by Helen Thayer
Table of Contents
Title Page
Dedication
Introduction
Summer
Approach
Trust
Camp
Ravens
Above
Hunt
Invasion
Escape
Pups
Neighbors
Attack
Parting
Winter
Arctic
Bears
Ice
Camp
Stranger
Affection
Epilogue
Acknowledgements
About the Author
Copyright Page
To the wolves who became our friends
To Charlie who made it all possible
Introduction
ALONE IN THE WILDERNESS of the Canadian Yukon, my husband Bill and I zigzagged up a steep slope to a knife-edged ridge. After discarding our packs, we crouched among lichen-covered boulders to scan our binoculars across a remote meadow nestled in the valley below. Our hearts skipped a beat when we spotted them: two wolves, one black and one blond. The pair strolled into the open. Three more adults and four roly-poly pups soon joined them. Charlie, our part-wolf canine companion, stood unseen on a short leash at our side, silent and still, his gaze fixed on the pack. Undetected downwind, we three continued our secret watch.
The black wolf, gripping a large stick between his teeth, began an energetic tug-of-war with the pups while the other four wolves flopped down in what seemed to be favorite places. After a few minutes the black wolf joined the rest of the pack, leaving the pups’ game to deteriorate into a raging fight. A dark gray wolf darted out and, with a few well-placed nips on rears, ended the squabble. The chastised pups scurried behind the rocks into their den.
From the trampled meadow, a heavily used trail, embedded in the tundra, snaked into a grove of stunted spruce trees. Two more trails switchbacked to the rocky summit of a steep slope. The den we had been seeking for the past eight weeks was dug into its base.
As Bill and I rejoiced at our discovery, howls suddenly erupted from the distant tundra beyond the trees. All the wolves jumped to their feet to stare in the direction of the sound, waving their tails expectantly. Soon five more adults emerged from the trees, dragging behind them the partly eaten carcass of a white Dall sheep. The pack greeted the hunters excitedly, licking their muzzles. A large male regurgitated partly digested meat for the pups, while the rest of the family ripped apart and eagerly consumed the sheep. After eating his fill, the black wolf climbed to the summit and sat with his back to us.
As we counted the wolves—sixteen altogether—Charlie tugged at his leash and took a step forward. Pointing his muzzle to the sky, he gave a long howl. The black wolf leaped to his feet and spun to face Charlie, who dropped silently to his belly, laying his head on his paws. He kept his eyes below those of the wolf, looking downward to display submission and respect.
We expected the wolf to retreat out of caution, but instead he returned Charlie’s howl. The blond wolf sped up the trail to the black one’s side. Now both stared at Charlie.
Charlie raised his muzzle and howled again. The pair stood tall and alert, with tails curled above their backs. In unison, both returned Charlie’s call. Then they bounded downhill to rejoin their pack. The rest of the wolf family was guarded but calm, watching Charlie, who gazed back, relaxed but vigilant.
Still hidden, Bill whispered, “We should leave.”
To mark the den’s location on our map, we quickly took a reading with our global positioning system (GPS). Then we crouched low and began to creep away silently, still downwind. Charlie followed at first, then stopped to look back. With an urgent tug of his leash I whispered, “Come on.” We didn’t stop or straighten up until we were well out of sight.
After two more miles of trekking across steep slopes and uneven tundra, we arrived at our camp, where we took another position reading to record our tent site in our journal notes. We would use these readings to locate the den when we returned next summer, equipped and ready to attempt to live among these wondrous creatures.
In our thirty-two years of marriage, Bill and I had worked together on more than twenty expeditions. He was a helicopter pilot who had amassed almost 13,000 flight hours during a career spanning four countries: New Zealand, the dense jungles of Guatemala and Honduras, and the United States, where he was a bush pilot in Alaska’s mountains. My love of outdoor adventure had begun early, at nine years of age, when I began climbing mountains in my home country of New Zealand. As I grew older, I challenged myself with more technical routes and also competed as a discus thrower for New Zealand, Guatemala, and the United States. Later, in 1975, I won the U.S. national luge championship and represented the United States in European competition.
