The Company of Wolves (55 page)

Tucker is not doctrinaire. “Nobody knows everything about wolves,” she says. In fact, “You can find an exception to everything you say about wolves. Wolves are individuals. Packs do different things at different times.”

And so the catechism goes, until at last Tucker stands on the table in the front of the room for, she says, “some audience involvement and a commercial break. I’m going to demonstrate a howl. You’ve gotta get your bellies into it. It’s like yoga. People have said I sound like a sick cow, but I’ve had wolves answer me.” She howls a long,
alto howl, keening up and then down. Children in the audience giggle nervously. But when she finishes there is a respectful, almost awed silence, and then an earnest applause.

Now all two hundred howl along with her. It is more than entertainment. The audience is giving voice to something they hope lies deep inside them, something unrestrained, something noble, something ancient and wild. These are people who go out into the woods under backpacks and over paddles, who spend much of their lives seeking wildness.

At last, Weide leads Koani into the room on a leash. The wolf moves down the aisle, calm and affable, but aloof. She doesn’t rush up to people wagging her tail. She is, if anything, unnerved by all this attention, and lies down on the floor, shrinking and submissive, then rolls onto her side and lets people stroke her. She becomes immovable, and Weide tugs at her leash, dragging her across the floor. Finally, so that they can get the show on the road, he pulls on the leash, and Tucker gets down and pushes the undignified and very unthreatening Koani’s flanks, and they wrestle her, like a sack of flour, to the front of the room. Koani is anything but the Big Bad Wolf of European fables and Wyoming sheep ranchers’ nightmares. She is so rumpled and domestic that Tucker must remind the audience, “Don’t go away thinking a wolf will make a great pet. They don’t. We’ve done a lot of things to alter our lives to keep Koani. A wild animal belongs in the wild. They’re a large, wonderful predator, and we really should celebrate that.”

This is the wolf—the symbol of wildness. It has destructive urges and a bite we have feared for centuries. It is the visible form of our own darker nature. But here it licks faces and lies passively on the floor, submitting weakly to the wide eyes and tentative touch of children. That’s exactly what these people hoped wildness would mean.

If Koani is the wolf we want to see, is she the wolf that we want in the wild? Tucker herself is not sure. “She’s an ambassador from wolves to us; she left her culture to come to ours.” Koani must be submissive and must forgo a wolfly penchant for travel. The whole aggressive side of wolf nature—competing for status and killing for food—must be stifled in her. Some “ambassador wolves” rebel. They
become sour on children and public appearances; they escape and wander into the gunsights of people who fear them. So far in her young life, Koani has never shown an inclination to hurt a child, but on her daily walks, Tucker never lets go of the leash. “I’ve had a few good falls,” she says, “but I don’t even want to make that instinctive choice to let go.”

The logistics of travel on these educational trips are exhausting. When they travel in the van, Koani rides in a cage, which she dislikes so much that she will not drink inside it. They must stop frequently and let her out to drink, exercise, and explore. It may take an hour or more to coax and wrestle her back in. After appearing in a schoolroom or a lecture hall, they must walk her awhile, then trick and beg her back into the van.

Tucker frets over whether it is the right thing to do to a wolf. “With captive wolves, there’s no way you can really give them what they need.” Ideally, a captive ought to have other wolves for company. “But if you have other wolves, you need an army to take them out, so that they can smell new scents and see new things. They’re just not a great animal to have in captivity. I have mixed emotions. Hopefully, these captive wolves provide some important educational value, but I sure don’t think it’s a great thing for them.”

Biology and the mythology are, at least in the body of Koani, at odds. Tucker has doubts about what kind of understanding the audience is getting. “It is a mixed message, taking an animal like this in on a leash and telling them an animal like this can be dangerous,” she says.

“Wilderness without animals is dead,” Lois Crisler wrote. “Animals without wilderness are a closed book.” Biologically, a lone captive wolf makes no sense. It lives almost wholly in a symbolic world. And Koani is so tame, so shy and yielding, that only a limited range of symbols is being offered. That’s good if the goal is to get people past the apprehension they learned in the stories of Little Red Riding Hood and the Big Bad Wolf. It is better than no wolf at all, but it’s not the whole wolf.

