WOLVES DO NOT GET hungry in the way we normally understand hunger. Their feeding habits and digestive systems are adapted to a feast-or-famine existence and to procuring and processing massive amounts of food in a relatively short time. They are more or less always hungry. Wolves commonly go without food for three or four days and then gorge, eating as much as eighteen pounds of meat in one sitting. Then, “meat drunk,” they may lay out in the sun until digestion is completed (in two or three hours), and then start again. A Russian record reports a wolf going without food for seventeen days, and it is commonly recorded that wolves may eat up to one-fifth of their body weight at one time.
The wolf’s diet consists mostly of muscle meat and fatty tissue from various animals. Heart, lung, liver, and other internal organs are eaten. Bones are crushed to get at the marrow, and bone fragments are eaten as well; even hair and skin are sometimes consumed. The only part consistently ignored is the stomach and its contents. Some vegetable matter is taken separately, particularly berries, but Canis lupus does not seem to digest them very well. The red wolf commonly consumes a higher proportion of vegetable matter and subsists on smaller game, like swamp rabbit, and such things as fiddler crabs. All wolves eat grass, possibly to scour the digestive tract and remove worms. Consisting mostly of cellulose, the grass itself is never digested.
Wolves consume an average of five to ten pounds of meat a day and wash it down with large quantities of water to prevent uremic poisoning from the high production of urea associated with a meat diet. The wolf has a large liver and pancreas to aid digestion, and the feces provide an interesting example of efficiency in its large intestine. Droppings in the wild typically consist of chips and slivers of bone neatly packaged along with such items as the rubbery remains of deer hooves in a capsule of hair that moves very smoothly down the colon.
The major sources of meat in the wolf’s diet are deer, moose, elk, musk ox, Dall sheep, Rocky Mountain sheep, caribou, reindeer, or beaver, depending on the area, the season, and the year—a good one or a bad one, say, for moose. Wolves also prey on buffalo (in Wood Buffalo National Park, Canada), snowshoe hares (on Ellesmere Island), flightless ducks (in the James Bay region of Canada), marmots, mice, squirrels, grouse, geese, and rabbits. Wolves fish, too, wade-herding salmon, arctic grayling, or whitefish into shallow pools where they’re trapped. They also mouth-spear them in swift water from the bank with well-timed lunges. They eat carrion and occasionally insects, especially when they encounter them in epidemic populations. And they feed on domestic stock. They hunt by intent but are opportunists, too.
Many studies indicate that wolves prey largely on the aged, the diseased, and the very young. While this is the norm, it is not always true. Wolves do take animals in their prime. And they kill in excess (though excessive kills are often made at the time of denning to ensure a supply of meat while the pack is denbound). In reality, they will likely kill, or try to kill, any animal that presents itself at a disadvantage. The important thing to bear in mind is that generally wolves do not overrun the prey population and kill it out, although they have been known to do so, just as they have, extraordinary as it seems, practiced a kind of fallow-field farming by not killing deer in certain parts of their territories for four or five years, letting the prey population recover there.
Surplus Killing
Wolves sometimes kill all out of proportion to their need for food. That this is also an eerie human trait is suggested by the behavior of buffalo hunters in the nineteenth century. Under peculiar circumstances, having to do with wind, perhaps—no one really knows—a herd of buffalo would remain placid while a hunter dropped animal after animal in its midst. The sight of blood and the bellowing of the wounded did nothing to disturb them. They remained oblivious until something—a gust of wind, the sight of so many carcasses—finally stampeded them. A hunter would commonly shoot until his gun barrel overheated and threatened to explode. The men who made such stands later recalled being absolutely mesmerized by the apparent oblivion, that the moment seemed utterly suspended. When the buffalo finally reacted, the almost mindless impulse to shoot abated immediately and a feeling of remorse overcame them.
In cases where wolf populations are small, or where the prey population is outstripping its food supply, wolves may kill indiscriminately across all age classes.
Just as some people would like to believe that wolves never hurt each other, so some would like to believe that wolves only kill animals that are doomed anyway—the old, the sick, the injured. But the pruning of herds attributed to predators like the wolf is, at best, crude. The question of which animals will die is also affected by severe winters, range deterioration, and human hunting, among other factors.
In a word, not enough is known.
