The Company of Wolves (14 page)

A study in Australia removed foxes and feral cats from an area to see whether afterward, when predators repopulated the area, they would again reduce the rabbit population. The study found that the rabbits increased to higher densities, but when the foxes returned, the rabbit population did not drop back to its earlier low density. The researchers concluded that this demonstrated the existence of multiple equilibria. If multiple equilibria exist in wolf-caribou systems, a wildlife agency might undertake one wolf-control operation and ever after allow nature to manage the system.

Wolf biologists today argue heatedly over the existence of multiple equilibria, but as yet there has been no direct test of the theory with wolves. A test could come out of a wolf-control program begun in the Yukon in 1993. The Aishihik caribou herd in the southwestern Yukon began to decline in the early 1980s. Between 1980 and 1990, the population plummeted from fourteen hundred to seven hundred individuals. Meanwhile, moose populations dropped to the lowest density recorded anywhere in boreal forests. The local native peoples, who depend upon moose and caribou for subsistence, urged the government to do something. It is not clear why the moose and caribou declined. Neither subsistence nor sport hunters appear to have exerted much pressure on the caribou population. “There is some evidence that the population was being limited by wolf predation,” says Robert Hayes of the Yukon Fish and Wildlife Branch. But researchers fear that putting radio collars on caribou calves, to verify that wolves are taking them, might make them more conspicuous and therefore more vulnerable to predators.

Instead, in 1993 the Yukon Fish and Wildlife Branch began to control wolves in the area. After removing 75 to 85 percent of the wolves, it planned to prohibit hunting and to monitor the moose, caribou, and wolf populations for several years, to see whether there is a higher density of prey that would support both wolves and hunters with no future need for wolf controls.

A lot rests on the outcome of the debate over multiple equilibria. If there is only one point of equilibrium—if wolves normally regulate prey at low densities—then wildlife managers will feel they must
choose between hunters, who pay their salaries, and wolves, who don’t. If there are multiple equilibria, then it may be possible in the future to manage the herds for humans and wolves without shooting wolves.

We have come a long way from the view that wolves are simply a curse on the gentler forms of life, but we haven’t yet arrived at our destination. What we have found is that predation is far more complex, far more varied, far more difficult to understand than we ever thought it would be.

Even if we can encompass all this complexity, it seems to me unlikely that we will ever really understand predation, for its greatest complication lies not in the woods of Minnesota or the mountains of Alaska but in our own minds. We will always have difficulty separating what killing means to wolves from what killing means to humans. And we may never agree upon what killing means to humans.

Bearhead Swaney, a member of the Flathead Tribal Council, was a big, broad-shouldered man who wore his hair in long braids and had a look of barely contained anger on his face. He loved to make white listeners squirm by accusing them of having shallow views. In 1980, at the University of Montana, Swaney lectured an audience of young whites on native-American attitudes toward wildlife. It outraged him, he said, to see biologists put radio collars and ear tags on wild animals, because this showed no respect for the spirits of animals. Then he changed his tack. “Did you ever pray before you killed something?” he roared at the audience. His listeners, mostly wildlife students, who were accomplished at neither killing nor prayer, sat in silence, paralyzed by their own sense of disengagement with life.

Swaney meant to make them feel that they stood pale and trembling outside the elemental relationships of life, and that they were immoral because they could not connect act with spirit. It was a fairly delicious act of red man’s revenge.

That line between object and feeling often daunts us. During the Gulf War of 1991, for example, Americans sat in front of their television sets, gripped by the sleek precision of smart bombs which carried their own televised point of view as they dropped from the
wings of jet aircraft, slid in great whistling arcs over the desert landscape, fell with eye-widening speed toward a looming bunker below, slipped soundlessly through an airshaft, and exploded inside, committing their own concussive suicide in the process. As we watched, we seemed to become machines. The war was, to our hearts and eyes, bloodless. Though one hundred thousand Iraqis died, we never saw a body, and we had no feeling whatsoever for their death or any individual suffering. Killing became an abstraction.

It seems to me that we make a similar abstraction when we talk about the roles or effects of wolf predation. Biologists ask us to overlook the individual suffering of prey species for the sake of the ecosystem and the ongoing process of evolution.

But there are people who cannot easily sublimate the suffering in the numbers. So while some of us out there in the snow are puzzling out the unfeeling facts of predation, others cannot look upon the carcass of a deer without confronting its suffering. It is fine to argue that the deer died with dignity, that this was nature’s way, that predation is part of the plan, that starvation is not necessarily any better than being dragged down in the snow by a pack of wolves. But not everybody can make that abstraction. Thus the regret, the uneasy glances away from the kill on the ground, to the trees and chickadees and life.

It’s the discomforting end of humankind’s bargain with consciousness. We empathize with other beings and imagine we feel their pain. Either the empathy blinds us to the mechanics of life, or we shut the empathy off.

Some people have no qualms about looking upon death, or about taking the life of a deer or a wolf. Some feel the taking is a blessing that gives them food, or that taking the life of an animal is a measure of their own competence and deserving effort. Others feel the taking of any life brutalizes both the victim and the killer. Killing is something we don’t agree upon. We find our own private understandings, and we shall probably never have a shared understanding of killing, never find an intersection between biology and spirit where predation makes real sense.

And because of that, we shall forever argue about wolves.

It is late at night in Algonquin Provincial Park in Ontario. The moon is a pale glow behind the rainclouds driving in from the west. The night is full of messages. Maple leaves rustle, and the wind sighs through spruce boughs. Green frogs twang like loose banjo strings. Spring peepers shrill like police whistles. Mosquitoes whine. John Theberge steps quietly out of his battered blue truck. He is tall and rangy, with a salt-and-pepper beard and bushy black eyebrows. Behind his thick eyeglasses, he has a faraway look, as if he is dreaming. His wife, Mary, a petite, sharp-featured, energetic woman, slips out the passenger side. Both are dressed for the field, socks pulled up out of their boots and over the cuffs of their trousers to keep the blackflies out. They are careful not to slam the doors. The lights are turned off.

