OF WOLVES AND MEN
ALSO BY THF. AUTHOR:
Desert Notes: Reflections in the Eye of a Raven
Giving Birth to Thunder, Sleeping with His Daughter:
Coyote Builds North America
Barry Holstun Lopez
OF WOLVES
AND MEN
With photographs by John Bauguess
CH A RLES SCRIBN ER’S SONS
New York
Copyright © 1978 Barry Holstun Lopez
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or
transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical,
including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and
retrieval system, without permission in writing from the Publisher.
Charles Scribner’s Sons
Macmillan Publishing Company
866 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10022
Collier Macmillan Canada, Inc.
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Lopez, Barry Holstun, 1945—
Of Wolves and Men.
Bibliography: p.
Includes index.
1. Wolves. 2. Wolves (in religion, folk-lore, etc.)
L Title.
QL737,C22L66 599'.74442 78-6070
ISBN 0-684-15624-5 (cloth)
ISBN 0-684-16322-5 (paper)
Grateful acknowledgment is made to the Memorial University of
Newfoundland for permission to quote from Georg Henriksen,
Hunters in the Barrens: the Naskapi on the Edge of the White Man’s World,
Memorial University of Newfoundland, 1973; and to Harper & Row,
Publishers, Inc., for permission to quote from Frank B. Linderman
(John Day ), American, pp. 262-65, copyright 1930,1957 by Frank B.
Linderman.
Designed by Joel Schick
Front cover photograph © 1975 Rollie Ostermick
Photograph p. 151 copyright © 1975 John Baugucss; photographs pp. 8,22-24, 34, 35,
40,41, 44-46, 91, 103, 125, 136, 190 copyright © 1979 John Baugucss.
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20
FOR WOLVES
Not the book, for which you would have little use,
but the effort at understanding.
1 enjoyed your company.
We need another and a wiser and perhaps a more mystical concept of animals.
Remote from universal nature, and living by complicated artifice, man in
civilization surveys the creature through the glass of his knowledge and sees
thereby a feather magnified and the whole image in distortion. We patronize
them for their incompleteness, for their tragic fate of having taken form sofar
below ourselves. And therein we err, and greatly err. For the animal shall not be
measured by man. In a world older and more complete than ours they move
finished and complete, gifted with extensions of the senses we have lost or never
attained, living by voices we shall never hear. They are not brethren, they are
not underlings; they are other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life
and time, fellow prisoners of the splendour and travail of the earth.
— H e n r y B e s t o n , The Outermost House
Presumption is our natural and original disease. The most wretched andfrail of
all creatures is man, and withal the proudest. He feels and sees himself lodged
here in the dirt andfilth of the world, nailed and riveted to the worst and deadest
part of the universe, in the lowest story of the house, trapped worse than bird or
fish, and yet in his imagination he places himself above the circle of the moon,
bringing heaven under his feet.
By the vanity of the same imaginat ion he equals himself to God, attributes to
himself divine faculties, and withdraws and separates himselffrom all other
creatures; he allots to these, hisfellows and companions, the portion of faculties
and power which he himself thinks fit.
How does he know, by the strength of his understanding, the secret and
internal motions of animals, and from what comparison between them and us
does he conclude the stupidity he attributes to them?
— M o n t a i g n e , The Defense of Raymond Sebond
The only real revolutionary stance is that “nature” is the greatest
convention of all. Perhaps there are no natures, no essences— only categories and
paradigms that human beings mentally and politically impose on the flux of
experience in order to produce illusions of certainty, definiteness, distinction,
hierarchy. Apparently, human beings do not like a Heraclitan world; they want
fixed points of reference in order not to fall into vertigo, nausea. Perhaps the idea
of nature or essence is man's ultimate grasp for eternity. The fu ll impact of the
theory of evolution (the mutability of species— including man) is thus still to
come.
— J o h n R o d m a n , The Dolphin Papers
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
M any people were generous with their time, in interviews and corres­
pondence, and generous with a bed and a meal when the situation arose.
I would particularly like to thank Robert Stephenson o f Fairbanks',
Alaska, with whom I had the pleasure o f weeks in the field, and Dave
M ech, with whom 1 stayed in Minnesota and who directed me to a
number o f valuable people.
