The Company of Wolves (52 page)

From 1788, when Roderick MacKenzie and the first European fur traders arrived here, the Peace-Athabaska Delta has supported fur trappers, who took the skins of mink, lynx, beaver, otter, and wolf. The delta once yielded two to three hundred thousand muskrat pelts a year. But twenty years ago, when British Columbia raised Bennett Dam on the Peace River, the dam cut off the spring floods that used to spread out over the delta, and much of the delta dried out. Said a Métis Indian trapper, “I see a lake where it used to be good for muskrats. Now it is all straight bush. Everything growed grass and willow. Where we used to fish in three or four feet of water, there is only four inches of water. Now nothing but mud, no fishing grounds there any more. Mink also disappeared, after the muskrat disappeared. Even the frogs left the country.”

As the delta dried out, so did traditional culture. The young people no longer go out with the old people to hunt and fish, so they no longer learn the things that their ancestors had to know to stay alive. Many of them will go off to the cities to the south to find employment. Others will stay in Fort Chipewyan, living on government handouts and the scorn of the outside society, buying their food at the Northern Store, and drinking to fill the emptiness of life. Domestic violence runs high; a Mountie says that half the complaints he responds to are of men being beaten by their wives, and that alcohol is the root of just about all the complaints. A new set of forces shapes their culture.

The men on the bench aren’t finding stories; they share only gossip—so-and-so
went out on his boat to Fort MacMurray for supplies and hasn’t come back, so-and-so owes me money The old stories are gone, but new stories aren’t yet born. The wind off the delta is not bringing words to mend the world.

For days, I hovered around the blue bench and eavesdropped. Whenever I approached as if to sit down and enter the stream of conversation, however, the men would suddenly disperse, like birds flushed from a field. One morning, I sidled to within a yard of the bench and took two men by surprise. One of them rose suddenly and scuttled down the street. The other turned and, as he caught sight of me, looked suddenly stricken. He got to his feet, tapped his watchless wrist, mumbled something that might have been “Oh, look how late it is,” and scurried down the street.

When I talked to people in the town about wolves, most of them had little to say to me. The kindest of them pled ignorance and referred me to the trappers who still go out in winter to harvest furs. So I looked up as many of them as I could find in town. I discovered that the wolf is not admired here.

Archie Simpson is a seventy-six-year-old Cree who lives in a small house in Fort Chipewyan. But for his graying hair, he hardly shows his age. He is a compactly built man, with searching eyes and small straight teeth. He grew up in the Peace-Athabaska Delta before much of it was set aside as Wood Buffalo National Park, and has hunted and trapped over more of it than any living man. His government-permitted trapping area is in the park, and he still goes out for weeks at a time in the middle of winter. He is regarded as the dean of trappers and wise in the ways of wolves.

“Wolf have an easy life,” he says. “They just running around for the exercise. That’s what they are, I think.” They follow the herds of caribou or bison. He says he has seen as many as sixty wolves together following the caribou, has watched them hunt and kill bison and moose, and has even driven wolves off a moose so that he could take some of the meat for his dogs.

Simpson has chased wolves on his snowmobile and shot them for the bounty, which was paid until 1954, and the fur, which he sold to commercial dealers. “I see forty in one bunch. Fresh tracks, I follow.
At night, after the snow’s over, they’re following buffalo. I seen sixteen buffalo got killed by these wolves. So I chased ’em on a lake, Lake Claire, for the fur now. I got about ten wolves in two days. They were beautiful wolves. Barren-lands wolf.”

Sometimes he shoots them simply because they steal his furs. “The wolf here is about thirty in a pack. Sometimes they’re alone. When they’re alone, that’s when you got to watch. They’ll go to your trap lines. You see, if they hit your trail, they’ll follow it. They’re hungry—that’s why they’ll follow you. As soon as a single wolf hits your trap line, they just follow your trap line, taking the fur out of your traps. One time, I took eleven lynx. The wolf took ’em all. If there were no wolf I’d have all that money.”