The idea of wolves on the hunt powerfully engages the human imagination. The wolf spends perhaps one-third of his life in pursuit of food. It is a task for which he evolved and to which he is well suited. With powerful jaw muscles he will clamp down on a moose’s bulbous nose and hold on tenaciously while the moose swings him clear of the ground or stomps on him in a vain effort to throw him off. The wolf can course for miles behind fleeing game, and smell prey a couple of miles off. He has superb hearing and can read tracks as well.
Man admires the wolf’s prowess and indefatigable pursuit, but death itself—blood, gore, and the thought of a wounded animal bellowing in its death throes—makes human beings intensely uncomfortable. There have been people throughout history who would gladly have taken a stand for the preservation of the wolf if only they could have gotten over their own revulsion at the way wolves kill. They frequently could not abide the idea of a wolf killing a creature as “beautiful” as a deer. So the hunting down of prey species warrants careful attention here.
The wolf is a marvelous hunter. Whether we care for the act (or the smelling of anal glands or rolling in decaying meat) is moot—or should be. Wolves kill the largest ungulates by running alongside them, slashing at their hams, ripping at their flanks and abdomen, tearing at the nose and head, harassing the animal until it weakens enough through loss of blood and the severing of muscles to be thrown to the ground. At this point the wolves usually rip open the abdominal cavity and begin eating, sometimes before the animal is dead. If the chase has been a hard one, the wolves may rest before eating anything.
Stories of Teutonically organized raids, where some wolves act as decoys while others wait in ambush, create a sense of hypermilitary tactics, which is misleading. Wolves are intelligent hunters, not marauders. Stories of wolves shredding each other during an attack, like a cauldron of sharks in a bloody frenzy, are spurious. But the conjecture put forth to counteract a claim of stockmen, that wolves never kill beyond their needs, is also erroneous. Wolves do sometimes kill their natural prey in excess of their need for food.
During exceptionally heavy snows in Minnesota in 1969, wolves killed almost every foundering deer they came across, leaving many of them wholly uneaten. Hans Kruuk, a Dutch biologist, studied this phenomenon among foxes in England and hyenas in Africa and gave it a name—surplus killing. He believes that a specific sequence of events leads up to an animal’s death and shuts off the predator’s impulse to kill. If the sequence jams—if, say a rare meteorological event like unseasonably deep snows or an excessively dark night interferes, if game animals can’t, or won’t, flee—the predator just keeps killing.
For the wolf, take a moose as an example of prey. The sequence (as established by the wildlife biologist L. David Mech) runs: (1) Wolf senses moose and approaches (the stalk); (2) wolf and moose sense each other (the encounter); (3) wolf charges (the rush); and (4) moose runs (the chase).
But things do not always go this smoothly. A pack of wolves may catch scent of a moose yet ignore it. Wolves and moose may stare at each other intently—then the moose may just walk off. During a chase the moose may be surrounded, seemingly doomed, when suddenly one wolf will break off the chase in mid-stride and snap at the other wolves to drive them off—as though they had selected the wrong moose.
Out of the 160 moose that Mech saw from the air on Isle Royale and judged to be within range of hunting wolves:
29 were ignored,
11 discovered the wolves first and eluded detection,
24 refused to run when confronted and were left alone.
Of the 96 that ran:
43 got away immediately,
34 were surrounded but not harmed,
12 made successful defensive stands,
7 were attacked,
6 were killed,
1 was wounded and abandoned.
It would appear that the wolf is either inefficient or not very serious about killing moose. Or that more is going on than we understand.
There is a difference between the way wolves hunt moose and the way they hunt other animals—mice in meadows, Dall sheep on precipitous slopes, and caribou on featureless tundra. As the size of the prey increases, so does the skill and endurance required of the wolf (as well as the size of the pack) and the chance that he himself will be killed. Cursorial hunting of the moose requires a keen refinement of the wolf’s skills. And it is in such encounters with large animals that the nature of this hunter is most clearly revealed.
To illustrate, begin with a classic case that took place in Wood Buffalo National Park, Alberta, Canada, in 1951. Two buffalo bulls and two cows are lying in the grass ruminating. Three of them are in good health; one cow is lame. Wolves approach and withdraw a number of times, apparently put off by a human observer. At each approach, though, the lame cow becomes agitated and begins looking all around. Her three companions ignore the wolves. When one wolf comes within twenty-five feet, the lame cow gets up on shaking legs to face it alone. It seems clear that prey selection is something both animals play a role in.