1 am deeply indebted to the Nunam iut hunters o f Anaktuvuk Pass,
Alaska, for their ideas; to John Fentress, Department o f Psychology,
Dalhousie U niversity, N ova Scotia, for his early encouragement in this
project; and to Joseph Brow n, Department o f Religious Studies, Univer­
sity o f Montana, for his direction and encouragement. T o Pat Reynolds
o f the N aval Arctic Research Laboratory, Barrow, Alaska; Dick Coles o f
the T yson Research Center, Saint Louis; and the staff o f the w olf re­
search facility, Shubenacadie, N ova Scotia, for their hospitality. And to
Dale Bush, D .V .M ., for his assistance.
T h e task o f research was eased by various librarians and by the staffs
o f several state historical societies. I would particularly like to thank the
interlibrary loan staff at the University o f Oregon, Eugene; Minnie
Paugh, special collections librarian at Montana State U niversity; the staff
o f the Montana Historical Society, Helena; the staff o f the South Dakota
H is to ric a l S o c ie ty , P ie rre ; and M a r y ly n S k a u d is o f P a rk v ille ,
Minnesota.
Portions o f the m anuscript w ere critically review ed by Robert
Stephenson, Joseph Brow n, and Roger Peters, and I am grateful for their
insights.
Some o f the ideas here first took shape in conversations with various
people. In addition to those already named I would like to thank Dick
Show alter, Je n n y R yo n , G ly n n R iley , Heather Parr, T im Roper,
Sandra G ra y , and the late Dave Wallace.
Laurie Graham , my editor at Scribners, and Peter Schults, my agent,
were deeply committed to the ideas here and I hope their insistence on
clear and elegant expression is evident on these pages.
Sandy, my w ife, read this manuscript in progress. Her insights and
the range o f her vision are remarkable, and I am indebted.
CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION
I:
1.
2.
3.
CAN IS LU PU S L I N N A E U S
O rigin and Description
Social Structure and Communication
Hunting and T erritory
II:
AN D A CLO U D PA SSES O V ERH EA D
4.
5.
Amaguk and Sacred Meat
6.
1
A Wolf in the Heart
Wolf Warriors
9
31
53
98
114
Ill:
7.
8.
9.
T H E B E A S T O F W A S T E A N D D E S O L A TIO N
137
153
167
T h e Clam or o f Justification
Wolfing for Sport
An Am erican Pogrom
IV :
A N D A W O LF S H A L L D E V O U R T H E SU N
10.
Out o f a Medieval Mind
203
11.
12.
13 .
14 .
T he Reach o f Science
Searching for the Beast
Images from a Childhood
A H ow ling at T w ilight
224
250
271
e p ilo g u e :
On the Raising
and a N ew Ethology
B IB L IO G R A P H Y
INDEX
ILLUSTRATION CREDITS
2 12
o f Wolves
279
288
299
309
INTRODUCTION
I
am in a small cabin outside Fairbanks, Alaska, as I write these
words. T h e cold sits down like iron here, and the long hours o f win­
ter darkness cause us to leave a light on most o f the day. Outside, at
thirty below, wood for the stove literally pops apart at the touch o f the
ax. I can see out across the short timber o f the taiga when I am out there
in the gray daylight.
G o out there.
T ravelin g for hours cross-country you see only a few animal tracks.
Perhaps a single ptarmigan or a hare. Once in a while the tracks of a
moose. In the dead o f winter hardly anything moves. It’s very hard to
make a living. Yet the w o lf eats. He hunts in the darkness. And stays
warm . H e gets on out there.
T h e cabin where I am writing sits a few miles north o f the city, in
i
2
OF WOLVES A N D MEN
Goldstream Valley. T h is valley came briefly into the news a few years
ago when wolves killed a lot o f domestic dogs here. Goldstream Valley is
lightly settled and lies on the edge o f active w o lf range, and that winter
wolves got into the habit o f visiting homes and killing pet dogs. A dog
owner wouldn’t hear a sound but the barking and growling o f his dog.
Then silence. He would pass a flashlight beam through the darkness and
see nothing. In the morning he would find the dog’s collar or a few o f its
bones stripped o f meat. T h e wolves would have left behind little else but
their enormous footprints in the snow.
A fter the wolves killed about tw enty dogs like this, a petition turned
up in local stores. Sign one sheet and it meant you wanted the Alaska
Department o f Fish and Gam e to kill the wolves. Sign another and it
meant you didn’t. T h e plan was defeated, five to one, and the Depart­
ment o f Fish and Gam e, for its part, declined to get involved. Some resi­
dents set out poisoned meat and steel traps on their own. T h e wolves
went on killing dogs until spring, when the toll was something like
forty-two.
