A Wolf Called Romeo

by Nick Jans

  Anita and her dogs never sought the wolf; he found them and followed, cementing the relationship as one of his choosing. One afternoon Gus and I were sitting out past the Big Rock, chatting with two burly commercial fishermen and their Labs as the wolf stood fifty yards away, sizing up the social opening and ready to engage. A half mile down the lake, figures emerged onto the ice near Skater’s Cabin: Anita and her boys. The wolf’s head snapped around, and he was off and running toward them as if wire-drawn; he knew exactly who the hell that was. As the two fishermen watched open-mouthed, Anita and crew moved past to the north, Romeo trotting along as always, a few paces behind. “Well,” one of the guys muttered, “she’s got a lot of nerve, running off with the wolf like that.” Pointing out the obvious—that Anita didn’t have a whole lot to say about the arrangement—was, I decided, a waste of breath.

  Though this odd canine couple posed a number of head-scratching contrasts, one clear difference lay in the matter of scale. Sugar wasn’t known as the Big Shug for nothing. He stood a hair under ninety pounds in his muscular prime, stretched over a long, lean, big-boned frame built for running. With a more sedate lifestyle, he could have easily filled out another fifteen and still been buff. Next to Romeo, though, he dwindled to junior status. For that matter, so did all other dogs, even those few that outweighed him. The length of the wolf’s legs, the density of his winter coat, and his chiseled head and chest made him loom far larger than his actual size. And no matter the pooch, I never saw a paw print in the snow that looked anything but puny next to his. Shug’s big, floppy foot spanned little more than Romeo’s palm.

  There were other dogs and their humans, all with their own tales of platonic dalliance with the wolf; some I knew as friends or simply by face, and others I never glimpsed. Most wolf acolytes guarded their privacy, sometimes in elaborate fashion. Everyone who entertained such trysts thought their own experiences unique, and they were absolutely right—except for the stage-whispered fact that there was a queue of others doing pretty much the same thing, carving out private audiences at secret meeting places and times, all over the valley and beyond; some with dogs, a few without.

  For me, one of the most memorable of these ties to the wolf existed between my friend Joel Bennett and his wife, Louisa. Several years preceding Romeo’s first appearance, she had been diagnosed with breast cancer. In between harrowing bouts of surgery, chemotherapy, and radiation, she still made regular pilgrimages out to see the wolf, alongside Joel and sometimes me, shuffling along on skis or on foot, a beatific smile spread across her face. Louisa, beautiful in body and spirit, wracked by pain and sickness, never once complained. As Joel would later say, seeing the wolf helped keep her alive and filled with hope. And like Sherrie, Joel, and I, Louisa saw her love of Alaska personified in the graceful shape of Romeo, silhouetted against the mountain-framed glacier.

  Beyond all others, though, Harry Robinson and his black Lab mix, Brittain, set an entirely different standard for social contact with the wolf. Close as it had begun, the connection between Harry, Brittain, and the wolf only deepened that second winter. Attraction and shared experience became interwoven, stretched across the frame of time. The three began to cover more ground together, wandering the forested slopes ever higher along the West Glacier Trail as well as Dredge, and along the base of Thunder Mountain, man and dog following, in weather foul and fair, wherever the black wolf led. Increasingly, they were a pack according to social function: they patrolled territory, and they rested and played—the latter in a way that included Harry. “He’d sometimes brush past me and bonk me on the leg with his nose,” he remembers. “He loved to make snow angels or snow wolves or whatever you want to call them, and roll clumps of snow with his paws and push them, like he was building a snowman, and he’d look at me sometimes with that big wolf grin, as if to say, ‘Look what I just did.’” On these forays, the wolf sometimes shifted into hunting mode; he’d disappear on purposeful loops, scouring for prey, and rejoin Harry and Brittain. And so these daily meetings between man, dog, and wolf—three beings of three species united in a manner more astonishing than explicable—became cemented in habit. The wolf often waited at the edge of the West Glacier Trail parking lot and bounded into view at the sound of Harry’s engine. If the wolf didn’t show, Harry couldn’t avoid twinges of disappointment and sometimes worry. On the rare occasions when he and his dog couldn’t make it, he was sure the wolf felt let down—certainly over his canine companion, and, he was certain, on his account as well. The three had set out together down a singular trail, and miles lay ahead, passing through light and shadow.

  As for me, I continued the course Sherrie and I had decided on by the middle of the first winter. Though I saw the wolf practically every day, sometimes several times, and though he often waited a hundred yards from the house, I hung back and generally discouraged the point-blank contact that easily could have been mine, with either tireless Sugar or gentle Gus as intermediaries. And yet Romeo clearly knew me, and I him, a mutually relaxed and sociable connection. If he spotted me, with or without a dog, he’d often come trotting my way to trade friendly yawns and bows and allow me to approach if I so chose—something he wouldn’t do if I had anyone besides Sherrie along. Sometimes he’d lope along for a time in parallel as I skied, the dogs running along behind, and we’d rest on the ice a stone’s throw apart. I’m sure he never guessed how tempted I was to close that distance, but when he moved too close, I called the dogs to me and waved a ski pole. If we were up some empty Brooks Range valley, it might have been different; but here we were. As much as I wished, I couldn’t squint the houses and people away.

