The Company of Wolves (24 page)

Wolf and human intelligences may focus on quite different things. The human mind focuses on objects. Human lives are transfixed by things that are inanimate, cars or television sets or clothes that give the illusion of imparting life to those who possess them. We confuse convenience with liveliness. Wolves are likely to think differently. The objects around them are alive, in motion, independent of wolf will. Their relationships with the world around them are likely to be more full of twists and turns, more alive and dynamic. Such a world requires a constant and free-flowing curiosity, a watchfulness, a capacity for sharp perception. It may be more fruitful for us to appraise wolf thinking in terms of perception than in terms of calculation.

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We must consider wolf intelligence on yet another level—that of emotion. An individual’s mind is an interplay between thought and feeling. The stronger feelings—which we call emotions—are mechanisms perfected through evolution that lead animals to intensify and focus behavior when it is advantageous to ignore other things. For example, emotions push a hunter to pursue and kill another animal despite the danger of sharp hooves or treacherous terrain. Emotions also impel parents to play with and care for their young when they might otherwise choose to hunt or sleep. At the same time, emotions can contradict thought or competing emotions, and thereby make an animal behave in unexpected ways. Emotions thus provide flexibility, so that life is not simply a matter of responding blindly to set stimuli. They give a species more kinds of response to its environment, and thereby make the species more adaptable to changes in that environment.

Many things about wolves suggest an emotional life that is rich, complex, and, like our own, full of contradictions. Wolves clearly have feelings, and observers frequently describe them as joyful or sad or sullen or playful. However, appraisal of animal emotions has so far eluded science, because animals cannot explain what they feel in human terms. When it comes to precise description of animal emotions, we humans are simply guessing.

The way the wolves Stephenson saw played tricks on eagles or bears seems to me very suggestive of the wolf’s rich emotional life and the flexibility it imparts to wolf behavior. Consider, for example, the way wolves relate to ravens. Over much of the range of wolves, if you want to find a wolf, the first thing you do is look for ravens. These birds often follow wolf packs or fly ahead of a hunting pack, wait in the trees for it to catch up, then fly farther on. Stephenson found that ravens were attracted by wolf howls, and when he howled to locate wolves, ravens would appear. Mech frequently saw ravens tracking the packs on Isle Royale, flying directly over their footprints in the snow. They perched in trees, waiting for wolves to finish feeding on a carcass, and as soon as the wolves left, they darted in to feed themselves. When the wolves moved on, the ravens dropped down and picked at their scats, swallowing the edible portions of incompletely digested meat and bone and hide.

Ravens will come from great distances to feed on a wolf kill.
Christophe Promberger, of Wildbiologische Gesellschaft, a wildlife-conservation group in Munich, Germany, conducted a study for the Yukon Division of Wildlife, which wanted to know how dependent ravens are on wolf kills in winter. He placed a dead moose in the snow and watched to see what the ravens did. They came, but stood around the carcass and did not eat. For two days, Promberger drove back and forth between the study site and Whitehorse, but the ravens continued to stand around the carcass without eating. He was about to give up when he saw another dead moose alongside a road. There were two wolves eating on one side of it, and a raven eating on the other. It occurred to him that perhaps ravens were unable to open a carcass—that they needed wolves to put their dinner on a platter. He went back to his bait kill, cut it open with an ax, and threw blood and hair and bone around in the snow. The ravens dined. Promberger continued his study, and eventually he found that ravens take an enormous share of wolf kills. In one day, ravens took almost ninety pounds of meat off one of his simulated kills. He concluded that wolf kills may be the principal source of food for ravens in winter.

After the wolves have eaten and are lying around in the snow sleeping off the torpor of a big meal, ravens will stand among them. Don Murray, one of the Isle Royale pilots, saw a raven alight for an instant on the back of a wolf. Mech and others have seen ravens play with wolves. When wolves were resting on lake ice, ravens would dive at them or walk up and peck their tails. If a wolf lunged at a raven, it jumped aside or flew a few feet away. Wolves then would stalk ravens, which would jump out of the way at the last minute, fly a few feet, and stand looking back at the wolf. It seemed to Mech like a game.

