A Wolf Called Romeo

by Nick Jans

  Huteson asked Barten to hunt down the wolf and shoot it, and the biologist refused. Years later, Barten still feels he made the correct decision. “I saw no justification for killing the wolf,” he said. “It’s not as if he’d showed up the day before and killed the beagle the following day. We had a very large sample set of peaceful interactions between the wolf and dogs.” A follow-up scouting of the area by Harry Robinson came up empty as well. He also found the bloody snow but no trace of the beagle, and did find tracks that could have been Tank’s leading out onto some precarious rotting ice. As a final bit of circumstantial counterevidence, just a couple of hours after Tank vanished, an acquaintance of Sherrie’s and her dog ran into Romeo on the northwest corner of the lake, and he seemed to be the same wolf that had never harmed a dog, nor had ever acted as if he might.

  If the beagle’s disappearance had been a criminal investigation, here’s how the case to that point would have stacked up: no body and no positive evidence of a killing; no firm proof placing the suspect at the scene of the presumed crime; no history of the suspect’s prior bad behavior in countless similar circumstances—in fact, the contrary; and the entire case hinging on the problematic testimony of a single witness. In short, no sensible district attorney would have found cause to file charges.

  However, the details about the predator call, like Barten’s view of the situation and those observations by others, never made it into the paper or passed into the realm of common knowledge. Instead, Juneau residents several days later met a feature article over their morning coffee: LAKE WOLF APPARENTLY KILLS BEAGLE, with the subhead DOG’S OWNER WANTS WOLF KILLED OR MOVED. Though the following piece was basically accurate and restrained in its conclusions, enough damage was done by the cause-effect headline and by what hadn’t been included in the story. The piece also featured an unchallenged version of events from Huteson, who was quoted as saying, “Had there been signs and frequent warnings about the location of this wolf, and the danger it posed to humans, I would not have put my dogs or myself in danger.” In short, Huteson claimed negligence on the part of authorities, though he admitted seeing the wolf the previous year and told Barten that he knew the wolf was around.

  Rather than Barten (who was conspicuously absent from the Empire piece), Matt Robus, then Alaska Department of Fish and Game’s director of wildlife conservation, defended the state’s position. The press involvement of a senior department administrator, one rung below the departmental commissioner, was highly unusual in a decidedly local matter regarding a single animal. Years later, Robus would tell me his taking the reporter’s call was incidental rather than planned (he wasn’t even Barten’s direct superior), and he had full confidence in Barten to say and do the right things on his own. But this was a touchy matter, and Robus, a longtime Juneau resident, knew it.

  Beyond strong local sentiment in favor of Romeo, the department was catching heat for its controversial aerial wolf control programs in other areas of the state, which had recently been restarted. While there was no such program in Southeast, the last thing Fish and Game needed was additional bad press, especially involving a unique, high-profile animal that might give a poster-child face to a broader, unconnected issue. The previous furor over state-supervised wolf killing under Governor Walter Hickel in the early 1990s had resulted in a widespread Alaska tourism boycott and the state’s wolf-killing program being suspended. Caught between the larger issue and local realpolitik, the department needed to play its cards carefully. Meanwhile, a small but vocal Juneau anti-Romeo crowd had been stirred into action by the incident. Huteson’s mother filed an angry and lengthy written protest with Fish and Game and posted one-page flyers around town, including in the Dredge area. A vehement letter by her to the Juneau Empire fumed, “What are we waiting for, another observation of a pet being carried off, or God forbid, Little Johnny carried away by a wild wolf? . . . I would hate to think Fish and Game is more interested in protecting the wolf for a tourist attraction then [sic] protecting the people who live here.” Of course, the department had hardly been protecting the wolf any more than any other and, in fact, had not lifted a finger to do so. In addition, the added traffic at the lake was decidedly local, with few or no tourists mixed in; nor was there any record to suggest humans had ever required safeguarding from this animal. But no matter how inaccurate or overblown the rhetoric, the message had been broadcast, and damage done. This could be the end of him, I breathed to Sherrie. She nodded back, fully knowing what was at stake.

