by Helen Thayer
Upon our arrival, the strangers spun in alarm to watch us, then nervously turned to depart. Alpha’s howl stopped them in their tracks. Bill and I instantly stepped a few paces back and sat down with our eyes averted to indicate submission, while Charlie stood at our side, neither submissive nor assertive.
Still suspicious, the distant wolves stared for a minute or two. A thick-chested, almost completely black wolf with gray flecks, his authority evident in his firm stance, replied to Alpha’s howl with a half-dozen warning barks. Alpha, his proud carriage projecting leadership, sent back a long, full-throated howl, while Mother, Denali, and Omega joined in different pitches.
As the howls slid down the scale to yips, the six strangers relaxed a little, still keeping an eye on us. They replied with shorter, higher calls. The echoes subsided into a silence that seemed to have a life of its own. No animosity appeared to exist between the two packs, only the friendly recognition of neighbors. The strangers appeared to be ignoring us, but Bill and I cautiously remained sitting.
Charlie now sat on his haunches alongside us, placidly watching the neighbors. He seemed to understand the situation, while we could only hope we were doing the right thing by demonstrating submission.
The abundant wolf scats and deep scratch marks on the ridge top were signs that wolves often frequented the area. Alpha scent-marked the spot, while his three companions watched the handsome gray-black stranger mark his pack’s scent line. Then the two groups observed each other from their respective vantage points. Occasionally a wolf rose to urinate on or sniff scent marks, and sometimes even defecated, but each pack respected the other’s territory.
Charlie continued to sit quietly, making no attempt to scent-mark. Bill and I sat still and avoided direct eye contact with the strangers. After a half hour, as if responding to a signal, the wolves of both sides rose to their feet and let loose with a long, jubilant howling that lasted for several minutes. Their spine-tingling song filled the valley, echoed off the mountainsides, then faded into the rustling of the chilling breeze.
With the concert finished, both families sniffed their own scent marks, then left in opposite directions. The strangers disappeared into the shadows of a deep ravine. Throughout the entire episode, none of the wolves attempted to cross the sedge- and lichen-covered area between the ridges. Scent marks were the “keep out” signs marking an area off limits by mutual agreement.
We couldn’t discern whether the wolves had encountered each other purely by chance this time, but we suspected, judging by the scats and scratches on the ridge, that it was not their first meeting. The friendly atmosphere indicated that some of the wolves in each pack might even be related to each other. Wolf biologist David Mech, founder of the International Wolf Center in Ely, Minnesota, has found that wolves recognize relatives even after several years of separation. A noted expert on wolves, Mech has studied the animals in North America and the Arctic for more than thirty years. Young wolves sometimes leave the pack, or “disperse,” according to Mech, to form their own family or join another pack. Some dispersal, which mixes genes with other families, is essential for the genetic health of the wolf population as a whole. If wolves remained for life with their birth family, inbreeding would eventually degrade the population’s health with deformities and a decreased immune system.
Soon Charlie, Bill, and I were the only ones left on the ridge. We had set out to follow a hunting party and ended up watching our wolves pay a social call on the neighbors. Charlie adapted well and had not attempted any interaction, seeming to understand that his role was that of a visitor, not a participant.
We returned to camp following the wolves’ shortcut. Now and then we caught a glimpse of the foursome trotting home through the trees, and we saw them again in the distance as they crossed the tundra.
Two hours later we arrived at camp, exhilarated by the day’s unexpected events, only to be met by utter calm. One or two wolves looked up briefly from their naps as we approached. The pups were growling over a stick they coveted and didn’t notice our arrival. While the wolves clearly took the day in stride, after dinner I spent two hours writing journal notes describing the events we had witnessed.
Once more we had observed wolves in a situation that humans rarely see. The friendly, unhurried atmosphere and the calm interaction between the two families were so different from the savage behavior often reported by those who hate wolves. Surely even those who wanted to destroy every last wolf, I thought, would change their minds had they been with us today. It was a privilege to observe such an intelligent, elegant species, and humbling to realize how our own human species often falls far short in comparison.
