Of Wolves and Men

by Barry Lopez

  Although I am familiar with wild country, I learned, I think, several remarkable things simply by walking in the woods with River and Prairie and paying attention to what they did. We took them out on leashes. They often sought out ridges, high on the slopes of the mountain valley where we lived. I assumed at first that it was for the view but later it seemed it was for another reason as well. Here the air currents that moved strongly upslope in the afternoon reached them intact, not broken up, with the olfactory information they carried scattered, as happened when the winds blew through the trees.

  The wolves moved deftly and silently in the woods and in trying to imitate them I came to walk more quietly and to freeze at the sign of slight movement. At first this imitation gave me no advantage, but after several weeks I realized I was becoming far more attuned to the environment we moved through. I heard more, for one thing, and, my senses now constantly alert, I occasionally saw a deer mouse or a grouse before they did. I also learned the several thousand acres we walked in well enough to find my way around in the dark. I never moved as quietly, or with the grace that they did, not with my upright stance and long limbs that caused my body to become entangled, and the ninety-degree angle at my ankle that caused my feet to catch. But I took from them the confidence to believe I could attune myself better to the woods by behaving as they did—minutely inspecting certain things, seeking vantage points, always sniffing at the air. I did, and felt vigorous, charged with alertness.

  They moved always, it seemed one day, in search of clues.

  After these experiences, when I came in contact with Eskimo perceptions of the wolf I was much quicker to understand that the Eskimo “sees” differently from the way I see, and that I would likely never see as well in the wild as the Eskimo did, any more than I would ever see as well in the woods one day as Prairie and River.

  There were moments of pain and embarrassment with the wolves, times when we sensed how awful the pen must have been for them, as large as it was. The smoke from a slash fire at a logging site would drift through. They would sense fire but have nowhere to run. Deer would appear, and the wolves would race excitedly up and down, looking for a way out. A loose board would make a banging noise in a storm and terrify them. There were other incidents, though, ones that could almost make up for these. To see them leaping for falling leaves in October. To sleep with them in the pen at night and feel them drifting by, just brushing your fingertips with their fur.

  I would often sit out in the woods next to the pen on sunny afternoons, reading and making notes. I enjoyed being around them.

  One summer day, when the wolves were a little more than two years old, someone let them out. We never found out who. I think it must have been someone who believed all wild animals should be free but who did not know that wild animals raised in captivity are no longer wild. River was shot and killed by a man who told us later he wasn’t sure what kind of animals they were but they looked wild and were trying to play with his neighbor’s dogs, so he thought they might be rabid. With River lying there dead, Prairie bolted for the deep woods. The next day, when we got home (we were away at a funeral), she responded to Sandy’s howling and came to her, lay down at her feet, trembling and disoriented.

  Prairie’s depression and disorientation lasted for weeks, long enough for us to consider putting her to sleep. Finally, with the aid of a young dog who befriended and supported her, she came around.

  We buried River. While I was digging the grave I thought of all the wolves I had met and how many of those were dead. Killed by other wolves in pens that did not let an ostracized animal escape. Killed in scientific experiments. Poisoned by people who hated wolves. Shot by neighbors who feared them. Wolf pups that had been killed by animal caretakers because there were simply too many to be fed and housed, and no one had taken the responsibility to isolate the sexes when the females were in estrus. Killed by people who professed a love for wolves but who, because the wolf puppies wouldn’t housebreak like dogs, or because they didn’t look royal blooded enough after losing an ear or the tip of a tail in a fight, didn’t want them around.

  I didn’t know what to say to the man who killed River. I didn’t know what to say to River. I just stood there in an afternoon rain trying to remember what I’d learned in his presence.

  I think, as the twentieth century comes to a close, that we are coming to an understanding of animals different from the one that has guided us for the past three hundred years. We have begun to see again, as our primitive ancestors did, that animals are neither imperfect imitations of men nor machines that can be described entirely in terms of endocrine secretions and neural impulses. Like us, they are genetically variable, and both the species and the individual are capable of unprecedented behavior. They are like us in the sense that we can figuratively talk of them as beings some of whose forms, movements, activities, and social organizations are analogous, but they are no more literally like us than are trees. To paraphrase Henry Beston, they move in another universe, as complete as we are, both of us caught at a moment in mid-evolution.

  I do not think it possible to define completely the sort of animals men require in order to live. They are always changing and are different for different peoples. Nor do I think it possible that science can by itself produce the animal entire. The range of the human mind, the scale and depth of the metaphors the mind is capable of manufacturing as it grapples with the universe, stand in stunning contrast to the belief that there is only one reality, which is man’s, or worse, that only one culture among the many on earth possesses the truth.

  To allow mystery, which is to say to yourself, “There could be more, there could be things we don’t understand,” is not to damn knowledge. It is to take a wider view. It is to permit yourself an extraordinary freedom: someone else does not have to be wrong in order that you may be right.

