A Wolf Called Romeo

by Nick Jans

  So, why forge through chest-deep snow when a packed route offers three times faster travel for the same calories spent? A firm trail can be so alluring that some of my Inupiaq trapper friends often simply drove a snowmobile through likely country and made sets right off the back of their machines, square in their own mechanical footprint. Not much need for deception, beyond the trap itself, nestled in a depression covered by sifted snow, and surrounded by a scattering of meat shavings and rancid seal oil. I’ve backtracked over my own machine or ski trails many times over the years to find practically every wild thing that traveled the country, from wolverine to moose, taking advantage of my ribbon of firmer snow, and wolves among the most frequent followers of all. Besides offering easier going, trails lead to food—either to the creatures that made them, or to kills made by others that might be scavenged. By selecting Mendenhall Lake as the anchor of his territory, Romeo inherited a ready-made transportation network so perfectly suited to his use that he might as well have designed it. In terms of survival, these ready-shaped trails may well have been the most critical feature of the black wolf’s chosen ground. In heavy snow country—and the upper Mendenhall valley was surely that—a single wolf would have been hard-pressed to break trail even in such a compressed area and keep a positive energy flow. Romeo probably traveled no less than an average wolf in his daily rambles, but he floated back and forth, mostly in short segments with easy going. Not only did he burn less energy, he required less food, which meant less time and physical stress hunting, and more time for rest and his social calendar. One more thought on the importance of those trails: they were, after all, probably what had led the black wolf here in the first place. But his remaining for months and then returning showed he must have found abundant prey along those trails.

  It’s true that the dietary—which is to say, evolutionary—fortunes of Canis lupus lie firmly intertwined with those of large, hoofed prey species—in Alaska, mostly moose, caribou, Sitka deer, mountain goats, and Dall sheep, depending on what’s locally available. Formidable quarry each in their own right, these ungulates have shaped wolves, and vice versa, in a mutually adaptive arms race stretching across millennia. Some Alaska packs specialize in one species, to the extent that biologists speak of moose wolves or those that depend on caribou, while other families may rotate between two or three species, according to opportunity. My longtime friend Fish and Game area biologist Jim Dau also describes highly successful, generalist packs he and colleagues call sport-hunting packs. Despite that ungulate link, wolves as a species prove highly adaptable and opportunistic in finding the answer to the age-old question of what’s for dinner; and some individuals take that quest to a whole new level.

  An active, healthy wolf needs around six pounds of food a day; in times of opportunity, it’s capable of devouring more than twenty pounds at one sitting (after which it sleeps, heavy-bellied, nearly comatose, for several hours—“meat drunk,” my Eskimo friend Clarence calls it). A wolf can also make do without eating for a month or more if need be, and the often-high starvation rate of wolves in the wild proves that many take in far less than the minimum, let alone that optimal amount. Since wolf population numbers rise and fall in direct proportion to prey abundance, and wolves reproduce quickly, some, even in times of relative plenty, are bound to starve.

  Let’s work in round, generous numbers, and say a well-fed wolf the size of Romeo would require around two thousand pounds of digestible food a year. Add in something more than five hundred pounds to account for the indigestible stuff, and we have a wolf consuming well over a ton of live-weight food a year. In deer, that works out to a couple dozen animals, or several moose, depending on size. Wolves draw nutrition from the bulk of any animal they eat—meat, fluids, organs, fat, the entire hide, connective tissue, and marrow-filled bones small enough to crunch apart and/or swallow. They start with the delicacies—organs, blood, fat, and flesh—and work their way down. Contrary to persistent tales of wanton killing with only tongues or livers taken and the rest left to rot, wolves, if not disturbed, tend to visit a carcass many times, sometimes dropping by to check, or perhaps reminisce, months or even years after nothing edible remains. A freshly killed, apparently abandoned, hardly touched carcass is most likely a result of wolves being temporarily displaced by approaching humans, or the wolves waiting nearby, soon to return. Prey is too hard-won to squander. Instances of so-called surplus killing—when wolves, finding easy opportunity, indeed kill more than they can readily eat—are rare as they are vilified, and the wolves involved would probably still make use of the meat if not disturbed or out-competed by scavengers.

