Acclaim for Peter Steinhart’s
THE COMPANY OF WOLVES
“Steinhart is … capable of evoking the mythic qualities that we associate with the wolf, the sheer poetry of its form and function, along with the scientific details.”
—Los Angeles Times
“The Company of Wolves is a must read. What big teeth it has.”
—Outside magazine
“Steinhart is able to assess and explain the emotional as well as the scientific debates over a complex piece of wilderness engineering. It is a rare talent.”
—The Economist
“In The Company of Wolves Peter Steinhart provides an insightful look at the duality of our view of wolves as well as a comprehensive review of their natural history.”
—Cleveland Plain Dealer
“Our response to this wildest of creatures provides a measure of our own humanity.… The Company of Wolves is worthy of our serious attention.”
—The New York Times Book Review
“A far-ranging, well-balanced portrait.”
—Seattle Times
“Peter Steinhart’s The Company of Wolves is remarkable for its detail and comprehensiveness.”
—The New York Review
Peter Steinhart
THE COMPANY OF WOLVES
Peter Steinhart was a columnist for Audubon and is the author of Tracks in the Sky, Two Eagles/Dos Aguilas (both with photographer Tupper Ansel Blake), and California’s Wild Heritage. He lives in Palo Alto, California.
Books by Peter Steinhart
Tracks in the Sky:
Wildlife and Wetlands of the Pacific Flyway
(with Tupper Ansel Blake)
California’s Wild Heritage:
Threatened and Endangered Animals in the Golden State
Two Eagles/Dos Aguilas:
The Natural World of the United States-Mexico Borderlands
(with Tupper Ansel Blake)
The Company of Wolves
FIRST VINTAGE BOOKS EDITION, JULY 1996
Copyright © 1995 by Peter Steinhart
Illustrations copyright © 1995 by Alan James Robinson
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in hardcover by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., New York, in 1995.
The Library of Congress has cataloged
the Knopf edition as follows:
Steinhart, Peter.
The company of wolves / by Peter Steinhart.
p. cm.
eISBN: 978-0-307-79848-0
1. Wolves. I. Title.
QL737.C22S74. 1995
599.74’442—DC20 94-26913
Random House Web address: http://www.randomhouse.com/
Author photograph © Judith Holland Steinhart
v3.1
For Judy
CONTENTS
Cover
About the Author
Books by This Author
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1. The Company of Wolves
2. Last of the Bounty Hunters
3. Killing
4. The Voice of the Wolf
5. Leader of the Pack
6. Thinking Like a Wolf
7. The Silent Woods
8. Wild Enough for Wolves
9. The Right Wolf
10. The Persistence of Wolves
11. Yellowstone
12. A Skirmish in Alaska
13. Wolf-Dogs
14. Looking for Spirit
15. Bridging the Gap
Appendixes
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
A number of people gave me invaluable assistance in this journey, and I would like to thank them for having made this book possible. Thanks for opening up your stores of knowledge, your hospitality, and your patience to: L. David Mech, Diane Boyd, Rolf and Candy Peterson, John and Mary Theberge, Ed Bangs, Lloyd Antoine, Durward Allen, Charles Jonkel, Paul Joslin, Peggy Graham, Robert Stephenson, Anne Ruggles, Robert Wayne, Ronald Nowak, Norman Bishop, Renée Askins, Terry Johnson, David Parsons, Harry Frank, Victor Van Ballenberghe, Robert Ream, Mike Jimenez, Pat Tucker, and Bruce Weide. The errors that no doubt will creep into this book are not in any way theirs. But whatever good sense may creep in owes especially to their experience and generosity. Thanks to the Peninsula Conservation Center Foundation for its willingness to sponsor parts of this project, and to Dieter Walz for translating some difficult German. A special thanks to Neil Soderstrom, whose faith and persistence made this book possible.
