He has a trap line a hundred miles north of Fort Chipewyan. “You’re right in a corner where there’s nothing at all. It’s just animals and you. Some years, there’s so many wolves.” He finds wolf-killed moose and caribou. Though he finds wolf tracks around his camp and believes the wolves are attracted by his dogs, he has never lost a dog to one. “I hear that other trappers lose dogs to wolves. I don’t know what they do. I never shoot wolves. I never shoot anything unless I make money on it or I need meat.” Even when there was a $40 bounty on wolves, he wouldn’t shoot one. “It wasn’t worth it. It was too much work to clean a wolf.
“In the olden days, they’d see wolves more. Since they started using Skidoos, they don’t see wolves much. The wolves hear you coming a long way away, and they run. Any wild animal hates Skidoos. Only moose don’t. A moose will stand three hundred yards away while you drive by. A caribou will run.”
In January 1979, Bourke was attacked by a wolf. “It was at night, and it was snowing hard. I had been going all day on the Skidoo, and I had run out of gas on the edge of Collins Lake, near where I had a trap and a snare. I was cold. I decided I’d jump off my Skidoo and run to the trap, and by the time I got back I’d be warm.” Although he had two rifles on the Skidoo, he says, he didn’t carry either firearm as he ran. The trap was over a low ridge, and as he came over the ridge, he saw wolves. They were eating two lynxes he had caught, one in the trap, one in the snare.
“There was twelve of them. One started to bark and come after me. I got out on the ice. I didn’t have any gun with me. The wolves were coming after me. I broke a stick off a tree.
“The wolf grabbed me just above the knee. I was wearing a Skidoo suit and jeans and underwear. The wolf tore that suit and the jeans just like a piece of cotton. I hit him over the head with the stick and that drove him away, and I run as fast as I can. I was scared. I ran to my Skidoo.
“I gassed up as fast as I could. What wolves hate is a Skidoo. Any wild animal hates Skidoos. I gassed up the Skidoo and started it, and when I started the Skidoo they all run off.”
Bourke could see later, “I had kind of cornered and surprised them, coming down over that rise.
“It didn’t bother me, because I had been attacked by a bear before. I had been bitten by a dog before. I have spent all my life in the bush; I’m not afraid of animals.” The next day, when he and his brother came upon a pack of twenty-two wolves, he didn’t even think about the attack.
These are not healing stories. They express no kinship between wolf and human, but tell at best of an understanding tolerance in the human, at worst of a frailty that armors itself in hatred. Where, I wonder, are the healing stories?
Clearly, they exist somewhere in the native world today. Robert Stephenson, who studied wolves on Alaska’s North Slope, found the local natives had great respect for the wolves. The Koyukon of Alaska’s Yukon Basin put a piece of fat into the mouth of a wolf that had been killed and spoke to its spirit. The Dogribs, who lived between Great Slave and Great Bear lakes, would not kill wolves. Nor would the Hans, who lived in the Yukon. Eskimos generally respect wolves. The Nunamiut Eskimos, says Stephenson, believe an animal has a powerful spirit. “You act with respect for it because you want to please its spirit so you can have more to eat. They’ll tell you their father told them never brag, ‘I’m going to go over there and shoot a wolf.’ It will bring you bad luck. In Anaktuvuk, after they skin an animal, they cut through the vertebrae behind the spine, because it will let the spirit go. You’ll see little acts and rituals. A lot of ’em probably do it and don’t know why.”
But when Stephenson compared the views of Eskimos, who live on the open tundra, where they see wolves, to the views of Indians who live in forested areas like Fort Chipewyan, where they do not, he found different attitudes. “Indians have less use for wolves than Eskimos,” says Stephenson. “Indians don’t see wolves very often. Mostly they see kills. When you live in the interior, you find these kills—a calf killed by a bear, or a moose killed by wolves in winter. If you don’t see the animal, and you just see what it does, that doesn’t give you a very favorable impression. They see wolves as a competitor and don’t have a lot of use for them. They complain about them a whole lot. Old-timers tell you that’s the only bad animal in Alaska—you better shoot them when you run into them.”