  In the Western world, in the biological sciences, we have an extraordinary tool for discovery of knowledge about animals, together with a system for its classification; and through the existence of journals and libraries we have a system for its dissemination. But if we are going to learn more about animals—real knowledge, not more facts—we are going to have to get out into the woods. We are going to have to pay more attention to free-ranging as opposed to penned animals, which will require an unfamiliar patience. And we are going to have to find ways in which single, startling incidents in animal behavior, now discarded in the winnowing process of science’s data assembly, can be preserved, can somehow be incorporated. And we are going to have to find a way, not necessarily to esteem, but at least not to despise intuition in the scientific process, for it is, as Kepler and Darwin and Einstein have said, the key.

  The English philosopher Alfred North Whitehead, writing about human inquiry into the nature of the universe, said that in simply discussing the issues, the merest hint of dogmatic certainty is an exhibition of folly. This tolerance for mystery invigorates the imagination; and it is the imagination that gives shape to the universe.

  The appreciation of the separate realities enjoyed by other organisms is not only no threat to our own reality, but the root of a fundamental joy. I learned from River that I was a human being and that he was a wolf and that we were different. I valued him as a creature, but he did not have to be what I imagined he was. It is with this freedom from dogma, I think, that the meaning of the words “the celebration of life” becomes clear.

  Afterword

  A REAQUAINTANCE WITH WOLVES

  THE HIGH DESERT OF eastern Oregon ranged off under a bright crescent moon in long swells, like an inland ocean. I was driving home from Burns, a ranching town in Oregon’s dry plateau country, headed for the Cascade Mountains and a temperate rainforest on the far side of those volcanic peaks, where my house sits by a river. Twenty minutes or more would pass between one oncoming vehicle and the next. At the farthest reach of my truck lights, coyotes skipped the road. Twice I saw small herds of antelope silhouetted against the clear sky.

 
; Despite the warm, insular confinement of the truck, the sound of its engine, and whir of tires on the two-lane blacktop and macadam, I felt included in the silent nightscape of chilled winter land I was moving through. It was fenced, to be sure, but the absence of any building and the moon’s pale light suggested, still, uncorralled nature.

  The rolling uplands of scattered juniper, sage, and rabbit brush to either side of the road were likely as wolfless on this night as they had been before white settlement, one of the few, odd corners of North America to have virtually no history of wolves, according to wolf historian Stanley Young. A hundred miles away to the northeast, in the wide basins and wooded foothills of the Blue Mountains, however, wolves had turned up at least three times since 1999. They had swum the Snake River from Idaho, to make their appearance in a land where the last wolf had been trapped out more than fifty years before. Of the three, one was struck and killed by a vehicle on Interstate 84, south of Baker City in May 2000. A second, a radio-collared female, was captured by state, federal, and Nez Perce tribal biologists on the Middle Fork of the John Day River in February 1999 and returned to her home range in central Idaho. The third, a male, was shot in October 2000 north of Ukiah, Oregon, and some suggested, left to be found.

  Each of these three wolves—and chances are good there were others, never seen or reported—was a descendant of animals introduced into Idaho’s Salmon River backcountry in 1995 and 1996 by the federal government. Their unanticipated appearance in eastern Oregon had instantly stirred mixed and powerful emotions across the state. Many people in the two largest urban areas, Portland and Eugene, initially saw these dispersing wolves as a favorable omen, a tenuous symbol of reconciliation between human and nonhuman worlds. Residents of predominantly rural eastern Oregon, however, were nearly unanimous in their demand that the state do something to keep such migrating wolves away. They viewed these creatures as a serious economic threat to livestock operations and to sport hunting, a major component of tourism in that part of Oregon. In the rising and acrimonious statewide debate, they charged that wolves would ruthlessly kill pets in the suburbs and argued that their presence would degrade the value of ranch land.

  That winter night, driving across the desert, I was coming home from one of fourteen regional town hall meetings arranged by Oregon’s Department of Fish and Wildlife, each meant to solicit public opinion about which approach the state might take to wolves wandering into Oregon from Idaho. The strident objections I’d heard to this animal’s establishing a presence in the state, raised by virtually all of the nearly one hundred people in attendance in Burns that night, were so vehement, so biologically naive, so seemingly beyond negotiation, I remember thinking the meeting could as easily have taken place in 1902 as 2002.

  The consensus sentiment was: Kill them, or they will harm us.

  It is difficult to summarize what we have learned about wolves in the twenty-five years since this book was written, partly because wolves are studied in a more politicized environment today. For example, recent genetic research suggests that the eastern timber wolf (at present Canis lupus lycaon, but tentatively Canis lycaon) may be a separate species from the gray wolf (Canis lupus), one more closely related to the red wolf (Canis rufus). This speculation has affected public debate about the reintroduction of wolves to their former habitat in the northeastern United States as well as debate about the intent of certain provisions in the Endangered Species Act. Such a contesting of scientific opinion likely would not have taken place twenty-five or thirty years ago.

