A Million Years with You (34 page)

 

Often events with animals appear to be minor, as the event with Cuneo might seem—tigers got up on their shelves, they looked at some men, they got back down—but in fact such events can be revealing, especially about the animals' minds. At the time I had four parrots, among them an African grey parrot named Pilgrim. One day I was giving them grapes to eat, and as I'd hand each parrot a grape I'd say, “For you.” When I got to Pilgrim, he said, “For me.” That might at first seem insignificant, but I was shocked. Pilgrim had never been taught to speak. He had figured out for himself which pronoun to use by listening to people. What did it say about his thoughts? If nothing else, it said that he valued communication.

People aren't very good at cross-species messaging. Perhaps I could sound like a tiger, and I also knew what
aaaaong
meant, probably because tigers and people are not that far apart on the evolutionary tree. But 200 million years have passed since we shared an ancestor with birds. I can't deduce what a parrot's call means, nor can I reproduce it. I'm not proud to say this, but to me their calls are just different forms of screaming. Pilgrim was way ahead of me.

I then remembered the tigers and John Cuneo, and wondered if they acquired their awe of him from watching people, perhaps noticing respectful behavior and speech on the part of his employees on the rare occasions when he came to the barns. That's just a guess, and not a very good one, because the trainers and the keepers were also respectful of me. Perhaps tigers can read minds or have ESP. Animals are sometimes credited with this ability, but proof is lacking. Whatever the tigers perceived about Cuneo would have been subtle, but then, most animals are significantly better at observation than is our reductive species in its present state. But if observation is your major tool for gathering information, you'd better be good at it. The tigers were all of that.

 

If one watches animals often enough and long enough, one sees some unexpected things, especially from the cat family. Once in Namibia I came upon two lionesses who had killed a female wildebeest but were not eating. Instead, they were resting. The day was hot, and to bring down a wildebeest must have been tiring. After a very long time, one lioness got up, trudged over to the corpse, lay down beside it, and began to eat at the belly. The wildebeest had been about to give birth. When the lioness opened the belly the fetus fell forward. The lioness cleaned the caul from its face, then cut the umbilical cord and licked and nudged the fetus as if to start it breathing, just as she would if birthing her own cubs. But the fetal wildebeest was dead, which the lioness soon realized. So she ate it.

I'm sure her behavior was caused by hard-wiring, which I've always admired in cats, but I would not have expected anything like what that lioness did. Cats also have a prodigious amount of original, independent thought, which leads them to do other kinds of unexpected things, sometimes in response to practical situations as Cuneo's tigers were doing, but sometimes not.

I think of another lion, a male this time, whom I saw after Katy completed her study of the elephants in the Portland zoo and took her project, myself included, to Etosha Park in Namibia. There she studied the calls of wild elephants.

Several herds of elephants drank from a certain water source, usually assembling at about the same time every evening, vocalizing as they came. Not far from the water, Katy and Bill built a high observation platform from which to observe and record them.

Late one afternoon, Katy and I were on the platform waiting for the elephants to show up when the lion in question came from the east and lay down near us on a rise of ground. Many animals, especially the large ones, don't bother to look up (which is why deer hunters use tree stands), so I think the lion didn't see us. But if he did, he wasn't interested. Propped on his elbows with his head raised, he fixed his eyes on the western horizon. The sun was setting. Not long before it touched the horizon, he roared. A moment later, he roared again. Many times he did this, never taking his eyes off the western sky, roaring and waiting, roaring and waiting, until the sun went under. Evidently that's what he had come to do. When the last red bit of the sun disappeared, he got to his feet, turned around, and walked away to the east.

What had we seen? Mostly lions roar for the benefit of other lions, who answer. But that evening no one answered. Lions also roar at other species, as a pride of them once did in the Kalahari when we, with some of the Ju/wasi, camped at a place which the local lions owned. They came in a group—probably the entire pride—and they all roared together for a very long time, several lions taking up the roar when other lions ran out of breath, so the horrifying sound was continuous. Lions can't speak? Wittgenstein should have been there. And we can't understand them? They were doing what lions do to keep other lions off their land. They were saying the place was theirs and their group was so large and powerful that together they could make one continuous, deafening roar that lasted for half an hour, so we had better not think of moving in. We got the picture.

