The Company of Wolves

by Peter Steinhart

  A considerable portion of the creation is devoted to the disassembly and redistribution of organic materials. Soil-dwelling fungi take apart the wood of trees, and bacteria consume what the beetles and fungi don’t get. Many creatures don’t wait for others to depart voluntarily: they kill and eat living organisms. Predation is a fact older than mammals, older than reptiles, older than the tooth or the claw or blood itself. Single-celled organisms in primeval pools hunted and gobbled each other with abandon. Predation is today the rule, rather than the exception, among vertebrates. Few fish, amphibians, reptiles, or birds live exclusively on plants. Among North American mammals, the only vegetarians are beaver, porcupine, hares and rabbits, pikas, manatees, pocket gophers, elk, deer, antelope, moose, bison, bighorn sheep, and mountain goats. Even creatures we expect to be meek have predatory moments: chipmunks have been known to kill mice, and one observer has seen deer consume fish.

  An evolutionary view sees the wolf as the product of a long line of evolutionary choices.

  Two hundred million years ago, reptilian ancestors began to connect the lower jaw to the skull by means of a cheekbone hinge, enabling an individual to chew food into small bits, exposing more surface area of food to digestive enzymes, and thus allowing quick digestion. That development enabled creatures to heat their own bodies efficiently and gave rise to warm-bloodedness. That ushered in the age of mammals.

  The earliest mammals were small nocturnal creatures, living in a world of fierce, quick, predatory dinosaurs. They probably relied more on scent than sight, and were furtive, secretive, and probably drab in color. They were more frequently prey than predator.

  But, as often happens, the drab get even. About sixty-five million years ago, the large dinosaurs disappeared. Many scientists believe that an asteroid hit the earth, throwing up huge dust clouds that blotted out the sun and reduced photosynthesis to the point where food resources for the larger vegetarian reptiles crashed. Creatures that lived in earth burrows and manufactured their own heat when abroad were more likely to survive. The age of reptiles came to an end, and the age of mammals began.

  Even without an asteroid collision, the days of the cold-blooded dinosaurs were probably numbered. Sixty million years ago, the continents were drifting apart from their earlier union in a single super-continent. The continental masses moved away from the earth’s equator, and as they drifted, they rose and folded. Mountains uplifted and ocean currents changed. Cooler local climates came with the uplands and the sea currents. In place of the tropical forests, new kinds of plants were evolving. Given the cooler climate and the new plants, dinosaurs would have been hard-pressed.

  In this changing world, grasses evolved. Savanna and prairie spread over large sections of the continents. And with this new habitat came a burst of evolutionary activity among mammals. Both hunters and hunted evolved dramatically. Earlier plant-eaters were slow and clumsy creatures with broad heads, big bones, and elephantine feet. To take advantage of the new grasses and shrubs, some plant-eaters developed the ruminant digestive tract, which allowed cattle, deer, and antelopes to eat quickly, then go off to some safer place, regurgitate the unchewed food, and quietly chew and swallow it. That put a greater premium on the ability to escape, and deer and antelope developed longer legs, smaller feet, and relatively large bodies, to contain larger digestive systems and larger lungs. They developed a wrist bone that hinged top and bottom and so gave them greater flexibility and extension. The long bones of third and fourth digits fused to form the cannon bone. Gradually, the radius and the ulna fused into a single bone. Plant-eaters were increasingly designed to eat and run. Escape and wariness became the great advantages, and deer, camels, llamas, pigs, sheep, goats, bison, and cattle became the common herbivores.

  As the herbivores grew faster, the slow, broad-headed, short-legged creodonts and mianids that had preyed on their ancestors died out. The surviving predators developed longer limbs and bigger brains. Out of these trends emerged the modern carnivores. Carnivores are defined by the presence of long sharp canine teeth and steeply ridged molars and premolars known as “carnassials,” which are used for shearing meat. Carnivores include bears, cats, hyenas, weasels, skunks, raccoons, and dogs. And the dogs, or canids, include foxes, coyotes, jackals, and wolves.