Postmortem examination of moose and other large prey confirms a kind of selection. Wolves, as stated, take predominantly the very young, the old, and the injured and diseased—individuals the prey population can conveniently do without (due to senility, contagion, etc.), or ones doomed to imminent death anyway because of injury or parasitic infection. They are, after all, the easiest to catch. (It is often forgotten that wild animals like sheep, elk, moose, and deer suffer, sometimes miserably, from disease and injury, perhaps because most of us experience these animals in zoos where they are cared for. A Canadian biologist once observed a mule deer at the point of death, parasitized by an estimated seven hundred winter ticks. Moose parasitized by winter ticks leave a distinctive trail of bloody beds and showers of red on the white snow where they have shaken. Caribou can suffer terribly from warble flies and nostril flies, and moose are sometimes crippled by hydatid cysts in their lungs. Mech found one moose with fifty-seven of these golfball-sized cysts. Necrotic stomatitis, actinomycosis, and other bone and gum diseases and hoof infections are also prevalent among ungulates.)
Prey animals such as these apparently announce their poor condition to the wolf in the subtleties of a stance, a peculiarity of gait, a rankness of breath, or more obvious signs of physical incapacity, such as wounds, massive loss of hair, or visible infection. Wolves are alert to such nuances; further, by forcing a hunch, so to speak, by making a moose run or testing it, the wolf may realize that its lungs are impacted from the wheezing, labored breathing. It might know that the moose is not going to run very far before collapsing.
The testing of a prey species by a predator has been frequently observed in the field, especially among herd animals like caribou. It occurs so often as to be perfunctory. But hundreds of animals may be chased before a burst of speed brings one down, and the conclusion that some of these chases are not serious is at least plausible.
If the prey runs, it is almost certain to be chased. If it refuses to run, or approaches the wolves, it may be left alone. More signals, perhaps, between predator and prey.
Some animals apparently set themselves up (or are set up) to be killed because they feed or travel alone. Musk oxen, practically invulnerable to attack when standing in a defensive formation together, are easy prey for wolves once they are banished. (Among gregarious species, such lone animals living away from the herd tend to be old or sick or both.)
There’s a logic to all this. The injured, the aged, and the diseased have ways of announcing themselves and are subsequently removed. The young are cropped, which in turn controls the size of the population and perhaps eliminates inferior or maladaptive combinations of genes at the outset.
But there are elements of the wolf hunt that suggest there is more to it than the simple pathology of diseased prey, or behavior that might be triggered by flight and the wolfs need to eat. In fact, people make a rather curious assumption: that wolves look for moose just to kill them. Nunamiut Eskimos believe that during winter a healthy adult wolf can run down any caribou it chooses, but it doesn’t always do this for reasons known only to the wolf. And perhaps the caribou.
Wolves expend energy carefully, taking every advantage of terrain in chasing prey, moving cross-country in trails broken through deep snow by caribou, and sleeping during the hot hours at midday. When food was scarce one year in Minnesota because of a collapse of the deer population, wolves adapted by ranging far outside their territory for food and by resting a great deal, sleeping as much as twenty hours a day.
It has long been held that wolves use various strategies when hunting, though the data are not yet clear. On occasion they do employ what seems to be conscious strategy, sending out one or two animals to herd prey into an ambush. And they vary their tactics slightly to hunt each species of prey, adapting primarily to terrain and somewhat less to the sort of prey. They prefer to attack sheep from above. They may split up to skirt both sides of an island in a frozen lake and then precipitously flush caribou or deer driven toward the island’s tip. When antelope were abundant on the Great Plains, wolves reputedly lay low in the grass, switching their tails from side to side like metronomes to attract the curious animals close enough to jump them. And they apparently once herded buffalo onto lake ice where the huge animals lost their footing, a practice they still use to bring down elk.
Wolves hunt into the wind, and they quickly incorporate any new roads into their strategies, mostly to conserve energy and to facilitate ambushes. Wolves remain acutely conscious of their energy budgets, letting one wolf break trail in deep snow while the others follow in its footsteps, for example. An intriguing instance of this conservation of energy was observed by Robert Ahgook on March 21, 1970, on the tundra sixty-four miles northeast of Anaktuvuk Pass, Alaska. A lone wolf chased a single caribou for ten kilometers across hard-packed snow into an area of loose powder. Both animals slowed to a walk and then alternated running and walking for three kilometers, the wolf always adjusting to keep the distance between the caribou and itself constant. When the two animals emerged from the loose snow and headed down a slight incline, the wolf put on a burst of speed and brought the exhausted caribou down in a space of seventy meters.