INTRODUCTION
No two species have a more tangled, more intimate, and more shadowy set of relationships than Homo sapiens and Canis lupus. In ancient times, we seem to have admired and perhaps even worshipped them. For centuries after that, we persecuted them, put out poisons for them, shot them on sight, told stories about them that frightened children and grown-ups alike, and all but exterminated them in the lower forty-eight states. Today, we argue over wolves. While we argue, wolves are returning on their own to Washington, Idaho, Montana, Wyoming, North Dakota, Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Michigan. There are controversial plans to reintroduce them in several other states. For more than a decade, people have been surreptitiously trying to reintroduce wolves into the wilds of California, Oregon, Utah, Montana, and possibly other states. There are bitter disputes over government programs to shoot wolves in order to increase the number of moose and caribou for the sake of sport hunters. Some individuals ill-advisedly keep wolves or wolf-dog hybrids, thinking they are helping to conserve the wolf. Dozens of books have been written about them, and dozens of television programs filmed about them. Even so, they still dwell in the realm of myth, for rarely does any human catch more than a furtive glimpse of a wolf in the wild—even in Canada or Alaska, where wolves are relatively abundant. In the absence of real encounter, there is invention. And we bring those inventions to our rare encounters—with real consequences for wolves and humans alike.
Consider the following:
Lash Callison is a seventy-eight-year-old retired hunting guide who lives in Fort St. John, British Columbia, rugged, mountainous country deep in the Canadian Rockies. Callison had a hunting territory on the Little Toad River in the Muskwa Range, where he took dudes out to hunt sheep, grizzly, mountain goat, caribou, and moose. He doesn’t like wolves. “As far as big-game hunting, they’ll run the game right down,” says Callison. “If you ever was a big-game hunter or a trapper and had to make a living and you went in there after the wolves, you’d know what I’m talking about. You don’t see wolves very often. But if I saw them around here right now, I’d shoot ’em.”
Callison felt that his clients weren’t getting the big trophies they had been getting when he started guiding. He would tell local game officials that the government ought to get rid of the predators. “But the more you’d complain,” he recalls, “the closer they’d watch you. I said to my brother, The only thing for us to do is don’t complain, don’t say anything, and just take care of these wolves ourselves. That’s what we did. We got poison.”
They injected tallow or pieces of moose liver with strychnine and put it on the ice of a winter lake or along a mountain pass where wolf tracks had been seen. In summers, they buried bait where a wolf would smell it and dig it up—if they just left it on the ground, crows or jays would take it. In the snow, they would put baits under strips of moose hide and throw a little water over everything. The water would freeze, and the ice would keep crows and jays and smaller mammals off the baits, b
ut wolves could pry them up. Callison carried out his own predator controls from the 1940s through the 1960s.
“Sure it was illegal,” says Callison. But wolves seemed so evil to him that legality hardly entered into it.
Today, Callison no longer hunts, but he still has the same sentiments about wolves. He sees the wolf as a competitor, and thinks it would be foolish of him to let the wolves take away the source of his livelihood. “Kill all these wolf off in the ranching country and the hunting country,” he says. “There’s plenty of other places for that wolf to go. Let ’em live out in the muskegs.”
Hugh Walker grew up in Shageluk, on the Innoko River in Alaska. A native American, he is working on a degree in social work at the University of Alaska. He tells a story his father told him. In the 1960s, his father and his uncle were shooting wolves from airplanes, hoping to collect bounties and sell the furs. One winter day, he said, after following wolf tracks, his father and his uncle herded a pack of wolves out of the forest and into the open on a valley floor. Says Walker, “The wolves were heading for the timber and they got almost halfway over and they realized the plane was going to catch them. They turned around and faced the airplane and were jumping off the ground at it. Over the sound of the engine, my father and my uncle could hear the wolves barking and snapping. They were barking and screaming because they knew it was over. My uncle did shoot them. But from that day, they could not do that any more. They didn’t have the stomach for it any more after that.”
