The Company of Wolves

by Peter Steinhart

  Howling is most frequent early in the morning and late in the evening, but occasionally wolves howl in daylight. Though hunters’ stories in the popular press often depict wolves howling while they hunt, Mech, Peterson, Haber, and Theberge, who have between them more than a century of wolf study, all say they have never heard a wolf howl while hunting. Howling increases in midwinter, when breeding season comes on and the social interaction of a pack is more intense and active. After breeding takes place, the wolves are quieter. Wolves howl least when pups are very young, perhaps to keep other predators from discovering their dens. But by July and August, the pups begin to howl, and it becomes relatively easy to find a rendezvous site. Captive pups will howl from as young as one month of age.

  A howling session can last many minutes. Usually one wolf starts it and howls once or twice before the others join in. The others give long, low howls and work up to a series of shorter, higher-pitched howls. It is not uncommon, when wolves howl in the woods, for other species to respond: coyotes may yip and howl in what seems like an answer, owls hoot, loons call, even sleeping songbirds pull their heads from under their wing feathers and chirp.

  When a pack howls, the interbraiding of voices and shifting harmonics gives the impression of many singers. General Ulysses Grant recalled in his Memoirs riding with a guide and hearing wolves howl. The guide asked Grant how many wolves he thought he heard, and Grant, wanting to appear wise in woodlore, concluded it would be best to underestimate. He said, “Oh, about twenty.” When they actually came upon the wolves, there were only two.

  Howling fascinated Theberge. He went on to the University of Guelph, returning each summer to work with Pimlott, and ultimately he wrote his master’s thesis at the University of Toronto on the howling of wolves. He built a pen in the park, put a captive wolf inside it, and waited to hear the wolf howl. “I couldn’t get it to open its mouth,” he recalls. Though he played it tape recordings of wolf howls, and stood outside the compound at night and howled, the wolf would not respond to him. Then Mary came to visit him. She howled once at the wolf and it howled back.

  Why did the wolf respond to one and not the other? They set about trying to understand. “We started to study the harmony of what was different in our voices. I can get up to middle C, and Mary can get down to middle C. The wolf would not answer me but it would answer Mary. However, it insisted on a live performance and wouldn’t respond to a tape recording. After a while, we understood that every wolf had its own set of harmonics that shifts, predictably, as its voice slides up or down the scale. They have a far better ability to discriminate between harmonics than humans, which means they can certainly identify who’s howling. Which raises the question, why do they howl back at humans?”

  And why do they sometimes not howl back? Joslin recalls, “I had one occasion in Algonquin where a wolf came up and saw me when I was howling, and I had a deuce of a time. It took two or three weeks before that pack would howl back. There’s usually one or two wolves that will lead the howl. I suspect it was that one that saw me.”

  Theberge and Joslin would talk much about why wolves howled or didn’t howl. Theberge tried a police siren; it worked. Wolves howled to loggers’ chainsaws. They got so habituated to Theberge’s own overtures that they would sing out when he accidentally slammed the door of the truck as he was getting out to howl.

  There were a variety of explanations offered for howling. Murie often saw wolves howl after hunting had separated them, and usually found the wolves reunited shortly after those howls. He guessed howling helped them to get back together. Theberge’s captive howled when he left camp, and the researcher thought it likely that the wolf was expressing a desire for companionship. Erich Klinghammer, who studied the howling of captive wolves at Wolf Park in Indiana, found that older and higher-ranking animals did more solo howling and then were joined in chorus more often than younger wolves, females, or lower-ranking males. He concluded that solo howls attracted lone wolves, especially females.

  But clearly there were other meanings. During dominance fights or other great excitement, Klinghammer found that females not directly involved in the fight were “running about and howling repeatedly.” And when animals became alarmed near the den, individuals might bark and howl. Mech and Fred Harrington, a professor of psychology at Mount St. Vincent University in Nova Scotia, got more wolves to return their howls near kills and considered howling “important in territorial maintenance.”

