The Company of Wolves (15 page)

Like Pimlott, Joslin was unsure how the wolves would respond to him. Finding himself nervous about being out alone in the woods, he thought he might be experiencing an ancient fear of predators, something ingrained in the human psyche by millennia of life in the woods. “I found in those early weeks that there wasn’t a sound that you didn’t right away identify as friend or foe.” A beaver slapping its tail on the water in the gloom of night a few yards away would just about put him into the air. “If you had a slap right beside you, you would suppress the impulse to leave the ground before you consciously heard the sound. And then it would hit you: ‘It’s a beaver.’

“I had the odd time where I accidentally got too close, and I howled, and the pack was right next door to me, and they came to check me out. They sounded like dogs coming. They came crashing through the bushes. I could hear them shuffling around me. I
couldn’t see anything. And the moment they were downwind of me, they were gone.

“But one night, I was howling back and forth with some wolves down a valley, then I hear
crash, crash, crash!” A
wolf was coming toward him through the bushes. “This wolf stopped in the brush and started to bark and growl. It kept moving back and forth, growling and barking. I put my back against a tree, then moved to another tree and put my back to it. I went from tree to tree, all the way up the hill. It carried on for twenty-some minutes, by which time I’d already gotten to the top of this small mountain and back to my trail.

“It’s one thing if I have a moose encounter. Then you go around the problem. But here the animal I’m working on has threatened me. It’s like falling off a horse: you’ve got to get back on, you’ve got to deal with it. I went back the next day with the only weapon I had, which was an ax. I didn’t find any wolves, but there was a freshly killed deer there. That was enough.

“I talked to Doug and said, ‘I need one of three things: an assistant, a pistol just in case as a backup, or a dog as a companion.’ Doug came up with a high-school student. He was built like an ox. That solved the problem.” Or at least it made Joslin comfortable enough to see that there wasn’t really a problem. Wolves never attacked him, the student, Pimlott, or Theberge. He and Theberge would find that, even if they approached wolves feeding on a kill, the wolves would run off before they got within two hundred yards of them.

At first Joslin got few wolves to howl back at him when he used the speakers. On a whim, he tried howling himself. “After some time, I finally found a wolf pack. They howled back. For a time I tried a combination of the recorded howling and my howling to get them to respond. At the end of the summer, I had 15–percent better results howling myself than using the recording.” He believes his own howls got more replies because the wolves took the recorded howls for the boasts of a strange pack suddenly turning up in their territory and were intimidated. Also, the recorded howling broadcast the sound farther, and a pack miles away might have responded, beyond the reach of Joslin’s hearing, and exhausted its will to reply before Joslin got within hearing range. Once wolves have howled, they will typically remain silent for twenty or thirty minutes. Perhaps they are listening
for other packs, or they are musically sated—no one knows why.

When Joslin heard howls, he would record the compass bearings from which the sound came and plot them out on a map, then, in daylight, go in to look at the site and perhaps find dens. Sometimes he would find something unexpected. Once he found a dead wolf near a den in a rotted-out tree. When he took her into camp and necropsied her, he found she had more than ten broken ribs. He went back to the den. Looking it over carefully, he found bear hairs on the opening of the den.

So little was known about wolves that discoveries came quickly. They found that there were two peaks in wolf howling—one in the winter, when they are courting, and one in the summer, when the pups are out of the den. Joslin found that, after they left the den, wolves would move to a meadow in the forest, where adults would leave the pups while they hunted. They would keep to that meadow a few days or weeks, then move to another. “I thought, ‘What am I going to call these things?’ I looked at Murie. He said they rendezvoused together. I said, ‘Fine, we’ll call it the rendezvous site.’ ” As radio collars came into use, Theberge began trapping and radio-collaring the wolves, and the researchers could spend their nights riding the logging roads, radio receivers in hand, trolling the airwaves for wolves.

