The Company of Wolves (46 page)

The state’s tourist industry is now geared more to wildlife viewing than to big-game hunting, and the conflict between the new tourism
and the old subsistence life-style is plain to see. At a 1991 Board of Game meeting, when one commissioner suggested that one of the state’s management objectives for wolves ought to be wildlife watching, another replied, “If they want to look at wildlife, they can watch it in my freezer.” When Al Manville of Defenders of Wildlife first appeared before the Board of Game to argue against wolf controls, a board member addressed him as “the goddamned conservationist from Washington, D.C.”

When Walter Hickel ran for governor in 1990, he reviled the federal government and appealed to rural Alaskan tradition. Hickel won, and his appointments to administrative positions in the Department of Fish and Game reflected rural Alaskan values. When Kelleyhouse was elevated from district biologist in Tok to head of the Division of Wildlife Conservation in Juneau, many saw it as an effort to resurrect wolf control. Concluded David Cline of the National Audubon Society, “They’re going back in time. They are trying to manage the state as it was in the 1930s and 1940s.” Two years later, five of the seven members of the Board of Game were Hickel appointees. In November 1992, not only was the Department of Fish and Game ready to recommend wolf controls; the Board of Game was ready to approve them.

The day after Kelleyhouse and Haber debated wolf control in the Westmark bar, the board authorized wolf-control programs in the area of the Delta caribou herd, the area of the Fortymile caribou herd, and the Nelchina Basin. Department officials would conduct the wolf hunts from helicopters in the Delta and Fortymile areas, but would issue permits to selected private individuals to do the killing from airplanes in the Nelchina Basin.

From the Department of Fish and Game’s point of view, the board’s action boiled down to a commitment to intensive management. The department’s Robert Stephenson said, “We had to do this. I mean, why are we here? To manage low-density populations forever? We’re not just here to sit and monitor. It doesn’t make much sense to spend $12 million a year on monitoring.”

Said Governor Walter Hickel: “You can’t just let nature run wild.”

But few people outside the department saw it that way. “This is single-species management at its worst,” said Melody Bankers of Wolf Haven. Former board chairman Douglas Pope called the department’s
decisions “myopic” and ascribed them to “upper-echelon wildlife officials … lobbied intensively by interest groups in the hunting community.” An Alaskan native activist said, “It’s an outrage the way they intend to kill them from airplanes and helicopters.” Said Tom Dowling, who delivers the mail on a 240-mile round trip between Tok and Delta Junction, “These people have an agenda that they feel our countryside is supposed to be a meatlocker and provide them with unlimited resources for moose. What they’re up to is extinction of wolves, is what they’re up to.”

Outside Alaska, criticism burgeoned into outrage. “How dare you spend my tax dollars to harvest wolves so that hunters can have more game to kill!” wrote an Arizona woman, who added, “Such practices enforce the image of Alaskans as barbaric, stupid, ignorant, backward people.” The National Parks and Conservation Association canceled plans for a 1993 conference in Alaska and urged its members to defer travel there. Defenders of Wildlife asked its members to boycott the state until the wolf issue was resolved, and announced plans to sue Alaska and seek a congressional ban on aerial wolf control. The department and the board received forty thousand letters on the issue, some of them threatening board members with violence. When a study by the Alaska Tourist Council predicted that if the wolf-control program was carried out, it would cost the state as much as $235 million in lost tourist revenues, Governor Hickel suspended all aerial wolf-reduction efforts.

Newspapers accused the state of seeking the extinction of wolves. The charge was ill-considered, for the proposed hunts covered only 3.5 percent of the state of Alaska. But the heart of the controversy was not the possibility of extermination—it was the issue of killing.

Much of the outrage expressed against the Alaskan hunts was directed at the proposal for the Nelchina Basin, where hunts were to be carried out by private individuals, not yet named, selected by the Department of Fish and Game. Department officials argued that the arrangement would save them money, but there were hints that there was more to it. During the board’s deliberation, board member Jack Didrickson said the arrangement would provide local people with a fine opportunity to harvest wolves.

