by Barry Lopez
One evening Seton set out to concoct the be-all-and-end-all of baits:
“Acting on the hint of an old trapper, I melted some cheese together with the kidney fat of a freshly killed heifer, stewing it in a china dish, and cutting it with a bone knife to avoid the taint of metal. When the mixture was cool, I cut it into lumps, and making a hole in the side of each lump I inserted a large dose of strychnine and cyanide, contained in a capsule that was impermeable by any odor; finally I sealed the holes with pieces of the cheese itself. During the whole process, I wore a pair of gloves steeped in the hot blood of the heifer, and even avoided breathing on the baits. When all was ready, I put them in a raw-hide bag rubbed all over with blood, and rode forth dragging the liver and kidneys of the beef at the end of a rope. With this I made a ten mile circuit, dropping a bait at each quarter mile, and taking the utmost care, always, not to touch any with my hands.”
Seton’s caution and arcane science were techniques much praised by wolfers of the time. The Currumpaw Wolf, for his part, carefully gathered four of the baits in a pile and defecated on them.
OUTLAWS
Three Toes of Harding County, South Dakota
Old Whitey, Bear Springs Mesa, Colorado
Big Foot, Lane County, Colorado
The Truxton Wolf, Arizona
Lobo, King of Currumpaw, northern New Mexico
White Wolf, Pine Ridge, South Dakota
Rags the Digger, Cathedral Bluffs, Colorado
The Traveler, west-central Arkansas
Virden Wolf, Virden, Manitoba
Old Lefty, Burns Hole, Colorado
Custer Wolf, Custer, South Dakota
Aquila Wolf, western Arizona
Cody’s Captive, Cheyenne, Wyoming
Mountain Billy, Medora, North Dakota
Sycan Wolf, Sycan Marsh, Oregon
Queen Wolf, Unaweep Canyon, Colorado
Black Buffalorunner, Carberry, Manitoba
The Greenhorn Wolf, southern Colorado
Three Toes of the Apishapa, Colorado
Werewolf of Nut Lake, Ft. Qu’Appelle, Saskatchewan
Split Rock Wolf, west–central Wyoming
Snowdrift Wolf, Judith Basin, Montana
Pryor Creek Wolf, southeastern Montana
Pine Ridge Wolf, southeastern South Dakota
Ghost Wolf of the Little Rockies, north-central Montana
The female wolf, Blanca, was finally caught in a steel trap in the spring of 1894. Seton and a companion approached the wolf on horseback. “Then followed the inevitable tragedy, the idea of which I shrank from afterward more than at the time. We each threw a lasso over the neck of the doomed wolf, and strained our horses in opposite directions until the blood burst from her mouth, her eyes glazed, her limbs” stiffened and then fell limp.”
The dead female was taken back to the ranch. The male, abandoning all his former caution, followed her and the next day stepped into a nest of traps set around the ranch buildings. He was chained up and left for the night but was found dead in the morning, without a wound or any sign of a struggle. Seton, deeply moved by what had happened, placed his dead body in the shed next to Blanca’s.
The price offered to the man who would kill the Currumpaw Wolf was one thousand dollars. Seton never says whether he took it. (In a long short story called “Wolf Tracker” by Zane Grey, which appeared in The Ladies’ Home Journal in 1924, the hero, Brink, walks a wolf to exhaustion and strangles him. Offered the five-thousand-dollar reward, he says a few words about the nobility of wolves and the poorness of human spirits and rides off.)
After the outlaw wolves were caught, government hunters turned to other predators. No one knows the dates when the last wolves disappeared, but by 1945 there were only stragglers. A few Mexican wolves drifting north into southern Arizona and New Mexico. A few British Columbia wolves moving south into northern Washington and Idaho. Some northern Rocky Mountain wolves coming into Glacier National Park in Montana and, rarely, down into the Bitterroot Mountains. But for a single pocket in northern Minnesota, a few on Isle Royale in Lake Superior, there were no more gray wolves in the lower forty-eight states.
There had never been a killing like it.
The final act of the wolf war in North America was staged in Canada in the 1950s.
