Unlike placid Yukai, we five humans are poorly prepared for a night’s bivouac in the snow, having long since abandoned most of our gear in an ill-advised gambit to lighten our load and move faster. Three of us— myself, the photographer Gordon Wiltsie, and a German visitor, Uli Geertz—are on backcountry skis with skins, schlepping along steadily behind a biologist named Christoph Promberger and his biologist wife, Barbara Promberger-Fuerpass, who are driving the two snowmobiles. Christoph is a lanky, black-haired German whose almond-thin, lidded eyes make him appear faintly Mongolian—that is, like a young Mongolian basketball player with a wry smile. Though attached to the Munich Wildlife Society, he has worked here in the Carpathian Mountains since 1993, collaborating with a Romanian counterpart named Ovidiu Ionescu, of the Forestry Research and Management Institute, to create the Carpathian Large Carnivore Project. Barbara, a fair-haired Austrian, joined the project more recently and is now beginning a study of lynx. Both of them are hardy souls with considerable field experience in remote parts of the Yukon (where Christoph did a master’s degree on wolf biology and where later they honeymooned), so they know a thing or three about winter survival, backcountry travel, problem avoidance, snowmobile repair. But tonight’s conditions, reflecting an unusually severe series of January storms and an absence of other human traffic along this road, have caught them by surprise.
Gordon and I are surprised too: that Murphy’s Law, though clearly in force, seems unheard of in Romania.
At the outset Christoph was towing a cargo sled, but that had to be cast loose and left behind. Even without it, the Ski-Doos have been foundering in soft six-foot drifts, and much of our energy for the past few hours has gone into pushing these infernal machines, pulling them, kicking them, cursing them, nudging them ever higher toward a peak called Fata lui Ilie; coaxing them and ourselves, that is, ever deeper into trouble. The sensible decision, after we’d bogged at the first steep pitch, then bogged again and again, would have been to turn back at nightfall and retreat to the valley. Instead we went on, convincing ourselves recklessly that the going would get easier farther up. Ha. Somewhere ahead, maybe three miles, maybe five, is a cabin. We have one balky Petzel headlamp, a bit of food, matches, two pairs of snowshoes as well as the skis, but no tent and, since ditching even our packs back at the last steep switchback, no sleeping bags. The good news is that the forest is full of wolves.
“I believe the term is goat-fucked,” Gordon says suddenly, as though during his last long stretch of silence he’s been reading my mind. “A situation that’s so absurdly bad, it becomes sublime.” Gordon’s own situation is more sublime than the rest of ours, since he’s suffering from a gut-curdling intestinal flu as well as the generally shared ailments—cold hands, exhaustion, frustration, hunger, and embarrassment. “We could easily spend the night out here, without sleeping bags,” he adds.
On that point I’m inclined to disagree: We could do it, yes, but it wouldn’t be easy.
The purpose of our trip is to reach the Fata lui Ilie cabin and use that as a base for three or four days of wolf-trapping. It’s part of the program.
Since 1995, Christoph and his coworkers have collared thirteen wolves, of which five have been shot, two have dispersed beyond the study zone, and four others have fallen cryptically silent, probably when their transmitters failed. One of the missing animals is a female named Timish, the first Carpathian wolf on which Christoph ever laid his hands. Timish, the alpha bitch in a pack, was a savvy survivor, and she opened his eyes to the range of lupine resourcefulness in Romania. Originally trapped and collared in a remote valley near Brasov, a regional capital of some 300,000 people amid the mountains, Timish and her pack soon relocated themselves closer and began making nocturnal forays into the heart of the city. On Brasov’s southern fringe was a large meadow where they could hunt rabbits, and by skulking along a sewage channel, then crossing a street or two, they could find their way to a garbage dump, rich with such toothsome possibilities as slaughterhouse scraps, feral cats, and rats. In 1996, Timish denned in the area and produced ten pups. With the aid of a remote camera set fifty meters from the den, Christoph spent many hours watching her perform the intimate chores of motherhood. But times change and idylls fade. Timish disappeared, the fate of her pups is unknown, and in the enterprising ferment of post-Communist Romania, the rabbit-filled meadow is now occupied by a Shell station and a McDonald’s.
At the time of our visit, only two wolves are still transmitting, one of which is a male known as Tsiganu, recently collared in another little valley not far from Brasov. Christoph needs more radio-bearing (and therefore trackable) animals for the ongoing study. Hence this night mission to Fata lui Ilie.
