Though wolves haven’t been tested, their olfactory abilities may be even more acute. Trappers so respect wolf noses that they boil their traps in oak leaves, and soak their gloves in calf’s blood. They stand on pieces of cowhide while setting a trap, or try to set them from horseback, and jealously guard their personal formulas of fox glands and coyote gallbladders in the scent baits they use. None of this may be of much avail, however, for all the while they are shedding dead skin cells and exhaling organic chemicals in their breath that probably cling to the ground and become the olfactory equivalent of billboards to passing wolves.
Wolves live far more by their noses than by their eyes. Much of what they communicate among themselves is expressed or interpreted in odors. Young and Goldman observed that, on their runways, “wolves have what are commonly referred to as scent posts or places where they come to urinate or defecate.” Farley Mowat’s fictional wolves put up a fence of scent marks which neighboring packs seemed not to cross, and his fictional biologist urinated all around his camp to keep wolves out. David Mech and Roger Peters put these speculations about scent-marking to scientific scrutiny in northern Minnesota between 1971 and 1974 by following the tracks of wolves to see exactly where and how they scent-marked.
Studies by Peters at the Brookfield and Como Park zoos had already shown that wolves urinate in two ways: females and subordinate males squat; dominant males stand, raise a hind leg, and squirt a small amount, perhaps a sixth of an ounce, of urine onto a stump or a rock or a clump of grass or some other object elevated above the surface of the ground. In one zoo study, 60 percent of raised-leg urinations were accompanied by snarling, growling, or biting, whereas none of the squat-posture urination was. The act apparently carried an emotional content.
Mech and Peters skied and snowshoed 240 kilometers of winter wolf tracks in northern Minnesota and recorded the rate of raised-leg urination. They found raised-leg urination increased markedly at breeding season, and that squat urination by females was often covered by male raised-leg urination. They noted seventy instances of nose-shaped indentations in the snow where wolves stopped to sniff, and found under thirty of them raised-leg urinations. Wolves clearly paid attention to the scents other wolves left behind.
The two researchers also looked at scent-marking in summer. They found that scats were deposited most heavily on trails leading to central points of rendezvous sites. Scats may bear odors of hormonal secretions imparted by the anal sacs, on either side of the anal opening. Mech and Peters had long observed wolves veering off their paths to sniff at scats.
Dominant males scratch the ground stiffly with right fore and left hind legs, then left fore and right hind legs. Various authors had seen dogs do this and concluded either that they were burying their waste or spreading it around to make it more prominent, but wolves neither bury nor spread their waste. The scratching is apparently intended to leave both visual and olfactory signs; it is probable that glands in the feet impart scents to the scratches.
Mech and Peters found a much higher rate of scratches, urinations, and scats at the junctions of roads, trails, and other commonly followed wolf paths, and far more raised-leg urination occurred on these paths than in the bush. Far more scent marks were found at the edges than at the centers of wolf territories, from which Mech and Peters concluded that wolves continually marked their territorial boundaries. If other packs crossed such tracks and the residents encountered their sign, the residents generally increased their rate of marking. Wolves leave scent marks every two or three minutes as they travel. “The entire territory,” concluded Mech, “is studded with olfactory hot spots.” A wolf can always tell whether or not it is on its own territory. Wherever it goes, scent marks may tell it which wolf passed recently, what that wolf ate, when it ate, and possibly what mood it was in.
Dispersing wolves tend to follow the boundaries of other packs’ territories, but scent boundaries aren’t absolutely inviolable. Mech and Peters found that, though wolves were generally reluctant to spend much time inside a neighbor’s territory, scent marks didn’t always repel them. In one instance, tracks showed that members of one pack chased a deer into a neighboring pack’s territory and seriously wounded it there. When the deer fled deeper into the neighboring territory, however, the intruding pack refused to follow it. They scent-marked heavily and returned home. The neighboring pack encountered the deer the next day and ate it.
What might wolves be reading in all that scent-marking? Might they be reading, not just declarations of ownership, but expressions of a pack’s willingness to fight for territory, signs of readiness to mate, and measures of size, strength, aggressiveness, and health? Might these messages include boasts, confessions, jokes, and insults? Wolves obviously make much of what they discern in other individuals’ leavings. Paul Joslin tells of a wolf whose sense of olfactory propriety was sorely tested. While working in Algonquin Park, he says, he approached a captive wolf he had approached many times before, but this time he was carrying a fresh scat which he had collected in the wild. “I showed it to the wolf inside. He took one sniff and bolted up the hill. He would never have anything to do with me again.” Even the next summer, when Joslin came back from a year at school to work in Algonquin, the wolf would not let him approach. “Whatever was communicated by that scent,” says Joslin, “was something he didn’t want to have anything to do with.”
And what may its keen sense of smell tell the wolf about the nonlupine world? Mech was able to judge, in fifty-one hunts he trailed or observed, whether the wolves sighted or scented moose. In forty-two of them, the wolves seemed to be scenting. In one, Mech concluded the wolves had smelled a cow and twin calves from 1.5 miles away.
