The Company of Wolves

by Peter Steinhart

  Scientists would still claim the high ground in debates about wolves, but there would be other voices in the fray, voices informed by other kinds of perception. Says Boyd, “In the early years, I was careful to have no feelings about wolves on the outside, and to keep them as data points. Now I don’t have to worry about that stigma any more. Now I know it with my heart and my brain.”

  Boyd is no less a scientist for recognizing that there are different ways of seeing wolves. She is careful to limit her scientific papers to observations and conclusions that other scientists can reproduce, and she is at least acquainted with her biases, whereas many more “objective” scientists have no idea how much their eyes are trained by culture. Moreover, she believes that keeping her mind open keeps her eyes open to unexpected possibilities in the lives of wolves.

  In 1989, the Camas Pack denned in a hollow log in a stand of lodgepole and ponderosa pines, but the pups all died. Boyd guessed from the fact that the adults spent less time at the den that some disaster had befallen the litter, but she didn’t want to endanger any surviving pups, so she waited a month before going in to inspect the den. Not far from the den, she found a scrape where an animal had dug something out of the soft duff of rotted wood and soil. The excavation was five inches deep, with the excavated earth piled to the side. In the excavated dirt she found some skin and part of the jawbone of a wolf pup. “It was apparent that it had been buried,” says Boyd. “And it was apparent that something had come along and dug it up.” Boyd returned the next day with her dog Max and followed Max’s nose around the site; it led her to five similar scrapes, one of which held the remains of a pup. Max responded to all the scrapes with the same keen interest. Blood samples taken from trapped wolves that year showed that the wolf population had been infected with canine parvovirus. Boyd concluded that the pups had probably died of parvovirus and that some solicitous wolf had buried them. No other evidence of wolf burials has ever been recorded. Humans are the only species supposed to bury their dead. If a wolf inters her pups, what does that say about wolves? What does it say about us? Boyd reflects, “You can take that and run with it forever.”

  Boyd has become one of the rare researchers who are capable of encompassing the wide range of views about wolves. She hunts deer and elk for food, because she feels hunting allows a deeper relationship with the landscape than one may find shopping at Safeway. “Why would I want to eat a cow any more?” she says. “They don’t have any spirit. A deer is a gift from the land.” And the land holds secrets to our own nature. Watching wolves has made her more aware. “When I’m out there, I can track a wolf and see where they paused and looked out over a valley at something, and I’ll do the same thing.” She has learned to listen more carefully to what people say, and to be more tolerant of opposing views.

  At the same time, she cares deeply about the wolves. In December 1992, Phyllis, who had been the alpha female of the Magic and Sage Creek packs, was shot to death by a hunter who had often seen her before and who knew her status in the pack. Phyllis had been an alpha female for seven years. She was an old wolf, wise in the ways of the wild and matriarch of a large and dispersing clan that might one day repopulate Montana’s wilderness with wolves. “Of all the wolves,” says Boyd, “I felt strongest about her.” When she heard that Phyllis had been killed, Boyd grieved. She was angry. “I felt this no-good jerk went and plugged her.”

  But a year later, on her Christmas vacation, Boyd went into Canada and visited the site of the shooting. She spent half a day talking with the hunter who had shot Phyllis, and she came away feeling better. “The hunter is neither a bad person nor a wolf hater,” she says. “I wish he hadn’t shot her. I’m not saying what he did was right or wrong. But after talking to him and thinking about the ideas he grew up with, I understand why.”

  The new science struggles to be wholly empirical, objective, based entirely on the eye. But, however its practitioners may trim the heart out of their writings, they are still moved. It’s a shadowy world out there, and unseen things murmur and scuttle under the leaves of fact. Those who understand this are better able to understand their own vision, and understanding our vision is part of understanding wolves.

  2

  LAST OF THE BOUNTY HUNTERS

  It is hard to talk about wolves in North America without talking about the campaign of eradication we waged against them. But other views of wolves preceded the era of organized slaughter, and the mania for wolf control, laid against the broader backdrop of human experience, appears to be an aberration, a temporary sickness that afflicted only some of our species, and which even some of the most avid wolf hunters came to regret.

