The Company of Wolves (23 page)

Sometimes, the wolves’ curiosity posed problems for Mech. “They’re so curious you don’t want them coming around your tent, because they’ll chew up the tent. Chewing is curiosity in wolves. They only have their paws or their mouths to work with, and can’t really explore the upper corner of the tent with their paws, so they explore it with their mouths.” One day, Mech looked back at his campsite to see that the wolves were at the tent, and one of them had his head inside the drawstring window. “He had his head in the tent, and he was jerking on the sleeping bag, pulling it out. He looked just like he was gutting a moose.”

Mech sees simple reasons for their watchfulness. “They are keyed in to judging subtle differences in prey. If they attack something too strong and healthy, they could get killed. If they don’t attack the ones that are vulnerable, they could starve.” So there is an evolutionary premium on being able to read and analyze small details quickly.

The sense humans rely most upon is vision. We know only a little about how visually adept wolves are; we have little idea how their brains organize what they see. Laboratory studies have shown that wolves can distinguish red, yellow, blue, and green. The visual receptors of a dog’s eye are 95 percent rods, an adaptation to night vision. Dogs lack the fovea, the area of the retina which in the human eye is densely packed with receptor cells, so dogs and wolves may not see the very sharp outlines and fine details that humans see.

Still, wolves rely heavily upon what they see. They communicate with elaborate and complex visual signals, reading each other’s eyes, ears, and mouths, and their faces are designed to emphasize emotional content. Lips are black and often contrast with white or light
colors on their muzzles, which make their mouths more expressive. Their bright-yellow eyes are set off by black eyelids, and frequently light patches around the eye areas draw attention to the eyes. The yellow eye color contrasts sharply with the black pupil, and changes in the size of the pupils indicate changes in mood. Wolves also read important messages in each other’s body postures. A threatening wolf puts its ears up, purses its mouth, or snarls, perhaps even showing teeth; it stands tall, so that its body seems larger and more powerful; its tail rises. A submissive wolf cowers, or shrinks, to seem smaller; its ears go back; it grins submissively, tail tucked between its legs.

Wolves process what they see with remarkable quickness and precision. Standing outside an enclosure near Ely, Minnesota, a young man edges closer to two captive wolves. Jedediah, the male wolf in the compound, comes over and stands sideways, showing his full size and power, and growls. He paces along the fence, challenging all the visitors, and turns so that his side is flat against the fence. His head and tail up, he makes eye contact with each person on the other side of the fence as he passes. And he growls a deep, throaty, serious threat. He fixes his gaze hard on the young man, who has gotten down to eye level and has stupidly sought to challenge him. The wolf growls fiercely, stands taller—on the very tips of his toes—and challenges more stiffly. The wolf’s owner patiently explains, “Eye contact is reserved for the alpha.” The visitor doesn’t take the hint, and keeps on his witless challenge, but then, without really knowing why, grows uncomfortable and steps back a fraction of an inch. Suddenly, the wolf brisks off to patrol the rest of the fence. His perception of the victory is so instantaneous and uncelebrated that it is hardly noticeable.

The wolf trots over to his owner, stands on his hind legs, and licks her mouth. His ears go back. His tail goes down. He rolls over submissively. She explains that he is testing her, just as he tested the visitor. He is looking for any sign of weakness, and he does this every time she comes into the pen, so she stays out if she’s feeling tired or weak. It’s not just that the wolf can overpower her, but that he reads her much faster and more accurately than she ever will read him.

Wolves read the postures of their prey with similar quickness and fluency. They bluff charges to get an animal to reveal its vulnerability, and if they see that a moose is strong and healthy, they move on.
Rolf Peterson tells of a wolf who was skilled at reading moose on Isle Royale. “A female alpha in the East Pack was in charge of the pack for eleven years. She went through four mates, and may have been in on the kills of five hundred moose, which means she probably tested more than ten thousand moose. Once the pack of eleven were walking down the lake ice. There were two moose browsing on the shore. She took one look at them, and paid no more attention.” While she recognized immediately that the moose were invulnerable, four youngsters didn’t, and they took off running after the moose. “She just sat down on the ice, waited for all of them to have their fling, and when they came panting back, she got up and led off at the front of the line.”