But the mountains were my first love. In 1986 I decided to embark on a series of expeditions to the world’s remote regions. Journeys with Bill included kayaking 1,200 miles through the Amazon rain forest and trekking 2,400 miles through the Sahara Desert. Closer to our home in the northwestern United States, we had explored 1,500 miles of the Mojave and Sonoran Deserts. In 1997 I trekked solo in Antarctica, and Bill and I walked 1,450 miles across the Gobi Desert of Mongolia in 2001.
In 1988, in celebration of my fiftieth birthday, I became the first woman ever to complete a solo trek to the magnetic North Pole. The trek was just one element of my quest to create a continuing educational series called Adventure Classroom that would enable me to share the challenges and wonders of the world with students of all ages, worldwide, through websites, lectures, and books.
The success of the first program encouraged me to join with Bill in a second journey on foot to the Pole four years later, again without dog teams or snowmobiles. Between these two polar journeys, we spent many months exploring remote areas in Alaska and in Canada’s Yukon Territory, the Northwest Territories, and Nunavut, where we encountered repeated examples of wolves coexisting with other creatures. Seeing such cooperation piqued our curiosity.
The Richardson Mountains where we hope to find a wolf den, as viewed from Eagle Plains.
As we trekked with caribou during their spring migration in Alaska, for instance, we observed wolves following the Western Arctic caribou herd as the almost half-million animals streamed north to their calving grounds on the North Slope. Similarly, in Canada we watched wolves following the Porcupine caribou herd as they traveled about four hundred miles from the Canadian Yukon to their calving area in Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. During previous expeditions in the northern polar regions, we had observed wolves and arctic foxes following polar bears in apparent harmony with each other.
I had been fascinated by wolves for many years, but it was Bill who really began studying wolves in the wild. While flying a helicopter as a commercial bush pilot in Alaska, he had seen many wolves at their dens and watched them as they pursued prey across the tundra, and had developed a lasting respect for the animals. Although usually soft-spoken and somewhat reserved, he had felt compelled to speak to Alaskan government agencies repeatedly concerning the need to protect wolves from aerial hunters, who sought to destroy entire wolf families by shooting them from planes. As his protests continued to go unheeded, he became even more determined to work toward a better understanding of wolves and their environmental importance.
These experiences led us to dream of a new program for Adventure Classroom, one in which we would explore the intertwined relationship of the gray wolf species (Canis lupus) and the other animals who share the wolf’s habitat, from grizzly bears to caribou. Gray wolves inhabit parts of North America, Europe, and Asia. A symbol of the wilderness, they are astute hunters, socia
lly complex, family oriented, with strong nurturing instincts—in many ways like our good friend the dog, but also cannily like humans. Perhaps our similarities are the reason wolves have often taken center stage in the human imagination and today stir strong emotional debate over their place in the world.
We conceived of a yearlong project in which we would attempt to live close to wild wolves, to share their home range, to feel their emotions and observe their lifestyle. Our main goal was to gain greater insight, over a summer, into wolves’ food-sharing habits with land-bound animals such as grizzlies and ravens. Then, the following winter, we hoped to observe the same behavior among wolves, polar bears, and foxes.
Due to the extreme difficulty of studying wild wolves up close at their dens and on hunts for a lengthy period, little of the wolves’ food-sharing behavior has been documented. Radio collars and airplanes have allowed some study of this elusive animal, and respected, hardworking biologists such as Adolph Murie, David Mech, Rick McIntyre, Diane Boyd, and Renee Askins have gained valuable knowledge from years of following wild wolf tracks and studying other clues. Their research has informed our own study of wolves in the wild.