  The black wolf had been effectively branded as a threat to people, and Fish and Game, the state agency charged with addressing such concerns (by default if not mandate), had been challenged to do something about it—in a manner the department could scarcely ignore. Not only had Robus not contradicted or qualified the uncertain evidence surrounding the beagle’s death; he agreed that it seemed to have indeed been killed by the wolf. If the department didn’t act in some fashion and someone did get hurt, Fish and Game (not to mention their federal partners in management, the U.S. Forest Service) could be subject to nasty, potentially landmark lawsuits. The department biologists had four choices: do what they had been doing all along, which was maintain a lightly monitored, hands-off stance; relocate the wolf; attempt to condition him to avoid contact with humans and their dogs; or take lethal action. Due to that possible legal exposure, the do-nothing course was out. And while killing the wolf had to be somewhere on the back of the table, it was a nuclear option, with guaranteed toxic fallout.

  Relocation, on the other hand, presented a nonlethal, viable alternative. This involved a team of biologists shooting the wolf with a tranquilizer dart, securing and stabilizing him, and transporting him to a suitable release point, far enough away to make his return unlikely—say, on the far side of the Lynn Canal fjord, somewhere south of Taku Inlet, or along the upper Chilkat valley, ninety miles to the north. Darting is approved capture protocol, and the state had relocated a number of wolves from the Fortymile River on the upper Yukon hundreds of miles south to the Kenai Peninsula a few years before, in an experimental program. Who could bitch about that? Wolf safe, people safe, story over.

  Tranquilizer darting, however, can be a tricky business. The drug is powerful, administering it in correct dosage via a shoulder-fired weapon is touchy, and numbers of tranquilized wildlife, from polar bears to moose, die from stress, adverse drug reactions, and being injured by the darts themselves. Generally this mortality rate hovers around one percent, but occasionally it’s much, much higher. Animals sometimes die during transport, as well, for a variety of reasons; in fact, several wolves from that Fortymile-to-Kenai relocation did exactly that.

  Even if the wolf were successfully moved and released, dropping him off in an unfamiliar area, in bottomless spring snow, might amount to a death sentence—if not by starvation, then at the jaws of an established pack defending its territory against a weakened, hopelessly outnumbered, and disoriented interloper. And the wolf’s movements and fate would most likely be recorded by a satellite tracking collar that would be bolted on after capture, the better to trace the wanderings of a known individual, for both study and management purposes—a two- to three-pound burden that some biologists believe can only make life more difficult. Consider such an added weight to an animal that depends on speed and flotation over snow for survival—the equivalent of a marathoner lugging several pounds of rocks in (quite literally) the race of his life. To further complicate matters, tracking data, especially in such a high-interest case, is often available to the public, and killing the wolf accidentally, or even the appearance of perhaps having done so indirectly, could balloon into a public relations nightmare. Robus summed up the dilemma in a nutshell: “Lots of people want to keep the wolf here. They think it is a fantastic opportunity to enjoy wildlife. If we try to remove or kill the animal, we will get more criticism than the current situation. This is a no-win situation for us.”

  The last option, attempting to train the wolf to be more wary of hum
ans through a principle known as adverse operant conditioning, made perfect, low-risk management sense. In layman’s terms, it’s simple enough: send out biologists with a dog; when the wolf gets close, fire nonlethal hazing rounds at him—stuff that would sting or startle him, but do no lasting physical harm. After a few episodes, he’d theoretically connect people and dogs to the unpleasant experiences he’d had and keep his distance. The department had three types of hazing devices at its disposal: so-called rubber bullets (not always rubber, but projectiles designed to be nonlethal), bean bags, and cracker shells. All have been used extensively to repel or condition large problem wildlife. Rubber bullets, shot from a pistol, shotgun, or special-purpose firearm, have the most range and impact. But they’re far from benign; such projectiles fired by riot police around the world have resulted in scores of human deaths and thousands of maiming injuries, and anything that would damage or kill a person could easily do the same to a wolf. Despite having fired very few rubber bullets at wolves (due to their normally elusive, nonconfrontational nature), Fish and Game biologist McNay recorded one wolf death caused by such a projectile, in the Canadian high Arctic. Bean bag rounds, a tiny pillow of pellets fired from a 12-gauge shotgun, offer far less chance of injury; but they’re also inaccurate, with an effective range of less than thirty yards. The last choice, cracker shells, aka pyrotechnic rounds, are shotgun-propelled explosive devices that rely on the startle effect rather than impact.

