by Barry Lopez
Without airplanes no one deliberately hunts wolves anymore—they are too hard to find from the ground. (Whatever sport there may be in wolf hunting, in the sense of earning a right to kill, is probably down there on the ground with the trapper who does it for a living. He works alone over long distances during a harsh season. He has to know something about wolf habits and a lot about the territory.) The wolf becomes a big game trophy animal today only when someone is lucky enough to see one while he is hunting something else. This kind of wolf hunting brings us to the present day.
Big game hunting in North America became popular after World War II. Books and articles about the romance of the sport in Alaska and Canada were suddenly everywhere. The formula for these stories was always the same: the author flew to the north country, explored widely with a guide, shot record numbers of animals, and sat around a campfire lamenting the loss of North America’s best trophy animals to wolves, Indians, and Eskimos. It was agreed that if something wasn’t done to thin the wolf population the herds would soon be gone.
One such book, From Out of the Yukon by James Bond, contains the requisite scenes and sentiments. It is worth reviewing not so much for its appeal to armchair adventurers as for the portrait it paints of the wolf and the hunting philosophy it endorses.
Around the campfire one evening Mr. Bond suggests it’s not the wolves but excessive human hunting that is to blame for the depletion of the game herds. Everyone agrees. The solution they arrive at is twofold: first, increase the wolf bounty and get furriers to raise the price of wolf pelts to encourage more wolf trapping; second, “encourage all hunters to be good sportsmen and not shoot more than they need.”
In his north country adventures Mr. Bond encounters wolves twice. The first time he can’t get a clear shot but the guide does. “Well, I do not have to tell you,” he writes, “that I badly wanted that big black devil for my trophy room, but I am glad Norman killed it, for it means one less wolf in the country.”
The second wolf he meets, one howled up by the guide, he cripples and as he approaches, he thinks: “What excitement! These wolves had no conception of man.” After he has killed the wolf, Mr. Bond inspects the head. “I was really amazed to find the numerous and tremendous muscles in the head and neck of this great wolf. They could only have developed through usage—ripping and tearing at our game animals… . It pleased me greatly to see this leader of destruction lying dead on the ground before me.” The dimensions Mr. Bond reports for the wolf, typically, exceed those of any wolf on record.
I do not think men thoughtlessly kill wolves; they have reasons for doing so. Prime among them is the belief that they are doing something deeply and profoundly right. Whatever arguments are put forth—predation on big game, wolves are cowards and deserve to die—all seem rooted in the belief that the wolf is “wrong” in the scheme of things, like cancer, and has to be rooted out.
Killed for bounty by aerial hunter in Minnesota in the 1960s
It is a convention of popular sociology that modern man leads a frustratingly inadequate life in which hunting becomes both overcompensation for a sense of impotence and an attempt to reroot oneself in the natural world. As man has matured, the traditional reason for hunting—to obtain food—has disappeared, along with the sacred relationship with the hunted. The modern hunter pays lip service to the ethics of the warrior hunter—respect for the animal, a taboo against waste, pride taken in highly developed skills like tracking—but his actions betray him. What has most emphatically not disappeared, oddly, is the almost spiritual sense of identification that comes over the hunter in the presence of a wolf.
Here is an animal capable of killing a man, an animal of legendary endurance and spirit, an animal that embodies marvelous integration with its environment. This is exactly what the frustrated modern hunter would like: the noble qualities imagined; a sense of fitting into the world. The hunter wants to be the wolf.
The first time I understood this I was talking with a man who had killed some thirty-odd wolves himself from a plane, alone, and flown hunters who had killed almost four hundred more. As he described with his hands the movement of the plane, the tack of its approach, his body began to lean into the movement and he shook his head as if to say no words could tell it. For him the thing was not the killing; it was that moment when the blast of the shotgun hit the wolf and flattened him—because the wolf’s legs never stopped driving. In that same instant the animal was fighting to go on, to stay on its feet, to shake off the impact of the buckshot. The man spoke with awed respect of the animal’s will to live, its bone and muscle shattered, blood streaking the snow, but refusing to fall. “When the legs stop, you know he’s dead. He doesn’t quit until there’s nothing left.” He spoke as though he himself would never be a quitter in life because he had seen this thing. Four hundred times.