  Earlier cultures looked more favorably upon wolves. Among North American Indians, clans were identified with particular animals, and a member of the bear or badger clan might look to that animal for guidance or inspiration. A clan member might be prohibited from killing his or her totem animal, lest the animal spirit take offense and abandon the mortal. Wolves were often the totems. The Moquis of the American Southwest, for example, divided into wolf, bear, eagle, and deer clans and believed that at death the spirit of the departed returned to the body of a living bear or wolf or eagle or deer. The Niska of British Columbia divided into wolf, bear, eagle, and raven clans, and all had specific prohibitions connected with the totem animals.

  The sanctions of a totem animal could be forceful. Frank Glaser, who trapped and poisoned wolves in Alaska early in this century, told a story in Outdoor Life magazine about a rabid wolf that attacked an Eskimo named Punyuk. In the middle of January, Punyuk was camped in a stove-heated tent between the Kobuk and Selawik rivers in Alaska. It was late in the day; the sun was down and it was dark. His dogs, tethered to willow clumps outside, began to growl and bark. Punyuk went out to see what was going on. In the darkness he saw what he took to be one of his dogs running loose. He threw a chunk of ice at the animal and ordered it to come. It leapt on him, knocked him down, and bit him about the head, tearing open his scalp. He managed to rise, open a pocket knife, slash the animal, and then choke it into unconsciousness. But he could not kill it, because he was a member of the wolf clan, and the spirit within the wolf might belong to an ancestor. He called it Grandmother and told it to go and leave him in peace. But the wolf revived, renewed the attack, and bit Punyuk on the thigh, laying bare the bone. It knocked him down again and bit into his shoulder. Punyuk passed out. When he awoke, the wolf was gone.

  Punyuk managed to harness his dogs and sled his way to medical care. His wounds, though serious, did not seem to be mortal. Meanwhile, the wolf entered a village and killed some dogs, and was shot. Glaser was able to get the wolf’s head, and sent it to a laboratory to be tested for rabies. The test came back positive, but it took the laboratory a month to report its findings. In the meantime, Punyuk, apparently healed from his wounds, went back out to camp, where he collapsed and died of rabies.

  Wolves were sometimes invested with special powers by whole societies. A Kwakiutl creation myth tells how the antediluvian ancestors of the people took off their wolf masks and became humans. The Mongols viewed themselves as “sons of the blue wolf,” descended through Genghis Khan from a mythical wolf that came down from heaven. Men dressed in wolf skins and ran through the streets beating people with leather thongs to purify Sabine cities. Roman soldiers wore wolf helmets to honor a wolf-god.

  Even among people who respected and admired wolves, wolf tales tend to reflect and focus on the conflicts between our humane and destructive impulses. A Sioux woman named Brings the Buffalo Girl told the story of The Woman who Lived with Wolves to Royal B. Hassrick, who recounted it in The Sioux: Life and Customs of a Warrior Society. A young woman fought with her husband and ran away into the winter plains. She walked for days without eating, determined that her people not find her and return her to her husband. She climbed a hill and found a cave, crawled into its darkness, and went to sleep. When she awoke, in the dim light of morning, she could see she was in a den full of wolve
s. They spoke to her in human voices and told her not to be afraid. They brought her fresh deer meat and she ate. She stayed with them. The wolves hunted for her, and she cooked and dried the meat and made pemmican with meat and berries. She tanned hides and made dresses. But after two years, the wolves told her she must return to her people. The great wolf told her to walk to a herd of wild horses near the cave, and they would lead her back. He warned her that the stallions would try to force her to stay with them, however, and that she must not let that happen, for her people would get her back anyway. The woman left the wolves and found the horses. The stallions courted her, and she succumbed to them and refused to go back to her people. She ran with the herd. Her clothes turned to tatters, and she was covered with dirt and unrecognizable as a human. One day, hunters from her people came upon the herd and captured horses. They found her among them, roped her, tied her up, and dragged her back to camp. When they cleaned her up, they recognized her, but though they combed her hair and dressed her in clean clothes, she would never tame down. She lived with her people, yet apart, as a creature half wild.

