I AM IN A SMALL cabin outside Fairbanks, Alaska, as I write these words. The cold sits down like iron here, and the long hours of winter darkness cause us to leave a light on most of the day. Outside, at thirty below, wood for the stove literally pops apart at the touch of the ax. I can see out across the short timber of the taiga when I am out there in the gray daylight.
Go out there.
Traveling for hours cross-country you see only a few animal tracks. Perhaps a single ptarmigan or a hare. Once in a while the tracks of a moose. In the dead of winter hardly anything moves. It’s very hard to make a living. Yet the wolf eats. He hunts in the darkness. And stays warm. He gets on out there.
The cabin where I am writing sits a few miles north of the city, in Goldstream Valley. This valley came briefly into the news a few years ago when wolves killed a lot of domestic dogs here. Goldstream Valley is lightly settled and lies on the edge of active wolf range, and that winter wolves got into the habit of visiting homes and killing pet dogs. A dog owner wouldn’t hear a sound but the barking and growling of his dog. Then silence. He would pass a flashlight beam through the darkness and see nothing. In the morning he would find the dog’s collar or a few of its bones stripped of meat. The wolves would have left behind little else but their enormous footprints in the snow.
After the wolves killed about twenty dogs like this, a petition turned up in local stores. Sign one sheet and it meant you wanted the Alaska Department of Fish and Game to kill the wolves. Sign another and it meant you didn’t. The plan was defeated, five to one, and the Department of Fish and Game, for its part, declined to get involved. Some residents set out poisoned meat and steel traps on their own. The wolves went on killing dogs until spring, when the toll was something like forty-two.
When it was over some biologists, pressed for an explanation, told residents it had been a hard winter, that wolves had simply turned to dogs for food. Athabascan Indians living in Fairbanks said with a grin that that might be true—they didn’t know—but wolves just naturally hate dogs, and that’s all it had been about. The owner of a sled-dog team argued that the wolf was a born killer, like the wolverine and the weasel. Some creatures God put on earth to help man, he said, and others to hinder him, and the wolf was a hinderer.
The dog-killing incident in Goldstream Valley brings together the principal threads in this book. What wolves do excites men and precipitates strong emotions, especially if men feel their lives or the lives of their domestic animals are threatened. Explanations for the wolf’s behavior are rampant. Biologists turn to data. Eskimos and Indians accept natural explanations but also take a wider view, that some things are inexplicable except through the metaphorical language of legend. The owner of a dog team is more righteously concerned with the safety of his animals than with understanding what motivates wolves. And everyone believes to some degree that wolves howl at the moon, or weigh two hundred pounds, or travel in packs of fifty, or are driven crazy by the smell of blood.
None of this is true. The truth is we know little about the wolf. What we know a good deal more about is what we imagine the wolf to be.
Alaska is the last North American stronghold of the wolf. With Eskimos and Indians here, with field biologists working on wolf studies, with a suburban population in Fairbanks wary of wolves on winter nights, with environmentalists pushing for protection, there is a great mix of opinion. The astounding thing is that, in large part, it is only opinion. Even biologists acknowledge that there are things about wolves and wolf behavior you just have to guess at.
Let’s say there are 8,000 wolves in Alaska. Multiplying by 365, that’s about 3 million wolf-days of activity a year. Researchers may see something like 75 different wolves over a period of 25 or 30 hours. That’s about 90 wolf-days. Observed behavior amounts to about three one-thousandths of 1 percent of wolf behavior. The deductions made from such observations represent good guesses, and indicate how incomplete is our sense of worlds outside our own.
Wolves are extraordinary animals. In the winter of 1976 an aerial hunter surprised ten gray wolves traveling on a ridge in the Alaska Range. There was nowhere for the animals to escape to and the gunner shot nine quickly. The tenth had broken for the tip of a spur running off the ridge. The hunter knew the spur ended at an abrupt vertical drop of about three hundred feet and he followed, curious to see what the wolf would do. Without hesitation the wolf sailed off the spur, fell the three hundred feet into a snowbank, and came up running in an explosion of powder.
The Nunamiut Eskimo of the central Brooks Range speak of wolves as hunters something like themselves. They believe that wolves know where they are going when they set out to find caribou, and that perhaps wolves learn from the behavior of ravens where caribou might be. They believe certain wolves in a pack never kill, while others in the pack specialize in killing small game. Always, to requests for generalizations, they say that each wolf is a little different, that new things are always seen. If someone says big males always lead the pack and do the killing, the Eskimo shrug and say, “Maybe. Sometimes.”
Wolves vary their hunting techniques, share food with the old who do not hunt, and give gifts to each other. They can live for a week without food and travel twenty miles without breaking stride. They have three systems of communication—vocal, postural, and olfactory. Their pelages range from slate blue to almost pure white, through chocolate brown, ocher, cinnamon, gray, and blond. And like primates they spend a good part of their time with their young and playing with each other. I once saw a wolf on the tundra winging a piece of caribou hide around like a Frisbee for an hour by himself.
You can look at a gray wolf standing in the snow in winter twilight and not see him at all. You may think I’m pulling your leg—I’m not. Sometimes even the Eskimos can’t see them, which causes the Eskimos to smile.
Perhaps you already know some of these things, or have heard that wolves, especially in the time before the responsibility of hunting is upon them, chase through caribou herds for the fun of it. In the past twenty years biologists have given us a new wolf, one separated from folklore. But they have not found the whole truth. For example, wolves do not kill just the old, the weak, and the injured. They also kill animals in the prime of health. And they don’t always kill just what they need; they sometimes kill in excess. And wolves kill each other. The reasons for these acts are not clear. No one—not biologists, not Eskimos, not backwoods hunters, not naturalist writers—knows why wolves do what they do.
The wolf exerts a powerful influence on the human imagination. It takes your stare and turns it back on you. (The Bella Coola Indians believed that someone once tried to change all the animals into men but succeeded in making human only the eyes of the wolf.) People suddenly want to explain the feelings that come over them when confronted with that stare—their fear, their hatred, their respect, their curiosity. Wolf-haters want to say they are born killers, which isn’t true. Wolf-lovers want to say no healthy wolf ever killed anyone in North America, which isn’t true either. They have killed Indians and Eskimos.
Everything we have been told about wolves in the past should have been said, I think, with more care, with the preface that it is only a perception in a particular set of circumstances, that in the end it is only an opinion.
To be rigorous about wolves—you might as well expect rigor of clouds.
I have looked for a wolf different from that ordinarily given us in the course of learning about animals. I have watched captive wolves in Barrow, Alaska; in Saint Louis, and in Nova Scotia. I drove across the Dakotas and Montana and Wyoming, speaking with old men who killed wolves for a living when they were young. In New York I read in libraries like the Pierpont Morgan what men thought of wolves hundreds of years ago. I read in the archives of historical societies of outlaw wolves and Indians. I went out with field biologists in Minnesota and Alaska and spoke with Eskimos. I spoke with people who loved wolves and with people who hated them.
I remember sitting in this cabin in Alaska one evening reading over the notes of all these encounters, and recalling Joseph Campbell, who wrote in the conclusion to Primitive Mythology that men do not discover their gods, they create them. So do they also, I thought, looking at the notes before me, create their animals.