  The first wolflike canids emerged about three million years ago. In the Eastern Hemisphere, they gave rise to the various species of jackal; in the Western Hemisphere, to coyotes. The first wolves probably split from the coyote line about one million years ago in the New World and then migrated to the Old World. Perhaps seven hundred thousand years ago—perhaps more recently—the gray wolf emerged from the evolutionary mists in the Eastern Hemisphere. There is much debate about the exact line of descent. Ronald Nowak of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service believes the ancestors of today’s red wolf were in North America a million years ago, and that one descendant migrated to South America, where it evolved into the dire wolf, and another went north to Alaska and the Old World, where it evolved into the gray wolf. The gray wolf recrossed the land bridge to America sometime between three and six hundred thousand years ago. By the time of the Roman Empire, the gray wolf ranged over most of Eurasia and North America and boasted the largest range of any land mammal.

  Cats split off the line that would lead to dogs about forty million years ago. The differences between dogs and cats tell much about the kinds of choices that were being made. Dogs are relatively long-limbed and slender-bodied. The lower part of the leg is generally longer than the upper part, for greater leverage. Dogs evolved in open country, where hunting requires pursuit. They are built for speed and endurance. Cats, on the other hand, are designed largely to lie in wait and take prey by stealth. Because they are built for speed, dogs walk on the very tips of their toes. Cats are slightly more flat-footed, a trait that allows them to maintain sharp claws, whereas dogs wear theirs down. Cats have wrists that turn, and with their extensible claws they can grab a prey and hold on to it while biting.

  Long legs alone don’t make a runner: runners need long noses. Long-distance running produces a lot of body heat, and, to vent that heat before it forces the animal to stop or damages the animal’s organs, dogs have long muzzles. Carnivores, like most of the mammals, don’t sweat. They cool down by panting. A large portion of a dog’s blood is pumped through the blood vessels of the nose. The rete mirabile, a network of blood vessels at the base of the brain, carries this cooled blood from the nasal passages across the arteries conducting blood from the heart to cool the brain. Thus, a dog’s long face is there not just to smell things but to chase things.

  Dog skulls tell yet more about evolution’s choices. Cats are shorter-muzzled and have, for the size of their jaws, a more powerful bite than dogs. A lion, for instance, can bite through the neck of a buffalo. Cats tend to hunt alone, coming together solely to breed. Only lions and cheetahs hunt in groups. The solitary habit probably explains, too, why the largest cats are larger than the largest dogs. A single lion or tiger or leopard can bring down a large prey that even a pack of dogs might be unable to tackle.

  Since dogs can’t deliver the quick fatal bite, they tend to hunt in packs. Their jaws are designed to nip and tear. When wolves attack a moose, one wolf may grab the moose’s nose and hang on while the much larger moose shakes him like a rag doll, trying to dislodge him. Meanwhile, other wolves are diving in from the rear to slash at the moose’s flanks. The operation may take hours. The wolves will withdraw and wait while the wounded moose stiffens or weakens from loss of blood. Death can be slow for the prey, and because this seems cruel and inefficient, it has earned wolves the scorn of humans.

  Much is made of a wolf’s fangs, but it is worth noting that a wolf’s canine teeth are not really all that distinctive. Big canines are relatively common among mammals. Several species of deer have diabolically overdeveloped canines that protrude over their lips. Pigs elaborate their canines into huge tusks that curl back toward the eye. Hippopotami have extravagantly developed cani
nes curving into sharp tusks. It’s not the canines that make wolves special—it’s the teeth behind them, the carnassials.

  The teeth of dogs may also tell something about their social order. Dogs have four premolars, cats only two. Once a cat has stabbed or suffocated its prey to death, it can drag the prey to a tree or some safe place and eat without hurrying. But because they hunt in packs, dogs cannot. In a pack, there are fights over meat, and a slow eater among fast eaters may be doomed. Premolars are useful for holding food, and for shearing it off quickly so that it can be bolted down. The dog’s extra premolars might have evolved as a way of coping with the darker side of sociability—the greed, jealousy, and envy that are the shadows of cooperation, love, and care.

