A Wolf Called Romeo Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Table of Contents

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Foreword

  Map

  Acknowledgments

  First meeting, Romeo and Dakotah

  Prologue

  Wolf!

  Rules of Engagement

  Romeo

  The Original Machine

  Shoot, Shovel, and Shut Up

  The Survival Sweepstakes

  What’s in a Name?

  The New Normal

  The Miracle Wolf

  The Wolf Whisperer

  Pugs and Pomeranians

  Friends of Romeo

  The Killers

  The Weight of Dreams

  Epilogue

  Notes

  Suggested Reading

  Index

  About the Author

  Copyright © 2014 by Nick Jans

  All rights reserved

  For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 215 Park Avenue South, New York, New York 10003.

  www.hmhco.com

  The Library of Congress has cataloged the print edition as follows:

  Jans, Nick, date.

  A wolf called Romeo / Nick Jans.

  pages cm

  Includes bibliographical references and index.

  ISBN 978-0-547-85819-7 (hardback)

  1. Romeo, –2009. 2. Wolves—Alaska—Biography. 3. Human-animal relationships—Alaska. 4. Poaching—Alaska. I. Title.

  SF422.82.R66J36 2014

  636.9773092—dc23

  [B]

  2013048435

  eISBN 978-0-547-85821-0

  v1.0514

  All photos courtesy of the author, with the following exceptions: [>], Romeo and Jessie: David Willson; [>], Romeo and Brittain: Hugh Lade; [>], Harry and Romeo: Joel Bennett; [>], Peacock and the suitcase bear: Alaska Trial Court evidence file; [>], Park Myers in court: Michael Penn/Juneau Empire

  Lines from Henry Beston’s The Outermost House: A Year of Life on the Great Beach of Cape Cod reprinted with permission, estate of Catherine Beston Barnes.

  In memory of Greg Brown

  1950–2013

  A friend to all living things

  For the animal shall not be measured by man. In a world older and more complete than ours, they move finished and complete, gifted with the extension of the senses we have lost or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear. They are not brethren, they are not underlings, they are other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time.

  HENRY BESTON

  The Outermost House

  Acknowledgments

  The hard work of writing, though solitary, is never done alone. I am indebted to all who encouraged and aided me in this book, seven years in the living, and three in the making. Special thanks to Harry Robinson for being so generous with his memories; to Corry Donner, who read every word not once, but many times with a keen eye and good judgment; to my wife, Sherrie, who pushed me toward the telling and lived the story along with me; Tina Brown, Joel Bennett, and Vic Walker, steadfast friends throughout; Laurie Craig, map artist nonpareil; Susan Canavan at Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, who believed; and Elizabeth Kaplan, agent extraordinaire, who guided me. Special thanks to researchers Dr. Vic Van Ballenberghe and Patrick Walsh, who reviewed the manuscript’s scientific content. I also offer heartfelt thanks to many who shared their experiences and knowledge, including John Hyde, Michael Lowman, Ryan Scott, Neil Barten, Doug Larsen, Matt Robus, Lem Butler, Chris Frary, Pete Griffin, Ron Marvin, Jon Stetson, John Neary, Kim Turley, Denise Chase, Lynn Schooler, Nene Wolfe, Arnie Hanger, Elise Augustson, Sue Arthur, Harriet Milks, Alaska State Trooper Dan Sadloske, Dr. William Palmer, and dozens more I’ve no doubt overlooked. I extend my profound respect to the many researchers who have illuminated the world of wolves, and to the Inupiaq hunters, especially Clarence Wood and Nelson Greist, Sr., who tried to teach me what they knew.

  First meeting, Romeo and Dakotah

  Prologue

  “Are you sure about this?” my wife, Sherrie, breathed. She glanced over her shoulder toward the comforting glow of our house on the lakeshore, then gazed ahead where a black wolf stood on the ice in the gathering twilight. Bundled against the Southeast Alaska cold, we’d taken along just one of our three dogs—our female yellow Lab, Dakotah, who’d always been perfectly mannered and under voice control around wildlife, from bears to porcupines.