Attack
At 6 A.M. ONE MID-AUGUST morning, we hiked northwest in the silence of dense fog that filled the valley from floor to ridge top. We were following Alpha, Yukon, and Klondike, who were scent-marking. For twenty minutes, Alpha’s black form led us through the mist. His blond companions were almost invisible. We soon lost sight of them all.
“Let’s parallel this ridge,” I said. “The fog could lift, and we might pick them up later.”
“Okay, but I can hardly see five feet ahead,” Bill said, nimbly sidestepping a tussock mound. “Hope we don’t fall into a beaver pond.”
When we stopped to take a compass bearing, a momentary lifting of the fog revealed three wolves—one dark mottled gray and two smaller blonds heavily streaked with gray—all of them different in coloring than any other wolf we had encountered. They were walking in single file along the crest above.
The fog closed. Hoping to see them again, we climbed through the dense mist to the fog-free summit, but they had disappeared, although all around lay dozens of bleached scats advertising a pack’s frequent presence. The rocks had clearly been scent-marked and now smelled heavily of urine. We had stumbled onto a boundary area four miles northwest of our camp.
We immediately headed south, in the opposite direction from where we had seen the friendly neighboring pack a few days before, and continued deeper into the strangers’ territory. I suddenly worried that an unfriendly new pack might object to Charlie, but Bill said if we kept him close he would be safe.
We crossed the gravel to begin our descent, but Charlie abruptly pulled back on his leash and steadfastly refused to continue. Puzzled, we all stopped. He tugged to go back in the direction we had come. Then it dawned on us. Charlie, who understood wolf boundaries better than we ever could, was refusing to enter deeper into another pack’s territory. Feeling somewhat sheepish, we allowed him to lead us down the slope we had just climbed. Once on our pack’s home ground, he relaxed.
“We should do what we first planned,” I said as I tried to peer through the oppressive fog. “Parallel the ridge and hope this fog leaves soon.”
Bill agreed as he checked the compass he kept on a leather strap around his neck. I kept mine in a handy top chest pocket to avoid the annoying pull on my neck, along with the GPS unit we used to check our position via satellite. A nearby splash warned us to swing south, where we followed a twisting route through a labyrinth of fog-shrouded beaver ponds.
An hour later, visibility improved. Mountaintops and ridges were in sharp relief in the sun’s oblique rays. We again glimpsed the three strangers on a faint path a quarter mile away. Suddenly they split up: Two headed east, while the third swung west. In minutes, all three converged to take an easy route through our pack’s valley. Charlie watched with only fleeting interest. We looked for signs of Alpha and the teens, but assumed they were too far away for us to see them.
Charlie stopped now and then to gaze into the lower valley. “Let’s drop down,” I said. “Charlie seems to think our pack is down there.” I still felt uneasy about his safety, so close to strange wolves’ territory, but Bill remained unconcerned.
Another hour later, as we were hiking around the marshy edges of a beaver pond, leaves suddenly crunched in the nearby trees. We froze. Three wolves—the same strangers we had seen earlier—confronted us.
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The blond-gray pair kept their distance. The darker wolf, his fur ruff bristling, took three aggressive paces forward, his furious green eyes riveted on Charlie. Growls from deep within the wolf’s throat rose to a vicious snarl. An unyielding Charlie stepped forward. Snarls vibrated his body as well. Bill and I both grabbed his leash, but he refused to retreat. Yelling the wildest sounds we could produce, we frantically threw chunks of dirt at the strangers.
But we were invisible in the angry standoff between the wolf and Charlie. He barked: one piercing, high-pitched bark followed by two more in quick succession. In seconds a black streak and two blond flashes erupted from the trees. Alpha, followed by the teens, was racing to take up the attack. Alpha’s teeth flashed in a snarl as he stood between us and the other wolves. He steadily advanced on the dark one, who at this unexpected confrontation retreated until he reached his two companions. As Alpha rushed at them, the three turned tail, raced up the nearby ridge, and disappeared over the crest into their own territory. Alpha and the teens dashed after them and were soon out of sight.