Wolves may learn their territories well enough to take advantage of shortcuts and to know where they can drive prey into snow that will founder them; but these, like so many other observations, are being made to conform to a preconceived idea, namely, a single-minded strategy, and this could be a mistake.
Wolves halt chases for no apparent reason (to our human senses). One wolf may insist on attacking a certain individual while the rest of the pack expresses disinterest. A pack on the hunt may investigate tracks less than a minute old but pick up some subtle cue from them and not pursue.
There is no certain outcome after the prey is rushed. The chase may last only a few seconds, it may go on for miles, or it may carry on intermittently for days. With most large game successfully pursued, however, the pathology of death is similar: (1) Massive damage to the animal’s hips breaks its stride; (2) crushing and tearing cause bleeding and induce trauma; (3) harassment tires the animal; (4) disembowelment causes death. With large animals like moose, one wolf may grab the nose or head while the others undercut the animal and mob it to get it off its feet. Smaller animals like sheep, deer, and caribou can be ridden down by a single wolf and killed with a neck or head hold, which appears to suffocate them. In deep, crusted snow, a single wolf may kill a moose. An animal is rarely, if ever, hamstrung.
Once the prey is wounded and has taken its death stand, one or two wolves may harass it—make it exert itself, keep it bleeding—while the others rest, play tag, or otherwise demonstrate a lack of interest. The pack may even depart, leaving one or two animals on a death watch.
Again, once one is reduced to considering those animals that are actually killed, prey selection seems in retrospect very tidy. But this does not account for the animals that are not killed, which is an equally important issue.
One of the central questions about predators and their prey is why one animal is killed and not another. Why is one chosen and another, seemingly in every way as suitable, ignored? No one knows.
The most beguiling moment in the hunt is the first moment of the encounter. Wolves and prey may remain absolutely still while staring at each other. Immediately afterward, a moose may simply turn and walk away (as we saw); or the wolves may turn and run; or the wolves may charge and kill the animal in less than a minute. An intense stare is frequently used by wolves to communicate with each other, and wolves also tend to engage strangers—wolf and human—in stares. I think what transpires in those moments of staring is an exchange of information between predator and prey that either triggers a chase or defuses the hunt right there. I call this exchange the conversation of death, and at the risk of leaving the reader hanging will discuss it further in the next section on Indians where the idea is more comfortable. For the moment let me say simply there is good evidence that signals go back and forth, and there is some other evidence to support the idea of a conversation of death. One researcher found that by arranging his fur-rimmed parka hood in a certain way, he could spook caribou at will. His observations of hunting wolves indicated that wolves seriously intent on a chase approached caribou herds with lowered heads; he deduced that it was his similarity of appearance—head buried below shoulder line in his parka hood—that was putting the caribou to flight. Other researchers have sought additional clues and have speculated that prey selection may be based on an exchange of information between predator and prey, but attempts to support such speculation have fallen short. Wolf hunts are rarely seen, even by field researchers, and when they are the observer is usually in a plane or at such a distance that picking up nuances of behavior is difficult. The best that can be done in such cases is to examine tracks in the snow carefully and to check the carcass and try to put together what happened.
There are some other elements in the wolf hunt that are intriguing, worth noting. Douglas Pimlott mentions a “bystander phenomenon.” Two prey animals are pursued, and while wolves focus on one the other backtracks to watch its companion killed. Murie saw an eagle chase off a wolf that was engaged in a sheep stalk. Mech observed a “sure kill” from the air only to find when the site was examined from the ground that the prey animal had walked off.
The latter point should be well taken: in the past, it was assumed that wolves were basely motivated and bloodthirsty; then in an environmentally enlightened age, it was suddenly assumed that they were noble and wise. So, too, have we analyzed their hunting behavior in human terms, and none of it is worth more than the metaphor it’s couched in. This habit indeed may eventually lead us even further from an understanding of the animal. For my own part, I mean to suggest that there is more to a wolf hunt than killing. And that wolves are wolves, not men.