Much of the scientific knowledge about wolves comes from the study of captive animals, however, and studying managed packs has many drawbacks. No matter how well an enclosure is set up, the wolves still live within wire fences, a barrier to their innermost emotions and survival skills. They cannot use their considerable intelligence and inherited knowledge to find prey and return it to the den after a nightlong hunt. A pack in captivity must always be managed. If abandoned, its social order disintegrates, tensions rise, and members often die or are killed. In contrast, wild wolves depend on instinct and experience to establish ranking and boundaries, and only in their natural environment can wolves interact with other species.
We had no interest in raising or studying wolves in captivity. Our experience would have to come in the wolves’ home range, according to their own boundaries and rules. But how could we possibly camp close enough to a den to observe and photograph a family? Wolves’ secretive nature would likely make them vanish at the first sign of humans. We would have to find a wild pack, discover its den, and gain the group’s trust. Then we would try to spend an entire summer with them. Later we would attempt an expedition to observe wolves in the Arctic for more than three winter months.
Wildlife scientists told us the goals of our summer and winter expeditions were sound, but gaining a wild pack’s trust could be an impossible challenge. One day while visiting a wolf rescue center near our home in Washington State, Bill and I spoke to one of the keepers about our plans. When I mentioned Charlie and his upbringing, the keeper suggested that Charlie might be the answer to our problem. The more we thought about the idea, the more it made sense to us. Charlie’s paternal family included a wild arctic gray wolf who entered the picture three generations ago. This ancestor was a member of the same species as the Yukon wolves, Canis lupus. The rest of his kin were Canadian Eskimo huskies, an Arctic sled-dog breed said to be distantly linked to wolves: intelligent, hard working, loyal, and easily trained. The combination of this remarkable breed and his wolf genes, although distant, gave Charlie a distinct edge in the wilderness.
The Inuit people from whom I bought Charlie had raised him not only around polar bears but near wolves, so he felt completely at ease with these distant cousins. Some wolves, in fact, even took shelter under the settlement buildings where Charlie was raised and had foraged for scraps. Until our dogs back home in the Cascade Range of Washington taught him to bark, he had howled like a wolf. As he and I had returned from the Pole, I watched him romp with year-old gray wolves on the sea ice.
Not only that, Charlie was a natural alpha—the leader of the pack. At home, he dominated our other dogs. Even the donkeys, goats, alpacas, and cats treated him with a level of respect that they never extended to each other. He was their undisputed leader.
Perhaps we could depend on Charlie’s insight into wolf life, his inherited wolf nature, and his proud alpha bearing—which resembled the best of wolf behavior—to impress a wild wolf family and earn its respect. Perhaps Charlie would be able to communicate with a wild pack as he had with his Arctic playmates. If he could bridge the gap, we might be able to make new discoveries about wolves’ hidden lives. If a wolf family accepted him as our alpha leader, regarding Bill and me as his pack, they might permit us to camp close enough to their den for our study.
Charlie weighs almost 100 pounds, making him smaller than some male wolves, who can weigh as much as 120 pounds. He has a black, wolflike coat with white paws, a white chest, and a white-flecked muzzle. Unlike a wolf’s ears, which stand up, the tips of Charlie’s ears flop over, a trait he inherited from his mother. He has a typical Eskimo husky chest, which is considerably broader than that of an average wolf. Although always the boss, Charlie’s nature is very doglike, easygoing, and gentle.
I first met Charlie three days before my solo 1988 trek. The local Inuit were concerned about my safety because I would be traveling among polar bears. They offered me one of their best bear dogs as a gift, but I insisted on paying one hundred dollars for him, all I had left in my expedition budget. As soon as I saw the big, nameless dog, I fell in love with his soft eyes and tenderness. I called him Charlie, and we set forth together to the Pole. We bonded and became best friends. Along the 364-mile journey he protected me from seven polar bears and even saved my life when one charged me.
I’ll never forget that experience. As we approached an area of extremely rough ice, frequented by numerous bears, Charlie suddenly stopped and refused to follow me around a thirty-foot-high mound of ice. Instead he growled a warning. I stopped, released my sled harness and skis, and waited with a pounding heart. Moments later, an enormous male bear stepped out from behind the ice and paused, then charged straight to my 160-pound sled and flipped it over as if it were a toothpick.
