The Man Who Lives with Wolves

I was sent for about eight weeks of basic training at the Woolwich Arsenal, where two of the three trainers were from the 29 Commando Regiment of the Royal Artillery. The one in charge was a man named John Morgan, who had been through the Special Forces selection but had been injured in the last lap. He was a strong man, fair and balanced, never ruffled, able to deal with whatever life threw at him, but he was someone you didn’t mess with. If I had to name the role models in my life, and the men I’ve looked up to—heroes in the mold of my grandfather—he would be one of them.

His colleagues were Lugsy Williams, so called because of his big ears, and a very short man named Corbet, known as Ronnie, after the comedian. Corbet was a human dynamo. The man never stopped—I’m sure he did cartwheels and push-ups in his sleep. They used to take turns taking us out on what we called Bergen runs of four, five, or six miles, wearing boots and all the gear, carrying anything up to sixty pounds in a backpack. These were in addition to the normal training and were designed to get our fitness up. It was crippling and I used to pray for John Morgan’s turn because he was slow and steady, as I was. The others ran us all into the ground.

I did sufficiently well in my written tests to be given a choice of which service I wanted to join. Having seen photographs of people rappelling out of helicopters and walking through snow and skiing, and having spoken to John Morgan and Lugsy Williams, I opted for the 29 Commando Regiment of the Royal Artillery. It was based at that time at HMS Drake, naval barracks on the south coast about three miles south of Plymouth. The regiment’s usual home was in the Royal Citadel, a beautiful seventeenth-century building in the center of Plymouth, with seventy-foot walls designed to fend off the Dutch in the wars of that century. It had provided England’s most important defense for the following hundred years, but when I arrived in 1986 the building was being renovated and all 29 personnel had moved to the modern facility (built in the 1880s) down the road.

The 29 Commando was a close support artillery regiment, part of the heavy-weapons division that supported the 3 Commando Brigade of the Royal Marines. In laymen’s terms, when the marines took the beaches, we were there to draw fire; but it felt as though we lived in no-man’s-land, between two worlds. We weren’t quite the navy and we weren’t quite army and neither seemed particularly fond of us. We went anywhere and everywhere the marines went, and since 3 Commando specialized in operating in extreme temperatures and conditions—in frozen wastes, jungles, and deserts—those were the places and conditions in which we trained.

The initial training took place at the Commando Training Centre Royal Marines near Lympstone in Devon. It was the toughest thing I had experienced—this from someone who had spent years as a roofer, running up and down ladders carrying stacks of tiles. We didn’t stop; we were running or doing push-ups, sit-ups, or pull-ups—strength and stamina training—all day. It made runs with Lugsy and Ronnie feel like child’s play.

It was relentless; day after day after day our bodies were pushed to the limit. We had tests sometimes as often as three times a day. We were worn down, exhausted, beyond exhaustion physically and mentally. I would get into a bath at night and feel as though I’d never be able to walk again—tomorrow couldn’t come slowly enough. But it was all done with a purpose. As commandos, we needed not only the physical fitness to get through hostile terrain, we also had to have the mental stamina to be able to fight and defend ourselves once we got there. If we weren’t up to it, we were no use to the unit.

And when we weren’t pushing our bodies to the limit, we were map reading, doing survival training in extreme weather conditions, taking military tactical awareness courses, learning to look after our kit, taking bearings, and preparing to be dropped into an enemy zone at night “by sea, by air and by land”—the force’s motto.

During the training we were known as hats, which was short for crap hats because we wore undistinguished black berets. The final test to win the coveted green beret was a thirty-mile trek across Dartmoor that had to be completed in eight hours. It was a combination of running and walking in full gear. The dropout rate at this stage was between 40 and 45 percent. It was as tough as anything we had done, but our team came in on time. There was no heroes’ fanfare, no ceremony. The instructors were at the finishing point waiting for us, and as we limped in on the verge of collapse, they flung our green berets at us. I can still remember the feel of the material, the excitement of holding it tightly in my hands as we returned to base in the back of an open truck, tired and freezing cold—and the feeling of incredible pride. It was a sense of achievement unlike any I had ever had.