Other animals also feed on wolf kills. Eagles, wolverines, lynxes, and foxes may take half the meat off a wolf kill. To save as much as they can, wolves dig holes and cache meat, and they kill their competitors. There are records of wolves killing otters and mink. They are extremely intolerant of foxes, which they seem to kill wherever they can. But why, then, don’t they as a matter of course try to kill ravens?

It has been suggested that they don’t because the ravens provide the wolves with an important service. “There is this theory that
ravens lead wolves to a kill,” says Promberger. Mech saw ravens attend an attack on a moose on Isle Royale, swirling around the moose and wolves as the wolves brought the moose to bay. When the moose had been wounded, one raven sat in a tree cawing, as if urging the combat on. “I’m sure ravens track wolves in the snow,” says Stephenson. “Wolves tell ravens things. Ravens tell wolves things.”

But there is no fixed rule to the relationship. On Isle Royale, Rolf Peterson and Don Murray once saw a wolf catch and eat a raven. At the Julian Science Center in California, ravens caw and soar over the wolf pen, but every now and then Paul Kenis has found bits of wing and flutters of black feathers where a wolf has leapt up and caught a careless bird.

It is not necessarily axiomatic that playing and killing are emotional acts, but it is hard to look at wolves engaged in such acts and deny the feeling inherent in the behavior. And the fact that some wolves play with ravens while others kill them suggests that wolf emotions are varied and that wolf behavior is flexible.

There are several possible ways to view this flexibility. One explanation is that wolf societies, like human societies, consist of different personalities. Stephenson says the Eskimos taught him to see that all wolves are individuals. The things he has seen out there in the wilds of Alaska don’t fit into scientific reports because they sometimes fall outside the realm of generalization, and, he says, “We want to generalize pretty quick with an animal.” He believes that, as research becomes more airborne and more office-bound, we generalize more and more, and we lose the vast range of wolf experience; in fact, there are soft wolves and hard wolves, kind wolves and malicious wolves, soldiers and nurses, philosophers and bullies. Perhaps the poor raven that is killed by a wolf has had the misfortune to run into a barbarian, whereas the boon companion has run into a Rotarian.

Another way to view this complexity is to recognize that even an individual may have conflicting emotions. Wolves and humans alike demonstrate that a creature that can love is also a creature that can hate. Both animals cover a wide range of character and behavior. Both are of many minds.

The cry of a loon trails off the water of Lake Superior. It is muffled by a summer fog clinging to the ridge tops of Isle Royale. The island is wet and dripping, as if all the low greenery meant to delay the runoff of rainwater, to hold it on leaf and stem and petal in round pregnant drops, then in the soup of duff and twigs and sand on the trail, to miser it from the unimaginably vast sea of fresh water a few feet away. Along the trails, the balsam firs have a spicy, Christmas aroma. Lichens cover the trunks of birches and balsam firs. Shy yellow violets and blushing pink pyrola blossoms color the forest floor. It is a place that could be lively with the sounds of animals, but it is not.

“It’s quiet,” says Rolf Peterson. “You don’t hear howling much. The howling has dwindled over the last decade.”

Indeed it has. In 1980, there were fifty wolves on this 210-square-mile island national park. On late-summer nights, visitors could hear them howl and sense something at once thrilling and familiar. Isle Royale’s were the best-known wolves in the world. Twenty-two years
of careful and continual observation had gone into studying them, and they had been the subject of thousands of news stories and magazine articles. But since then, something has happened to the wolves. From the peak in 1980, their population plummeted to twelve in 1988, and they have remained at that level for five years.

“Howling in summer is prompted by having lots of pups around that like to howl,” says Peterson. “And having large packs around. With just a male and a female constituting a pack, there’s not much reason to howl. It’s quiet. And every wolf track is worth noting these days.”

