by Nick Jans
As for the $11,000 reward: no one stepped forward to claim it, a fact that speaks to the character of some unnamed soul, who could have been any of us. And Romeo? As I sat writing on a frost-dusted morning in November of 2006, I looked out across the lake toward a dark shape flowing across the ice in that familiar straight-backed, loose-footed trot and felt a burst of gratitude for a place and its people. While the glacier wolf didn’t belong to any of us, he’d become part of who we were.
Harry and Romeo
10
The Wolf Whisperer
January 2007
Whatever the traditional Chinese calendar claimed, anyone whose life had twined into Romeo’s would remember 2007 as the year of the wolf—a time of deep-drifted storm and swelling tension, and beneath it all, the sense that the raveled trails of the story, once soft and new-broken, had set hard, with no going back. We who shared space with the black wolf for four consecutive winters struggled with an ever more strident local reality; wills flexed, paths diverged, and divisions formed, not only between the wolf’s enemies, but among his allies as well. Meanwhile, beyond the wrangles and our own glowing, warm dens, Romeo dealt with the work of living that only a wolf can know. The rest was not his business.
I stood at an upstairs window, jaw clenched as I stared out over the white sprawl of the lake on a sunlit, late-January midday. Near the Big Rock, a scant half mile from our back door, a small crowd milled—maybe twenty people and half as many dogs. Of course I knew why; the reason stood out, darker than any shadow against the snow, holding audience as always with his canine courtiers. But unlike years past, this was less spontaneous dog party than organized affair, and it had been going on for more than an hour—not only this day, but the past several, and on and off over the past two weeks. I tweaked my binoculars and sure enough, at the center of the action a guy with a long, straight-backed stride and a big-bodied black Lab mix merged into focus: Harry Robinson and his dog, Brittain. Whenever the wolf moved out from the group, or cast glances across the lake, as if preparing to leave, Harry approached near touching distance and stood by as Brittain and Romeo nuzzled and wrestled, and cameras pointed. When the wolf relaxed and trotted closer to the crowd, Harry, the ringmaster of this dog-and-wolf show, faded back, and left center stage to the black wolf and his playmates.
Harry Robinson, normally quiet if not downright secretive in his twilit wolf rambles for three years, had suddenly pulled a 180, placing both himself and Romeo in a hard-to-ignore spotlight. By choosing an arena just a couple hundred yards from the West Glacier Trail parking lot, during banker’s hours and on a more or less regular schedule, he’d ushered in an era of up-close wolf access to anyone who could walk a hundred yards—sometimes without even changing from street shoes. Sure, folks who put in the effort and hours had long since watched the wolf many times from a distance, and perhaps thrilled at a closer encounter or two; but Romeo’s social ease around our kind was still relative. Despite his general affability, he’d always remained standoffish, even skittish, around most strangers, especially those who stared and marched straight toward him and didn’t have the right dog, or none at all. To the average viewer, he remained an enigmatic, intimidating presence, most often seen at a distance. Now Harry and Brittain, the ultimate tag-team wolf magnets and reassuring guides, pulled him in tight and held him within thirty or forty yards, and sometimes much closer. What the hell was he up to, and why?
That was just the first act in a surreal two-ring circus. Within a few minutes of Harry’s early-afternoon departure, another knot of dogs and humans formed around the wolf along the opposite side of the lake, near the river mouth. Some people simply marched across the lake from one spot to the next, as if the wolf were Tiger Woods at the Masters. There, photographer John Hyde’s shift picked right up where Harry’s left off—by early January of 2007, practically an everyday event. With steady persistence and the help of a neighbor’s two good-natured chocolate Labs (apparently on permanent loan) Hyde had conditioned Romeo over the past two years to accept his presence at breathtakingly close distances, sometimes so tight you could barely glimpse air between them. He didn’t have to seek the wolf; it came to visit the dogs, and by extension, him. Hyde, being a superb professional wildlife photographer, understood the opportunity that he had before him and shot like there might be no tomorrow, which, on any given day, could have been true. While he followed wherever the wolf might lead, he purposely frequented locations with well-lit, knockout backdrops; and the Dredge beach near the river mouth on a sunny, snow-laden afternoon was quite literally picture-perfect in every direction. Even better, the area was one of Romeo’s favored hangouts. But out in plain sight, where the unbroken scenic vistas lay, Hyde couldn’t avoid attracting hangers-on. Operating as he was on public land, he couldn’t shoo away anyone who wanted to follow and glean whatever opportunities or wolf juju they could. Much to his irritation, John ended up some days being shadowed by a gallery of photographers and watchers, sifting in and out of his compositions and distracting wolf and dogs. “I didn’t want to share the wolf with anyone,” he told me years later. “I wanted him all to myself.”
