The Company of Wolves (21 page)

As Mech stepped down from the stage, Messier boiled up to the front of the room. Round and bearded, intense and heavy-jawed, he moved quickly, like a badger. Mech, though caught by surprise, was eminently calm, and his voice did not rise at all. Messier’s jaw moved rapidly; his dark bushy eyebrows alternately flared and furrowed. “I believe what you are doing, but you put out a comment that is not appropriate!” he said, and declared that it was not fair for Mech to rebut his work when Messier could not reply. Mech, however, looked upon his remarks not as a rebuttal but as a revision of his own work. “I would never do that to you,” he said. “I would never rebut you without giving you an opportunity to rebut.” Mech’s gaze was unwavering, his mouth relaxed, and his voice soft and steady. Messier was dogged in his attack, rapidly going over key points in his objection to Mech’s argument: “The first winter there was no effect. The second winter there was no effect.…” His eyes glanced at Mech and veered off again, and his teeth flashed.

If we had been watching wolves here, we’d have to have said the postures showed Mech to be the dominant, resisting the challenge by not barking back.

• • •

Although writers often ascribe leadership of a pack to the dominant male, dominance is not necessarily leadership. Ernest Thompson Seton held that when a wolf attains great size and cunning “he attracts a numerous following.” Durward Allen wrote of the alpha male’s “privileges of leadership.” Eric Zimen held: “My own theory is that … it is the alpha female, the mother of the cubs, that is the principal figure governing the life of the pack.” Erich Klinghammer’s view may be more to the point. He says, “We tend to think in categories that don’t mean too much to wolves.” Mech points out that leadership is a human concept, and we aren’t sure how to define it among wolves.

Leadership is a complex enough issue among humans. We know even less about it with regard to wolves. The alphas do seem to have some leadership role. Peterson found that, 70 percent of the time, it is the dominant male or dominant female that runs at the head of a wolf pack. Allen believed that, before setting out for a hunt or for travel, when wolves came together for a rally, nose to nose, with wagging tails, the alpha male was the center of the ceremony. Lois Crisler observed that, among her captive wolves, the female seemed to lead, especially presiding over mood. “If she was gay,” Crisler wrote, “their eyes turned gay; they trooped and tossed with her in gaiety. If she ‘talked’ and she was the sole one that truly, wolfishly did—they uttered their own indescribable ows and wows.”

None of the expected indicators of leadership correlate with dominant status, however. Pack howling is initiated by one wolf, but not always by the pack leader. Fox believed that hunting success was synonymous with dominant rank; yet it is not necessarily the alpha which kills. When experimenters in Germany released rabbits into a wolf enclosure, they found that the lowest-ranking wolf caught and killed more rabbits than any other wolf. In Alaska, Robert Stephenson could find no correlation between social rank and hunting success. Zimen wrote, “No member decides alone when the pack is to move or exercises sole power of command in any of the other activities that are vital to the cohesion of the pack. The autocratic leading wolf does not exist.”

What makes an individual dominant? In sheep and antelopes, size
and age are the most important determinants of rank. In Old World monkeys such as Japanese macaques, rank may be derived from one’s mother’s standing. Among squirrel monkeys, dominance correlates with levels of adrenal hormones. It may be that among wolves the alpha is the dominant not by virtue of an aggressive nature or a sharper bite, but by virtue of an ability to hold the pack together, to give it comfort and coordination and belonging. Zimen noted that subordinates seemed less able to form subgroups; the strongest bonds of friendship seemed to be between the highest-ranking individuals. Noting that the alpha male is the center of the greeting and rallying ceremonies, he declared, “No wolf is more interested in a friendly, cooperative atmosphere” than the alpha male. “He is the experienced initiator, the watchdog and protector against external dangers, the friendly and tolerant center of the pack.” He felt that the alpha male preferred peace because peace favored the successful rearing of his cubs and put off the day of his overthrow as dominant male. Self-interest may decree that one of the alpha male’s roles is simply to reduce tension.

