The Company of Wolves

by Peter Steinhart

  “The Mexicans themselves never bothered to fool with the wolves. It was just like the water and the sky.” Only when modern ranchers moved in and a European tradition took hold did they start to trap. He recalls Seminole Indian refugees he met while trapping along the Bavispe River in Sonora. He says, “They were very sharp people. They had an awful lot of respect for these wolves. It was a part of the folklore that the wolf was ethereal almost. That they had properties and capabilities that were not controllable by people. It was something that existed up there in the sky.

  “I share their appreciation for the qualities of the wolf as he really was. I’ve got photos of wolves that were killed, and it’s sad to see such a beautiful thing dead.”

  Behind Gish’s house, there are low fences built to contain Destiny, a hybrid wolf-dog with a very aggressive view of strangers. And there is an old sheet-metal-sided trailer, built in the early 1950s by Gish’s father-in-law, where Gish keeps his files, clippings, typewriter, and fax machine. The sheet-rock ceiling crumbles under a long-unrepaired leak in the roof. He hobbles in and begins to pick up books and papers to show his visitor.

  “I have dug stuff out of the history that you wouldn’t believe,” he says. He picks up a tattered paperback copy of Allen and Allen’s Pioneering in Texas, and, perhaps quoting something from the book, announces that a “Colonel Dodge” claimed to have seen forty thousand wolves crossing Nebraska’s Platte River at night. He hefts a thick typescript that appears to be a compendium of short summaries of the lives of every Indian-fighter in Texas. Pointing to a copy of Young and Goldman’s Wolves of North America on his shelf, he praises it as the best book on wolves. “You can bank on it,” he says of the book. “You can bank on it because it was our people and that kind of people working with their own hands out in the field that he based it on.” He waves a copy of Barry Lopez’s Of Wolves and Men and says, “This is all bunk. This guy wouldn’t know a wolf from a Volkswagen.”

  He says there has been no study, “nothing ethical, since Young.” He believes, “A major amount of misinformation is trickling down from David Mech.” He talks of other books about wolves, and is sour on all of them. “I’m sick and tired of these new biologists making up a biology which doesn’t exist.”

  Gish did two studies of the Mexican wolf in his lifetime. The first was the study Voorhies commissioned him to do in the 1940s. The second was an unpublished historical account of the eradication of the Mexican wolf, entitled “An Historical Look at the Gray Wolf in Early Arizona Territory,” commissioned by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service in 1970. David E. Brown drew heavily upon it in The Wolf in the Southwest, and listed Gish as a “major contributing author,” but Gish feels his own study should have been published and given credit.

  He feels he ought to have a say in the future of the wolf, the way he had had a say in its past. “I felt at least I was entitled to be considered as knowledgeable in the field, and at least deserved to be considered.” But he is not. Though there is an effort to restore Mexican wolves under the leadership of officials of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the Arizona Department of Game and Fish, they do not ask Gish for his views.

  If he were asked, he would say the effort is a sham. He believes fervently there are still wolves in Arizona. He says a woman biologist working north of the Animas Mountains in New Mexico ran into a wolf that she saw at a range of fifty yards, “in clear sight.” When she went back to the New Mexico Game and Fish Department and reported it, he says, “she was transferred to a desk job.” He shows three pictures taken by Ross Kane in 1991 in the Canelo Hills, of a wolf crossing a road. They show the landscape of southeastern Arizona, dry grass, low oak or scrub on the hills in the background, a dirt road, and a wolf crossing it. The light is low—late day, perhaps just before sunset. The wolf is deep-chested, with a broad head and long legs. In one picture its head and tail are both held low as it steps into the road, looking nervously toward the photographer.

  He thinks reports of wolves are silenced, dismissed, put down the way UFO reports are put down, by bureaucrats who have a vested interest in denying the existence of wild wolves. “They want you to believe there aren’t wolves here. They have declared the Mexican wolf extinct in the wild wherever he existed, and they made that determination without any fieldwork in the wild.” They want instead to reintroduce captive-bred wolves, which he doubts will survive in the wild.

