Of Wolves and Men

by Barry Lopez

  Wolves are elusive, secretive creatures. L. David Mech, who has been studying them in the wild for twenty years, has come upon only a dozen on the ground that he didn’t first see from an airplane or track down with the aid of a radio collar. Elusiveness is a defensive trait and it is conceivable that its function is to avoid detection by other wolves, so adjacent packs can overlap their territories and run little risk of fatally encountering each other. This would allow an area to “breathe” more easily as game populations fluctuated. It would also facilitate the movement of dispersing wolves.

  It will be brought out in the next section that the world of the wolf and that of the Indian of North America and the Eskimo have certain things in common, but it might be mentioned here that the Pawnee and the Omaha Indians had an agreement to forget their traditional enmity and allow trespass in each other’s territory in order to facilitate pursuit of migrating herds of buffalo, on which both tribes depended for maintenance. Similarly, Plains Indians moved back and forth through the territories of other tribes on various errands and cultivated the quality of elusiveness to facilitate such movement. Boundaries traditionally ebbed and flowed, and an area left unused for a period of time might be occupied by a band from a neighboring tribe.

  A wolf in search of territory runs the highest risk of encountering both hostile wolves and human beings. To take such risks you must, it seems to me, be intent on something important; and to do it successfully, you must be elusive.

  Most territorial fights involve the resident pack and a lone individual, though packs may also fight each other. If the encounter is fatal, it is almost always fatal to the trespassers. Four wolves killed another wolf on June 25, 1970, in Mount McKinley National Park, and the incident was witnessed by three people. They saw a black male feeding on a caribou carcass when suddenly a single gray wolf appeared, followed at some distance by three other grays. The black wolf ran, but the first gray caught up with him and pulled him down. In seconds the other three had arrived and they all began biting the black wolf. The black wolf became submissive and the grays appeared to back off. Then the black jumped up and seemed to be trying to get away. The grays attacked again and did not stop until one gray had the black by the throat. The black raised his head once and then apparently died. The grays backed off, sniffed around the area, and left.

  Whether this incident was triggered by the black wolf’s feeding on the caribou carcass or was simply a case of trespassing remains unclear.

  There is a common belief among wolf biologists working in the field that wolves like to travel. I think they do, too, and think, further, that one reason for maintaining large territories is to have the space to travel freely and widely.

  Much remains to be learned of how wolves relate to, learn about, and occupy space. Howling and scent marking are two ways they seem to have of assuring that a proper space exists between packs, thus tending to distribute food sources and ensure space for all concerned. But there are more intriguing ideas here. Research suggests that the wolves are capable of moving cross-country and intercepting herds of migrating animals that they cannot see when they set out—they appear to have an uncanny sense of where they’re going to be. They certainly seem to know when caribou are coming toward them well enough to move to favorite crossings (which they must remember from times before) and set up ambushes. I remember once coming on a pack of wolves in the Nelchina Basin in south-central Alaska. One of the animals shot from the air with a tranquilizer gun went down in heavy timber; to reach her we had to land the helicopter in a clearing and wade through hip-deep snow to where she lay. As we approached I noticed how healthy she looked. It was March, a lean time of year, but she had a good layer of fat along her back. She had been eating well. When I opened her mouth, I saw her canines had been worn down to nubs. She must have been eight or nine years old. What meat she was eating she was not herself killing, and among wolves animals that don’t contribute to the pack structure pass on. What did she contribute? As anthropomorphic as the notion was, I could not shake the idea that what she contributed was the experience of having done so many things. She was one, I thought, who knew where to go to find caribou.

  Wolves are related in little-understood ways to animals they do not hunt. Some, like the coyote and lynx, move out of the immediate area when wolves move in. Others—the fox, the raven, the wolverine—feed off the carrion wolves provide. Wolves in turn take advantage of abandoned fox burrows and other creatures’ homes for their dens, raid fox caches, and feed on an occasional bear’s kill.

