A Wolf Called Romeo

by Nick Jans

  As it turned out, an altruistic motive lay behind Harry’s public wolf-viewing sessions; he’d had requests from other Romeo aficionados, asking to see the wolf with him as guide. Naturally, Harry hoped more people seeing the wolf for the sociable creature he was would strengthen or forge their desire to protect him, and help in passing the word in all directions. Too, he seemed to embrace the name a local pilot applied to him, after spotting Harry, Brittain, and the wolf hiking together above the timberline on McGinnis: the Wolf Whisperer. Harry explained to anyone who asked that Romeo had accepted him as a friend, and vice versa—not as a brag, but calmly stated, level-eyed truth.

  Friendship: an odd, and many would say naïve word to describe the relationship between any human and a wild beast, especially one that might devour one’s children. The naming issue by itself lay bad enough in the eyes of wildlife managers, self-labeled sportsmen, and a general assortment of naysayers, for all that it implied. That the wolf had forged affectionate, personal bonds with certain dogs had to be conceded as observable fact. But outright friendship with a human seemed to insist on yet another, controversial (to some, hackle-raising) level of interspecies connection. Of course, friendship can be a one-way, nonreciprocal flow of positive thoughts and deeds from one being to another; just because we acted as the wolf’s friends, didn’t mean he was ours. But what about that ultimate bond, a human and a wild wolf, true bonded friends, each taking pleasure in the other’s company? John Hyde, when I asked him years later, shrugged and shook his head. “Nah, it was all about the dogs. The wolf recognized me, and was used to me, and didn’t mind me, but that was it.” Then he paused and added, “He was one hell of an animal. . . . I can’t even begin to describe the connection.” Watching his eyes, I glimpsed something more, in the silence between words.

  Harry Robinson has a different story to tell—one that seems straight out of some Pixar fantasy. As Harry told it then, and still does now, he and the wolf indeed became friends, in all ways that a bonded dog and human might be, and more. In his words, “Brittain was his pseudomate/love of his life, and I was more his trusted friend/alpha male role model. He began to depend upon me for guidance and security.” Regardless of how self-assured and anchored the voice, that was a lot to believe; and I’m still not quite sure of the edge between what I do and don’t. But anyone who really watched Harry and the wolf out on the ice couldn’t help but notice the connection between them in those crowd situations—more than tolerance, more than acceptance, something closer to trust. And understanding, too—similar, outwardly, to the transactions of glance, posture, and utterance that connect human and dog: body language and gestures, eye contact, short vocalizations. I wouldn’t call the wolf trained, and Harry agrees; the word implies a subservience that didn’t exist. Instead, information flowed in both directions, in a way that made perfect sense. If dog is 99.98 percent wolf, then the reverse is true as well—and communication methods that worked between humans and one species should serve the sensory interface of the other. Granted, the gulf between Pekingese and Canis lupus, though measured in microns along a double helix, still yawns huge; a wolf remains centuries of selective breeding distant from a dog and can’t become one merely by being treated as such, even if captive-born and imprinted by constant handling and interaction.

  But neither was this an ordinary wolf, nor Harry an ordinary human; nor was their history together anything near ordinary. Since 2003, he and Brittain had been meeting the wolf on an almost daily basis, sometimes more than once a day, and often for hours at a time. They roamed together, rested, and played—tens, then hundreds, finally thousands of hours in all seasons and weather, over a growing sweep of years. Like any of us who’d met the wolf, the bond began with wolf to dog but, to an extent that must have surprised even Harry, ended up including him as well. “As time progressed,” Harry said, “Romeo and I developed a personal relationship that was quite independent from the one he had with Brittain. Usually in the mornings, he would run to greet Brittain first and then come over and greet me separately.” The hello amounted to a grinning approach, a gently waving, high-held tail, affable yawns, and play bows. Romeo had long passed simply accepting Harry. He engaged him: made and held eye contact, brushed against his leg as they passed on the trail, played with him, sometimes delivered a nose bonk on the back of his thigh. Harry said that he never reached out to touch or pet the wolf, though he might have many times; neither did he ever feed him, as some who never met Harry claimed—apparently supposing that was the only way anyone could lure and hold a wild, predatory beast that close. A social relationship between human and wolf, companionship for its own sake, couldn’t be; though clearly, just such a bond must have formed not once, but many times in our collective past. How else did we end up with the shaped children of wolves lying at our feet?

  “He would obey a number of my commands, although he would usually carefully consider them beforehand,” Harry said. “He’d observe a situation and reason it through. . . . [But] he definitely knew what the word no! meant.” Though claims of voice control over a wild, never-captive predator strain credibility, several times as I watched those crowd scenes through binoculars I saw Harry gesture or murmur unheard syllables to the wolf, and the wolf respond. Fish and Game area biologist Ryan Scott once sent Harry an email thanking him for intervening in and diffusing a physical confrontation with a large husky mix, in which the wolf apparently followed Harry’s direction to back off.

