Of Wolves and Men

by Barry Lopez

  The female is a mile away and she trots off obliquely through the trees. The other wolf stands listening, laps water again, then he too departs, moving quickly, quietly through the trees, away from the trail he had been on. In a few minutes the two wolves meet. They approach each other briskly, almost formally, tails erect and moving somewhat as deer move. When they come together they make high squeaking noises and encircle each other, rubbing and pushing, poking their noses into each other’s neck fur, backing away to stretch, chasing each other for a few steps, then standing quietly together, one putting a head over the other’s back. And then they are gone, down a vague trail, the female first. After a few hundred yards they begin, simultaneously, to wag their tails.

  In the days to follow, they will meet another wolf from the pack, a second female, younger by a year, and the three of them will kill a caribou. They will travel together ten or twenty miles a day, through the country where they live, eating and sleeping, birthing, playing with sticks, chasing ravens, growing old, barking at bears, scent-marking trails, killing moose, and staring at the way water in a creek breaks around their legs and flows on.

  This is the animal Linnaeus called Canis lupus in 1758. In recent years the wolf has been studied enough by biologists to produce this picture, but his numbers have dwindled and his range has shrunk, and as is the case with so many things, deep appreciation and a sense of loss have arrived simultaneously.

  Wolves, twenty or thirty subspecies of them, are Holarctic—that is, they once roamed most of the Northern Hemisphere above thirty degrees north latitude. They were found throughout Europe, from the Ze-zere River Valley of Portugal north to Finland and south to the Mediterranean. They roamed eastern Europe, the Balkans, and the Near and Middle East south into Arabia. They were found in Afghanistan and northern India, throughout Russia north into Siberia, south again as far as China, and east into the islands of Japan. In North America the wolf reached a southern limit north of Mexico City and ranged north as far as Cape Morris Jesup, Greenland, less than four hundred miles from the North Pole. Outside of Iceland and North Africa, and such places as the Gobi Desert, wolves—if you imagine the differences in geography it seems astounding—had adapted to virtually every habitat available to them.

  Today they have been exterminated in the British Isles and Scandinavia and throughout most of Europe. There are a few wolves left in northern Spain, some in the Apennines in Italy, and a few in Germany and eastern Europe. Populations in the Near and Middle East and in northern India are greatly reduced. The present, or even past, populations of Russia and China are undetermined.

  Mexico still has a small population of wolves, and large populations—perhaps twenty to twenty-five thousand—remain in Alaska and Canada. The largest concentrations of wolves in the lower forty-eight states are in northeastern Minnesota (about one thousand) and on Isle Royale in Lake Superior (about thirty). There is a very small wolf population in Glacier National Park in Montana and a few in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. Occasionally lone wolves show up in the western states along the Canadian border; most are young animals dispersing from packs in British Columbia, Alberta, and Saskatchewan.

  The red wolf, Canis rufus, a little known but distinct species of wolf found only in America, has been exterminated across virtually all its former range in the southeastern United States. A small population of perhaps one hundred survives in the swamp thickets of extreme southeastern Texas and adjacent Cameron Parish, Louisiana.

  Of the twenty-three subspecies of wolf (too many to be meaningful) that taxonomist Edward Goldman identified in North America in 1945, seven are no longer around. These include the Great Plains wolf (also called the lobo wolf, the loafer wolf, or simply the buffalo runner), the Cascade Mountain wolf, the Texas gray wolf, the Mogollon Mountain wolf of central Arizona and New Mexico, the Newfoundland wolf, and the northern Rocky Mountain wolf. The southern Rocky Mountain wolf, last reported alive in 1970, is now also believed to be extinct.

  Japan’s two wolves, Canis lupus hattai and Canis lupus hodophilax, are probably extinct. And another wolf, one that lived in the Danube River Valley and was apparently distinct enough to be classed as a subspecies, was eliminated before any specimens were examined. Other subspecies in Asia have probably disappeared, but this is hard to prove and even harder to give meaning to. They represent subtle losses. In North America, and elsewhere, as human civilization affected the distribution and food habits of wolves—by killing buffalo, for example, and putting domestic cattle in their place on the ranges—various subspecies of wolf interbred and the purity of gene pools, such as they were, was altered. The wolves that remain in North America today are often distinguished simply as tundra or timber (or gray) wolves, according to where they live.

