Of Wolves and Men

by Barry Lopez

  There are no records I know of for albino wolves, but an aerial hunter told me of one he killed twenty-five miles east of Umiat on the arctic slope in April 1957. It was a female, with pink eyes, nose, and footpads, and weighed about eighty pounds. There are no statistics to bear this out, but when it came up in conversation, many people in Alaska—hunters, biologists, native people—volunteered the information that the biggest wolves they’d seen were blacks.

  The great variety in pelage—and I know of no other mammal so variously colored—among wolves in a single area is attested to by the number of words people use to describe local wolf coloration. “Peach,” “yellow,” “orange,” “tan,” and “rusty” were all words I heard used in the Arctic. One Eskimo remembered trapping a spotted wolf, a black with white patches in its coat, in 1968 in the Brooks Range.

  Eskimos are keen observers of detail and the Nunamiut people of the Brooks Range in Alaska distinguish between male and female wolves and between lactating females and other wolves partly on the basis of differences in pelage. Females tend to have more reddish tones in their fur, and the hair on their legs tends to be smooth, where the hair on a male’s leg has a slightly tufted appearance. Pelage changes texture as the animal grows older, with females generally developing the smoothest coats. Older animals tend to have more white hairs in the tip of the tail and elsewhere, along the nose and on the forehead, for example. Lactating females retain their long winter fur longer than other wolves and show hair loss around their nipples. What hair remains on the belly around the mammae develops a red-brown stain.

  The Nunamiut also point out that there are subtle anatomical differences between males and females. Females have a narrower muzzle and forehead, thinner neck, slightly shorter legs, and less massive shoulders, which makes the males seem slimmer in the waist by comparison. Two-and three-year-old females, in the opinion of these Eskimos, were also faster runners than males of the same age.

  These are all generalizations, of course, but valuable pieces of information in the aggregate for distinguishing the age and sex of a wolf at a distance.

  Tireless and silent, the fluid motion of the long-distance hunter.

  The shading in a wolf’s coat has a discernible (and purposeful) pattern. Even relatively pure black and white specimens reveal these patterns. The long, dark-tipped, or grizzled, guard hairs saddle the shoulders and extend up the neck and down the spine, fading out toward the rump, where they merge with darker hairs on the top of the tail. The underside of the tail, the insides of the legs, the belly, and the underside of the muzzle are usually light. The head is marked, particularly around the eyes and ears, in such a way as to emphasize the features of the face. The end of the tail is usually dark, with at least a few white hairs at the tip, and there is often a dark spot on the top of the tail marking the location of a scent gland.

  The wolf uses a series of stereotyped body postures and facial expressions to communicate, and careful observation reveals that these signals are enhanced by shadings in the fur, making the signals more noticeable.

  On Endurance

  An Eskimo intent on killing a wolf for bounty but finding himself without ammunition decided to run the animal to exhaustion with a snowmobile. Referring to maps later, he determined the wolf had run for twelve miles at speeds between fifteen and thirty mph before slowing to a trot, which he kept up for another four miles, at which point he began walking. He collapsed four miles later.

  Wolves are agile creatures but not as deft and quick as coyotes. Red wolves move in a more delicate manner than gray wolves, appearing to put less weight on the foot. In captivity red wolf-coyote hybrids have jumped into the lower limbs of trees, four or five feet off the ground. Red wolf/coyotes also stot when alarmed, moving off with the stiff-legged bound of a white-tailed deer.

  Wolves spend an average of eight to ten hours out of every twenty-four on the move, mostly the crepuscular hours. They travel great distances and have tremendous stamina. One observer followed two wolves who broke trail through five feet of snow for 22 miles in British Columbia. The animals paused in their tracks but never lay down to rest. Taking wolves on Isle Royale as an example, they average 30 miles of travel a day in winter. A Finnish biologist reported one pack that moved 125 miles in a day. The naturalist Adolph Murie watched a pack in Alaska make a regular daily round of about 40 miles in search of food while the female was denning. Tundra wolves may run for 5 or 6 miles behind caribou before accelerating to attack.

  Wolves are also good swimmers, though they rarely follow prey into the water during a chase.

  The wolf’s most efficient hunting tool, after its legs get it there, is its mouth. Evolved in an elongated shape, its forty-two teeth are adapted to seize (the long canines), to shear and tear (the premolars), and to crush (the molars). The incisors nibble and strip the shreds of meat from bone. The carnassial teeth (an upper premolar and a lower molar) are specially adapted to function like a set of pruning shears, slicing meat and snipping tough connective tissues and tendons. The animal can develop a crushing pressure of perhaps 1,500 lbs./in2 compared to 750 lbs./in2 for a German shepherd. This is enough to break open most of the bones the wolf encounters to get at the marrow.

  Wolves live in packs with fairly refined social structures. Packs are typically extended families of five to eight individuals but range in size from two or three to fifteen or twenty. The largest authenticated report is of a pack of thirty-six in Alaska, though packs of more than twenty-five are rarely reported. Stories of hundreds of wolves traveling together are probably folklore. It is possible, however, from the preponderance of references in nineteenth-century magazines, to infer that packs of twenty-five to thirty animals once were rather common in northeastern Europe and central Russia.

