The Company of Wolves

by Peter Steinhart

  It takes skill at flying. Says Frost, “People kill themselves hunting wolves. They fly into trees or they turn too fast. There’s a lot of skills—paying attention, flying the plane, landing the plane, shutting off the engine, and jumping out. If the wolf is in timber and going to come out on a lake, you have to coordinate how far away you are from him before you’re landing. If you get there too much before him, he may turn and go back. There’s a lot of flying judgment. There are maybe a hundred guys in the state of Alaska who can do it, maybe twenty or forty that do it.” Frost and the rest of this small cadre of hunters took most of the sport harvest of wolves in Alaska.

  He believes that land-and-shoot hunting is fair chase, because he believes the wolves always have a chance to escape. “Once I spot a wolf that I want, I’m guessing, I would get maybe 20 percent of them,” he says. “Lots of times you see wolves where there is no place to land. Lots of times you land and they duck into the bushes and you just don’t get them. The first wolf I ever landed on in an airplane was in deep snow, and I jumped out and I shot all the bullets in my rifle. There was a guy in the back seat and he handed me his gun and I shot all the bullets in his rifle. The wolf was 150 yards away and I just missed. It went into the woods.”

  Frost insists it is not necessary to herd or chase them. He says wolves don’t always run away. “In landing on wolves, I have had every reaction from running, to stopping and gawking at the plane, to sitting and looking at it, to trotting over to see what was going on. You can’t predict how any wolf is going to react. I have landed thirty yards away on a lake and had them just stand up and look at me.” Once he landed below four wolves he had found sleeping on a hillside. Three of them scattered into the trees. “The biggest wolf trotted down the hill to within twenty yards of me. And I missed him with my bow and arrow.”

  Often enough, he didn’t miss. A legally killed wolf must be reported to the department, and the records indicate that Frost killed as many as twenty wolves a year. He says, “I was successful at wolf hunting because I worked hard at it. There have been winters I’ve flown in excess of 250 hours.” Some years, he would take a whole month off from work to hunt wolves.

  Frost insists that department officials assured him that land-and-shoot hunting did not run afoul of state or federal law, that landing near a wolf, although it might disturb the animal, would not be regarded as a violation of laws against harassment. “We were told, ‘Go ahead and land, and shoot as they are going away.’ State fish-and-game enforcement officers said that over and over. They were saying, ‘We need to harvest some of these wolves. I mean we want you to harvest them.’ ”

  Today, Frost declares he did nothing wrong. He insists, “I’ve never fired out of an airplane at a wolf,” and denies he used the airplane to herd the animals: “They basically charged that we harassed them, driving them to exhaustion, and we didn’t do that, either. We went out hunting wolves, we found wolf tracks, we followed the tracks. When we found the wolves, we followed the wolves. We couldn’t land where we first saw them. When the wolves came out on a lake where we could land, we landed the airplane as close as we possibly could and jumped out of the airplane and shot the wolves. It was our understanding that that was okay. It was what we were told we could do.

  “We thought, if we were not shooting the animals from the air and we were not driving the animals from the ground, the state of Alaska allowed us to take ten wolves, and the definition of take says hunt, kill, pursue, and disturb. If we’re allowed to hunt an animal, we ought to be able to pursue him. We ought to be able to disturb him.

  “There had never been a court case on this thing. We were the first people ever tried for landing near a quarry. I would have fought it in court if they had simply charged me with the misdemeanor violation of the federal Airborne Hunting Act.” But when they charged him with a felony violation of the Lacey Act, for transporting an illegally taken animal, his combativeness faded. Conviction on the Airborne Hunting Act charge would have made conviction on the Lacey Act violation more or less automatic. “Then all of a sudden I’m looking at hundreds of thousands of dollars in attorneys’ fees, possibly going to jail for a long time, possibly losing my right to vote and to own arms, and possibly even losing my medical license.”