  Theberge thought howling might help wolves identify each other as individuals. Howard McCarley, of Austin College in Texas, had found that he could identify individual red wolves by the way they started and ended their howls. Mech was coming to the same conclusion about gray wolves in Minnesota. Theberge wanted to know if each howl had an individual signature. He and J. Bruce Falls analyzed the harmonic structure and pitch of howls of captives from Algonquin Park. They found, “Each individual had a tendency toward a certain type of beginning, ending, pitch range, and pitch change throughout the howl.”

  Others had similar thoughts. Z. J. Tooze, John Fentress, and Fred Harrington recorded the howls of captive wolves temporarily isolated from their packmates and made spectrograms of the recording. Analyzing fourteen different variables on the spectrogram, they found that each howl had its own frequency or its own way of varying the frequency. In other words, each wolf had its own distinctive voice.

  The findings suggested that howling may have evolved, at least in part, to keep wolves from engaging in unnecessary aggression. Harrington believed aggression is expressed by howling at lower frequencies; bigger animals produce sounds of lower pitch and harsher tonal quality, and a deep voice is apparently as intimidating to wolves as it is to humans. Harrington found that wolves that responded to his howl by moving toward him howled back with deeper voices than those that stayed put or moved away.

  Howling probably serves notice to other packs or dispersing individuals that this pack is here and the territory is claimed. Howling has often been observed to help packs avoid one another. When one pack howls, another, near the boundary of the territory, may move away from it. In Minnesota, when one pack howls, the neighboring pack may respond, and a third pack over the ridges may join. Robert Stephenson, of the Alaska Department of Fish and Game, says that in the open terrain of Alaska’s North Slope humans have heard wolves howling ten miles away. In Minnesota, electronic microphones picked up the replies of wolves responding to the howls of researchers 6.8 miles away. “Thus on calm quiet nights,” wrote Mech, “a single howling session could advertise a pack’s presence over an area of 50 square miles to 140 square miles or more.”

  Theberge thought there might be two layers of meaning in wolf howls. One level was “universal,” in that all wolves might understand, for example, the proclamation of territorial rights in a howl. The other was “individual,” in that wolves of long acquaintance might read nuances in each other’s howls that indicated individuals’ moods. He found that spontaneous howls contained higher notes than howls he had elicited, which suggested to him that subtle differences in howls might convey distinct meanings. And researchers who worked in a particular area for long periods said they recognized different howling styles in different packs. Jason Badridze believes that each of the packs he has worked with in the Republic of Georgia has its own dialect. Mary Theberge recalls that the Foys Lake pack in Algonquin Provincial Park had a beautiful, trailing call she found distinctive.

  For John Theberge, the wolf’s howl seemed much more than mere reflex. “We also determined that there was some emotional content in the howl,” he says. “When this wolf in the pen was agitated, he would howl differently. For example, we went blueberry picking one day and left him alone, and he started to howl differently than when we were in the cabin with him. We started to analyze these howls, and we found there were significant differences in emotional content. Howling has significant communication value. It identifies the wolf and tells something about its emotional state.

  “
We think we can discriminate a mourning howl. It is a haunting howl. It drops in pitch twice and goes into minor keys. It’s quite emotional. At least, you can read the emotion into it.” Once, Theberge visited a man who had just killed a wolf near the park. The wolf that had been killed was a dominant female with pups left behind in the woods. Theberge went outside with his radio receiver and located other radio-collared wolves. “One,” he said, “was giving the mourning howl over and over.” When Pimlott euthanized a captive wolf that had been injured in its pen, Theberge heard this howl from a compatriot wolf. Badridze says, “There is a howl of loneliness. It’s very distinctive for everybody. Everybody can just feel it. It must be a universal language.”