Before moving on to a discussion of territory, I would like to glance quickly at something else: caching. Wolves occasionally bury parts of a kill. In the Arctic, cold helps to preserve the meat; farther south, a covering of earth and duff keeps some potential raiders at bay. The wolf digs the hole with his paws and covers it by pushing with his nose, perhaps memorizing the smell. But caching is not a very efficient system. Field researchers think that other animals—eagles, weasels, foxes, wolverines—use wolf caches as often as wolves do. Foxes seem especially adept at locating wolf caches. Murie writes about a wolf that killed a Dall lamb and carried off part of the carcass. The ground was covered with enough snow for good tracking and Murie followed him, only to find that a fox had cut the trail ahead of him and was also following. In one place the wolf backtracked for fifteen yards, jumped off the trail eight feet to one side, then wandered about in several loops. At this point the fox tracks circled around as though the fox were confused. The wolf went on across some wet tundra, stepping deliberately into shallow puddles—to destroy his scent, Murie thought. After passing through some woods, he came to a creek, and there the trail ended. The fox sniffed around for the scent before, like Murie, he discovered the tracks downstream about fifteen yards. Three hundred yards and the wolf crossed the stream and drifted into the woods. There, beside a tree, was the cache. By the time Murie got there the fox had raided it and departed.
Such incidents, it seems to me, contribute to the sense of a community of creatures in the woods which we so often lack when we examine a single species.
What land actually constitutes a wolf pack’s territory is difficult to determine. Territories overlap; there are gaps between them; they are even abandoned. Tundra wolves don’t really have year-round territories. During the winter months they wander over vast areas of land in the wake of migrating caribou, centrally locating only during the denning season. Timber wolves, on the other hand, preying on species that migrate less or not at all, tend to have more recognizable territories. In an extreme case, such as on Isle Royale, where the packs are clearly defined and the landmass is exactly known, territories take on an artificial precision.
A given pack territory also changes size and shape with the season, shrinking or shifting a little during the denning period, for example. In winter the wolves may stay in one small area for weeks where a large number of deer have yarded up. Size of territory is also a function of prey density, as are the type of prey available and the number of wolves in a pack. Some wolves—loners—don’t seem to have any territories.
The problem here is not simply one of definition, but one of conceptualization. “Territory” is too frequently understood to mean something rigid and well defined, like a city block. Wolf territories are highly plastic, more or less so depending on factors already mentioned. And this idea, that there is a high probability that in a certain area you will find the members of a certain pack on a regular basis, is tenable. But we are not talking about well-delineated areas patrolled in an orderly fashion by paramilitary creatures—a notion spawned by confusing the idea of territory with the idea of private property.
Wolf territories are defined, albeit rather temporarily, by scent marking and by hunting activities. We get a sense of a territory’s boundaries from the way in which packs double back on themselves at various points in their wanderings. A pack at the edge of its territory might permit a wounded prey animal to escape if it flees across that border into another pack’s territory. A wolf pack is repelled by the fresh scent marks of a neighboring pack. The boundary is defined from both sides of the fence; that it is not an idea to be taken lightly is evidenced by the number of trespassing wolves that are killed.
Wolf packs, everything else being equal, occupy larger territories in the north than wolves in the timbered country in the south do. Game is denser in the south; those packs need less territory to secure the same amount of food. The sheer size of a wolf pack’s territory, therefore, is a relatively minor issue. More important are questions like these: Where do the lone wolves that leave packs every year go? Do they join other packs? If not, how—and where—do they define a new territory? Does a space of, say, 100 square miles suddenly open up? Which leads to the more interesting issue: How does an area where wolves are found absorb an increase in population if the loner is an unstable social entity (as he is) and the pack, as a rule, doesn’t accept strangers and, furthermore, presumably controls contiguous territories? The answer, since loners do indeed find a place to live, can only be that territories are organic and not necessarily exclusive.
The idea of territory is really not very exciting in itself. Its importance lies in the fact that it precipitates such things as interpack communication through scent marking, that as a sine qua non of existence it is a major influence on the control of the wolf population, and that to violate its boundaries can result in death—sometimes.
Wolves are elusive, secretive creatures. L. David Mech, who has been studying them in the wild for twenty years, has come upon only a dozen on the ground that he didn’t first see from an airplane or track down with the aid of a radio collar. Elusiveness is a defensive trait and it is conceivable that its function is to avoid detection by other wolves, so adjacent packs can overlap their territories and run little risk of fatally encountering each other. This would allow an area to “breathe” more easily as game populations fluctuated. It would also facilitate the movement of dispersing wolves.
