The Wisdom of Wolves Read online

  In many ways the social organization of wolves is surprisingly similar to what anthropologists have pieced together as the social organization of early man. The well-defined dominance order and the disciplined manner in which duties are assigned and carried out, the presence of different generations of the same family living together, the prolonged dependency of the young, the group effort in raising and training them, the cooperative effort of many individuals in hunting large prey—in these and other respects, wolves, like our own human ancestors, have developed a highly effective means of coping with a wide variety of ecological conditions. Perhaps by more intensively studying—not persecuting—a species so similar in behavior to that of our ancestors, we can learn much more about ourselves.

  It is now understood that all domestic dogs are the descendants of wolves, and there is good evidence that domestication likely began more than 15,000 years ago, possibly over 30,000. Yet whenever domestication occurred, our special relationship with wolves certainly began much earlier. Many hypotheses suggest that ancient humans and wolves lived in close proximity and may even have hunted together. Humans and wolves were, and still are, two of the most geographically widespread mammals on Earth. As our ancestors were spreading across the globe, wolves were there. As two of the few animals to live in extended family groups where cooperation is essential, it’s not surprising that we became kindred spirits. In the lives of wolves we see reflections of things we have come to value in ourselves. They care for their pups with a familiar devotion and share our reflexive instinct to care for youngsters, related or not. They hold a place in society for their elders. They push boundaries and explore, then return to visit their families. They care what happens to one another, they miss each other when they’re separated, and they grieve when one among them dies. They do all of this with a clarity of purpose that we often struggle to achieve.

  One can’t observe a wolf pack without seeing a reflection of ourselves, although the reflection is not always unconditionally positive. The life of a wolf can be fiercely complicated. An individual wolf has bonds to its pack but may also harbor a strong personal drive for breeding and territory. The tug-of-war between society and individual ambition adds a layer of complexity that occasionally plays out in Shakespearean-style narrative. It’s one of the things that makes wolves endlessly fascinating and personally compelling.

  The wolves of the Sawtooth Pack gave us not only the rare opportunity to share their private lives but also a greater understanding of our own human nature. Their lives and behaviors mirrored our own contradictions and complexities: social hierarchy tempered by compassion, contention mixed with cooperation, the admirable side by side with the abhorrent. Among all their qualities there were many we admired, but one stands out more than any other, especially considering all that has befallen them at the hands of man. Wolves can forgive.

  Rick McIntyre, park ranger, biological technician, author, and friend of ours who has come to know every wolf in Yellowstone since reintroduction, recently quipped in an interview, quoted in Carl Safina’s book Beyond Words: “Certain wolves I’ve known—they were better at being a wolf than I’ve been at being a person.” We can’t count the number of times we experienced that sentiment while watching the Sawtooth Pack.

  It is with this spirit that we write this book. Our intention is not to anthropomorphize wolves or to imbue them with human morals; it is to celebrate their very wolflike qualities through the lens of our own humanity. As it happens, many of the qualities that make a wolf successful at being a wolf also represent the best in human nature. In this book we have gathered favorite memories from our years with the Sawtooth Pack as well as stories of other wolves we have come to know. They are benevolent leaders and faithful lieutenants, fierce mothers, nurturing fathers, and devoted brothers; they are hunters, adventurers, comedians, and caregivers. Wherever there are wolves, there are tales as inspiring as any human narrative. We owe it to wolves to let them live their stories without persecution and without judgment. We owe it to ourselves to watch and marvel and reflect. Our lives are richer when we listen to what the wolves have to teach us.

  Note from the editor: Chapters in this book are written in either Jim or Jamie’s voice, allowing each of them to share personal observations and experiences. You will see the signature of one or the other at the start of each chapter.

  Kamots howling at wolf camp, Lakota and Wyakin in view

  CHAPTER ONE

  EARNING TRUST

  JIM

  THE SOUND SEEMS TO COME from everywhere at once.

  Outside there is nothing but the freezing black of a moonless January night. Jamie and I peer out into the darkness, but we see no movement, no source. From the deck of our camp, we can barely make out the surrounding mountains as snow clouds spill in from the west and we stand listening.

  The howl grows more intense. For a moment I think I can pick out individual voices coming from a definite direction, but then they dissolve and meld into a dissonant chorus. At times it sounds like there could be 20 of them. We know there are only eight. But what a sound these eight can make! It’s eerie and mournful, exuberant and mysterious—all the contradictions of the American wilderness wrapped up in one sound. Looking at Jamie, I know it triggers the same conflicting emotions in her as it does in me—a strange mixture of loss and hope, a feeling of connection, a great sense of privilege, and maybe just a tinge of primordial awe.

  After a few minutes the song dissolves. Voices drop out one by one. Somewhere in the dark there’s a single final oop from a yearling wolf, still perfecting his howl, and then everything is silent. The Sawtooth Pack has just treated us to another pack rally, culminating in a riotous howl. We will never know precisely why they do it—only they know their reasons—but if we could stay with them for 20 years, it would never get old. Jamie and I exchange smiles and I squeeze her hand, acknowledging the precious experience we have just shared. Then we go back to the business of making dinner in silence.