  Wolves have a curious dependency on caribou to act as snowplows. It seems clear that tundra wolves do not follow caribou in winter solely to feed on them but because the herds open the way and pack the snow down. Wolves could not move through the deep snows of the northern forests without these highways. They also take advantage of moose trails in such snows.

  The wolf seems to have few relationships with other animals that could be termed purely social, though he apparently takes pleasure in the company of ravens. The raven, with a range almost as extensive as the wolf’s, one that includes even the tundra, commonly follows hunting wolves to feed on the remains of a kill. In winter, when tracks are visible from the air, ravens will follow the trail of a wolf pack in hopes of finding a carcass. They roost in neighboring trees or hop about eating bloody snow while the wolves eat, approaching the carcass when the wolves have finished. But the relationship between the two is deeper than this, as is revealed in the following incident. A traveling pack stopped to rest and four or five ravens who were tagging along began to pester them. As Mech writes in The Wolf:

  “The birds would dive at a wolf’s head or tail and the wolf would duck and then leap at them. Sometimes the ravens chased the wolves, flying just above their heads, and once, a raven waddled to a resting wolf, pecked at its tail, and jumped aside as the wolf snapped at it. When the wolf retaliated by stalking the raven, the bird allowed it within a foot before arising. Then it landed a few feet beyond the wolf, and repeated the prank.

  The raven (Corvus corax), who may lead wolves to their prey, who certainly feeds on their kills. Raven tag, in which ravens pester napping wolves and are in turn chased, seems to be a mutually enjoyable game.

  “It appears that the wolf and the raven have reached an adjustment in their relationships such that each creature is rewarded in some way by the presence of the other and that each is fully aware of the other’s capabilities. Both species are extremely social, so they must possess the psychological mechanisms necessary for forming social attachments. Perhaps in some way individuals of each species have included members of the other in their social group and have formed bonds with them.”

  The wolf may have similar relationships with other creatures. People have heard loons and barred owls responding to wolf howls, and vice versa.

  The wolf has few satisfactory meetings with bears. In most encounters wolves snap at the bear’s heels and lunge at his flanks to drive him away from a carcass or a pup, and the bear in turn swats at the wolves or tries to catch a wolf between his paws. In the end the most the wolves can hope to do is to herd a bear off in the right direction.

  Wolves may kill a coyote and occasionally throttle a fox in a dispute over food. Meetings between dogs and wolves result in anything from swift death to lasting relationships. Wolves sometimes prey on dogs near villages as though they were domestic stock. (The set of steel nubs on a leather strap seen on dogs today is a gentler version of the spiked collar dogs once wore as protection against wolves.) Dispersing wolves and feral dogs may occasionally breed and establish hybrid packs. A common practice in captivity is to allow wolf pups to establish a bond with an older dog. The relationship gives humans an intermediary, and makes handling the wolves easier. Wolves will submit to dogs they have grown up with, no matter how small. I’ve seen a tame adult wolf act submissive before an eight-pound cairn terrier. As we shall see later, feral dogs preyed frequently on domestic stock, which precipitated massive retaliat
ion—against wolves.

  If one considers the ramifications, the wolf’s most important and dangerous relationship must be his relationship with man.

  It is popularly believed that there is no written record of a healthy wolf ever having killed a person in North America. Those making the claim ignore Eskimos and Indians, who have been killed, and are careful to rule out rabid wolves. The latter have attacked people several times.

  Ernest Thompson Seton believed that wolves attacked and killed people before the coming of the gun and poisons, especially during the winter months when food was scarce, and native American oral history supports him. To judge from all the stories that have been told, contacts between human beings and wolves were more frequent before the massive antipredator campaigns of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Whether more people were attacked under these circumstances remains a matter of conjecture. In evolutionary terms, of course, wolves and men developed along similar lines as social hunters and were in competition for the same game. Undoubtedly there were encounters in prehistoric times that resulted in death, but that is going pretty far back.

