DURING THE TIME I was researching this book, my wife and I raised two hybrid red wolves at our home in the woods in Oregon. These two wolves, Prairie and River, triggered many of the perceptions in this book and it was my association with them that first alerted me to the possibility of human error in the judgment of animals.
I am wary of situations in which wild animals are penned for the sake of human analysis. And yet I cannot deny that this experience, our experience, was extraordinary. It opened my eyes to my own human biases, to the gaps in my formal education with regard to animals, and to my own capacity for pity, anger, and a sense of helplessness where wild animals are concerned.
I would like in this epilogue to share some of these episodes. I don’t think they belong in the foregoing chapters because, strictly speaking, they amount to little more than the author’s experiences with his pets. But, with some clarification of my point of view, they have a place here.
I am not an authority on wolves. I do not think my experiences are universal, and I do not wish to encourage other people to raise wolves. Wolves don’t belong living with people. It’s as simple as that. Having done it once, naïvely, I would never do it again. Most people I know who have raised wolves feel the same way. All too often the wolf’s life ends tragically and its potential for growth while it lives is smothered. I am grateful for the knowledge I have gained but if I’d known what it would cost I don’t think I would have asked.
Prairie and River came to us from a wildlife park through the intervention of a friend and were three weeks old when they arrived. We bottle-fed them and, as is usually the case with young wolves, or dogs, they were intensely interested in everything around them. Canines use their mouths, I think, in much the same way we use our hands, especially when they are young. They are not trying to eat everything they encounter, they are simply trying to get a feeling for whatever it is. And the wolves felt everything. By the time they were six weeks old we had anything we valued stored three feet off the floor.
In these first few weeks, Prairie and River howled mournfully, perhaps sensing their parents’ distance or their isolation from others like themselves. They ate ravenously and seemed always to be at one of two extremes: sleeping, sprawled like beanbags in the middle of the floor, or tearing through the house in pursuit of each other or imaginary beings. When they were seven weeks old they had a single, short, bloody fight during which the female, Prairie, got the best of the male, River. We never saw another fight as serious, though which animal usually deferred to the other afterward changed several times.
They never tried to harm us when they were puppies (or later), though they jerked at our hair hard enough almost to wrench it from our skulls, and they would scratch us inadvertently with their claws and sharp milk teeth. And though we were not afraid of them when they got larger, they occasionally tried the imaginations of our friends with their antics. One day a woman left her infant son on a blanket on our living-room floor and turned her back to talk with us. Behind her were the wolves, whose hiding place was under the wood stove. The pups came out into the open (overcoming their fear of a strange adult), anxious to get a closer look at the baby, a living creature (I was thinking they were thinking) close to their own size and, more importantly, one who also lived in that twelve-inch-high zone next to the floor where they lived.
With great hesitancy, ready to flee at the first sign of discovery, jabbing the air nervously, high and low, for some clue to the creature, they finally got up to the edge of the baby’s blanket. Anxious to draw the baby into their world but still afraid of the adult whose back was turned only inches away, they took an obvious but frightening step—they took hold of the baby’s blanket and began pulling him away. At that moment the mother turned around and the surprised wolves—scrambling frantically for traction on the hardwood floor—bolted for their hideout under the wood stove.
Another time, when they were about a year old, Prairie and River “attacked” Sandy, my wife. We had had friends to dinner and we wanted them to see the wolves before they left. It was very late, so we took a flashlight and led them out through the woods. The wolves had been asleep but they jumped up as we drew near. We were at the fence for only a few minutes, sweeping the flashlight around their pen, before we said good night to our friends and they departed.
I felt guilty about waking the wolves up, about invading their privacy. I wouldn’t wake a child up for friends to see in the middle of the night. Sandy and I exchanged some thoughts about this and she went back to the pen without the flashlight. I went into the house. As she entered the pen the wolves immediately began to push her around, slamming against her with their bodies and soft-biting her arms and legs. They were fast enough and strong enough, of course, to have hurt her seriously, but they didn’t. Our intuitive feeling was that they were angry. Other people who have worked with wolves in enclosures have had similar experiences. It is almost as if the animals were warning you of the limits of friendship. What makes the message so strong, of course, is that it’s coming from an animal that can kill you.
Although I am familiar with wild country, I learned, I think, several remarkable things simply by walking in the woods with River and Prairie and paying attention to what they did. We took them out on leashes. They often sought out ridges, high on the slopes of the mountain valley where we lived. I assumed at first that it was for the view but later it seemed it was for another reason as well. Here the air currents that moved strongly upslope in the afternoon reached them intact, not broken up, with the olfactory information they carried scattered, as happened when the winds blew through the trees.
The wolves moved deftly and silently in the woods and in trying to imitate them I came to walk more quietly and to freeze at the sign of slight movement. At first this imitation gave me no advantage, but after several weeks I realized I was becoming far more attuned to the environment we moved through. I heard more, for one thing, and, my senses now constantly alert, I occasionally saw a deer mouse or a grouse before they did. I also learned the several thousand acres we walked in well enough to find my way around in the dark. I never moved as quietly, or with the grace that they did, not with my upright stance and long limbs that caused my body to become entangled, and the ninety-degree angle at my ankle that caused my feet to catch. But I took from them the confidence to believe I could attune myself better to the woods by behaving as they did—minutely inspecting certain things, seeking vantage points, always sniffing at the air. I did, and felt vigorous, charged with alertness.
