Of Wolves and Men

by Barry Lopez

  If you examine what they have to say, if you watch Eskimos hunt, you discover something about wolves; but you also discover something about men and how they envision animals. For some, the animal is only an object to be quantified; it is limited, capable of being fully understood. For others, the animal is a likeness to be compared to other animals. In the end, it is unfathomable. The view from both places—the one slightly arrogant, the other perhaps more humble—gives you an animal neither can see. When you think about it, that’s quite extraordinary: a wolf that is both substance and shadow.

  The hope of grasping that vision is grandiose. But that is what we are about.

  In the spring of 1970, Robert Stephenson, a young wildlife biologist, went up to the small Eskimo village of Anaktuvuk in the central Brooks Range, some hundred miles north of the Arctic Circle. He was sent by the Alaska Department of Fish and Game to study wolf ecology in the region, to discover why the wolf population seemed to be in decline. He stayed for almost three years to study wolves with the Nunamiut people. He learned Inupiatun. He ate what the Eskimos ate. They liked him.

  Stephenson had been studying arctic foxes; he knew very little about wolves when he arrived in Anaktuvuk, only some of what had been published by other wildlife biologists. It had not occurred to him then that most of their work had been done far to the south, and with only one subspecies of wolf, the Eastern timber wolf. And in a single, rather confined area: southern Ontario, adjacent northeastern Minnesota, and Isle Royale.

  As Stephenson traveled around the tundra and mountain country of the Nunamiut, it dawned on him that the wolves he was watching were not like the wolves described in the literature he had read. And the Nunamiut were telling him things about wolves that no one, no biologist at least, had ever written about—not because they were odd or singular or mysterious things, but because they were things biologists were not interested in. Or never saw.

  As Stephenson grew closer to the Nunamiut, as he gradually took on their sense of time and space (spending weeks during the full light of midsummer watching with powerful telescopes from foothill plateaus as wolves gamboled over sixty or seventy square miles of open tundra), his reflections on the animal led him toward a different understanding. Later, his wolf work would reflect an appreciation of the animal that was a blend of his academic knowledge and a primitive sensitivity that had been awakened, nurtured, and formed by his association with the Nunamiut. He had come among hunters to study a hunter, the one the Nunamiut called amaguk. Stephenson provided a bridge.

  It can’t be emphasized too strongly that the wolf simply goes about his business; and men select only those (few) things the wolf does that interest them to pay attention to. The biologist counts placental scars on the uterus of a dead female, something that would never occur to an Eskimo to do. An Eskimo looking for caribou is attentive to the direction of movement of wolves in various places over a period of weeks, something the biologist might regard as only anecdotal information in his reports. The mistake that is made here, with consistency, it seems, only by educated Western people, is to think that there is an ultimate wolf reality to be divined, one that can only be unearthed with microscope and radio collar. Some wolf biologists are possessed of the idea of binding the wolf up in “statistically significant” data. They want no question about the wolf not to have an answer.

  This is a difficult line to hew.

  The Nunamiut Eskimos are genuinely pleased by the wolf biologist’s attempts to understand the animal because they, too, are very interested in the wolf. But they find the biologist’s methods sometimes unfathomable—and amusing. A Nunamiut man was once shown a radio collar. The electronic principle involved was outlined. It was explained that a wolf wearing such a collar could be tracked wherever he went—he could never hide. The Eskimo said, “That’s a very interesting piece of equipment. You should do that. You would learn a lot that way.” He was deferring to a system of inquiry different from his own; but he did not think the biologists would learn much more about wolf movements than Eskimos already knew.

