The Company of Wolves (45 page)

He says that the combination of Murie’s work and his own constitutes the longest continuous study of a single blood line of wolves, longer even than the study on Isle Royale. “I’ve seen far more of wolves than any other living person,” he says. “That’s a fact. I don’t say that to brag. You look at my Ph.D. thesis and it has 8,279 hours of observation. Since then, I’ve added another 2,000-plus. What I’m talking about is not just what I think happens or what I’ve heard trappers say, but what I’ve seen. In one winter, I covered over 2,665 miles of tracking the two packs. I know not only the kills they made; I know every single encounter they had with live moose and sheep; and I know their behavior. There’s nobody in the business, now or in the past, that has a sample that comes close to that.”

He seems to enjoy his reputation for being thorny. Of the Park Service he says, “I’ve been their primary critic for twenty-seven years. In 1986, they decided, ‘We’ll get our own wolf-research project
so we can get Haber out.” That year, the Park Service invited Mech to begin his Alaska study, and Haber was not asked to collaborate, even though they were studying the same packs. Mech’s study is now winding down, “but,” says Haber, “I’m still there. The Park Service has discovered they’re dealing with a mean son of a bitch. But they haven’t been able to run me out of there.”

Haber believes most wolf and caribou biologists oversimplify the systems they study. He wants managers to see that nature is far more complex than they think. He believes, for example, that caribou herds expand and contract on cycles that take sixty to ninety years to complete. Herds briefly reach unimaginable numbers, collapse as weather changes and food supplies diminish, and then go through long periods of low density. Haber points out that the Fortymile caribou declined in the late 1800s. “Indians were starving to death there in the late 1800s. No amount of hunting could explain that decline.” And then the population came back to perhaps more than five hundred thousand in the 1920s. The herd doesn’t have a sustainable size, he says: it fluctuates wildly, with or without predation.

Haber has been hired by Wolf Haven to critique the Alaska Department of Fish and Game’s plan for wolf controls. His review of the plan led him to conclude, “The biology doesn’t make any sense, period.” And the essential misunderstanding, he says, is simple: “They feel they can replace the effect of natural predation with human harvest. We can increase the hunting and not have to do any wolf control. None.”

He believes that the Delta and Fortymile herds are about to stage their own comebacks. The Western Arctic herd now numbers five hundred thousand. As the larger herds reach peak populations, they will connect with smaller herds through migration and range expansion, and infuse new life into them. All Alaska needs to do, he feels, is wait for this natural increase. And moose could be increased by harvesting older moose and encouraging a younger population that would have higher pregnancy and twinning rates and less vulnerability to predators.

As he sits down across the table from Kelleyhouse, Haber starts right in objecting to the department’s wolf-control proposal, saying that the department’s population objectives for ungulates in the Nelchina Basin are too high. “Game Management 101,” he admonishes
Kelleyhouse. It is a shorthand reference to the dome-shaped curve that is taught in wildlife-biology courses and that represents the growth and decline of moose or caribou populations. The highest reproductive rate for ungulates does not come at the top of the dome: reproduction is highest 20 to 40 percent
below
that peak, because at that level there are more individuals of breeding age. He tells Kelleyhouse, “You’re not going to get those increases at those larger populations; the highest production is farther back on the curve.”

“You’re right,” says Kelleyhouse. “You want to keep them right up at the top of the curve, or back a bit. I’ve got a $100,000 or $150,000 budget to determine where they are on that curve. What did Tom Bergerud say on that? We’re better off with a herd of five thousand that is producing than with a herd of fifty thousand that’s not.”

Haber says caribou numbers are already high in the Nelchina Basin. Why kill wolves if the object is to reduce caribou?

Kelleyhouse responds as though Haber has questioned his professional competence: highlighting his sixteen years of experience with wolves, moose, and caribou, he tells Haber that he urged restoration of natural fires to improve moose habitat long before it became accepted practice in the department, and that he directed wolf-control efforts and participated in the research afterward that showed increasing ungulate numbers. “I’ve spent my whole career working on this,” he says.

Haber reiterates that Alaska Department of Fish and Game can’t expect to have high production at the large populations the plan calls for. He says Alaska can’t aspire to be like Scandinavia, where there are high moose densities in the absence of wolves.