  Despite some understandable jitters, Sherrie was so thrilled she was about to jump out of her skin. After all these years of trying and not seeing, there it was: her first wolf. Perfect, I thought, and easier than it ever should be. But as we walked farther out on the ice, things changed. The wolf, instead of watching from the tree line as he had several times with me, angled toward us at a trot. Then he broke into a bounding lope, snow flying beneath his paws, jaws agape. I drew Sherrie toward me and reached for Dakotah’s collar. My vision sharpened, and synapses crackled. I’d seen my share of wolves over the years, some point-blank close, and hadn’t quite shifted into panic mode. But anyone who claims he wouldn’t get an adrenaline jolt from a running wolf coming straight in, with no weapon and no place to run, and loved ones to defend, is either brain-dead or lying.

  In a few heartbeats, the wolf had closed the distance to forty yards. He stood stiff-legged, tail raised above his back, his unblinking stare fixed on us—a dominant posture, less than reassuring. Then, with a moaning whimper, Dakotah suddenly wrenched free of the two fingers I’d hooked through her collar and bounded straight at the wolf. A tone of desperation sharpening her voice, Sherrie called again and again, but there was no stopping that dog. The Lab skidded to a stop several body lengths short of contact and stood tall, her own tail straight out, and as we watched, mouths open, the wolf lowered his to match. With the two so close, I had my first clear idea of just how large the wolf really was. Dakotah, a stocky, traditional-style female Lab, weighed in at a muscular fifty-six pounds. The black wolf towered over her, more than double her weight. Just his head and neck matched the size of her torso. A hundred twenty pounds, I figured. Maybe more.

  The wolf stepped stiff-legged toward Dakotah, and she answered. If she heard our calls, she gave no sign. She was locked on and intent, but utterly silent—not at all her normal happy-Lab self. She seemed half-hypnotized. She and the wolf regarded each other, as if each were glimpsing an almost-forgotten face and trying to remember. This was one of those moments when time seems to hold its breath. I lifted my camera and snapped off a single frame.

  As if that tiny click had been a finger snap, the world began to move again. The wolf’s stance altered. Ears perked high and held narrow, he bounced forward a body length, bowed on his forelegs, then leaned back and lifted a paw. Dakotah sidled closer and circled, her tail still straight out. The eyes of each were locked on the other. With their noses a foot apart, I pressed the shutter once more. Again, the sound seemed to break a spell. Dakotah heard Sherrie’s voice at last and bounded back toward us, turning her back, at least for now, on whatever call of the wild she’d just heard. We watched for long minutes with Dakotah softly whining at our sides, staring toward the dark, handsome stranger who stood staring our way and whining back, a high-pitched keening that filled the silence. Half-stunned, Sherrie and I murmured back and forth, wondering at what we’d seen and what it meant.

  But it was getting dark—time to go. The wolf stood watching our retreat, his tail flagging, then raised his muzzle to the sky in a drawn-out howl, as if crushed. At last he trotted west and faded into the trees. As we walked toward home in the deepening winter evening, the first stars flickered
against the curve of space. Behind us, the wolf’s deep cries echoed off the glacier.

  With that first close meeting one evening in December 2003, a wild black wolf became part of our lives—not just as a fleeting shape in the dusk, but as a creature we and others would come to know over a span of years, just as he came to know us. We were neighbors, that much is certain; and though some will scoff, I say friends as well. This is a tale woven of light and darkness, hope and sorrow, fear and love, and perhaps, a little magic. It’s a story of our time on this shrinking world, one I need to tell—most of all, to myself. Late at night, it fills the spaces between heartbeats, nudges me awake. By speaking, I hope not to be rid of it, nor even to understand, but just to set down all the facts, the musings, and unanswered questions as best I can. Years from now, at least I’ll know that I did more than dream, and that once upon a time, there was a wolf we called Romeo. This is his story.

  Romeo’s signature—left rear drag marks

  1

  Wolf!

