The Man Who Lives with Wolves

CHAPTER SEVEN

A Question of Morality

I felt deeply flattered to have these creatures trust me so much that they were prepared to rub themselves against me, and an incredible sense of achievement to be tolerated in this way. It meant more to me than any human relationship I had established. I found myself looking forward to the end of each day when I could go and be with them again, and I stayed longer and longer during the nights. It was such a privilege to be allowed to sit among this family group and to feel that in some small way I was becoming a part of it. I was beginning to need these creatures that I had been frightened of for so long; I wanted to be with them. But what did they think of me? What did they think I was? They were always curious when I arrived, but what did they think when I left them? Did they miss me? I was attributing human values to them, and human emotions, which I came to realize are not part of their world. I had to learn to turn off my own.

After a while, they started greeting me when I went into the enclosure during the daytime and testing me in the same way as they did at night, a sure sign that they recognized and accepted me. There would be some nips and a bit of interaction that the other keepers began to notice. It felt good to see their reaction, to watch the surprise on their faces and to see them revising their view about these creatures that they fended off with broom handles. Little by little the days and nights merged and I found a week had gone by, and the only times that I had been away from the wolves was when I’d slipped out for some food. I once took a sleeping bag in with me but that was a mistake. The wolves tore it to shreds. They accepted my clothing but nothing else; and the truth was I needed nothing else. When I lay down to sleep, they settled down with me and the warmth of their bodies kept me warm. My excitement at what I had achieved with them was hard to contain.

I never allowed myself to feel complacent, however. I knew that anything could happen and there was no guarantee that because my last interaction had been good, the next one would be also. Every time I went into the enclosure I was full of apprehension, wondering what would happen next. I watched the way they behaved with one another—the way they wrestled and played, and snarled and snapped—and knew that if they started to treat me the same way, I wasn’t going to be able to cope. My skin wasn’t as tough as theirs. I wasn’t covered in thick fur and if they were as rough with me as I’d seen them be with one another, it would not only hurt, but I could sustain serious injuries. Would they recognize that my body was completely different from theirs? Their necks and throats, two of the areas they used most frequently to communicate, were also the best-protected parts of their bodies. My throat was one of the most vulnerable. One bite like the ones I had seen them give their fellow wolves would have been it for me.

But that sense of danger was as appealing as it was appalling. It was like watching a horror movie from behind a pillow, not wanting to see, not wanting to turn it off, and not being able to resist peeping. The excitement and the pleasure I derived from being with the wolves outweighed the danger. I felt comfortable with them; I admired the respectful way they interacted with one another, the hierarchy that obviously governed the pack, the discipline they meted out to members who stepped out of line or pushed in to feed before their elders and betters had eaten. I wasn’t able to articulate it at the time, but what I felt most of all was a sense of belonging. Here was a group of some of the most feared and revered creatures on earth, and they had accepted me into that group. I had taken a rigorous entry exam and been tested within an inch of my life, and by a mixture of luck and intuition, I had passed.

But I wasn’t allowed to bask in self-satisfaction for long. I went into the enclosure one evening, exhausted after a long day, and fell asleep. I was lying flat out, snoring my head off, and without warning Reuben ran over and bounced onto my chest, landing on all four feet. More than 120 pounds of wolf on your chest is quite a wake-up call. As soon as he’d landed, he bounced off again and stood looking at me quizzically before setting off around the boundary, scent marking. He kept looking back, as if wanting me to follow, and I made the mistake of ignoring him and going back to sleep. What I didn’t realize until it was too late was that he was trying to teach me to identify his scent, and it was an important lesson because his job was to look after the alpha pair, which included disciplining around the kill. Any food that had his scent on it was reserved for them.

The alphas are the most important members because they are the decision makers and without them the pack is leaderless. So their survival is paramount. If food is scarce, they will eat first and they may be the only ones who do eat. Other members of the pack will go hungry, even the pups, and starve if necessary. And the rest of the pack knows better than to touch something that has the beta’s scent on it. As it was, I learned the hard way.

It was customary for the local shoot to drop off birds during the season and one day they delivered three ducks to the enclosure. At that time I didn’t know much about the different foods wolves eat or the value they place on them. During the winter months, when it’s cold and there’s snow on the ground, fatty, greasy ducks are a valuable food source for the high-ranking animals. The alpha pair took the first two ducks and although I didn’t want to eat it, I thought I had better protect my share, so I picked up the third, unaware that the beta wolf had laid an arc of scent around it.

