The Company of Wolves (10 page)

The wolf’s trail leads into the densest part of the spruce bog, where we find another bed already dug up by foxes. Right next to that are the deer’s hind legs, rank with the scent of fox urine. The tracks out of this thicket are fresh, possibly made this morning—possibly when we arrived. Ravens croak and caw from the trees, but not from the kill site. The wolf may be nearby, wondering what all this clatter and exclamation and heavy breathing are about.

From the length of the leg bone, the deer appears to have been a yearling. We break open the bone. The gelatinous marrow is dark pink, almost crimson, indicating that the deer has been drawing on its last fat reserves. If the deer had been healthy, the bone marrow would be firm and white. Several of the group are fascinated by the bones and blood and tracks in the snow. We dig around and puzzle over the footprints, putting the events of the day together. Did a single wolf ambush the deer? Or did a pack run it down? What did the
wolf see in the deer that urged it to attack? Did the deer limp or look skinny or hang its head in exhaustion? Was it obvious to the wolf that this was a deer failing its first test of winter and likely therefore to fail the test of wolf? After the wolf ate, did it cache food here and there while ravens and foxes darted in to gnaw and peck at the corpse behind its back? Did the wolf protest their lootings or resignedly concede them a share? Did the wolf stay for days by the kill, alternately eating its fill and sleeping, until the clatter of skis and the rasp of tree branches against L. L. Bean parkas and Jansport packs spooked it out of a full-bellied slumber and sent it skulking off into some darker recess of the forest?

What have we seen here? Tracks in the snow. Hieroglyphs of struggle. Tufts of hair. Crystals of blood. What is the nature of the beast that left them? What is the nature of the world inhabited by such a beast? What’s going on here?

Predation has always fascinated humans. Perhaps we are interested because we are the world’s preeminent predator, killing more kinds of creatures in more kinds of ways and for more kinds of reasons than any other species. Perhaps we have an ingrown interest in killing that we sublimate for the sake of society, but indulge with abandon when we look at other species. Perhaps we have a long history of perfecting our arts by borrowing from other species. Perhaps we’re just irrepressibly curious about how others live and die.

Sometimes, the fascination discomforts us. A few members of the group hang back at the edges of the circle—looking for chickadees in the branches, following the passage of a gyrfalcon as it flies just over the treetops. “I’m not excited about seeing the kill,” confesses a woman from Indiana. “I mean, it’s the natural process and all …” Her voice trails off and the sentence remains unfinished. Her expression, however, says, “Sure, the wolf kills to eat, but it’s something we ought to regret.”

We have regretted the killing for centuries. Early in American history, when settlers cleared pastures in the forest and concentrated livestock in a few small areas, where wolves easily attacked them, they quickly developed an antipathy for wolves. William Bradford, who arrived in Massachusetts on the
Mayflower
, declared in 1624, “The country is annoyed with foxes and wolves.” Roger Williams, founder of Rhode Island, wrote, “The Wolfe is an Embleme of a
fierce blood-sucking persecutor.” Mark Catesby, the early naturalist, held, “The wolves in Carolina are very numerous, and more destructive than another animal. They go in droves by night, and hunt deer like hounds, with dismal yelling cries.” More than a century later, in 1904, William T. Hornaday, longtime director of the New York Zoological Park and a man who ought to have seen beyond the stereotypes, wrote, “Of all the wild creatures of North America, none are more despicable than wolves. There is no depth of meanness, treachery or cruelty to which they do not cheerfully descend.”

We have made much of the cruelty. Roy McBride, an experienced wolf trapper, examined many cows killed by wolves in Mexico and the American Southwest. He says, “In many cases, I don’t think the cow was dead when they ate them. I think these wolves just start eating on them. I find some of them alive, laying on the ground, with their back end eaten.”

The heart of our quarrel with wolves is that we humans have developed a different view of death. We think of it as an event staged by and in the service of the supernatural. We die to receive judgment—to ascend to heaven or descend to hell. It is God’s will, what we deserve, what we are entitled to by the sum of our moral qualities. We are called away to reflect upon virtue. Even the deaths of other creatures are computed with this kind of accounting. Native Americans believe that an animal presents itself to a hunter because that hunter has been caring, hardworking, and respectful, and the animal gives its life as a reward.