  So he pled guilty to the one violation of the Airborne Hunting Act. “The only thing I agreed to in the plea-bargain agreement that I signed was that I used my airplane to disturb a wolf. And I have to say that they probably were disturbed. My plane was there. I didn’t intentionally disturb them.”

  “He is playing with words,” says Stephen Cooper, the assistant U.S. attorney who prosecuted Frost. The indictment to which Frost pled guilty charges that Frost “did unlawfully and knowingly engage in using an aircraft for the purpose of harassing and killing a wolf.” Cooper says, “He was questioned at great length in the court” as to what the language in the plea-bargain agreement meant. “It was like pulling teeth to get him to say he used the airplane to run the wolves in the direction he wanted so that he could kill them. Eventually the judge got him to answer yes to having used the airplane to herd the wolves to a place where he could shoot. He was driving them by means of an airplane.”

  Says Frost, “I’ve always felt I was a law-abiding person. I pay attention to the laws. I try to understand them. All they had to do anywhere along the line is to say, ‘It’s illegal,’ and I wouldn’t have done it. I felt I was aware of the law, aware of the issue, and I was doing it within the realm of what was legal.”

  Cooper concedes, “There’s a lot of gray area in that law. If you try to land next to a wolf, are you disturbing the wolf or not? That’s very difficult to define.” And he expects that, as long as Alaska regards land-and-shoot hunting as a way to control wolves, “all that’s going to do is push people close to the line for potential violations of the Airborne Hunting Act. If they try to control wolf populations by trying to get people to do it with land-and-shoot, they’re practically asking people to walk on the wrong side of the line.”

  Partly in response to the outcry over the Kanuti Refuge hunt, the Board of Game stopped authorizing land-and-shoot hunting. Bennett thinks the resurrection of wolf control in 1992 came about in part because the board believed it would never be able to revive land-and-shoot hunting. A poll taken in 1992 showed that 80 percent of Alaskans opposed aerial hunting of wolves. Says Bennett, “Probably the writing was on the wall that land-and-shoot would fall afoul of the Airborne Hunting Act.” Without land-and-shoot hunting, the board may have felt that it had lost some of its ability to manage wolves.

  For most observers outside the courtroom, the issue was not what was legal, but what was ethical. I suspect that the look of reserve on Frost’s face is an expression of his feeling that he is caught in the middle of someone else’s debate. “The two most prevalent views about wolves,” he says, “are either wolves are a true symbol of the wilderness or a menace to game populations that need to be kept at low levels. I feel the wolf’s neither a villain nor a god. It’s just another wildlife species. It’s a renewable resource that can be reliably harvested. The vast majority of people have one emotion or another. That doesn’t leave much room for someone in the middle.”

  But the debate is far more encompassing than Frost has seen. For most Americans, it seems wrong to shoot a wolf for the sake of the excitement. The debate is not just about wolves; it is about people, and about the nature of killing.

  Since the middle of the twentieth century, we have been absorbed with the issue of killing. In the atomic bomb, humankind grasped the power to destroy all life on earth. After 1950, crime and violence grew in our cities. By 1960, we wondered whether we were helpless to prevent war and crime. We asked whether we were a killer species. In the 1960s and 1970s, animal behavioralists and psychologists sought to resolve this question in a wide-ranging debate about aggression, or behavior aimed at hurting another physically or emotionally. The debate was inaugurated by the German animal behavior expert Konrad Lorenz in
his book On Aggression. Lorenz held that aggression was innate and unavoidable. He was to some degree reiterating the ideas of Sigmund Freud, who wrote, “Men are not gentle friendly creatures wishing for love.… A powerful measure of desire for aggression has to be reckoned as part of their instinctual endowment.” Like Freud, Lorenz believed that, if aggressive drives were repressed, they would accumulate until they exploded into violence. Lorenz believed that “primitive” people exercised their aggressive drives by making war on neighbors, which allowed them to be loving and gentle and exhibit little aggression toward their friends and families. But in the modern community, he believed, there was no longer a legitimate outlet for aggressive behavior. He wrote, “Present day civilized man suffers from insufficient discharges of his aggressive drive.… We are all psychopaths for each of us suffers from the necessity of self-imposed control for the good of the community.”