  December 2003

  I was taking my usual afternoon ski on Mendenhall Lake on an early-December day, right behind the house. Ahead, the blue bulk of the Mendenhall Glacier loomed, framed by a ragged sweep of snow-laden peaks—McGinnis, Stroller White, the Mendenhall Towers, Bullard, and Thunder Mountain—glowing in blue winter light. My nearest company was a hiker nearly a mile away. Concentrating on my skiing form, I almost missed the line of tracks that intersected my trail. Even at a quick glance, there was something about them that made me skid to a halt and double back for another look.

  It couldn’t be.

  It was.

  Prints that would cover my palm, larger and more diamond-shaped than a dog’s, front and rear paw prints almost an exact match, all laid out in that flowing pattern I’d seen so many times in my two decades living in the Arctic wilderness, a thousand miles to the north. I brushed my hand lightly across one track. Crisply etched, yet feather soft—just a couple of hours old, at most.

  A wolf. Right there, at the edge of the city limits of Juneau, the state capital. Of course, this was Alaska. But even in The Great Land, one of its last strongholds anywhere on the planet, Canis lupus, the gray wolf, is spread thinly across the country—according to the state’s own estimates, between seven thousand and twelve thousand, averaging out to fewer than one fiftieth of a wolf for each of Alaska’s half-million-plus square miles. Most Alaskans, even those living in ultra-remote villages, spend a lifetime without ever seeing one, or even catching the echo of a howl. Here in Juneau, third largest city in the state, with a population of over thirty thousand, outdoors people and biologists talked of a pack that ran the ridgelines from Berners Bay south across the Mendenhall Icefield, as far as the Taku valley, an enormous sprawl of dense rain forest, sawtooth mountains, snowfields, and crevasse-riddled glaciers. My wife Sherrie and I had heard faint howls now and then from the deck of the home we’d just built, perched on the edge of suburbia and the wild, and counted ourselves lucky. A fresh wolf trail down on the lake, the most popular winter playground for the entire city, was big news.

  I spent minutes studying the tracks, which meandered from near the West Glacier trailhead toward the maze of trails, beaver ponds, and brushy woods known as Dredge Lakes. The animal, besides showing enormous feet even by wolf standards, displayed a clear, habitual drag of his left rear paw, which made a distinctive furrow. On my homeward loop I kept my eyes open, half expecting the trail to have been an illusion. But it was still there. I followed the tracks into the tree line and found overlapping, older prints leading to circular depressions where the animal had bedded down. He’d been hanging around at least since the most recent snow, a few days before.

  Back at the house, I blurted the news to Sherrie. Though she nodded, I knew she didn’t quite believe me. Couldn’t it have been a wandering dog? Or a coyote, like we’d seen before, out on the lake? She’d moved from Florida to Alaska fifteen years earlier and traveled thousands of miles across the almost unimaginable vastness of the state, trying and hoping to spy a wolf, without ever having caught so much as a flicker of fur. Now, we had fresh tracks right here, a half mile from our door, and a twenty-minute drive from the governor’s mansion. To tell the truth, I still didn’t believe it myself, even when I returned for another look.

  Two days later, I lounged in the hot tub on our back deck in a cloud of steam, working out the kink in a sore shoulder, when I spotted a dark shape moving far out on the ice. Even at a distance, that straight-backed, floating trot practically shouted wolf. I jumped out, toweled half-dry, and threw on ski gear. Ten minutes later, our three dogs trotting at my heels, I double-poled out along the lake’s west shore. I knew the dogs—constant companions, our own pack—would stay close, and I carried a leash for our youngest, just in case. I didn’t hope to more than see the wolf as a distant mirage, and only if I were lucky.

  Just around the bend from what area regulars call the Big Rock, a ten-foot-tall, glacier-deposited granite boulder jutting from the shallows at the head of a bay along the west shore, I met two rattled women with their dogs. They’d just been followed for a quarter mile, they said, by a huge black wolf. Staring and intent, it had edged into unnervingly close range behind them—twenty feet, they gestured—then finally moved off, after they waved and shouted. “Where?” I asked. They pointed north up the lake and hurried back toward the parking lot, dogs close at their heels. I skied on, and three-quarters of a mile up the lake, against the trees, I spied what must have been the same animal, standing, staring back over his shoulder.

