The Company of Wolves (53 page)

Campbell regards wolves as an additional adversity. “I don’t like the wolf. A wolf is a bad animal. They’ll kill any animal. They take the dogs from right in front of the house. Every year, we lose dogs right here in the yard to wolves. They’re pretty quiet when they come here, because there’s people all over town. That wolf will know whether you’re asleep or you’re awake.

“When they kill a dog here, they pick it up and carry it away. The wolf will break an ordinary dog chain—they rip the collar right off. They don’t leave any blood. I don’t know how. I got my dog out here, and a wolf came and cut her right in half. Half the dog was there, and the wolf took the other half away. And there’s no blood. You explain that. They must drain the blood out of ’em. When they
cut ’em in half like that, they must suck the blood right out of ’em. There’s not time to lick the blood up, because I’m out there.

“One time, forty years ago, fifteen come after me. I didn’t know whether they were after me or after my dogs. I was on the dog sled in a little muskeg, tracking caribou. All of a sudden, the dogs give a jump. They almost knocked me off. There were wolves coming down the hill. Even though it was daytime and a clear sky, these wolves were coming this way. The dogs were running. I stopped the dogs and grabbed the rifle. There was a black wolf there and I shot her. I stayed in the bush and made a fire. Those wolves went clear around me. They surrounded me. They started howling. I had this fire going so they wouldn’t come any closer. I grabbed my rifle, because they were too close.

“Lots of time, they come awful close. I don’t know what they were after, me or the dogs. But I never got hurt.”

He does concede, “I don’t know anybody to be attacked.” But he believes wolves are laying waste to the rest of the wildlife. “There’s an awful pile of wolves here. They kill just about every day. Around Claire Lake, you see, them wolves are living right off the buffalo. They just live with them, following them around. They kill anything they can. They get a herd of caribou and they’d run. These wolves”—he holds two fingers of his left hand down—“they lay here in the front. This other wolf”—he holds down the index finger of his right hand—“will grab her and hang on. This wolf, he’s got poison in his teeth. I’ve lived here sixty-five years and I know something. That’s my study. The disease from the poison in the teeth gets into the caribou. He gets weak. They say they’re killing the sick and the weak. Well, sure. That caribou is sick already because the wolf’s bit him.
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“They’ll eat them alive, on the run. Sometime you’ll see the whole thigh eaten. Their guts has fallen out of their back parts while they’re standing. Sometimes the buffalo is lying there two weeks before it dies.”

This talk of wolves and loss turns quickly to talk of hardship and treachery. “If you kill the buffalo off, the wolves are going to clean this whole country out,” he says. “This country won’t be worth anything.” Campbell’s face reddens and his voice rises as he talks about politicians and environmentalists: “A lot of people like to save the wolf. It’s not the people they’re worried about, it’s just their business. They’re not worried about the people in the North. By God, if they were in my shoes all the time and seen the tough times I seen, they’d know what I’m talking about!”

Jerry Bourke is a fifty-year-old Chipewyan Métis. “I’ve been out in the woods most of my life,” he says. “I spent most of my life on the trap line. I didn’t go to school much. I went out with my dad. He got sick, and after that I went out with my uncle. My dad or my uncle told me about animals.”

He has a trap line a hundred miles north of Fort Chipewyan. “You’re right in a corner where there’s nothing at all. It’s just animals and you. Some years, there’s so many wolves.” He finds wolf-killed moose and caribou. Though he finds wolf tracks around his camp and believes the wolves are attracted by his dogs, he has never lost a dog to one. “I hear that other trappers lose dogs to wolves. I don’t know what they do. I never shoot wolves. I never shoot anything unless I make money on it or I need meat.” Even when there was a $40 bounty on wolves, he wouldn’t shoot one. “It wasn’t worth it. It was too much work to clean a wolf.

“In the olden days, they’d see wolves more. Since they started using Skidoos, they don’t see wolves much. The wolves hear you coming a long way away, and they run. Any wild animal hates Skidoos. Only moose don’t. A moose will stand three hundred yards away while you drive by. A caribou will run.”