  Reports from Russia and Europe of wolves preying on human beings are more numerous than those from North America and there is probably some truth to them. I see no reason why under the right circumstances—a desperately hungry wolf and an unarmed man, for instance—the wolf wouldn’t kill.

  In a book called Adventures in Error, Vilhjalmer Stefansson recalls his efforts to track down virtually every report of a wolf killing a human being between 1923 and 1936. Reports from the Caucasus, the Near East, Canada, and Alaska all proved to be either fiction or gross exaggeration. Furthermore, Stefansson could not substantiate a single report of wolves traveling in packs larger than about thirty. In 1945 it was reported that no incident of wolf attack brought to the attention of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service in the preceding twenty-five years could be substantiated. The late James Curran, editor of the Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario, Daily Star, put up a standing offer of $100 for anyone who could document a wolf attack on a human being. The reward went uncollected for years and lapsed with his death. It should be noted that there are more wolves in southern Ontario than anywhere else in Canada and that there is probably a greater likelihood of a person encountering one there in the region of Algonquin Provincial Park than perhaps anywhere else in the world.

  C. H. D. Clarke, a Canadian naturalist, is responsible for bringing to English readers the story of the “beasts of Gévaudan.” These two animals between them killed at least sixty-four people, maybe as many as one hundred, in the Cevennes Mountains of south-central France between June 30, 1764, and June 19, 1767. The majority of the victims were small children.

  The creatures were hunted down by a succession of small armies, all of whom failed until the job was finally done by a gentleman in his sixties called Antoine de Bauterne. The male of the ravening pair was killed on September 21, 1766. He weighed 130 pounds, stood 32 inches at the shoulder, and measured 5 feet, 7 inches from nose to tail. By European standards, compared to other specimens of European wolf, he was enormous. The female, somewhat smaller, was killed nine months later.

  In July 1833 a rabid white wolf wandered into two separate camps on the upper Green River in western Wyoming and attacked a number of people. Thirteen of those bitten—mountain men, traders, and Indians—died. In 1926 a rabid wolf drifted through Churchill, Manitoba. The incident, grossly exaggerated by the press, was made to sound like a siege. The wolf was run over by a car and bit no one, but in the confusion six dogs and an Indian were shot.

  Clarke reviewed most of the literature bearing on human predation in southern and central Europe, and in central Asia (where the majority of stories originated) and concluded that almost every report of a wolf attacking a human being could be attributed to a rabid animal or a hybrid. The Gévaudan wolves were of such size and were so oddly colored, Clarke believed, that they must have been wolf-dog hybrids. Wolf-dog hybrids are sometimes larger than either parent and are far more likely, too, to prey on children and livestock and would probably fear men less.

  Between 1740 and 1773, about two thousand wolves were killed in the region of Gévaudan, mostly in attempts to kill the Gévaudan pair.

  It is the fashion today to dismiss rather glibly accounts of wolves preying on human beings. However, I think it would be foolish to maintain that no healthy wolf ever did so, or that wolves were unable to size up human beings like any other sort of domestic stock and see whether in lean times taking such a creature was worth the risk. I am sure they can. The problem is one of setting things in perspective. How many tens of thousands of encounters between wolves and unarmed individuals have passed without incident? The reality seems to be that such events are incredibly rare nowadays, in spite of stories that continue to surface even in the New York Times, reporting wolves descending on peasant villages in blizzards in search of human food.

  While the wolf preyed rarely on man, man clearly preyed excessively on the wolf and it may be appropriate to close this chapter on the behavior and ecology of the wolf with a mention of how that predilection has affected science.

  The late Adolph Murie, the first person seriously to undertake a study of the wolf, began his work in Alaska in the spring of 1939 as a game biologist in Mount McKinley National Park. It was an enormous undertaking in an age when aerial observation and radio telemetry were not available. Murie walked more than seventeen hundred miles in the six months before September 1939, examining the remains of wolf kills and observing wolves away from their dens. He returned the next year, and finished his work in the summer of 1941. The results were published by the U.S. Government Printing Office in 1944 under the title The Wolves of Mount McKinley. The work is a classic.

