The Company of Wolves (19 page)

The first collars were simple radio transmitters beeping out an unvarying ping-ping-ping, twenty-four hours a day, an electronic case of hiccups that kept up until the batteries died. They allowed researchers to plot the location of wolves on maps and to find kills and dens. To allow researchers to follow individual wolves a long time, the batteries had to be replaced, and to do that, the animals had to step into traps. Many wolves would not do that twice in a lifetime.

“Twenty years ago,” Mech says, “I had the idea to make a collar through which you could drug an animal. For ten years, I just thought about it. Then I put a student on it.” The 3M Company hired the graduate student and put close to $1 million into development of the collar. After five years of work, they came up with a collar that would dart a wolf in the field. The collars must be handmade, and they cost about $1,750 apiece, but they can do an enormous range of things.

The collar has both a standard transmitter, to emit beeps, and a receiver,
to receive commands from the researchers. It also has a computer, so it can interpret the commands. The researchers can turn it on and off. When it is on, a mercury switch on the collar senses tilts of more than ten degrees. Each tilt is recorded on a counter, and the record is stored in the computer. One pattern will indicate that the wolf is up and running, another that it is sleeping, another that it has died. The collar thus keeps a record of the wolf’s most recent thirty-six hours of activity, and the researchers can instruct the collar to confide its observations into a laptop computer in the field. If the collar fails, it has a mechanism that allows the technicians to instruct it to fall to the forest floor and continue to broadcast signals until they find and retrieve it.

The collar has two gunpowdered-charged syringes inside metal sleeves strong enough to survive wolf bites. The syringes are armed with the drugs Telazol and Rompun in a solution of glycol to keep them from freezing. By triggering the darts, the researchers can immobilize a wolf from a half-mile away, and then follow the radio signal to capture the animal or take blood samples. The cylinders stand out on the wolves’ necks like small antlers. It wouldn’t be at all unlikely for a hiker or a hunter in the woods to glimpse one of these animals and mistake it for a young deer. And if wolves insult one another, the ones with the collars must take some hard kidding about looking like badly dressed herbivores.

Wolf 171 is one of four wolves and two deer wearing this collar in the study area. Says Mech, “With the deer, we’ve directed the collar to listen for high activity counts in twenty-four hours. We know that deer are chased by wolves. I have absolutely no idea whether that is once a day, once a month, once a year, or once in a lifetime.” With the collar, they can get some idea when the deer has been chased. “Once we recorded not only the chase, but the wolf killing the deer,” says Mech. “It probably was one of the collared wolf packs in that area that killed the deer.” So it is possible to monitor both the victim and the killer simultaneously, an unveiling of woodland secrets hitherto denied to an observer on the ground.

The next step with this collar will be to have it locate the wearer precisely without having to fly or triangulate, to work something like the ETF loran navigation system used by boat operators. It will report by radio signal the wolf’s latitude and longitude within 154
meters every fifteen minutes. Currently, researchers get one or two locations a week by flying, and that only when weather permits. With the locating collar, a computer could map the wolf’s movements, and the researchers would always know where to start looking for an animal that had stopped broadcasting.

Mech is always looking for ways to spy on wolves. He would like to use satellite collars, which transmit exact locations to orbiting satellites several times a day, but, he says, “It’s extremely expensive, and not that practical.” He has tried implanted transmitters—cylinder-encased radios, slightly larger than a lipstick, surgically placed inside the abdominal cavity of a wolf. “We have not used them routinely. With a radio under the skin, you don’t get a signal that’s very powerful—you can’t put a very big battery in a subcutaneous transmitter. And our wolves travel far and wide.

“I’m constantly looking for things that will improve our data-collecting ability,” says Mech. “Technology is the only thing that has made wolf studies possible. Without that technology, we’d be back doing studies like Sig Olson, slogging around in snowshoes at one mile per hour.”

On Road 424, we stop and get the radio out of a metal case in the bed of the pickup truck. Seabloom turns it on and broadcasts an instruction to Wolf 171’s collar to turn itself on, and Norton, standing on the roof of the cab, sweeps the horizon with a hand-held antenna, searching for an answering signal. We get nothing. There is just the stillness of spruce and pine, a latticework of bare birch and aspen branches, and the silence of snow. We drive another half-mile, stop, get out, broadcast, and listen. In this way, we troll for wolf, traveling down miles of snow-covered logging road. In fair weather, they would do this in an airplane and have the location in a half-hour or less. In the falling snow, it is two hours before we get a signal back. Seabloom instructs the collar. It replies with twenty double beeps, as if to say, “Hello, hello.” Then there is a steady signal. The wolf is probably less than a mile away.