Predation is a challenge to this view. It is death unwarranted by divine intention; it is morally unscheduled suffering. Our view of death as moral summation is of little help in understanding nature’s workings, and biologists have had to search for evolutionary and ecological meanings in death.

Real study of predation is a recent thing. Even fifty years ago, studies were being made in the half-light between science and woodlore. On a winter night in the late 1930s, Sigurd Olson, the great wilderness writer, was snowshoeing over the ice of the frozen Kawishiwi River near Ely, Minnesota. The moon cast the shadows of twisted branches over the silvery snow. It was silent, except for the swish and creak of his snowshoes, the hiss of his breath, and the crackle of branches in the brush beyond the river’s edge.

He could hear the wolves on both sides of him, following him. “I knew I was being watched, a lone dark spot moving slowly along the frozen river,” he later wrote. He recalled the long war with wolves, the poisoning and shooting, and tales of wolves stalking humans hovered in his mind. Olson had once seen a wolf kill a doe near Bass-wood Lake. The wolf had loped easily behind the doe, then leapt on it and grabbed it by the nose. The doe had somersaulted, and the fall had broken her back. Olson thought of this as he approached a narrow point in the river, and he became afraid that he might be attacked. He knew of no authenticated instance of an unprovoked attack by wolves on a human being, but, he wrote, “In spite of reason and my knowledge of the predators, ancient reactions were coming to the fore, intuitive warnings out of the past.”

The river narrowed between dark, forested hills, and there two shadows left the brush and came rapidly toward him. He stopped and removed his pack. The wolves stopped fifty feet away, and looked him over. “In the moonlight,” wrote Olson, “their gray hides glistened and I could see the greenish glint in their eyes.” For a long and testing moment, man and wolves stood silently confronting each other. Then the wolves turned and trotted away into the night. Off in the forest, Olson heard a long howl. He was thrilled by the experience. He saw in the wolf something like himself, but unencumbered by the confusions and moral ambiguities of modern life. Something wild and noble.

Olson’s reaction was unusual for the Minnesota of the 1930s, but Olson was an unusual man. He understood ecological relationships, and he had undertaken the first serious scientific study of the wolf on his own initiative. He deplored the fact that conservation meant largely “protection of herbivores at the expense of predatory forms.” He saw that conservation might thus lead to the extermination of large carnivores, and hoped to suggest to the world that, “after all, lions, wolves and coyotes may be an exceedingly vital part of a primitive community, a part which once removed would disturb the delicate ecological adjustment of dependent types.”

His study, published in 1938 in
The Scientific Monthly
, wasn’t rigorous enough to survive the kind of peer review it would get today. It consisted of eighteen years’ experience snowshoeing, hiking, and canoeing in the north woods, and of observations shared with him by
trappers and timber cruisers. Olson focused especially on the wolf’s food habits, which, he wrote, “determine whether or not a species is an acceptable member of any society.” He declared, “The major portion of the food of the wolf during the summer months is grouse, woodmice, meadow voles, fish, marmots, snakes, insects and some vegetation.” The wolf, he said, fed on deer only in the winter, when the smaller animals were in hibernation. “Close students of wildlife in the border country all agree,” he wrote, “that wolves kill comparatively few deer, and then only in the late winter and early spring periods.” That observation was largely based on anecdote and the sampling one winter of the stomach contents of wolves—all of which contained deer. Today, wolf biologists say wolves may eat grouse, mice, and rabbits but live mainly on large ungulates, such as deer and moose. But from examining the remains of winter kills, Olson came up with a stimulating conclusion: “The great majority of the killings are of old, diseased or crippled animals. Such purely salvage killings are assuredly not detrimental to either deer or moose, for without the constant elimination of the unfit, the breeding stock would suffer.”

It was the dawning of a new era. Something dramatic was happening to our view of predators. In 1928, F. S. Bodenheimer, a German biologist studying insect populations, suggested that climate was almost wholly responsible for determining population densities, and that predation meant little to overall numbers. About the same time, the ecologist Charles Elton noted that, when populations grew large, individuals migrated, and the migrants were more susceptible to predators, because they were on unfamiliar ground and often harassed by those already in possession of the territory. In the 1930s, Paul Errington, studying the effects of mink on muskrat populations in Iowa, concluded, “Mink predation upon muskrats tends to be almost restricted to those individuals or parts of the muskrat population that may be properly referred to as pushovers.” He found that muskrats would produce a surplus of young every year, and that the young would go wandering in search of breeding territories, which were limited in number. Muskrats that were too small, too irresolute, too stupid, or too slow would weaken as they traveled. His studies showed that 70 percent of the muskrats that fell prey to mink were already victims of disease or freezing.