There was no resting on our laurels. That was just the beginning. We were away from base for eight and a half to nine months a year, and the training we were given in that time and the places we went to were phenomenal. I had thought I knew about outdoor living, but being out in the wild in Norfolk was a far cry from the frozen wastes of Norway in midwinter, when it can be minus twenty degrees centigrade. That place will kill you if you don’t know how to take care of yourself. I learned all about survival. I learned how to keep myself warm, how to be healthy by eating the sort of food that the body could use rather than food that simply satisfied hunger or was comforting. I learned how and where to cross frozen lakes, and how to use the environment to my advantage. In those conditions it’s possible to go from subzero temperatures to plus two degrees by something as simple as digging a hole in the snow for shelter. I learned where and how to make those holes in the quickest time and using a minimum amount of energy.

If we were traveling long distances on foot in those temperatures and that terrain, the leading person would never break trail for very long. He would lead for about five hundred meters, then taper off and go to the back and the next person in line would lead for another five hundred meters and so it would go on. The logic was that forging a path through deep snow is more tiring than following in someone else’s footprints, and on the presumption we would have to fight once we had arrived at our destination, every soldier needed to be as fit as the next.

I always used to wonder how people discovered this, but it wasn’t until I was out on the mountains with wild wolves in central Idaho years later that I noticed they used exactly the same technique in snow. After a while the leader would break off and join the back of the line, ensuring that when they came to make the kill, every animal had conserved enough energy to be effective. My guess is that the Inuit, the indigenous people of North America and Greenland, learned from the wolves, and passed on their techniques to our specialized troops when they arrived to train in those areas.

There was nothing I learned during my time in the army that wasn’t invaluable in my work with wolves, and many of the survival techniques the wolves also used. In combat I was taught to go for the element of surprise, to fight the enemy in a known environment, where the odds for keeping control are in my favor. One person alone against twelve on enemy turf doesn’t stand a chance, but by taking on those twelve in a familiar environment, the chances of survival go up considerably.

Wolves, I discovered, do exactly that. They will always make sure they change the environment to bring the odds into their favor before taking on an opponent. I’ve seen three wolves successfully take on a seven-hundred- to eight-hundred-pound bear and remain in control throughout just by waiting until it was pitch dark for the final assault. Being nocturnal animals, the wolves could still see clearly, but the bear, which is fundamentally a daytime creature, was at a disadvantage.

My unit didn’t go to Afghanistan or Iraq; the only active duty we did was in Northern Ireland, but we did a number of “hearts and minds” tours with the United Nations. I remember in particular being in Cyprus, where the UN was maintaining a buffer zone between the Greek and Turkish parts of the island. I went to the Turkish side one day to deliver food. I was the driver and I had a mate with me, but once we arrived, we were redundant. Local henchmen stepped in and started handing out the food—and violence if there was any trouble. I felt cynical about the whole exercise; it seemed to me that all we were doing was helping the rich get richer and the poor get poorer.

As I was standing around waiting, I noticed an old lady struggling to wheel a wooden cart down a cobbled alleyway toward the lorry. She had a lined and weathered face and was dressed in black, as so many of the women were. The henchmen didn’t seem to be paying her any attention, so I quietly loaded her cart with food and while she followed, muttering, I pushed it back up the hill to her cottage, which must have been six or seven hundred meters away. I didn’t speak a word of Turkish and she didn’t speak a word of English, but when we reached her door, she thanked me by holding my hand in hers. Then she did the most incredible thing: She reached into the cart and took out a precious apple, which she insisted I take. I tried to explain that I didn’t need it, that I had plenty of food, but she wouldn’t hear of it. I was so moved; this old woman had nothing and I had three square meals a day. Her generosity of spirit was humbling. Her culture and upbringing made it impossible for her not to repay an act of kindness, and much as I admire the billionaires who give millions to charity, there’s nothing quite like the gesture of someone giving away a piece of fruit that could mean the difference between life and death to her.