  The most striking—and uncontested—reassessment of our understanding of wolf ecology in recent years has been prompted by long-term studies of predator/prey relationships. The effect wolves have on the size of prey populations, we now know, is much more complicated than originally imagined. In short, wolves limit the size of prey populations but they do not regulate them. Grizzly bears, for example, where they are present, play a larger role in the population dynamics of moose and caribou than anyone previously suspected.

  While wolf researchers continue to refine our conceptions of wolf biology, behavior, and ecology (looking, for instance, for the causes of infant mortality or speculating on the resolution of social tensions in a pack), we have arguably seen the most significant change in our understanding of the wolf in another area—wolf-human relations. This change has come about largely as a result of wolves’ increased contact with humans (1) in areas where large wolf populations are intact, protected, or well managed (Alaska, Canada, and Minnesota); (2) where smaller, naturally occurring wolf populations are recovering (Montana, Wisconsin, and Michigan); and (3) in areas where wolves have been reintroduced.

  Red wolves, the first species of wolf to be successfully reintroduced, were released in North Carolina, mostly in and around Alligator River National Wildlife Refuge, beginning in 1987. Gray wolves, after early attempts in various locales failed, were successfully reintroduced in 1995 and 1996, when the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service placed thirty-five wolves from British Columbia and Alberta in former wolf habitat in central Idaho and released another thirty-one in the Yellowstone country of Wyoming. These two populations have thrived, and wolves in Yellowstone National Park have provided researchers in the lower forty-eight states with extraordinary new opportunities for study. Gray wolves were also reintroduced in Arizona and New Mexico in 1998, and a federal plan for their release in northern New England and upstate New York was drawn up in 1992.

  Increased human contact with wolves over the past three decades has led to a reconsideration of their reputedly always-benign response to the presence of human beings. The topic of much greater interest to most, however, and an area of intense scientific curiosity, has been wolf reintroduction. Whether the reintroduction of the wolf makes good all-around biological sense remains an open question; the successful reintroduction of these creatures in several regions, however, has signaled the appearance of something new—an active human desire now to share wild land with wolves, bears, and other large predators, perhaps not incidentally emerging in a country that historically has been this animal’s most systematic foe.

  It is easy, I think, to underestimate the emotional impact wolf reintroduction has had on many Americans. For some, considering the near maniacal way in which the animal was once hunted down, it’s been like reconciliation with a bad dream. Scientists contend we will never be able to completely restore the ecosystems in which wolves once lived, but many now feel that we’ve been able at least to restore some sense of our own dignity by successfully implementing and managing wolf reintroduction programs.

  The decades following the publication of Adolph Murie’s The Wolves of Mount McKinley (1944) and Stanley Young and Edward Goldman’s The Wolves of North America (1944) saw an enormous growth in our general understanding of the biology and ecology of wolves, and we developed a greatly expanded appreciation of the complexity of their behavior. This awakening pointed directly to a reassessment of our relationship with wolves and, I believe, led straight to considering the feasibility of reintroduction.

  Today, along with the usual stream of data from field and laboratory studies, work that scientists have traditionally relied on, most professional researchers, with some notable exceptions, are willing to take seriously the amplifying views of indigenous people about wolves, building on the pioneering work of Robert O. Stephenson with Nunamiut Eskimos in Alaska’s Brooks Range. They are also more willing to consult with scholars in folklore, mythology, history, and human psychology on the development of wolf management and wolf reintroduction programs. The fieldwork of scientists in Europe, the Middle East, and Asia has further deepened our knowledge of the wolf’s ability to adapt successfully to human encroachment in previously wild environments.

  Our awareness of wolves, as a result, has become quite complex. We better comprehend how our own behavior and preconceptions affect our understanding of what they do, and our overall relations with them are now more informed by ethical considerations.

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sp; You wouldn’t have guessed, of course, at the Harney County Senior Center in Burns that December night, that such a profound shift in awareness had occurred. (The anger and frustration directed against wolves at some of the other town hall meetings in Oregon, I later learned, was even greater.) But in fairness to many of those testifying in Burns, the wolf itself, Canis lupus, was not the focus of their fulminations but rather what the wolf’s protected status and its deliberate reintroduction symbolized for the majority of those who attended the meeting. Along with many other rural Americans, these Oregonians shared a sense that they were being financially compromised and socially marginalized by the recent development of ecologically based land-use policy decisions across the United States. They also felt, generally, that these policies were too environmentally restrictive and that they were developed mostly by “city people,” persons innocent of the day-to-day realities of rural life.

  A second, closely allied group of Americans—if they can, indeed, be separated out as a second group—spoke that night about their conviction that they were being chronically thwarted and endlessly manipulated by the federal government because of their way of life. Some in this group were instantly hostile toward the suggestion of any kind of toleration of potential threats to their grazing privileges on public land, should that land be seen to have some other public use, such as water conservation or wildlife protection.