“You’re not telling me anything I don’t know,” says Kelleyhouse, his conciliatory tone starting to thin. “You can’t have a Scandinavian situation here, because you’re not raising the kind of conifers that the moose like.”

Haber continues to needle Kelleyhouse. The Fortymile moose numbered ten to twelve thousand in 1965, but dropped to below twenty-five hundred by 1980 due to severe winters and high grizzly-bear and wolf predation. To expect that region to carry ten thousand moose again is, Haber feels, to ignore weather and other complexities.

By now, Kelleyhouse has tired of Haber’s assault. “You know,
Gordon,” he says, “we had our best talk at Edmonton, telling stories about times in the woods. When we start talking biology, we’ll never get anywhere. It’s like arguing religion or politics.” He says he’d like to relax now, to have a drink with his friends. He does not wish to continue this debate.

But Haber, deaf to the entreaty, presses his case. “I think the decisions have to be based on some pretty tricky biology. How in the hell can you expect the board to understand it?”

“My biologist is sitting there with the data when it comes to the cut,” says Kelleyhouse. With this he draws the conversation to a close, refusing to reply to any more of Haber’s arguments.

There is a moment of uncomfortable silence, and across it stretches a gap that divides Alaska. It is not just wolves that inhabit this silence, but the very identities of Alaskans. Some see Alaska as a last frontier, a place where young Americans can go to find lofty independence in a life framed by adventure, risk, and limitless space. Since the oil boom of the 1970s, however, there is also a more settled Alaska, a place less given to risk and more to order, security, and cautious planning, a place in which wilderness is less a challenge than a reassurance. Haber, for all his hours following wolves, lives in Anchorage and is comfortable in the urban setting. He is apt to see rural hunters as people with little respect for biological complexity and the healing intelligence of nature. Kelleyhouse has for years lived in the small town of Tok, many of whose residents hunt and trap for food and winter cash. He is convinced the newly arrived city dwellers have lost their daily association with wildlife and their understanding of nature. Says Kelleyhouse, “I would say the vast majority of people testifying against this are recent arrivals [to Alaska]. They are urban residents. They don’t understand what life is like for rural residents.”

Frontier Alaska still lives. Greg Neubauer, a placer miner who grew up in the Alaskan bush, sits in his living room in Fairbanks and tells stories of his youth in a mining camp. His father drove a Caterpillar bulldozer from the railhead near Denali one hundred miles across roadless country to Iditarod one winter, with temperatures sixty below zero, in order to make the machine available for him to dig
river gravels in the summer. Another year, he caravanned three Cats three hundred miles cross-country into the Brooks Range, a three-month trek in the dark of winter. The paths he cut are both established trails today. Neubauer’s mother shot twenty-seven bears in camp, bears that simply came too close and thereby seemed to pose a risk to her children. When Neubauer was a child, a neighbor was killed by a black bear. The neighbor had heard something outside his cabin and opened the door, and there the bear was. When they found the neighbor, his chest was eaten away. Neubauer recalls wolves breaking into the camp cookhouse one day when his father left the door open; they destroyed everything and urinated on what they didn’t eat. On the wall behind Neubauer is the coal-black skin of a bear he snot after it damaged his airplane and broke into a case of oil cans, biting into every one and spilling their contents onto the ground.

Such stories advertise Alaska as a place where one may confront a vast and elemental nature. The promise of adventure draws young men and women from the tame and possessive cities of the lower forty-eight to the wilds of Alaska. There is a powerful desire to lead the life of the wilderness family; the young settlers talk about it, dream about it. A few of them even try it.

Not many stick with it. Living off the land in Alaska is not easy: game doesn’t wait around for hunters, winters are hard, and subsistence life-styles are lonely. Most of the new arrivals usually end up living in the cities, where the jobs are.

But there is still a powerful desire to lead this life. Though Dick Bishop lives in Fairbanks, he still gets 90 percent of his family’s protein from the woods. “There are a lot of people that have a foot in each camp,” he says. “They have jobs and live in cities, but they hunt for food, they pick berries and fish.” Each fall, they try to shoot a moose to feed them over the winter. Says Bishop, “They feel self-reliant. The part of their lives they appreciate the most is a sample of that life, but they can’t devote themselves to it.”