There were many reasons why I loved the Forces, and moments like that were certainly among them. Having been a solitary child, I also enjoyed the sense of camaraderie. I loved the outdoor Action Man lifestyle and I believed in everything the military stood for. It suited me down to the ground. I felt secure in the routine and discipline. I felt a sense of family among my colleagues in the ranks. I imagined I would be there for a very long stint. I even tried to get into the notoriously difficult Special Air Service (SAS) and the Special Boat Service (SBS).

Normally you could only apply for the SAS if you were in the army, and the SBS if you were in the navy, but the government had begun a trial to allow crossover. I volunteered to take part in the trial. The SBS training was tough but then I went up to Wales for the SAS training and that was carnage. I got through the first stage, but I didn’t get to Hereford, where the unit is based. It was disappointing, but I was comforted to have made it past the first day. Out of 150 people who started, 40 had fallen by the wayside before nightfall. Their exhausted bodies were lying over the Brecon Beacons like sheep dung.

I obviously wasn’t destined to join the Special Forces but it turned out that I was not destined to make a long-term career of the army either. Instead, it proved to be a valuable apprenticeship for the real job I was going to do in life.

CHAPTER SIX

Up Close and Personal

Ever since my extraordinary encounter with that big cream-colored wolf in the zoo near Thetford, I had wanted to see and know more about these creatures that had so preyed on my imagination as a child. I began reading natural history books, and a lot of what I had learned about foxes from years of watching them seemed applicable to what I was reading about wolves. Foxes were being cruelly and systematically persecuted because of a reputation I knew they didn’t deserve; mankind had gone one further with wolves and exterminated them from most parts of the world. I began to wonder whether all the negative stories I had heard about wolves as I was growing up were any more reliable than the falsehoods I had been told about their small, red cousins.

Wolves used to be everywhere. Once upon a time they were second only to humans in the breadth of their distribution across the globe, and when humans were hunter-gatherers, they hunted the same prey as wolves and successfully lived alongside each other, to mutual benefit. They were respected as powerful fellow hunters and given mystical and magical properties. Native North Americans still believe that the spirits of their ancestors live on in the guise of wolves. They won’t sign a treaty unless a wolf, or these days a dog, is present. There were countless legends through the centuries about wolves suckling human children. Romulus and Remus, the twins who founded Rome, were supposedly rescued and nursed by a she-wolf who found them in a basket floating down the river Tiber.

But when man evolved from hunter-gatherer to farmer and wolves started preying on his livestock, the wolf swiftly turned from hero to villain. They were demonized, persecuted, and hunted, in many places to extinction. Despite being endangered, they are still hunted in some parts of the world and still widely feared as savage creatures that hunt by the light of the moon, snatch babies from cradles, and tear Russian peasants from the backs of sleighs.

I had felt such intense and curious empathy with that wolf in the zoo that on the basis of nothing more than instinct, and a habit of identifying with the underdog, I felt an overwhelming need to find out the truth and do whatever I could to help and stand up for these creatures.

It quickly became an obsession. I discovered the Dartmoor Wildlife Park near Plymouth in the village of Sparkwell, which had a pack of wolves, and at the first opportunity I made my way there and got chatting with the keepers. I went there repeatedly on any free days I had from the regiment, and offered to lend a hand at times when they were short staffed. I came to know the owner of the park, Ellis Daw, who lived in an imposing house in its midst, and was soon volunteering to work over Christmas and during other holiday periods when the regular keepers wanted time off. There was a flat in one wing of the house that the keepers lived in and I was able to stay there. Whenever we had leave, and my friends and colleagues went off home to see their families, I went to Sparkwell. I didn’t go back to Norfolk for more than ten years. I felt the wolves were my family.