Theberge stands quietly, adjusting his ears to the small noises of the night. Then he tilts his head back and howls. It is a loud, straightforward unmusical howl, in slightly descending notes—not deep and melodramatic, not a movie sound-track version of a wolf, but more
like the long steamwhistle shift call at a steel mill. He doesn’t bother to cup his hands to direct the sound. He has been doing this so long that he knows it is unnecessary.

From off in the darkness comes the yipping, and then the crooning, of wolf pups howling back. Next a deep, throaty adult voice joins in, rising slowly and then descending, howling repeatedly, its refrain something between a moan and a song. It is the sound Stanley Young held was “so frightfully piercing as to go through your heart and soul.” The Theberges are transfixed by the performance.

The voice of the wolf is the only aspect of the animal most people have any experience with. They have heard wolf howls, if not in the forests of Minnesota or British Columbia, in the sound tracks of television movies. Because this sound lodges in an older, less tutored part of the mind, it is the most emotional point of contact we have with the creature. If wolves clicked or burped or brayed or wheezed, they would be, in our minds, a far different animal.

The Theberges spend their days setting traps in order to radio-collar wolves. They spend their nights howling. The wolves’ responses give some idea of whether they’re breeding and how many are out there without collars. “Usually when you howl,” says Theberge, “you get the pups answering first. Then the adults answer.” Often they get no howls back, but one wolf howled back a hundred times before tiring of the game. Sometimes a wolf creeps up to them in the darkness, hidden in the bushes. “It will whimper, as if wanting to come along,” explains Theberge, “but it doesn’t have enough incentive to come out of the bush.”

Says Theberge, “Mary and I have undoubtedly howled at wolves more than anybody.” Indeed, he has been howling at wolves and listening to their replies for more than thirty years. But he still can’t say what the return howls mean. “I don’t know if that means they think we’re insane or it’s a note of pleasure.” What the howl means is a question he has been pursuing in one way or another for most of his life.

Theberge began in 1959, when he was just a high-school student, working for the Canadian biologist Douglas Pimlott, who had begun that year to study wolves in Algonquin Provincial Park. Pimlott had seen that hunters and farmers were pushing the wolf toward
extinction all over its range, and he felt wolves belonged in the ecosystem. “It might be said that the wolf was one of the last natural resources to be included in the great modern movement toward conservation,” Pimlott wrote. He wanted to see Ontario’s bounty on wolves eliminated, and he knew that the development of an argument that would convince hunters, livestock owners, and the politicians who listened to them would require the study of wolves.

No one had studied wolves in a forest environment like Ontario’s. Murie had done his study in the open landscape of Alaska; Ian McTaggart Cowan had done his in the Canadian Rockies, where wolves were more visible. Here, in Algonquin Provincial Park, the forest of oak, maple, birch, poplar, fir, pine, and spruce has a thick understory. Pimlott had started with little idea of how to see enough of wolves to learn anything in this leafy environment. He hadn’t the luxury of radio collars, which hadn’t yet come into wide use. He did have a Labrador retriever, which he let run loose in the woods. “It actually did come back with two wolves one night,” says Theberge. “But it didn’t work out as a research tool.”

Pimlott wanted to know how many wolves were in the park, and decided that getting wolves to howl would help locate them. He had found that captive wolves would reply to recordings of their own howls, so he mounted huge, trumpet-shaped speakers on the hood of an old government truck and proposed to drive the truck down logging roads in the park, broadcasting recorded howls. His first recording was of three timber wolves, three coyotes, and a coyote-dog, all howling together, which he thought sounded like a mixture of adult and juvenile wolves. He would crank up the big speakers, play the recording, and wait to see if other wolves responded.

On one of their first tries, Theberge recalls, they drove out into the woods. “I was about to play the tape of wolves howling. Doug said, ‘I’m going to go to the top of this hill to see what happens. Give me five minutes and turn on the tape and blast it out.’ ” Theberge waited the requisite five minutes and turned on the tape. Immediately, wolves began to howl all around him. It was an unexpected and unnerving reply. And almost as immediately, there came a crashing in the bushes, and Pimlott, breathless and frightened, came running to the safety of the truck. “He didn’t know what we had stimulated,” says Theberge. “None of us knew what we were doing in trying to
trigger the howls ourselves. We wondered if we were triggering aggression.”

Having only studies by Murie and Cowan to go by, Pimlott and Theberge knew almost nothing about wolves, and the weight of centuries of folklore hung upon their imaginations. “We all believed that wolves were safe,” says Theberge, “but we had a few exciting encounters.” Wolves would sometimes run toward the researchers when they howled them up. Once, three wolves came toward them at a gallop, not howling back. “If you didn’t know what was going on, you’d be scared,” he says. “The whole experience is open to misinterpretation. I knew that no one had been attacked by a wolf, but I thought, ‘Who’s the most likely to be the first?’ ”

Paul Joslin was a student of Cowan’s at the University of British Columbia when he joined Pimlott’s Algonquin Park study. “I didn’t know anything about wolves at that stage,” he recalls. Today, Joslin is director of research and education for Wolf Haven International, a wolf rescue-and-education center in Tenino, Washington. Beneath his white hair and beard, he is placid and soft-spoken, and he has a broad, outgoing curiosity. “Doug wanted to use howling as a way to census wolves,” he says. Joslin would pack the big speakers on his back and spend the whole night walking miles into the woods along a railroad right of way, stopping now and then to play Pimlott’s recorded howls and listen for responses.