  The story trained the listener’s attention on the line between sociability and individuality—between the need to cooperate and the urge to vent one’s passions—that divides our lives. Many cultures made similar uses of wolves. Among the Nootka, boys were initiated into adulthood by being ceremonially killed and carried off by men dressed in wolf skins. The ritual represented, said a nineteenth-century observer, “the killing of the lad in order that he might be born anew as a wolf.” It reenacted a tribal myth in which wolves taught a chief’s son their rites and carried him back to the village, to teach humans how to live. The ceremony implied that to be an adult was to have lethal powers that one must learn to live with.

  Romulus and Remus, the founders of Rome, were the issue of an illicit union between Rhea, the daughter of the deposed king Numitor, and Mars, the god of war. The twins were condemned to be put into the Tiber by Rhea’s uncle, who had deposed Numitor. A wolf found them and suckled them. The implication in the story is that being suckled by a wolf gave the twins a wolfish nature. Raised by a shepherd, the twins returned to take revenge on their uncle, and eventually to rule the kingdom. They founded the city of Rome on the spot where the wolf had fed them. As in American Indian tales, the Roman wolf seems to be a lens through which we view the dual and conflicting nature of humans, for Romulus was fierce and suspicious, Remus deriding and jealous. Romulus forbade his brother to go past the frontiers, Remus disobeyed the order, and Romulus killed him.

  When humans begin to fear their own predatory nature, wolves come in for very much darker imagery. At the festival of Lupercalia in Sabine cities, men dressed in wolf skins, slaughtered goats, and ran through the town beating whomever they met. Among the Greeks, there was a cult that imitated wolves and practiced ritual cannibalism. In Navaho society, witches were identified with wolves. Navahos believed in “skinwalkers,” men or women who dressed in wolf skins, climbed on top of a neighbor’s hogan at night, and dropped pollen or the ground-up bones of children down the smoke hole. It was said that they gathered in caves and sang songs backward to create chaos out of order, that they ate the flesh of the dead and had intercourse with corpses. They broke the boundaries between life and death, good and evil, community and selfishness.

  Wolves seem to grow more fearsome as human conduct becomes more fearsome, and that may explain why Western culture takes such a dim view of wolves. European history over the past two millennia has been a progression of ever-widening wars. As the scale of battle grew, the number of dead left on the field also grew. And wolves, being scavengers, fed on the corpses. The Hundred Years’ War between the Armagnacs and Burgundians left thousands of dead on the fields. At night, wolves came to feed on them, and, having acquired a taste for human flesh, the wolves came into towns and attacked people. In 1423 and again in 1438, wolves came into Paris, seizing dogs and children. On a December day in 1439, wolves ate four Parisian women. On the following Friday, they attacked sixteen more, eleven of whom died. Wolves would continually appear in Paris until the seventeenth century; the Louvre Museum is so named because it sits on a spot once frequented by them.

  This kind of scavenging did not occur in North America, where Indian battles left few corpses behind. Plains Indians, for example, carried off their battlefield dead and put the bodies on platforms to keep the wolves from getting them. Only occasionally in North America did wolves feast on human flesh. They were said to have attacked and eaten Indians of Delaware Bay who were dying of smallpox in 1781. And when cholera struck the emigrant trains heading west along the Platte River in 1849–51, hundreds of trailside graves were dug into by wolves. But in general, wolves in the Western Hemisphere did not scavenge on human corpses, and that may account for the rarity of wolf attacks on humans in North America.

  In Europe, those who saw wolves scavenging on battlefield dead associated the gruesome sight with the underworld and Satan. By A.D. 500, the Germanic word wargus was used to refer both to the wolf and someone who desecrated the dead. In time, it would also mean “outlaw,” “evil one,” a human possessed. Throughout Europe, wolves became associates of war gods. Artemis in her capacity as destroyer of life was accompanied by wolves. The wolf Fenrir accompanied the Teutonic god of war, Odin, and according to myth it was the breaking of the chain that restrained Fenrir that set in motion the end of the world. That myth may well have seeded the twentieth century’s view that it would be war, rather than disease, overpopulation, famine, or pollution, that ultimately destroyed humankind.

