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There is always tension between accounts written by scientists, who in their professional work are taught to lay aside personal feelings and concentrate on the facts, and the wider public, who want to read a good story and do not share this obsession with factual accuracy at all costs. I once heard a very eminent embryologist, an author himself, commenting on the fussy detail of yet another fact-filled presentation at a conference. I don’t remember anything about the paper but I do recall what he said when as session chairman he summed up the lecture: ‘The trouble with you people [we were not embryologists] is that you know a great deal but you explain absolutely nothing.’ To a greater or lesser extent, all authors necessarily struggle with the same conflict when they write for the general reader. Never Cry Wolf may at times have been fanciful, but millions have read it and been affected by it in a very positive way.
Fortunately, to balance this, there has been a good deal of scientifically rigorous field research into wolves living in the wild: perhaps not as entertaining nor as fanciful as Never Cry Wolf, but a source of factual information on this fascinating animal. Most of the field research has been done in North America, in Canada and Alaska in particular, where combined wolf numbers are estimated at around 20,000. They have been eliminated from the lower 48 states save for the reintroductions in Idaho and Wyoming and a small resident population in Minnesota and on Isle Royale in Lake Superior. Small numbers also live close to the Canadian border in northern Michigan and Montana and in the swamp woods of south-east Texas and Louisiana. Otherwise there are none. In Europe, where once they roamed freely, wolves have been entirely eliminated from the British Isles, where the last one was shot in Perthshire in 1680 by Sir Ewen Cameron. The last Scandinavian wolf was killed in Finland in 1911, but small numbers still remain in Italy, Spain and France. Further east, wolves are scattered in the forests of Estonia, Poland and the Balkans. They are wanderers and no respecters of political boundaries, so wolves can and do turn up almost anywhere on mainland Europe. I remember being in the South of France a few years ago when a lone wolf caused a stir by walking, at night only, along the main road from the Italian border. The local papers concocted a romance about a forlorn widower searching in vain for his lost lover. Outside Europe, wolves are found right across Asia, in Iran, northern India and Afghanistan and east into China, though their numbers are unknown. There is a rare wolf in Ethiopia, Canis simensis, but it belongs to a different species from the grey wolf Canis lupus.
In North America, the extermination of the wolf began in earnest when trappers moved west shortly after the Lewis and Clark expedition of 1804–06. Their expedition, commissioned by Thomas Jefferson, was sent to explore the lands west of the Mississippi that had been bought from the French in the Louisiana Purchase of 1803. The trappers were after beaver pelts and killed the wolves that had acquired the habit of stealing beavers from their trap-lines. By 1850 beavers had become so scarce that the trappers turned to killing the wolves for their pelts. At the same time buffalo came under intense hunting pressure, and by 1880 an astonishing 75 million of them had been slaughtered, mainly for their hides. Wolves learned to follow the buffalo hunters and feed on the carcasses left behind. They too came under attack from hunters, who rarely bothered to skin them. When all the buffalo had gone, men turned once again to wolfing for a living, and by the 1890s they had killed almost all the wolves east of the Rockies, from Texas in the south to Dakota hard up against the border with Canada in the north.
The Wolf Wars, as they came to be known, were accompanied by a campaign of vilification reminiscent of the vitriolic propaganda attacks which we have always used against our enemies, human or otherwise.
The extent of this slaughter, which sickens most of us now, astonished the Native American tribes who had lived side by side with the wolf for millennia. They had, and still have, a completely different attitude to the land and the animals with whom they share it. If you will accept the generalisation, Native Americans see themselves as the custodians of the land and the animals under the watchful eye of the Great Spirit. Of course, they still hunted buffalo, elk and deer for food and clothing, but not before offering prayers that asked for the animal’s blessing. And herein, in my own view, lies the answer to the whole question of our relationship with, first, the wolf, and now the dog. Unlike us ‘civilised’ Westerners, Native Americans understand that some things are inexplicable except through the medium of myth.