  Coordinated pursuit requires greater intelligence. The wolf’s ancestors learned to track, to communicate with one another, and to read strengths or weaknesses in prospective prey. Wolves learn what to hunt and how to hunt it. There are wolves that live today among livestock but never seem to think of cows as food. Near Churchill Bay, Ontario, a wolf pack learned to distract mother polar bears long enough to kill and eat their cubs. In this century, Alaska’s Brooks Range wolves were almost eradicated by poisons, traps, and disease, and in the absence of predator pressure, moose moved into the region. After wolf controls ended, wolves returned to the area, but fed on caribou. Twenty-five years passed before they started preying on moose again.

  As intelligence becomes more important, youth becomes more protracted. Nature decrees dependency and helplessness as a way of keeping an individual out of trouble until it has sufficient knowledge and experience. To equip an infant with adult bulk and power is to make a destructive monster, a creature that poses danger to its kind and lacks the experience needed to live long enough to pass on its genes. Large carnivores require long schooling. Bear cubs may stay with their mothers two years. Wolves may stay with their parents all their lives.

  That long childhood leads to strong social bonds, affection, loyalty, self-sacrifice, and the love of touch. Twenty-nine of the thirty-five canid species have been studied well enough for us to understand how they rear offspring, and in all twenty-nine the male helps the female rear the young. In nine of them, other individuals are also involved in the rearing. Red foxes may have an individual other than the mother or father feeding the young. Unmated jackals of either sex act as nannies while the parents go off to hunt. Both male and female domestic dogs have a propensity to adopt orphaned pups.

  All that tightly knit sociability also leads to more complex forms of communication. Canids develop languages of gesture, posture, voice, and scent, and these languages are most complex among the most social carnivores. Wolves are extremely expressive. Their faces are designed to convey quick and subtle changes of mood. The color and shape of their bodies allow them to transmit messages with changes in posture. They have supracaudal glands which secrete substances that impart information about an individual’s readiness to breed, and anal glands which impart odors to feces that indicate the individual’s identity and probably a great deal more. They constantly urinate and defecate around their territories, and other wolves are presumably able to smell in these scent markings indications of the depositor’s sex, age, physical condition, and emotional state. So they are able thereby to share with one another and intruding canids essential information about who they are, what they are eating, how healthy they are, perhaps even how they feel about strangers walking into their territories. They have a variety of vocalizations—barks, howls, growls, whines, and whimpers—each of which may have subtle and complex meanings.

  Predatory habits led also to strong emotions. Predators must be a balance of calculation and action. The action must be intense, moved at times by desperate need, and emotion is what triggers such action. In the wolf, emotion seems to run strong. Some individuals get carried away with rage or aggression, some can be paralyzed with fear or resignation. To see wolves at play, leaping over one another, backs arching sinuously, bodies almost hovering in air, with necks craned and eyes sparkling, is to see clear expressions of joy. Several observers have concluded that wolves howl in a particularly mournful way when a beloved companion has died.

  Social predation also led to strong tendencies toward individual variety in temperament and character. When wolves hunt, they make use of disparate special abilities. Some wolves are good at finding prey, some at reading the strengths and weaknesses of prey, some at chasing prey, some at killing prey. A wolf pack is a collection of individuals. At the Folsom City Zoo in California, curator Terry Jenkins built a life-sized caribou out of cardboard and crepe paper for a wolf celebration at the zoo. She put the creature into the wolf enclosure. Each of the zoo’s four wolves treated the caribou differently. Sage, the big white dominant male, focused entirely on the caribou’s antlers, and seemed oblivious to the rest of it. Onyx, the black dominant female, sneaked up behind the caribou and bit mouthfuls of crepe-paper hair out of its flanks. Terra, a subordinate female, came over to Jenkins and jabbed her with her nose to ask for help. And Lupine, the lowest-ranking female, lunged at the caribou and knocked it down. Jenkins has since put out two more cardboard caribous for two more wolf celebrations, and the roles remained the same. Lupine made the knock-down and Terra asked for help.