  By the fifteenth century, Europeans widely believed that there were wolves that prowled about human habitations and could not be killed. They were, according to the writings of religious scholars, emissaries of the Devil. Between 1598 and 1600, a French judge sentenced six hundred people to death, believing the Devil had rubbed their bodies with a satanic unguent, turned them into werewolves, and sent them to torment the countryside.

  In spasms of civic spirit, European communities launched organized wolf hunts. The French army designated louvetiers, officers charged with organizing ordinary citizens to hunt wolves, and the office persisted into the twentieth century. The British felt so beset by wolves that in 1652 Oliver Cromwell forbade the export of Irish wolfhounds, lest Ireland have an inadequate supply of the dogs.

  The war against wolves came to the New World as a virus in the mind of the first Europeans to settle North America. Wherever it found farmers keeping livestock, it grew deadly. The first domestic livestock arrived in the New World in 1512. In 1609, cattle, pigs, and horses arrived at Jamestown. Early settlements carved pastures out of the almost continuous forest of the Eastern Seaboard. That concentrated cattle and sheep onto open ground, where it was relatively easy for wolves to attack. At the same time, the settlers so reduced the deer and other native prey of wolves, that wolves were compelled to feed on livestock. The result was that, within twenty years, the colonies were establishing bounties on wolves. Massachusetts installed a bounty in 1630, Jamestown less than two years later.

  We can get some idea what indiscriminate trapping, poisoning, and shooting might have done to wolf populations by looking at what happens to coyote and mountain-lion populations today in the western states. Not all coyotes attack sheep. Resident breeding pairs of coyotes tend to hold a territory and to drive out young dispersers, who have left their birthplaces and gone looking for unoccupied space to claim as their own. If the resident coyotes do not eat sheep, there is little or no predation on the neighboring ranchers’ flocks. But if the resident pair is eliminated, the territory becomes a sink into which young wolves disperse from neighboring areas. Moreover, constant shooting lowers the age at which females bear young and raises the number of young in an average litter. So, where coyotes are shot, population density is apt to be high, competition for food intense, and the loss of sheep more likely.

  A similar process may have occurred among mountain lions in California. In a stud
y of mountain-lion predation on deer fawns in the Sierra National Forest, researchers found that mountain lions took a very high toll on the young deer. But they had trouble keeping the radio-collared lions on the airwaves, because poachers were shooting them. One of the collars ended up broadcasting from the bottom of a lake. With the poaching, there may have been no resident lions available to keep dispersers moving on. The researcher, perhaps not coincidentally, reported the highest density of mountain lions known to science.

  Wolves, like coyotes, reproduce at earlier ages and have larger litters when their population is dramatically reduced. To control wolf numbers, the population must be reduced at least 70 percent each year. Early on, bounty hunting didn’t destroy that many wolves, and probably did little more than give ranchers the impression that they had to keep up the pressure to prevent wolves from simply overwhelming them. In 1925, Henry Boice of the Chiricahua Cattle Company in Arizona observed that, although bounty hunters were taking 15 to 125 wolves a year from ranch properties, “the number of wolves running on our range remained about the same.”

  In the East, predator controls combined with alteration of habitat and elimination of deer to cause the extinction of the wolf by the early part of the century. In the West, the land wasn’t cleared for farms, and extinction took longer.

  Before the coming of the railroads, western ranching coexisted with wolves. The West was arid land and could not support cattle in concentrated pastures typical of the eastern states and Europe. A rancher in the West turned large numbers of cows loose on the open range, and left them unattended until roundup. Mexican ranchers turned wild longhorn cattle onto the range, and they probably held their own against wolves, because they were aggressive and stood their ground against wolf attacks.