It will be brought out in the next section that the world of the wolf and that of the Indian of North America and the Eskimo have certain things in common, but it might be mentioned here that the Pawnee and the Omaha Indians had an agreement to forget their traditional enmity and allow trespass in each other’s territory in order to facilitate pursuit of migrating herds of buffalo, on which both tribes depended for maintenance. Similarly, Plains Indians moved back and forth through the territories of other tribes on various errands and cultivated the quality of elusiveness to facilitate such movement. Boundaries traditionally ebbed and flowed, and an area left unused for a period of time might be occupied by a band from a neighboring tribe.
A wolf in search of territory runs the highest risk of encountering both hostile wolves and human beings. To take such risks you must, it seems to me, be intent on something important; and to do it successfully, you must be elusive.
Most territorial fights involve the resident pack and a lone individual, though packs may also fight each other. If the encounter is fatal, it is almost always fatal to the trespassers. Four wolves killed another wolf on June 25, 1970, in Mount McKinley National Park, and the incident was witnessed by three people. They saw a black male feeding on a caribou carcass when suddenly a single gray wolf appeared, followed at some distance by three other grays. The black wolf ran, but the first gray caught up with him and pulled him down. In seconds the other three had arrived and they all began biting the black wolf. The black wolf became submissive and the grays appeared to back off. Then the black jumped up and seemed to be trying to get away. The grays attacked again and did not stop until one gray had the black by the throat. The black raised his head once and then apparently died. The grays backed off, sniffed around the area, and left.
Whether this incident was triggered by the black wolf’s feeding on the caribou carcass or was simply a case of trespassing remains unclear.
There is a common belief among wolf biologists working in the field that wolves like to travel. I think they do, too, and think, further, that one reason for maintaining large territories is to have the space to travel freely and widely.
Much remains to be learned of how wolves relate to, learn about, and occupy space. Howling and scent marking are two ways they seem to have of assuring that a proper space exists between packs, thus tending to distribute food sources and ensure space for all concerned. But there are more intriguing ideas here. Research suggests that the wolves are capable of moving cross-country and intercepting herds of migrating animals that they cannot see when they set out—they appear to have an uncanny sense of where they’re going to be. They certainly seem to know when caribou are coming toward them well enough to move to favorite crossings (which they must remember from times before) and set up ambushes. I remember once coming on a pack of wolves in the Nelchina Basin in south-central Alaska. One of the animals shot from the air with a tranquilizer gun went down in heavy timber; to reach her we had to land the helicopter in a clearing and wade through hip-deep snow to where she lay. As we approached I noticed how healthy she looked. It was March, a lean time of year, but she had a good layer of fat along her back. She had been eating well. When I opened her mouth, I saw her canines had been worn down to nubs. She must have been eight or nine years old. What meat she was eating she was not herself killing, and among wolves animals that don’t contribute to the pack structure pass on. What did she contribute? As anthropomorphic as the notion was, I could not shake the idea that what she contributed was the experience of having done so many things. She was one, I thought, who knew where to go to find caribou.
Wolves are related in little-understood ways to animals they do not hunt. Some, like the coyote and lynx, move out of the immediate area when wolves move in. Others—the fox, the raven, the wolverine—feed off the carrion wolves provide. Wolves in turn take advantage of abandoned fox burrows and other creatures’ homes for their dens, raid fox caches, and feed on an occasional bear’s kill.
Wolves have a curious dependency on caribou to act as snowplows. It seems clear that tundra wolves do not follow caribou in winter solely to feed on them but because the herds open the way and pack the snow down. Wolves could not move through the deep snows of the northern forests without these highways. They also take advantage of moose trails in such snows.
The wolf seems to have few relationships with other animals that could be termed purely social, though he apparently takes pleasure in the company of ravens. The raven, with a range almost as extensive as the wolf’s, one that includes even the tundra, commonly follows hunting wolves to feed on the remains of a kill. In winter, when tracks are visible from the air, ravens will follow the trail of a wolf pack in hopes of finding a carcass. They roost in neighboring trees or hop about eating bloody snow while the wolves eat, approaching the carcass when the wolves have finished. But the relationship between the two is deeper than this, as is revealed in the following incident. A traveling pack stopped to rest and four or five ravens who were tagging along began to pester them. As Mech writes in The Wolf:
“The birds would dive at a wolf’s head or tail and the wolf would duck and then leap at them. Sometimes the ravens chased the wolves, flying just above their heads, and once, a raven waddled to a resting wolf, pecked at its tail, and jumped aside as the wolf snapped at it. When the wolf retaliated by stalking the raven, the bird allowed it within a foot before arising. Then it landed a few feet beyond the wolf, and repeated the prank.