  Nicholas Gubser, an anthropologist, wrote of these particular Eskimos: “The more reflective Nunamiut do not search for a primordial cause, a complete explanation or order of the nature of ultimate destiny.” For the Nunamiut there is no “ultimate wolf reality.” The animal is observed as a part of the universe. Some things are known, other things are hidden. Some of the wolf is known, some is not. But it is not a thing to be anxious over. Their orientation is practical: the wolf’s pelt is valuable (especially to “crazy tannik,” the white tourist, who might pay $450 for one); watching the wolf, learning his ways, will make you a better hunter—not only a caribou hunter but a wolf hunter. A feeling of integrated well-being comes to the Nunamiut who knows so much about the wolf. Studying the wolf, he gets closer to the physical world in which he lives. The lack of separation from its elements distinguishes him from the biologist.

  The Nunamiut have been watching wolves for as long as they can remember. Their knowledge is precise but open-ended. For a few weeks every summer, some of the Nunamiut men watch wolves with spotting scopes from campsites in the Brooks Range where they have an enormous field of view. One day Justus Mekiana, one of the older men, saw a wolf following a grizzly bear around all day, at a distance of about twenty yards. He took his eye from the spotting scope to say “That’s a new one, I haven’t seen that before.” Someone mentioned a family of wolves that had howled every day for two weeks during the denning season. Mekiana said he had never known wolves to do that, in forty years of watching them, but he added: “I wonder if wolves change their behavior over time, you know, different in some ways from thirty years ago?” If he is correct, then the implications for wildlife biology are staggering. It means that social animals evolve, that what you learn today may not apply tomorrow, that in striving to create a generalized static animal you have lost the real, dynamic animal. The nature of Mekiana’s stake in the right answer is such that he remains open to many more possibilities. This same man admired Rudolph Schenkel’s drawings and correctly identified the behavior associated with each, though he could not read a word of their English captions.

  The thoroughness of the Nunamiut’s observation is the result of the keen attention given to small details, and, as is the case with all oral cultures, the constant exercise of a rich memory. On a riverbank, for example, faced with a few wolf tracks headed in a certain direction, perhaps a scent mark, the Nunamiut will call on his own knowledge of this area (as well as his knowledge of wolves, what time of year it is, and so on) and on things he has heard from others and make an educated guess at what this particular cluster of clues might mean—which wolves these might have been, where they were headed, why, how long ago, and so on. His guess will be largely correct. The Eskimo’s ability to do this, of course, astounds Western man.

  Stephenson recalls one morning being out with Bob Ahgook, one of his Nunamiut friends, searching for a den. They were traversing a hillside when suddenly Ahgook stopped and pointed to a faint trail about four inches wide in some moss and lichen. By twisting his head to get the right angle of illumination and peering intently, Stephenson was able to make out a depression in the moss.

  “Wolf trail,” said Ahgook, scanning the slope above them. Suddenly a white female, who had been sleeping 150 feet up the slope, stood up and stared at them, then turned, quickly ascended an escarpment, and disappeared. In the silence that followed a bird landed on a rock near where the wolf had been, moved around a few moments, then flew away.

  “She has a den up there, see that?” said Ahgook.

  “See what?” asked Stephenson.

  “Where that robin landed, picked up some wolf hairs, and flew away? That would be a good sleeping place, maybe very close to a den.”

  Stephenson recalled later that even though he had seen the bird it was so quick, so far away, he did not know it was a robin and would never have seen the wolf hairs in its beak. When they had climbed up to the spot it proved, inde
ed, to be a sleeping place. The female’s den was a hundred feet away. Ahgook said as the wolf departed that he saw she had shed hair around her mammae, which meant she was very close to giving birth.

  As Stephenson himself demonstrated, the chances were excellent that all this would have escaped the field biologist. He would not have seen the track, looked up, or guessed at the den. Edward T. Hall, the anthropologist, has called this difference of sensitivity the result of a difference in “culturally patterned sensory screens.” And studies by Judith Kleinfeld have shown that Eskimos are very good at picking up visual detail, better than most whites.