Next, fixing his eyes on me, he gathered his powerful body and prepared to charge. With a speed born of terror, I unclipped a release on Charlie’s collar. Bursting loose with an earsplitting growl, Charlie raced at the bear, grabbed his right rear heel, and hung on. The bear, his attention now turned to Charlie, spun in tight circles, reaching back to grab his tormentor. But Charlie evaded his grasp and hung on with all his might.
Finally, in desperation, the bear tore loose and raced across the ice with Charlie in hot pursuit, no doubt enjoying the most wonderful bear chase of his life. I watched them disappear, astonished to have survived. Thirty minutes later Charlie trotted back. I ran to greet him with a grateful hug. Then he received his reward: peanut butter cups. He’d found them on my sled earlier in the expedition, and they’d become his favorite food.
Bill and I hoped Charlie would be the key to our studies of wolves this summer and winter. We had many uncertainties, and everything depended on the wolves’ acceptance of Charlie as a go-between.
After my second ski trek to the magnetic North Pole, this time with Bill in 1992, we flew back to our base camp at Resolute Bay in the Canadian Arctic. There we met Ian Randle, a noted British biologist who had come there from England to study arctic gray wolves. Over dinner at Resolute Bay, Ian agreed that our plan might work. “It’s extremely difficult to study wolves in the wild,” he told us. “They’re smart, cautious, and hard to see. But if you’re persistent, you have a good chance with Charlie as your alpha. I know of dogs and wolves who respect each other. Your situation is unique. Charlie’s genes and experience could lead you to success.”
Having resolved to take Charlie with us, our next question was where we could find wolves. We were fairly sure we knew of a good winter location—the Mackenzie River Delta close to Inuvik in the Northwest Territories, not far from Canada’s northern coast. An Inuk friend had told us he had located and watched a group of wolves there during several winters.
Choosing the summer location was more difficult. Considering our many years of Arctic experience, one of the Arctic i
slands with unlimited visibility across the treeless tundra at first seemed logical. But our thoughts soon moved south to the tundra and mountains of the Canadian Yukon Territory, which we had also explored many times.
The northern Yukon is an immense, mostly uninhabited space, one of the world’s last great wildernesses. Vast expanses of flat and rolling tundra silently sweep the spaces between mountain ranges. Here and there, stunted, twisted stands of black spruce struggle to penetrate the permafrost—a continuous layer of frozen earth a few feet to two thousand feet thick—as the roots seek nutrients from the frozen soil. Wildlife abounds and the sun shines twenty-four hours a day in summer. The barren, rocky summits cast long shadows across the land.
As summer slips into winter, the tundra foliage turns a dazzling red, orange, and yellow. Radiant displays of northern lights, or aurora borealis, grace the dark winter heavens. As snow begins to fall, the tundra’s tiny plants, some of which grow only a few inches in a hundred years, become dormant. The land’s many moods, its challenges, and most of all its peace, continue to attract us.
Although the difficult terrain could make our already daunting task even more of a struggle, the Yukon might be the perfect place, especially if we found a relatively inaccessible area where hunters rarely visited. Wolves might be less cautious around us if they had not already been habituated to humans.
We flew home from Resolute Bay having decided to make a reconnaissance trek with Charlie to the Yukon’s Richardson Mountains. If we found wolves and if Charlie could communicate with them successfully, as he had in the Arctic, we would have an indication that the plan might work, and we would begin preparing for an expedition the following summer. We realized there was a serious possibility that they might not accept Charlie or, worse, might attempt to kill him. But we reasoned that if he remained on his leash at all times he would be safe. He would always be close to Bill and me, and we would have complete control over how closely he could approach wolves. (We were never concerned that the wolves might attack us. Normally, wolves prefer to keep their distance from humans—and as we would learn later, with good reason.)