Wolves probably read the landscape with the same fluency. Dispersing wolves tend to turn up in exactly the same locations where people have seen wolves before, years and even decades apart. Dispersing from Russia into Finland, wolves have used the very routes wolves used fifty years before. Wolves moving south from Canada into Montana turn up in exactly the same spots wolves were seen decades ago. John Weaver, after several years studying the wolves of Jasper National Park in Canada, suggests that wolves have inborn search images that enable them to recognize habitat productive of moose, deer, or elk. They might be responding to the scent and shape of trees, the aroma of soil fungi, the texture of rock and dirt underfoot, the faint odors of mice and squirrels on the grass.

The wolf’s deeper engagement with the world must owe something to its capacity to read its setting through several senses at once. Some people have suggested that much of the wolf’s uncanny perceptiveness is due to an extremely keen sense of hearing. Roy McBride, who trapped wolves for Mexican ranchers in the 1960s and ’70s, recalls two captive Mexican wolves on a Chihuahua ranch where he was trapping. After observing that the captive wolves were fed only tortillas and beans, he began to bring them coyotes, bobcats, and javelinas caught unintentionally in his traps. The wolves began to distinguish McBride from the host of cowboys and fence builders that came and went on the ranch. Says McBride, “The cowboys told me that, long before I would arrive in the afternoon, the wolves would begin to pace excitedly, and after perhaps twenty minutes the ranch dogs would also detect my approach and begin to bark.”
McBride left the ranch and returned six months later; long before his arrival, the wolves were up and pacing and wagging their tails. McBride attributes their awareness to their sense of smell, but it is just as possible that they heard his vehicle. No one has yet tested the auditory powers of wolves, but they probably hear better than dogs—and dogs can hear sounds at forty kilohertz, about double the upper range of human hearing. Coyotes have been shown to hear sounds above eighty kilohertz; wolves could have equal or greater abilities.

The wolf’s sense of smell may be its most acute sense. The sense of smell in other creatures has always been a difficult thing for humans to appraise, in part because ours is feeble compared with that of other animals, and in part because olfaction is rooted in the deeper core of the brain, which also presides over emotions, and not in the neocortex, which governs both vision and reason. Odors can arouse fear or nostalgia or courage. As rational creatures, we defer to our eyes as the supreme judges of truth, and often belittle or deny what our noses tell us. The wolf, however, has a sense of smell that challenges our imaginations. By presenting dogs with odorants in ever-smaller dilutions and testing their responses, researchers have shown that dogs are at least ten thousand times more sensitive than humans. Paul Joslin says that preliminary experiments conducted with dogs at Wolf Haven show dogs may perceive odorants in one-hundred-thousandth the concentration at which humans can smell them. They can also recognize much finer nuances of scent than humans can discern. Dogs can distinguish by smell between human twins, and detect the odor of six-week-old human fingerprints on glass slides.

Though wolves haven’t been tested, their olfactory abilities may be even more acute. Trappers so respect wolf noses that they boil their traps in oak leaves, and soak their gloves in calf’s blood. They stand on pieces of cowhide while setting a trap, or try to set them from horseback, and jealously guard their personal formulas of fox glands and coyote gallbladders in the scent baits they use. None of this may be of much avail, however, for all the while they are shedding dead skin cells and exhaling organic chemicals in their breath that probably cling to the ground and become the olfactory equivalent of billboards to passing wolves.

Wolves live far more by their noses than by their eyes. Much of what they communicate among themselves is expressed or interpreted in odors. Young and Goldman observed that, on their runways, “wolves have what are commonly referred to as scent posts or places where they come to urinate or defecate.” Farley Mowat’s fictional wolves put up a fence of scent marks which neighboring packs seemed not to cross, and his fictional biologist urinated all around his camp to keep wolves out. David Mech and Roger Peters put these speculations about scent-marking to scientific scrutiny in northern Minnesota between 1971 and 1974 by following the tracks of wolves to see exactly where and how they scent-marked.

Studies by Peters at the Brookfield and Como Park zoos had already shown that wolves urinate in two ways: females and subordinate males squat; dominant males stand, raise a hind leg, and squirt a small amount, perhaps a sixth of an ounce, of urine onto a stump or a rock or a clump of grass or some other object elevated above the surface of the ground. In one zoo study, 60 percent of raised-leg urinations were accompanied by snarling, growling, or biting, whereas none of the squat-posture urination was. The act apparently carried an emotional content.