The section of Ontario adjacent to the United States and southern sections of the prairie provinces had been involved in America’s wolf war early on. Ontario established a wolf bounty in 1793, Alberta not until 1899, and British Columbia in 1909. Canadian wolf populations began to decline steadily west of Manitoba after 1900 under increased bounty pressure. By 1948 attention had shifted north to the Northwest Territories, where the herds of barren ground caribou were declining. Almost in a panic, the Crown and provincial governments set in motion the most intensively organized wolf-control program ever mounted.
It was never argued that there was any other cause than excessive human hunting for the caribou decline, but it was decided to remove substantial numbers of wolves anyway because the situation was critical. Between 1951 and 1961, 17,500 wolves were poisoned. In 1955, when most of the wolf range in northern Canada was covered with poison bait stations (some of them poisoned wolf carcasses) served by airplane, the take reached 2,000 animals a year. Some attempt was made to keep the baits in areas where they would not harm other wildlife. Nevertheless, in one area, from 1955 to 1959, 496 red fox, 105 arctic fox, and 385 wolverines were killed, along with 3,417 wolves.
The caribou herds recovered and the program was terminated.
When the herds first began to thin in the north in 1948, some wolves apparently drifted south into Alberta, Saskatchewan, and Manitoba, and Alberta’s Veterinary Services Branch claimed an antirabies campaign was needed to protect people against possibly rabid wolves. Behind the prop of a public health program an astonishing arsenal of poison was distributed: 39,960 cyanide guns, 106,100 cyanide cartridges, and 628,000 strychnine pellets. Sodium fluoroacetate (1080) poison bait stations were increased from 25 in 1951 to 800 by 1956. There is no record of the number of wolves that were killed, along with 246,800 coyotes, but in all that time exactly one rabid wolf was diagnosed, in 1952.
British Columbia established a Predator Control Division, ostensibly to assist cattle ranchers in the south, but under pressure from professional guides and outfitters it concentrated its efforts in the north where wolves preyed on big game.
Wolf bounties were dropped in the western provinces in the mid-fifties in favor of using provincial hunters in certified problem areas. Ontario struck its bounty on wolves in 1972, Quebec in 1971. Between 1935 and 1955, about twenty thousand wolves were bountied in British Columbia; between 1942 and 1955, about twelve thousand in Alberta; and between 1947 and 1971, about thirty-three thousand in Ontario.
Recently in the 1970s a declining deer population in Quebec triggered a vigorous antiwolf campaign. Antiwolf sentiment is also still strong in coastal British Columbia, another deer hunting area. In the Yukon, complaints from guides and outfitters that wolves bother their horses (grazing free on Crown lands) and elk (artificially introduced) have resulted in a wolf-control program there. In northeastern British Columbia guides apparently have kept up a private wolf-poisoning program to protect trophy Dall sheep for their clients.
At present, however, the wolf population of Canada seems fairly healthy. Canada got into and out of unlimited warfare on wolves rather quickly. Major portions of Canada are still only thinly settled, and in these areas wolf populations have recovered from the effects of the poisoning campaigns.
The state of Alaska established a wolf bounty in 1915, but the number of wolves killed there in the past sixty years has not seemed to affect the overall population, which remains somewhere between five and ten thousand. The Mexican wolf population, on the other hand, has declined precipitously in the last thirty years. Livestock interests have expanded into former wolf ranges and human hunters have reduced the wild game populations of deer, bighorn sheep, and antelope t
hat wolves feed on. The owners of large ranchos pay no attention to Mexico’s wolf protection statutes, and there is little hope that the Mexican wolf (Canis lupus baileyi) will survive except in isolated pockets. (One such region is in southern Durango, where the wolves are protected by the Tepehuanan Indians.)
Incredibly, the unrestrained savagery that was once a part of wolf killing in the United States continues with efforts in America to control “brush wolves,” or coyotes. These animals are hunted down by ranchers from helicopters with shotguns. Their dens are dynamited. Their mouths are wired shut and they are left to starve. They are strung up in trees and picked apart with pistol fire. They are doused with gasoline and ignited.