Max Lipinski lives on the farm where he was born in 1917, just outside of Bonnechere, Ontario. His parents were Polish immigrants who brought their own traditions of wolves with them. He is an austere man, a man without fancy, a man who never married and lived alone through long, silent winters. His voice is like wind on rock, almost a whisper, almost a groan. “I know wolves,” he says. One February morning, he looked up from his porch and saw a wolf in his field. “It wasn’t bothering anything,” he admits. He long ago stopped raising livestock or poultry. “But I want to get even. I know what they can do. They took a lot of sheep. They took calves. And they didn’t do it because they were hungry. There were many deer, beaver, moose—lots to eat.” So he got his gun and shot the wolf.
“I’d shoot them every time,” he says. “They got no business being here.”
Jason Badridze is a small, balding man with dark, heavy-lidded eyes and an aquiline nose. Trained as a neurophysiologist, he is director of the Vertebrate Behavior and Ecology Section at the Institute of Zoology in Tbilisi, Republic of Georgia. As a boy, he hiked in the nearby Caucasus Mountains, and, perhaps once a year, he would hear wolves howling. His father had taught him to respect animals. He saw parallels between the communist occupation of Georgia and government persecution of wolves. In 1974, he began to buy wolf pups from local hunters, paying them the bounty they would have gotten from the government. He studied them in his lab, and concluded that wolves have their own languages, and that they can count up to seven. But when the captive wolves got older and Badridze realized he could not keep them in the lab, he had to choose between euthanizing them and releasing them into the mountains. He chose the latter. Using homemade electric-shock collars, he conditioned them to avoid livestock and humans other than himself, then released the wolves in the mountains and began studying them in the wild. He could get them to come to him by howling, and he continued to feed them even after they proved capable of catching their own prey.
By 1992, he had released fourteen wolves in the mountains. Because they were hard to observe in the forest, he would take some to a desert valley near the Trialete Mountains, release them, observe them, and bring them back to his laboratory. In order to follow them, he constructed his own radio collars and his own radio receiver. One day, he was sitting between two overhanging rocks to stay out of the hot sun, fiddling with the controls on his radio receiver, when a vehicle full of soldiers rumbled up to him. The soldiers had chanced upon mysterious radio transmissions out in the desert, and had followed them to this curious anchorite, turning a radio antenna suspiciously between two rocks in the middle of nowhere. They thought him a spy, for only a spy could, in their imaginations, possess such a radio, but they could not begin to guess what sort of spying he might be doing out there. When he told them he was studying wolves and had equipped them with radio collars, they didn’t believe him. He said he would call the wolves so they could see the radio collars, but his sympathy with wolves seemed so preposterous that they took him away. They detained him for three days, repeatedly asking to whom he was giving information. At last, unable to make sense of the incident, they relented. He took the soldiers to where they had found him and howled; the wolves came in, he returned them to his laboratory, and the army took the collars away. But, he says, “The government doesn’t know about the wolf releases.”
• • •
In none of these stories are the actors able to explain adequately what wolves mean to them. But their feelings are intense, and the stories argue that wolves exist as much inside our minds as outside.
It is not news that we use animals as symbols—as mascots for athletic teams or national emblems. But sometimes we use animal symbols in very profound ways. We don’t only think about animals: we think through them. They become mental forms around which we wrap ideas, hopes, fears, and longings.
For hundreds of thousands—perhaps millions—of years, we lived as hunters and gatherers. Our survival and the survival of our offspring depended upon seeing deeply into nature and into the behavior, not just of prey and competing predators, but of all the smaller creatures that animated the world around us. For millennia, human awareness of the world was attuned to the cadence of bird song and insect buzz, the movement of shadows through the trees, the flutter of leaf in the wind, and our minds must have been selected on the basis of how acutely we observed other animals.
