Of Wolves and Men

Book by Barry Holstun Lopez

Chapter One: ORIGIN AND DESCRIPTION

Imagine a wolf moving through the northern woods. The movement, over a trail he has traversed many times before, is distinctive, unlike that of a cougar or a bear, yet he appears, if you are watching, sometimes catlike or bearlike. It is purposeful, deliberate movement. Occasionally the rhythm is broken by the wolf's pause to inspect a scent mark, or a move off the trail to paw among stones where a year before he had cached meat.

The movement down the trail would seem relentless if it did not appear so effortless. The wolf's body, from neck to hips, appears to float over the long, almost spindly legs and the flicker of wrists, a bicycling drift through the trees, reminiscent of the movement of water or of shadows.

The wolf is three years old. A male. He is of the subspecies occidentalis, and the trees he is moving among are spruce and subalpine fir on the eastern slope of the Rockies in northern Canada. He is light gray; that is, there are more blond and white hairs mixed with gray in the saddle of fur that covers his shoulders and extends down his spine than there are black and brown. But there are silver and even red hairs mixed in, too.

It is early September, an easy time of year, and he has not seen the other wolves in his pack for three or four days. He has heard no howls, but he knows the others are about, in ones and twos like himself. It is not a time of year for much howling. It is an easy time. The weather is pleasant. Moose are fat. Suddenly the wolf stops in mid-stride. A moment, then his feet slowly come alongside each other. He is staring into the grass. His ears are rammed forward, stiff. His back arches and he rears up and pounces like a cat. A deer mouse is pinned between his forepaws. Eaten. The wolf drifts on. He approaches a trail crossing, an undistinguished crossroads. His movement is now slower and he sniffs the air as though aware of a possibility for scents. He sniffs a scent post, a scrawny blueberry bush in use for years, and goes on.

The wolf weighs ninety-four pounds and stands thirty inches at the shoulder. His feet are enormous, leaving prints in the mud along a creek (where he pauses to hunt crayfish but not with much interest) more than five inches long by just over four wide. He has two fractured ribs, broken by a moose a year before. They are healed now, but a sharp eye would notice the irregularity. The skin on his right hip is scarred, from a fight with another wolf in a neighboring pack when he was a yearling. He has not had anything but a few mice and a piece of arctic char in three days, but he is not hungry. He is traveling. The char was a day old, left on rocks along the river by bears.

The wolf is tied by subtle threads to the woods he moves through. His fur carries seeds that will fall off, effectively dispersed, along the trail some miles from where they first caught in his fur. And miles distant is a raven perched on the ribs of a caribou the wolf helped kill ten days ago, pecking like a chicken at the decaying scraps of meat. A smart snowshoe hare that eluded the wolf and left him exhausted when he was a pup has been dead a year now, food for an owl. The den in which he was born one April evening was home to porcupines last winter.

It is now late in the afternoon. The wolf has stopped traveling, has lain down to sleep on cool earth beneath a rock outcropping. Mosquitoes rest on his ears. His ears flicker. He begins to waken. He rolls on his back and lies motionless with his front legs pointed toward the sky but folded like wilted flowers, his back legs splayed, and his nose and tail curved toward each other on one side of his body. After a few moments he flops on his side, rises, stretches, and moves a few feet to inspect -- minutely, delicately -- a crevice in the rock outcropping and finds or doesn't find what draws him there. And then he ascends the rock face, bounding and balancing momentarily before bounding again, appearing slightly unsure of the process -- but committed. A few minutes later he bolts suddenly into the woods, achieving full speed, almost forty miles per hour, for forty or fifty yards before he begins to skid, to lunge at a lodgepole pine cone. He trots away with it, his head erect, tail erect, his hips slightly to one side and out of line with his shoulders, as though hindquarters were impatient with forequarters, the cone inert in his mouth. He carries it for a hundred feet before dropping it by the trail. He sniffs it. He goes on.

The underfur next to his skin has begun to thicken with the coming of fall. In the months to follow it will become so dense between his shoulders it will be almost impossible to work a finger down to his skin. In seven months he will weigh less: eighty-nine pounds. He will have tried unsuccessfully to mate with another wolf in the pack. He will have helped kill four moose and thirteen caribou. He will have fallen through ice into a creek at twenty-two below zero but not frozen. He will have fought with other wolves.