Sport hunting of wolves is controversial in Alaska. People disagree as to whether it is proper to take the life of so sentient a creature, and debate whether it is proper to take the lives of animals that aren’t eaten.

There is also controversy over the methods used to hunt wolves. The wolf is so wary, so likely to flee at the scent or sound of humans, and so dispersed in the vast Alaskan landscape, that it is a rare hunter who can find and approach one on foot. The only way to locate and approach wolves consistently is to use an airplane. But it is a violation both of state law and of the federal Airborne Hunting Act of 1971 to shoot at animals from an airplane or to use aircraft to herd, drive, or chase animals. For years, holding that it is consistent with the Airborne Hunting Act, Alaska has permitted “land-and-shoot” hunting, in which the hunter uses the airplane to find the wolves but must land nearby, get out of the airplane, and approach the wolves on the ground.

In fact, land-and-shoot hunting has often been abused. Hunters shoot wolves from the air, or taxi after them on the ground until they are exhausted—both violations of the Airborne Hunting Act. Sean McGuire, a Fairbanks resident, has witnessed aerial wolf hunts. In one, a pilot tried to drive a wolf out of forests on a hillside into the open valley below, where he might shoot at it. “The wolf wanted to go up, and each time the plane would try to move it down, it would circle back. The plane finally gave up.” On another occasion, he heard a four-hour battle on the other side of a mountain ridge—the whining and circling of the plane and gunshots over the sound of the engine. But proof of such hunts was hard to come by. Alaska is a land of open spaces. In winter there are no backpackers or fishermen to question what an airborne hunter is doing in the back country. Says Bennett, “It’s a place where you can do things that you wouldn’t be allowed to do in other places, or do things without much chance of being caught.”

Bennett believes the Department of Fish and Game ignored, and even condoned, such violations, because it viewed the sport hunt as a back-door wolf-control program. He recalls one board member saying, “Hey, if you eliminated land-and-shoot, what are we going to do for wolf control?” Bennett believes, “It was incredibly effective in some areas. In Nelchina, they could send one family of hunters
out and be fairly sure of getting one hundred wolves a year.” But those who did the hunting publicly denied any wrongdoing.

And then, in March 1989, two national-park rangers overheard a radio conversation between aerial hunters over Kanuti National Wildlife Refuge. They took notes, and produced a transcript of the conversation:

Investigator Alan Crane later found five skinned wolf carcasses near Old Dummy Lake, inside Kanuti National Wildlife Refuge. One of them contained an arrow shaft and three arrow wounds. In the same area, he found wolf tracks with abrupt changes in directions, including sharp reversals in course, periodically intersected by aircraft ski tracks in a snaking pattern, atypical of a normal landing, taxiing, or takeoff pattern, and with occasionally greater depth of one ski track on the outside of turns, indicating high-speed taxiing. The wolf tracks showed a wolf falling down occasionally, and between leaps were spots of urine, indicating that the wolf was stressed and exhausted. Crane found aircraft and wolf tracks of this nature at five different sites, and all indicated someone had been chasing wolves in a taxiing airplane.

An Anchorage orthopedic surgeon, Jack Frost, and a licensed guide, Charles Wirschem, were charged with violation of the Airborne Hunting Act by using a plane to herd the wolves, with using their airplanes’ radios to hunt wolves, and with violating the federal Lacey Act by transporting a wolf that had been illegally killed. The government seized a photograph of Frost and Wirschem on the lake
in question in front of their planes, with Wirschem shooting at a wolf. Frost was vilified in the press, which printed transcripts of the radio transmissions. He signed a plea bargain in which he admitted using his aircraft to “disturb” a wolf. He was fined $10,000, his airplane was confiscated, and he lost the right to hunt wolves for two years.

Originally, Jack Frost had settled in Alaska for the hunting. As a boy in State College, Pennsylvania, he tramped the hills outside town, hunting rabbits. The first week of deer season, he remembers, school closed so that fathers could take their sons out into the woods. In winter, when a fresh snow fell, he’d go out and track rabbits and foxes. He came to Alaska in the service, and he stayed.