It does not demean men to want to be what they imagine the wolf to be, but it demeans them to kill the animal for it.
Nine
AN AMERICAN POGROM
WHEN I WAS IN college it was my habit to go down to West Virginia and stay with a man who, among other things, ran sheep to make ends meet. He and his wife were both in their eighties, living on an income of about twenty-five hundred dollars a year, almost all of that from the sale of mutton and wool. One winter night—I was sleeping on the second floor—I was suddenly awakened by shouts from the sheep pen. I sprang from under the down covers and ran across the bare, freezing floor to the window. The man’s oldest son was out there in the snow in his underwear with a .30/30, trying to get a shot at a black bear in the sheep pens. The bear killed eleven sheep. And disappeared into the darkness. I never forgot that. The man standing there in the snow with his gun, looking at the dead sheep.
On a summer afternoon recently I sat in the shade of cottonwood trees near a trickling creek on the edge of a playa desert in southeastern Oregon, talking with an old man who had hunted wolves when he was young. He was working a cinnabar claim here now, for mercury. His nearest neighbors were a few miles away. He had no electricity in his one-room shack, no phone, no running water. But he got on from one year to the next. He was a frontier jack-of-all-trades, who’d herded cattle, been a commercial fisherman in Alaska, trapped in the Coast Range, and worked Montana oilfields. When he was nineteen he hunted wolves with a pack of dogs in the Dakotas and eastern Montana. As he spoke, he explained how he controlled the half-wild dogs and what happened when they met a wolf and how the wolves were finally killed out of that country by the late twenties.
He would turn the wolves in for an eight-dollar bounty. If the pelt was good and it was a good year, he got another fifteen or twenty dollars in trade.
“God, that was terrible big money,” Dave Wallace said that afternoon. Without the ranchers’ help, he told me, without meals and grain feed for his horses, he never would have made it. “It was awful work. God, the dogs, you didn’t want to turn your back on them. They’d try to kill you.”
When the dogs jumped a wolf, he would worry about how many dogs he was going to lose. “A wolf can’t run as fast as a coyote, so he’d get in a low place like a coulee and wait for the dogs chasing him to come over the top. The first time I saw it, the wolf grabbed the first dog behind the shoulder and tore out a rib and the second one he got back of the head and crushed it. Just crushed it. Then the rest of them came in on him and I ran over the top of all of them on the horse and clubbed the wolf to death.”
Wallace left Montana when he still was nineteen. He told me he never liked dogs much after that. But he did. As is the way, oddly, with such men, he was quite fond of animals, and he imagined himself, in his later years, something like them. Lonely. Looked down on.
Dave Wallace died a few months after I spoke with him. One afternoon in the spring he had a heart attack while he was driving his pickup down the road. It drifted off into the sagebrush and coasted to a stop in some cheat grass. From where the truck came to rest, out the windshield, you could see most of a thirty-thousand-acre c
attle ranch. It was in the interest of that industry, ironically, that Wallace had killed fifty-nine wolves for bounty.
One evening before he died, Wallace told me how cold it would get in the Dakotas in the winter, and that he would bundle himself up in wolf furs to keep warm at forty and fifty below. “A wolf will live through that kind of cold, walk around in it. Jesus they’re a tough animal.” We talked about dying and I told him that as part of an Aztec ritual of last rites a man’s breast was pricked with the sharpened bone of a wolf. Wallace looked across the room at me and said nothing. It was as though he understood exactly the kind of meaning this had, the sort of encouragement it was to a dying man. Uneducated, alone in a shack in the desert, dying of old age, Wallace smiled for a moment, as serene in his comprehension of the mystery of life as Buddha.