  Another thing that sets the Nunamiut and the biologist apart in the field is subtle, but worth noting. When the Nunamiut hunter goes out, he leaves his personal problems behind, as though they were a coat he had left on a hook. He slips, instead, into a state of concentrated, relentless attention to details: the depth of a track, the bend of grass along trails in a certain valley, the movement of ravens in the distance. It is the custom of most biologists, on the other hand, not only to bring their mental preoccupations into the field but to talk about them while they are walking along. Eskimos rarely speak when they are on the move and are inattentive to questions, giving only brief answers.

  When the Nunamiut speaks, he speaks of exceptions to the rules, of the likelihood of something happening in a particular situation. He speaks more often of individual wolves than of the collective wolf, of “the white wolf that lives over near Chandler Lake,” or “that three-legged female who had pups last year.” He believes, too—and this seems quite foreign to the Western mind—that though equipped for it, the wolf is not a natural hunter. He must learn a good deal and work hard to become a good hunter.

  One of the first practical things Stephenson noticed about the Nunamiuts’ knowledge of wolves was their ability to determine an animal’s sex and age at a distance by observing the condition and color of the pelage and fine differences in anatomy and behavior. (Some of these differences were mentioned in the first chapter.) Stephenson also learned that black wolves tend to be more high-strung than gray wolves; that two- and three-year-old females are the best caribou hunters; and that you might tell from a wolf’s track alone what color it was or whether it was rabid.

  Such things take a long time to learn.

  The Nunamiut make these observations on the basis of thousands of encounters and, like guesses about sex and age at a distance, they are based on many small pieces of interlocking detail. When a pack of wolves lies down to sleep on a hillside, it is the black ones, usually, that take the longest time to settle down. The black wolf, too, moves differently from the light-colored wolf when he crosses the tundra. It is a very subtle thing, but over the years it begins to fit and you come to believe, if you are a Nunamiut, that the black wolf is “a little more nervous.” In a caribou chase it is the sleek young females, built more like greyhounds than the males, that hunt caribou best because they are faster. As for telling a wolf’s color by its tracks, a very large track, one over 5½ inches long, is most often one left by a male black wolf. It just happens to be that way. And a rabid wolf has a tension in the muscles of his feet that keeps his footpads spread when he is walking on dry ground.

  These are interesting things to know, especially entertaining to the Western mind, because there is a neatness to them we appreciate: they have a graspable, definable quality that would fit nicely in a handbook. When you spend time with the Nunamiut, however, it is not such encapsulated data that fascinates you so much after a while. The wolf the Eskimo sees is a variable creature who does things because he is a certain age, or because it is a warm day, or because he is hungry. Everything depends on so many other things. Amaguk may be a wolf with a family who hunts with more determination than a yearling wolf who has no family to feed. He may be an old wolf alone on the tundra, tossing a piece of caribou hide up in the air and running to catch it. He may be an ill-tempered wolf who always tries to kill trespassing wolves wandering in his territory. Or he may be a wolf who toys with a red-backed mouse in the morning and kills a moose in the afternoon.

  “Wolves Eating Caribou,” from a contemporary Eskimo print.

  Examine some of the (until recently) basic precepts of wildlife science in the light of all this, such as that wolves kill primarily the weak, the old, and the injured. Too simple, say the Nunamiut. Temperature and humidity affect the wolf’s and caribou’s endurance. Terrain affects their ability to run. For caribou and moose, the nearness of deep, open water is important. With no water to get into, even the healthiest caribou may fall prey to the wolf, because no caribou can outlast the wolf. There are other things it is quite impossible to know, say the Nunamiut, but maybe the reason for some long chases is that some wolves like the taste of meat that has been run hard. Maybe, suggests one Nunamiut, healthy caribou are killed at times because when the wolves drive the caribou into an ambush, the healthy caribou get there first.

  What about wolf territories? Depends on where the caribou are coming from, say the Nunamiut, the personalities in the pack, the season, whether there are pups, whether it’s a pack of males alone.