  His face reddens, and his tone grows angry. “That’s the ecofascists taking over total control of the resources of the United States under government mandate. Bureaucrats already have hundreds and hundreds of officials, and the program isn’t even approved. They want a bureaucracy. They don’t want a wolf. It’s a land grab.” A cascade of symbols issues forth. “Riparian water rights. Spotted owls. Such-and-such a minnow. Whatever. It’s all designed to create a bureaucracy and bring a range of programs with no accountability. They are creating meetings and organizations all over the U.S. It’s as phony as a three-dollar bill!

  “They have to get title for the land for them to be on, and they have to keep people out. So who’s going to enjoy it? Only the bureaucrats. The helicopter fliers and the dart nuts.”

  If the authorities are really interested in wolves, he says, “all they have to do is allow the wolves that are still alive in Mexico and in southern Arizona to come back in, and set up an effective compensation system for stockmen who lose stock to them.

  “I have a relationship and an understanding of the wolf that these people don’t have,” he says. “I cannot be so far off base after all these years. I have no problem with wolves. I know what they do.

  “I would like to see wolves in a lot of places where I see people,” he says. Instead, what he sees creeping across the desert and up the mountains of Arizona is “the encroachment of rules, regulations, license fees, and arbitrary decisions on the world. I doubt that, anywhere in these United States and maybe in Mexico, these wolves can very long survive. I recognize the overpowering dominance of the open free market. And I have seen thousands and thousands of acres become asphalt and cement.” When he bought the lot he lives on, he bought three lots together, so he would have space on all sides, but houses have crept up to his fences. At the time he moved out here, there were irrigation canals and citrus groves. “Every one of those irrigation canals used to have gigantic cottonwood trees, all of which have been cut. The citrus groves are gone. The wolf is not built for that kind of world. God never made him that way.”

  He would probably agree that God didn’t make him to work in factories or to smile as the suburbs sprawled out from Phoenix, either. Gish watched the Old West turn into the New, and, like the wolf, he has not been master of the transformation. “I never made much money in my life,” he declares with an air of defiance. “We haven’t accomplished much in the way of getting on top of the economy.” Asked if he means this implied comparison between his history and the wolf’s, he looks off, through the piles of papers and the sheet metal walls of the trailer, at something beyond, and he nods and says in a soft voice, “Our time is past.”

  It is both a lie and a cliché to say that killing is a kind of love for the wolf. Dan Gish was certainly not a wolf hater, though he worked for wolf haters, for men who were so sour on life that they wanted to reduce it to numbers, to profit and loss, to what they could suck out of the marrow before the bones bleached. It’s an awful paradox: he identifies with what he spent his life chasing. The wolf has meanings for him as powerful, deep, and true as those cherished by the most ardent of wolf defenders. And when the last wolf vanished, he lost something more precious than he knew. It cut his bond to the earth and severed connections between eye and heart. There is a lesson in this for us all.

  3

  KILLING

  In February, a pilot flying over the snowbound stillness of northern Minnesota has spotted a wolf kill in the snow below and radioed its location to wolf biologists at the North Central Forest Experiment Station, thirteen miles from Ely. Hours l
ater, a group of wildlife enthusiasts and schoolteachers participating in a Vermilion Community College weekend wolf seminar have skied a mile over the flat surface of a frozen lake toward the kill. The skies are so gray they make the spruce-and-balsam-fir-forested ridges seem almost black in color. There are four inches of fresh powder on the ground from the previous night’s storm. It is quiet but for the clatter of ski poles and the zipping of skis over ice crystals. The kill is away from the lake, in a spruce bog, a low area with dwarfed and twisted trees. The croak of ravens off in the woods at the edge of the swamp announces our arrival.

  There is a strong catbox odor of foxes. Fox footprints weave through the spruce, looping around in wide, gossipy, intersecting arcs in the snow. They stop to sniff at something, then hurry on. A wolf kill is an event in the woods. It is food for ravens, foxes, and eagles, and they attend it like the opening of opera season.

  To us, a wolf kill is a window on an unseen world. Wolves are not watched; they are glimpsed. One may see a flash of yellow eye or a movement in a thicket of branches, and then it is gone. Much of our impression of the animal has come from reading its tracks in the snow. And much of what we imagine comes from having found its kills.