No other wolf killing ever achieved either in geographic scope or economic or emotional scale the predator-control war waged against wolves in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in the United States and Canada, on the tail end of which Dave Wallace found himself. Eric Zimen, a German wolf biologist, once remarked that he was utterly unable to fathom the relentless carnage. “We killed the wolf in Europe,” he said, “and we hated the wolf, but it was not anything like what you have done in America.” Even speaking as a prejudiced European he was correct.
The immigrant newly arrived in North America in the seventeenth century faced certain hardship. Starting almost literally from scratch he had to clear timber, build a home, secure food, and deal with a host of adverse conditions, many of which were dangerous and some of which he had never heard of, like poison ivy and rattlesnakes. In addition he had to effect some sort of understanding with native Americans, a people whose language he did not speak, whose customs he did not understand, and whose power was mysterious. The Indians came and went like fog; they survived well in an environment that seemed to him intractable. They were like the wolves who came at night and snatched a pig, a small enough thing in itself but not to a man who had brought the pig thousands of miles to a place where there were no domestic pigs. The Indian came in the middle of the night and took an ax and disappeared. Wolves and Indians stared at him from the edge of his fields for hours and made him uneasy; he wrote that the wolves were not as ferocious as European wolves but were more numerous. In the colonist’s mind Indian and wolf often fused into a symbol of the land’s hostility, of the dangers that lay ahead. In more sober moments he recognized that both Indian and wolf were simply curious; but he did not deal well at all with curiosity. He built walls around his villages to keep wolves and Indians out. He began to shoot wolves and Indians. He wrote in his bounty ordinances of “wolf scalps,” and said of Indians that they attacked his villages “like a pack of wolves.” A Massachusetts law of 1638 stated, “Whoever shall [within the town] shoot off a gun on any unnecessary occasion, or at any game except an Indian or a wolf, shall forfeit 5 shillings for every shot.”
Newly arrived Protestant ministers drew parallels between the savage paganism of the Indian and the wolf. Both, they preached, tried the souls of men with their depredations, and the ministers urged colonists to give in to neither. They didn’t. By the end of the nineteenth century the primary food resources of Indian and wolf were gone—both had been deliberately poisoned—and both had been reduced to living on reservations. Insofar as the Indian became a Christian and lived like a white man he was accepted; insofar as the wolf became a dog, a pet, or a draft animal in someone’s sledge harness he, too, was accepted. But by 1900 there wasn’t much point in being either a wolf or an Indian in the United States.
The colonist had no experience in dealing with Indians and knew little more about killing wolves. But since the two seemed so alike, he fell to dealing with them in similar ways. He set out poisoned meat for the wolf and gave the Indian blankets infected with smallpox. He raided the wolf’s den to dig out and destroy the pups, and stole the Indian’s children and sent them to missionary schools to be rehabilitated. When he was accused of butchery for killing wolves and Indians, he spun tales of Mohawk cruelty and of wolves who ate fawns while they were still alive, invoking the ancient law of literal equivalents. By the late nineteenth century the argot of the Indian wars was the argot of the wolf wars. General Sheridan said: “The only good Indians I ever saw were dead,” and the wolfer said, “The only good wolf is a dead one.” Indians and wolves who later came into areas where there were no more of either were called renegades. Wolves that lay around among the buffalo herds were called loafer wolves and Indians that hung around the forts were called loafer Indians.
In the aftermath of this persecution, America came to beat its breast over the murder of Indians. But most people never knew, and few cared, what had happened to wolves. Insofar as both were exterminated for similar reasons, that is interesting. Insofar as the wolf, unlike the whooping crane and the buffalo we almost killed out, led a life similar to our own, it is odd that no one ever asked why.
The European colonist was not much troubled by wolves until he began raising stock. The first livestock came to Jamestown, Virginia, in 1609—swine, cattle, and horses. By 1625 these animals were common in colonial settlements and how to stop the wolves who preyed on these beasts was a topic to galvanize community discussion. While the European farmer might have dealt with predation by himself, in America, where people were forced to band together for a variety of reasons, wolf control was a community problem. Together with his neighbors a man dug wolf pits and erected palisades. He conducted battues and paid salaries of professional wolf hunters, as he had done in Europe. And he passed bounty laws. Wolf bounties had been a means of effecting wolf control for thousands of years and were current in Europe and the British Isles at the time of immigration. A system both biologically ineffective and wide open to fraud, it was nevertheless popular because raising the bounty payment and exchanging it for a dead wolf was tangible, daily evidence that something was being done.