They moved always, it seemed one day, in search of clues.
After these experiences, when I came in contact with Eskimo perceptions of the wolf I was much quicker to understand that the Eskimo “sees” differently from the way I see, and that I would likely never see as well in the wild as the Eskimo did, any more than I would ever see as well in the woods one day as Prairie and River.
There were moments of pain and embarrassment with the wolves, times when we sensed how awful the pen must have been for them, as large as it was. The smoke from a slash fire at a logging site would drift through. They would sense fire but have nowhere to run. Deer would appear, and the wolves would race excitedly up and down, looking for a way out. A loose board would make a banging noise in a storm and terrify them. There were other incidents, though, ones that could almost make up for these. To see them leaping for falling leaves in October. To sleep with them in the pen at night and feel them drifting by, just brushing your fingertips with their fur.
I would often sit out in the woods next to the pen on sunny afternoons, reading and making notes. I enjoyed being around them.
One summer day, when the wolves were a little more than two years old, someone let them out. We never found out who. I think it must have been someone who believed all wild animals should be free but who did not know that wild animals raised in captivity are no longer wild. River was shot and killed by a man who told us later he wasn’t sure what kind of animals they were but they looked wild and were trying to play with his neighbor’s dogs, so he thought they might be rabid. With River lying there dead, Prairie bolted for the deep woods. The next day, when we got home (we were away at a funeral), she responded to Sandy’s howling and came to her, lay down at her feet, trembling and disoriented.
Prairie’s depression and disorientation lasted for weeks, long enough for us to consider putting her to sleep. Finally, with the aid of a young dog who befriended and supported her, she came around.
We buried River. While I was digging the grave I thought of all the wolves I had met and how many of those were dead. Killed by other wolves in pens that did not let an ostracized animal escape. Killed in scientific experiments. Poisoned by people who hated wolves. Shot by neighbors who feared them. Wolf pups that had been killed by animal caretakers because there were simply too many to be fed and housed, and no one had taken the responsibility to isolate the sexes when the females were in estrus. Killed by people who professed a love for wolves but who, because the wolf puppies wouldn’t housebreak like dogs, or because they didn’t look royal blooded enough after losing an ear or the tip of a tail in a fight, didn’t want them around.
I didn’t know what to say to the man who killed River. I didn’t know what to say to River. I just stood there in an afternoon rain trying to remember what I’d learned in his presence.
I think, as the twentieth century comes to a close, that we are coming to an understanding of animals different from the one that has guided us for the past three hundred years. We have begun to see again, as our primitive ancestors did, that animals are neither imperfect imitations of men nor machines that can be described entirely in terms of endocrine secretions and neural impulses. Like us, they are genetically variable, and both the species and the individual are capable of unprecedented behavior. They are like us in the sense that we can figuratively talk of them as beings some of whose forms, movements, activities, and social organizations are analogous, but they are no more literally like us than are trees. To paraphrase Henry Beston, they move in another universe, as complete as we are, both of us caught at a moment in mid-evolution.
I do not think it possible to define completely the sort of animals men require in order to live. They are always changing and are different for different peoples. Nor do I think it possible that science can by itself produce the animal entire. The range of the human mind, the scale and depth of the metaphors the mind is capable of manufacturing as it grapples with the universe, stand in stunning contrast to the belief that there is only one reality, which is man’s, or worse, that only one culture among the many on earth possesses the truth.
To allow mystery, which is to say to yourself, “There could be more, there could be things we don’t understand,” is not to damn knowledge. It is to take a wider view. It is to permit yourself an extraordinary freedom: someone else does not have to be wrong in order that you may be right.
In the Western world, in the biological sciences, we have an extraordinary tool for discovery of knowledge about animals, together with a system for its classification; and through the existence of journals and libraries we have a system for its dissemination. But if we are going to learn more about animals—real knowledge, not more facts—we are going to have to get out into the woods. We are going to have to pay more attention to free-ranging as opposed to penned animals, which will require an unfamiliar patience. And we are going to have to find ways in which single, startling incidents in animal behavior, now discarded in the winnowing process of science’s data assembly, can be preserved, can somehow be incorporated. And we are going to have to find a way, not necessarily to esteem, but at least not to despise intuition in the scientific process, for it is, as Kepler and Darwin and Einstein have said, the key.
The English philosopher Alfred North Whitehead, writing about human inquiry into the nature of the universe, said that in simply discussing the issues, the merest hint of dogmatic certainty is an exhibition of folly. This tolerance for mystery invigorates the imagination; and it is the imagination that gives shape to the universe.
The appreciation of the separate realities enjoyed by other organisms is not only no threat to our own reality, but the root of a fundamental joy. I learned from River that I was a human being and that he was a wolf and that we were different. I valued him as a creature, but he did not have to be what I imagined he was. It is with this freedom from dogma, I think, that the meaning of the words “the celebration of life” becomes clear.