Pimlott, Theberge, and Joslin were growing comfortable with wolves. The ones they caught in traps or snares seldom offered any resistance, displaying instead “a total fear response,” says Theberge. “We’ve hardly ever had one lunge at us. In some, the parasympathetic nervous system kicks in and they’re quiet, basically fatigued.” He and Mary once followed a radio-collar signal to a wolf caught in a snare. “It was alive,” he says, “but it was cartwheeling and strangling itself. We didn’t have any drugs or equipment. We went up to it and it just went into shock.” Theberge put a snowshoe over it to restrain it while Mary released it from the snare. The wolf lay in the snow passively until they left, then scampered off. “We could do a lot of this work without drugging the animals,” says Theberge. “But holding them down stresses them, so it’s better to have them out.”

In the early days in the dense Algonquin woods, howling proved to be the best way to locate wolves. Since the team heard wolves
more than they saw them, they grew especially interested in the meanings of wolf vocalizations. They found that wolves make a complex and varied array of sounds—howls, barks, growls, whines, squeaks, and combinations of these noises. Traditional peoples and modern writers alike have held that these vocalizations constitute a language that conveys specific information. Jason Badridze thinks his Georgian wolves have distinctive howls to inform other members of the pack when they have killed something. He believes wolves can even convey numbers vocally. Farley Mowat wrote in
Never Cry Wolf
that an Eskimo told him that wolves passed on news of moving caribou herds from one pack to another. People who keep captive wolves frequently say the wolves know who is coming to visit and convey this to other wolves many minutes before the guest arrives.

Whines and whimpers are soft, high-pitched sounds that humans generally regard as plaintive or begging, whimpers usually being described as short bursts of sound, and whines as longer, more drawn-out vocalizations. Both can start as squeaks at the upper ends of the human ability to hear. Dr. Michael Fox, who has done extensive studies of wolf behavior at Washington University and the St. Louis Zoo, reported “undulating long whines” by an adult as it brought pups out of a den. Pups whine in pain, but they also whine or whimper to adults during greeting ceremonies after the adults return to the rendezvous site or the den. Joslin was once howling near a den when a pup howled back at him and then rushed toward him, whining.

Adults also whine when greeting or submitting to a higher-ranking adult. A captive wolf will go from growl to whine and back again if a human handler tries to take its food away. It will lay its ears back and wag its tail and whine and attempt to lick, then bare its teeth and flare its ears and growl, then lay the ears back again and whine and wag its tail submissively.

Barks are short bursts of sound lasting less than a tenth of a second. Humans interpret them as alarms or warnings, something like our shouts of “Fire!” or “Scram!” Joslin feels that single barks are alarms and seried barks are threats. A growl ending in a bark by an adult may send pups running into the den. Often a sharp bark ends a howling session. When researchers have approached den sites or rendezvous sites too closely, they have heard one or two sharp barks and a
drawn-out bark in a series of lower pitches. Joslin once heard such barking repeated for twenty-seven minutes, with growling between the barks, and felt it was a warning. John Fentress, of Dalhousie University, could make a captive adult bark by entering the cage and howling while it was howling. When Murie heard wolves bark, he could usually see them, and they seemed to him to mean to be seen. Once he attempted to get close to a den and adults came toward him barking. Barking may have other meanings as well. In captive wolves, barking has been observed in animals trying to solicit play. Pimlott heard two wild wolves howl and bark as they approached each other, then go off into the woods howling together.

Growls are deep-throated sounds which humans universally interpret as threatening. A wolf may growl at another wolf when its tail is high, its legs are stiffened, and its hackles are raised, and follow with an attack. Growling is usually heard among wolves of higher status. Very subordinate wolves seldom growl; typically, they whine in submission. In a dominance fight at the Folsom City Zoo, Lupine, the lowest-ranking wolf, was attacked by all three of the other wolves. While they mauled her, they growled. But she neither growled nor whined; she curled her lips and showed her teeth and snapped her jaws loudly and repeatedly. Growling is the least recorded of the wolf vocalizations, probably because it is usually directed at fellow wolves. Observers watching den sites are usually too far from the wolves to hear a growl if it is uttered, for growls do not carry long distances. Rabid wolves attacking humans have been said to growl and snarl.

