The Company of Wolves (2 page)

Max Lipinski lives on the farm where he was born in 1917, just outside of Bonnechere, Ontario. His parents were Polish immigrants who brought their own traditions of wolves with them. He is an austere man, a man without fancy, a man who never married and lived alone through long, silent winters. His voice is like wind on rock, almost a whisper, almost a groan. “I know wolves,” he says. One February morning, he looked up from his porch and saw a wolf in his field. “It wasn’t bothering anything,” he admits. He long ago stopped raising livestock or poultry. “But I want to get even. I know what they can do. They took a lot of sheep. They took calves. And they didn’t do it because they were hungry. There were many deer, beaver, moose—lots to eat.” So he got his gun and shot the wolf.

“I’d shoot them every time,” he says. “They got no business being here.”

Jason Badridze is a small, balding man with dark, heavy-lidded eyes and an aquiline nose. Trained as a neurophysiologist, he is director of the Vertebrate Behavior and Ecology Section at the Institute of Zoology in Tbilisi, Republic of Georgia. As a boy, he hiked in the nearby Caucasus Mountains, and, perhaps once a year, he would hear wolves howling. His father had taught him to respect animals. He saw parallels between the communist occupation of Georgia and government
persecution of wolves. In 1974, he began to buy wolf pups from local hunters, paying them the bounty they would have gotten from the government. He studied them in his lab, and concluded that wolves have their own languages, and that they can count up to seven. But when the captive wolves got older and Badridze realized he could not keep them in the lab, he had to choose between euthanizing them and releasing them into the mountains. He chose the latter. Using homemade electric-shock collars, he conditioned them to avoid livestock and humans other than himself, then released the wolves in the mountains and began studying them in the wild. He could get them to come to him by howling, and he continued to feed them even after they proved capable of catching their own prey.

By 1992, he had released fourteen wolves in the mountains. Because they were hard to observe in the forest, he would take some to a desert valley near the Trialete Mountains, release them, observe them, and bring them back to his laboratory. In order to follow them, he constructed his own radio collars and his own radio receiver. One day, he was sitting between two overhanging rocks to stay out of the hot sun, fiddling with the controls on his radio receiver, when a vehicle full of soldiers rumbled up to him. The soldiers had chanced upon mysterious radio transmissions out in the desert, and had followed them to this curious anchorite, turning a radio antenna suspiciously between two rocks in the middle of nowhere. They thought him a spy, for only a spy could, in their imaginations, possess such a radio, but they could not begin to guess what sort of spying he might be doing out there. When he told them he was studying wolves and had equipped them with radio collars, they didn’t believe him. He said he would call the wolves so they could see the radio collars, but his sympathy with wolves seemed so preposterous that they took him away. They detained him for three days, repeatedly asking to whom he was giving information. At last, unable to make sense of the incident, they relented. He took the soldiers to where they had found him and howled; the wolves came in, he returned them to his laboratory, and the army took the collars away. But, he says, “The government doesn’t know about the wolf releases.”

• • •

In none of these stories are the actors able to explain adequately what wolves mean to them. But their feelings are intense, and the stories argue that wolves exist as much inside our minds as outside.

It is not news that we use animals as symbols—as mascots for athletic teams or national emblems. But sometimes we use animal symbols in very profound ways. We don’t only think
about
animals: we think
through
them. They become mental forms around which we wrap ideas, hopes, fears, and longings.

For hundreds of thousands—perhaps millions—of years, we lived as hunters and gatherers. Our survival and the survival of our offspring depended upon seeing deeply into nature and into the behavior, not just of prey and competing predators, but of all the smaller creatures that animated the world around us. For millennia, human awareness of the world was attuned to the cadence of bird song and insect buzz, the movement of shadows through the trees, the flutter of leaf in the wind, and our minds must have been selected on the basis of how acutely we observed other animals.

