The Company of Wolves (5 page)

The picture emerging from Boyd’s experience with wolves was different from the one people had held before the middle of the twentieth century. Before 1950, wolves were generally viewed in narrowly restricted terms. The standard text about wolf life at that time was Stanley Young and Edward Goldman’s 1944
The Wolves of North America
, a compendium of tales from the diaries and journals of explorers, trappers, ranchers, and historians of the West, combined with Young’s own lifetime of experience with federal bounty hunters. Goldman, a taxonomist, contributed to the work chiefly by identifying the characteristics and ranges of various subspecies. Young wrote the narrative and descriptive parts of the work. He had himself made a living trapping wolves, and had worked since the 1920s for government predator-control agencies. Young drew very little from scientists, because few had ever studied wolves in the wild. In
The Wolves of North America
, he described a creature “symbolizing power, ferocity, sagacity, courage, fighting ability and ruthlessness.” It was “a menace to human life,” and “everywhere so destructive to
domestic stock that constant warfare had to be waged against it.” Because the wolf was being exterminated in the United States, Young professed to see it as a tragic creature, akin to the outlaw gunmen of the old Wild West. That merely reinforced the old myth of the wolf as a malevolent will with large teeth and glowing yellow eyes. At midcentury, one could hardly think of a wolf without thinking of the slaughter of innocent sheep or attacks on sleigh riders in winter snows.

The actuality never really fit Young’s picture of murder and mayhem. In North America, accounts of wolf attacks on humans seem generally to be tall tales or accounts of rabid wolves. Randolph Peterson of the Royal Ontario Museum reported an attack in 1942 by a wolf on a Canadian railway section foreman, who was knocked, along with his handcar, off the railroad tracks. For half an hour, he fought the wolf with an ax. The wolf growled and gnashed its teeth and refused to flee even after the railroad man had hit it with the ax. Finally, a freight train came along and stopped. The engineer, fireman, and brakeman all came to the foreman’s aid and killed the wolf. Though the animal was never tested for rabies, its behavior strongly suggests that it was rabid. Naturalist and editor George Bird Grinnell said he had looked for years for an authentic case of a healthy wolf attacking a human and found only the story of an eighteen-year-old Colorado girl who met a young wolf while herding milk cows at dusk. She called out and threw a stone at it, and the animal took her by the shoulder, knocked her down, and bit her on the legs and arms until her brother came to her rescue and killed the wolf. That wolf was not tested for rabies, either. J. W. Curran, editor of the Sault Ste. Marie
Daily Star
, for years offered a $100 reward to anyone who could prove he had been attacked by a wolf in the Algoma district of Ontario, but never had to part with his money.

The fact that wolves kill has always colored humankind’s view of them. We have a hard time separating killing as necessary predation from killing as moral outrage. Real reappraisal of the myths of wolf ferocity did not come until scientists began to think of them in ecological and evolutionary terms, and thus changed the moral basis of the question of killing.

An ecological view states that, if nothing died, all the earth’s available materials would be locked up in a kind of carbon freeze. If nothing
ate plants, they would simply become huge masses of wood and coal sitting glumly over the millennia. At some point, all the available carbon would be tied up in living plants, and nothing more would be born. Death is nature’s way of making things continually interesting. Death is the possibility of change. Every individual gets its allotted lifespan, its opportunity to introduce change through mutation or culture, its chance to try something new on the world. But time is called, and the molecules which make up leaf and limb, heart and eye are disassembled and redistributed to other tenants.

A considerable portion of the creation is devoted to the disassembly and redistribution of organic materials. Soil-dwelling fungi take apart the wood of trees, and bacteria consume what the beetles and fungi don’t get. Many creatures don’t wait for others to depart voluntarily: they kill and eat living organisms. Predation is a fact older than mammals, older than reptiles, older than the tooth or the claw or blood itself. Single-celled organisms in primeval pools hunted and gobbled each other with abandon. Predation is today the rule, rather than the exception, among vertebrates. Few fish, amphibians, reptiles, or birds live exclusively on plants. Among North American mammals, the only vegetarians are beaver, porcupine, hares and rabbits, pikas, manatees, pocket gophers, elk, deer, antelope, moose, bison, bighorn sheep, and mountain goats. Even creatures we expect to be meek have predatory moments: chipmunks have been known to kill mice, and one observer has seen deer consume fish.