  One can glean a great deal of information from a quick glance at a wolf’s scats. Dark, runny stools indicate not sickness, but wolves that are feeding heavily off the rich, choicest parts of a fresh kill. Well-formed stools with some bone and hair mixed in means they’ve moved past that point but are still gaining plenty of useful nutrition. Scats composed almost totally of hair and bone are signs of the final stages of cleanup, or a hungry, perhaps desperate wolf gleaning whatever he can from an old kill. In the cold, near-desert of the Brooks Range, some of these bleached, half-fossilized turds may persevere for years, long after even bacteria have given up and moved on. Over the years, I’ve used these familiar relics, far up empty canyons or on the crests of windswept ridges, as trail markers, even thought of them as friends—something that made the country less lonely. And each and every one stands as a testament to the hard life of a wolf.

  Call it luck or skill, Romeo had struck another jackpot in the upper Mendenhall valley—an oasis of relative plenty that hadn’t existed just a half century earlier. Like more than 90 percent of Alaska’s glaciers, the Mendenhall had been steadily receding for the past century; but in the late 1970s the retreat decayed into a rout. Since I first glimpsed the Mendenhall nearly thirty years ago, its craggy leading edge has galloped backward nearly a mile, exposing a tumult of fresh-gouged granite cut by several new waterfalls. The body of the glacier has shrunk several hundred vertical feet—untold billions of tons of ancient ice lost, far faster than it could be replaced.

  Farther down-valley, and a few decades earlier, the ice river’s retreat had bared a rubble-strewn, sandy bottomland drained by a network of ponds and sloughs into the ice-cold, silt-laden Mendenhall River: an austere-seeming patch of ground that provides an object lesson in the intimate tie between destruction and creation. Nurtured by the cloudy, rain-soaked climate of the upper valley and pockets of rich glacial silt, an outburst of pioneering plant life followed the fading ice—a shrub, moss, and grass community with cottonwood, alder, and Sitka spruce mixing in, which in turn has attracted burgeoning populations of small herbivores: snowshoe hares, beaver, porcupines, red squirrels, mice, and voles, plus a wide array of birds, hordes of insects, and microscopic life. Several streams feeding into the lake or river, some of which hadn’t existed a century ago, now host salmon runs of one or more species—an annual tsunami of marine energy surging inland, enriching soils and stimulating life across the food web, from delicate mosses to great coastal brown bears.

  For all that, traditional wolf-sized prey in the upper Mendenhall—hoofed mammals with which they coevolved—remains scarce. Except for a few recorded transients over the years, moose are absent, due to marginal forage and soft, deep snow. Even if a dozen of the big ungulates had yarded up for the winter along the lake fringes, it’s tough to imagine a single wolf making a steady living from them. While lone wolves have been known to kill moose, the perilous, arduous task of taking down even a sick or injured adult usually requires the concerted work of at least two animals, and more often, a full pack’s attention, sometimes over days.

  The upper valley and surrounding country holds solid numbers of mountain goats. These surly animals pose tough targets for a lone wolf in summer, fall, and early winter, when they frequent near-vertical escape terrain. Goats become more vulnerable in times of deep snow when they settle below the timberline, and also in sp
ring, when goats forage low after fresh greens, and young are born. However, they’re neither plentiful nor available enough to qualify as a year-round, go-to species for a single, homebody wolf. The diminutive Sitka black-tailed deer that are a mainstay for most Alexander Archipelago wolves are rare around the glacier, though small pockets cling here and there, with better numbers nearer the coast, just a several-mile trot away. No doubt there were times when Romeo availed himself of that opportunity.