Just as our bones and teeth are shaped by what we eat, our minds are shaped by what we think about. Our thought processes arose in part through consideration of the immense variety of form in other living creatures. Animals have come to embody concepts for us. They give life to abstract qualities, such as quickness, strength, cunning, timidity, and aggressiveness. We think about human character by thinking about animals, because it allows us to define sharply personality traits that may be confusing in the people we know. Humans are complex and paradoxical. A man may be a fierce warrior and a warm and loving father. He may kill without remorse one day and cry at a wedding the next. The concept of fierceness is clearer when it is cloaked in animal skins, so we describe such a man as a wolf or a bear.

We almost daily use animals as metaphor or simile to communicate human qualities to one another. We are lion-hearted or eagle-eyed, proud as peacocks, sly as foxes, big as whales, timid as mice, cross as bears, stubborn as mules. We’ll worm our way into a conversation, hawk our goods, or weasel out of a deal. We still use animals in advertisements to try to convey ideas of integrity, freedom, power, and simplicity, but there is more going on here than mere metaphor. We keep
in our minds a menagerie of types which we have drawn from animals, and we use them to formulate thoughts about human behavior. Since the 1930s, scientists have sought more formal insights into human nature by studying the behavior of elephants, lions, monkeys, gorillas, and chimpanzees. They have brought new rules to the custom. But the habit of understanding and explaining ourselves by thinking about other creatures is older than science.

We are increasingly estranged from nature, in cities where walls and pavement banish most other forms of life. Our mental menagerie grows smaller and smaller, because we see fewer and fewer wild creatures. Even those of us who are birdwatchers or hunters or hikers spend far less time out of doors than our ancestors did, and if we step out at all, it is into an intensely altered and managed landscape. What we see out there are glimpses, slivers of life, mere hints that there is a wider, deeper world.

We still have need for animals to think upon. Despite what we have learned from the biological and social sciences, at no time in human history have we been less certain of who we are as people and what we are as a species. Many of us are drawn to animals, we say, because of their beauty or their liveliness or their faithfulness to ancient form. But I suspect we are really drawn, not by their shapes and textures, but by what we think through them. And what we think through wolves is never simple.

We are drawn to wolves because no other animal is so like us. Of all the rest of creation, wolves reflect our own images back to us most dramatically, most realistically, and most intensely. We recognize chimpanzees and gorillas, which are more like us in body structure and which show capacities for language and tool-making, as our closest evolutionary relatives. But long ago we diverged from chimpanzees and gorillas, and we have been shaped by different habits. As a result, though we are in many ways like chimpanzees, we are in some ways more like wolves. Like wolves, we evolved as hunters; we have long legs and considerable powers of endurance, adaptations to the chase rather than to hiding; we have minds that are capable of fine calculation, not just of spatial relationships, but of strategy and coordination. Like wolves, we band together to kill larger prey, and that has given us a different social system and a different personality from the chimpanzee; we have long childhoods, strong social bonds, complex
social roles, and status differences; we tend to claim and defend territories; we have complex forms of communication; we are individuals; we have strong emotions. Humans and wolves are so much alike that they take an unusual interest in one another. Wild wolves have often followed humans with what the humans felt was friendly curiosity, perhaps even a desire for company. And humans have, for thousands of years, adopted wolves and felt with them a mutual sense of companionship.

Wolves do little to resist our mythologies. The real facts of wolf life remain hidden, because wolves in the wild have evolved a shyness of humans. When humans appear, wolves vanish. Our glimpses of them, with rare exceptions, have been fleeting and incomplete. In thirty-five years of studying wolves, except in the Arctic, biologist David Mech saw wolves only fifteen times without the assistance of radio-telemetry devices or airplanes, and most of those sightings were of wolves that dashed across a road in front of his car. In 1986, he began observing wolves on Ellesmere Island, in the Canadian Arctic, where there are no trees and where he could follow the wolves all day. Such day-to-day familiarity between human and wolf is something almost wholly new, something denied to humans other than the Eskimos and Indians who ventured into the far north, where trees do not obscure the view. For the most part, we have seen only a fraction of the animal’s nature, and we have let our imaginations fill in the gaps.