In the cold, it takes us half an hour more to get the snowmobiles down into the snow and our gear into a sled to be towed behind one of them. When at last the gear is ready, Mech offers the back of the
sled, where one can stand like a dog musher and feel more engaged with the winter woods, to anyone else. No one claims the honor, so Mech takes it, and we set off down a snow-covered logging road that winds into the forest. After a half-mile, we stop to retake bearings. The signal is faint and intermittent. We go another quarter-mile. The signal is a slow, rhythmic pinging, indicating that the wolf is lying down, probably asleep, within a half-mile of us. The cawing of two ravens off in the trees may indicate a kill there; the wolf may have fed and moved away to sleep. We get off the snowmobiles and Seabloom and Norton chat the computer through another set of commands. Norton instructs the collar to report on the wolf’s activity. The collar answers with the slow pinging of a sleeping wolf. Another command arms the dart.

Norton sends a command that fires the dart. We hear a sudden rapid series of beeps as the wolf is startled by the eruption inside her collar and the sting of the needle. She gets up and lurches off. For a minute, there are rapid beeps. Then they slow. Within three minutes, the wolf has collapsed and the slow, rhythmic beep resumes.

What must she have felt from the jab of the dart until the drug took hold and scattered her consciousness? Did her legs grow heavy and the air thicken in a riot of gravity? Did the trees jelly and streak as she lunged to escape? Somewhere in the woods, she lies motionless, eyes staring, tongue lolling.

We put on snowshoes. With Seabloom carrying the antenna and the receiver, we follow the radio signals into the woods. The snow is deep; it is still falling in thick flakes. As we brush by trees, branches crack and snow falls down the backs of our necks. We must climb over logs and go around densely clustered spruces. At one point, Mech stumbles noisily. I wonder what the wolf is hearing, how clumsy she must think humans are, how noisy and awkward of movement.

In the hilly terrain, it takes a half-hour to find Wolf 171. She has plowed into the ground sixty feet from where she lay when the dart struck. Her tracks show she has come from a bed in a cluster of spruces at the bottom of a hollow and has crossed a hillside, keeping to cover, perhaps flattening herself out a little to go under a deadfall. The drug overtook her as she entered a small forest clearing. Her legs are folded under her, as if she had started to rise and then forgotten
what she was about to do. Her nose is wedged into the snow. An attending raven croaks perplexedly from the trees.

Norton and Seabloom remove the collar carefully because the needle is still in the wolf’s neck. After extracting the dart, they spread out a heat-reflecting space blanket, lift the wolf onto it, and drag her into the shelter of a cluster of balsam firs. Norton carefully dusts newfallen snow from the back of the wolf, and pulls the edges of the space blanket over her to help keep her warm—one effect of the drugs is that, despite the blanket, the wolf’s temperature will drop from a normal 101 to below 96. As she sprawls on the blanket, her eyes still glow bright yellow. She yawns and blinks, unable to shake off the chemical restraint.

Wolf 171 was collared in September at the age of four months, in hopes of understanding how hormonal changes relate to dispersal. She was darted in November for tests, and again in December because the collar needed new batteries. Now, for the third time, they take a blood sample. This is difficult, for the wolf’s veins do not stand out, and in the ten-degree cold, the researchers’ hands are not agile. After they get a baseline sample, they inject a hormone into the wolf. The hormone will stimulate the wolf’s pituitary, which in turn will prompt her to release sex hormones. Every ten minutes for the next hour, more blood will be drawn, and each of the seven samples will ultimately be screened for sex hormones. “We’re interested in the degree of maturation in relationship to when they disperse,” Mech explains. When I ask if the hypothesis is that animals that mature earlier are more likely to disperse, Mech says, with characteristic lupine caution, “Something like that, but I’m not saying that. The hypothesis is that there is some relationship. We’re not sure what it is.”