An evolutionary view sees the wolf as the product of a long line of evolutionary choices.

Two hundred million years ago, reptilian ancestors began to connect the lower jaw to the skull by means of a cheekbone hinge, enabling an individual to chew food into small bits, exposing more surface area of food to digestive enzymes, and thus allowing quick digestion. That development enabled creatures to heat their own bodies efficiently and gave rise to warm-bloodedness. That ushered in the age of mammals.

The earliest mammals were small nocturnal creatures, living in a world of fierce, quick, predatory dinosaurs. They probably relied more on scent than sight, and were furtive, secretive, and probably drab in color. They were more frequently prey than predator.

But, as often happens, the drab get even. About sixty-five million
years ago, the large dinosaurs disappeared. Many scientists believe that an asteroid hit the earth, throwing up huge dust clouds that blotted out the sun and reduced photosynthesis to the point where food resources for the larger vegetarian reptiles crashed. Creatures that lived in earth burrows and manufactured their own heat when abroad were more likely to survive. The age of reptiles came to an end, and the age of mammals began.

Even without an asteroid collision, the days of the cold-blooded dinosaurs were probably numbered. Sixty million years ago, the continents were drifting apart from their earlier union in a single super-continent. The continental masses moved away from the earth’s equator, and as they drifted, they rose and folded. Mountains uplifted and ocean currents changed. Cooler local climates came with the uplands and the sea currents. In place of the tropical forests, new kinds of plants were evolving. Given the cooler climate and the new plants, dinosaurs would have been hard-pressed.

In this changing world, grasses evolved. Savanna and prairie spread over large sections of the continents. And with this new habitat came a burst of evolutionary activity among mammals. Both hunters and hunted evolved dramatically. Earlier plant-eaters were slow and clumsy creatures with broad heads, big bones, and elephantine feet. To take advantage of the new grasses and shrubs, some plant-eaters developed the ruminant digestive tract, which allowed cattle, deer, and antelopes to eat quickly, then go off to some safer place, regurgitate the unchewed food, and quietly chew and swallow it. That put a greater premium on the ability to escape, and deer and antelope developed longer legs, smaller feet, and relatively large bodies, to contain larger digestive systems and larger lungs. They developed a wrist bone that hinged top and bottom and so gave them greater flexibility and extension. The long bones of third and fourth digits fused to form the cannon bone. Gradually, the radius and the ulna fused into a single bone. Plant-eaters were increasingly designed to eat and run. Escape and wariness became the great advantages, and deer, camels, llamas, pigs, sheep, goats, bison, and cattle became the common herbivores.

As the herbivores grew faster, the slow, broad-headed, short-legged creodonts and mianids that had preyed on their ancestors died out. The surviving predators developed longer limbs and bigger
brains. Out of these trends emerged the modern carnivores. Carnivores are defined by the presence of long sharp canine teeth and steeply ridged molars and premolars known as “carnassials,” which are used for shearing meat. Carnivores include bears, cats, hyenas, weasels, skunks, raccoons, and dogs. And the dogs, or canids, include foxes, coyotes, jackals, and wolves.

The first wolflike canids emerged about three million years ago. In the Eastern Hemisphere, they gave rise to the various species of jackal; in the Western Hemisphere, to coyotes. The first wolves probably split from the coyote line about one million years ago in the New World and then migrated to the Old World. Perhaps seven hundred thousand years ago—perhaps more recently—the gray wolf emerged from the evolutionary mists in the Eastern Hemisphere. There is much debate about the exact line of descent. Ronald Nowak of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service believes the ancestors of today’s red wolf were in North America a million years ago, and that one descendant migrated to South America, where it evolved into the dire wolf, and another went north to Alaska and the Old World, where it evolved into the gray wolf. The gray wolf recrossed the land bridge to America sometime between three and six hundred thousand years ago. By the time of the Roman Empire, the gray wolf ranged over most of Eurasia and North America and boasted the largest range of any land mammal.