Within a split second I was on the ground. Reuben had come at me from about ten meters away with such force I felt as if I had been hit by a train. The duck went up in the air, and I fell onto my back and lay there, completely winded while he took my face in his jaws and squeezed. He was growling all the while, a deep menacing growl, and saliva was collecting around his lips. I could feel the bones in my cheeks bending under the pressure. It sounded like a handful of dry twigs being crushed. I thought, this is it—no question. He’s going to kill me, and I fleetingly wondered what I could do, but I was being pinned to the ground with such force that my options were limited. So I decided to do what he’d already taught me: show him respect and trust, knowing that if he had wanted to kill me, with the amount of weaponry he had, I’d have been dead by now. He was teaching me a lesson. So I tried to tilt my head to display my throat, which I’d been taught was the vulnerable trust area, and as I did so, he moved his grip from my face to my throat, still growling. He held me in a viselike grip for a few seconds longer and then he let go and backed off, still growling, his teeth bared.

If I had read the signs properly, and known what to look for, I would never have taken that duck in the first place. I would have noticed the progression in his behavior to that high-energy snapping and snarling, which should have drawn my attention to his weaponry, as it’s designed to do. He was warning me off and I would have seen his ear posture telling me that he was protecting the duck from afar. They would have been flat, going out like airplane wings, to indicate that he was covering something that belonged to him.

It was an experience that changed my entire perspective. I came out of that enclosure wondering just who the monsters on our planet really are. Humans have branded wolves as ruthless killers, but real strength comes in having the weaponry and not using it. How many humans, with that kind of killing power at their disposal, would have had the restraint not to use it?

I had spent seven years in the army being a part of man’s brutality to man and becoming increasingly sickened by it. If I had been a religious man, I might have turned to the church for forgiveness for my sins and for the sins of my species, as many army veterans do. Instead I looked to these creatures and I felt what I can only describe as a spiritual bond with them. That wolf in the zoo had looked into my soul and seen the grief that had marked my childhood. These wolves seemed to sense my anguish and my shame and in some way I felt they were the key to my redemption.

There were so many things I loved about the army; it had taken me all over the world. I loved the challenges, loved being part of a crack team. It was exciting to be in control of heavy weaponry, but modern warfare is so removed from reality that much of the time I didn’t know what I was fighting for. I became more and more disillusioned. I had been brought up to kill for the right reason and to respect the animal I killed and to respect its place in the world. As a soldier I was part of an organization that killed for other reasons and I didn’t have an appetite for them.

The final straw for me was in Northern Ireland, where I did several tours of duty. The province was like a war zone. I remember walking down a street one day in uniform and having to defend myself from a group of children, no more than six or seven years old. They were screaming abuse and hurling broken bricks and anything else they could get hold of. I am sure the only reason they were doing it was because they had seen their parents and grandparents do the same, but there was so much hatred in their eyes. Those children should have been at home playing with LEGO, dressing dolls, or watching Sesame Street; they should have been anywhere but out there on those streets, because today’s bricks will be tomorrow’s bombs.

I don’t know whether I killed people in Northern Ireland. I fired in the course of battle and people died, but I’ll never know whether it was my bullets that killed them, and I don’t want to know. It was sickening enough to have been part of it. It was not the right battle to have been fighting and I found that very difficult to cope with. The people who wanted the army there didn’t appreciate us, and the people who didn’t want us hated us with such passion that all we did was fuel the situation. There had to be a better way and in the end, years later, they found it: they talked.

In the short time I had spent watching wolves I could see a stark difference between their aggression and ours, and I suspect that at one time, hundreds of years ago, there had been very little difference. Wolves have the power to kill and threaten to use that power all the time, but they only use it when they must. They will fight to the death to save their family and to preserve the food sources that will get their family through the winter, and they will be archrivals with other wolf packs, but they also respect their rivals and value them for what they do. We don’t value our enemies; in modern warfare, we don’t even have to see our enemies—we can kill them at the push of a button and most of us who are engaged in the fighting don’t even know why they are our enemies. The killing is pointless and needless—and the morality highly questionable. I had had enough.

CHAPTER EIGHT

A Ticket to a New Life

Wolves had got under my skin and my mind was in turmoil. I felt nothing but contempt for my fellow man and nothing but admiration for these creatures that had admitted me into their world. Theirs was the world I wanted to stay in. It was safer than mine, more disciplined, and I had a greater sense of belonging.