If the alpha isn’t the biggest, baddest wolf, or even necessarily the wolf that breeds, one may ask, what is the evolutionary advantage of the hierarchy? Sociobiologists point out that evolution proceeds on more than one level—not just on the individual but on the group as well. Thus, ants and bees have evolved sterile castes of workers that do not reproduce. Hierarchies produce stable social systems and so are advantageous to a group if not to the individual. And, in a roundabout way, altruism helps even the subdominant wolf to pass on its genes. Since most fellow pack members are siblings, increasing the fitness of one’s fellows by cooperating in defense of territory or helping to feed the young improves the chances of passing on the genes that both dominant and subordinate have inherited. At the same time, in societies with strong dominance hierarchies, newcomers are a threat to the status—and therefore to the perpetuation of the genes—of every member of the group, and every member of the group is apt to attack a newcomer.

We are still laboring under the assumption that with wolves, if not with people, it is toughness, hard will, and readiness to contest things that determine rank. The cinematic view says life’s prizes go to the contestant with the strongest impulses. The evidence, however,
doesn’t always show that’s the case. Some races go to the swift, some to the strong, some to the sly, some to the sociable. It may be that each wolf is different and each pack is different. It may be that there is no fixed rule. And if the absence of simple explanations of wolf society discomforts us, it is probably because we are of more than one mind about our own.

Back in northern Minnesota, Wolf 171 blinks a yellow eye. Seabloom is having a hard time finding a vein from which to draw more blood. Mech shows him. Their hands are blue with cold, but they do not put on their gloves between blood samples, because there is too much to do. Mech pinches the wolf’s leg and directs Seabloom to align the needle parallel to the bone. Seabloom finally finds the vein and draws blood. “Thank you,” he says to Mech. “Wolf Topography,” Seabloom says to no one in particular, offering the words to the trees satirically, as an imaginary course title or a cartoon caption.

It takes nearly four hours to complete the work. The wolf is bled, weighed, and measured. The collar’s stored thirty-six hours of data is dumped into a portable computer. The darts are replaced, and the collar is put back on. By the time we are ready to inject a drug that will pull the wolf out of sedation, everyone’s hands are numb. It is still snowing. The wolf is injected. She licks her nose and blinks. In a few minutes, she raises her head, pulls her legs under her, and tries to wobble to her feet. We put on our snowshoes and move away. Mech moves out quickly, wanting to leave the wolf with as little experience of humans as possible—not just to avoid spooking her, but presumably to avoid habituating her. As I pull on my bindings, I look back across the clearing at her. She drags herself away, looking at me uneasily, the cold yellow fire glowing in her eyes proclaiming still that there is a dimension to wolves we haven’t fathomed.

In his famous story of the outlaw wolf Lobo, Ernest Thompson Seton held that the wolf walked on the backs of sheep at night to attack the goats around which the flock clustered, not because he was hungry for goats, but so that the sheep would scatter and the wolves could pick them off at their leisure over the following weeks. Seton described his own meticulous care in putting out poison to kill the wolf. He melted cheese and kidney fat in a china dish, cut it with a bone knife “to avoid the taint of metal,” and injected strychnine and cyanide into chunks of the bait. All the while, he wore gloves “steeped in the hot blood of a heifer.” Carrying the baits in a rawhide bag which was bathed in blood and always suspended from a rope, he dropped baits over a ten-mile circuit; the next day, he returned to find that the wolf had gathered up baits, piled them in the trail, and defecated on them. The wolf methodically sprung the traps he buried in the trail, too. “The old king was too cunning for me,” confessed Seton.

Such stories crowd our view of wolves, but their proclamation that wolves are sagacious is largely an interpretation born of storytelling. The artful tracker reconstructs a hunt from tracks, and often fills the gaps between what he knows with speculations about how a wolf thought.

We really know very little about what a wolf plans or thinks. However, those who spend time observing wolves see plenty of evidence that the mind of the wolf is complex, purposeful, and full of feeling.