  One more large prey possibility presented itself. On occasion, wolves deliberately seek bears—sometimes a cub or young brown/grizzlies, but especially black bears—as food. A number of such predatory attacks have been recorded in Alaska and Canada, and there’s at least one documented case of a pack digging out, killing, and eating a winter-denned bear. Though not predatory in nature, that wolf and grizzly brawl I witnessed thirty-some years ago reflected the general antipathy the species hold for each other. More recently, I witnessed the obvious fear wolves can trigger in black bears. One spring some years ago, in a distant inlet of Glacier Bay, photographer Mark Kelley and I sat perched on huge granite boulders, leaning into our cameras as two enormous, fight-scarred males jockeyed for turf and mating rights. Suddenly, though, a gray blur shot out of the trees, straight at the bears, and the two broke and ran, fleeing a wolf that might have weighed eighty pounds. The wolf was probably just running off the bears from a nearby den site or hunting area rather than launching a predatory attack, but the utter panic the bears displayed was unmistakable. Both brown/grizzly and black species occur in the upper Mendenhall, with the latter far more common; and younger animals, far less formidable than adults, could easily fall within the abilities of a wolf like Romeo now and then. But in such a limited area, the number of young bears was too small to provide a dependable food source.

  All told, that was the sum of Romeo’s prospective menu; all of the abundant, easily accessible items more coyote fare than lupine, it seemed, and standard fare scarce or problematic. What, then, was he eating? Following the black wolf’s trails, I came across kill remains and teased apart dozens of scats. In them I found the bits of bone and hair that bore witness to the stuff from which this wolf was built.

  Direct observation, along with analyses of not only scat, kills, and stomach contents, but of signature chemical traces found in DNA (which can be gathered nonlethally from tranquilized animals via hair or whisker samples), demonstrate that many Alaska wolves dedicate a surprising amount of energy—and gain a great deal in return—from nonhoofed sources. No huge shock that the Alexander Archipelago wolf subspecies of coastal Southeast Alaska and British Columbia joins other land-based carnivores in spending much time beachcombing for whatever the tides bring their way—washed-up carcasses of seals, whales, fish, and seabirds—and many of these coastal wolves regularly forage, as well, for clams and other shellfish. The beachfront also functions as trail, often with good travel on flats or bear paths, the easy going every bit as attractive as the food to which it leads. Coastal wolves with salmon stream access also make heavy use of these fat-rich fish during those brief periods of bounty when runs may almost clog some creeks. From a wolf’s perspective, the choice makes no-brainer sense: high-value food, with minimal energy expenditure or chance of injury (though for health reasons, they need to avoid the tapeworm cysts that riddle many salmon—accomplished by focusing on the nutritious and parasite-free heads, skin, and eggs; how they know this is a mystery). Some fishing wolves are damn good at what they do; in one British Columbia study, adults caught as many as twenty-seven pink salmon an hour, with a catch success rate of 49 percent. DNA research by former Fish and Game biologist Dr. Dave Person on massive Prince of Wales Island, on the southeastern edge of Alaska, found the summer and fall diet of at least some local wolves worked out to 20 percent salmon—this despite the island’s thriving deer population.

  But even farther north, wolves that live near Alaska’s convoluted, peninsular coast (which totals more miles than earth’s circumference at the equator) follow suit. DNA analysis there shows similar strong traces of marine mammal species, and, in some cases, remarked one researcher, the sort of seafood levels one might expect to find in seals. Along the Katmai coast in southwestern Alaska, wolves sometimes fish for salmon side by side with coastal brown bears. Even hundreds of miles inland, a DNA study shows heavy salmon consumption by a population of interior wolves that has access to fish, and, farther north still, in the upper Kobuk and Noatak valleys, I often noted the density of wolf action along active salmon spawning streams, though those same wolves no doubt relied on caribou and moose as a staple. No surprise, then, that with four species of salmon available in his territory—pinks, chums, sockeye, and coho, in overlapping runs spanning early July into October—Romeo’s scats were seasonally packed with scales, fins, and bones. He was just being a sensible wolf, taking advantage of easy calories.