The wolf population of the Carpathians is sizable, but the animals are difficult to trap—far more difficult than wolves of the Yukon or Minnesota, Christoph figures—probably because their long history of close but troubled relations with humans has left them warier than North American wolves. Romania is an old country, rich with natural blessings but much wrinkled by conflict and paradox, and history here is a first explanation for everything, including the ecology and behavior of Canis lupus. Go back two thousand years, before the imperial Romans put their stamp on the place, and you find the Dacia, a fearsome indigenous people who referred to their warriors as Daois, meaning “the young wolves.”
Just after World War II, wolves roamed the forests throughout Romania, even the lowland forests, with a total population of perhaps 4,000. They preyed on roe deer, red deer, and wild boar but were much loathed and dreaded for their depredations also against livestock, especially sheep. In the 1950s, the early Communist government, under a leader named Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej, sponsored a campaign of hunting, trapping, poisoning, and killing pups at their dens, to reduce the wolf population and make the countryside safe for Marxist-Leninist lambs. That antiwolf pogrom worked well in the lowlands, which were in any case becoming more thoroughly devoted to agriculture and heavy industry. On the high slopes of the Carpathians, though, where lovely beech and oak forests were protected by a tradition of conscientious forestry, where fir and spruce grew to a timberline below tall limestone crags, and where dreams and memories of freedom survived among at least a few of the hardy rural people, wolves survived too.
The Carpathians also served as a refuge for brown bear and lynx. The bear population stands presently at about 5,400, a startling multitude of Ursus arctos considering that in all the contiguous western United States (where we call them grizzlies) there are fewer than 1,000. The wolf population, presently numbering somewhere between 2,000 and 3,000 animals, represents a large fraction of all Canis lupus surviving between the Atlantic Ocean and Russia. Why has Romania, of all places, remained such a haven for large carnivores? The reasons involve accidents of geology, geography, ecology, politics, and the ironic circumstance that a certain Communist potentate, successor to Gheorghiu-Dej, came to fancy himself a great hunter. This of course was the pipsqueak dictator Nicolae Ceausescu, who for decades ruled Romania as though he owned it.
Born in the village of Scornicesti and apprenticed to a Bucharest shoemaker at age eleven, Ceausescu made his way upward as a gofer to early Communist activists during their years of persecution by a fascist regime. He served time in prison, a good place for making criminal and political contacts. He was cunning: he was ambitious and efficacious, though never brilliant; he bided his time, sliding into this opening and then that one, eventually gaining ultimate control as general secretary of the Communist Party in 1965. He styled himself the Conducator, a lofty title that paired him with an earlier supreme leader from Romania’s past. He distanced himself from certain Soviet policies, such as the invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968, and thereby made himself America’s favorite Communist autocrat, at least during the administrations of Nixon and Ford and Carter. His manner of domestic governance was merely Stalinism in a Romanian hat, but for a long time the U.S. didn’t notice.
Ceausescu’s dark little shadow cast itself ac
ross Romania for twenty-five years, with the help of his Securitate apparatus of secret police and informers, which included as many as 3 million people in a nation of just 23 million. “The Securitate maintained a collection of handwriting samples from sixty per cent of the population,” according to Robert Cullen, who covered the 1989 revolution for The New Yorker. “Anyone with a typewriter had to register it. Mail and telephones were routinely monitored.” Such institutional menace wasn’t uncommon in the Communist bloc, of course, but it may have weighed more heavily here, owing to a certain wary, fatalistic strain in the national spirit. Romania under Ceausescu doesn’t seem to have had the sort of robust underground network of dissidents that existed in the Soviet Union or, say, Poland or Czechoslovakia. There’s a nervous old Romanian proverb, counseling caution: Vorbesti de lup si lupul e la usa. Speak of the wolf, and he’s at your door.