  The howl seems to many people to express the essence of the wolf. For those who think of the wolf as evil, the howl is frightening. Stanley Young described it as “perhaps the most dismal sound ever heard by human ear.” He compared it to a dozen railroad whistles braided together, hooting until one after another has faded off, leaving a last, long, heart-wrenching wail. We still hear such sounds in the sound tracks of movies to suggest the lurking of supernatural powers. On the other hand, those who spent time watching wolves and came to see them as noble creatures began to hear joy and reassurance in their howls. Lois Crisler heard such howls.

  In 1953, Crisler and her husband, Herb, a cinematographer, went to Alaska. He had shot footage of elk in Washington’s Olympic Peninsula for use in a Walt Disney True Life Adventure, and now he wished to film the great caribou migrations in Alaska. The Crislers planned to spend two years in the Arctic, filming wildlife. They wanted to film wolves hunting caribou, but found that wild wolves wouldn’t let Herb get within camera range. So they acquired wolf pups dug out of a den by Eskimos at Anaktuvuk Pass, which they hoped to rear to maturity and use to get the footage Herb needed. The wolves, however, took on additional purposes. Alone in a camp in the Brooks Range of Alaska, Lois Crisler looked long and hard at the wolves. She became enthralled by their dignity, their intelligence, their gentleness, their remoteness, and their mystery. And she began to write about them. Her sensitive portrait of the wolves, published in 1956 as the book Arctic Wild, would influence a generation of wolf researchers.

  Crisler observed that people thought in a stereotype about wolves. “Everybody ‘knows all about’ wolves,” she wrote—everybody thought them to be vicious, conniving, sneaking, and cruel. “And people who have never seen a wolf will defend their myth-wolf pattern with betraying fury.” She saw in that perception a reflection of the human observer, whom she described as “a naked, nervous, angry species.”

  She found no suggestion that wolves were combative or cruel. In fact, she felt wolves were exemplary. “Wolves have what it takes to live together in peace,” she wrote. “For one thing, they communicate lavishly. By gestures … and by sounds, from the big social howls to the conversational whimpers.”

  She found that they cared for one another. “They feel concern for an animal in trouble even when they cannot do anything for it,” she observed. “A dog got his nose full of porcupine quills on our walk one day. All the way home the wolf Alatna hovered anxious-eyed around his face, whimpering when the dog cried in trying to tramp the quills out.” When a newly acquired dog cried through the night, a wolf stayed near him, whimpering when he cried. A young dog wandered off from their daily walk, and “the wolf with us ran to me, cried up to my face, then standing beside me looked searchingly round, call-howling again and again. When the dog sauntered into view, the wolf bounded to him and kissed him, overjoyed.”

  The wolf’s howl was to Crisler the sound of a noble conviviality. “A howl is not mere noise, it is a happy social occasion. Wolves love a howl. When it is started, they instantly seek contact with one another, troop together, fur to fur.… Some wolves love a sing more than others do and will run from any distance, panting and bright eyed, to join in, uttering as they near, fervent little wows, jaws wide, hardly able to wait to sing.”

  It was the beginning of a change in the way humans heard the voice of the wolf. Mech and Pimlott had not published their studies, and Mowat had not yet published Never Cry Wolf. But as people like Crisler, Pimlott, and Theberge got to know wolves, the howl meant, not the approach of darkness and evil, but something more reassuring. Crisler saw her glimpse into “wolfness” as a glimpse into “wildness.” She declared that wilderness was emblematic of wolves, not because they were ferocious but because they were independent. Pimlott and Theberge used the same terms. Theberge would write his own book, Wolves and Wilderness, in which he would declare, “Today the howl reminds us that our past is deeprooted in wildness.… It epitomizes the wilderness we have fought so successfully to conquer and now must fight to save.” He saw in wildness and wilderness the source of our own better nature. If wolves were considerate and expressive, communicative, reluctant to kill members of their own kind, and ready to display joy and exuberance for life, so might be humans who threw off the shackles imposed by citified life. Wildness and wilderness, in other words, had healing qualities.