What a wolf does with its fine perception is bound to be different from what a human does. Wolves live deeply immersed in nature, but humans have removed themselves from it. There is debate as to whether humans are themselves domesticated animals. There is some evidence that Neanderthal brains from thirty thousand years ago were as much as one-sixth larger than modern brains. Whether or not our brains have grown or diminished, there may be differences in specific parts of the brain that have come about as we gave up hunting and gathering and lived farther and farther from nature. It may be argued, for example, that we have lost perceptive powers, as urban noise deafened us and urban smoke and sweat favored people whose sense of smell was not too sensitive. City life may favor conservative strategies of caution and camouflage over acute perception.
Wolf and human intelligences may focus on quite different things. The human mind focuses on objects. Human lives are transfixed by things that are inanimate, cars or television sets or clothes that give the illusion of imparting life to those who possess them. We confuse convenience with liveliness. Wolves are likely to think differently. The objects around them are alive, in motion, independent of wolf will. Their relationships with the world around them are likely to be more full of twists and turns, more alive and dynamic. Such a world requires a constant and free-flowing curiosity, a watchfulness, a capacity for sharp perception. It may be more fruitful for us to appraise wolf thinking in terms of perception than in terms of calculation.
• • •
We must consider wolf intelligence on yet another level—that of emotion. An individual’s mind is an interplay between thought and feeling. The stronger feelings—which we call emotions—are mechanisms perfected through evolution that lead animals to intensify and focus behavior when it is advantageous to ignore other things. For example, emotions push a hunter to pursue and kill another animal despite the danger of sharp hooves or treacherous terrain. Emotions also impel parents to play with and care for their young when they might otherwise choose to hunt or sleep. At the same time, emotions can contradict thought or competing emotions, and thereby make an animal behave in unexpected ways. Emotions thus provide flexibility, so that life is not simply a matter of responding blindly to set stimuli. They give a species more kinds of response to its environment, and thereby make th
e species more adaptable to changes in that environment.
Many things about wolves suggest an emotional life that is rich, complex, and, like our own, full of contradictions. Wolves clearly have feelings, and observers frequently describe them as joyful or sad or sullen or playful. However, appraisal of animal emotions has so far eluded science, because animals cannot explain what they feel in human terms. When it comes to precise description of animal emotions, we humans are simply guessing.
The way the wolves Stephenson saw played tricks on eagles or bears seems to me very suggestive of the wolf’s rich emotional life and the flexibility it imparts to wolf behavior. Consider, for example, the way wolves relate to ravens. Over much of the range of wolves, if you want to find a wolf, the first thing you do is look for ravens. These birds often follow wolf packs or fly ahead of a hunting pack, wait in the trees for it to catch up, then fly farther on. Stephenson found that ravens were attracted by wolf howls, and when he howled to locate wolves, ravens would appear. Mech frequently saw ravens tracking the packs on Isle Royale, flying directly over their footprints in the snow. They perched in trees, waiting for wolves to finish feeding on a carcass, and as soon as the wolves left, they darted in to feed themselves. When the wolves moved on, the ravens dropped down and picked at their scats, swallowing the edible portions of incompletely digested meat and bone and hide.
Ravens will come from great distances to feed on a wolf kill. Christophe Promberger, of Wildbiologische Gesellschaft, a wildlife-conservation group in Munich, Germany, conducted a study for the Yukon Division of Wildlife, which wanted to know how dependent ravens are on wolf kills in winter. He placed a dead moose in the snow and watched to see what the ravens did. They came, but stood around the carcass and did not eat. For two days, Promberger drove back and forth between the study site and Whitehorse, but the ravens continued to stand around the carcass without eating. He was about to give up when he saw another dead moose alongside a road. There were two wolves eating on one side of it, and a raven eating on the other. It occurred to him that perhaps ravens were unable to open a carcass—that they needed wolves to put their dinner on a platter. He went back to his bait kill, cut it open with an ax, and threw blood and hair and bone around in the snow. The ravens dined. Promberger continued his study, and eventually he found that ravens take an enormous share of wolf kills. In one day, ravens took almost ninety pounds of meat off one of his simulated kills. He concluded that wolf kills may be the principal source of food for ravens in winter.
After the wolves have eaten and are lying around in the snow sleeping off the torpor of a big meal, ravens will stand among them. Don Murray, one of the Isle Royale pilots, saw a raven alight for an instant on the back of a wolf. Mech and others have seen ravens play with wolves. When wolves were resting on lake ice, ravens would dive at them or walk up and peck their tails. If a wolf lunged at a raven, it jumped aside or flew a few feet away. Wolves then would stalk ravens, which would jump out of the way at the last minute, fly a few feet, and stand looking back at the wolf. It seemed to Mech like a game.
Other animals also feed on wolf kills. Eagles, wolverines, lynxes, and foxes may take half the meat off a wolf kill. To save as much as they can, wolves dig holes and cache meat, and they kill their competitors. There are records of wolves killing otters and mink. They are extremely intolerant of foxes, which they seem to kill wherever they can. But why, then, don’t they as a matter of course try to kill ravens?