Ceausescu’s industrial, economic, and social policies were as wrongheaded as they were eccentric. Though he was Stalinist in style, he had that self-important yearning for independence from Moscow, and so he pushed Romania to develop its own capacities in oil refining, mineral smelting, and heavy manufacturing. During the 1970s, his industrialization initiative sucked off a huge fraction of the country’s GNP and a big burden in foreign loans; then in the 1980s he became obsessed with paying off those loans and made the Romanian populace endure ferocious austerity in order to do it. He exported petroleum products and food while his own people suffered in underheated and underlit apartments without enough to eat. He instituted a “systematization” campaign, as he called it, which essentially meant bulldozing old neighborhoods and villages in order to force their inhabitants into high-rise urban housing projects, where he could better control their flow of vital resources. His systematization created a larger proletariat living amid ugly urban blight, and his industrialization resulted in some horrendous point-source pollution problems, such as the smelter at Zlatna and the gold-reprocessing plant at Baia Mare, which just recently let slip a vast, wet fart of toxic sludge from one of its containment ponds into the upper Danube drainage, poisoning fish downstream for miles. But for some reason Ceausescu did not become obsessed with exporting timber, and so the Carpathian highlands remained wild and sylvan while other parts of the country grew grim.
The Conducator himself lived a life of splendorous self-indulgence and paranoia, like a neurasthenic king. He had food-tasters to protect him from poisoning. He had germ obsessions like Howard Hughes. He trusted only his wife, Elena, who was his full partner in megalomania and his chief adviser on how to govern poorly. With her, he sealed himself away in palatial residences, letting the people see him mainly through stagy televised ceremonials. For bolstering his ego and political luster he depended also on occasional mass rallies, for which tens of thousands of workers and other citizens were mandatorily mustered to express—or anyway feign—adulation of the Conducator. The last of those, on December 22, 1989, went badly askew and led to his fall. All the other Communist leaders who got dumped during that dizzy time, from Gorbachev down, were content to go peacefully, but Nicolae Ceausescu required being shot. That speaks not just to the loathsome force of his personality, I suspect, but also to a truth about Romania generally: its edgy, recalcitrant uniqueness.
Ceausescu’s shadow still lingers in some places, including the snowed-over road that may or may not eventually carry us to Fata lui Ilie. The forest is thick. The spruce trees are large and heavily flocked with snow. While the Ski-Doos are mired still again, on another steep switchback below a ridge line, I wonder aloud whether this route was originally cut for hauling timber.
“No, this was a hunting road for Ceausescu,” Christoph tells me. “He’d fly in by helicopter. And his people would come in by four-wheel-drive to organize the hunt.” Among other fatuities, Ceausescu prided himself as a great killer of trophy-size bears. Although his name went into record books and his trophies can still be seen at a museum in the town of Posada, Ceausescu’s actual accomplishments were contemptible: squeezing off shots at animals that had been located, fattened, and baited for his convenience. The sad irony is that so long as he arrogated the country’s bear-hunting rights largely to himself and allowed his forestry bureaucrats to protect the habitat, the bear population flourished. Records show that it peaked, at about eight thousand animals, in 1989. The end of that year was when the ground shifted for everyone—carnivores, citizens, and Ceausescu. “Until December,” Robert Cullen noted, “the vast majority of the Romanian people feared the Securitate and submitted wearily to its control.” Then, on December 22, the people arose and Ceausescu, losing his nerve, tried to flee but was captured. On Christmas Day, before a firing squad, the great hunter got his.
Farther along, when we pass a spur road to Ceausescu’s helicopter pad, I feel tempted to ski up and inspect it. But by now Christoph and Barbara are far ahead on the snowmobiles, Gordon is with them, and I’m skiing through darkness with only Uli’s dim headlamp as a point of guidance. Ceausescu is dead, the bears are asleep, the new government is led by a center-right coalition of parliamentarians, the Carpathian forests are being privatized to their great peril, the currency is weak, the mafia is getting strong, wolves are what brought me up onto this mountain, and all idle contemplation of the pungent contingencies of recent Romanian history is best left, I realize, for a time when I’m not threatened by hypothermia.
The wolf known as Tsiganu was trapped on December 19, 1999, near a valley called Tsiganesti. The handling, collaring, and release were done by a Romanian technician named Marius Scurtu, a sturdy young man with an unassuming grin and a missing front tooth, from Ovidiu Ionescu’s wildlife unit at the forestry institute. Marius had blossomed into an important member of the carnivore project, absorbing well the field training in wolf capture that Christoph gave him and showing great appetite for the hard backcountry legwork. In recognition of his role, he was allowed to christen the new animal. Besides relating the wolf to that particular valley, the name he picked—Tsiganu—means “Gypsy.”