It is our inability to see the whole wolf that makes the creature so mysterious, so powerful, so controversial. It is the fact that we conceive of nature simultaneously on moral and biological levels that makes conservation—particularly of other species—so difficult a
challenge. Bridging the gap between moral and biological views is one of the great challenges to us as a species.

We cannot help viewing wolves in symbolic terms, but symbols change. The wolf was once widely seen as a symbol of the depravity of wildness; it is now to many a symbol of the nobility of nature. Largely by the use of symbols, we nearly eradicated the wolf. Largely by manipulating symbols, we may yet save it. As symbols change, wolves are returning to their former haunts in Montana, North Dakota, Idaho, Washington, Wyoming, Minnesota, Michigan, and Wisconsin. Their return will also benefit other species, for wolves need vast amounts of wild habitat, relatively unimpaired by human uses, and large tracts of wild land will provide sanctuary for hundreds of other species that make up healthy ecosystems.

Many have argued that the reason for protecting wolves is to save ecosystems, but there is little likelihood that a whole ecosystem will collapse without wolves. Where the wolf has been eliminated, bears, mountain lions, coyotes, and other predators assumed some of its biological functions. Says John Theberge, “You can’t say that wolves are essential to wilderness ecosystems as far as function. We had far more mammalian species in the Paleocene, and the ecosystems did fine without saber-toothed tigers and the megafauna. Nothing is essential to an ecosystem—the ecosystem will still go on capturing energy. It will adjust. It will be different. But we ought to conserve for the marvelous complexity that evolved.”

We ought to save wolves not simply to keep ecosystems marvelous, but to keep the integrity of an unfolding process. Wolves are part of the machinery of evolution, and we should value them highly because they affect the evolution of other creatures. Remove them, and we may alter the direction of evolution.

The greatest harm we do to the world is that we oversimplify it. We look upon evolution as past tense, entertaining the vanity that both nature and humankind are finished works, stone statues, complete and unchangeable. But, of course, neither nature nor humankind is unchanging. Evolution is still unfolding, and since its direction is focused and deflected by small and seemingly insignificant things, we ought not to destroy any of the parts.

This is not just a question of ecological health; it may also affect our mental health. It is part of our design as a species to be mindful
of other creatures. Wolves are an essential likeness to ourselves, a mirror in which we can examine ourselves as we can with no other creature. We see in them reflections of our own good or evil, our own selfless love and our own perplexing violence. We see ourselves as we are and as we might be. The loss of a creature we think upon and dream about could well deprive our children of chances to attain depth and range and complexity.

The very act of saving wolves may help to shape our character, and to incorporate limits in our behavior before our own brashness leads the world to tragedy. The shadow of the mushroom-shaped cloud, the hole in the ozone layer, the radioactive fallout from Chernobyl, the accumulation of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere—these are powerful indications that we must accept limits. Saving wolves does not mean giving up all control, but trying to accept the need for self-control. It means giving up the idea that each of us can take from the world whatever we desire.

It is also an effort to see that all of us have the potential for good and evil installed within us, that life turns in some ways on violent acts, and that we need to address the conflicts within our own nature that lead to violence. As long as we recognize as evil only things that exist outside our skins, we shall fail to solve our problems.

Saving wolves is to some extent a gesture, but gestures have enormous meaning, and more power than words alone to change our minds. Returning wolves to the landscape and reestablishing natural ecosystems are gestures that lead us to greater consideration of the natural world and our dependence upon it. The immense variety and individuality of wolves offers us an opportunity to see the true complexity of life. At least this complexity will require us to design responses to wolves that entertain their wide range of character and their striking likenesses to ourselves. Wolves require us to look at the world through science and spirit simultaneously and to integrate thought and feeling. If we can do that, there is hope, not just for wolves, but for humankind.

The literature of wolves is surprisingly large. In the course of my research, I found and read more than eighty popular books and hundreds of scientific articles about wolves. What follows is chiefly a summary of the popular books I found most insightful and most thorough.