He moves along now at the edge of a clearing. The wind coming down-valley surrounds him with a river of odors, as if he were a migrating salmon. He can smell ptarmigan and deer droppings. He can smell willow and spruce and the fading sweetness of fireweed. Above, he sees a hawk circling, and farther south, lower on the horizon, a flock of sharp-tailed sparrows going east. He senses through his pads with each step the dryness of the moss beneath his feet, and the ridges of old tracks, some his own. He hears the sound his feet make. He hears the occasional movement of deer mice and voles. Summer food.

Toward dusk he is standing by a creek, lapping the cool water, when a wolf howls -- a long wail that quickly reaches pitch and then tapers, with several harmonics, long moments to a tremolo. He recognizes his sister. He waits a few moments, then, throwing his head back and closing his eyes, he howls. The howl is shorter and it changes pitch twice in the beginning, very quickly. There is no answer.

The female is a mile away and she trots off obliquely through the trees. The other wolf stands listening, laps water again, then he too departs, moving quickly, quietly through the trees, away from the trail he had been on. In a few minutes the two wolves meet. They approach each other briskly, almost formally, tails erect and moving somewhat as deer move. When they come together they make high squeaking noises and encircle each other, rubbing and pushing, poking their noses into each other's neck fur, backing away to stretch, chasing each other for a few steps, then standing quietly together, one putting a head over the other's back. And then they are gone, down a vague trail, the female first. After a few hundred yards they begin, simultaneously, to wag their tails.

In the days to follow, they will meet another wolf from the pack, a second female, younger by a year, and the three of them will kill a caribou. They will travel together ten or twenty miles a day, through the country where they live, eating and sleeping, birthing, playing with sticks, chasing ravens, growing old, barking at bears, scent-marking trails, killing moose, and staring at the way water in a creek breaks around their legs and flows on.

This is the animal Linnaeus called Canis lupus in 1758. In recent years the wolf has been studied enough by biologists to produce this picture, but his numbers have dwindled and his range has shrunk, and as is the case with so many things, deep appreciation and a sense of loss have arrived simultaneously.

Wolves, twenty or thirty subspecies of them, are Holarctic -- that is, they once roamed most of the Northern Hemisphere above thirty degrees north latitude. They were found throughout Europe, from the Zezere River Valley of Portugal north to Finland and south to the Mediterranean. They roamed eastern Europe, the Balkans, and the Near and Middle East south into Arabia. They were found in Afghanistan and northern India, throughout Russia north into Siberia, south again as far as China, and east into the islands of Japan. In North America the wolf reached a southern limit north of Mexico City and ranged north as far as Cape Morris Jesup, Greenland, less than four hundred miles from the North Pole. Outside of Iceland and North Africa, and such places as the Gobi Desert, wolves -- if you imagine the differences in geography it seems astounding -- had adapted to virtually every habitat available to them.

Today they have been exterminated in the British Isles and Scandinavia and throughout most of Europe. There are a few wolves left in northern Spain, some in the Apennines in Italy, and a few in Germany and eastern Europe. Populations in the Near and Middle East and in northern India are greatly reduced. The present, or even past, populations of Russia and China are undetermined.

Mexico still has a small population of wolves, and large populations -- perhaps twenty to twenty-five thousand -- remain in Alaska and Canada. The largest concentrations of wolves in the lower forty-eight states are in northeastern Minnesota (about one thousand) and on Isle Royale in Lake Superior (about thirty). There is a very small wolf population in Glacier National Park in Montana and a few in Michigan's Upper Peninsula. Occasionally lone wolves show up in the western states along the Canadian border; most are young animals dispersing from packs in British Columbia, Alberta, and Saskatchewan.

The red wolf, Canis rufus, a little known but distinct species of wolf found only in America, has been exterminated across virtually all its former range in the southeastern United States. A small population of perhaps one hundred survives in the swamp thickets of extreme south-eastern Texas and adjacent Cameron Parish, Louisiana.

Of the twenty-three subspecies of wolf (too many to be meaningful) that taxonomist Edward Goldman identified in North America in 1945, seven are no longer around. These include the Great Plains wolf (also called the lobo wolf, the loafer wolf, or simply the buffalo runner), the Cascade Mountain wolf, the Texas gray wolf, the Mogollon Mountain wolf of central Arizona and New Mexico, the Newfoundland wolf, and the northern Rocky Mountain wolf. The southern Rocky Mountain wolf, last reported alive in 1970, is now also believed to be extinct.