  The other side of the debate held that aggression is not innate, that, however genetically disposed we might be to aggressive acts, it takes environmental conditions to elicit them. Critics pointed out that Lorenz based his views on the relatively inflexible behavior of fishes and birds, whereas higher mammals, such as wolves and humans, are not so rigid. They also pointed out that Lorenz’s accounts of warlike primitive societies were faulty, and that many human societies experience very little violence.

  In the 1970s, an increasing body of research showed clearly that aggression is learned behavior evoked particularly by pain or frustration, and that poor and dispossessed people were more likely to display it. Experimenters showed that both children and adults who see aggressive behavior respond by becoming more aggressive themselves, and that American spectators are more aggressive after watching sporting events.

  Bits and pieces of these academic debates trickle into popular understanding. Frost, for example, says, “I think hunting is a part of our nature. And I think, if a man doesn’t hunt, those same drives and urges will come out in other areas, and the people that have those drives and urges may become inhumane to other people.” Animal-rights advocates who burn down research laboratories, he says, may be simply exercising their hunting instincts. “They want to get something. They want to get that big company.” Nonhunters, on the other hand, are apt to side with those who believe aggression is learned, and to say humankind would be better off if it put hunting behind it. That hunters can’t feel the suffering of their victims, or that they enjoy killing, disturbs such people. They believe that, whether aggression is innate or not, we are obliged to suppress the urge to kill, because one act of aggression begets others. In the Kanuti Refuge wolf hunt, they see the kind of hateful violence they want to expunge from the human character.

  The academic debate about the nature of aggression doesn’t resolve the issue for most people. We tend to work out our views from day to day in popular cultural expressions such as movies or song, and in these the nature of killing is still a battleground. Much of our popular culture is redirected or vicarious aggression, invoking the views of Freud and Lorenz by providing harmless substitutes for war as a way of discharging accumulated aggressive impulses. Our spectator sports are violent. Video games encourage our children to tear the head off or rip the heart out of an opponent. Popular music is littered with images of assault. Our children see, on the average, more than one thousand murders a year on television. The purveyors of these entertainments often argue that they are helping displace aggression that would otherwise overwhelm our society, but critics say they are really making us more aggressive.

  We seem to be deeply conflicted over this issue—set off not against one another but against ourselves. We rail against abortion yet clamor for the death penalty, preach the Golden Rule yet purchase hand guns.

  Frost is caught in this debate, but the wider ethical issue frustrates him. He talks little about the animal and much about the people he sees when he looks through the lens of the wolf. “People have grown up learning about wildlife from Walt Disney movies and the propaganda that is put out by animal-rights groups,” he says. “The environmentalists just don’t want to allow anybody to kill a wolf.” In his opinion, “The general population everywhere is more urban, more likely to be anti-hunting, and think their meat should come off the shelves and not be shot, watched die and butchered in the field, and brought home.” He suggests that they are as deeply implicated in death as he is, and that what sets him apart from nonhunters is his own understanding of the mystery of death.

  But Frost can’t, in the end, pinpoint why killing is essential to him. He says he has tried photography, but it just doesn’t satisfy him. “When you come down to why you have to kill,” he says, “that’s the part I can’t come up with, except to say I think it’s inbred, it’s a genetic part of us.”

  “Though not everybody feels it,” he says, it is a natural thing to do. “You can take a house cat and rear it through ten generations, feeding it dried cat food, and in the eleventh generation you put it down and it sees a canary in a cage and its tail will start twitching. I think that hunting is as deeply inbred in the human species as it is in animals. Many people try to deny that.”