  The Empire article stated that the deterrent of choice would be a rubber bullet, though Matt Robus told me years later this detail was a case of misreporting. It wasn’t his place to make such an order, and Barten would have consulted with his direct supervisor or been free to decide on his own. Barten affirmed in an interview that he used a bean bag round for the first hazing attempt, which happened to be witnessed by photographer John Hyde. “And I missed,” Barten added wryly. “However, it seemed to have the desired effect. . . . [The wolf] was obviously frightened by the gun shot. I don’t know that it even noticed the bean bag as it landed well in front of it. However, upon running off, he got into the cover of the forest and howled for a bit . . . and wasn’t seen very often for the next several weeks.” And though Barten patrolled the lake several more times as a follow-up, he said he never fired at the wolf again for a simple reason: he never got the chance. Whether Romeo had been successfully conditioned to avoid dogs and humans, or just Barten, was a matter open to debate, especially given that the wolf soon resumed regular contact with many of his friends, Brittain and Harry included.

  Of course, a number of Romeo followers were upset by the hazing, which they felt was uncalled for. They worried, too, that driving the wolf elsewhere, to less-protected areas, would only place him in greater danger. Harry maintained that Romeo had indeed been struck with a rubber bullet and was limping as a result (and the wolf did favor his left front leg on and off the rest of that spring, though the injury could have been the result of a slip, a porcupine quill, or even a leg-hold trap he’d escaped). I, like many who knew the wolf, had mixed feelings myself. Making Romeo more cautious around our kind might well aid his survival, and if we weren’t being selfish, his life was the bottom line. Whether by bean bag or rubber bullet, hazing was a restrained official response to an incident that could have easily ended up far worse.

  Ahead lay at least a month of heavy wolf-human interaction on the lake and in Dredge—plenty of time for things to go wrong, and for some irate antiwolfers waiting for an excuse to insist on drastic action or to even take matters in their own hands. And what if Romeo had just decided that some dogs—maybe certain small ones that acted or looked a certain way, or had strayed away a certain distance from people—were now a blue plate special? What if one dog’s disappearance were followed by another? A second such event on the heels of the first might well doom the black wolf, and the seasonal clock was ticking.

  Within days of Tank the beagle’s disappearance, a young veterinary technician named Bill was walking his twelve-week-old Akita puppy along the northeast edge of the lake. Relatively new to both Juneau and Alaska, he was a big Romeo fan and so of course was thrilled when the black wolf appeared out of the brush and began to gently play with the twenty-five-pound pup. But suddenly the wolf seized the Akita by the neck and bounded off into the willows. Bill’s frantic calls for his puppy were met by echoing silence. Shocked disbelief gave way to waves of grief and remorse; he’d stood there and allowed the dog he loved to be taken. How could he have been so thoughtless and foolish to risk its life in the first place? What now? What could he do? He realized that if he reported the incident, he would have not one, but two hard deaths on his conscience; the wolf would almost certainly be killed in response. Though the thought of following the wolf’s trail into the brush, alone and without a weapon, swept him with fear, he plunged into the off-trail maze before him. Before he had gone thirty yards, his puppy came scampering toward him, whining. It must have somehow escaped! He swept the young Akita into his arms and ran far out onto the lake before pausing to assess its injuries, bound to be major—and a nose-to-tail exam under his practiced, frantic hands couldn’t detect a single laceration or bruise. Not a scratch. He scanned the tree line; the lakeshore lay silent in the twilight. The black wolf had vanished, leaving Bill both profoundly grateful and wondering what the hell. A year later, he’d be gone from Alaska, taking with him the sort of experience he’d see in his sleep the rest of his life.