  When a Nunamiut hunter goes out to kill wolves (there is no confusion in his mind between respect and reverence), all this that he knows about the animals comes to bear. He finds the wolf by watching the sky for ravens, because ravens are frequently looking for wolf kills and following them around. When he has located wolves, he hides somewhere downwind and opens the quiet arctic silence with a howl that carries for miles. (Best, the Nunamiut reminds you, to howl in the breeding season, on a cool day when the air is still.) He waits to hear if the wolf howls back. If he is going to come to you, the wolf comes right away. His sense of direction is so good he will almost always pass within your rifle range, even starting from three or four miles away. But if he hears the click of the rifle being cocked, he may disappear like fog.

  When the Nunamiut is searching for wolf dens on the tundra, he doesn’t pay much attention to what yearling wolves in the vicinity are doing. He tells you yearlings are always fooling around. It is impossible to tell where a den may be by watching what they do. But older animals will show a pattern. Very subtle. Mostly it is how fast they are walking in what direction and at what time of day in June that tells you where the den might be. Subtle. Like the special way (to the Eskimo eye) the wolf holds his head when he smells caribou.

  A correspondence begins to emerge.

  The Nunamiut are a seminomadic hunting society, as are most of the Indian people I will consider in this section, who lead lives similar to wolves’. They eat almost the same foods—caribou, some sheep and moose, berries, not much vegetable matter. The harsh environment requires of them both the same stamina, alertness, cooperativeness, self-assurance, and, possibly, sense of humor to survive. They often hunt caribou in the same way, anticipating caribou movement patterns and waiting at likely spots to ambush them.

  Hunting in this country is hard and Eskimos respect a good hunter. In all the time he spent with them, Stephenson never heard Nunamiut say anything degrading or contemptuous about a wolf. They admire his skill as a hunter because they know how hard it is to secure game. In the collective years of tribal memory there are very few stories about wolves that starved to death. The Nunamiut, on the other hand, have starved to death. Some of them alive today have gone for a month or more on only scraps of dried meat, pieces of caribou hide, and water. It is neither a mystery, nor surprising to anyone but a white man who no longer hunts for his food, that the Nunamiut admire the wolf and emulate his ways. In the land they share, hunting among the same caribou herds, hunting as the wolf does has proved to be the most reliable way to put meat in your belly.

  I would like to suggest that there is a correspondence between the worlds of these two hunters about which the reader should be both open-minded and critical. I will not try to prove that primitive hunting societies were socially or psychologically organized like wolves that lived in the same environment, though t
his may be close to the truth. What I am saying is this: we do not know very much at all about animals. We cannot understand them except in terms of our own needs and experiences. And to approach them solely in terms of the Western imagination is, really, to deny the animal. It behooves us to visit with a people with whom we share a planet and an interest in wolves but who themselves come from a different time-space and who, so far as we know, are very much closer to the wolf than we will ever be.

  What, if anything, does this correspondence mean? I think it can mean almost everything if you are trying to fathom wolves.

  It became clear to me one evening in a single question.

  An old Nunamiut man was asked who, at the end of his life, knew more about the mountains and foothills of the Brooks Range near Anaktuvuk, an old man or an old wolf? Where and when to hunt, how to survive a blizzard or a year when the caribou didn’t come? After, a pause the man said, “The same. They know the same.” The remark has special meaning for what it implies about wolves. It comes from a man who has had to negotiate in polar darkness and in whiteouts, when the world surrounding him was entirely without the one thing indispensable to a Western navigator—an edge. Anthropologist Edmund Carpenter has written of the extraordinary ability of polar Eskimos like the Aivilik to find their way about in a world that is often without horizon or actual points or objects for reference. What the Aivilik perceive is relationships, clusters of information that include what type of snow is underfoot, the direction and sound (against a parka ruff) of wind, any smells in the air, the contour of the landscape, the movement of animals, and so on. By constantly processing this information, the Aivilik knows where he is and where he is going. By implication, the Eskimo suggests that the wolf does something similar.