  Underneath this new view of wildness as healing lay a kind of misanthropy. Crisler described humans as a “seething, hating species.” It was the era of the atomic bomb and the cold war, which brought a new awareness that coldly rational humans could at a moment’s notice snuff out a considerable portion of the life on earth. Two world wars had made us question the nature of our species, and we looked for new evidence that humankind was not an evolutionary blunder, bent ultimately on destroying itself and the earth in the process. Hoping to find the answers in our origins, we became intensely interested in the ways other species lived, and in the ways evolution shaped human behavior.

  Anthropologist Ashley Montagu, for example, wrote, “Animals in the state of nature do not make war upon their own kind; they have no Attilas or Hitlers. They seldom exhibit the kind of savagery that civilized men exhibit toward one another.” It was precisely because humans denied their own nature that they devastated much of the world, and wilderness offered a chance for redemption. Declared Montagu, “Man may yet restore himself to health if he will learn to understand himself in relation to the world of nature in which he evolved.”

  The idea that humans needed to rediscover their nature precipitated an intense debate over wilderness. By 1960, the United States and Canada were considering laws to enable them to preserve wilderness areas. The debate was argued, on one level, about saving ecosystems for plants and wildlife, but on a deeper level it was about human character. The “old” view held that wilderness was the source of ignorance and violent impulse that humans tried to overcome. Robert Wernick, a writer who viewed human material culture as the species’ triumphant achievement, declared that wilderness “is precisely what man has been fighting against since he began his painful, awkward climb to civilization. It is the dark, the formless, the terrible, the old chaos which our fathers pushed back, which surrounds us yet.… It lurks in our own hearts, where it breeds wars and oppressions and crimes.” Replied Montagu, “Civilized man, especially in the western world, has projected an image of his own violent self upon the screen of nature.” Author Wallace Stegner declared, “Wilderness is something that has helped to form our character.” Stegner believed “we are a wild species,” and suggested, “One means of sanity is to retain a hold on the natural world, to remain, insofar as we can, good animals.”

  Are we at heart savage and predatory and not to be trusted? Or is wildness the best in us, the instinct for freedom and motion, adventure and care, for close engagement with each other and with the world? We continue to debate the nature of wildness on all sorts of levels. We debate it when we ask why we are violent and when it is permissible to be violent. Characters in television dramas who kill one another are part of the debate. So, too, is argument about abortion or gun control, or whether prisons should punish or rehabilitate—or about the morality of hunting. And we debate wildness when we talk about wolves. If we see nature as treacherous or insane, we shall see
in the wolf a reflection of that nature. And if we think of wildness as the source of kindness and joy, we are apt to see our better nature reflected in the gaze of the wolf.

  The voice of the wolf has increasingly symbolized the new view that wildness is a source of good. All over the range of the wolf, humans now go out into the night and howl, as if seeking affirmation of their faith in wildness. Theberge did much to popularize the practice, and his experience of howling up wolves has become the most widely shared such experience in the world.

  When the Minnesota Science Museum’s traveling exhibit, “Wolves and Humans,” was installed at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City, the museum called Theberge and asked if he had recordings of wild wolves they could use for a cassette tape and record to give to members as a premium for joining. Theberge had written articles on wolf howling for Natural History, the magazine of the American Museum. He happily provided some recordings, because they would help educate the public about wolves and create more interest in their conservation.

  When the museum issued the recording, The Language and Music of Wolves, there was a press conference, and Mech and Theberge came to speak. They appeared on television talk shows and The New York Times ran a front-page article on wolf howling. Someone enlisted Robert Redford to read a script on the record, and Theberge helped write the script. Columbia Records bought the recording, which was sold in record stores and is still widely used in television news stories and documentaries. Unfortunately, Theberge had signed a release that precluded him from earning royalties—something he rues today, when he considers all the radio collars and flying time that royalties might have provided for his project.