Sometimes he shoots because he feels threatened. “One time, first time I went in the bush with my dad in the fall, I was pretty young that time. I was going to go to the creek. I hitch up my dogs, and after I hit all my traps, I was riding and going pretty good. It was a prairie before you hit the lake. Lots of buffalo. My dogs stop and look toward the shore. They [normally] don’t stop for nothing. I could hear wolves coming to me, across the prairie. I had a good gun and could shoot about eleven or twelve altogether. I tied up my dogs. I counted seven wolves. Just right, I thought. The wolves are just coming. They don’t look like they’re going to stop. The first one, I shot him. He fall among my dogs. That big black wolf was here to that spruce [thirty yards]. They still keep coming. I shot five. I let two go.

“I didn’t know what was gonna happen if I didn’t have a gun. That was too damn close. After I shoot ’em, I was shaking. We skin ’em. They’re in good shape. You could see not starving. But the fur was nothing on it. No bounty. Nothing.” His brother took the skins and hung them up, but forgot about them, and so didn’t cure them or ever sell them.

“A few years after, I went again in the fall. I used dogs. I got on Lake Six in the cabin there. I stopped my dogs. The sun was just going down. I took a pail down the hill and I was going to get some ice. I went out on the lake and I was standing there looking around. I look down and I see something sitting on the point. I look and look and look. I started chopping the ice. At the same time, he moved. As soon as I stopped, he just lay down flat. As soon as I start
again, he started coming trotting. I stop and he stop. I start and he start. I ran as fast as I could to my dogs. When I got to my dogs, I took my gun. I look around on the lake: no wolf. I look under the tree. There the wolf was sitting. I shot and I killed him. A big wolf, a big gray wolf. I think it really meant it, that wolf. Lucky I got away.

“Once, riding a Skidoo, coming home from Little Buffalo Lake, I see wolf tracks on the lake, but I didn’t know he was coming behind me. I stopped. I looked and he was sitting right behind me. I start and he follow. I stop and he stop. I start and he’s coming. So I trick him. When he was coming, I took my gun out, just turn my Skidoo around, and I chase him. And I caught him right in a snow drift.

“I never tasted the meat, just threw the carcasses away. Dogs won’t eat wolf. They’ll eat lynx. Lynx is good meat; I like that meat. Dogs will eat martin. But they won’t eat wolf.

“They’re pretty smart, the wolf. I can call a moose in; I can’t call a wolf in. If you miss once, he never come back. When you catch one, the rest go away. They go someplace else, they don’t come back. If they see a person, they don’t stay there. They’ve got to go. Even they hear a Skidoo, they’ll go.”

Forty other natives have rights to trap in the area, but few of them exercise their rights. Simpson says, “There used to be camps all over the place. But now nothing. They’re all here in town.

“That Bennett Dam, what it done, where people kill a thousand rats, it’s all brush. My father-in-law cut bush in his trap line eight miles from here. One time I took twenty-one hundred muskrats out of that place. Now there’s no water. Anyplace you go, you see dust flying. Any lake you go, you could see young ducks swimming. Now you won’t see that.” And prices for furs have gone down: he used to get $1,000 for a good lynx, but now he’s lucky to get $300.

Simpson sees how it has affected the culture. “I used to go to the old people when I was young. That’s the way I learned everything hunting. Today, it’s lots different. If they go out on a Skidoo and they go a long way and it broke down, some of ’em, they can’t even make a fire and they can’t make a bed. Some of ’em don’t know how to use the ax. Lots of things finished from the old way. Even the killing of a moose, they throw the hide away. They should learn the old way. They’ll be helping themselves.”

Simpson thinks about his father: “My father was not a working
man, just trapping and hunting and fishing. My dad used to tell me how to hunt the animal: You gotta do this. You gotta do that. You gotta follow the wind. If the moose go away from the wind and you go behind it, you’ll never get it. You gotta watch when you’re going after moose. You gotta follow the wind. But now nothing. Moose don’t follow the wind. They don’t move that way. Even the animals are changing. Walking, walking like that”—his hands indicate that the moose is turning without regard to the direction of the wind—“eating, eating, then they lay down. Everything has changed. I don’t know why. Everything has changed. The world has changed.”

The bison are also changing. “In the springtime, all the young buffalo are born. During the fall, you don’t see the young ones—the wolves kill all the young ones. If there are old cows, they won’t have no young ones. How in the hell’s there going to be the buffalo?”