It has been suggested that they don’t because the ravens provide the wolves with an important service. “There is this theory that ravens lead wolves to a kill,” says Promberger. Mech saw ravens attend an attack on a moose on Isle Royale, swirling around the moose and wolves as the wolves brought the moose to bay. When the moose had been wounded, one raven sat in a tree cawing, as if urging the combat on. “I’m sure ravens track wolves in the snow,” says Stephenson. “Wolves tell ravens things. Ravens tell wolves things.”
But there is no fixed rule to the relationship. On Isle Royale, Rolf Peterson and Don Murray once saw a wolf catch and eat a raven. At the Julian Science Center in California, ravens caw and soar over the wolf pen, but every now and then Paul Kenis has found bits of wing and flutters of black feathers where a wolf has leapt up and caught a careless bird.
It is not necessarily axiomatic that playing and killing are emotional acts, but it is hard to look at wolves engaged in such acts and deny the feeling inherent in the behavior. And the fact that some wolves play with ravens while others kill them suggests that wolf emotions are varied and that wolf behavior is flexible.
There are several possible ways to view this flexibility. One explanation is that wolf societies, like human societies, consist of different personalities. Stephenson says the Eskimos taught him to see that all wolves are individuals. The things he has seen out there in the wilds of Alaska don’t fit into scientific reports because they sometimes fall outside the realm of generalization, and, he says, “We want to generalize pretty quick with an animal.” He believes that, as research becomes more airborne and more office-bound, we generalize more and more, and we lose the vast range of wolf experience; in fact, there are soft wolves and hard wolves, kind wolves and malicious wolves, soldiers and nurses, philosophers and bullies. Perhaps the poor raven that is killed by a wolf has had the misfortune to run into a barbarian, whereas the boon companion has run into a Rotarian.
Another way to view this complexity is to recognize that even an individual may have conflicting emotions. Wolves and humans alike demonstrate that a creature that can love is also a creature that can hate. Both animals cover a wide range of character and behavior. Both are of many minds.
7
THE SILENT WOODS
The cry of a loon trails off the water of Lake Superior. It is muffled by a summer fog clinging to the ridge tops of Isle Royale. The island is wet and dripping, as if all the low greenery meant to delay the runoff of rainwater, to hold it on leaf and stem and petal in round pregnant drops, then in the soup of duff and twigs and sand on the trail, to miser it from the unimaginably vast sea of fresh water a few feet away. Along the trails, the balsam firs have a spicy, Christmas aroma. Lichens cover the trunks of birches and balsam firs. Shy yellow violets and blushing pink pyrola blossoms color the forest floor. It is a place that could be lively with the sounds of animals, but it is not.
“It’s quiet,” says Rolf Peterson. “You don’t hear howling much. The howling has dwindled over the last decade.”
Indeed it has. In 1980, there were fifty wolves on this 210-square-mile island national park. On late-summer nights, visitors could hear them howl and sense something at once thrilling and familiar. Isle Royale’s were the best-known wolves in the world. Twenty-two years of careful and continual observation had gone into studying them, and they had been the subject of thousands of news stories and magazine articles. But since then, something has happened to the wolves. From the peak in 1980, their population plummeted to twelve in 1988, and they have remained at that level for five years.
“Howling in summer is prompted by having lots of pups around that like to howl,” says Peterson. “And having large packs around. With just a male and a female constituting a pack, there’s not much reason to howl. It’s quiet. And every wolf track is worth noting these days.”
Since 1970, Peterson and his wife, Candy, and, later, their two sons have spent their summers in a seventy-five-year-old fisherman’s cabin on one of the outer islands. It is a snug hidey-hole of hand-hewn logs nestled in the forest at the edge of the water. The rest of the year, they are in Houghton, Michigan, where he is a professor of wildlife ecology at Michigan Technological University. He comes out to count the wolves for several weeks every winter, when the trees are leafless and tracks are easily seen.
Peterson’s blue eyes and fair complexion suggest a Viking ancestry, and perhaps an inherited penchant for seeing the ends of things, of unexplored rivers and unexplained biological cycles. The son of a Minneapolis archit
ect, he attended a YMCA camp in Canada, which taught him woodcraft and canoeing. He majored in zoology at the University of Minnesota at Duluth and spent his summers in canoe expeditions. In 1968, at the age of nineteen, he and five friends descended the Dubawnt River to the barren grounds of the Northwest Territories, passing near where Farley Mowat had watched wolves twenty years before. “I think we were only the fourth group of white people to go down the river, and the first group not to try to live off the land,” says Peterson. “It was really rough.” It was so cold that their feet would go numb by day and warm up only at night, and all members of the party suffered vascular damage. For thirty-five days, they saw no other humans. “We never saw wolves. All we saw of caribou, except for one band, was skeletons.” The great herds of barren-ground caribou were gone, and so perhaps were the wolves that had lived off of them. The sheer adventure of the trip confirmed in Peterson a desire to stay in the North. By the time he was a senior in college, “it was a toss-up between limnology and wolves.”
The Company of Wolves Page 18