  Murie was working in Mount McKinley National Park at a time when outside pressure was being brought to destroy the wolves inside its boundaries in order to protect game herds. He alludes to instances in which wolves were killed and twice makes reference to wolf dens that were raided for pups. He remarks, rather stoically, “When a den is discovered the young are destroyed and all opportunity for making further observation is lost.” This in a national park where the wildlife was supposedly protected.

  Thirty years later L. David Mech, also a veteran of hundreds of miles of hiking on Isle Royale and in Minnesota, and innumerable hours in foul weather in a tiny observation plane or in the back of pickup trucks listening for signals from radio-collared wolves, was confronted with similar problems. Seventeen of his radio-collared wolves were killed by human beings. In northern Michigan an experiment to establish transplanted wolves into old range where there was sufficient wild food for them came to an inconclusive end when all four animals, each wearing a plainly visible radio collar, were killed. Erkki Pulliainen’s research in Finland reached a state of limbo in 1975 when the last wolf was killed there. In 1976 the state of Alaska, under pressure from hunters to reduce its wolf population, deliberately shot the radio-collared wolves in one of its own studies.

  The miracle is that in such a climate of human hatred, misunderstanding, and harassment wildlife biologists have managed to bring the wolf out of the darkness of superstition at all.

  In a paper presented at a conference on wolves held in Maryland in 1966, it was suggested that more could be learned about the origins of man as a social animal by studying the social structure of wolf packs than could be learned by studying primates. The suggestion was prophetic. I write now in a country and at a time when man’s own brutal nature is cause for concern and when the wolf, whom man has historically accused of craven savagery, has begun to emerge as a benign creature.

  Two

  AND A CLOUD PASSES OVERHEAD

  Four

  AMAGUK AND SACRED MEAT

  IT OCCURRED TO ME early on in my association with wolves that I was distrustful of science. Not because it was unimaginative, though I think that is a charge that can be made against wildlife biology, but because it was narrow. I encountered
what seemed to me eminently rational explanations for why wolves did some of the things they did, only to find wildlife biologists ignoring those ideas. True, some of the ideas were put forth by people who had only observed captive wolves; their explanations were intriguing and rational, but it was admittedly taking quite a leap to extrapolate from the behavior of captive animals to include those in the wild.

  But, clearly, there was a body of evidence which seemed both rational and pertinent and which was being ignored: what people who lived in the Arctic among wolves, who had observed them for years in the wild, thought about them. Second, there was an even larger issue: what could be inferred about the behavior of wolves from the lifeways of seminomadic human hunters who faced virtually the same problems as the wolf in securing game and surviving in the Arctic?

  It is difficult, and perhaps ultimately pointless, to try to keep the two ideas separated. What the arctic hunter sees in the wolf. What we see of the wolf in the arctic hunter. The Nunamiut Eskimos, the Naskapi Indians of Labrador, the tribes of the northern plains and the North Pacific coast discussed below are all, in a sense, timeless. Even those tribes we can converse with today because they happen to live in our own age are timeless; the ideas that surface in conversation with them (even inside a helicopter at two thousand feet) are ancient ideas. For the vision that guides them is not the vision that guides Western man a thousand years removed from the Age of Charlemagne. And the life they lead, you notice, tagging along behind them as they hunt, really is replete with examples of the ways wolves might do things. Over thousands of years Eskimos and wolves have tended to develop the same kind of efficiency in the Arctic.

  It is one of the oddities of our age that much of what Eskimos know about wolves—and speak about clearly in English, in twentieth-century terms—wildlife biologists are still intent on discovering. It was this fact that made me uneasy. Later, I was made even more uneasy by how much fuller the wolf was as a creature in the mind of the modern Eskimo.