  Wolf! A wild-edged thrill swelled in my chest, strong as the time I’d met my first, more than two decades before. My two Labs and blue heeler clearly understood this was no stray husky. Even mild-mannered Gus, the black Lab ex–Seeing Eye dog we’d recently adopted, raised his hackles and rumbled a growl. Dakotah, our gorgeous, almost-white female Lab, whined. Chase, the yearling blue heeler, who was bred to guard the herd against such creatures, raised a sharp, desperate alarm as the wolf trotted into the brush.

  Though the odds were slimming by the moment, I raced back to the house, gathered my camera pack and tripod, and shut the heartbroken dogs inside with noses pressed against glass. I panted back out to the creek mouth where the wolf had disappeared. There he stood, a dark shape along the snow-deep shore. He must have seen me coming, but instead of loping off, as I’d expected, he slowed to a walk, sniffed around, and curled up for a snooze near an alder clump. Starting with that sighting from a hot tub, of all places, the whole sequence of events seemed to be tilting toward the surreal.

  Out in the open, I figured I didn’t have a chance to get within picture range. Still, I attached my biggest telephoto lens, ditched my skis, shouldered my tripod, and post-holed on foot through knee-deep snow, meandering, fighting down the urge to look toward him. As ecologist Dr. Tom Smith had once reminded me, an unknown animal staring at and approaching another communicates three possible messages: I want to displace you; I want to eat you; I want to mate with you—all alarming overtures. And I knew that the wide, staring eye of a camera lens, with the photographer leaning behind it, radiating quiet excitement, only intensifies the perceived threat.

  I plodded on with head lowered, pausing and sitting for long minutes whenever he looked my way. At a couple hundred yards, he yawned, stretched, and moved off a few paces, then lay down again. Though even the most ethical wildlife photographers occasionally write themselves a personal exemption slip in cases of extreme opportunity, and the wolf wasn’t acting stressed or going far, I resisted the temptation to push too far inside his personal envelope of space. We completed a slow-motion interspecies two-step for an hour, most of that time with me sitting, eyes averted, or sometimes turning my back and increasing the distance, until finally I was within eighty yards, thanks in part to the wolf angling toward me at least twice. Setting up, I fought to hold steady against my breathing as I squeezed off a series of shots in blue, fading light—the wolf gazing across the lake, then lifti
ng his muzzle and howling against a backdrop of snow-draped trees. Then he faded into the hemlocks, and I headed home in the twilight, feeling like some National Geographic rock star.

  Back home, Sherrie had just returned from work and errands. When I told her, of course she went bonkers. What do you mean? You really . . . Of course, she wanted to go straight out, right then. Just about pitch-dark, I pointed out. Black wolf, black night, and cold to boot. But we’d give it a shot tomorrow evening, soon as she got home. We stood out in the yard, listening for howls, and heard nothing. Maybe he had already drifted back into the country, gone for good.

  The next day, I was out alone on the lake at first light, believing the odds of another sighting were slim. But damned if the wolf didn’t appear as if on cue, right where he’d been before: back along the trees in the bay behind the Big Rock, just off the West Glacier Trail. He seemed far more wolflike this time, though. He didn’t show the same willingness to be approached. I sat back and studied him with binoculars. This guy (now confirmed a male, as I saw him lift his leg to scent-mark a snow-covered log) wasn’t just any wolf. Out of my hundred-some hard-won sightings in the Arctic, he stood out—perfectly proportioned from his broad head to his deep-barreled chest. Exactly how big was hard to say without some sort of reference to measure against, but he was clearly some shade of huge. Gorgeously furred in glossy black, he seemed groomed, as if he’d just returned from collecting best in breed at Westminster. All in all, I’d never seen a more perfect example of the species.