The buffalo in the park are declining in numbers, and biologists note that they have been infected with brucellosis and tuberculosis. Some wildlife managers urge that some of the disease-free buffalo be brought in and quarantined, and the rest of the buffalo killed. The healthy captives would later be put back into the wild. Simpson believes the buffalo are declining for other reasons. “I’ve been trapping a long time and I never seen any dead buffalo, dead for nothing. If I see a dead buffalo, it’s dead for the wolf. I told them, I don’t believe the disease. Their disease is the wolf. If they take away the wolf, the population of buffalo might come up again.”

Still, he doesn’t want to see wildlife managers shoot buffalo. “I like to protect the buffalo and I like to protect the wolf. I don’t like to see killing all the buffalo and starving the wolf. I hate like to poison the wolf. I hate like to shoot ’em clean out. They’re feeding themself. They’re like some people looking for a job. They’re looking for food. If they down all the buffalo, I want ’em to move the wolf where they could make their living.

“Move the wolf. Move them somewhere else where they could live. If they kill all these buffalo and the wolf are living on that, where are they going to go, the wolf? They might go to the town and kill the children. If the wolf get to town, they’ll kill anybody.”

• • •

Carl Granath’s mother was an Indian, his father a Swedish trapper. Carl married a Métis woman in Fort Chipewyan and has been trapping lynx, fox, martin, and otter since 1966. His trapping area is thirty miles from town in rocky country with a lot of lakes and muskegs and forests of pine and spruce. He goes out by boat in October, before it freezes, to clear brush so that he can get a snowmobile over his trap line in winter. Though he returns to town by December, he then goes out again and stays most of the winter on his trap line, coming into town on his Skidoo every few weeks to see his wife and children.

“I like it. I look forward to the winter.” He sees wolves out along his trap lines from time to time. “I don’t think they are dangerous. Years ago, when I was driving dogs, I would always run into them, especially in winter and after dark. They would howl to let you know they’re around. They never bother me.

“In the 1980s, I had one wolf hanging around the cabin. I saw him hundreds of times. He was kind of a silvery color, like a silver fox. I had thrown out scraps to him. I had dogs, and the same wolf would come in and be playing with my dogs—just playing—he never bothered the dogs. I started off one day on the Skidoo to check the lines, and I went a half-mile and remembered something I’d forgotten back at the cabin. I walked back and saw the wolf playing with the dogs. He used to go up and down my lines and sometimes take furs. He might take one or two lynx at a time. He got to be like a pest. It was pretty expensive. I’d get pretty mad at him. I had in my mind, if I seen him out on the ice, I’d shoot him. But I never did.

“I respected him. I never bothered him; I didn’t try to shoot him. When I used to come to town after I had no dogs, this wolf would follow me. And he’d stay on the outskirts of town, and when I went back, he’d follow me back. I thought I must be his friend or something. That wolf was around for five years.”

But the fifth year the wolf followed Granath to town proved its last. “People complain about wolves getting too close to town,” says Granath. “People must have complained, and Fish and Wildlife put out some poison at the town dump. They must have gotten it, because Fish and Wildlife said they got a wolf at the dump, a silver gray wolf. And he never showed up after that. I kind of missed him after all the years he was around.

“I know people today, lots of them are scared of wolves. They won’t go anywhere after dark. I don’t know what they are scared of out there.”

Andrew Campbell is a big, powerfully built man, with a dour expression and a hint of the accent of his father, who came to Canada from Scotland. His mother was a Métis Indian. He is sixty-five years old, born the year the first airplane came into the north country. He lives at the mouth of a small canyon on the west side of town, just below the grounds of the Catholic mission. “I’ve been here all my life,” he says, “been with wolves.”

As a boy of eight or nine, he would go out winter trapping with his father, and his father would send him back to town alone with the dog sled to get supplies. “He would send me into town from a cabin thirty miles out. My mom wouldn’t let me go back, because she was afraid the wolves would get me.”

He has a trap line and a cabin inside the park, seven miles from his home in Fort Chipewyan. “I love it out there. I still trap, but you can’t make a living off trapping now—there’s not enough animals, and the price of things is too high. Look at the Skidoo I got out here—that’s $4,000. The gas is an expense. So you go out on your trap lines, it’s going to cost you a hundred dollars.” And the Northern Company fur buyers “put your fur way down low and the groceries they put way up high.”