  Latin nomenclature for various subspecies wolf was not applied rigorously, but some of it is intriguing. Many of the subspecific designations, such as nubilus for the Great Plains wolf and fuscus (tawny or cinnamon colored) for the Cascade Mountains wolf, refer to the color of the pelage. Monstrabalis (Texas gray wolf) means “unusual” or “remarkable.” Occidentalis (Mackenzie Valley wolf) refers, of course, to the wolf of the west, while orion (Greenland wolf) refers to the mythic hunter and giant. Irremotus (Northern Rocky Mountain wolf) means something like “the wolf who is always showing up there.”

  Lyacon (Eastern timber wolf) was the Greek king of Arcadia whom Zeus turned into a wolf. Youngi (Southern Rocky Mountain wolf) was named for Stanley Young, a government hunter and popularizer of wolf lore in the forties and fifties. Baileyi (Mexican wolf) was named for government trapper.

  Laniger (Chinese wolf) means wolly, and campestris (central Asian wolf) simply “the wolf of the open plains.”

  One value of distinguishing among wolves is to set off other wolflike canids. There is, for example, a wild canid in Maine that is intermediate in size between wolf and coyote; and in Texas, red wolves and coyotes have bred to produce what biologists call a hybrid swarm. Feral dogs—pets gone wild—sometimes breed with wolves. All these creatures are wolflike but they are not wolves and it is right to keep them out of things.

  Originally, distinctions were made among subspecies on the basis of cranial features, pelage (fur), relative size, and geographic distribution. But taxonomic distinction among wolves is probably most valuable for the way it distinguishes among factors other than size and color. The small Asian, or Iranian, wolf, Cants lupus pallipes, for example, differs from most other wolves in that it is not known to howl and apparently travels alone, or in very small packs. The Chinese wolf, Canis lupus laniger, also hunts alone or in small packs. And the European wolf, Canis lupus lupus, has adapted to living in fairly close proximity with human beings. Wolves in thinly populated areas of Canada may move out if the human density is more than three persons per square mile.

  Recently the trend has been to distinguish less among subspecies of wolf and to make more of other differences—hunting techniques, pack size, range, diet—than color and size.

  By whatever standard, a significant part of the genetic reservoir that once represented one of the more adaptive mammals on the face of the earth is now gone. The argument in rebuttal; that wolves in captivity represent pure strains of extinct races and therefore constitute a genetic reservoir, is probably meaningless. Zoo populations are sometimes derived from animals of questionable genetic background and/or geographic origin, and in many cases subspecific labels are casually applied. And pups raised in captivity are virtually certain not to survive in the wild.

  A sixteen-month-old male red wolf—coyote hybrid (Canis rufus X Canis latrans).

  It would be nice to write with precision and neatness about the exact location of the last subspecific populations of wolves in the world, because we are a culture that fancies that sort of order, but the task is complicated and ultimately made impossible by two factors: wolves wander, and subspecific populations, as stated, breed with each other. Even prior to widespread human persecution, wolves disappeared from certain po
rtions of their ranges for years at a time. No one knows why. Game thinned out, perhaps, or people moved in. Douglas Pimlott, a Canadian wildlife biologist, believes the “extinct” Newfoundland wolf, for example, simply vanished from that island as part of a natural process, that it was not hunted out. Ian MacTaggart Cowan, another Canadian, thinks that the last specimens of northern Rocky Mountain wolf bred with the Mackenzie Valley wolf to finally eliminate all vestiges of that race. These cases are important I think insofar as we blame ourselves, with a lack of humility, for every animal’s demise.

  A third factor to consider in trying to pinpoint world populations is the simple lack of records and research. It was not, astonishingly, until the early 1940s that anyone took a serious, scientific look at wolves, and in some parts of Eurasia (where they are still regarded as beasts of blood and darkness) specific information on their numbers, locations, and habits is lacking even now.

  A fourth factor is that lone wolves disperse for considerable distances, hundreds of miles away from known wolf ranges, in search of new territories each year. In North America some generalizations can be made about the pattern—about where dispersing wolves will likely show up. But in China, for example, we still lack a general picture of primary wolf ranges.