All this was done to the wolf—and more. One of the cowhand’s favorite ruses was to stake out a dog in heat in hopes of attracting a male wolf. During a copulatory tie the animals cannot break apart. Thus trapped, the wolf was clubbed to death.
It seems to me that somewhere in our history we should have attempted to answer to ourselves for all this. As I have tried to make clear, the motive for wiping out wolves (as opposed to controlling them) proceeded from misunderstanding, from illusions of what constituted sport, from strident attachment to private property, from ignorance and irrational hatred. But the scope, the casual irresponsibility, and the cruelty of wolf killing is something else. I do not think it comes from some base, atavistic urge, though that may be a part of it. I think it is that we simply do not understand our place in the universe and have not the courage to admit it.
I would like to close this chapter with a few observations on some of the people I spoke with while I was writing this book: Dave Wallace, who lived out on the Oregon desert; a retired wolf trapper in Minnesota; a government hunter from North Dakota; and an aerial hunter from Alaska.
These men were not barbarians. They all liked wolves and were sorry for the killing. They grew up in hard times and today they are not rich. There is cause in their lives for bitterness, but they are not bitter. They are patient men. They have cultivated patience. It fills a human need, I suppose, to believe that the wolf is an incredibly intelligent animal, very difficult to trap. Stories like that about the Currumpaw Wolf and the other outlaws tend to support the idea but, really, the wolf wasn’t all that hard to trap. What it took more than anything else was patience. To make a good set and just wait till a wolf stepped in it.
Each of these men hunted wolves for bounty in a different way. They were not particularly vain men, but they knew what they did was done well. They smile whenever you mention the equipment fetishes of some of the old trappers, the wolf tail used to dust off the ground after the trap was set, or the concoctions of store-bought, sure-fire wolf scent advertised in trapper magazines in the twenties. They knew in the end it all came down to work and to being careful and to knowing the wolf and the land he lived in. One of these old men knew as much about wolves as some of the biologists I’d spoken with, but without a formal education, a good suit of clothes, and a set of teeth he was hard pressed to communicate it to anyone.
They’d been in a grim business but they had not thought much about it at the time. It was, as the man who killed the pups said, duty. They would tell you stories of horror, and struggle to find their own reasons and end up silent, beaten by history, by something they couldn’t understand.
They remembered some tight times. The Minnesota trapper was attacked by a wolf in a trap and bitten. The government hunter was threatened with losing his job when he refused to kill a wolf that wasn’t killing stock but which local cattle ranchers, well connected politically, claimed was.
They remembered things that made you laugh. An inexperienced man who tried to kill wolf pups underground with a .45 and broke both eardrums with the first shot. A North Dakota rancher who admitted one day he didn’t really know how to tell a coyote from a wolf but he was pretty sure it was wolves that were running his horses around the corrals at night. It turned out to be his own dog and two feral Irish setters.
They remembered when the last wolf around them was killed. “The last gray wolf killed in eastern Montana was in June 1927, over in the Lone Pine Hills, over east of Ekalaka in what is now Carter County.” They remembered it that well, staring now out the window of a battered trailer house at the vision, as though they wished they might have gone then, too.
They’d been on the bad side of the law. The aerial hunter and his son had been fined for illegally hunting wolves from the air. The trapper had been fined for bounty fraud.
You could not blame these men, at least I could not, for what they had done, as though it had all happened in a vacuum. The aerial hunter, trapping on the ground one year, caught a large male black wolf in one of his traps. As he approached, the wolf lifted his trapped foot, extended it toward him, and whined softly. “I would have let him go if I didn’t need the money awful bad,” he said quietly.
The old trapper I met in Minnesota I think is a tragic figure. There was, at the time I spoke with him, an argument over the status of the wolf in Minnesota. He, and others, claimed there were too many in the northeastern corner and that they were killing all the deer and should be trapped out. Others, particularly people outside the state, thought the wolf should be federally protected as an endangered species. The old man had a stake in this argument, and for him it was larger than the fate of the wolf. It was his own. He was staring at the end of his life.