Stephenson’s generalization seems a fair one. Like the Eskimos, the Indians of the plains saw wolves coming and going, and they, too, spoke admiringly of them, told stories of wolves and humans sharing a common language, dressed as wolves when they went into battle, dreamed of wolves when they wanted vision. Indians of the forested east were less likely to celebrate a sense of kinship with the wolf. Fort Chipewyan is at the northern edge of the forest, and most of its inhabitants take a dim view of wolves.
Still, there are people in Fort Chipewyan who look for a sense of kinship with the wolf. One of them is Lloyd Antoine, a forty-seven-year-old Cree Indian. Round faced, his mouth set on the edge of a smile, he has the calm affability of a man who sees the good in other people. Though he grew up in Fort Chipewyan, he went away to college. He was out of the village for ten years, going to school and working in Edmonton, so he knows something of the outside world. After ten years there, however, he decided the city was no place for him. “You’re totally alone, and there are thousands of strangers around you,” he says. “You’ve got to be rude. You got to look the other way a lot of times. In the city, people have an inability to feel.” He came back to Fort Chipewyan hoping to raise his children in the closeness and community of native culture.
As a boy, Antoine had worked alongside his father and six brothers on a trap line in Wood Buffalo National Park. He points out a sixty-square-mile area on a map at the offices of the Cree Indian Band, where he works. Where blue shapes indicate lakes, he says, as a result of Bennett Dam’s going in “there are no lakes now. My brothers and I used to trap right here, about 1972 to 1978,” he says, pointing at one of the lakes. “I took out twelve hundred muskrats and my brother took out two thousand in one three-week period. All of this now, there’s no water, there’s just grass. All of this is pretty much gone as far as muskrat. Beaver and otter’s gone, because there’s no water. The fox are pretty well gone, because they live on muskrat, too. Buffalo used to come through our trap lines. We used to see them by the thousand. They’d trample the muskrat lodges, and the wolves would follow them.” Now the buffalo are disappearing, and there aren’t many wolves in his area.
Antoine still has rights to work the trap line in the park, but he observes that fewer and fewer people go out hunting or trapping. “It’s pretty grim,” says Antoine. “It costs you more money to get out there than you can get out of it. People just can’t make a go of it any more. When you run a trap line here, it’s because you want to be out there. You want to have a sense of being a person.”
Antoine goes out, not to make a living, but to try to preserve vestiges of the old ways: he is trying to get back to something he believes his family once had, and the wolf is part of it. “The wolf was my dad’s spiritual brother. It kind of passed down from my grandfather. This was an animal that takes care of you. If you hear a wolf, you stop and listen. It’s trying to tell you something: it’s time to settle down or to go for a hunt; it could be telling you that a big wind is coming.”
In December 1965, Antoine and his brothers were out trapping with their father. “We were running the north end of our trap line. All eight of us were in there.” They were working individually on different parts of the trap line for part of the day, then coming together for lunch. “I went out alone. Right in the middle of a lake, there was an island, and there was a wolf in there, and all day long this one wolf kept howling. I felt uneasy. My brothers came where we would congregate for tea about noon before we would go out again. One of my brothers said, ‘Did you hear that wolf?’ I said, ‘Yes.’ He said, ‘That’s kind of a bad omen. It’s not too often during the day you hear a wolf.’ Maybe we surrounded hi
m and he couldn’t get out—they are really private animals.” They concluded that there was more to it than that. “We said there’s something else you can’t understand about it.” A few days later, his father died. “A long time after, my brother told me the brother wolf was calling my father that day and telling him it was time to go. My father knew from that trip he didn’t have a long time to live.”
Antoine didn’t hear the meaning himself. “I’ve been exposed to too many worlds,” he says. “I’ve kind of lost it. I did not have that kind of exposure” to the old ways. He only began to think about what his father had tried to teach him after he returned from living in the city. One day, six years after he came back, “It hit me that this is the way things are—that the animals do talk to people, that it’s not just some kind of a storybook.”
Other families may have special relationships with other animals; in his family, it’s the wolf. “It’s something very private,” he says. “We don’t tell.” Maintaining the relationship doesn’t require ceremonies or taboos, and wolves may still be shot or trapped. Says Antoine, “If a wolf is there, you catch him. It’s a means of making a living.” In the past, they ate the meat and they used the sinews for sewing and the teeth for ornament. More recently, they sold the fur to buyers in Edmonton or Winnipeg. “When I caught a nice wolf, I got $275 for it,” he says. “I put food on the table. I was happy.”
