The Company of Wolves (54 page)

Says Antoine, “Unless we smarten up and go back to pursue some of the things we are very fast losing, we will not be what they call in our language ‘the people.’ We’ll be lost. We’ll be walking around like zombies.”

They have lost more than the spring floods and the muskrats: they have lost the stories. Their fathers and mothers learned about spiritual relationships when the old people told them stories as children. The stories told, for example of Wisacisa, a person who lived with the animals and could speak their language. They made the listener feel a kinship with the wolf, the goose, the moose. “It was a relaxing kind of coexistence,” says Antoine. “In Cree it’s got a whole meaning—it helps you understand some of the meaning of life.” The stories were shared only when listener and teller were likely to be attentive to each other. “The only time I was told fables in my family was when everything had been quieted down and we had been fed.”

But in the new culture of the town, there is no time for stories. “We just don’t have the opportunity, because of the way we are. When it came time to share our culture, you detached yourself from thinking about going to work. If you were able to go out to our old traditional summer camping grounds with one of the old people, you might hear the old stories, but not here in town. This has got nothing to do with our old way of life when you come here. This is a place you can watch TV.”

Back at the lodge that night, I turned on the television and watched rock singer Michael Jackson, in black leather and silver studs, surrounded by a circus of alienated beings, singing “I’m Bad” in the subways of New York City. Someone moonwalked on roller skates. Dancers glared like caged animals. It was a lightless, treeless, waterless, futuristic world, about as far away as you can get from Fort Chipewyan. Satellite dishes were bringing this signal into homes all over town.

We need stories that tell us how we are tied to the wider world. It is as much a need as food and air and water. In the citified world, however, we throw up walls around us to keep from bumping into
one another. We are starved for those stories, impoverished of the thread of connection. That is one reason we want to put wolves back into the wild. If we again see wolves in the wild, we may share stories about them. And that, we hope, may restore us.

For now, few North Americans or Europeans see wolves in the wild, and our stories about them are personal and idiosyncratic and far removed from the real animal that would, in Eskimo or Plains Indian cultures, seem to validate the telling. We profess to love wolves or to hate them, but we don’t see the same animal, or share the same meaning. When we speak of wolves, it is not entirely clear what we love or hate.

In 1994, the movie
Wolf
, written by novelist Jim Harrison and directed by Mike Nichols, was released. Harrison, who spurns the city because he believes civilization stifles the human spirit, recalls that one night in his backwoods Michigan cabin, the approach of car headlights set him into a rage, and he tore a door off his cabin and ran out into the night. “There was something inside me,” recalled Harrison. He had used the image of the wolf entering his spirit before in his writings, and he saw in that image a wildness that could revivify the human soul. He eventually wrote a screenplay about the idea, in which a middle-aged man is bitten by a wolf and something of the wolf enters the man to heal his spirit. He becomes supernaturally strong and predatory. Director Mike Nichols, however, saw the story differently, and thought the wolf-bitten hero lost his humanity. For two and a half years, writer and director quarreled over whether the wildness kindled by the wolf bite was healing or dissolute. After writing five drafts of the script, Harrison withdrew from the project, and Nichols’ old performing partner, Elaine May, finished the script.

That argument is exactly the kind of thing that is happening in Fort Chipewyan. Each person you talk to sees a different wolf. One wolf strikes fear into the heart, another is companionable and playful, another rapacious and another knowing and sympathetic. In Fort Chipewyan, as in the rest of the world, there are many different levels of culture: three different Indian groups, the ritual and discipline of the Catholic church, the soulless technocracy of industrialism, the unearthly fantasies of rock video, and a smattering of ecological science. There is a constant shuffling and streaking of messages. Everybody
draws on the inventions of other cultures. We are no longer a single people, united by our stories. Each of us invents our own wolf.

If a spiritual view of wolves survives on the Peace-Athabaska Delta, no one but Antoine shared it with me. I am inclined to doubt that it was simply because I was an outsider. Spiritual life comes from what one does day by day; it is not something one turns on and off, like television. If wolves once had spiritual meaning, it was because those who felt it lived with wolves day in and day out. The people of Fort Chipewyan no longer live with wolves. And trying to acquire traditional views of a creature we no longer live with, as if we were acquiring an old car or an antique table, will not work.

On my last day in Fort Chipewyan, I walked past an empty schoolyard. The empty playground swings swayed in the breeze. A taffy-colored mongrel pointed its nose to the gray sky, squinted its eyes, and howled, low and soft, musically. A quiet pleasure rippled down the sides of its body. Its tail wagged slowly back and forth, a metronome set on adagio. It seemed to be replying to some message drifting on the cold air from the delta. But what? The distant howl of an ancestry close at hand? Stories on the wind?

If we are ever to deal adequately with wolves, we will have to overcome our long history of estrangement. North American culture, like the European cultures that gave rise to it, is a forest culture. Our innate sense of good land embraces deep shade and groves of trees. Like that of the people of Fort Chipewyan, our outlook has grown in the presence of wolves but with wolves rarely in view.

We are also a pluralistic culture, with diverse and sometimes discordant views of things. We look for consensus, and science is increasingly the framework by which we seek agreement. Only in the last fifty years have we had the technology and the inclination to study wolves as they really live in the wild, and science hasn’t yet managed to summarize their complexity in a way that reflects our own. Despite an impressive amount of study of wolves, a great deal more is needed—as is more effort to communicate the uncertainties of science to the general public.