Those who hunt say it is harder and harder to stock their winter larder, and many say wolves are to blame for the hard times. Bill Waugaman, a hunter from Fairbanks, complained that in 1992 he tramped an area he had hunted for years and saw thirty-eight sheep and only one bull moose. “I used to see this much game out of the
window of my cabin,” he says. “We have an emergency there.” Says Archie Miller, who has trapped for twenty-eight years on the Upper Yukon Flats: “The wolf population is extremely out of hand. The result is, we’ve got hardly any caribou, hardly any moose, and hardly any sheep. Take wolves down a peg or two to the point that we can have game for a generation or two. Do it until it gets back the way it was in the fifties.” Jim Roland of Fairbanks says, “The predators are taking 97 percent of the game, and the hunters are getting 3 percent. The land will hold ten times what’s out there. We just need a new philosophy in Fish and Game.” Bill Hager of Fairbanks urges, “Bring back equal allocation: one-third to the bears, one-third to the wolves, one-third to the humans!”

But there is a competing view. Only forty thousand of Alaska’s six hundred thousand residents live in rural areas. The vast urban majority consists largely of recent migrants from other states, where, as urban boundaries expand, fewer and fewer people grow up hunting. Today, fewer than 20 percent of Alaskans hunt. The urban majority sees nature less as a pantry than as a spiritual and recreational resource. Says Nicole Whittington-Evans of the Alaska Wildlife Alliance, “Wolves are a part of a natural system. They in fact allow a system to be a healthy system. One of the reasons people move to Anchorage is to be near a system with large predators.” In a poll taken by the Alaska Wildlife Alliance and Wolf Haven in 1992, only 8 percent of the responders supported an increase in the number of wolves being killed. Declared an Alaskan woman, “Nature does things really well. We don’t have to do better. Living within the limits set by nature is the lesson we have to learn for the future. Wolf control should be a method of last resort.”

To settle conflicts over the uses of wildlife, most states established governor-appointed fish-and-game commissions, like Alaska’s Board of Game. Commissions are supposed to take the politics out of wildlife decisions, eliminate the influence of market hunters and commercial fishermen, and free the legislature and the governor from having to wade through tedious biological reports in order to make decisions. They are supposed to put wildlife questions into the hands of citizens.

Alaska went other states one better by establishing local advisory committees to report to the Board of Game on local conditions and
interests. These committees give a strong voice to the older rural citizens, seldom admitting newcomers or people likely to introduce a contesting view; women are almost completely unrepresented on them. Urban residents often find these committees exasperating. Says former Board of Game member Joel Bennett, “That whole advisory system is poisonous—it’s impossible to work with, it’s stacked. There’s no way they will allow environmentalists to be represented. They’re elected by existing members, and whoever shows up is who votes. They view themselves as experts. And, to some extent, the biologists and the board are stopped.”

For example, when moose populations crashed in the 1970s, it was probably due in general to overhunting and cold winters. But in the Nelchina Basin, the local advisory committees were convinced that the crash was due to hunter harvest of cow moose. When the moose population recovered and threatened to outstrip the carrying capacity of the land, biologists in the department urged the Board of Game to initiate a cow-moose season. The local hunters, however, managed to get the legislature to pass a law stipulating that the board could not initiate a cow-moose season without concurrence from the local advisory committees. And they would not concur.

The issue is complicated by the sense many rural Alaskans have that environmentalists in the lower forty-eight and the United States government threaten their way of life. Kelleyhouse says the reason the wolf issue came about in the first place was that in 1980, when the federal government set aside a hundred million acres in parks and refuges, and in the process closed them to hunting, it was a blow to the rural life-style. Closure of all these areas has concentrated the hunters more heavily on the remaining areas. Meanwhile, game populations are declining, as is hunter success. The number of hunting licenses sold in Alaska has also been declining, because buying a license doesn’t guarantee a hunter the chance to hunt. After buying a license, one must get a permit for a specific hunt, but subsistence rights guaranteed by federal legislation give native Americans priority on most hunts. Kelleyhouse, recalling the setting aside of these federal lands, says he is “bitter at the way it was done. Suddenly people are being told they can’t hunt where they hunted all their lives.”