The first wolf bounty law in America was passed in Massachusetts on November 9, 1630. Further bounty laws were soon passed in Virginia at Jamestown (on September 4, 1632) and in the other colonies. Payments were made in cash, tobacco, wine, corn, and, for Indians, blankets and trinkets. A New Jersey law of 1697 states: “Whatsoever Christian shall kill and bring the head of a wolf … to any magistrate … shall be paid a bounty of twenty shillings… .” Only half that much was to be paid to Indians and blacks who killed wolves; it also became the custom to require Indians to produce without compensation one or two wolf pelts a year. A Virginia law passed in 1668 broke down the requirement of tribute in wolves to be paid according to the number of hunters in each tribe, asking 725 hunters to produce 145 wolves annually. (A hundred and fifty years later at Fort Union, Montana, trading companies were buying wolf pelts they didn’t need in order “not to create any dissatisfaction” among the Indians.)
In 1717 residents on Cape Cod tried to build a six-foot-high, eight-mile-long fence across the peninsula between Plymouth and Barnstable counties to keep the wolves from knocking off an occasional cow, but the project proved too expensive. Someone else discovered spring-loaded tallow balls. A steel fishhook was rolled back on itself like a spring, bound with thread, and covered with tallow. The balls were scattered around a wolf kill and the wolves who ate them died of internal hemorrhaging. Iron shipments from England and the production of local bog iron resulted in a variety of traps being produced, but they were too heavy and unwieldy to be popular. Some towns bought their own wolfhounds and appointed a hound master. (The huge Irish wolfhounds, 36 inches at the shoulder and weighing 120 pounds, were hard to come by. Oliver Cromwell in 1652 had issued an order that the popular dogs were not to be exported as they were too much needed in Ireland.)
By the first part of the eighteenth century the colonies were striving for self-sufficiency and the need for a sheep industry was clear. One of those concerned with wool production was Gen. George Washington. In a series of letters he exchanged with Arthur Young, president of
the Agricultural Society of Great Britain, with Thomas Jefferson, and with Richard Peters, of the Philadelphia Agricultural Society, Washington lamented the attacks of feral dogs and wolves, which “retarded the growth of the sheep industry.” Young couldn’t understand why, since there were wolves in Europe and sheep raising flourished there. It was one of the last times America went to England for advice.
Two points had eluded Young: first, that there were a lot more wolves and wild dogs in America; and second, that the tendency in the States
In the 1920s the Ross Island Meat Packing Company of North Dakota paid a little-publicized bounty of eight dollars on German shepherds, a popular breed of dog in the northern plains at the time and often responsible for killing cattle, the slaughter of which was invariably blamed on wolves.
was not, as it was in Europe, to subdivide more or less settled land but to expand into decidedly unsettled land. Under those conditions more than a couple of shepherds and a hedgerow were required to guarantee a sheep industry.
The extent of predation on sheep by feral dogs that the Washington-Young correspondence alludes to has largely been ignored by historians of the period, who were content, as were the colonists, to ascribe all canine predation to the wolf. Since the wolf, not the dog, wore the cloak of evil and few could tell the difference between their tracks, wolves were blamed for the death of any animal if a canine print was close by. If a sheep died of natural causes—and sheep diseases were another thing that worried Washington—and its carcass was scavenged by dogs, it was often reported as a wolf kill. This error was far from innocuous. Long after the wolf ceased to be important as a predator on New England livestock, he was still bountied and blamed for predation caused by feral dogs.
Compounding the issue was the indiscriminate killing of wolves when only one or two were actually doing the damage in a region where twenty or thirty lived.
