolf positively linked by the DNA match was rated in excellent physical condition. Neither was there firm evidence of human habituation or food conditioning, though neither can be dismissed as a contributing factor. Biologist Butler’s report notes that local dogs and cats had been eaten by wolves around Chignik in the past. Wolf tracks were found near the town’s fenced but incompletely secured garbage dump, and he had observed a village dog dragging off a bag of trash. Surely wolves could have done the same and so begun to associate people with food.
There’s only one other documented case implicating healthy, wild wolves in a North American human death. The animals involved, in Saskatchewan, near a remote geological exploration camp garbage dump in November 2005, seem to have been bold, habituated, food-conditioned wolves. The victim, a young geology student named Kenton Carnegie, went for a walk after work and was attacked, killed, partially eaten, and cached (dragged off and covered) by one or more large carnivores. As the first-ever possible case of wild wolves killing humans in North America, Carnegie’s death naturally drew intense scrutiny. Several highly respected biologists contended that the killer was most likely a black bear, while some, including Mark McNay, argued that the evidence implicated wolves. Still others, including researcher David Mech, suspended final judgment, which was the official conclusion. If wolves were indeed involved, that makes just two documented cases of human predation on the entire continent of North America in more than four centuries of wolf-human interactions. During that same period, many dozens of people have been killed by a variety of livestock and wild animals, including pigs, donkeys, deer, and llamas. Human deaths from domestic dogs in the United States alone average around thirty per year, and thousands are severely bitten by our supposed best friends.
In my own encounters with wolves, many of them under circumstances that should have rendered me especially vulnerable—including animals bounding toward me as I stood mired hip-deep in snow, or circling me in the dark—I’ve only once felt threatened, and that animal, a young female (and like a disproportionate number of the wolves I’ve met in my life, black), probably meant no harm. She and her pack were locked on to a cornered moose. She spotted my indistinct shape in the brush, struggling with a stuck snowmobile, and charged with what seemed predatory intent before skidding to a halt thirty feet away, regarding me wide-eyed and then running full tilt in the opposite direction. Aside from that wolf, and Romeo, of course, the rest of the nonfearful wolves that have reacted to me at close range—a couple of dozen or so—seemed cautiously curious, indifferent, or to be taking restrained exception to my presence.
Meanwhile, every trapped or wounded wolf I’ve seen has made submissive or fearful gestures, or tried its best to escape. Growling or snapping is a totally defensive reaction to being closely approached or physically prodded and signals not ferocity, but a desire to avoid conflict. Virtually every bit of titillating film footage featuring apparently vicious snarling and snapping among a pack is actually wolves gathered close over a kill, signaling others that they want to feed with no trouble.
By comparison with my wolf experiences, over the same three-plus decades I’ve been charged, chased, or aggressively approached by more than a dozen grizzlies and triple that number of moose; been rushed by several musk oxen; been growled at, jaw-snapped, and/or bluff-charged by a handful of black bears and a female polar bear; and had to grapple, hands and knife against antlers, with a wounded bull caribou that lowered its head and tried to gore me. I’ve personally known a double handful of brown/grizzly mauling victims (several of them my friends, one of them killed). But no one I’ve known, including homesteaders, trappers, and hunters with combined centuries of wilderness experience, has been so much as nipped by a wild, healthy wolf. Clarence Wood’s old Inupiaq friend, Zach Hugo, from Anaktuvuk Pass, was attacked in 1943, at age fourteen, by a wolf he and his father presumed rabid, based on its behavior. Caribou skin clothing protected Zach, and he went on to live into old age and tell me the story over coffee one stormy April day, years ago.
Fearless wolves are often suspected of being rabid; the virus is almost absent in Southeast and South-central Alaska, though outbreaks do occur, especially in the Arctic and western reaches of the state, where the disease smolders and erupts every few years. A mammal struck by the fatal virus, which attacks and systematically destroys the brain, may seem oddly tame or fearless; it might stagger or drool and, in rare instances, become blindly aggressive. In addition to Zach Hugo’s, several attacks in Alaska have been recorded, at least two resulting in death when individuals contracted the invariably fatal disease after having been bitten. However, such instances are more a minor footnote than an ongoing public health risk.
The hanging question isn’
t why Berner and Carnegie were attacked and killed, but why wolf attacks on humans on this continent, and pretty much everywhere except remote areas of south-central Asia, are as rare as they are. Wolves are opportunistic, adaptable predators. Why not choose humans—comparatively slow, small, and weak compared to most wild prey—on a regular basis? Surely, if North American wolves saw humans as potential food, thousands should have died at their fangs. Instead, just two. As for nonpredatory motives, wolves don’t attack humans in defense of territory, like the monster wolves in The Grey. In fact, wolves around a den, even with pups present, are oddly unwilling to be aggressive toward encroaching people, though they may bark like dogs in alarm, howl, bluff-charge, and show anxiety before retreating (though they will attack bears). Why this reluctance? Through long coevolution and natural selection, perhaps we’re ingrained in wolves’ genetic memory as demigods or (quite rightly) a mortal threat to be avoided. Or maybe we’re simply so strange, like nothing else in the landscape, that our alien presence invokes fear. So it is that wolves collectively seem at least as worried about us as we are about them, and our own fears have minuscule grounding in reality. You have to be exponentially unlucky—right up there with being struck dead by a piece of space junk—to be killed by a wolf.