Mech and Peters skied and snowshoed 240 kilometers of winter wolf tracks in northern Minnesota and recorded the rate of raised-leg urination. They found raised-leg urination increased markedly at breeding season, and that squat urination by females was often covered by male raised-leg urination. They noted seventy instances of nose-shaped indentations in the snow where wolves stopped to sniff, and found under thirty of them raised-leg urinations. Wolves clearly paid attention to the scents other wolves left behind.

The two researchers also looked at scent-marking in summer. They found that scats were deposited most heavily on trails leading to central points of rendezvous sites. Scats may bear odors of hormonal secretions imparted by the anal sacs, on either side of the anal opening. Mech and Peters had long observed wolves veering off their paths to sniff at scats.

Dominant males scratch the ground stiffly with right fore and left hind legs, then left fore and right hind legs. Various authors had seen dogs do this and concluded either that they were burying their waste or spreading it around to make it more prominent, but wolves neither
bury nor spread their waste. The scratching is apparently intended to leave both visual and olfactory signs; it is probable that glands in the feet impart scents to the scratches.

Mech and Peters found a much higher rate of scratches, urinations, and scats at the junctions of roads, trails, and other commonly followed wolf paths, and far more raised-leg urination occurred on these paths than in the bush. Far more scent marks were found at the edges than at the centers of wolf territories, from which Mech and Peters concluded that wolves continually marked their territorial boundaries. If other packs crossed such tracks and the residents encountered their sign, the residents generally increased their rate of marking. Wolves leave scent marks every two or three minutes as they travel. “The entire territory,” concluded Mech, “is studded with olfactory hot spots.” A wolf can always tell whether or not it is on its own territory. Wherever it goes, scent marks may tell it which wolf passed recently, what that wolf ate, when it ate, and possibly what mood it was in.

Dispersing wolves tend to follow the boundaries of other packs’ territories, but scent boundaries aren’t absolutely inviolable. Mech and Peters found that, though wolves were generally reluctant to spend much time inside a neighbor’s territory, scent marks didn’t always repel them. In one instance, tracks showed that members of one pack chased a deer into a neighboring pack’s territory and seriously wounded it there. When the deer fled deeper into the neighboring territory, however, the intruding pack refused to follow it. They scent-marked heavily and returned home. The neighboring pack encountered the deer the next day and ate it.

What might wolves be reading in all that scent-marking? Might they be reading, not just declarations of ownership, but expressions of a pack’s willingness to fight for territory, signs of readiness to mate, and measures of size, strength, aggressiveness, and health? Might these messages include boasts, confessions, jokes, and insults? Wolves obviously make much of what they discern in other individuals’ leavings. Paul Joslin tells of a wolf whose sense of olfactory propriety was sorely tested. While working in Algonquin Park, he says, he approached a captive wolf he had approached many times before, but this time he was carrying a fresh scat which he had collected in the wild. “I showed it to the wolf inside. He took one sniff and bolted
up the hill. He would never have anything to do with me again.” Even the next summer, when Joslin came back from a year at school to work in Algonquin, the wolf would not let him approach. “Whatever was communicated by that scent,” says Joslin, “was something he didn’t want to have anything to do with.”

And what may its keen sense of smell tell the wolf about the nonlupine world? Mech was able to judge, in fifty-one hunts he trailed or observed, whether the wolves sighted or scented moose. In forty-two of them, the wolves seemed to be scenting. In one, Mech concluded the wolves had smelled a cow and twin calves from 1.5 miles away.

What a wolf does with its fine perception is bound to be different from what a human does. Wolves live deeply immersed in nature, but humans have removed themselves from it. There is debate as to whether humans are themselves domesticated animals. There is some evidence that Neanderthal brains from thirty thousand years ago were as much as one-sixth larger than modern brains. Whether or not our brains have grown or diminished, there may be differences in specific parts of the brain that have come about as we gave up hunting and gathering and lived farther and farther from nature. It may be argued, for example, that we have lost perceptive powers, as urban noise deafened us and urban smoke and sweat favored people whose sense of smell was not too sensitive. City life may favor conservative strategies of caution and camouflage over acute perception.