We may scoff at these ‘primitive’ and unscientific explanations for natural phenomena, but they closely resemble the way our own Palaeolithic ancestors saw the natural world, as is evident from the painted galleries of Chauvet. There are innumerable Native American legends involving the wolf. Barry Lopez, in his 1978 book Of Wolves and Men1 recounts one of them from the Cheyenne. In common with other Plains tribes, the Cheyenne created societies of young warriors whose task it was to defend the tribe against attack and also to lead raiding parties against their neighbours. The ‘Wolf Soldiers’, as they were called, rose to prominence in the early nineteenth century as the Native American Wars began in earnest. At the time, the two main branches of the Cheyenne were each travelling northwards towards their traditional lands in the Dakotas from which they had been forcibly deported to reservations in Oklahoma. The leader of the Wolf Soldiers, Owl Friend, set out alone one night to join up with the southern Cheyenne when he was caught in a sudden snowstorm. In the darkness he came across a single lodge pitched by the side of a stream. He approached the entrance, where he was met by a group of young men who welcomed him inside. They gave him food, started to dry his clothes that had been soaked by the storm and put him to bed. The storm lasted for four days. On the morning of the fifth day the young men led Owl Friend outside. The storm had abated and the sky had cleared. ‘Remember this,’ they said, ‘We give it all to you.’
The next morning Owl Friend awoke to find himself in the middle of the open prairie. He was surrounded by four wolves, whom he recognised as the young men from the lodge. ‘Repeat this dance for four days and four nights and you will become a Wolf Soldier,’ they said. Owl Friend did as they said. On the fifth day he returned to his tribe and inaugurated the Wolf Soldiers of the Cheyenne, the last and the most feared of the seven great Cheyenne soldier societies. In the years following their inauguration the Wolf Soldiers fought their enemies with great courage and ferocity, qualities that, through the power of Owl Friend’s dream, had come to them directly from the wolves.
Similar myths of spiritual transference crop up again and again in Native American legend. All we have in Europe to remind us of the ancient spiritual affinity of man and animal are the murals of Chauvet, despite the strange fact that none depict wolves. But there is a much more vivid reminder even than art or myth of the ancient pact between wolf and man – and it lives on in the minds and the lives of dog-lovers everywhere.
The wolf has been demonised throughout history as the embodiment of evil, savagery, even wanton lust and sexual promiscuity. In medieval Europe, people accused of being werewolves were allegedly capable of alternating between human and lupine forms. They were burned at the stake. We now believe these unfortunates were nothing of the kind but likely to have been suffering from a severe form of schizophrenia. Feral children raised by wolves, which has happened occasionally, often exhibit symptoms interpreted as severe autism when ‘rescued’. They huddle in a corner, never speak, refuse clothes and are prone to outbursts of unprovoked aggression. In neither case do we now believe that the people have literally become part-wolf, part-human.
Mythological wolves were rarely pictured as anything other than the epitome of evil. The Norse myths tell of the sinister wolves Fenris and Garm, and the shape-shifting Loki, held in chains until the end of the world, the Twilight of the Gods, when they broke free to fight the Norse god Odin and the Aisir to the death at Asgard. The wolf’s association with death and destruction is everywhere. The Church aligned the wolf with the Devil, and during the reign of terror implemented by the Spanish Inquisition beginning in 1478, his agents, the unfortunate werewolves, were hunted down and put to death.
This deeply embedded hatred of the wolf makes it all the more surprising that dogs, which are so little removed from wolves, have become ‘our best friends’ and the source of so much devotion, happiness and, yes, even love. Can it be that we recognise so much of ourselves in the dog and indeed the wolf that our emotions are amplified? Is what we see when we look into the eyes of either animal a reflection, a transference of our own emotions? Shaun Ellis certainly experienced this when he first met the wolf’s amber gaze. He felt its eyes drilling into his very soul.
He later reflected that perhaps he was completely mistaken and that the wolf felt nothing of the sort and was probably just thinking about its next meal. Dog owners consistently describe the same feeling of mutual understanding as Shaun experienced, but is it real? And does it really matter anyway? After all, the most obliging server in a restaurant may think all her customers are complete fools, but as long as she doesn’t spill the soup, however tempting that might be, they are none the wiser. Most dog owners would fiercely contradict this interpretation of their pet’s behaviour towards them, and they may well be right. Perhaps the admiration they see in their pets is real and well deserved. But as with the restaurant server, does it really matter if it is a pretence, so long as they manage to keep it up?