That you could catch such a wolf owed to the wolf’s willingness, says Antoine, “to lay down its life so you could live.” An animal who comes into your gunsights does so as a gift. “You have this reverence. It means a lot to hear the wolf—it goes beyond having food on the table. You’re thankful. You’re going to be taken care of. It’s a way of life. It’s a whole circle.”
So, when he’s out on the delta, he listens for wolves. “If you hear the wolf, you feel good. When we are out there hunting and hear the wolf, I tell my children, ‘Stop and listen. That’s your grandfather talking.’ ”
However, they seldom hear it. He feels that his own two oldest sons, who work in Fort MacMurray, have lost touch with the land. “They’re ignorant of a lot of things they would have known if the trapping were still alive. They’re making fantastic money, but they’re losing a lot not being out there—they lose a sense of serenity, a sense of being part of nature, being part of the land. We still have that knowledge, but it’s getting away from us. You go to a bank and get some money and go to a grocery store to get some food. That’s not a way of life. And yet we practice it.”
Says Antoine, “Unless we smarten up and go back to pursue some of the things we are very fast losing, we will not be what they call in our language ‘the people.’ We’ll be lost. We’ll be walking around like zombies.”
They have lost more than the spring floods and the muskrats: they have lost the stories. Their fathers and mothers learned about spiritual relationships when the old people told them stories as children. The stories told, for example of Wisacisa, a person who lived with the animals and could speak their language. They made the listener feel a kinship with the wolf, the goose, the moose. “It was a relaxing kind of coexistence,” says Antoine. “In Cree it’s got a whole meaning—it helps you understand some of the meaning of life.” The stories were shared only when listener and teller were likely to be attentive to each other. “The only time I was told fables in my family was when everything had been quieted down and we had been fed.”
But in the new culture of the town, there is no time for stories. “We just don’t have the opportunity, because of the way we are. When it came time to share our culture, you detached yourself from thinking about going to work. If you were able to go out to our old traditional summer camping grounds with one of the old people, you might hear the old stories, but not here in town. This has got nothing to do with our old way of life when you come here. This is a place you can watch TV.”
Back at the lodge that night, I turned on the television and watched rock singer Michael Jackson, in black leather and silver studs, surrounded by a circus of alienated beings, singing “I’m Bad” in the subways of New York City. Someone moonwalked on roller skates. Dancers glared like caged animals. It was a lightless, treeless, waterless, futuristic world, about as far away as you can get from Fort Chipewyan. Satellite dishes were bringing this signal into homes all over town.
We need stories that tell us how we are tied to the wider world. It is as much a need as food and air and water. In the citified world, however, we throw up walls around us to keep from bumping into one another. We are starved for those stories, impoverished of the thread of connection. That is one reason we want to put wolves back into the wild. If we again see wolves in the wild, we may share stories about them. And that, we hope, may restore us.
For now, few North Americans or Europeans see wolves in the wild, and our stories about them are personal and idiosyncratic and far removed from the real animal that would, in Eskimo or Plains Indian cultures, seem to validate the telling. We profess to love wolves or to hate them, but we don’t see the same animal, or share the same meaning. When we speak of wolves, it is not entirely clear what we love or hate.
In 1994, the movie Wolf, written by novelist Jim Harrison and directed by Mike Nichols, was released. Harrison, who spurns the city because he believes civilization stifles the human spirit, recalls that one night in his backwoods Michigan cabin, the approach of car headlights set him into a rage, and he tore a door off his cabin and ran out into the night. “There was something inside me,” recalled Harrison. He had used the image of the wolf entering his spirit before in his writings, and he saw in that image a wildness that could revivify the human soul. He eventually wrote a screenplay about the idea, in which a middle-aged man is bitten by a wolf and something of the wolf enters the man to heal his spirit. He becomes supernaturally strong and predatory. Director Mike Nichols, however, saw the story differently, and thought the wolf-bitten hero lost his humanity. For two and a half years, writer and director quarreled over whether the wildness kindled by the wolf bite was healing or dissolute. After writing five drafts of the script, Harrison withdrew from the project, and Nichols’ old performing partner, Elaine May, finished the script.