What do we really know about wolves? What do we merely imagine? In a world molded so much by human activity, the future of wolves depends on our understanding of how fact shapes symbol and symbol shapes fact. It is a problem that all wildlife conservation faces: before we can save biological habitat for birds and butterflies, we must take steps to manage the habitat of the human heart. In the following chapters, I hope to explore the tangled and shadowy relationships between fact and feeling, biology and mythology, wolf and human.

Diane Boyd came to Montana for the wolves. In the 1970s, as a wildlife-management student at the University of Minnesota, she had worked for L. David Mech (pronounced “Meech”), whose studies on Isle Royale and in northern Minnesota had made him the dean of wolf researchers. It was a period of remarkable new interest in wolves. Mech had published
The Wolves of Isle Royale
in 1966, and then his detailed account of wolf biology,
The Wolf
, in 1970. These and the writings of a handful of other researchers had already turned aside centuries of folklore and apprehension of wolves. And while Boyd was at the University of Minnesota, Barry Lopez’s
Of Wolves and Men
had edged American and European views of wolves into spiritual and ethical realms.

It was a time of change for wolves, too. Since 1973, Dr. Robert Ream, a biologist at the University of Montana, had been collecting reports of wolf sightings in Montana and Idaho. Wolves had been declared an endangered species in all the United States outside of
Alaska. They had not reproduced successfully in Glacier National Park for fifty years, and in that time there had been only sporadic sightings of wolves in Montana. The closest known breeding population was 150 miles away, in Canada’s Banff National Park. Ream believed wolves might return to Montana. In April 1979, Joe Smith, working with Ream and with Canadian bear-researchers, had trapped a female wolf in British Columbia, not far from Glacier. Smith put a radio collar around the wolf’s neck and released her. The presence of a radio-collared wolf was a fresh research opportunity for Ream, and he wanted the animal watched. When Diane Boyd enrolled as a graduate student at Montana, Ream hired her to work on the Wolf Ecology Project.

Tall and blonde, with the high cheekbones and pale complexion of her Nordic ancestors, Boyd would become an anomaly in the world of wolf research, a woman in a field dominated by men, and a person of searching curiosity in a science often dominated by reductionist skepticism. The job might have gone to a male researcher had others than Ream believed that this might be the beginning of a return of wolves to Glacier National Park. Other wolf scientists pointed out that the one radio-collared female did not constitute a breeding population. They saw it as an outlier, an oddity that would probably disappear.

Boyd proposed to study the relationship between wolves and coyotes and to write a master’s thesis on the results. She intended to track radio-collared coyotes, the radio-collared wolf, and any other wolves she could find. There were wolves just north of the international border, which hunters and timber cruisers saw now and then. She would collect and analyze scats and search for carcasses of wolf-killed elk, deer, and moose, find out what coyotes and wolves were eating, and judge whether they competed for food.

Boyd caught dozens of coyotes, but she didn’t see signs of another wolf. The lone radio-collared female she sought to study was a traveler, a crosser of ridges and rivers, a consumer of distances. Wolves don’t stay in any one place; motion is their characteristic state. They must move around as packs in search of prey, or move as individuals to new locations in search of unoccupied ground or a pack hospitable enough to welcome them. The long-legged, loose-jointed trot of a moving wolf is as much a defining quality as the creature’s
teeth. A wolf traveling across the landscape bounces slightly. Its big, splaying paws glance off the earth and curl as they rise, and they seem to whip the body forward. The lithe backbone coils and releases like a spring, but the bend is almost unnoticeable, so fluid is the motion. The hind feet tread in line behind the forefeet, unlike dogs, whose hind feet slap down
beside
the forefeet. When a wolf is walking, its hind feet step right into the impressions left by the forefeet; the movement is spare and economical. A wolf effortlessly travels thirty miles in a day. David Mech followed a pack on Isle Royale that covered 277 miles in nine days.