  Although the lines of descent are not entirely clear, the wolf began to develop as a specialized genus of cursorial, or hunt-by-chasing, carnivore in the Paleocene, some 60 million years ago. Its ancestors included small, rodentlike insectivores and, later, much larger creodonts, animals that walked on five toes, had partially retractile claws, partially opposable thumbs on the forefeet, and long, thick tails. They perhaps looked like long-legged otters, dwelt in forests, and may have slept in trees. Some of them, evolutionarily speaking, moved out on the plains and prairies and became wolves, bears, badgers, skunks, and weasels. The ones that stayed behind in the forests retained their retractile claws, perfected an ambush/stabbing kind of hunting, and became saber-toothed tigers, leopards, and cheetahs.

  By Miocene times, 20 million years ago, these two superfamilies of carnivores, the dogs and cats, were distinct, and the more recognizable ancestors of the wolf had emerged. They had specialized shearing teeth and the bones of their lower legs had begun to fuse as flexibility in the limbs (as in the cats) gave way to rigidity for strength in the chase. In one relative, Tomarctus, the fifth toe on the hind leg became vestigial and the dewclaw was born. The legs grew longer, the feet more compact. By the Pleistocene, 1 million years ago, the wolf’s immediate ancestor, Canis, had emerged with a larger brain and longer nose than his predecessors. Among the species of Canis was dirus, the dire wolf. Canis was better adapted to running and had perhaps evolved a primitive social structure and some cooperative hunting techniques. We can imagine him pulling down camels hundreds of thousands of years ago in what is now Oklahoma.

  Canis sp. was parent to Canis lupus, the wolf (a somewhat smaller animal, with a higher forehead and more social tendencies); and the wolf was probably parent to the domestic dog, Canis familiaris, the first large creature who would live with men.

  Today the wolf’s closest relatives are the domestic dog, the dingo, the coyote, and the jackal. Then come the other members of the family Canidae: the foxes and wild dogs. The Canidae in turn are related to the Ursidae, the bears, and more distantly to animals like the raccoon, the marten, and the wolverine. There are some irregularities in popular names that should be cleared up here. The aardwolf, Proteles cristatus, is not a wolf but an insect-eating member of the hyena family—and hyenas are related to the cats. The maned wolf, Chrysocyon brachyurus, and the Andean wolf, Dasycyon hagenbecki, are not wolves but South American wild dogs. The extinct Falkland wolf, Dusicyon australis, was also a South American canid that shared but few behavioral traits with the wolf of the Northern Hemisphere. The same can be said of a rare Ethiopian canid, the Abyssinian wolf, Canis simensis. The Tasmanian wolf, or thylacine, Thylacinus cynocephalus, is a marsupial, in the same order with kangaroos and possums.

  The Cape hunting dog, or African wild dog, Lycaon pictus, on the other hand, has much in common with the wolf in its hunting habits and social behavior, and some zoologists have suggested that it belongs in the same genus with the wolf. Another irregularity of taxonomy.

  Of them all, the wolf is perhaps the most socially evolved and intelligent. Wolves have a high degree of social organization and have evolved a system of communication and communal interaction which stabilizes these social relationships. They may be unique in having markedly different individual personalities. In human terms, some are more aggressive or shyer or moodier, and pack society allows these individual temperaments to mature. In one pack, for example, one wolf may be the best hunter, another have a better sense of strategy and (again, to stretch for the human equivalent) be called upon for it by the others.

  Whenever I’ve spoken with people who’ve never seen a wolf, I’ve found that the belief that wolves are enormous is pervasive. Even people who have considerable experience with the animal seem to want it to be, somehow, bigger than it is. A trapper in Minnesota, a man who had caught hundreds of wolves in his life, looked at one in a trap one day and judged its weight at “eighty-five or ninety pounds.” When it was weighed and found to be sixty-seven pounds, he became slightly indignant with the creature and said, “He’s got the frame to carry ninety pounds. Must be sick.”

  Wolves range in size from about 45 pounds for an adult Arabian wolf to well over 100 pounds for a large timber wolf. In Alaska, where perhaps the biggest wolves are found, a wolf that weighs more than 120 pounds is uncommon. The largest wolf on record is a 175-pound animal killed on 70 Mile River in extreme east central Alaska by a government hunter on July 12, 1939. A Canadian park ranger killed a 172-pound animal in Jasper National Park in 1945. Males are generally 5 or 10 pounds heavier than females. An average weight for a North American wolf would be 80 pounds, less in southern Canada, more in the north. A mature European wolf might weigh 85 pounds. Wolves in the Punjab in India and on the Arabian Peninsula might average 55 pounds.