  By the time we find this one, there is nothing left but a mat of dun-colored fur and a welt of frozen blood. It was once, judging by the fur, a deer. The night’s snowfall has blotted out the record of the hunt, but the surface of the snow around the hair is tattooed by the feet of ravens and foxes. There are delicate featherings in the snow where ravens landed or darted out of the way. No bones are left at the kill, but fox trails lead to a wolf bed, a hollow in the snow under a cluster of sheltering spruces where the wolf has curled up to sleep after its feast. Wolves sometimes cache pieces of meat near or under these beds, to hide them from scavengers. Digging with a bowie knife, we unearth a few chips of bone and a frozen chunk of blood. The bed has already been excavated and the meat removed by the foxes. Ravens must have watched excitedly, judging from the fanlike tracks of wing feathers around the fox trails.

  The wolf’s trail leads into the densest part of the spruce bog, where we find another bed already dug up by foxes. Right next to that are the deer’s hind legs, rank with the scent of fox urine. The tracks out of this thicket are fresh, possibly made this morning—possibly when we arrived. Ravens croak and caw from the trees, but not from the kill site. The wolf may be nearby, wondering what all this clatter and exclamation and heavy breathing are about.

  From the length of the leg bone, the deer appears to have been a yearling. We break open the bone. The gelatinous marrow is dark pink, almost crimson, indicating that the deer has been drawing on its last fat reserves. If the deer had been healthy, the bone marrow would be firm and white. Several of the group are fascinated by the bones and blood and tracks in the snow. We dig around and puzzle over the footprints, putting the events of the day together. Did a single wolf ambush the deer? Or did a pack run it down? What did the wolf see in the deer that urged it to attack? Did the deer limp or look skinny or hang its head in exhaustion? Was it obvious to the wolf that this was a deer failing its first test of winter and likely therefore to fail the test of wolf? After the wolf ate, did it cache food here and there while ravens and foxes darted in to gnaw and peck at the corpse behind its back? Did the wolf protest their lootings or resignedly concede them a share? Did the wolf stay for days by the kill, alternately eating its fill and sleeping, until the clatter of skis and the rasp of tree branches against L. L. Bean parkas and Jansport packs spooked it out of a full-bellied slumber and sent it skulking off into some darker recess of the forest?

  What have we seen here? Tracks in the snow. Hieroglyphs of struggle. Tufts of hair. Crystals of blood. What is the nature of the beast that left them? What is the nature of the world inhabited by such a beast? What’s going on here?

  Predation has always fascinated humans. Perhaps we are interested because we are the world’s preeminent predator, killing more kinds of creatures in more kinds of ways and for more kinds of reasons than any other species. Perhaps we have an ingrown interest in killing that we sublimate for the sake of society, but indulge with abandon when we look at other species. Perhaps we have a long history of perfecting our arts by borrowing from other species. Perhaps we’re just irrepressibly curious about how others live and die.

  Sometimes, the fascination discomforts us. A few members of the group hang back at the edges of the circle—looking for chickadees in the branches, following the passage of a gyrfalcon as it flies just over the treetops. “I’m not excited about seeing the kill,” confesses a woman from Indiana. “I mean, it’s the natural process and all …” Her voice trails off and the sentence remains unfinished. Her expression, however, says, “Sure, the wolf kills to eat, but it’s something we ought to regret.”

  We have regretted the killing for centuries. Early in American history, when settlers cleared pastures in the forest and concentrated livestock in a few small areas, where wolves easily attacked them, they quickly developed an antipathy for wolves. William Bradford, who arrived in Massachusetts on the Mayflower, declared in 1624, “The country is annoyed with foxes and wolves.” Roger Williams, founder of Rhode Island, wrote, “The Wolfe is an Embleme of a fierce blood-sucking persecutor.” Mark Catesby, the early naturalist, held, “The wolves in Carolina are very numerous, and more destructive than another animal. They go in droves by night, and hunt deer like hounds, with dismal yelling cries.” More than a century later, in 1904, William T. Hornaday, longtime director of the New York Zoological Park and a man who ought to have seen beyond the stereotypes, wrote, “Of all the wild creatures of North America, none are more despicable than wolves. There is no depth of meanness, treachery or cruelty to which they do not cheerfully descend.”

  We have made much of the cruelty. Roy McBride, an experienced wolf trapper, examined many cows killed by wolves in Mexico and the American Southwest. He says, “In many cases, I don’t think the cow was dead when they ate them. I think these wolves just start eating on them. I find some of them alive, laying on the ground, with their back end eaten.”