So shortly after I left the army I found myself on a plane to America. It was insanity by any standard. I was going to meet a man I had never met, to work on a program for which I was not qualified, in a country where I knew no one, and I had sold every possession I owned to buy the ticket. The man was a Native American I had heard about, a member of the Nez Percé tribe named Levi Holt. He ran the Wolf Education and Research Center on tribal lands near Winchester, in Idaho, with a captive pack designed to teach people about wolves and give tribal members a chance to connect with their culture. He was also managing a controversial reintroduction program of wild wolves into the Rocky Mountains. It was run by a team of highly qualified biologists, and I didn’t have so much as an O level in woodworking.

It all began when I saw a documentary on television called Living with Wolves, which featured an American couple named Jim and Jamie Dutcher. They spent six years living with a captive pack in Idaho. The film was riveting; this couple had done everything I had done and had drawn all the same conclusions about pack structure, hierarchy, and the importance of family to these creatures. It was as though we had been living parallel lives. After six years their permit to house the animals had expired and they needed to find a new home for the wolves. The Nez Percé tribe had come to their rescue and in particular, Levi Holt.

I had never met Levi, but I had spoken to him on the telephone and told him I would like to go across to Idaho and study. He said that was fine but since it was a scientific program and I had no qualifications, I would have to do an internship so they could be sure I knew how to record data correctly and be able to support the biologists in the field. Then he told me what it would cost and mentioned a figure that audibly took my breath away. It was several thousands of dollars, and Levi picked up my reaction down the line.

“What’s the matter?” he asked.

“I’ve sold everything,” I said. “I barely have enough money for the airfare.”

“So what are you going to do?”

“I hear you have a captive pack that you use as ambassadors to teach people about wolves. I’ve worked in wildlife parks with captive wolves and maybe I could help out with them and that would pay my way through the internship.”

“There are only so many hours in the day,” he said. “How are you going to do it?”

“How about if I work all day and study at night?”

“Hang on a second,” he said. “Let me get this right. You want to come over here and work all day and study all night for your internship?”

“Yes.”

The phone went dead for what felt like hours while he went away to consult with colleagues.

“Okay,” he said. “Buy your ticket, come over, and we’ll see what we can do.” It wasn’t until later that I discovered how much they’d laughed at this mad Brit who was prepared to come over on a wing and a prayer on the promise of nothing but a tent to sleep in, but my idiocy had appealed to them.

A week later I was on the plane, and I admit I was terrified. I didn’t know what I had let myself in for. I had sold my car, my trinkets, my knives, most of my equipment and clothes, and had scraped together the money for the fare. If it all went wrong, I had nothing to return to.

I flew into Boise, the capital of Idaho, which lies in the southwest of the state, where I was met by a tall Texan cowboy named Rick who was married to Cathy, a volunteer at the Center with Levi. I was to spend the night with them and the following morning she would drive me up to Winchester. After a very pleasant meal and a comfortable night at their home, Cathy and I, and a friend she took along for company for the return journey, set off at first light for the reservation. Rick stayed behind to look after their young child. It was a drive of about 250 miles, and the slight flurry of snow we left in soon became a more serious storm. We stopped several times along the way to put snow chains on and take them off again when the road was clear, but by the time we hit the Rocky Mountains we were into deep snow and the chains were on permanently. We were now into wolf country—rocky terrain, lodge-pole pine forests, and snow-capped mountains—and most of the traffic on the road was associated with the logging industry: huge lorries driving back and forth moving timber. We were in the car for most of the day and as we drove, Cathy explained the work that was being done at the Center and how the release program worked.

This program had been a political hot potato for many years, ever since the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, which was responsible for protecting endangered species, proposed a recovery plan for the wolf in 1980. The wolf was officially classified as endangered in forty-eight states in 1978. The plan was to reintroduce wolves in northwestern Montana, central Idaho, and Yellowstone National Park, but it had been thwarted again and again by legal action, largely by farming communities afraid that wolves roaming wild would kill their livestock. Finally, in 1994, after much argument, the secretary of the interior signed the release plan, which called for state agencies to manage the wolves once they had been released, but all three states declined to cooperate. Finally, the Nez Percé came up with a management program for Idaho, and in January 1995, after fifteen years of debate, fifteen Canadian gray wolves were released into about thirteen million acres of national forest in the Rockies. Two years later they released another twenty and they were doing so well that the biologists were already predicting that it would take no more than seven years before they could be taken off the endangered species list.