The wolves live in the region of the Porcupine caribou herd’s wintering area.
Relief engulfed us as our pounding hearts slowed. Our wolf friends had averted a crisis and possibly saved Charlie’s life. Charlie acted as if nothing out of the ordinary had happened. He dug at a nearby lemming burrow and then, finding no one at home, rolled on the tiny hole. We, on the other hand, needed to pause and soothe our shattered nerves. We sat on the soft moss and leaned back against a convenient tree. Bill took out a thermos of hot chocolate. “Now I wish I’d paid more attention to your worrying over Charlie’s safety,” he said. “If we’d been alone, I’m sure those wolves would have run from us, but I misjudged what their reaction to Charlie would be.”
After many years as equal partners in expeditions, having faced danger together so many times, we could often read each other’s minds. There had been emergencies in the polar regions when high winds and plunging subzero temperatures made it almost impossible to erect our lifesaving tent. Without a word we always went into instant action, each attending to our own job, knowing just what we had to do because we’d practiced it together so many times.
I wondered whether the strange wolves had seen Charlie as a wolf rather than a dog, as a competitor they needed to eliminate. His defiant stance had delivered a challenge that no respectable wolf could ignore. When Charlie barked, he must have known all along that Alpha was fairly close and could help. Alpha’s speed in response had been remarkable. His desire to protect his family’s territory, and especially his defense of Charlie, made us feel even closer to this wild pack.
After a half-hour rest, we decided that we had had enough excitement for one day and headed back to camp, stopping only to replenish our supply of Labrador tea, cotton grass roots, and lichen. Alpha, Yukon, and Klondike did not return until dusk, when Charlie was already fast asleep on my sleeping bag.
Ten days later, just as a sea of fog rolled across the tundra and into our valley, we followed Alpha and the teens on a boundary scent-marking excursion. The three wolves loped slowly toward the ridge where we had recently seen the three aggressive strangers.
The wolves stopped frequently to scent-mark until they reached the summit which was clear of fog. They all stopped to urinate on several rocks. Alpha rubbed his neck on a stump then scratched dirt, each leg working as a stiff one-legged piston. Yukon defecated and, after a lengthy sniff of a gnarled log, marked it. After leaving ample warning to intruders, they all headed down a faint trail into the fog, then reappeared on the next ridge and repeated their routine. We kept pace with them as they methodically scent-marked the crest of several ridges, disposing of a few lemmings along the way. As evening approached, the fog lifted.
On one ridge Alpha sniffed a rock and then all three milled about, touching muzzles and wagging tails for several minutes before they calmed down and continued. Perhaps the scent contained a message from a strange wolf who had recently left his mark. After three miles, the threesome outdistanced us and disappeared into a valley. Leaving the wolves to continue marking their range, we returned to camp.
Numerous studies have been conducted concerning the size of wolf ranges. The general consensus is that they vary in size according to availability of prey and pack size. We were sure that the nearby ridge represented the southern boundary of this pack’s hunting range. Their den and rendezvous sites were presumably located there because of the extreme security the area provided. Most of the family’s range appeared to cover tundra with tree-covered valleys to the north and west.
As the August days slipped by, autumn crept in quietly. Tundra colors deepened and temperatures dropped to linger a few degrees below freezing. Four months after we had first arrived at Wolf Camp One, we awoke as storm clouds piled up from the north to herald the season’s first snowstorm. By noon, the mountains lay behind a wall of thick gray clouds. All was hushed as the first flakes landed gently on the ground. Trees and willows were quietly cloaked in white, their branches bent under their autumn mantle.
All the wolves except Beta and the pups had already left before daylight to hunt. The pups quickly discovered a new game as they attempted to catch the flakes. Soon covered in white, they shook from end to end, showering nearby Beta, then joined him to lie under an overhanging rock, where they could wait for the hunters to return with breakfast.
After an hour, the sun emerged. The two inches of snow quickly turned to slush, and by midafternoon it had mostly disappeared. Temperatures rose to the low 40s for the next week in an unseasonably warm spell.