For example, in 1970, the Alaska Department of Fish and Game sent Robert Stephenson to Alaska’s North Slope to find out what was happening to its wolves. Hunters had been shooting them from airplanes, and the wolf population appeared to be in decline. Eskimos said dens that were usually active were empty, and hunters said they weren’t seeing many wolves.

How might Stephenson tell if wolves were any more or less common than they had been ten or twenty years before? There had been no rigorous surveys of the wolf population. It was still early in the days of radio telemetry, and the equipment could not withstand the extreme arctic conditions. Stephenson began by talking to the local Nunamiut Eskimos, who still hunted for much of their food on open tundra.

He found that the Eskimos watched wolves. From the 1940s to the 1960s, Alaska paid bounties on wolves, and the bounties brought the Nunamiut enough money to buy guns and cartridges with which to hunt for meat. They would hunt wolves in summer. It was treeless country, one of the rare places that allowed prolonged observation of wolves. Says Stephenson, “They would camp up high, watching adult wolves through brass ship’s telescopes to see where they went and try to find the dens. They had spent thousands and thousands of hours watching wolves in open country. They knew about seventy dens. Some of them became real students of wolf behavior. I realized that with a modest budget this was a place to learn about wolves.”

So, over the course of three years, Stephenson sat on mountainsides with these Nunamiut wolf-watchers, a campstove, and a spotting scope. In the summer, when the sun never set, he says, “We’d stay up all night watching wolves coming and going. Sometimes you
didn’t see any wolves. Once we watched two wolves hunt small mammals for eighteen hours.”

The Eskimos were full of lore. “They’d say, ‘That wolf is going to lay down,’ and it would lay down. ‘That’s a male. That’s a female. That’s an old one: see how its hair is shedding differently?’ We’d talk about old stories. We’d travel in the winter, too, tracking wolves. We’d trap wolves with them. They knew all kinds of idiosyncratic things, like different kinds of howls.”

Stephenson’s study fell somewhere between experimental science and anthropology. He wasn’t manipulating his subject or generating complex statistics, but he saw things other observers had not seen. He watched a wolf sneak up on a bald eagle and, at the last minute, make noise to scare the eagle. He believes that wolf was “just fooling around.” One day, looking down on a valley with clumps of willow in it, he saw a wolf tease a grizzly. “We’d see this wolf fooling around at the edge of the willows,” he says, “and then a grizzly came out of the willows and chased the wolf.” The wolf disappeared into the willows, and so did the bear. When the wolf came out, the bear came out chasing it. “It looked like the wolf was having a good time. The wolf had this smiling face, like he was really enjoying the hell out of it.”

Wolves sometimes kill bears. They have been known to eat grizzlies. In 1992, a pack of wolves in Alaska killed a sow grizzly while her cubs escaped. Bears kill wolves now and then, too. But one day, says Stephenson, “we saw a wolf traveling with a bear—just walking along, thirty feet apart.” His Eskimo hosts said they’d never seen that before.

Nearly everything humans see of wolves is fragmented and incomplete, truncated by wolves’ shyness and hidden by their furtiveness. Stephenson, however, was seeing long sequences of complex and puzzling behavior, and much of it raised questions about how wolves think. Stephenson quickly agreed with the Nunamiut: “When you talk to them, they’ll say it’s a real smart animal.”

We equate thought with purposeful behavior. Until midcentury, we supposed only humans could foresee the consequences of their actions. “The cat runs after the mouse,” wrote psychologist William James in 1890, “not because he has any notion either of life or of death, or of self, or of preservation.… He acts … simply because
he cannot help it; being so framed that when that particular running thing called a mouse appears in his field of vision he
must
pursue. His nervous system is to a great extent a preorganized bundle of such reactions.” Indeed, experiments in the 1940s showed that one could predictably cause cats to sleep or fight by passing small electrical currents to specific parts of their brains. Thus, animal intelligence was thought to be a matter of instinctive responses to specific stimuli, and each animal was thought to be more or less identical to all others of its kind.