That argument is exactly the kind of thing that is happening in Fort Chipewyan. Each person you talk to sees a different wolf. One wolf strikes fear into the heart, another is companionable and playful, another rapacious and another knowing and sympathetic. In Fort Chipewyan, as in the rest of the world, there are many different levels of culture: three different Indian groups, the ritual and discipline of the Catholic church, the soulless technocracy of industrialism, the unearthly fantasies of rock video, and a smattering of ecological science. There is a constant shuffling and streaking of messages. Everybody draws on the inventions of other cultures. We are no longer a single people, united by our stories. Each of us invents our own wolf.
If a spiritual view of wolves survives on the Peace-Athabaska Delta, no one but Antoine shared it with me. I am inclined to doubt that it was simply because I was an outsider. Spiritual life comes from what one does day by day; it is not something one turns on and off, like television. If wolves once had spiritual meaning, it was because those who felt it lived with wolves day in and day out. The people of Fort Chipewyan no longer live with wolves. And trying to acquire traditional views of a creature we no longer live with, as if we were acquiring an old car or an antique table, will not work.
On my last day in Fort Chipewyan, I walked past an empty schoolyard. The empty playground swings swayed in the breeze. A taffy-colored mongrel pointed its nose to the gray sky, squinted its eyes, and howled, low and soft, musically. A quiet pleasure rippled down the sides of its body. Its tail wagged slowly back and forth, a metronome set on adagio. It seemed to be replying to some message drifting on the cold air from the delta. But what? The distant howl of an ancestry close at hand? Stories on the wind?
* While this sounds like the folklore of a man who considers wolves supernaturally evil, biol
ogist Tom Bergerud has suggested that in fact prey may die from pasturela-bacteria, infections caused by wolf bites.
15
BRIDGING THE GAP
If we are ever to deal adequately with wolves, we will have to overcome our long history of estrangement. North American culture, like the European cultures that gave rise to it, is a forest culture. Our innate sense of good land embraces deep shade and groves of trees. Like that of the people of Fort Chipewyan, our outlook has grown in the presence of wolves but with wolves rarely in view.
We are also a pluralistic culture, with diverse and sometimes discordant views of things. We look for consensus, and science is increasingly the framework by which we seek agreement. Only in the last fifty years have we had the technology and the inclination to study wolves as they really live in the wild, and science hasn’t yet managed to summarize their complexity in a way that reflects our own. Despite an impressive amount of study of wolves, a great deal more is needed—as is more effort to communicate the uncertainties of science to the general public.
Science is only one way of seeing things, and many of us will look at wolves in other ways. If we have no wolves in view, we shall go on inventing them and seeing them as shadows of ourselves. Today, neither our science nor our myth yet gives us an adequate basis for dealing with wolves. The wolf is more complex and varied than the biologist yet sees, and we humans are too varied and disparate to be served by a single mythology. Can we ever develop a common view of a wild creature that exacts a cost but fails to repay us with frequent encounters?
Pat Tucker hopes we can. Every day, she clips a long leash on Koani and takes her out for a walk in the hills above Missoula, Montana. Koani is a black wolf. Her legs are long, her head is broad, her posture tense and alert, her yellow-eyed gaze penetrating. At eleven months, she weighs eighty-five pounds, and to walk her is an athletic event. Tucker runs to keep up with Koani until the wolf stops suddenly to look long and hard at children playing down the hill, or cars passing on the freeway, or a beetle crawling up a grass stem. Tucker stands by patiently. Tucker is tall, green-eyed, self-effacing, and so good-humored that laughter sneaks out of her every few moments. She is without a predatory thought. Her attention wanders before the wolf’s, in part because she has seen all this before, in part because it is human to let one’s gaze move on rapidly. When Tucker’s attention passes to something else, Koani lunges off and Tucker is caught unawares, jerked like a windblown leaf, stumbling, free arm flailing, trying to dig in her heels, laughing at the silliness of it all.
The Company of Wolves Page 41