The new view held that predators took nothing more than the expendable surplus, but it also argued the somewhat contradictory view that, without predators, prey populations would increase to such numbers that they would consume all their nutritional resources. Perhaps the most famous example came from Arizona’s Kaibab Plateau. The Kaibab had been made part of the Grand Canyon National Game Preserve in 1906, but by 1920 predator control had removed its wolves and mountain lions. In the 1920s, the deer population rose from perhaps four thousand to perhaps a hundred thousand. But public sentiment would not permit shooting the deer. Within a few years, 90 percent of the forage was gone, and the deer were starving everywhere. Aldo Leopold, the famous wildlife biologist and environmental philosopher, had urged the extermination of wolves early in this century. But by 1944, he looked back on the past with regret: “I have seen every edible bush and seedling browsed, first to anaemic desuetude and then to death. I have seen every edible tree defoliated to the height of a saddle horn.… In the end the starved bones of the hoped-for deer herd, dead of its own too-much, bleach with the bones of dead sage.” Only the wolf, he concluded, could have kept this tragedy from happening.

Durward Allen, who had studied predation in Michigan in the 1930s and 1940s, declared, “The natural function of predators is to keep big game range from being destroyed by the animals it supports.” Predators might even help to keep prey numbers from falling. Allen recounted that bighorn sheep had succumbed all around the West to diseases brought to them by domestic livestock, but that the ranchers, seeing wolves feeding on their carcasses, concluded predators were to blame and redoubled their efforts to eliminate them. Allen held that the wolves, if left alone, might have slowed the spread of disease through the sheep population by culling the weak animals before they infected others. “There are strong implications that this species needs the culling of its ancient enemies, the wolf and the cougar,” he declared.

Increasingly, biologists were concluding that predators served a useful function, that they kept prey populations from destroying their own food resources and removed genetic mistakes from the population, thereby keeping the species strong. Wrote Allen, “The intensive weeding out process to which a prey may be subjected, if
sustained through the ages as it undoubtedly has been, could hardly fail to render the stock more vigorous and more efficient in using the protective features of its environment.”

Acting upon this new view that predators didn’t really limit prey posed problems. Wildlife management had developed upon human rather than biological needs. Its view of predators derived not from ecological studies, but from moralizing over the taking of game and livestock by nonhuman competitors. Allen observed that game management had evolved largely as the effort to produce harvestable animals, and that, “from the first, war on carnivores has been one with game production.” Antipathy to predators was further fueled by professional writers, who “learned long ago that the atrocities committed by gore-fed carnivores are among the most merchantable material for the magazine trade.” As a result, he wrote in
Our Wildlife Legacy
, “Many people think … the wolf doesn’t live in the forest; he infests it. You don’t just kill a predator; you execute him. You don’t just hunt him for sport; you track him down in a crusade for moral reform.”

Paul Errington cautioned, “Man may call predators robber barons or cannibals and talk of honor or lack of honor” when they talked about the relationships between hunters and hunted. But, he declared, “the moral rightness or wrongness that man sees in these relationships, after all, is only man’s.”

The new view of predators was based on studies of small birds and mammals. Could studies of mink and quail be generalized to larger creatures like wolves and moose? In 1939, Adolph Murie, a biologist who had already studied moose in Michigan, elk in Washington, and coyotes in Yellowstone National Park, was asked to undertake a study of the wolves of Mount McKinley National Park in Alaska. In the late 1920s, the Dall’s sheep of the park were abundant, and wolves, which had been scarce, were just beginning to increase. But in 1929 and 1932, snow was deep and crusted, and sheep died in large numbers. Sheep remained scarce through 1938, and wolves were blamed. The National Park Service was by then embarrassed about having eradicated wolves in Yellowstone National Park. Park officials were uncertain whether they should pursue wolf-control programs in Mount McKinley. They wanted to know more about the relationships between wolves and caribou, moose, and Dall’s sheep.