  While deer or goat hair seldom showed in Romeo’s waste, it often bore the fur, feathers, and bone fragments of small prey—red squirrels, mink, waterfowl, plus mice and voles (which he must have eaten like popcorn), and most abundant by far, snowshoe hares and beaver. Twice over the years I saw him trot across the lake with a white hare dangling in his jaws, and often came across signs of the hunt: gnawed-off feet and clumps of fur on blood-tinged snow. One might think that wolves wouldn’t be agile enough to tackle such nimble prey, or that hunting something so small wouldn’t be energy efficient; but some wolves focus on hares (whether the smaller varying [snowshoe] or much larger, far-north-dwelling arctic hares) with great success. They patrol brushy areas where hare populations are locally dense, following the bunnies’ own runways, which inevitably lead to their makers and offer better footing. The wolf may employ either of two tactics: trample through and flush out hares in panic-stricken bursts, or hunt carefully and catlike, relying on keen senses to detect a snow-camouflaged hare holding fast against cover. Either way, a sudden burst of speed and an agile pounce win a meal often enough. At the brushy mouth of a remote Brooks Range creek valley, Seth Kantner and I watched a diminutive gray wolf hunting hares in the willows; its overlapping tracks showed it had been doing so for days. Biologist Gordon Haber also documented one Denali pack whose principal food became varying hares during a population explosion, despite no tradition of this in the past—yet another example of wolves adapting to opportunity.

  Romeo’s hunting trails and leavings also traced his regular visits to the many beaver lodges and dams across the upper valley. Harry Robinson and photographer John Hyde each witnessed Romeo making successful kills. Though these burly, outsized aquatic rodents, some weighing in excess of fifty pounds, are tough, hard-to-kill customers, both men recall the overwhelming power of the wolf’s assault. Hyde sat at the northwest corner of the lake in late spring when a medium-sized beaver hauled out on the sandy shore. He didn’t even know the wolf was nearby until a black streak bounded from the brush and slammed in, teeth and paws first. “He didn’t screw around,” remembers Hyde. “He bit down hard, boom, at the back of the neck, gave a couple of hard shakes, and that beaver was dead.” The wolf then picked up the thirty-pound animal as if it were a squirrel and trotted off to feast in seclusion. Like the rest of us, wolves don’t much like being watched while they eat. They also cache leftovers in exclusive places for later snacks, a behavior echoed by domestic canines burying bones and toys.

  Like a sizeable percentage of Southeast Alaska wolves, Romeo specialized in one particularly dangerous prey item. Though porcupines seem slow of both foot and wit, their quills present a deadly problem to would-be predators—and that’s just the point, so to speak. While they can’t throw quills, when threatened they tail-swat and whirl with startling quickness, brandishing their bristled backsides at attackers. The quills, all thirty thousand or so of them, are not only sticky sharp, they’re covered with microbarbs that impale with the slightest pressure and work their way inward, migrating through muscle and piercing organs, sometimes causing crippling injuries and a ling
ering death. Most predators leave porcupines the hell alone and apparently pass on that avoidance to offspring; those that don’t risk an exit from the gene pool. Get around those nasty spines, though, and you have a fat-laden and easily caught meal, living up to the old sourdough term quill hog. The trick is to make a quick killing bite to the skull or perhaps to the belly—both quill-free areas that the porcupine strives to protect. Then eat from the underside outward, leaving the flayed skin in one piece, quills facedown, with the end result resembling a spiky orange rind. While I’m not sure of his exact technique (I’d bet on a head-on bite, affording maximum avoidance of quills), Romeo certainly solved that prickly problem many times over the years. Porcupine husks lay scattered here and there throughout his domain, and I regularly found tiny, soft, not-yet-barbed replacement quills—they’re actually specialized hairs—in his droppings. One early-spring evening I watched him reclining at the base of a small cottonwood, gazing up at an obviously concerned porcupine that perched in its scant branches. An expectant-looking eagle lounged at the tree’s peak. The next morning, all were gone, but the waddling tracks of the porcupine, ending in a spatter of frozen blood a few dozen yards away, pointed to the outcome. The eagle had apparently carried away the spiny skin to pick over. Regardless of how the black wolf pulled off these specialized hunts, one wrong bite or misjudgment, even long after the porcupine was dead, could have spelled his end. Call it luck, but like a seasoned poker player, the wolf seemed to make his own—not only with hazardous prey, but all things.