  Those who study wolves today see them as a collection of different personalities. There are gentle wolves and rough ones, shy ones and outgoing ones. There are clowns and scholars, bullies and pals. A pack is well served by having such variety. Whereas one wolf’s aggressiveness may be valuable in bringing down large prey, another’s timidity may serve the pack if the moose and caribou vanish and the hares and birds it has sharpened its skills on must feed the pack. There is probably call, too, for different styles within the pack—for nurturing wolves to bring pups along, for aggressive wolves to keep neighboring packs off the hunting territory, for studious wolves to read the prey better, for friendly wolves to stimulate the greater solidarity of the pack. “Wolves are individuals,” says Boyd. “There are playful wolves. There are smart wolves. Some are born to be leaders. Some are not. It’s just the same as people.”

  The wolf Diane Boyd observed was, at first glance, very much in the mode of this new ecological view, and a creature of more complex and intriguing character than the beast of Young and Goldman’s views. But Boyd’s experiences with wolves pushed her even further, into realms the more cautious scientists regard at best as softheaded and at worst as perilous.

  Boyd talks about experiences she can’t explain. Sometimes they are merely ironies. For example, she says, she may spend a long day crawling through tangled thickets of lodgepole pine without seeing a wolf or locating a radio signal. “Then you come home and find wolf scat outside your cabin door.” At times she suspects wolves are laughing at her.

  Sometimes, however, she has the impression the wolves are talking to her. Time and again, wolves have come to her cabin on the North Fork and sat there, watching. She recalls a wolf that came down to the river near her cabin and sat there in plain sight howling, while she approached and took photographs. Whether it meant anything, and if so what, she cannot say.

  Boyd tells a story she would not share at scientific meetings. For two of the early summers while she was trapping wolves, she would occasionally dream at night of trapping one. “When I woke up in the morning, I knew I had caught a wolf. I knew the color of the animal I’d caught, because I’d seen it in the dream.” She would tell Mike Fairchild that she had had the dream, and they would go out to the trap line and find that she had indeed caught a wolf. She believes that 90 to 95 percent of the time she caught wolves those two summers, she had had such dreams. But it happened only during those two summers, and then stopped. “It sounds so wacky that I don’t tell people about it,” says Boyd.

  To some extent, the ground on which such experiences fall was prepared by Barry Lopez. In Of Wolves and Men, Lopez dashed the myths of wolf rapaciousness and savagery, and showed that most of what people said and wrote abo
ut wolves consisted merely of deflected views of humans. The wolf “takes your stare and turns it back on you,” he wrote. “People suddenly want to explain the feelings that come over them when confronted with that stare—their fear, their hatred, their respect, their curiosity.” Lopez dealt especially with mythic and spiritual—sometimes even mystical—connections with wolves. He drew much from Eskimo and Indian views, in which wolves were spiritual, even supernatural beings. He focused a great deal on the fear and hatred in those who had defined the wolf before, and he showed that the real wolf bore little resemblance to the wolf of their views.

  Lopez based his work on good science and close personal observation of wolves. He pointed out that many of the things wolf defenders said weren’t true, either. He maintained that wolves did kill more than the old and the weak, that they sometimes killed more than they would eat, and that they had indeed been known to make unprovoked attacks on humans in North America. Readers sympathetic to wolves often ignored such statements, because, when it comes to wolves, we see what we want to see.

  Lopez offered a wider context, in which views other than science might obtain a hearing. He wrote, for example, that there was more to hunting than killing, and that, in the context of hunting for food, dying might be as sacred as living. Because science could not respond to such an idea, he asked us to view the creature with our hearts as well as our minds. Many scientists, old trappers, and ranchers, people who based their view of wolves on the old understanding, did not like the book. Environmentalists and city dwellers who felt something was very wrong with the way humans approached nature embraced it. Of Wolves and Men threw the subject of wolves open to new approaches. And into the opening rushed a new generation of controversy.