But that wasn't why the Etosha lion roared. So who was he, and why had he come alone to roar at the setting sun? He was mature, perhaps quite old. When he wandered off he went rather slowly, as if he had no immediate plans or special destination. He seemed lonely. It came to me that he did not belong to a pride, which would not have been unusual. Sooner or later, most older male lions are evicted from their prides by younger males. Thus wherever lions live, their population has aging, solitary males who live alone for the rest of their lives. And because they don't have much involvement with other lions they have plenty of time to think. The possibilities of what that lion might have been thinking are almost endless, and all are spine-chilling.

The lion wasn't the only animal who cared about the sun. When we lived in Cambridge, I saw something similar when a friend who owned two wolves came to visit us. The friend stayed in our house and the two wolves stayed in his van, which was parked in the street. Every morning before dawn the wolves would stand, heads together, in the van's east-facing window, where they would wait for the sun to rise. When its first red flames came into view, they would start to sing a song in two parts, which they would continue until the entire sun was above the horizon. Then they would stop. But they did this only if they actually saw the sun. If the sky was cloudy, they would not sing. They did this every morning, said their owner, singing if they saw the sun, not singing if they didn't. Why they did this is unknown, but again, the possibilities are spine- chilling.

 

It then became my great privilege to watch wild wolves on Baffin Island. I went there with four graduate students who, with Dr. Douglass Pimlott, director of environmental studies at the University of Toronto, had been studying the Baffin Island wolves for years. But by the time I went, Dr. Pimlott had handed the research over to his graduate students, and they were there to determine the size of the caribou population, so the wolves were left to me. As I think about them now, I realize that they were not the kind of wolves who would sing at a rising sun. That's the kind of thing a person might do if his basic needs were met and he had time to think expansively. The wolves of Baffin had too much to do and they lived in the moment, hunting most of the time, alert for every rustle of grass that might indicate a lemming. They slept when they weren't hunting.

We went to Frobisher Bay, now called Iqaluit, on a regular Air Canada flight, and there we boarded a military DC-3 of World War II vintage, bound for a DEW Line station farther north. The age of the plane was discouraging, as were the fumes rising from a dozen or so barrels of gasoline that were crowded around us, but before takeoff we were reassured by the pilot. Despite the fumes, he lit a cigarette, and dangling it from his lips because the plane was taking off and his hands were busy, he told us that any DC-3 that was going to crash had crashed already. A spark fell from the cigarette as he spoke.

Oh well. We got there. From the station we walked about seventy miles across the tundra to the place where the wolves were denning. We didn't bother to make camps on the way—we simply lay down and slept. This was in July so there was no night. The sky wasn't telling us what to do. We slept when we got tired.

Just as we arrived, two white wolves came trotting around a hill and saw us. One was an adult, who increased her pace and disappeared over a ridge between two distant hills, but the other was a juvenile, and he kept right on trotting as before, doing exactly what the Ju/wasi had told us do in the presence of a predator—don't run, just move away in a moderate manner at an oblique angle. The young wolf did this beautifully until he came near the nest of a jaeger, who repeatedly dove down and bit him. She tore out tufts of his fur, but rather than spoil his facade of unconcern, he pretended to know nothing about her until he was far enough from us to leap up and grab her tail. He pulled out a feather. The jaeger shrieked and flew higher and the young wolf ran away at full speed.

Later we heard a wolf howling. One of the graduate students said that the adult wolf who had seen us was calling the rest of her pack. I don't remember his words exactly, but I gathered that the wolf would communicate to the others that something bad was near the den so they all would have to move. No one knew how she did it, but that is exactly what happened. Later we heard all the wolves howling. They had gathered at the den they were about to leave. Why they were howling at that point wasn't clear, but wolves are like people in that they sometimes sing before taking important actions. For us, this might be going into battle or competing in a team sport. Perhaps it strengthens their unity.