L. David Mech’s
The Wolf: The Ecology and Behavior of an Endangered Species
(Garden City, N.Y.: Natural History Press, 1970) is still the most comprehensive work about the biology of the gray wolf. Since its publication, a great deal more research has been done, and it may no longer be possible to assemble in a single readable text all that is known about wolves. Most of the other original works about wolves have focused upon local studies. Durward L. Allen’s
The Wolves of Minong: Their Vital Role in a Wild Community
(Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1979), recently reprinted by the University of Michigan Press, is a valuable and very readable account of the research conducted on Isle Royale prior to 1976. Adolph Murie’s classic study of wolf predation in Alaska,
The Wolves of Mount McKinley
(Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1944), has been reprinted by the University of Washington Press. Its meticulous science and beautiful writing could well serve as a model to aspiring scientists today; a half-century after it was originally published, it is still rewarding reading. Ludwig Carbyn, S. M. Oosenbrug, and D. W. Anions’
Wolves, Bison … and the Dynamics Related to the Peace-Athabasca Delta in Canada’s Wood Buffalo National Park
(Edmonton: Canadian Circumpolar Institute, University of Alberta, 1993), gives a view of wolves preying on bison in a relatively open country. L. David Mech’s
The Arctic Wolf: Living with the Pack
(Stillwater, Minn.: Voyageur Press, 1988), and Jim Brandenburg’s
White Wolf: Living with an Arctic Legend
(Minocqua, Wisc: North Word Press, 1988), both provide accounts of wolves on Canada’s Ellesmere Island, where wolves prey upon musk oxen and snowshoe hares. Douglas Pimlott’s
The Ecology of the Timber Wolf in Algonquin Provincial Park
, co-authored with J. A. Shannen and G. B. Kolenosky, Ontario Fish and Wildlife Research Branch Report 87 (Ontario Ministry of Natural Resources, 1969), gave a detailed view of the kinds of results that came from the first decade of field studies. It has long been out of print. Pimlott also co-authored, with R. J. Rutter, a popular work,
The World of the Wolf
(New York: J. B. Lippincott, 1968), which is still one of the best introductions to wolf biology and conservation, but, alas, is also out of print. It is to be hoped that some enterprising publisher or natural-history association will one day bring them back.

Last, but by no means least, I would add to this list of books about the biology of wolves Barry Lopez’s fine
Of Wolves and Men
(New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1978). I place it last on this list only because it focuses on much more than wolf biology, and places the science into a wider human perspective. Lopez showed that we cannot see the creature apart from our own imaginations, which caused many scientists to dismiss it as literary and discomforting. Nevertheless, it presents a broad and scientifically accurate discussion of the life and ecology of the wolf.

Several interesting and well-considered works focus on the study of captive wolves. Eric Zimen’s
The Wolf: A Species in Danger
(New York: Delacorte Press, 1980) is an extensive account of a German researcher’s studies of a captive pack, with discussion of some of the
conservation problems in Europe in the 1970s. Michael W. Fox’s
The Behavior of Wolves, Dogs and Related Canids
(New York: Harper and Row, 1971) provides an interesting overview of the body language and social interaction of captive wolves.

Three excellent works chronicle the demise and/or return of wolves to specific parts of the United States. Jan DeBlieu’s
Meant to Be Wild
(Golden, Col.: Fulcrum Press, 1991) provides a thoughtful and detailed chronicle of the return of red wolves to North Carolina. Rick Bass’ very engaging narrative
The Ninemile Wolves
(New York: Random House, 1992) tells the story of the first years of the expansion of wolves south from Glacier National Park into western Montana. David E. Brown’s
The Wolf in the Southwest
(Tucson, Ariz.: University of Arizona Press, 1983) recounts the story of the eradication of the Mexican wolf in the Southwest, and presents a detailed picture of the work of the Predatory Animal and Rodent Control service.

No library collection devoted to wolves would be complete without the works of Lois Crisler. Her
Arctic Wild
(New York: Harper and Row, 1958) is a trove of insights into the mind and character of the wolf; though it is no longer much cited by wolf scientists in their works, earlier researchers confessed a debt to it. I find it difficult to resist the temptation to quote long, eloquent sections of Crisler’s deeply felt and acutely perceptive prose. Much less often cited in the wolf literature—because it focuses on the wolves Crisler took from Alaska and bred to dogs in Colorado—is
Captive Wild
(New York: Harper and Row, 1968). A gloomy—but no less eloquent—cautionary tale about what we do when we try to take the wildness out of life, it is a work anyone thinking of owning a wolf or a wolf hybrid ought to read before bringing home a puppy.