The park was on a hillside, about thirty acres in all, backing on to Dartmoor National Park. The wolf enclosure was at the top of the hill, running alongside the perimeter fence. It was a small enclosure, not much more than an acre for six wolves, and was fenced with heavy-duty six-foot-high link wire with a double gate to prevent a wolf accidentally escaping when the keepers came and went. Although the area was small, it was quite heavily wooded, and there was a bank toward the back under the shade of the densest trees where the wolves had dug an underground den. Otherwise there was a low rectangular hut by the gate that looked like an air-raid shelter and another smaller structure with a flat roof that the wolves seemed to enjoy lying on during the day. The keepers took carcasses to the animals every few days. Otherwise, their only human contact was when one of the animals needed veterinary attention. The keepers certainly didn’t make a habit of being on the wrong side of the wire for any length of time and no one ever went near the wolves at night. The park closed before dusk and the keepers all went off duty.

It was common practice for everyone going into the enclosure to be armed with a broom handle. It was routine with all of the big predators in case anything went wrong, but the wolves were never threatening. On the contrary, they seemed to feel threatened by us. They panicked when anyone went near them; they tore off to the far end of the enclosure or disappeared underground and only came to their food when we were well away. These didn’t look to me like vicious creatures that would attack as soon as look at you.

Curiosity soon got the better of me. I wanted to get close to those animals and to know more about them and so I started sitting quietly inside the enclosure. I sat there for hour after hour, for several weeks, hoping that the wolves might start to take an interest, as the foxes had done, and come and investigate me. They didn’t. Then I realized what I was doing wrong. I was invading their territory in daylight, when I felt comfortable. What would happen, I wondered, if I switched the odds and approached them, as I had the foxes, at night when they had the upper hand? Might I then get a truer understanding of what those creatures were really about? I applied the psychology I had learned in the army in reverse. I wanted the wolves to feel that they had the advantage and I did not. My colleagues had been astonished by my desire to sit in the enclosure during the day and when I told them that I wanted to go in at night, they thought I was certifiable. But to his credit, Ellis Daw, the owner, whom I had come to know quite well by then, let me experiment.

Even now I have no idea what I wanted from those wolves or why I felt so compelled to get to know them in that way. Maybe it was a voyage of self-discovery, to lay the ghosts of my childhood to rest. Maybe it was because they reminded me of the dogs I had grown up with and I was hoping that I would find some of the comfort and security with the wolves that I had felt with the dogs—and not experienced fully since my grandfather died. Or maybe I was just plain nuts. What I do know is that it upset me that those beautiful creatures found contact with humans so stressful, and I hoped that if they got to know me, I might in some way be able to make their lives in captivity a little better.

One night, when there was a new moon in the sky, I put on an old tracksuit and, taking my courage in both hands, went into the enclosure and locked the doors behind me. I was terrified, absolutely terrified; to the best of my knowledge, no one had ever done this before—and there had been plenty of accidents with captive wolves. There was no way of knowing how these wolves might react, whether they would hide away or tear me to pieces. But I had to know. Enveloped by darkness and stumbling over fallen branches and protruding tree roots, I made my way to the bank at the top and sat down to wait for I wasn’t sure what. It was hard to see and the night was full of strange noises as the nocturnal animals in the park limbered up. But I soon began to relax. The wolves remained hidden in the shadows and gave me no cause for concern. I began to feel comforted by the darkness. As a child I had loved the dark and the noises of the forest; they had made me feel safe as I lay in my bed under the coarse black blanket in Norfolk, and they began to make me feel safe here, too.

Every night for a week and a half I went into the enclosure. I wore the same clothes, knowing the importance of scent from my experience of the wild, although I didn’t know at that time that diet was also important. I was eating normal human food, but as I learned more, I discovered that I had to change. For the first three nights I sat in the same spot; although the wolves kept their distance, I could see that they were beginning to be a little curious. The next night I got up and moved to another part of the enclosure during the night. They immediately scattered, as though frightened, but I could see that a couple of the wolves went over to where I had been sitting to investigate my smell and to urinate, or scent, over it. They then resettled a safe distance away, but I was aware that they were watching me. That went on for a few more nights. They were interested but they just didn’t have the courage to come up and face me.