  WE CALLED IT “WOLF CAMP,” a deceptively simple name for the little patch of tents, platforms, and fencing we had constructed. Wolf camp was more than a place; it was the embodiment of all the inspiration, trial and error, and years of hard work that had gone into this project. It was the foundation of the entirely new way that we were telling the world about wolves. The project began as an idea: Find a way to share the hidden lives of animals who were so scarce and so elusive that they had become virtually unknown. The project was to span a few years and culminate in a documentary film. It evolved into something far bigger than we ever could have imagined.

  What became our life’s passion started in 1990 as an idea for a one-hour TV documentary. My film Cougar: Ghost of the Rockies had just aired on ABC Television’s World of Discovery. Before that I had made Rocky Mountain Beaver Pond for National Geographic. It felt like I was on a roll, and I was eager to find my next subject.

  I wasn’t sure what it would be, but I already knew how I wanted to approach it. Many years earlier I had read the work of Austrian zoologist Konrad Lorenz. One thing he wrote had stayed with me all that time, inspired me in my filmmaking, and has since informed everything I do. He wrote, “The quickest way to learn the language of a species is to do so as a social partner.” With that in mind, I made it my mission to give the audience of my wildlife films a personal experience with my animal subjects. I specifically chose animals who were very difficult to see, let alone film. Beavers aren’t hard to locate, but they have the frustrating habit of hiding out in their lodge most of the day. When they do venture out on land, the slightest disturbance sends them dashing for their pond. Cougars are the opposite. They’re unafraid, but elusive. Catch a glimpse of one and you may never see it again. So I had to come up with original ways to get close to these creatures, either by filming animals habituated to my presence, in enclosures, or with the beavers, in our authentically constructed cutaway beaver lodge, to brin
g viewers in close for an intimate look that they wouldn’t get any other way. I knew that after Cougar and Beaver, my next film would have to do the same.

  As it turned out, I didn’t find my next subject; it found me. On a hike in Wyoming’s Absaroka mountains I crested a ridge and glimpsed what at that time was one of the rarest sights in the lower 48 states: a wolf. It was crossing a high alpine meadow more than a hundred yards away, but it saw me the moment I saw it. By the time I brought my binoculars to my eyes, the wolf had darted over the next ridge.

  Here was an even greater challenge than the previous animals I had sought to film. Wolves weren’t just elusive; they were very nearly gone from this part of the world. The wolf I had seen was probably a young disperser, a wanderer who had left its pack and gone looking for a mate and new territory. It likely found no others and turned back for home—possibly in northern Montana or perhaps across the Canadian border. I found myself wondering about its inner life and its quest for companionship. I wanted to know this animal.

  Immediately I began thinking about how to approach making a film about wolves. I recognized that they are the most misunderstood large mammals in North America, which made the challenge even greater. If I could bring my audience in close, give them a personal experience, and show them the animals’ inner life, people would understand and care.

  To achieve that goal, I had to create a setup similar to what I had done filming beavers and cougars: a semiwild situation where the wolves would be accustomed to my presence and allow me to film them without changing their behavior. I would be filming in an enclosure, but I wanted to be as transparent as possible and make the project part of the story.

  A primary reason for this method was purely practical: There was simply no way to film truly wild wolves at a close range to achieve the depth I was looking for. I had seen what others had achieved after spending months in the field in Alaska and Canada, and the results were admirable but not at all intimate. Jamie and I had filmed wolves in Alaska, and I began to refer to the faraway creatures as Canis lupus minisculis. They were always just tiny flecks in the lens. With the help of a very long telephoto lens, I was able to capture them moving about, occasionally playing or hunting (if I happened to be at the right place at the right time), but I wasn’t terribly interested in such a limited story. I wanted to know how they interacted, communicated, showed affection, and resolved conflicts. To do that, I had to see into their eyes. I had to be close enough to detect the nuances in their behavior and hear the sounds they made to one another. If I tried to get that close to wild wolves, I wouldn’t have seen anything but their tails disappearing into the trees.

  I had deeper reasons for setting up the wolf project the way I did. By 1990 most conservationists knew of the federal plan to restore wolves to some of their former range. Five years before reintroduction, anger and resentment were already brewing. The more extreme wings of cattlemen’s associations and hunting groups had already pledged to “shoot, shovel, and shut up”—in other words, shoot and quietly bury any wolf they could. In that climate, it would have been irresponsible for me to habituate wild wolves and get them comfortable being around a man with a big camera. The next time someone pointed something at those wolves, it probably wouldn’t be a camera.

  Thus I set out to film North America’s most controversial animal at the very moment when that controversy was reaching a boiling point and in the region of the country where the anti-wolf movement raged with the greatest fury. Suffice it to say, I took precautions. If I had started the process a year later, the anti-wolf opposition would have had time to organize and would have shut down the project. As it happened, I didn’t fully grasp the scope of all the hatred, but my timing was perfect. My plan for creating an environment that would allow me to film wolves was emerging.