The raven (Corvus corax), who may lead wolves to their prey, who certainly feeds on their kills. Raven tag, in which ravens pester napping wolves and are in turn chased, seems to be a mutually enjoyable game.
“It appears that the wolf and the raven have reached an adjustment in their relationships such that each creature is rewarded in some way by the presence of the other and that each is fully aware of the other’s capabilities. Both species are extremely social, so they must possess the psychological mechanisms necessary for forming social attachments. Perhaps in some way individuals of each species have included members of the other in their social group and have formed bonds with them.”
The wolf may have similar relationships with other creatures. People have heard loons and barred owls responding to wolf howls, and vice versa.
The wolf has few satisfactory meetings with bears. In most encounters wolves snap at the bear’s heels and lunge at his flanks to drive him away from a carcass or a pup, and the bear in turn swats at the wolves or tries to catch a wolf between his paws. In the end the most the wolves can hope to do is to herd a bear off in the right direction.
Wolves may kill a coyote and occasionally throttle a fox in a dispute over food. Meetings between dogs and wolves result in anything from swift death to lasting relationships. Wolves sometimes prey on dogs near villages as though they were domestic stock. (The set of steel nubs on a leather strap seen on dogs today is a gentler version of the spiked collar dogs once wore as protection against wolves.) Dispersing wolves and feral dogs may occasionally breed and establish hybrid packs. A common practice in captivity is to allow wolf pups to establish a bond with an older dog. The relationship gives humans an intermediary, and makes handling the wolves easier. Wolves will submit to dogs they have grown up with, no matter how small. I’ve seen a tame adult wolf act submissive before an eight-pound cairn terrier. As we shall see later, feral dogs preyed frequently on domestic stock, which precipitated massive retaliation—against wolves.
If one considers the ramifications, the wolf’s most important and dangerous relationship must be his relationship with man.
It is popularly believed that there is no written record of a healthy wolf ever having killed a person in North America. Those making the claim ignore Eskimos and Indians, who have been killed, and are careful to rule out rabid wolves. The latter have attacked people several times.
Ernest Thompson Seton believed that wolves attacked and killed people before the coming of the gun and poisons, especially during the winter months when food was scarce, and native American oral history supports him. To judge from all the stories that have been told, contacts between human beings and wolves were more frequent before the massive antipredator campaigns of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Whether more people were attacked under these circumstances remains a matter of conjecture. In evolutionary terms, of course, wolves and men developed along similar lines as social hunters and were in competition for the same game. Undoubtedly there were encounters in prehistoric times that resulted in death, but that is going pretty far back.
Reports from Russia and Europe of wolves preying on human beings are more numerous than those from North America and there is probably some truth to them. I see no reason why under the right circumstances—a desperately hungry wolf and an unarmed man, for instance—the wolf wouldn’t kill.
In a book called Adventures in Error, Vilhjalmer Stefansson recalls his efforts to track down virtually every report of a wolf killing a human being between 1923 and 1936. Reports from the Caucasus, the Near East, Canada, and Alaska all proved to be either fiction or gross exaggeration. Furthermore, Stefansson could not substantiate a single report of wolves traveling in packs larger than about thirty. In 1945 it was reported that no incident of wolf attack brought to the attention of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service in the preceding twenty-five years could be substantiated. The late James Curran, editor of the Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario, Daily Star, put up a standing offer of $100 for anyone who could document a wolf attack on a human being. The reward went uncollected for years and lapsed with his death. It should be noted that there are more wolves in southern Ontario than anywhere else in Canada and that there is probably a greater likelihood of a person encountering one there in the region of Algonquin Provincial Park than perhaps anywhere else in the world.
C. H. D. Clarke, a Canadian naturalist, is responsible for bringing to English readers the story of the “beasts of Gévaudan.” These two animals between them killed at least sixty-four people, maybe as many as one hundred, in the Cevennes Mountains of south-central France between June 30, 1764, and June 19, 1767. The majority of the victims were small children.