Between them, Harry and Hyde had carved out as much face time with Romeo as the rest of Juneau put together. In addition to those regular public audiences, Harry was still going out at least once a day, early or late, to see the wolf alone, more than doubling Hyde’s total contact hours. As one who’d stood within the wolf’s aura and been smitten, I knew the pull that both men felt. I didn’t blame them for that, but a glance out the window was all it took to know things weren’t right. Regardless of opposing intent—one obviously trying to display the wolf to others, the other hoping not to—the end result of what some came to call The Harry and Hyde Show was the same: Romeo was exposed to more regular, up-close human contact than ever before, including folks who had little clue about how to behave around a wolf. At the same time, he was being inadvertently conditioned to accept a wide variety of strangers at point-blank range. A worrier could hardly begin to count the ways things could go wrong. Romeo’s life hung like a cornice of spring snow; the air beneath a raven’s wing might be enough to bring it crashing down.
The foreboding was ratcheted up further by the political backstory. In December 2006, Sarah Palin had taken office as Alaska’s governor and straightaway put her stamp on wildlife management: every moose a conservative and every wolf a liberal, and too many of the latter around. Although outside of Alaska, Sarah has frequently been blamed or praised for wolf control, the issue roiled The Great Land long before she was born. She merely served as the latest catalyst in an ongoing civil disagreement (and surely in terms of words and emotion, a war) that had long divided Alaskans in two roughly even-numbered camps. Two previous ballot initiative votes had put temporary halts to predator control, but each time the legislature had reinstated the program, and since 2002 it had steadily intensified under Governor Frank Murkowski. When Palin came on the scene, several areas the size of midwestern states were already open to aerial wolf shooting by private pilots and gunners with special permits. Palin appointees to the Alaska Department of Fish and Game and to the state Board of Game, connected to right-wing sport-hunting, out-of-state groups such as Sportsmen for Fish and Wildlife and Safari Club International, plus the in-state organization, the Alaska Outdoor Council, pushed for still more control areas and measures aimed at reducing predators, all under the scientifically shaky assumption that such tinkering with large-scale, complex ecosystems would automatically result in more moose, caribou, and deer for human hunters. And if not, so what? Fewer wolves could only be a good thing. The legislature’s Intensive Management statute stipulated that wildlife be managed for human benefit, which they interpreted to mean maintaining maximum numbers of trophy and meat animals in a given area (maximum sustained yield). Most mainstream wildlife biologists agree that such management strains habitat and nearly assures perpetual boom-and-bust cycles and endless predator control, as wolves and bears take the rap for
inevitable declines. Also, weren’t wolves and bears also valuable, commercially and intrinsically? I once heard a highly respected senior Fish and Game biologist mutter that maximum sustained yield amounted to “smoke and mirrors”—an unattainable goal imposed by nonscientists who understood nothing about ecosystem dynamics. But state biologists who questioned the plan quickly learned to keep their opinions to themselves. Contrary to the principles of scientific discourse, a behind-the-scenes but very real gag order on the issue stifled dissent within the department. Both in and beyond Alaska, the always divisive issue waxed bitterer than ever, rendered all the more so by the scale and intensity of the program, unmatched since Alaska’s territorial days, when wolves were exterminated by full-time federal hunters at taxpayer expense, including a bounty for each wolf killed.