By now the pups had grown to resemble adults. Their soft, dark gray fur gradually turned blond like their mother’s. Their bodies filled out, their legs were stronger, and their eyes, which had long ago lost their blueness, were changing to a yellow-green.
Beta took them on increasingly long walks. One day a pup proudly strode home with a lemming tightly grasped in his jaws. His brother promptly jumped him, trying to steal it. They squabbled over the dead body until Alpha pinned one pup to the ground and growled at the other. Then he stepped back, picked up the mangled lemming, chewed a moment, and swallowed as if to say, “If you’re going to fight, then neither of you shall have it.”
Bones in various stages of chewed destruction lay around the wolves’ living area. After returning with Beta from forays to nearby ridges, the pups spent a substantial amount of time chewing these leftovers, while others became toys. One day, with Charlie looking on intently, a pup carefully dug a shallow hole behind one of Charlie’s scent-marked rocks and buried a large moose leg bone there. After the pup left to join his brother and Yukon in a game of chase, Charlie dug up the bone and carried it to the side of the tent, where he promptly lay down and chewed it. Ownership had changed.
Yukon and Klondike, now disciplined members of the pack, hunted as frequently as the adults. Their howls had lost the reedy sound of the very young and taken on a deep, mature timbre. Sometimes they even returned carrying the largest portion of the prey, perhaps a lesson in building strength and stamina. But in spite of their growing stature within the pack, they still had pup-sitting duties when Beta and Mother rested.
One day a small rodent ran from behind our tent and across the den entrance. The pups gave chase at once. The game ended in disaster, as one pup miscalculated a sharp turn to cut off the rodent and crashed into his brother, sending him rolling. The crashee jumped to his feet and attacked the crasher in a fit of rage. Mother instantly grabbed the crashee’s fur ruff and flipped him onto his back as he whimpered his apology. After she allowed him to get to his feet, he solemnly lay down to chew a bone as if nothing had happened. His brother gnawed another bone beside him.
Beta still hunted and appeared healthy and vigorous, but as summer became autumn, he looked older and moved more slowly. While Mother and the teenagers hunted frequently, more and more often Beta, the perfect guardian, stayed with the pups.
After the airplane incident, we
concluded that this wolf pack had learned to watch the sky and listen for human hunters, and then taught their offspring to do the same. Our theory was reinforced as we noticed the pups being taught this behavior. One afternoon in near-freezing temperatures, made colder by the light northerly wind, we heard the faint sound of a distant plane flying low across the tundra. All of us—wolves and humans—were instantly alert.
As the sound drifted away, we beheld the comical sight of Beta, up on the ridge, instructing the pups in how to watch for planes. First he cocked his head toward the heavens for a moment, then looked down at the two pups. When he received no reaction, he patiently repeated the process. Although the brothers gave Beta their full attention, they were clearly puzzled.
Giving up for the moment, Beta lay down. The two young wolves were on him in an instant, tugging his fur and attacking his tail. Then they changed tactics and stepped back a few feet. Both crouched in their best hunting style and slowly crept up on Beta, cautiously placing each front paw in front of the other. In unison, they leaped at his throat and shoulder, attacking as never before, growling and tugging. Although superb hunting practice, it was more than Beta could tolerate. He heaved himself to his feet, shedding his tormentors.
After a vigorous shake, he resumed the sky-watching lesson. This time his patience had its reward: The pups caught on and glanced up with him. The next day Beta again took both students to the ridge top for more practice. From then on, they sometimes looked up, without adult urging, when a plane was heard. The human quality of this behavior—the ability to teach offspring survival tactics—made it the most fascinating one we observed, and proof of the wolves’ profound intelligence.
Under a night lit by a full moon, we happened to awake just as a group prepared to leave on a hunt. Denali ran down from his watch post to greet Alpha, who lifted his nose, pursed his lips, and sent a long low wail through the valley, across the treetops, all the way to the tundra. Others joined in, and soon even the pups’ reedy voices joined the songfest. The family’s music rang out, mingling with the soft moonlight.