In January 1979, Bourke was attacked by a wolf. “It was at night, and it was snowing hard. I had been going all day on the Skidoo, and I had run out of gas on the edge of Collins Lake, near where I had a trap and a snare. I was cold. I decided I’d jump off my Skidoo and run to the trap, and by the time I got back I’d be warm.” Although he had two rifles on the Skidoo, he says, he didn’t carry either firearm as he ran. The trap was over a low ridge, and as he came over
the ridge, he saw wolves. They were eating two lynxes he had caught, one in the trap, one in the snare.

“There was twelve of them. One started to bark and come after me. I got out on the ice. I didn’t have any gun with me. The wolves were coming after me. I broke a stick off a tree.

“The wolf grabbed me just above the knee. I was wearing a Skidoo suit and jeans and underwear. The wolf tore that suit and the jeans just like a piece of cotton. I hit him over the head with the stick and that drove him away, and I run as fast as I can. I was scared. I ran to my Skidoo.

“I gassed up as fast as I could. What wolves hate is a Skidoo. Any wild animal hates Skidoos. I gassed up the Skidoo and started it, and when I started the Skidoo they all run off.”

Bourke could see later, “I had kind of cornered and surprised them, coming down over that rise.

“It didn’t bother me, because I had been attacked by a bear before. I had been bitten by a dog before. I have spent all my life in the bush; I’m not afraid of animals.” The next day, when he and his brother came upon a pack of twenty-two wolves, he didn’t even think about the attack.

These are not healing stories. They express no kinship between wolf and human, but tell at best of an understanding tolerance in the human, at worst of a frailty that armors itself in hatred. Where, I wonder, are the healing stories?

Clearly, they exist somewhere in the native world today. Robert Stephenson, who studied wolves on Alaska’s North Slope, found the local natives had great respect for the wolves. The Koyukon of Alaska’s Yukon Basin put a piece of fat into the mouth of a wolf that had been killed and spoke to its spirit. The Dogribs, who lived between Great Slave and Great Bear lakes, would not kill wolves. Nor would the Hans, who lived in the Yukon. Eskimos generally respect wolves. The Nunamiut Eskimos, says Stephenson, believe an animal has a powerful spirit. “You act with respect for it because you want to please its spirit so you can have more to eat. They’ll tell you their father told them never brag, ‘I’m going to go over there and shoot a wolf.’ It will bring you bad luck. In Anaktuvuk, after they skin an
animal, they cut through the vertebrae behind the spine, because it will let the spirit go. You’ll see little acts and rituals. A lot of ’em probably do it and don’t know why.”

But when Stephenson compared the views of Eskimos, who live on the open tundra, where they see wolves, to the views of Indians who live in forested areas like Fort Chipewyan, where they do not, he found different attitudes. “Indians have less use for wolves than Eskimos,” says Stephenson. “Indians don’t see wolves very often. Mostly they see kills. When you live in the interior, you find these kills—a calf killed by a bear, or a moose killed by wolves in winter. If you don’t see the animal, and you just see what it does, that doesn’t give you a very favorable impression. They see wolves as a competitor and don’t have a lot of use for them. They complain about them a whole lot. Old-timers tell you that’s the only bad animal in Alaska—you better shoot them when you run into them.”

Stephenson’s generalization seems a fair one. Like the Eskimos, the Indians of the plains saw wolves coming and going, and they, too, spoke admiringly of them, told stories of wolves and humans sharing a common language, dressed as wolves when they went into battle, dreamed of wolves when they wanted vision. Indians of the forested east were less likely to celebrate a sense of kinship with the wolf. Fort Chipewyan is at the northern edge of the forest, and most of its inhabitants take a dim view of wolves.

Still, there are people in Fort Chipewyan who look for a sense of kinship with the wolf. One of them is Lloyd Antoine, a forty-seven-year-old Cree Indian. Round faced, his mouth set on the edge of a smile, he has the calm affability of a man who sees the good in other people. Though he grew up in Fort Chipewyan, he went away to college. He was out of the village for ten years, going to school and working in Edmonton, so he knows something of the outside world. After ten years there, however, he decided the city was no place for him. “You’re totally alone, and there are thousands of strangers around you,” he says. “You’ve got to be rude. You got to look the other way a lot of times. In the city, people have an inability to feel.” He came back to Fort Chipewyan hoping to raise his children in the closeness and community of native culture.