He told me stories of wolf predation that were clearly exaggerations, and admitted freely that they were. But he persisted in telling the stories, and as the statewide controversy wore on, he became more and more insistent on the truth of his silly stories about bloodthirsty wolves and wanton slaughter. He wanted, more than anything else, a reinstatement of the wolf bounty program. I could not understand what he was thinking about until one day I drove him over to a friend’s house, a man in his eighties with whom he’d once trapped.
As these two men talked with each other about the early days with wolves, they were saying to anyone listening that they wanted to be needed. If no one needed wolves trapped anymore there wasn’t any reason for them to be around. They were useless. So they talked each other up about what a killer the wolf was, and how hard he was to trap, because that’s what they wanted their neighbors to believe. They wanted the attention and respect they used to get in a township, young boys tagging after them, men their own age cheering their shenanigans with the game wardens. It was all slipping away from them now.
That afternoon the old man had shown me three wolves hanging up in his garage. Under the provisions of the Endangered Species Act he could have been fined twenty thousand dollars for each one. He told me he didn’t give a damn. He’d gotten a call from the owner of a cattle ranch north of his place to come up and trap out wolves that were “bothering stock.” He had not asked, as he would have done in the old days, to see the tracks, to see a kill, to see evidence. He just set his traps. And he got three wolves.
As the three of us sat in the small, overheated house that afternoon in Minnesota, looking at sepia-toned prints from years ago, I felt very bad for the old men. They had little left but these pictures in their lap, nothing but the yellow newspaper clippings crumbling in their weathered hands, even as they showed them to me.
We killed hundreds of thousands of wolves. Sometimes with cause, sometimes with none. In the end, I think we are going to have to go back and look at the stories we made up when we had no reason to kill, and find some way to look the animal in the face again.
Four
AND A WOLF SHALL DEVOUR THE SUN
Ten
OUT OF A MEDIEVAL MIND
UP TO THIS POINT I have been considering wolves from three fairly distinct viewpoints: as objects of scientific inquiry, as objects of interest to people bound up in the natural world with them, and as objects of hatred for livestock raisers. But the points of view are not quite so distinct. And the intimation that the wolf can be objectified is one that must ultimately break down, even for science.
Each of these visions flows, historically, from man’s never-ending struggle to come to grips with the nature of the universe. That struggle has produced at different times in history different places for the wolf to fit; and at the same moment in history different ideas of the wolf’s place in the universe have existed side by side, even in the same culture. So, in the wolf we have not so much an animal that we have always known as one that we have consistently imagined. To the human imagination the wolf has proved at various times the appropriate symbol for greed or savagery, the exactly proper guise for the Devil, or fitting as a patron of warrior clans.
How did people arrive at all these notions? The wish, of course, is to uncover some underlying theme that synthesizes all perceptions of the wolf, all allusions to him, in one grand animal. I will suggest some themes below, some ways to organize the visions so that when a human being suddenly confronts a wolf there can be both a sense of the richness of ideas associated with the animal and a sense that an orderly mind has been at work. But I am not hopeful that a feeling of integration will be forthcoming. And even if it is, I don’t think it should be trusted. It seems important to be kept slightly off-balance through all this. Otherwise the temptation is to think that, although what we are examining may be complex, it is in the end reducible. I cannot, in the light of his effect on man, conceive of the wolf as reducible.
We embark then on an observation of an imaginary creature, not in the pejorative sense but in the enlightened sense—a wolf from which all other wolves are derived.
The entrance to the Pierpont Morgan Library in New York is shaded by London plane trees. On a cool autumn afternoon, with the stiff, sycamorelike leaves scraping the sidewalk in the wind and their dying yellows offset against the lush green of well-kept lawns, the building seems surrealistically isolated. It is not the wrought-iron gates through which you pass to the grounds or the oak doors by which you enter the building that sustain the illusion of being slightly out of time. It is the knowledge of what information rests on the shelves of this library, contrasted with the noise and impatience of the modern city streets outside.