When it was over some biologists, pressed for an explanation, told res­
idents it had been a hard winter, that wolves had simply turned to dogs
for food. Athabascan Indians living in Fairbanks said with a grin that
that might be true— they didn’t know— but wolves just naturally hate
dogs, and that’s all it had been about. T h e owner o f a sled-dog team ar­
gued that the w o lf was a born killer, like the wolverine and the weasel.
Some creatures God put on earth to help man, he said, and others to
hinder him, and the w o lf was a hinderer.
T h e dog-killing incident in Goldstream Valley brings together the
principal threads in this book. What wolves do excites men and precipi­
tates strong emotions, especially if men feel their lives or the lives o f their
domestic animals are threatened. Explanations for the w o lf’s behavior
are rampant. Biologists turn to data. Eskimos and Indians accept natural
explanations but also take a wider view , that some things are inexplicable
except through the metaphorical language o f legend. T he owner o f a dog
team is more righteously concerned with the safety o f his animals than
with understanding what motivates wolves. And everyone believes to
some degree that wolves howl at the moon, or weigh two hundred
pounds, or travel in packs o f fifty, or are driven crazy by the smell o f
blood.
Introduction
None o f this is true. T h e truth is we know little about the wolf. What
we know a good deal more about is what we imagine the w o lf to be.
Alaska is the last N orth American stronghold o f the wolf. With Es­
kimos and Indians here, with field biologists working on w o lf studies,
with a suburban population in Fairbanks w ary o f wolves on winter
nights, with environmentalists pushing for protection, there is a great
mix o f opinion. T he astounding thing is that, in large part, it is only
opinion. Even biologists acknowledge that there are things about wolves
and w olf behavior you just have to guess at.
Let’s say there are 8,000 wolves in Alaska. M ultiplying by 365, that’s
about 3 million wolf-days o f activity a year. Researchers may see some­
thing like 75 different wolves over a period o f 25 or 30 hours. T h at’s
about 90 w olf-days. Observed behavior amounts to about three onethousandths o f 1 percent o f w o lf behavior. T h e deductions made from
such observations represent good guesses, and indicate how incomplete
is our sense o f worlds outside our own.
Wolves are extraordinary animals. In the winter o f 1976 an aerial
hunter surprised ten gray wolves traveling on a ridge in the Alaska
Range. T here was nowhere for the animals to escape to and the gunner
shot nine quickly. T h e tenth had broken for the tip o f a spur running off
the ridge. T h e hunter knew the spur ended at an abrupt vertical drop o f
about three hundred feet and he followed, curious to see what the w olf
would do. Without hesitation the w o lf sailed o ff the spur, fell the three
hundred feet into a snowbank, and came up running in an explosion o f
powder.
T h e Nunam iut Eskimo o f the central Brooks Range speak o f wolves as
hunters something like themselves. They believe that wolves know
where they are going when they set out to find caribou, and that perhaps
wolves learn from the behavior o f ravens where caribou might be. They
believe certain wolves in a pack never kill, while others in the pack
specialize in killing small game. A lw ays, to requests for generalizations,
they say that each w o lf is a little different, that new things are always
seen. If someone says big males always lead the pack and do the killing,
the Eskimo shrug and say, “ M aybe. Som etim es.”
Wolves vary their hunting techniques, share food with the old who do
not hunt, and give gifts to each other. T h ey can live for a week without
3
4
OF WOLVES A N D MEN
food and travel twenty miles without breaking stride. T h ey have three
systems o f communication— vocal, postural, and olfactory. T h eir pel­
ages range from slate blue to almost pure white, through chocolate
brown, ocher, cinnamon, gray, and blond. And like primates they spend
a good part o f their time with their young and playing with each other. I
once saw a w o lf on the tundra winging a piece o f caribou hide around
like a Frisbee for an hour by himself.
You can look at a gray w o lf standing in the snow in winter twilight and
not see him at all. You may think I'm pulling your leg— I’m not. Some­
times even the Eskimos can’t see them, which causes the Eskimos to
smile.
Perhaps you already know some o f these things, or have heard that
wolves, especially in the time before the responsibility o f hunting is
upon them, chase through caribou herds for the fun o f it. In the past
tw enty years biologists have given us a new w olf, one separated from
folklore. But they have not found the whole truth. For example, wolves
do not kill just the old, the weak, and the injured. T h ey also kill animals
in the prime o f health. And they don’t always kill just what they need;
they sometimes kill in excess. And wolves kill each other. I'he reasons
for these acts are not clear. N o one— not biologists, not Eskimos, not
backwoods hunters, not naturalist w riters— knows w hy wolves do what
they do.