  I spent a couple of days south of the Alaska Range on the Susitna River one spring weighing and measuring wild wolves and when I returned home, a friend asked how wolves compared in size to his Alaskan malamute, which many people think of as a sort of carbon copy of the wolf. I took a tape measure, and using the figures from my notebook for a typical male of the same age and weight came up with the following differences: The wolf’s head was wider, longer, and generally larger. Malamute and wolf were about the same in the neck, twenty inches around, but the malamute was bigger in the chest by a few inches. The wolf stood two inches taller, was three inches longer in the leg, and eight inches longer in the body. The wolf’s tail was longer and had no tendency to curl over its back as the malamute’s did. The wolf’s track was nearly twice the size of the dog’s. Both animals weighed about 100 pounds.

  The wolf’s coat is remarkable, a luxurious fur consisting of two layers: a soft, light-colored, dense underfur that lies beneath a covering of long guard hairs which shed moisture and keep the underfur dry. Much of the underfur and some of the guard hairs are shed in the spring and grow back in the fall. The coat is thick across the shoulders, where guard hairs may be four or five inches long, and thins out on the muzzle and legs. By placing muzzle and unprotected nose between the rear legs and overlapping the face with the thickly furred tail, wolves can turn their backs to the wind and sleep comfortably in the open at forty degrees below zero. Pound for pound a wolf’s fur provides better insulation than a dog’s fur, and, like the wolverine’s fur, it won’t collect ice when warm breath condenses against it.

  Wolves in warmer climes have shorter guard hairs and less dense underfur. The red wolf, which inhabits hot, humid areas on the Gulf Coast, has a short, coarse coat and large, pointed ears in contrast to the short, rounded ears of tundra wolves. Short ears are less sensitive to the cold; long ears are efficient dissipaters of body heat.

  In extreme cold the wolf can redu
ce the flow of blood near its skin and conserve even more heat. A team of biologists in Barrow, Alaska, found that the temperature of the wolf’s footpads was maintained at just above the tissue-freezing point where the pads came in contact with ice and snow. Warmth there was regulated independently of the rest of the body. This is a good example of the marvelous but nevertheless commonplace efficiency of design found in all wild creatures.

  Footprint of a three-year-old Alaskan timber wolf (Canis lupus pambasileus), actual size.

  On warm days wolves dissipate heat by panting, a weary-looking but efficient method of cooling by evaporation. And by flopping in creeks and rivers. In the 1920s a Montana cattleman wrote that the wolves on his ranch “would lay up in the damp cool dirt among the reeds and cattails below some spring or in the cedar clumps and thickets on the north side of a high butte” on a hot day.

  During hot spells wolves travel much less and restrict their hunting to the coolest hours of the night.

  The wolf’s ability to regulate its body temperature no doubt helped it survive in a wide variety of climates, each with a wide range of temperature. In the Northwest Territories it may reach seventy degrees below zero or climb to ninety degrees on a summer day. In the northern plains it gets nearly as cold and twenty degrees hotter. The Cascade wolf had to contend with deep snows, the British Columbia wolf with forty to fifty inches of rain in the winter. No one knows how wolves managed in all that moisture. Maybe they simply stayed out of the rain.

  The wolf’s coat ranges in color from almost pure white through various shades of blond, cream, and ocher to grays, browns, and blacks. Among the more striking are the slate blue coats of some arctic wolves. Most white wolves are found in the north, though Lewis and Clark and many mountain men, explorers, and immigrants reported large numbers of very light wolves on the Great Plains in the early 1800s. The color of the coat apparently has no camouflage function, as black wolves are commonly found on the tundra and white wolves stand out against the black soils of central Russia. In southern Canada and Minnesota the black phase is more common than the white, but grays predominate. Variety in color in the same litter is the rule, though litter mates usually have the same quality of fur. The most luxuriant pelages show up among adults on the tundra, the difference between a tundra wolf pelt and a timber wolf pelt being so pronounced that the former often sells for twice as much.