Cats split off the line that would lead to dogs about forty million years ago. The differences between dogs and cats tell much about the kinds of choices that were being made. Dogs are relatively long-limbed and slender-bodied. The lower part of the leg is generally longer than the upper part, for greater leverage. Dogs evolved in open country, where hunting requires pursuit. They are built for speed and endurance. Cats, on the other hand, are designed largely to lie in wait and take prey by stealth. Because they are built for speed, dogs walk on the very tips of their toes. Cats are slightly more flat-footed, a trait that allows them to maintain sharp claws, whereas dogs wear theirs down. Cats have wrists that turn, and with their extensible claws they can grab a prey and hold on to it while biting.

Long legs alone don’t make a runner: runners need long noses. Long-distance running produces a lot of body heat, and, to vent that heat before it forces the animal to stop or damages the animal’s organs,
dogs have long muzzles. Carnivores, like most of the mammals, don’t sweat. They cool down by panting. A large portion of a dog’s blood is pumped through the blood vessels of the nose. The
rete mirabile
, a network of blood vessels at the base of the brain, carries this cooled blood from the nasal passages across the arteries conducting blood from the heart to cool the brain. Thus, a dog’s long face is there not just to smell things but to chase things.

Dog skulls tell yet more about evolution’s choices. Cats are shorter-muzzled and have, for the size of their jaws, a more powerful bite than dogs. A lion, for instance, can bite through the neck of a buffalo. Cats tend to hunt alone, coming together solely to breed. Only lions and cheetahs hunt in groups. The solitary habit probably explains, too, why the largest cats are larger than the largest dogs. A single lion or tiger or leopard can bring down a large prey that even a pack of dogs might be unable to tackle.

Since dogs can’t deliver the quick fatal bite, they tend to hunt in packs. Their jaws are designed to nip and tear. When wolves attack a moose, one wolf may grab the moose’s nose and hang on while the much larger moose shakes him like a rag doll, trying to dislodge him. Meanwhile, other wolves are diving in from the rear to slash at the moose’s flanks. The operation may take hours. The wolves will withdraw and wait while the wounded moose stiffens or weakens from loss of blood. Death can be slow for the prey, and because this seems cruel and inefficient, it has earned wolves the scorn of humans.

Much is made of a wolf’s fangs, but it is worth noting that a wolf’s canine teeth are not really all that distinctive. Big canines are relatively common among mammals. Several species of deer have diabolically overdeveloped canines that protrude over their lips. Pigs elaborate their canines into huge tusks that curl back toward the eye. Hippopotami have extravagantly developed canines curving into sharp tusks. It’s not the canines that make wolves special—it’s the teeth behind them, the carnassials.

The teeth of dogs may also tell something about their social order. Dogs have four premolars, cats only two. Once a cat has stabbed or suffocated its prey to death, it can drag the prey to a tree or some safe place and eat without hurrying. But because they hunt in packs, dogs cannot. In a pack, there are fights over meat, and a slow eater
among fast eaters may be doomed. Premolars are useful for holding food, and for shearing it off quickly so that it can be bolted down. The dog’s extra premolars might have evolved as a way of coping with the darker side of sociability—the greed, jealousy, and envy that are the shadows of cooperation, love, and care.

Coordinated pursuit requires greater intelligence. The wolf’s ancestors learned to track, to communicate with one another, and to read strengths or weaknesses in prospective prey. Wolves learn what to hunt and how to hunt it. There are wolves that live today among livestock but never seem to think of cows as food. Near Churchill Bay, Ontario, a wolf pack learned to distract mother polar bears long enough to kill and eat their cubs. In this century, Alaska’s Brooks Range wolves were almost eradicated by poisons, traps, and disease, and in the absence of predator pressure, moose moved into the region. After wolf controls ended, wolves returned to the area, but fed on caribou. Twenty-five years passed before they started preying on moose again.

As intelligence becomes more important, youth becomes more protracted. Nature decrees dependency and helplessness as a way of keeping an individual out of trouble until it has sufficient knowledge and experience. To equip an infant with adult bulk and power is to make a destructive monster, a creature that poses danger to its kind and lacks the experience needed to live long enough to pass on its genes. Large carnivores require long schooling. Bear cubs may stay with their mothers two years. Wolves may stay with their parents all their lives.