  Whatever Harry did with others watching, his most profound moments with the wolf came in their times alone—off in the wild, out of sight of others. Most often, especially during times of snow, cold, and short days, the three would trace game trails and visit rendezvous spots lower down, in the rolling spruce-hemlock forest above the West Glacier Trail or in hidden thickets in the Dredge Lakes, both areas the core of the black wolf’s territory. In summer, when sightings of the wolf were so rare that most people assumed he wasn’t around, their secret rambles often began in the pale, gathering light of 3 A.M. and reached far onto the alpine shoulders of Mount McGinnis, so high they looked down on the glacier’s furrowed expanse. Wolf and dog would range uphill and down, following their noses and scent-marking, pausing for play sessions, the wolf occasionally breaking off on his own, and returning. More than once the wolf led them, Harry said, to a crevasse-riddled crossing toward Bullard Mountain, less than a half mile from the glacier’s face—and looked back, disappointed, before continuing alone, when man and dog did not follow through the deadly ice maze toward the fine hunting on the far side. Sometimes, too, Romeo brought out that tattered tennis ball (maybe one of ours from that first winter) or the plastic foam buoy he had stashed in the brush, and initiated games of fetch.

  However unbelievable the tale to this point, it waxes more so. As Harry tells it, Romeo once sensed something ahead on one of their walks, bristled, then lunged forward, growling, as a locally known brown bear and grown cub appeared around a bend in the trail, a few dozen feet away. As the wolf charged in defense of his pack, the bear turned tail, and Romeo completed the rout. On another occasion, Romeo engaged in the same behavior to drive off what Harry suspected was an unseen black bear.

  Again, what to believe? There are no eyewitnesses to corroborate most of Harry’s accounts. However, his conversations with me in the years since have been marked by a consistency of detail and the sort of level-gazed assurance that are difficult to dismiss. He’s pointed to me the exact places where certain events occurred—a rock outcropping, a mossy glade, a barely visible game trail—and led me to bits of physical evidence such as a scattering of goat bones from a kill site where he watched Romeo feed, and a certain spruce tree with drooping, springy limbs that the wolf loved to leap for, grab in his jaws, and tug against (indeed scarred by apparent tooth marks), all of which further cement his versions of events. What few witnesses there are—notably ex–Alaska state senator Kim Elton, who occasionally tagged along with Harry and in fact took pictures of Romeo reclining, gnawin
g on the ribs of that aforementioned goat kill—offer support rather than contradiction. Joel Bennett and attorney Jan Van Dort, too, tagged along with Harry a number of times and confirmed the close, interspecies connection between this man, a wild wolf, and his dog.

  What about precedents for this sort of relationship—an apex predator and a man, friends? Dozens of well-documented tales of lifelong bonds of friendship between captive or rescued wild carnivores and humans exist, from the real Grizzly Adams and his namesake companion, Benjamin Franklin, strolling the streets of nineteenth-century San Francisco to the contemporary story of Costa Rican fisherman Chito Shedden frolicking in a pond with a doting thousand-pound saltwater crocodile he named Pocho. These and other stories support the emotional capacity of certain individual “man-eating” predators in unique circumstances to develop affectionate, lifelong relationships with humans. But no matter how gilded, bars cast an inescapable shadow. Even if a once-captive creature makes a full transition into the wild—as in the celebrated 1970s case of Christian the lion and Englishmen John Rendall and Ace Bourke, whose ecstatic reunion in Africa, years after Christian’s release, is memorialized on film—the unavoidable circumstances of captivity and a fully dependent relationship, including feeding, create a context quite different from that linking Harry to Romeo, a born-wild, free-wandering animal that had always hunted on his own and showed no sign of associating him with food. Again, Harry flatly denies ever having fed the wolf, though he always carried a pocketful of dog jerky treats for Brittain. “I once accidentally dropped a strip out of my pocket,” he said, “and [Romeo] gave it a quick sniff and left it. He obviously had better things to eat.” On the other hand, the wolf was happy to snatch up a shearling mitt someone had lost, toss it around, and rip it to pieces.

  Food conditioning—already discussed, frowned upon by wildlife managers for obvious, valid reasons—can create at least the appearance of friendship between humans and wild predators, and such instances are fairly common. In one extreme example from contemporary Alaska, a man named Charlie Vandergaw fed dozens of bears, both black and brown/grizzly, at his remote homestead over a period of years and achieved a remarkable rapport with a number of individual animals before being prosecuted by the state. Judging from the outtakes of his six-episode reality TV show, at least some of the bears ended up in it for more than the food; the human-ursine interaction seemed to go beyond caloric interest, to obvious social interaction for its own sake, and even affection. Using high-value treats for positive behavior reinforcement is standard procedure for animal trainers working with captive wildlife, including predators such as killer whales and grizzlies, with whom they have a close social bond many keepers would insist to be friendship, and with good reason; there’s obviously more to the food conditioning issue than meets the eye. But managers point to such apparent friendships as false, anthropomorphic interpretations and rightly claim that such feeding leads straight to too-close interaction and potential animal-human aggression.