  Pack size is determined by the availability of space free of other packs and by the type and abundance of game, as well as by the personal dispositions of the various wolves involved and such factors as pup mortality and overall wolf population. Packs may break up in winter or summer, some permanently, others only for a season or a few days. An individual pack may retain an identity over a long period of time, using the same dens year after year, hunting the same territory, and outliving founding members. Murie studied a pack of wolves on the East Fork of the Toklat River in Mount McKinley National Park between 1939 and 1941. Thirty-four years later, studies by another wildlife biologist revealed a pack of similar size and habits in the same place, using the same dens. Packs develop distinct personalities, so that a good observer can tell at a distance from their behavior alone (not just from the number or pelages or in whose territory the observer might be) which pack he is watching.

  Breeding normally occurs in February or March, usually every year. There is a physical tie during copulation that may last as long as thirty minutes, and some have suggested that this intimacy reinforces the monogamous bond and galvanizes the pack. As a rule, only one female becomes pregnant.

  The pups are born sixty-three days later. April and May are the most common months. Mating and whelping take place later in the spring the farther north one moves. The pups are usually born in a den excavated for the purpose—in a sandy esker in northern Canada, under massive tree trunks, in cut banks, or in natural cavities around boulders or in caves in other locales. In northern Alaska, females may give birth in the open in a hastily prepared depression or “pit den,” as though labor had been sudden and unexpected.

  An excavated den is usually located high on a cut bank or otherwise situated in well-drained soil, and the location often provides a clear view of the surrounding area; but many dens, especially in wooded areas, have no view at all. The den is kept scrupulously clean. No bedding is used. The entrance hole is normally smaller than twenty x twenty inches; the entrance tunnel may lead back six or eight feet and then dogleg to a rounded hollow, somewhat elevated, where the pups monkeyball together for warmth. Because they have difficulty regulating their body temperature for the first few days, wolf pups require thi
s protection from wind and weather.

  Normally from four to six pups are born, but births of only one or as many as thirteen have been recorded. The pups are born deaf and blind; they can hear after a few days, will open their eyes at eleven to fifteen days, and are weaned at five weeks, by which time they are already playing at the entrance to the den. Their floppy ears stand erect at about four weeks and their first howls—the sudden sound of which often startles them—are heard at the same time. The development of a hierarchy of deference in the litter is visible by about six weeks but will change many times in the months to come.

  Most of these pups die. Mortality ranges upward of 60 percent, for several reasons. Pups require perhaps three times as much protein per pound as their parents do, and food may be scarce. They sometimes wound each other during fights and a parent may kill (and eat) a severely wounded one. Distemper, listeriosis, and other diseases take a toll, as do pneumonia and hypothermia if a late winter storm hits. A pup exhibiting any untoward behavior, like epilepsy, is killed by the adults. And occasionally an eagle, lynx, or bear may snatch one.

  Litter size is related to the availability of game and to the density of wolves in an area—the more wolves, the smaller the litters. Whether or not a litter is born at all, as well as who breeds, depends on social organization within the pack. One pack might even respond to pressure from a neighboring pack with a lot of surviving yearlings in it and not breed. The wolf’s endocrine system may be responsible for all this, responding in some way to stress in the animal’s environment—how often it sees members of another pack, how much time passes between its kills—so as to control breeding and litter size. The interesting thing is that sometimes not breeding—during a time of famine, for example—increases the chances for the pack to survive.

  While the pups are growing up, the older wolves express strong interest in them, and the pups respond with much affection, especially toward their parents. They face-lick and nuzzle the adults, direct play at them, and huddle around them when the adults lie down. The social bond between them is so obvious that in 1576, in an age when people believed the worst of wolves, a sportsman wrote in a book on hunting: “If the pups chance to meet their sire or dam anytime after they leave the pack they will fawn upon them and seem in their kind greatly to rejoice.” The older wolves make no effort to snatch food from the pups or, later, to keep them from feeding on a kill. Observers in the wild, in fact, have frequently commented on how benignly a pack of wolves behaves around a carcass. (In captivity, where wolves develop some level of neurosis, the reverse is sometimes true.) Because an adult will rarely use force to get food from a pup, Konrad Lorenz has wondered if such respect for “rights” might not represent a primitive sense of morality in the wolf, one that might be expected to develop only among social carnivores. The continuation of the thought is that herbivores and other gregarious animals have no food to fight over and no social structure in which to develop a sense of morals.

  Three-week-old pup, father.

  All this generosity and deference in caring for the pups, while less than strictly observed, is in sharp contrast of course to folk belief. As one Russian authority wrote in 1934: “Most of the prey goes to the older wolves, particularly to the males. They intimidate the yearlings and the newborn … and the weakest are often torn to pieces by their stronger relatives.”

  By the time they are five to ten months old, the mortality rate for pups has fallen off to about 45 percent. When they mature sexually (usually at two for the females, sometimes not until the next year for males), they enjoy a survival rate of about 80 percent. No animal habitually preys on the wolf and in the wild they may survive for eight or nine years. An exceptional animal may live to be thirteen or fourteen.