The w o lf exerts a powerful influence on the human imagination. It
takes your stare and turns it back on you. (The Bella Coola Indians be­
lieved that someone once tried to change all the animals into men but
succeeded in making human only the eyes o f the wolf.) People suddenly
want to explain the feelings that come over them when confronted with
that stare— their fear, their hatred, their respect, their curiosity. Wolfhaters want to say they are born killers, which isn’t true. Wolf-lovers
want to say no healthy w o lf ever killed anyone in North Am erica, which
isn’t true either. T h ey have killed Indians and Eskimos.
Everything we have been told about wolves in the past should have
been said, I think, with more care, with the preface that it is only a per­
ception in a particular set o f circumstances, that in the end it is only an
opinion.
T o be rigorous about w olves— you might as well expect rigor o f
clouds.
Introduction
I have looked for a w o lf different from that ordinarily given us in the
course o f learning about animals. I have watched captive wolves in Bar­
row , Alaska; in Saint Louis, and in Nova Scotia. I drove across the
Dakotas and Montana and W yoming, speaking with old men who killed
wolves for a living when they were young. In N ew York I read in li­
braries like the Pierpont Morgan what men thought o f wolves hundreds o f
years ago. I read in the archives o f historical societies o f outlaw wolves
and Indians. I went out with field biologists in Minnesota and Alaska
and spoke with Eskimos. I spoke with people who loved wolves and with
people who hated them.
I remember sitting in this cabin in Alaska one evening reading over the
notes o f all these encounters, and recalling Joseph Cam pbell, who wrote
in the conclusion to Primitive Mythology that men do not discover their
gods, they create them. So do they also, I thought, looking at the notes
before me, create their animals.
5
One
CANIS LUPUS
LINNAEUS
l
One
ORIGIN AND DESCRIPTION
I
m a g i n e a w o lf moving through the northern woods. 'I'he move­
ment, over a trail he has traversed many times before, is distinctive,
unlike that o f a cougar or a bear, yet he appears, if you are watching,
sometimes catlike or bearlike. It is purposeful, deliberate movement.
O ccasionally the rhythm is broken by the w o lf’s pause to inspect a scent
mark, or a move o ff the trail to paw among stones where a year before he
had cached meat.
T h e movement down the trail would seem relentless if it did not ap­
pear so effortless. T h e w o lf’s body, from neck to hips, appears to float
over the long, almost spindly legs and the flicker o f wrists, a bicycling
drift through the trees, reminiscent o f the movement o f water or o f
shadows.
9
io
OF W OLVES A N D MEN
T h e w o lf is three years old. A male. I le is o f the subspecies occidentalism
and the trees he is moving among are spruce and subalpine fir on the
eastern slope o f the Rockies in northern Canada. He is light gray; that is,
there are more blond and white hairs mixed with gray in the saddle o f 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 Septem ber, an easy time o f 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 o f year for much howling. It is an easy time. T he weather is pleas­
ant. Moose are fat. Suddenly the w o lf stops in mid-stride. A moment,
then his feet slow ly 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. T h e w o lf drifts on. He approaches a trail crossing, an undistin­
guished crossroads. His movement is now slower and he sniffs the air as
though aware o f a possibility for scents. He sniffs a scent post, a scrawny
blueberry bush in use for years, and goes on.
T he w o lf 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, bro­
ken by a moose a year before. T h e y are healed now, but a sharp eye
would notice the irregularity. T h e skin on his right hip is scarred, from a
fight with another w olf 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. T h e char was a day
old, left on rocks along the river by bears.
T h e w o lf 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 o f a caribou the w o lf helped kill ten days ago,
pecking like a chicken at the decaying scraps o f meat. A smart snowshoe
hare that eluded the w o lf and left him exhausted when he was a pup has
been dead a year now, food for an ow l. T h e den in which he was born
one April evening was home to porcupines last winter.
Can is Lupus Linnaeus
It is now late in the afternoon. T he w o lf has stopped traveling, has lain
down to sleep on cool earth beneath a rock outcropping. Mosquitoes rest
on his ears. H is 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 rail curved
toward each other on one side o f his body. A fter 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
o f 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 aw ay with it, his head erect, tail erect, his hips slightly to
one side and out o f 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. 1 le sniffs it. He goes on.