Palin’s rise to national attention would only throw more gas on the bonfire. Joel Bennett and I were caught up in it, too, as cosponsors of a statewide ballot initiative to curb the use of private pilots and gunners to kill wolves, and to require that predator control in a given area must be supported by local research that showed wolves were indeed causing low game populations (poor habitat quality and hard winters, rather than predation, are frequently the prime forcing mechanisms for low moose, caribou, and deer numbers). As a fail-safe, Fish and Game’s commissioner would still be free to declare biological emergencies that could trigger localized predator control, conducted by department biologists. It seemed a modest-enough proposal, though of course we, the figureheads for the initiative, were cast as wolf worshipers and shills for Outside radicals—never mind my years traveling alongside Inupiaq wolf hunters up north. Sherrie and I and dozens of others across the subcontinental vastness of the state had stood on street corners from Ketchikan to Kotzebue, collecting tens of thousands of signatures to place the measure on the ballot. All we wanted was what many well-regarded wildlife biologists called for: a wolf management program built on area-specific scientific data, not politically driven angst and generalized pseudo-lore. Like others on the front lines, I gained enemies and lost friends across the state and got used to being cursed by people I’d never met; and though I’d hardly planned standing alone as the public face of such an issue, there I was. I’d expected Joel, seasoned by the previous two ballot measures and by long service on the Alaska Board of Game, to be the point man, but he had more important matters to face. His wife, Louisa, long struggling with breast cancer, was dying. He needed to attend to her, which included long absences to the hospital in Seattle, and caretaking at home. Of course, I understood his necessary absence.
This latest campaign in Alaska’s long-standing war over wolves had been raging since 2005, and there was still nearly a year to go until the vote in 2008—one that, unlike the two previous initiatives, would fall a few percentage points short, due to a variety of overlapping factors, not the least of which was ballot language (chosen by the state) so tricky that many voters marked the wrong box. No doubt, the politics of predator control were shifting toward the right—and whether the shift was temporary or not was anyone’s guess. Looking back, I couldn’t help but think of things I should have said or done that might have made a difference in the campaign.
A few weeks later, on a beautiful late-spring day, our friend Louisa died at home. Two days before, Sherrie and I had stopped by to bid farewell at the idyllic seaside home that she and Joel shared. The windows were open, and rufous hummingbirds flitted past the feeders as friends chatted; one by one, we went to take her hand. She was drifting in and out, beyond pain, eyes closed, smiling at our voices; and I remembered her just a few months before, pausing to lean on her ski poles at an opening along the campground trail, looking out on the lake toward the glacier, hoping to see Romeo one last time. Joel would commission a hand-built cedar bench installed on that spot, for passers-by to rest and watch as she had. On the back of that bench, cast in bronze, an inlay of Romeo reclines, howling—we hoped toward a place where Louisa could hear.
Though no systematic wolf culling was planned at that time for the Southeast region, Juneau, as state capital, was home to both the governor’s mansion and Fish and Game’s central offices; the top-down concentric ripples couldn’t help but wash against Romeo’s world. Local antiwolfers could only have been emboldened by the kill-and-grill crowd’s party-line rhetoric: wolf control wasn’t just about sensible resource stewardship, but saving wildlife and safeguarding our families, too. All in all, it was a bad time to be Alaska’s best-known, most accessible wolf—and his affable nature only irked, even enraged, those who had no use for any of his species, especially not one that contradicted their own menacing version. Romeo, as unwitting poster figure for positive lupine-human relations, stood the ever- increasing risk of getting blasted for setting a too-good example.
And there I sat, caught up in a petty tiff, wondering what to say to either Harry or John. I understood the overarching motives of both men: Harry, to spend time with the wolf as his friend, while Hyde pursued a, if not the, professional photographic opportunity of a lifetime. While Hyde of course did what he could to protect the wolf while he was there, Harry saw it as his mission. All that separated me from them was personal philosophy and matter of degree. To all three of us, I’m sure the wolf felt closer to family than wild creature; and on top of that, Romeo was a living, breathing reminder of all I hoped and had failed to save, and of the ghosts from my past.