  With no human feeding involved, sociable interactions between people and free-ranging predators are not only possible, but not as rare as you might think. I can recall at least a dozen times over the years when, for reasons unknown, an animal made some sort of social overture—that Brooks Range wolf picking up a stick and shaking it at me in a play invitation; a young brown bear on a wide grass flat sauntering over to plunk down twenty feet away and make relaxed, friendly gestures; a short-tailed weasel who turned the tables on food conditioning and brought me a fresh-killed vole as an offering, bounding over to lay it near my feet; a fox that kept me company on a woodcutting expedition; Romeo trotting over to say hello, as he did so many times. A Google or YouTube search will bring up dozens of positive social interchanges between humans and wild carnivores from lions to sharks. My personal favorite is another backward feeding episode: National Geographic photographer Paul Nicklen being offered penguins, one after another, by an enormous female leopard seal. But these moments are usually brief; few, if any, are sustained for days or months, let alone years.

  Timothy Treadwell surely managed to establish amicable, individual relationships with a number of bears in western Alaska’s Katmai National Park over thirteen years; but Joel Bennett, who filmed him repeatedly in the field, and himself became close friends with Treadwell, stops short of declaring that remarkable rapport with certain bears to be friendship. “Who knows?” he said, spreading his hands to the sky.

  One clear case involves the more than quarter-century friendship between a wild dolphin named JoJo and naturalist Dean Bernal, in the British West Indies. Their shared affection, captured in video and still photography, is unmistakable; and though feeding is no doubt part of their relationship, it’s clearly not the driving factor. Bernal, who’s been JoJo’s official warden for decades, has nursed him through a number of life-threatening injuries; they roam and hunt lobster together, JoJo following his skiff; the dolphin and he swirl in tender underwater ballets. Their case serves as exemplar, indicating such relationships are indeed possible. Wild dolphin and human, fine. Flipper and SeaWorld, not to mention dozens of anecdotes of contact between these two seemingly akin species, going back into ancient history, prepared us for that one. But what about a wild wolf?

  Plenty of remarkable, sociable interactions between never-captive wolves and humans do indeed exist. Excluding Romeo, I’d experienced several myself, up north, and woods-wise friends have told me of their own; but they’re all fleeting experiences, not relationships. When it comes to boots-on-the-ground, prolonged contact, well-respected wolf biologists like David Mech and Gordon Haber repeatedly gained high degrees of habituated tolerance from members of wild, free-ranging packs they studied, and occasionally had wild wolves initiate social behavior with them; but they followed a no-interaction model as part of good research practice—the exact opposite of Harry Robinson. Harry, of course, was no scientist and didn’t pretend to be. He had no hypotheses to test and compiled no data; he didn’t even keep a simple logbook or journal and almost never carried a camera. His agenda was simple: he wanted to be a friend to Romeo, whom he saw as desperately lonely. “I did it for the wolf,” he said. “He depended on us.”

  What further persuades me to accept Harry’s story overall is the lens of my own experience. Though I watched the wolf from a distance on an almost daily basis from late autumn through midspring, sometimes as many as a dozen times in any given day, I limited close, self-initiated contact to no more than a half-dozen times a year and usually less than an hour. I figured the wolf already had too many humans in his face, and the best thing I could do was set a good example and keep my distance. The times I broke down were simple failings of will. In any case, if I had dogs along, they weren’t allowed to approach the wolf any longer. Despite that slim social reward, and no good reason for our cold shoulder from his point of view, Romeo would still come loping across the lake to greet us as if we were among his favorites, and trot along with us for a time. He knew exactly who we were and, judging from his reactions, remembered a fond past, now several years gone—Dakotah, tennis balls, and all. I have since been able to confirm the acute memory power and drive of a wolf to maintain cross-species bonding in my interactions with Isis, a captive-born, imprinted wolf at the Kroschel Wildlife Center in Haines, Alaska. I first held her when she was four weeks old and interacted with her—intensively, but just several times. Now age four, she clearly shows she remembers me by her excited, submissive greetings (this past summer, singling me out of a crowd of tourists at the park), despite months between visits. Incidentally, she also fetched the very first time I threw a toy, apparently a hardwired, rather than learned behavior, since Steve Kroschel told me not he nor anyone else had to that point engaged her that way.

  If I was alone and moved gradually, Romeo would allow me to approach within a few yards with no sign of unease. Generalized tolerance or friendliness toward known dogs was one thing; but if I stopped and sat down, he’d often close the distance and display his
usual sociable body language (bows and unstressed yawns, relaxed eye contact, and sometimes wolf grins) even if I didn’t have a dog with me. He had a markedly different response to most strangers. I’d offered to help out photographer Mark Kelley, a good friend who had so far been unsuccessful in getting a decent shot of the wolf. We spotted Romeo lying over near the river mouth, and I told Mark to stay back and wait for my signal. I skied to within a hundred yards, sat on a boulder on the shore, and Romeo stretched, yawned, and trotted over to say hello, and lay down maybe twenty yards away. Once he settled in, I waved, and Mark meandered toward us from a third of a mile out, making no eye contact as I’d advised him. But he hadn’t covered half that distance before Romeo took notice, abruptly rose, and trotted off into the willows. Mark would eventually get his shot, after he had put in enough time.