At the time of trapping, Tsiganu weighed ninety-five pounds. He was notable for the lankiness of his legs and, after careful measurement, the length of his canine teeth. Since collaring, he has rejoined a small pack of four or five animals, though whether he himself is the alpha male remains uncertain. He now broadcasts his locator beeps on a frequency of 148.6 megahertz, and several times each week either Marius or another project technician goes out with a map, a radio receiver, and a directional antenna to check on him. Tsiganu seldom lets himself be seen, but from his prints and other evidence in the snow, a good tracker can learn what he has been doing. In the past month he has killed at least three roe deer, two dogs, and two sheep. On a warmish day not long before our misadventure on the trail toward Fata lui Ilie, Gordon and I skied along with a tracker named Peter Suerth.
We followed Peter up a tight little canyon into the foothills above a village. It was slow travel, through wet heavy snow along the bank of a small stream, but within less than a mile we came to a kill. The rib cage and hide of a roe deer, partly covered by overnight snowfall, confirmed that Tsiganu and his pack hadn’t gone hungry. Continuing upward, we passed an old log barn within which, by their companionable gurgles and their neck bells, we could hear sheep, safely shut away behind a door. Moments later we met a man in country clothes, presumably the sheep-owner, trudging down a steep slope. Peter spoke a few words with him, then told us the gist of the exchange. Wolves, you want wolves? the man had said. Wolves we’ve got, around here. Lots of them.
We angled steeply up a slope, rising away from the creek bottom. A half-hour of climbing brought us each to a full sweat, and onto a ridge. Peter took another listen with the receiver, catching a strong signal that seemed to place Tsiganu within 300 yards. Which direction? Well, probably there, to the northwest. But the tempo of beeps also indicated that the animal was active, not resting, and therefore his position could change fast. We hustled northwest along the ridge line. When Peter listened aga
in he got a very different bearing, this one suggesting that Tsiganu and his pack were below us, possibly far below, on the opposite slope of the creek valley we’d just left. Or maybe the earlier signal had been deceptive, because of echo effects from the terrain. Or maybe this one was the echo.
While Peter pondered those uncertainties, I noticed that we had skied our way up to the southeastern outskirts of a place I recognized—a snowbound hamlet of thatch-roofed cottages, conical haystacks, coppiced willow stumps defining an unplowed lane, and a few shapely farmhouses with gabled and turreted tin roofs, all hung like a saddle blanket across the steep sides of this foothill ridge. It was called Magura. It seemed a mirage of bucolic tranquillity from the late Middle Ages, but it was real. I had been here before.
Most recently, I had been here with a Romanian friend, Andrei Blumer, when he and Gordon and I skied up from the other side, on a day of bright sunshine and stabbing cold, and stopped to visit an elderly couple named Gheorghe and Aurica Surdu. The Surdus live in a trim little cottage they built fifty years ago to replace a five-hundred-year-old cottage on the same spot, in which Aurica had been born. Aurica is a pretty woman of seventy-some years, with a deeply lined face and a wide, jokey smile. We were greeted effusively by her, Gheorghe, and their middle-aged son, another Gheorghe but nicknamed Mosorel, who himself had boot-kicked up through the snow for a Saturday visit. Passing from deep snowbanks and icy air into a small narrow room with a low ceiling, a bare bulb, and a woodstove upon which simmered a pot of rose-hip tea, we commenced to be steam-cooked with hospitality. Aurica, wearing a head scarf and a thick-waled corduroy vest, spoke as little English as Gordon and I did Romanian, but she made herself understood, and her motherly eyes missed nothing. She stood by the stove and fussed cheerily while Andrei traded news with Mosorel, Gordon thawed his camera lenses, and I waited for my glasses to clear. Have some rose tea, you boys, get warm. Here, have some bread, have some cheese, don’t be so skinny. Okay, thanks, don’t mind if we do. The tea was deep-simmered and laced with honey. Have some smoked pork. And the sausage too, it’s good, here, I’ll cut you a bigger piece, don’t you like it? You do? Then don’t be shy, eat. Have some of the apple. We had set off without lunch, so we were pushovers. Mosorel, give them some tsuica, what are you waiting for? Mosorel, grinning broadly, poured us heated shots of his mother’s homemade apple-pear brandy, lightly enhanced with sugar and pepper. Tsuica is more than just the national moonshine; it’s a form of communion, and we communed.
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