The howl is the form of expression that most fascinated Theberge. To human ears, the howl is the wolf’s masterpiece. A drawn-out, continuous sound, sometimes lasting more than ten seconds, in which the wolf’s voice rises and falls melodically, the howl is produced by vibration of the animal’s vocal cords. Just as a violin string vibrates at several different frequencies—at halves or thirds or quarters of its entire length—when it is plucked, wolf vocal cords vibrate at more than one frequency, and thus produce complex tones. Theberge’s studies showed that, whereas human ears hear only one tone, the howl actually consists of a fundamental tone and a number of harmonic tones, usually only one, two, or three, but sometimes as many as a dozen.

Howling is most frequent early in the morning and late in the
evening, but occasionally wolves howl in daylight. Though hunters’ stories in the popular press often depict wolves howling while they hunt, Mech, Peterson, Haber, and Theberge, who have between them more than a century of wolf study, all say they have never heard a wolf howl while hunting. Howling increases in midwinter, when breeding season comes on and the social interaction of a pack is more intense and active. After breeding takes place, the wolves are quieter. Wolves howl least when pups are very young, perhaps to keep other predators from discovering their dens. But by July and August, the pups begin to howl, and it becomes relatively easy to find a rendezvous site. Captive pups will howl from as young as one month of age.

A howling session can last many minutes. Usually one wolf starts it and howls once or twice before the others join in. The others give long, low howls and work up to a series of shorter, higher-pitched howls. It is not uncommon, when wolves howl in the woods, for other species to respond: coyotes may yip and howl in what seems like an answer, owls hoot, loons call, even sleeping songbirds pull their heads from under their wing feathers and chirp.

When a pack howls, the interbraiding of voices and shifting harmonics gives the impression of many singers. General Ulysses Grant recalled in his
Memoirs
riding with a guide and hearing wolves howl. The guide asked Grant how many wolves he thought he heard, and Grant, wanting to appear wise in woodlore, concluded it would be best to underestimate. He said, “Oh, about twenty.” When they actually came upon the wolves, there were only two.

Howling fascinated Theberge. He went on to the University of Guelph, returning each summer to work with Pimlott, and ultimately he wrote his master’s thesis at the University of Toronto on the howling of wolves. He built a pen in the park, put a captive wolf inside it, and waited to hear the wolf howl. “I couldn’t get it to open its mouth,” he recalls. Though he played it tape recordings of wolf howls, and stood outside the compound at night and howled, the wolf would not respond to him. Then Mary came to visit him. She howled once at the wolf and it howled back.

Why did the wolf respond to one and not the other? They set about trying to understand. “We started to study the harmony of what was different in our voices. I can get up to middle C, and Mary
can get down to middle C. The wolf would not answer me but it would answer Mary. However, it insisted on a live performance and wouldn’t respond to a tape recording. After a while, we understood that every wolf had its own set of harmonics that shifts, predictably, as its voice slides up or down the scale. They have a far better ability to discriminate between harmonics than humans, which means they can certainly identify who’s howling. Which raises the question, why do they howl back at humans?”

And why do they sometimes not howl back? Joslin recalls, “I had one occasion in Algonquin where a wolf came up and saw me when I was howling, and I had a deuce of a time. It took two or three weeks before that pack would howl back. There’s usually one or two wolves that will lead the howl. I suspect it was that one that saw me.”

Theberge and Joslin would talk much about why wolves howled or didn’t howl. Theberge tried a police siren; it worked. Wolves howled to loggers’ chainsaws. They got so habituated to Theberge’s own overtures that they would sing out when he accidentally slammed the door of the truck as he was getting out to howl.

There were a variety of explanations offered for howling. Murie often saw wolves howl after hunting had separated them, and usually found the wolves reunited shortly after those howls. He guessed howling helped them to get back together. Theberge’s captive howled when he left camp, and the researcher thought it likely that the wolf was expressing a desire for companionship. Erich Klinghammer, who studied the howling of captive wolves at Wolf Park in Indiana, found that older and higher-ranking animals did more solo howling and then were joined in chorus more often than younger wolves, females, or lower-ranking males. He concluded that solo howls attracted lone wolves, especially females.