  Meanwhile, Juneau as a whole had continued to settle into a broader version of the same familiarity. There was, people realized, a wolf not just passing through, but living around us, an individual you could recognize and come to know, in some sense of the word: not a wolf, but the wolf. Romeo. The name had slid into such common use that even people who had never seen him adopted it, and everyone knew who that was, much to the chagrin of some wildlife managers and traditionalists, who believed naming any wild creature—especially something large, uncuddly, and carnivorous—was a foolhardy exercise in anthropomorphic fantasy.

  The name issue struck a special sore spot among some local Alaska Department of Fish and Game and Forest Service officials. In the words of Pete Griffin, district ranger (head administrator) of the Juneau district at that time, “Naming an animal creates an illusion of a relationship that doesn’t exist.” Pete, remember, was a guy who thought having the wolf around was “pretty cool,” so it wasn’t about the animal itself, but the naming and all it stood for. The logic goes like this: by giving a wild creature a name, people unavoidably attach humanlike traits as well and come to believe, somehow, that some sort of reciprocal bond exists—friendship, or at least mutual understanding. This belief leads to overfamiliarity, close-range habituation, and conflict. Sooner or later someone gets hurt or killed. And if it ends up being a human victim, the animal inevitably follows. The carry-away lesson most biologists and managers point to is that human-wildlife relationships sooner or later come to no good.

  The policy about naming, while clear and commonsense enough, isn’t uniform among management agencies in Alaska or elsewhere, nor even within the Forest Service. For example, at the Anan Creek Wildlife Observatory, about two hundred miles south of Juneau, administered by the Ketchikan ranger district, dozens of bears, both black and brown/grizzly, show up every summer to feast on the creek’s pink salmon run. As soon as a new bear can be reliably identified by local staff, it’s given a name, often whimsical, that suits the animal’s appearance or personality—about the same way junior high kids give each other nicknames, about as personal and unscientific as it gets. Same thing goes at McNeil River and Brooks Falls in southwestern Alaska—the first under State of Alaska supervision, the latter controlled by the National Park Service. Three different agencies rely on the same system for a simple reason: names are easier to recal
l and less likely to confuse than numbers, and everyone knows right away who Shorty or Alice is, how that bear behaves, where it hangs out. While one could argue those names are simply administrative tools, serving the purpose of science and management, there’s obviously a deeper connection. Practically everyone at Brooks Falls twenty years ago knew who Diver was, and the same for Mrs. White at McNeil, and dozens of other animals, shared back and forth between staff, tour guides, and thousands of enthralled visitors, along with stories of those bears—each one a named individual known by appearance, habits, and personality. Some of the humans with the closest ties were not naïve tourists, but agency field staff who knew the animals best and, in most cases, christened them. As for names leading to trouble, those three viewing areas have remained models of safety over hundreds of thousands of human-animal interactions; and specific examples of animal names leading to management issues in Alaska or elsewhere are, at best, hard to come by. In truth, the to-name-or-not debate seems more a red herring than a genuine problem. Some folks mumble in their beards that it just ain’t fittin’, others ask, why not, and what’s the harm if now and then an animal gets a name? Why not recognize certain wild creatures as unique individuals? The wolf sure as hell was that, and much more, in the minds of many.

  The don’t-name ethos carries an underlying message: Keep your distance—not just physical, but emotional. A wolf, like any wild creature, is technically a faceless resource, and there are those who would much rather keep it that way for a variety of reasons, not the least of which are the potential headaches posed by managing a recognized, popular individual—especially if “managing” means removing or killing, or allowing that animal to be subject to legal hunting or trapping.

  At the far end of the attitudinal spectrum—common among self-styled sportsmen—lurks a deep-seated, knee-jerk disdain for those who would attempt to recognize and engage a wild creature as a sentient being. Palling around with a wolf, like Harry was doing, verges on cultural taboo in that crowd, where such behavior is considered not just misguided, but deeply offensive and a danger to the modern sport-hunting tradition—a strange disconnect, considering that traditional hunter-gatherer societies insisted on a deep spiritual bond with the creatures they sought, gave them respectful, meaning-laden names, and generally saw them as equals, if not beings with supernatural powers; in the terminology of Austrian theologian Martin Buber, an I-Thou relationship. Mainstream modern sport hunting, as represented in hook-and-bullet television and magazines, insists on a link Buber would have labeled as I-It—objectification rather than engagement, pursuing and killing faceless creatures as a given, legal right, for our own entertainment or profit, or just on a whim. California bear advocate Timothy Treadwell, who pushed the social envelope by giving cutesy names like Booble and Cupcake to Alaska coastal brown bears and hanging around with them for years, until he and a female companion were killed by one, became a magnet for ridicule among the hunting crowd, both before and after his death. If Treadwell had been a trophy hunter and had been mauled to death clutching a lever-action .45/70 as he stalked Ol’ Baldy, he would have instead been mourned by the mockers, the same folks that would think it fine to give names to “rogue” bears, wolves, or whatever and establish individual relationships built on grudging admiration as long as the animal is inevitably hunted down and killed. But what was going on with this black wolf was something else entirely, something dangerously not right—and it all started with that damn name.