Mech’s curiosity is covered with cautions; he wants to attack the problem only where it is vulnerable. He is trying to see into the mechanisms of wolf society. What makes a wolf disperse? Is it kicked out, or does it have some lupine equivalent of gumption? Some authorities suggest that dispersers are genetically different from residents, but no one has yet demonstrated a wolf gene for wandering. Murie believed that dispersers might be subordinate wolves that got less to eat, and lack of food put pressure on them to go off to hunt
by themselves. Michael Fox held that lone wolves were wolves genetically destined to become alphas, wolves with a swaggering pride which left them unable to hold an inferior position and compelled them to leave the pack. It is hard not to frame the question in human terms. Is the disperser a winner or a loser in the great lottery of wolf life? It’s the question we pose of the alpha, too. Is the alpha the biggest, baddest wolf, the one most capable of aggression? Or is it the most intelligent, or the most caring, or the most civic-minded? Are alphas despots? Or are they diplomats?

Either character may be found within the pack. Wolves display a spirit of friendliness and cooperation. Old or wounded wolves that don’t share in the killing are allowed to eat what other wolves kill. Cooperation begins with the pups. Adult wolves seem to love pups. In zoos and breeding facilities, it has often been noticed that when a wolf gives birth all the wolves in the facility, even those in distant cages, show great excitement. Adult wolves in adjacent cages will try to entice pups to crawl under fences to play with them. And pups can roughhouse with adults almost without constraint; they are seldom punished for biting or clawing. Adults have even been seen to hold up a bone or a piece of deer hide to distract pups who are overly rambunctious.

Adult wolves continue to demonstrate the companionability they learned as pups. Whenever the pack gets up from a rest or leaves a kill and is about to travel, there is likely to be a rally or a play session. A wolf will arch its back and twitch its tail, put its front legs flat to the ground, and open its mouth with tongue dangling, making a play face. If it gains a playmate’s attention, it may turn and race away. The companion may give chase. They play games of keep-away with bits of stick and bone. A racing wolf turns and pounces on a pursuing wolf, and the two tussle in mock battle, biting at each other’s neck ruffs, slamming hips into each other’s sides. They may slide down snowbanks with expressions of glee. And the session may end with a greeting ceremony, in which all gather around the dominant male, their ears back and eyes narrowed in submission and pleasure, nuzzling his face, licking his jaws.

It is thought that this kind of active and friendly intimacy helps to develop and maintain the close coordination wolves need for hunting.
Pups and adults alike play at hunting behavior, stalking and ambushing, pursuing and snapping. Wolves need to have a sense of each other’s quickness and aggressiveness, watchfulness and impulsiveness. When they are pursuing a moose or deer, that very sense gives the pack coordination and may save individuals from injury. A wolf that has played these games often is more likely to sense when an erstwhile playmate is darting in for a bite or dashing away from the moose’s hooves.

Companionability also assists in the rearing of the young. Adults will bring meat from a kill even to pups that are another pair’s offspring. If a lactating mother is killed, sometimes other females in the pack will lactate and feed her pups. And pups learn adult behavior by playing with adult wolves in the pack.

There is a competitive side to the games of chase and keep-away. If things get out of hand, a wolf may close its jaws over the neck of a pup or a subordinate adult and pin it to the ground in a posture of submission. Submission does not seem to instill fear or resentment in wolves. Dr. Michael Fox measured the resting heart rate of wolves in a captive pack. Heart rate declined when a wolf watched with interest a falling leaf or sunlight glinting on water, or engaged in submissive greeting or friendly contact. Indeed, Fox found that being licked or groomed by a companion lowered a wolf’s heart rate by half. Heart rate also declined when a wolf was seized by its muzzle and pinned to the ground by a superior; Fox likened this to the tonic immobility of a frightened fawn or frog.

A hierarchy of strong to weak is constantly evolving and changing in the pack. Wolves compete for status from an early age. Fox found wolf pups routinely working out dominance hierarchies at eight weeks; Mech saw four-week-old pups fighting for status. Wolves have a complex language of gesture and posture for dominance behavior. Dominant wolves may need only to stare at a subordinate to freeze it in its tracks. In humans and wolves alike, a direct stare is a threat. Some wolves look right through you as if you were not there. That is a dominant stare; it expresses the looker’s loftiness. A subordinate wolf, like a submissive human, looks down and away, or makes a lot of quick, glancing eye contact—looking, then looking away, licking with the gaze rather than skewering with the stare. Within
the gaze itself, there is more content: changes in pupil size accompany changes in emotion and help to communicate fear or playfulness, pleasure or pain.