At forty-seven, he has blond hair framing his bearded face in tightly curled ringlets. He speaks with cautious deliberation. When I met him at a San Francisco hotel, his reserve struck me as a form of apprehension. He seemed to be trying to make sense of a shadow that had fallen over his view of life.

He has hunted moose and caribou all over Alaska, has taken the grand slam—all four kinds of North American wild sheep—and, above all, has hunted wolves. On winter days, he would range in his airplane far from Anchorage. When he found tracks in the snow, he would follow them until he came upon a pack of wolves.

Wolf hunting is not a pursuit for novices. “It’s not an easy thing to do to go out and find a wolf in an airplane,” says Frost. “It’s a skill that takes a long time to learn, and some people never can learn it.” Reading tracks from the air while traveling at seventy miles per hour and watching for mountains and treetops is demanding. When snow is soft and deep, the wolves walk in old tracks or stay under the trees, where the going is easier. When wind settles and compacts the snow, the wolves travel on lakes and rivers, but the compacted snow may not reveal their tracks.

It takes skill at flying. Says Frost, “People kill themselves hunting wolves. They fly into trees or they turn too fast. There’s a lot of skills—paying attention, flying the plane, landing the plane, shutting off the engine, and jumping out. If the wolf is in timber and going to come out on a lake, you have to coordinate how far away you are from him before you’re landing. If you get there too much before him, he may turn and go back. There’s a lot of flying judgment.
There are maybe a hundred guys in the state of Alaska who can do it, maybe twenty or forty that do it.” Frost and the rest of this small cadre of hunters took most of the sport harvest of wolves in Alaska.

He believes that land-and-shoot hunting is fair chase, because he believes the wolves always have a chance to escape. “Once I spot a wolf that I want, I’m guessing, I would get maybe 20 percent of them,” he says. “Lots of times you see wolves where there is no place to land. Lots of times you land and they duck into the bushes and you just don’t get them. The first wolf I ever landed on in an airplane was in deep snow, and I jumped out and I shot all the bullets in my rifle. There was a guy in the back seat and he handed me his gun and I shot all the bullets in his rifle. The wolf was 150 yards away and I just missed. It went into the woods.”

Frost insists it is not necessary to herd or chase them. He says wolves don’t always run away. “In landing on wolves, I have had every reaction from running, to stopping and gawking at the plane, to sitting and looking at it, to trotting over to see what was going on. You can’t predict how any wolf is going to react. I have landed thirty yards away on a lake and had them just stand up and look at me.” Once he landed below four wolves he had found sleeping on a hillside. Three of them scattered into the trees. “The biggest wolf trotted down the hill to within twenty yards of me. And I missed him with my bow and arrow.”

Often enough, he didn’t miss. A legally killed wolf must be reported to the department, and the records indicate that Frost killed as many as twenty wolves a year. He says, “I was successful at wolf hunting because I worked hard at it. There have been winters I’ve flown in excess of 250 hours.” Some years, he would take a whole month off from work to hunt wolves.

Frost insists that department officials assured him that land-and-shoot hunting did not run afoul of state or federal law, that landing near a wolf, although it might disturb the animal, would not be regarded as a violation of laws against harassment. “We were told, ‘Go ahead and land, and shoot as they are going away.’ State fish-and-game enforcement officers said that over and over. They were saying, ‘We need to harvest some of these wolves. I mean we
want
you to harvest them.’ ”

Today, Frost declares he did nothing wrong. He insists, “I’ve never
fired out of an airplane at a wolf,” and denies he used the airplane to herd the animals: “They basically charged that we harassed them, driving them to exhaustion, and we didn’t do that, either. We went out hunting wolves, we found wolf tracks, we followed the tracks. When we found the wolves, we followed the wolves. We couldn’t land where we first saw them. When the wolves came out on a lake where we could land, we landed the airplane as close as we possibly could and jumped out of the airplane and shot the wolves. It was our understanding that that was okay. It was what we were told we could do.