T h e underfur next to his skin has begun to thicken with the com ing o f
fall. In the months to follow it will become so dense between his shoul­
ders 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 w o lf in the pack. He will have
helped kill four moose and thirteen caribou. 1 le will have fallen through
ice into a creek at twenty-two below zero but not frozen. He w ill have
fought with other wolves.
He moves along now at the edge o f a clearing. 1'he wind coming
down-valley surrounds him with a river o f odors, as if he were a migrat­
ing salmon. He can smell ptarmigan and deer droppings. He can smell
w illow and spruce and the fading sweetness o f 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 o f the moss beneath his feet, and the ridges o f old
tracks, some his own. He hears the sound his feet make. He hears the
occasional movement o f deer mice and voles. Sum mer food.
Toward dusk he is standing by a creek, lapping the cool water, when a
w o lf how Is— a long w ail that quickly reaches pitch and then tapers, w ith
11
12
OF W OLVES A N D MEN
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. T h e howl is shorter and it changes pitch twice in the
beginning, very quickly. T here is no answer.
T h e female is a mile aw ay and she trots off obliquely through the
trees. T h e other w o lf stands listening, laps water again, then he too de­
parts, moving quickly, quietly through the trees, away from the trail he
had been on. In a few minutes the two wolves meet. T h ey approach each
other briskly, almost form ally, 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 aw ay 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 w ag their tails.
In the days to follow, they will meet another w o lf from the pack, a
second female, younger by a year, and the three o f them will kill a
caribou. T h e y will travel together ten or tw enty 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 w ay water in a creek breaks
around their legs and flows on.
T h is is the animal Linnaeus called Canis lupus in 1758. In recent years
the w o lf 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 o f loss have ar­
rived simultaneously.
Wolves, tw enty or thirty subspecies o f them, are I lolarctic— that is,
they once roamed most o f the Northern Hemisphere above thirty de­
grees north latitude. T h ey were found throughout Europe, from the Zezere River Valley o f Portugal north to Finland and south to the M editer­
ranean. T h ey roamed eastern Europe, the Balkans, and the N ear and
M iddle East south into Arabia. T h ey were found in Afghanistan and
northern India, throughout Russia north into Siberia, south again as far
as China, and east into the islands o f Japan. In N orth Am erica the w o lf
Can is Lupus Linnaeus
reached a southern limit north o f Mexico C ity and ranged north as far as
Cape M orris Jesup , Greenland, less'than four hundred miles from the
North Pole. Outside o f Iceland and North A frica, and such places as the
Gobi Desert, w olves— if you imagine the differences in geography it
seems astounding— had adapted to virtually every habitat available to
them.
T oday they have been exterminated in the British Isles and Scan­
dinavia and throughout most o f Europe. T here are a few wolves left in
northern Spain, some in the Apennines in Italy, and a few in G erm any
and eastern Europe. Populations in the N ear and Middle East and in
northern India are greatly reduced. T h e present, or even past, popula­
tions o f Russia and China are undetermined.
M ex ico still has a sm all p o p u latio n o f w o lv e s, and large
populations— perhaps tw en ty to tw en ty-five thousand— remain in
Alaska and Canada. T h e largest concentrations o f wolves in the lower
forty-eight states are in northeastern Minnesota (about one thousand)
and on Isle Royale in Lake Superior (about thirty). T here is a very small
w o lf population in G lacier National Park in Montana and a few in
M ichigan’s Upper Peninsula. O ccasionally lone wolves show up in the
western states along the Canadian border; most are young animals dis­
persing from packs in British Colum bia, Alberta, and Saskatchewan.
T h e red wolf, Can is rufus, a little known but distinct species o f w olf
found only in Am erica, has been exterminated across virtually all its
former range in the southeastern United States. A small population o f
perhaps one hundred survives in the swam p thickets of. extreme south­
eastern Texas and adjacent Cameron Parish, Louisiana.
O f the twenty-three subspecies o f w o lf (too many to be meaningful)
that taxonomist Edw ard Goldm an identified in North Am erica in 1945,
seven are no longer around. These include the Great Plains w o lf (also
called the lobo w olf, the loafer w olf, or simply the buffalo runner), the
Cascade Mountain wolf, the Texas gray w olf, the Mogollon Mountain
w o lf o f central Arizona and N ew Mexico, the Newfoundland w olf, and
the northern Rocky Mountain wolf. T h e southern Rocky Mountain
wolf, last reported alive in 1970, is now also believed to be extinct.
Japan ’s two wolves, Can is lupus hattai and Can is lupus hodophilax, are
probably extinct. And another w olf, one that lived in the Danube River
13