  Wolves, of course—and it is curious how unaware we seem of this—suffer injury, disease, and violent death as part of living. Tigers kill them in India; bears kill them in North America. And although death does not normally occur as a result of strife in a pack, flight being the usual outcome, encounters between different packs do sometimes involve fatalities.

  Most wolves are parasitized to some extent, internally by tapeworms and roundworms and externally by ticks, fleas, and mites, though these external parasites are rare in northern populations. Wolves sometimes endure mange and they suffer from various cancers and tumors. Rabies and distemper are perhaps the most virulent diseases the wolf is susceptible to. A wolf may cut its tongue on a bone and bleed to death. A wind-born seed may bury itself in the inner ear and destroy the animal’s equilibrium. Porcupine quills can kill them with swelling and infection. They get cataracts and go blind.

  Wolves are sometimes injured by moose and other large animals and these skull fractures, broken ribs, and joint injuries can precipitate arthritis (which also occurs naturally with age). Malnutrition may bring on rickets or other diseases associated with vitamin and mineral deficiencies. In some areas wolves are subject to endemic problems. Red wolves in Texas are heavily parasitized by heartworm; wolves in British Columbia suffer fatally from salmon poisoning; wolves in Spain show a high level of trichinosis.

  An examination of 110 wolves killed mostly along the Tanana River in Alaska in 1976 showed 56 had survived one or more traumatic injuries, principally, it was thought, in hunting moose—fractured skulls, broken ribs, broken legs, and so on. A four-year-old male (with healed fractures of the front left leg, two ribs on the right side and the skull) was in “fair to good” physical condition. Others had similarly recovered.

  The point of all this is that the woods is a hard place to get on, and yet the wolf survives.

  Two

  SOCIAL STRUCTURE AND COMMUNICATION

  THE SOCIAL STRUCTURE OF a wolf pack is all-important. Breeding, hunting, and feeding are tied to it, as is territorial maintenance and play behavior. What evidence we have of the wolf’s ability to teach its young to hunt (as well as their ability to learn) suggests that social structure plays a strong role here, too. Wolf pups raised without a pack structure adapt very poorly to life in the wild.

  Generally speaking, there are three separate social structures in the pack: a hierarchy of males, a hierarchy of females, and a more seasonally related cross-sexual social structure. There is, typically, an “alpha,” or primary, male that dominates the other males and an alpha female that dominates the other females. This alpha pair is thought to be the breeding pair, but there are a good many cases in captivity and in the wild where a lower-ranking male has bred with the alpha female, the alpha male expressing apparent disinterest.

  Females may head packs and they always strongly influence pack activities. We often think of animals like the wolf, who appear to have so many points in common with us, in human social terms. With respect to females, who have largely a subordinate standing in Western human societies, the analogy, I think, is poor. Female wolves may not only lead packs but outlast a succession of male alpha animals. It is females, moreover, who decide where to den and thus where the pack will have to hunt for five or six weeks. In the north, where wolves are following migrating caribou, a poor guess about where caribou are going to be can be disastrous, and the possibility of failure underlines the gravity of the female’s decision.

  Young females, as mentioned, are thought to be slightly faster than young males and therefore better hunters under some circumstances. The male hunter-male leader image of the wolf pack is misleading but, unconsciously, I am sure, it is perpetuated by males, who dominate this field of study. For the same reason paramilitary descriptions of wolf behavior—where “lieutenant wolves” are “dispatched” to “patrol” the territory, and parents “instill discipline” in the pups—creep in and strongly color our impressions of the animal, often without our knowing it. I am certain this is part of the reason people believe that male wolves always do the killing, and why the males’ weights are so often exaggerated.

  Social structure in a wolf pack has been observed in greatest detail among captive wolves, which makes extrapolating to
wild wolves risky. Captive animals engage in no hunting activities, are penned in areas of incomprehensible size when compared with the one-hundred-plus square miles routinely used by a pack, often lack for suitable exercise, and are constantly interfered with by human beings seeking to establish or maintain various levels of socialization. Their social displays, because they can never get away from each other, are excessive. Fieldwork has substantiated that a strong social order does exist in the wild and that there is an alpha pair at the top. It is most evident during the mating season when the alpha female asserts herself and sometimes fights to keep other females in estrus away from the alpha male, and the alpha male fights, less vigorously it seems, to keep other males away from the alpha female. (These are ritualized squabbles with few physical injuries in most cases.) It is not known whether it is the alpha male that normally fathers the pups, but they are almost always whelped by the alpha female.

  Lesson

  A female wolf left four or five pups alone in a rendezvous area in the Brooks Range one morning and set off down a trail away from them. When she was well out of sight, she turned around and lay flat in the path, watching her back trail. After a few moments, a pup who had left the rendezvous area trotted briskly over a rise in the trail and came face to face with her. She gave a low bark. He stopped short, looked about as though preoccupied with something else, then, with a dissembling air, began to edge back the way he had come. His mother escorted him to the rendezvous site and departed again. This time she didn’t bother watching her back trail. Apparently the lesson had taken, for all the pups stayed put until she returned that evening.