Japan's two wolves, Canis lupus hattai and Canis lupus hodophilax, are probably extinct. And another wolf, one that lived in the Danube River Valley and was apparently distinct enough to be classed as a subspecies, was eliminated before any specimens were examined. Other subspecies in Asia have probably disappeared, but this is hard to prove and even harder to give meaning to. They represent subtle losses. In North America, and elsewhere, as human civilization affected the distribution and food habits of wolves -- by killing buffalo, for example, and putting domestic cattle in their place on the ranges -- various subspecies of wolf interbred and the purity of gene pools, such as they were, was altered. The wolves that remain in North America today are often distinguished simply as tundra or timber (or gray) wolves, according to where they live.

One value of distinguishing among wolves is to set off other wolflike canids. There is, for example, a wild canid in Maine that is intermediate in size between wolf and coyote; and in Texas, red wolves and coyotes have bred to produce what biologists call a hybrid swarm. Feral dogs -- pets gone wild -- sometimes breed with wolves. All these creatures are wolflike but they are not wolves and it is right to keep them out of things.

Originally, distinctions were made among subspecies on the basis of cranial features, pelage (fur), relative size, and geographic distribution. But taxonomic distinction among wolves is probably most valuable for the way it distinguishes among factors other than size and color. The small Asian, or Iranian, wolf, Canis lupus pallipes, for example, differs from most other wolves in that it is not known to howl and apparently travels alone, or in very small packs. The Chinese wolf, Canis lupus laniger, also hunts alone or in small packs. And the European wolf, Canis lupus lupus, has adapted to living in fairly close proximity with human beings. Wolves in thinly populated areas of Canada may move out if the human density is more than three persons per square mile.

Recently the trend has been to distinguish less among subspecies of wolf and to make more of other differences -- hunting techniques, pack size, range, diet -- than color and size.

By whatever standard, a significant part of the genetic reservoir that once represented one of the more adaptive mammals on the face of the earth is now gone. The argument in rebuttal; that wolves in captivity represent pure strains of extinct races and therefore constitute a genetic reservoir, is probably meaningless. Zoo populations are sometimes derived from animals of questionable genetic background and/or geographic origin, and in many cases subspecific labels are casually applied. And pups raised in captivity are virtually certain not to survive in the wild.

It would be nice to write with precision and neatness about the exact location of the last subspecific populations of wolves in the world, because we are a culture that fancies that sort of order, but the task is complicated and ultimately made impossible by two factors: wolves wander, and subspecific populations, as stated, breed with each other. Even prior to widespread human persecution, wolves disappeared from certain portions of their ranges for years at a time. No one knows why. Game thinned out, perhaps, or people moved in. Douglas Pimlott, a Canadian wildlife biologist, believes the "extinct" Newfoundland wolf, for example, simply vanished from that island as part of a natural process, that it was not hunted out. Ian MacTaggart Cowan, another Canadian, thinks that the last specimens of northern Rocky Mountain wolf bred with the Mackenzie Valley wolf to finally eliminate all vestiges of that race. These cases are important I think insofar as. we blame ourselves, with a lack of humility, for every animal's demise.

A third factor to consider in trying to pinpoint world populations is the simple lack of records and research. It was not, astonishingly, until the early 1940s that anyone took a serious, scientific look at wolves, and in some parts of Eurasia (where they are still regarded as beasts of blood and darkness) specific information on their numbers, locations, and habits is lacking even now.

A fourth factor is that lone wolves disperse for considerable distances, hundreds of miles away from known wolf ranges, in search of new territories each year. In North America some generalizations can be made about the pattern -- about where dispersing wolves will likely show up. But in China, for example, we still lack a general picture of primary wolf ranges.

Although the lines of descent are not entirely clear, the wolf began to develop as a specialized genus of cursorial, or hunt-by-chasing, carnivore in the Paleocene, some 60 million years ago. Its ancestors included small, rodentlike insectivores and, later, much larger creodonts, animals that walked on five toes, had partially retractile claws, partially opposable thumbs on the forefeet, and long, thick tails. They perhaps looked like long-legged otters, dwelt in forests, and may have slept in trees. Some of them, evolutionarily speaking, moved out on the plains and prairies and became wolves, bears, badgers, skunks, and weasels. The ones that stayed behind in the forests retained their retractile claws, perfected an ambush/stabbing kind of...