Of Wolves and Men

The wolf exerts a powerful influence on the human imagination. It takes your stare and turns it back on you

I remember sitting in this cabin in Alaska one evening reading over the notes of all these encounters, and recalling Joseph Campbell, 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.

Why we should believe in wolf children seems somehow easier to understand than the ways we distinguish between what is human and what is animal behavior. In making such distinctions we run the risk of fooling ourselves completely. We assume that the animal is entirely comprehensible and, as Henry Beston has said, has taken form on a plane beneath the one we occupy. It seems to me that this is a sure way to miss the animal and to see, instead, only another reflection of our own ideas.

The wolf was the one animal that, again, did two things at once year after year: remained distinct and exemplary as an individual, yet served the tribe. There are no stories among Indians of lone wolves.

It is, after all, not man but the universe that is subtle.

The first time I understood this I was talking with a man who had killed some thirty-odd wolves himself from a plane, alone, and flown hunters who had killed almost four hundred more. As he described with his hands the movement of the plane, the tack of its approach, his body began to lean into the movement and he shook his head as if to say no words could tell it. For him the thing was not the killing; it was that moment when the blast of the shotgun hit the wolf and flattened him—because the wolf’s legs never stopped driving. In that same instant the animal was fighting to go on, to stay on its feet, to shake off the impact of the buckshot. The man spoke with awed respect of the animal’s will to live, its bone and muscle shattered, blood streaking the snow, but refusing to fall. “When the legs stop, you know he’s dead. He doesn’t quit until there’s nothing left.” He spoke as though he himself would never be a quitter in life because he had seen this thing. Four hundred times.

The wolf in the middle begins to howl in response to the others. In chorus like this, each wolf chooses a different pitch. The production of harmonics (see chart, page 42) may create the impression of fifteen or twenty wolves where there are in fact only three or four.

The focal point of the act of hunting among the Naskapi is the preparation of a ritual meal, called Mokoshan. Caribou meat and bones are carefully prepared and consumed by the hunters. Not a morsel of meat or a sliver of bone may touch the ground. The function of the meal for the Naskapi hunter is to ingratiate himself with the Spirit of the Caribou, to indicate respect for his food, to honor the tenuous balance that keeps him alive by asserting that there will be no waste of whatever meat is secured in the hunt. It is not hard for Western minds to miss the seriousness of this ritual: the link between hunter and hunted (symbolized in the meal) lies at the very foundation of every hunting society. It is, literally, the most important thing in the hunter’s life. To fail in the hunt is to fail to eat. To die. To be finished. The ritual preparation for the hunt, therefore, acknowledges a perpetual agreement: the game will be given to the hunter by dwellers in the spirit world as long as the hunter remains worthy. The hunt itself is but an acting out of the agreement, the bullet or arrow loosed but a symbol of the communication between hunter and hunted.

There had never been a killing like it.

In a book called Adventures in Error, Vilhjalmer Stefansson recalls his efforts to track down virtually every report of a wolf killing a human being between 1923 and 1936. Reports from the Caucasus, the Near East, Canada, and Alaska all proved to be either fiction or gross exaggeration. Furthermore, Stefansson could not substantiate a single report of wolves traveling in packs larger than about thirty. In 1945 it was reported that no incident of wolf attack brought to the attention of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service in the preceding twenty-five years could be substantiated.

It is popularly believed that there is no written record of a healthy wolf ever having killed a person in North America. Those making the claim ignore Eskimos and Indians, who have been killed, and are careful to rule out rabid wolves. The latter have attacked people several times.

it was assumed that wolves were basely motivated and bloodthirsty; then in an environmentally enlightened age, it was suddenly assumed that they were noble and wise. So, too, have we analyzed their hunting behavior in human terms, and none of it is worth more than the metaphor it’s couched in. This habit indeed may eventually lead us even further from an understanding of the animal. For my own part, I mean to suggest that there is more to a wolf hunt than killing. And that wolves are wolves, not men.

Roger Peters told me once that wolves in the Superior National Forest defecate sometimes on beer cans. Like any scent mark, these scats give off both visual and olfactory signals. We should see more here than what the wolf might be telling us about our littering habits. The animals may be marking things they consider dangerous to other wolves, especially pups, for wolves also mark traps and poisoned baits by defecating on them. If Peters is correct in thinking that the olfactory information in a scat is intended for other pack members, the idea makes even better sense.

Voglio dire solo questo: non conosciamo affatto gli animali. Non possiamo comprenderli se non in termini di nostre esigenze ed esperienze; e avvicinarci a un popolo con cui condividiamo il pianeta e il fascino per i lupi ma che proviene da una dimensione spazio-temporale differente e che, per quanto ne sappiamo, è molto più vicino ai lupi di quanto potremo mai esserlo noi.

Quando, dalle prigioni delle nostre città, volgiamo lo sguardo alla wilderness, quando il nostro intelletto sperimenta il privilegio di condurre una vita scevra da convenzioni insensate o senza colpe né sotterfugi, in breve, una vita integra, credo che possiamo rivolgerci al lupo. In esso percepiamo il coraggio, la resistenza e un modo di vivere franco e leale; percepiamo che è in armonia con l’universo mentre noi non lo siamo ancora.