Just as our bones and teeth are shaped by what we eat, our minds are shaped by what we think about. Our thought processes arose in part through consideration of the immense variety of form in other living creatures. Animals have come to embody concepts for us. They give life to abstract qualities, such as quickness, strength, cunning, timidity, and aggressiveness. We think about human character by thinking about animals, because it allows us to define sharply personality traits that may be confusing in the people we know. Humans are complex and paradoxical. A man may be a fierce warrior and a warm and loving father. He may kill without remorse one day and cry at a wedding the next. The concept of fierceness is clearer when it is cloaked in animal skins, so we describe such a man as a wolf or a bear.
We almost daily use animals as metaphor or simile to communicate human qualities to one another. We are lion-hearted or eagle-eyed, proud as peacocks, sly as foxes, big as whales, timid as mice, cross as bears, stubborn as mules. We’ll worm our way into a conversation, hawk our goods, or weasel out of a deal. We still use animals in advertisements to try to convey ideas of integrity, freedom, power, and simplicity, but there is more going on here than mere metaphor. We keep in our minds a menagerie of types which we have drawn from animals, and we use them to formulate thoughts about human behavior. Since the 1930s, scientists have sought more formal insights into human nature by studying the behavior of elephants, lions, monkeys, gorillas, and chimpanzees. They have brought new rules to the custom. But the habit of understanding and explaining ourselves by thinking about other creatures is older than science.
We are increasingly estranged from nature, in cities where walls and pavement banish most other forms of life. Our mental menagerie grows smaller and smaller, because we see fewer and fewer wild creatures. Even those of us who are birdwatchers or hunters or hikers spend far less time out of doors than our ancestors did, and if we step out at all, it is into an intensely altered and managed landscape. What we see out there are glimpses, slivers of life, mere hints that there is a wider, deeper world.
We still have need for animals to think upon. Despite what we have learned from the b
iological and social sciences, at no time in human history have we been less certain of who we are as people and what we are as a species. Many of us are drawn to animals, we say, because of their beauty or their liveliness or their faithfulness to ancient form. But I suspect we are really drawn, not by their shapes and textures, but by what we think through them. And what we think through wolves is never simple.
We are drawn to wolves because no other animal is so like us. Of all the rest of creation, wolves reflect our own images back to us most dramatically, most realistically, and most intensely. We recognize chimpanzees and gorillas, which are more like us in body structure and which show capacities for language and tool-making, as our closest evolutionary relatives. But long ago we diverged from chimpanzees and gorillas, and we have been shaped by different habits. As a result, though we are in many ways like chimpanzees, we are in some ways more like wolves. Like wolves, we evolved as hunters; we have long legs and considerable powers of endurance, adaptations to the chase rather than to hiding; we have minds that are capable of fine calculation, not just of spatial relationships, but of strategy and coordination. Like wolves, we band together to kill larger prey, and that has given us a different social system and a different personality from the chimpanzee; we have long childhoods, strong social bonds, complex social roles, and status differences; we tend to claim and defend territories; we have complex forms of communication; we are individuals; we have strong emotions. Humans and wolves are so much alike that they take an unusual interest in one another. Wild wolves have often followed humans with what the humans felt was friendly curiosity, perhaps even a desire for company. And humans have, for thousands of years, adopted wolves and felt with them a mutual sense of companionship.
Wolves do little to resist our mythologies. The real facts of wolf life remain hidden, because wolves in the wild have evolved a shyness of humans. When humans appear, wolves vanish. Our glimpses of them, with rare exceptions, have been fleeting and incomplete. In thirty-five years of studying wolves, except in the Arctic, biologist David Mech saw wolves only fifteen times without the assistance of radio-telemetry devices or airplanes, and most of those sightings were of wolves that dashed across a road in front of his car. In 1986, he began observing wolves on Ellesmere Island, in the Canadian Arctic, where there are no trees and where he could follow the wolves all day. Such day-to-day familiarity between human and wolf is something almost wholly new, something denied to humans other than the Eskimos and Indians who ventured into the far north, where trees do not obscure the view. For the most part, we have seen only a fraction of the animal’s nature, and we have let our imaginations fill in the gaps.
The Company of Wolves Page 1