The next night one of the wolves, Reuben, which I now know to have been the beta animal, walked boldly up to me and started to sniff me all over and sniff the air. He didn’t touch—he was just checking me out; and he did this for a couple of nights. The next night I was sitting up on the bank at the highest point in the enclosure with my legs out in front of me, knees in the air. The same wolf came over to me and did exactly what he had done the previous two nights: sniffed me, sniffed the air, sniffed down my legs, and then suddenly without warning he lunged forward and in a split second his incisors had taken a hard, very painful nip out of the fleshy bit of my knee.

I sat frozen to the spot. I didn’t know what to do. If I got up and ran, would he run after me with the pack and bring me down? If I lashed out at him, would I make him more aggressive? So out of sheer ignorance, I sat there thinking, Christ, this is it, game over.

But he backed off, and stood looking at me quizzically as if gauging my reaction. Then he turned and disappeared into the darkness and I didn’t see him again until the following night, when he came and did exactly the same thing. He repeated the behavior every night for about two weeks, by which time my knees were black-and-blue. He might bite a different knee or nip my shin, but it was always the same procedure; he would come close, sniff, then lash out and disappear into the night. Sometimes he did it two or three times a night.

I had no idea what he was doing, but I knew that he couldn’t have meant me any real harm because he never followed it up with any sign of aggression and he never called over another wolf to join him—and with jaws that are capable of exerting fifteen hundred pounds of pressure per square inch, he could have had my kneecap off in seconds. But he chose not to and that’s what kept me going back for more. All I had to show for his assaults were thin lines of bruising on my knees and legs, like little wolf love bites. I didn’t react on any of those occasions, which I later discovered is what saved me.

The first thing a wolf will do, I came to realize, is find out whether a newcomer is trustworthy; the way he does that is by seeing how the stranger reacts to a bite. The incoming wolf immediately exposes his vulnerable throat area to signify that he has come in peace and the established wolf will dominate him until he is satisfied there is no threat. If I had pulled away or screamed, it could have been all over very quickly.

After two weeks of nips, Reuben started rolling his scent over me. He started with my feet, rubbing them with the side of his face, his teeth, the back of his ears, his hackles, and his tail. He then did the same to my legs, never biting, just rolling on me. If I got up and moved during this process, he’d nip me, back off, and if I didn’t react—which I didn’t—he’d come and start rolling on me again. What he was doing, I realized, was testing me. That is the beta’s role in the pack: to protect the others and to act like a bouncer at the door, making sure that no undesirable or threatening individual gets through. I must have satisfied him that I was acceptable because after four or five weeks he started bringing other members of the pack over.

This was the process that happens in the wild when a lone wolf attempts to join an established pack, as I later discovered. The ones that came to meet me were all high ranking and they didn’t touch me initially; they just stood behind Reuben and watched and sniffed, as he moved slowly around my body, nipping. He nipped the back of my head, not quite as roughly as he’d bitten other parts, but enough to produce blood spots that turned into scabs. Once or twice I tried moving back to try to rub against him, but any movement, whether subtle or sudden, got me another nip. He was biting me to keep me in place—and establishing that I could cope with their world, in which nips and bites are an important part of their communication.

I knew scent was important and I discovered that if I put on different clothes or washed or ate different food, the beta male would start nipping me again until he was satisfied that the new smell didn’t mean I was going to react differently to his approach or that my mood had changed. The other high-ranking wolves did the same thing, but he didn’t involve every wolf in the enclosure. The lower-ranking members of the pack, I was to learn, don’t question what the higher-ranking members decide; they are foot soldiers—they have an important job to do, but it is not to think for themselves.