  The heart of our quarrel with wolves is that we humans have developed a different view of death. We think of it as an event staged by and in the service of the supernatural. We die to receive judgment—to ascend to heaven or descend to hell. It is God’s will, what we deserve, what we are entitled to by the sum of our moral qualities. We are called away to reflect upon virtue. Even the deaths of other creatures are computed with this kind of accounting. Native Americans believe that an animal presents itself to a hunter because that hunter has been caring, hardworking, and respectful, and the animal gives its life as a reward.

  Predation is a challenge to this view. It is death unwarranted by divine intention; it is morally unscheduled suffering. Our view of death as moral summation is of little help in understanding nature’s workings, and biologists have had to search for evolutionary and ecological meanings in death.

  Real study of predation is a recent thing. Even fifty years ago, studies were being made in the half-light between science and woodlore. On a winter night in the late 1930s, Sigurd Olson, the great wilderness writer, was snowshoeing over the ice of the frozen Kawishiwi River near Ely, Minnesota. The moon cast the shadows of twisted branches over the silvery snow. It was silent, except for the swish and creak of his snowshoes, the hiss of his breath, and the crackle of branches in the brush beyond the river’s edge.

  He could hear the wolves on both sides of him, following him. “I knew I was being watched, a lone dark spot moving slowly along the frozen river,” he later wrote. He recalled the long war with wolves, the poisoning and shooting, and tales of wolves stalking humans hovered in his mind. Olson had once seen a wolf kill a doe near Bass-wood Lake. The wolf had loped easily behind the doe, then leapt on it and grabbed it by the nose. The doe had somersaulted, and the fall had broken her back. Olson thought of this as he approached a narrow point in the river, and he became afraid that he m
ight be attacked. He knew of no authenticated instance of an unprovoked attack by wolves on a human being, but, he wrote, “In spite of reason and my knowledge of the predators, ancient reactions were coming to the fore, intuitive warnings out of the past.”

  The river narrowed between dark, forested hills, and there two shadows left the brush and came rapidly toward him. He stopped and removed his pack. The wolves stopped fifty feet away, and looked him over. “In the moonlight,” wrote Olson, “their gray hides glistened and I could see the greenish glint in their eyes.” For a long and testing moment, man and wolves stood silently confronting each other. Then the wolves turned and trotted away into the night. Off in the forest, Olson heard a long howl. He was thrilled by the experience. He saw in the wolf something like himself, but unencumbered by the confusions and moral ambiguities of modern life. Something wild and noble.

  Olson’s reaction was unusual for the Minnesota of the 1930s, but Olson was an unusual man. He understood ecological relationships, and he had undertaken the first serious scientific study of the wolf on his own initiative. He deplored the fact that conservation meant largely “protection of herbivores at the expense of predatory forms.” He saw that conservation might thus lead to the extermination of large carnivores, and hoped to suggest to the world that, “after all, lions, wolves and coyotes may be an exceedingly vital part of a primitive community, a part which once removed would disturb the delicate ecological adjustment of dependent types.”

  His study, published in 1938 in The Scientific Monthly, wasn’t rigorous enough to survive the kind of peer review it would get today. It consisted of eighteen years’ experience snowshoeing, hiking, and canoeing in the north woods, and of observations shared with him by trappers and timber cruisers. Olson focused especially on the wolf’s food habits, which, he wrote, “determine whether or not a species is an acceptable member of any society.” He declared, “The major portion of the food of the wolf during the summer months is grouse, woodmice, meadow voles, fish, marmots, snakes, insects and some vegetation.” The wolf, he said, fed on deer only in the winter, when the smaller animals were in hibernation. “Close students of wildlife in the border country all agree,” he wrote, “that wolves kill comparatively few deer, and then only in the late winter and early spring periods.” That observation was largely based on anecdote and the sampling one winter of the stomach contents of wolves—all of which contained deer. Today, wolf biologists say wolves may eat grouse, mice, and rabbits but live mainly on large ungulates, such as deer and moose. But from examining the remains of winter kills, Olson came up with a stimulating conclusion: “The great majority of the killings are of old, diseased or crippled animals. Such purely salvage killings are assuredly not detrimental to either deer or moose, for without the constant elimination of the unfit, the breeding stock would suffer.”