  What the hell indeed. How had the Akita pup managed to escape the not merely figurative, but literal jaws of death? Clearly, the wolf had let him go. But why? And was this a predatory incident inexplicably gone touchy-feely, like those nature television sequences of a cheetah expending a huge burst of energy to capture a gazelle, only to release it; or a hunting killer whale gently nudging a seal pup ashore, unharmed? Of course, even the most experienced researcher can no more than guess as to what crosses the mind of any wolf. My own hypothesis, shared by others, is as plausible as any: Romeo was puppy-napping—acting not as predator, but caretaker. All wolves in a pack, remember, are solicitous of the pups born to their family, and actively share rearing duties. Some pack members other than the parents seem to take special interest and display incredible devotion and patience in caring for the pack’s genetic future. Romeo, a wolf of undeniably social and gentle temperament, was a perfect candidate for playing the role of an uncle wolf, and the dogs of Juneau had become his pack. Overwhelmed by the instinctive desire to tend the pup, he had carefully picked up the Akita (a breed with more than passing lupine resemblance and behavior) in those bone-crushing jaws and toted it off. When the pup wanted to return toward Bill’s calls, he understood its distress and let it go. I can’t think of another plausible explanation for why the wolf would have picked up that young dog so gently, carried it away, and then released it.

  But that story, like so many others about the wolf, never drifted outside a relatively closed circle; or if it did, in a game of telephone with details lost or transposed, in some cases so skewed that the wolf killed another dog. As for Tank the beagle, I think it’s entirely possible, even probable, that Romeo did kill it under the circumstances Barten suspected, though Harry Robinson and others argued, with good reason, that such a killing was unlikely, circumstantial at best, and totally out of character. Or perhaps Romeo had tried to pick up the beagle, and it had either panicked or turned aggressive and triggered a response from the wolf. Or maybe the dog had indeed fallen through the ice. We’ll never fully know what transpired in those two encounters. Even those who knew the wolf best peered toward him like astronomers viewing a distant star, on the far edge of our galaxy.

  The spring of 2005 continued. A rainy spell and a thaw interceded at the right time, keeping most people and their dogs off the lake for several weeks. Two feet of solid ice remained beneath the slush and water, and the wolf still trotted back and forth. A few diehards slogged around in knee boots. Dredge, too, collapsed into a half-thawed, flooded mess. Romeo appeared in
the usual places less and less often; then one day, he was gone. Maybe he’d finally found a mate up in the hills and started his own pack. March faded into a warm, early-spring April, and there were no tracks on the dark, rotting ice. I still often sat outside at dusk, listening for a familiar howl echoing off the ridges, and patrolled the lakeshore, searching for a sign. And though I should have known better, I couldn’t help but hope.

  9

  The Miracle Wolf

  March 2006

  The black wolf stood at the lake’s west edge at twilight, his form mirrored in the water’s surface as he scanned the Dredge Lakes shore, a half mile away. He and the surrounding landscape stood silent, bathed in the glow that spilled through a veil of mist, casting a palette too subtle for any camera to record. A raven’s cry echoed against the mountain as I stood alone, waiting for the world to exhale. At last the wolf stepped forward—not into the water, but onto it—and as I watched, he trotted across the lake, each step raising a silver-white plume and the spreading vee of a wake to mark his passing. At the far side, the wolf paused, a shadow among shadows, and merged into the night.

  Though the wolf’s evening stroll on the lake seemed an event of biblical proportions, a simple explanation lay several inches below the water’s surface. A weeklong winter thaw, accompanied by torrential rains, had flooded the lake, dissolving snow but not the two feet of hard ice beneath it. But even if you knew the key to the wolf’s deus ex machina, the scene was a spectacle to behold, and a reminder of the near miracle of his survival over three winters, now, among us.

  Like any wild wolf, Romeo had run a gauntlet of natural threats since birth: starvation, hostile wolves, disease, injury. One slip, one piece of bad luck, and he’d have been gone. While his choice of a territory near and among humans had clearly worked in his favor, he’d also traded one set of advantages for an opposing cluster of threats, paradoxically from the same species that afforded him safety. No matter if most Juneauites wished him no ill; his death could hinge on the act of a single individual. Whether deliberate or careless, malevolent or thoughtless, lawful or not, the result would have been the same. No one will ever know the number of bullets, literal and figurative, the black wolf dodged over his time, but the few we knew of hinted at a veritable barrage.