  THE WOLF PROJECT WAS AMBITIOUS: To create a safe, natural habitat for wolves that allowed me uninterrupted filming, I needed to find the perfect spot. I required a location that was accessible to an equipment truck to ferry in fence materials but remote enough that strangers could not easily find it. I needed access by all-terrain vehicle in the wet months of spring and by snowmobile during the long months of winter. Not only did we need to bring in all our food and the appropriate film gear and equipment, but also food for the wolves—usually road-killed elk or deer that we collected for them. I needed a place that was picturesque and had a variety of vegetation and topography in which to film. For the wolves, it needed to have a good balance of sunlight and shade and a consistent water source that wouldn’t dry up in the summer.

  So with my small crew of two, I started searching for the perfect location. I knew we were going to find what we needed only on Forest Service land—private land bears too many signs of human development, so to find land still wild and natural, it was going to be land under federal protection. We made 17 trips into the backcountry on foot, by four-wheel drive, or by snowmobile. We looked into all the surrounding mountain ranges: the Pioneers, the Boulder/White Clouds, and the Sawtooths. One morning in early October 1990, after following an overgrown jeep trail behind a ranch and hiking a short distance into the foothills of the Sawtooths, we found ourselves standing in the middle of a wide, grassy meadow. To one side ran a mountain stream, to another stood a grove of aspen. In front of us was a deep forest of lodgepole pine and spruce, out of which soared the gray walls of the Sawtooth Mountains. It was absolutely perfect.

  Next came the lengthy process of obtaining permits to operate on Forest Service land, a process I was familiar with from my previous films. To keep the project as secret as possible, I hired an out-of-state fencing company to construct a 25-acre chain-link fence, 10 feet high with a 6-foot apron facing in and an overhang in all the corners so that even the most determined wolf couldn’t dig under or climb over it. After a year of preparation, the only thing missing was a pack of wolves.

  I suppose I was a little naive in those early months. Under pressure of a filming schedule I thought I could jump-start a pack by borrowing adult wolves from two rescue centers: a male we named Akai and a female named Makuyi, the first official Sawtooth wolves. I soon came to understand that a wolf pack is not something a human being can simply assemble at will.

  Makuyi was a beautiful, sweet wolf, and I was taken with her the moment I first set eyes on her. Unfortunately, as I was soon to discover, she suffered from cataracts, and her poor vision made her spook easily. The following year, when a litter of pups joined the adults, Makuyi became increasingly fearful and spent most of her time as far away from the others as she could get. We brought in a skilled veterinary ophthalmologist and performed a successful corneal transplant—possibly the first such operation conducted on a wolf. I believed that restoring her vision would enable her to integrate with the rest of the pack, but wolves don’t work that way. Her status as a semi-outsider had already been established. And so rather than subject her to a life alone, I returned her to her original caretakers, where at least she would be in familiar company.

  The male was a big photogenic wolf named Akai, who certainly looked the part of alpha. Like Makuyi, Akai had grown up at a wolf center and was used to people. I came to learn, though, that a wolf’s being used to people is not the same thing as a wolf’s trust. My project required me to get close to these wolves, to film them feeding and during displays of dominance when they were sorting out their pack hierarchy. But Akai didn’t know my crew or me—or even Makuyi. As a result, he was unpredictable. He was usually fine around people, but occasionally something would frighten or anger him. He never injured anyone, but there were times he seemed as if he could have. I simply did not feel that Akai could be trusted, and probably Akai felt the same about me. It was a frustrating start, but today I look back at the learning curve of this period and realize that some of these early mistakes were what ultimately made the wolf project so successful. For wolves to live together in a pack, they must trust each other without question. For me to be able to
live with these wolves, and film their lives intimately, they needed to trust me.

  My knowledge of raising wolves evolved out of research far and wide and, most important, from an association with the wolf expert Erik Zimen, who had raised a captive pack in Bavaria. Erik himself was a graduate student of Konrad Lorenz, who had been such an inspiration to me. I met Erik at a wildlife film symposium in Bristol, England, and he stressed to me that trust was the most important ingredient in the formation of a safe and healthy pack—trust that could be achieved only by living with the wolves as social partners. This was a new idea for me, and a challenging one. I had hoped that, as with the cougars, I could simply let these animals live their life without interference and they would reveal all their secrets to me. But cougars and wolves are very different creatures. Every expert I spoke to said or implied the same thing: These wolves must trust me absolutely or my work would be impossible. I was going to have to be more involved in their lives than I had anticipated. This meant that the wolves would need to get to know me from the moment they opened their eyes, so it was essential that we start with pups.

  As close as we got to the wolves, we never treated them like pets. The pups kept their wild ways, wrestling for supremacy and sorting out squabbles on their own. More than anything, wolves, like our beloved dogs, are social creatures. As pups they need companionship, a sense of belonging, and the bonds of a pack.

  My original intent had been that this litter, and another scheduled to come to us a year later, would bond with the adults, Makuyi and Akai, but I soon realized that the adult wolves would never be the social partners the young wolves—and I—needed. The project rested solely with the pups that trusted us completely. I decided to return the adults to sanctuaries and relaunch the project with just the young wolves. Those two litters of six pups, born a year apart, formed the core of the Sawtooth Pack that, since then, legions of fans have come to recognize and follow.