  So let’s back up and say the black wolf was never called anything beyond that simple adjective and noun or, in common research practice, was tagged with a neutral identifier—W-14A or whatever. Would that have changed anything that had so far happened, shifted his fate, or altered how we perceived him? The wolf arrived without a name, and his personality and actions over time led to it, not the other way around. And how many wild wolves have been named, in all our history? A double handful in dark notoriety, to be sure, but none in fond recognition, at least not while alive. “What’s in a name?” Shakespeare’s Juliet mused. “That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet.” Perhaps the same could be said for her lover’s wild namesake, centuries later and worlds apart.

  Romeo and Brittain

  8

  The New Normal

  March 2005

  Romeo lay alone on the ice near the river mouth, stretched out in the afternoon sun. As I skied past a hundred yards away, he lifted his head to regard me, yawned, and squinted against the glare, but didn’t rise. Oh, just you, he seemed to say, and settled back for another one-eye-open wolf nap. I paused, nodded in wordless gratitude—for both his familiar indifference and his presence—and double-poled on toward the glacier. Our second winter of the wolf had all but passed. The soul-numbing dark of January had given way to the ever-lengthening days of almost-spring, and all had gone far better than most of us had ever dared hope. To be sure, some carping persisted, but it had settled to background noise. Everyone, Romeo included, seemed to be setting a new standard for a large, wild, free-ranging carnivore peacefully interacting with humans and their domestic creatures—day in and day out, over weeks, months, and beyond. And not within the confines of some wilderness park with regulations and uniforms imposing order, but in semi-urban Alaska—as unrestricted as such an interchange could possibly be. Yet, over thousands of encounters, some of them in backyards and parking lots, interlaced with episodes of shaky human and canine behavior, there had still been no game-changing acts on either side—none of the menacing incidents, slaughtered pets, or worse some had predicted and, at least as surprisingly, no dead wolf.

  As he’d become more settled and relaxed around us, and vice versa, getting rid of him would have been easier than ever; and his life had always hung by a strand. Most Juneauites seemed to have bought into the outlandish notion that this good-big-wolf-out-the-back-door arrangement was the new normal and those that didn’t share that view continued to exercise remarkable, even admirable, forbearance. Of course, it was all too good to last.

  A twenty-year-old local named Rick Huteson was walking in Dredge one mid-March day with friends and his two dogs, one of them a two-year-old beagle named Tank. According to Huteson, Tank, who was off leash, bolted and ran off into the woods, hot on the trail of something—in other words, normal beagle behavior. Huteson said he raced after his dog, trying to call him back. “It was only a matter of seconds before I heard a deep growl right in front of me and lost sight of Tank,” Huteson told a Juneau Empire reporter. “A few seconds later, I saw the wolf running from me and I knew that Tank was in his mouth.” Huteson and his friends were unable to find the dog, dead or alive. He reported the incident to Fish and Game and the next day renewed the search, accompanied by Fish and Game area biologist Neil Barten. As part of standard field protocol, Barten carried a 12-gauge shotgun slung over his shoulder, loaded with rubber bullets, with some slug shells in his pocket, just in case—enough firepower in the latter to knock down a charging grizzly.

  Barten and Huteson scoured the brushy area. The spring snow was difficult—so crusty it scarcely bore marks from the day before, and laced with older, intermingled tracks, distorted by repeated melts and thaws: wolf, dogs, humans, and various small animals, from hares to squirrels. In places, water lay beneath the crust; the ice on some sloughs was starting to rot. Despite Huteson having been there just the day before, Barten couldn’t find clear tracks or other signs corroborating the young man’s story. They did locate a patch of blood soaked into icy snow, but not that much and hard to say how fresh. But no hanks of dog hair, chunks of bone, or a telltale collar. Huteson’s account, too, seemed less than certain and hazy in some details. One thing Barten did note: Huteson had a predator call in his possession, which he inadvertently pulled from his pocket as Barten watched. People use such devices for one reason only: to mimic the squeals of an injured hare, for the purpose of drawing a carnivore in close. “I asked him why he had it,” said Barten, “and he fumbled around and told
me he only blew it in his yard. That put a whole new color on everything.” Barten offered a possible scenario in which Huteson had been attempting to lure in the wolf and had been successful. Coming on the run, all set for an easy meal, Romeo had seen a hare-sized, similarly colored animal darting through the brush, and his predatory instinct had kicked in. After all, the area was one of Romeo’s favored hunting grounds, crisscrossed with bunny runways. Under those circumstances, and considering Huteson didn’t have control of his dog, Barten felt he could hardly hold the wolf responsible. Besides, they didn’t have solid evidence that Romeo had even killed the beagle; the blood could have been from a hare, or Tank could have even fallen prey to a bald eagle. (As if to underscore that possibility, a Juneau friend of mine reported an eagle dropped part of a dog carcass of unknown origin in her yard just days after I wrote this, years after the actual incident.)