Science is only one way of seeing things, and many of us will look at wolves in other ways. If we have no wolves in view, we shall go on inventing them and seeing them as shadows of ourselves. Today, neither our science nor our myth yet gives us an adequate basis for dealing with wolves. The wolf is more complex and varied than the biologist yet sees, and we humans are too varied and disparate to be served by a single mythology. Can we ever develop a common view of a wild creature that exacts a cost but fails to repay us with frequent encounters?

Pat Tucker hopes we can. Every day, she clips a long leash on Koani and takes her out for a walk in the hills above Missoula, Montana. Koani is a black wolf. Her legs are long, her head is broad, her posture tense and alert, her yellow-eyed gaze penetrating. At eleven months, she weighs eighty-five pounds, and to walk her is an athletic event. Tucker runs to keep up with Koani until the wolf stops suddenly to look long and hard at children playing down the hill, or cars passing on the freeway, or a beetle crawling up a grass stem. Tucker stands by patiently. Tucker is tall, green-eyed, self-effacing, and so good-humored that laughter sneaks out of her every few moments. She is without a predatory thought. Her attention wanders before the wolf’s, in part because she has seen all this before, in part because it is human to let one’s gaze move on rapidly. When Tucker’s attention passes to something else, Koani lunges off and Tucker is caught unawares, jerked like a windblown leaf, stumbling, free arm flailing, trying to dig in her heels, laughing at the silliness of it all.

Koani gets at least three hours of walking a day—one of many accommodations Tucker must make to the wolf. Koani’s captivity is a project of converging purposes. A film-production company wished to make a television movie about wolves and needed someone to rear a tame wolf so that they could film her growth. Tucker, an environmental educator working for the National Wildlife Federation, and long interested in wolf conservation, figured she could use the wolf in her environmental-education programs. She and her filmmaker husband, Bruce Weide, now take Koani to schools around Montana. They show slides and bits of Weide’s videos about wolves, and they talk about wolf behavior and ecology. Says Tucker, “We go in, have them do a howl, and get them excited about wolves. These
are the people who are going to be inheriting the ranches.” Changing people’s attitudes when they are young is a critical part of restoring wolves to Montana.

A live wolf is a potent teacher. “It’s amazing to watch the impact the real animal has on people,” says Tucker. “You can show them pictures and pictures, but it doesn’t really hit them until they see the real animal, and they see her in the same room, and it’s not fangs dripping with blood or chewing off my arm.”

While visiting relatives in California, Tucker and Weide take Koani to nature centers and outdoor outfitters to talk about wolf reintroduction in Yellowstone and to raise money for the Wolf Education Center, an Idaho project that sponsors Koani’s public appearances. On a January night in 1993, they arrive to give a talk about wolves at the Adventure 16 store in Solana Beach.

Adventure 16 sells tents and boots, freeze-dried food, walking shorts, and Gore-Tex raingear. It is a long, narrow store with backpacks and sleeping bags hanging on the walls. By the time Tucker and Weide arrive, there are two hundred people, mostly men and women in their twenties and thirties, waiting. Folding chairs have been set up, and a number of small children sit on the floor in the aisle.

The presentation starts without the wolf. Tucker tells the audience, “I want the people who see her to know something about what she really ought to be doing, instead of running around on a leash.” For that reason, she and Weide will talk for a while about wolves before bringing Koani out.

They talk about the wolf as a symbol of wilderness. Says Weide, “The stories that come from myth and folklore are guided by the society you live in. The wolf is a symbol of wildness, and whether that’s viewed as positive or negative depends on the society you grow up in.” He reads a quote from Luther Standing Bear, an Oglala Sioux: “We do not think of the great open plains … as wild.… Only to the white man was nature a wilderness.” Weide also recounts the story of Little Red Riding Hood and stresses Little Red’s mother telling her, “Whatsoever you do, don’t talk to strangers.” He has a deep, sly voice with sexual overtones for the wolf when it encounters Red Riding Hood: “Hey, little girl, what’s your name?” He has an old scratchy voice for the wolf’s grandma voice: “The better to
see you with.” In the end he says, “The reason for that grisly ending wasn’t to warn children that wolves were bad. It was to warn them not to talk to strangers.” The wolf in the story is simply a masked human, its wildness the predatory nature of the human heart.

They also talk about the harder edges of wolf biology. “There are people who think wolves are nice creatures that eat nothing but sick, weak mice,” says Tucker. “Wolves are primarily dependent on large, hoofed animals.” And she wants people to understand how tough it is for a wolf to make a living. “Most of us in this audience weigh more than a wolf. Think about putting on one-inch fangs and running up and attacking a moose. This is a dangerous business, going out and hunting.”

She explains that when settlers shot out the deer and elk and replaced them with cows and sheep the wolves ate what the ranchers provided. She recounts the history of poisoning, trapping, and cruel killing that followed. “A lot of Montanans feel wolves are going to kill nothing but livestock if they get back there,” she says. “It’s kind of ironic that the wolf is a symbol of wildness, but to them it’s becoming a symbol of control by bureaucrats over their lives.” She pleads for understanding of the ranchers’ problems: “We should not be trying to tell ranchers that wolves will not kill livestock.” She shows a photo of a dead calf, its haunches eaten out by wolves. “Even if you get compensated, there’s still a feeling of violation.” She compares it to going out to one’s car in the morning and finding that someone has smashed a window and torn out the radio. “I think we really need to acknowledge those feelings.”

But, she points out, only about one wolf in ninety in Minnesota ends up killing livestock. And Weide observes that no human has been known to have been killed by a healthy wolf in North America.