Since 1970, Peterson and his wife, Candy, and, later, their two sons have spent their summers in a seventy-five-year-old fisherman’s cabin on one of the outer islands. It is a snug hidey-hole of hand-hewn logs nestled in the forest at the edge of the water. The rest of the year, they are in Houghton, Michigan, where he is a professor of wildlife ecology at Michigan Technological University. He comes out to count the wolves for several weeks every winter, when the trees are leafless and tracks are easily seen.

Peterson’s blue eyes and fair complexion suggest a Viking ancestry, and perhaps an inherited penchant for seeing the ends of things, of unexplored rivers and unexplained biological cycles. The son of a Minneapolis architect, he attended a YMCA camp in Canada, which taught him woodcraft and canoeing. He majored in zoology at the University of Minnesota at Duluth and spent his summers in canoe expeditions. In 1968, at the age of nineteen, he and five friends descended the Dubawnt River to the barren grounds of the Northwest Territories, passing near where Farley Mowat had watched wolves twenty years before. “I think we were only the fourth group of white people to go down the river, and the first group not to try to live off the land,” says Peterson. “It was really rough.” It was so cold that their feet would go numb by day and warm up only at night, and all members of the party suffered vascular damage. For thirty-five days, they saw no other humans. “We never saw wolves. All we saw of caribou, except for one band, was skeletons.” The great herds of barren-ground caribou were gone, and so perhaps were the wolves that had lived off of them. The sheer adventure of the trip confirmed in Peterson a desire to stay in the North. By the time he was a senior in college, “it was a toss-up between limnology and wolves.”

Peterson became aware of wolves when he visited Isle Royale as a young backpacker in 1967. Two years later, thinking the Isle Royale study had been discontinued, Peterson wrote to Douglas Pimlott asking for a position studying wolves in the Canadian Arctic, but Pimlott had nothing for him. Peterson then saw Durward Allen on a television program, and thus discovered that the Isle Royale study had
not
ended. He wrote Allen asking to be hired. Impressed by Peterson’s summer expeditions, Allen took him on as a graduate student. Eventually, Peterson succeeded Allen as director of the project, and moved its headquarters from Purdue to Michigan Technological University at Houghton, which offered a greater likelihood of future funding.

Peterson had never seen a wild wolf before he came to the island. He had to visit Chicago’s Brookfield Zoo before he came out to Isle Royale, to begin to get to know the animal. And his first sighting of a wild wolf was a confusing blur. He was with pilot Don Murray, who had been flying for thirteen years on Isle Royale and knew the wolves well. Murray found a kill and circled the plane over it. “He pointed out the wolves,” says Peterson. “I’m not sure I really saw them.”

Isle Royale’s study was blessed in that it had only two pilots for most of its history, lending a regularity to the observations on which estimates of moose-population trends are based. The pilots urged Peterson to gain his own sighting skills. Murray would not announce there was a wolf below; he would circle and circle until Peterson saw what he wanted him to see. In time, Peterson learned to identify wolves from the air by looking at their tail markings. With gyro-balanced binoculars, he could keep a wolf in view while the plane was turning in tight circles and rough air, and could thus count wolves and observe their behavior in winter.

In spring, he would go out on foot to search for den sites and to try to confirm the existence of pups. It was hard work, because the Park Service forbade the researchers to use radio collars, lest park visitors complain that the wolves were being exploited or overmanaged. Peterson would search for them by tracking and howling, and sightings were seldom lengthy events. “Basically,” says Peterson, “it’s wolf sees people, wolf runs.” He recalls, for example, watching a rendezvous site from a nearby ridge for ten days as a pack with seven pups played and howled and returned from hunts with food for the
young. Then, one day when Peterson was watching the study site waiting for the wolves to appear, the male and female arrived—but there were no pups. “They just sat down and howled, the longest, most mournful howl. There was an answering from the other wolves off in the forest. And then they were gone. I think they knew we were there.”