  At this point, he begins to wander around the edges of the question of why he kills—speaking of the importance of the right to bear arms, and cautioning that he doesn’t feel paranoid, that what he is talking about here is not a conviction but a vague speculation. He can’t really imagine locking himself in his basement with his guns to defend himself against a siege of criminals or government goons. But, he says, “I don’t think it’s totally inconceivable in times to come. If the government knows there are lots of arms in private ownership, they could never start loading people in boxcars. That’s not science fiction. That happened fifty years ago in Germany. It’s happening today,” in places like Bosnia and Iraq. “Who’s to say that isn’t going to happen?”

  Even though I cannot be certain, I suspect that what Frost is talking about is not wolves but people. It occurs to me that he’s talking in heavily veiled ways about the propriety of killing humans—in self-defense, in war, in the ugliest of eventualities.

  The history of the world since 1945 has been shaped a great deal by remorse at the blood our own species has spilled. It has been a search for the sources of our own humanity, and for the sources of goodness and nobility. The great debates of our time have been about how to excise whatever makes us cruel and enlarge what makes us noble. Increasingly critical of our own nature, we would like to perfect what is uneven in it.

  We congratulate ourselves on our abhorrence of murder, but perhaps we do so in proportion to our own desire to commit it. We are uncomfortable with the plethora and strangeness of our own species. There is evidence that, the more numerous we grow, the more prone we are to violence. We are divided more and more into separate communities of rich and poor, black and white, orthodox and reform, rural and urban. Like the wolf, we have different ethical standards for strangers. We may only be really moral when we love one another not as a matter of principle but as a matter of mingled breath, shared thoughts, of looking directly into one another’s eyes.

  I suspect that, when we argue about wolves, we are arguing about love and hate, peace and war, killing and kindness. We are arguing about our own hearts and souls.

  In the outcry that followed the Board of Game’s authorization of wolf control, Alaska made a half-hearted attempt to show that wolf control was needed. The department invited journalists and environmental leaders to attend a “Wolf Summit” in Fairbanks, at which wolf experts, state officials, and environmental leaders would all discuss the issue. But the wolf-control proponents felt that no one outside Alaska would listen to them anyway. Said Kelleyhouse, “There’s no way to satisfy the concerns of animal-rights people.” The department did not even provide news media with maps showing the proposed wolf-control zones. In Kelleyhouse’s view, “There’s a simple fact that the news is only going to carry what it wants to carry. Alaskans have no way to get out what they want to get out to 270
million people. I think it comes down to a state’s-rights issue, and I think we have to debate this issue well internally and reach some sort of a decision and proceed.”

  The Board of Game agreed, and plunged ahead with its plan. In June 1993, the board reimposed the wolf-control effort in the Tanana Flats area. The wolves would be taken only by department personnel, and they would be baited with carcasses and taken with snares, rather than shot from airplanes. But, as a further gesture of defiance, the board voted to end its two-year ban on aerial sport hunting of wolves.

  Robert Stephenson tried to be philosophical. “This isn’t a big conservation problem. It’s not a biological catastrophe. As things rank around the world, this is not a core issue that is going to break the world. I hate to see us blow our emotional budget on it.”

  But it may be that when we talk about wolves we simply are unable to see what we are really arguing about. We seem to have freighted the wolf with too much meaning for mere discussion to encompass. Said Anne Ruggles, who had been a member of the public advisory team on wolves and a member of the Board of Game, “None of this is biological. We’re beyond the biology. We’re in the sociological now.”

  At the Wolf Summit, a man drove up in his truck to the front of the indoor hockey rink in Fairbanks where journalists and hunters, trappers and biologists had gathered to discuss the issue of wolf control. He took out of the back of his truck a freshly killed wolf and carried it into the building, and dumped it on the floor. Blood dripped from the carcass. The bearer of the dead wolf seemed angry. But as state troopers led him away, no one could say exactly what the gesture meant.

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  WOLF-DOGS