As a boy, Antoine had worked alongside his father and six brothers on a trap line in Wood Buffalo National Park. He points out a
sixty-square-mile area on a map at the offices of the Cree Indian Band, where he works. Where blue shapes indicate lakes, he says, as a result of Bennett Dam’s going in “there are no lakes now. My brothers and I used to trap right here, about 1972 to 1978,” he says, pointing at one of the lakes. “I took out twelve hundred muskrats and my brother took out two thousand in one three-week period. All of this now, there’s no water, there’s just grass. All of this is pretty much gone as far as muskrat. Beaver and otter’s gone, because there’s no water. The fox are pretty well gone, because they live on muskrat, too. Buffalo used to come through our trap lines. We used to see them by the thousand. They’d trample the muskrat lodges, and the wolves would follow them.” Now the buffalo are disappearing, and there aren’t many wolves in his area.

Antoine still has rights to work the trap line in the park, but he observes that fewer and fewer people go out hunting or trapping. “It’s pretty grim,” says Antoine. “It costs you more money to get out there than you can get out of it. People just can’t make a go of it any more. When you run a trap line here, it’s because you want to be out there. You want to have a sense of being a person.”

Antoine goes out, not to make a living, but to try to preserve vestiges of the old ways: he is trying to get back to something he believes his family once had, and the wolf is part of it. “The wolf was my dad’s spiritual brother. It kind of passed down from my grandfather. This was an animal that takes care of you. If you hear a wolf, you stop and listen. It’s trying to tell you something: it’s time to settle down or to go for a hunt; it could be telling you that a big wind is coming.”

In December 1965, Antoine and his brothers were out trapping with their father. “We were running the north end of our trap line. All eight of us were in there.” They were working individually on different parts of the trap line for part of the day, then coming together for lunch. “I went out alone. Right in the middle of a lake, there was an island, and there was a wolf in there, and all day long this one wolf kept howling. I felt uneasy. My brothers came where we would congregate for tea about noon before we would go out again. One of my brothers said, ‘Did you hear that wolf?’ I said, ‘Yes.’ He said, ‘That’s kind of a bad omen. It’s not too often during the day you hear a wolf.’ Maybe we surrounded him and he couldn’t
get out—they are really private animals.” They concluded that there was more to it than that. “We said there’s something else you can’t understand about it.” A few days later, his father died. “A long time after, my brother told me the brother wolf was calling my father that day and telling him it was time to go. My father knew from that trip he didn’t have a long time to live.”

Antoine didn’t hear the meaning himself. “I’ve been exposed to too many worlds,” he says. “I’ve kind of lost it. I did not have that kind of exposure” to the old ways. He only began to think about what his father had tried to teach him after he returned from living in the city. One day, six years after he came back, “It hit me that this is the way things are—that the animals do talk to people, that it’s not just some kind of a storybook.”

Other families may have special relationships with other animals; in his family, it’s the wolf. “It’s something very private,” he says. “We don’t tell.” Maintaining the relationship doesn’t require ceremonies or taboos, and wolves may still be shot or trapped. Says Antoine, “If a wolf is there, you catch him. It’s a means of making a living.” In the past, they ate the meat and they used the sinews for sewing and the teeth for ornament. More recently, they sold the fur to buyers in Edmonton or Winnipeg. “When I caught a nice wolf, I got $275 for it,” he says. “I put food on the table. I was happy.”

That you could catch such a wolf owed to the wolf’s willingness, says Antoine, “to lay down its life so you could live.” An animal who comes into your gunsights does so as a gift. “You have this reverence. It means a lot to hear the wolf—it goes beyond having food on the table. You’re thankful. You’re going to be taken care of. It’s a way of life. It’s a whole circle.”

So, when he’s out on the delta, he listens for wolves. “If you hear the wolf, you feel good. When we are out there hunting and hear the wolf, I tell my children, ‘Stop and listen. That’s your grandfather talking.’ ”

However, they seldom hear it. He feels that his own two oldest sons, who work in Fort MacMurray, have lost touch with the land. “They’re ignorant of a lot of things they would have known if the trapping were still alive. They’re making fantastic money, but they’re losing a lot not being out there—they lose a sense of serenity, a sense of being part of nature, being part of the land. We still have that
knowledge, but it’s getting away from us. You go to a bank and get some money and go to a grocery store to get some food. That’s not a way of life. And yet we practice it.”