We arrived at the Center just as it was getting dark and everyone came out to welcome us. I think they were keen to take a look at the madman who had traveled all the way from England. It was about half an hour’s drive out of the town of Winchester up a windy mountain track. The whole area was breathtakingly beautiful, with mountain trails through forests of giant ponderosa pines and Douglas firs. The main attraction was a big lake that brought tourists to the area as well as eagles and fish-eating birds. In summer the lake offered canoeing and water sports and in winter, ice-skating and ice fishing. The population of this little town was less than three hundred people and the facilities amounted to a canteen, a pub, a grocery store, and a gas station, and that was where we went each week to stock up on supplies and to have a shower and launder clothes.

There was no running water in the camp and no electricity; drinking water had to be carried in and cooking was all done on propane gas appliances. One of the biologists showed me around. The accommodation comprised a cluster of individual tepees, one smaller one that was the toilet, and one larger tent, set apart from the main living quarters, which was the kitchen and canteen, where there was always a big pot of coffee available. It was set apart because bears frequently came out of the forest in search of food, and any food had to be either buried or hung up to try to prevent them from taking it. The tepees were allocated in order of seniority, those at the heart of the camp being the most prestigious. There was one, I noticed, that couldn’t have been farther away. It was right on the edge of the forest; it had a hole in the roof, moss growing up the sides of the canvas, and a door that was hanging off. Pity the poor devil who has to live in that one, I thought to myself. And yes, I was that poor devil.

The tepees were semipermanent. Each one had a wooden floor, a wooden platform bed about three feet off the ground, and a little wood-burning stove, which was essential in those temperatures. That night I sat in my tent listening to the wolves that I would meet in the morning, and stoked the fire with logs. I was broke, I had none of the right equipment because I’d had to spend everything I had on airfare, and I had borrowed a friend’s sleeping bag that was far too short. I had no pillow and no creature comforts like those that adorned the other tepees, but by the time I put my head down, my nerves had dissolved and I had a very good feeling in the pit of my stomach. I felt that this could be what I had been searching for.

The next morning I was awake before anyone else, too excited and too uncomfortable to sleep. I pulled on my army boots, put on fewer layers than I would have liked, and stepped outside into the cold of first light; it must have been about minus fifteen degrees. I thought that I could compensate for poor-quality clothing by my knowledge of survival, the golden rule for which is to be aware of your body temperature and resist the temptation to put on every garment you have. If you warm up and sweat, everything becomes wet and then icy cold. As the sun started to rise over the Sawtooth Mountains, I could see the full beauty of my surroundings. The snow was two to three feet deep and crisp underfoot and lay heavily on the tops of the trees—the most magnificent trees with huge trunks that rose more than a hundred feet above my head and smelled faintly of vanilla. It was so silent you could have heard a pin drop; I had arrived in paradise.

The wolf enclosure was at the center of the camp, near the visitor center, where members of the public came to see the wolves and learn about them and the history and culture of the Nez Percé. It was one of the main tourist attractions of the area, but also very useful as a way of countering the fear and prejudice that so many people held toward these creatures. They had eleven timber wolves in captivity living in forty-eight acres of forest that was double fenced with a strip between the two fences. It became my job to walk around between the fences in the early morning looking for breaches or for frozen drifts of snow that could bring the ground high enough for the wolves to escape over the top.

After the small enclosure at Sparkwell it was good to see these wolves had so much space to roam, although on subsequent visits I realized that even these wolves could suffer from the behavioral problems I had seen in small enclosures and always attributed to the cramped conditions. On the face of it, these animals had everything that nature intended and yet they began to have difficulty living with one another. It was a valuable lesson that space was not the most important factor. What was missing, I came to realize, was a rival pack. Just as human beings pull together in the face of a common threat or enemy, so do wolves. If life is too easy for them, food is plentiful and there is no immediate danger, they start to turn on one another.

Once back from my dawn patrol I would go into the cooking tent and fill in the log book, noting any unusual findings. Then I’d pour myself a mug of hot black coffee, or if no one else was up, I would brew the first pot of the morning. Coffee was the only thing that was provided. Everyone bought and cooked food individually, but there was coffee ready throughout the day and for the first three weeks, I lived on black coffee and Jujubes, a sugar jelly sweet that I discovered I could buy very cheaply in the grocery store in Winchester. I used to go down there—the walk took about two hours—and buy three pounds at a time, which only cost a few cents, and which saw me through the coming week. They were packed full of sugar, of course, which gave me an instant high followed by a terrible low. It wasn’t an ideal diet to be living on when working eighteen-hour days in subzero temperatures, but I didn’t have enough money for anything else and I knew that it was only a matter of time before I wouldn’t even be able to afford the Jujubes.

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