Considering the shared connection, you’d think it would have been easy to ski over for a friendly chat and straighten things out. But things between us three were far more complicated. Strangely enough, Harry and I, though among the first to meet the wolf in 2003, hadn’t yet met in person. We’d spoken on the phone no more than four times, all during 2006, comparing impressions on the case of Romeo’s body double and trading other wolf-specific information. And while I’d known John for years, we seldom talked; when we did in those days, it was cordial chitchat, never about the black wolf. Harry and Hyde rarely had much to do with each other, either. All three of us saw one another out on the lake over months and years, yet seldom acknowledged even the fact of each other’s existence, as if we were suitors competing for the hand of the same exotic beauty, simultaneously bound and repelled by the force of that connection. Given our attachment and focus, such a comparison was apt enough. By ignoring one another, we each affirmed our own rightful position, while refusing to acknowledge that of our rivals. If we, the three people who knew Romeo best, couldn’t unite in defense of his best interests, who could or would?
Sure, I was angry—anywhere between irked and livid, depending on the day. Harry and Hyde were each spending way too much time around the wolf for his own good, no two ways around it. However, that was just one of my opinions, and I held another that directly contradicted it. Just because Sherrie, I, and Anita had chosen to pull back both our dogs and ourselves, and some watchers had always kept their distance, didn’t necessarily mean others were wrong for not following suit. Over and again I had to remind myself that this wasn’t my wolf or anyone else’s. And never mind us—what did the wolf want? Romeo, who waited day in and out for each of these men and their dogs, and hung with them for hours at a time, could have voted with his feet whenever he chose and melted into the landscape, momentarily or forever. Claiming that either Harry or John was somehow duping him was to sell short Romeo’s own formidable intelligence, not to mention that already-proven, almost magical talent for turning strange situations to his own advantage. You could easily make the case that rather than being used, he’d somehow conned those guys into providing what he most pined for: close, regular contact with friendly canines, regular enough that he could form a lasting, packlike bond. Romeo was making his own choices, and we had to respect the instincts and judgment that had so far served him so well.
But with this increased, almost ritualistic close contact, now merged into public spectacle, weren’t Harry and Hyde practically cowriting a manual for everything not to do around wildlife: interfering with t
he wolf’s natural behaviors; habituating him to close and prolonged human contact, which made him more vulnerable to those with bad intent; stressing him out by their proximity; monopolizing a public resource; creating a bad example for others to follow; and hurting his chances of survival by sucking up time he should have spent hunting or resting? That was the commonsense analysis most professional wildlife managers and enforcement officers would (and did) espouse; and in most situations, that evaluation would be spot-on.
However, the ground-truth reality of this wolf, like everything else about him, was far more complex. Romeo, by then at least six years old, was in tremendous shape: glossy coat, clear eyes, unworn teeth, deep chest, and a smooth gait—all in all as handsome and healthy a wolf as ever trotted the earth. I had little doubt he tipped the scales well past 120, maybe even as high as 130 pounds in times of plenty—an exceptional example of the species, by any standard. If anything, spending all that time with those two and their dogs seemed to be a positive tonic. And folks who believed (as most of those who knew the wolf did) that the wrong human, whether wielding a gun, trap, vehicle, out-of-control dog, or poor judgment, posed by far the largest threat to his survival also realized the risk dropped to near zero in the right company. Simply put, no one was going to illegally shoot or trap the wolf with witnesses at hand. While hundreds of other Juneauites, consciously or not, contributed to the general wolf watch, and I probably had the most sightings, due to the commanding view from my house and its proximity to Romeo’s territory, Harry and Hyde were the two individuals in the trenches most often by far. From a pragmatic angle, it’d be hard to find better guardians than those two: capable outdoorsmen who were comfortable and even-keeled around Romeo, knowledgeable of his mannerisms and habits, not shy to advise or correct viewers, and most important of all, present for long hours, day in and out. Neither the Forest Service, Wildlife Troopers, nor Fish and Game had the manpower, let alone the least inclination, to do what these men did on their own. Whether you saw the motives of each as pure or self-serving, or some blend of the two, the end result—what really mattered, if what you truly cared about was Romeo—was the same. As for my own jealousy (after all, I knew damn well it could have been me out there, hanging around each day within touching distance of a wild animal I loved like no other), I had to open my hand and let it go. Though I knew all that, I still was riled about those crowd scenes. Too many people with too little experience and not enough common sense were getting too close for anyone’s good, and no one could hope to control all the variables.