The creatures were hunted down by a succession of small armies, all of whom failed until the job was finally done by a gentleman in his sixties called Antoine de Bauterne. The male of the ravening pair was killed on September 21, 1766. He weighed 130 pounds, stood 32 inches at the shoulder, and measured 5 feet, 7 inches from nose to tail. By European standards, compared to other specimens of European wolf, he was enormous. The female, somewhat smaller, was killed nine months later.
In July 1833 a rabid white wolf wandered into two separate camps on the upper Green River in western Wyoming and attacked a number of people. Thirteen of those bitten—mountain men, traders, and Indians—died. In 1926 a rabid wolf drifted through Churchill, Manitoba. The incident, grossly exaggerated by the press, was made to sound like a siege. The wolf was run over by a car and bit no one, but in the confusion six dogs and an Indian were shot.
Clarke reviewed most of the literature bearing on human predation in southern and central Europe, and in central Asia (where the majority of stories originated) and concluded that almost every report of a wolf attacking a human being could be attributed to a rabid animal or a hybrid. The Gévaudan wolves were of such size and were so oddly colored, Clarke believed, that they must have been wolf-dog hybrids. Wolf-dog hybrids are sometimes larger than either parent and are far more likely, too, to prey on children and livestock and would probably fear men less.
Between 1740 and 1773, about two thousand wolves were killed in the region of Gévaudan, mostly in attempts to kill the Gévaudan pair.
It is the fashion today to dismiss rather glibly accounts of wolves preying on human beings. However, I think it would be foolish to maintain that no healthy wolf ever did so, or that wolves were unable to size up human beings like any other sort of domestic stock and see whether in lean times taking such a creature was worth the risk. I am sure they can. The problem is one of setting things in perspective. How many tens of thousands of encounters between wolves and unarmed individuals have passed without incident? The reality seems to be that such events are incredibly rare nowadays, in spite of stories that continue to surface even in the New York Times, reporting wolves descending on peasant villages in blizzards in search of human food.
While the wolf preyed rarely on man, man clearly preyed excessively on the wolf and it may be appropriate to close this chapter on the behavior and ecology of the wolf with a mention of how that predilection has affected science.
The late Adolph Murie, the first person seriously to undertake a study of the wolf, began his work in Alaska in the spring of 1939 as a game biologist in Mount McKinley National Park. It was an enormous undertaking in an age when aerial observation and radio telemetry were not available. Murie walked more than seventeen hundred miles in the six months before September 1939, examining the remains of wolf kills and observing wolves away from their dens. He returned the next year, and finished his work in the summer of 1941. The results were published by the U.S. Government Printing Office in 1944 under the title The Wolves of Mount McKinley. The work is a classic.
Murie was working in Mount McKinley National Park at a time when outside pressure was being brought to destroy the wolves inside its boundaries in order to protect game herds. He alludes to instances in which wolves were killed and twice makes reference to wolf dens that were raided for pups. He remarks, rather stoically, “When a den is discovered the young are destroyed and all opportunity for making further observation is lost.” This in a national park where the wildlife was supposedly protected.
Thirty years later L. David Mech, also a veteran of hundreds of miles of hiking on Isle Royale and in Minnesota, and innumerable hours in foul weather in a tiny observation plane or in the back of pickup trucks listening for signals from radio-collared wolves, was confronted with similar problems. Seventeen of his radio-collared wolves were killed by human beings. In northern Michigan an experiment to establish transplanted wolves into old range where there was sufficient wild food for them came to an inconclusive end when all four animals, each wearing a plainly visible radio collar, were killed. Erkki Pulliainen’s research in Finland reached a state of limbo in 1975 when the last wolf was killed there. In 1976 the state of Alaska, under pressure from hunters to reduce its wolf population, deliberately shot the radio-collared wolves in one of its own studies.
The miracle is that in such a climate of human hatred, misunderstanding, and harassment wildlife biologists have managed to bring the wolf out of the darkness of superstition at all.
In a paper presented at a conference on wolves held in Maryland in 1966, it was suggested that more could be learned about the origins of man as a social animal by studying the social structure of wolf packs than could be learned by studying primates. The suggestion was prophetic. I write now in a country and at a time when man’s own brutal nature is cause for concern and when the wolf, whom man has historically accused of craven savagery, has begun to emerge as a benign creature.