My colleagues knew from past visits that these wolves had four dens. If things went wrong near one, the wolves could move to another. We soon went to look at the nearby den, but the wolves had gone already, taking the pups. The graduate students camped nearby because they had camped there on earlier visits and their task was to count caribou, not to watch the wolves. But one of them took time to show me the way to another den, several miles from the first. We found a fresh wolf scat near it, and although no wolf was in sight, the graduate student thought we were at the right place. The next day we set a date for me to rejoin the others, then he returned to their camp and I was alone.

I had a backpacker's tent and set it up. But I wasn't there for long before I thought I had a problem. Here's a letter I wrote to Steve (but had no way to mail it).

 

A big storm has blown up from Greenland which is where the weather comes from. I saw ice crystals around the sun and said uh-oh and decided to walk out. But then, since I'm not expected until August 4, I decided to stay. And then I found a little cave! Not a breath of wind in it, though it must be 50 mph outside. I made a little fireplace, put in a huge bed of heather, put in a good supply of heather for fuel, put all my food and things in nice little cracks in the rock. I am so nice and warm, so optimistic and happy. I could survive a winter storm.

 

Since at first we saw no wolves, I'm not sure why the graduate student was confident that we were at the right den. Maybe he was guessing, or maybe I was lucky, but the wolves were there, no question. After the grad student left, I scanned the surrounding hills with my binoculars, never doubting that I was in the right place, and after several hours I saw a wolf approaching. She trotted up the hill toward the den. Then all of a sudden seven little pups came bursting out and ran to her, crowding around her face and licking the corners of her mouth. She lowered her head and vomited up some partly chewed meat. They bolted it and begged for more. She sniffed each of them quickly, perhaps to learn how they were doing, and then she lay down on her side, loosened her thigh, and let them nurse. Evidently she was the mother.

I guessed that the pups were perhaps five weeks old. Their ears were still floppy and their fur was gray-brown, the color of the earth, unlike the adult wolves, white and conspicuous on the green summer tundra. Other wild canids are also earth-colored as infants. So are some domestic dogs, who change to the breed-appropriate color when they grow up. Earth color seems standard for puppies of the dog family.

The pups nursed hungrily but not for long. Soon enough their mom stood up and jumped to the top of a nearby boulder, where, out of reach of the pups, she lay down to sleep. The pups stood below, looking up at her, but when they accepted the fact that she was finished with them for the time being, they went back in the den. After many hours the mother wolf got up and went hunting again.

After a few more hours, a second wolf arrived. The pups must have been listening carefully, because again they came right out and swarmed around his mouth. He too vomited some food and fed them, and he too jumped up on the boulder to sleep where the pups couldn't reach him.

That's mostly what happened, again and again. Five grown wolves belonged to that pack, the two parents and three younger wolves, who were probably their young of the year before. For most of the time, four grown wolves would be out hunting and the fifth would be babysitting, even though asleep. Interestingly, no adult wolf was present when I arrived, but after they noticed my presence, they never again left the pups unattended.

 

At first I assumed that the wolves were hunting caribou, because wolves hunt large ungulates wherever they can. But to bring down the big ones takes the effort of a pack, and the Baffin Island wolves appeared to hunt individually. During my entire stay, I never saw more than one wolf at a time return from hunting, and the vomit piles were always fairly small. That left carrion, eggs, baby birds, Arctic hares, lemmings, perhaps Arctic foxes, and even dead fish as food items, because few other animals lived on Baffin Island.

Eventually it came to me that those particular wolves were not hunting caribou, or not during the denning season. However, their den was halfway between the coast and the caribou calving grounds. The caribou spent the winter near the coast and went upland to their calving grounds in spring, and these seasonal migrations took them right past the den. Female caribou, like females of some other ungulates, bear their calves all at the same time in the same place. Suddenly there are hundreds of calves. The number of the local predators remains the same, so the predators who live nearby can kill some of the calves but not all—not even a significant number. This could be called a good thing for both species, as most of the calves survive and the predators get to feast for a little while in spring when—hungry from the winter but required to raise pups—they have the greatest need of food. As for the wolves I was watching, when the caribou passed by the den in spring, the wolves would know where they were going and why, and for a short time they could hunt the calves. It would be wrong to say they had no interest in caribou.