A Wolf Called Romeo Read online

  Once you know what to look for, there’s no mistaking a wolf for a dog. It’s more than a matter of size or weight. Wolves are built differently—longer legs, straighter spines, thicker necks, brushier tails, and thicker, multilayered coats. A wolf’s gliding, economical movements, like its tracks, are distinctive, too. However, the true measure of distance between wolves and dogs lies in the eyes. A dog’s may display intelligence and engagement, but being caught in a wolf’s unblinking gaze is like standing in the path of a laser. That startling intensity bores in and seems to take the very measure of your being. This black wolf’s deep amber irises held all that force, but something more radiated from him that I’d never sensed in any other wild wolf: a relaxed acceptance of my presence. Most wolves I’d encountered, even those that approached me out of curiosity, were probing, on edge, ready to lope for the horizon at the least flicker of suspicious movement, the least waft of wrong scent. In fact, most wild wolves I’d encountered ran at the first hint of human presence, sometimes a distance of a mile or more, and went to incredible lengths to remain unseen. On the other hand, some wolves, whether habituated animals in protected areas or naturally wild, may all but ignore unobtrusive humans and go about their business as if the watchers were invisible. In rare instances, a wolf—usually a younger animal, or one who has never encountered people before—may investigate us with bold curiosity. Tracking wolves alongside Inupiaq subsistence hunters in the western Brooks Range, and watching them as a photographer, writer, and naturalist, I’d witnessed that full range of behavior firsthand. But something about this wolf was different. He lay there watching, neither agitated nor unengaged. It was if he were studying me almost as much as I was him, trying to figure out what I’d do next. And regardless of what the wolf had on his mind, what I would do, along with the rest of my kind, was a perfectly good question.

  One thing was certain. Sherrie needed to see this wolf, for my sake as much as hers. After all, I’d promised her a wolf sighting on our first date years before, and though we’d come close several times, I’d never quite been able to deliver. You can’t plan on seeing wolves, any more than you can falling in love. By the time she got home from work, dusk was heaving in, a dark line of cloud riding the horizon. I didn’t have to tell her to hurry as she bundled into her parka, snow pants, and boots. We took just Dakotah along for company—Chase, the blue heeler, was just too reactive toward any unknown canine if it got too close, and gentle Gus made the perfect babysitter—and headed out onto the lake. Twenty minutes later, just a few hundred yards from our back door, we met the black wolf in the winter twilight—the encounter that began this story. Years later, knowing what I do now, I close my eyes and feel the image of that instant eddy around me like a gust of windblown snow. There would be no going back.

  Over the next week, whatever we knew as normal life screeched to a halt. Sherrie went to work gnawing on her knuckles, called for updates and sightings, and hurried home to get out on the lake for a few minutes before dark. I blew off chores and writing deadlines; dishes stacked up in the sink; we ran out of eggs. There was no time to waste. Judging from the signs I’d seen in the snow, the black wolf had already stuck around longer than anyone could expect. Of course, we were so damn excited that we were tempted to blab to all our friends and let them in on the deal: Come on over, see the wolf! We knew people who’d be thrilled to see stale tracks, let alone a two-second flash of their maker.

  We decided the fewer who knew, the better. One word in the wrong circle, and the whole thing could turn into a one-ring circus with a bad end. We kept the news to our downstairs tenant and close friend, Anita (she took her two dogs for daily walks on the lake and needed to know), and my old pal Joel Bennett, a respected wildlife filmmaker whom I’d helped guide to caribou and wolves years ago in the Kobuk valley. Both were sworn to secrecy. Each would meet the wolf with us first, and many times later on their own, and with others.

  On those first morning forays, of course I left the dogs shut in back home; pals or not, trained or not, it’s a no-brainer that wildlife photography and canines don’t mix. I wanted to be totally focused, and even a well-controlled dog is just another moving object that can only make getting into range—or far better, having the subject approach you—more difficult. Wild animals can count, so to speak, and don’t like being outnumbered. Too, canines register as predators on most animals’ radar. In fact, dogs are a documented factor in what biologists call agonistic (aggression-related) encounters between humans and a number of species, including grizzlies, moose, and wolves. All that aside, I’d always had the best luck and the most profound experiences alone, without even a human companion.

  A cold front had settled in. Coupled with the on-rolling winter solstice, that translated to sun above the mountains for just a few hours and morning temperatures hovering below zero—mild compared to my former Kobuk valley home far to the north, but cold all the same. Both my camera gear and frost-damaged fingers complained, but I dug in and made both work as best I could. After all those years of frozen sweat and busted gear in the Arctic, I had just three wolf pictures worth showing. The rest, gleaned from a couple of dozen chances, amounted to rapidly retreating furry butts you had to pick out of the slide with a magnifying loupe. Even with a big lens and top-notch gear, you need to be a few dozen yards away from any animal for a decent portrait; and wild wolves are notoriously difficult subjects. Most of my wolf encounters had been measured in heartbeats; I might as well have been watching smoke peeling downwind. This was something else entirely.

  The black wolf had already won my undying gratitude for not pulling a Houdini every time he saw me. Still, he seemed to possess an incredible instinct for disappearing whenever the light got close to decent, and for keeping at just the outside edge of photographic range. I had to balance my desire to get the perfect shot with not wanting to displace him. Squinting down the bazooka barrel of my 600 mm Nikon manual focus lens, further stopped down by a 1.4 multiplier, trying not to steam up the viewfinder or jiggle the tripod, I squeezed off long-range shots at agonizingly slow shutter speeds, adding to a growing pile of slides that featured a dark, decidedly unsharp silhouette in a blue-white landscape. Though my early photography efforts with him were largely failures from a professional perspective, I was beyond thrilled to watch a wolf, any wolf, but increasingly, this wolf—see how he moved, where he went, what he did.

  One of those first days, I sat hunkered on the lakeshore just after dawn, watching from a distance, hoping the wolf would decide to angle my way, as he had before. Suddenly he swung his head, staring down the lake, ears cocked. A skier approached—a woman with a husky mix trotting at her heels. The wolf loped toward them. I watched, half holding my breath. A few days before, the Juneau Empire had run a front-page article about wolves eating dogs within the city limits of Ketchikan, a couple hundred miles to the south. Notwithstanding that friendly seeming overture with Dakotah, I wondered if I could be in for a live replay. Wolves were wolves, and I had no illusions about what they did for a living. Maybe that’s why he was here—he’d developed a taste for fresh leg of kibble-stuffed spaniel.

  The wolf closed in and the dog charged out to meet it head-on. Nose to nose, they stood, tails out, backs stiff. Though the husky mix was solidly built, the difference in size was startling. The wolf could have grabbed his sixty-pound cousin crosswise in his jaws like a bratwurst, given a spine-snapping shake, and trotted away with his prey dangling. Both animals tensed.

  And then it started. The wolf bowed, then launched skyward off his haunches with all the weightless grace of a ballet dancer, hung in the air, executed a half pirouette, and floated earthward. Hesitant and clumsy by comparison, the dog joined in. As I watched open-mouthed, they switched to pawing and mouth-fighting like yearlings, interspersed with the wolf’s gravity-defying leaps and spins. There was an artistic exuberance to his movements that went beyond play. Celebration was more like it. Or a dance. The woman leaned on her ski poles and watched, rapt but relax
ed, oddly unconcerned about either her or her dog’s safety.

  In the Arctic, friends of mine talked of single, unaggressive wolves shadowing traveling sled dog teams or hanging around their cabins for periods ranging from a few minutes to a number of days, especially in the early-spring mating season, when young adult wolves commonly disperse from their natal packs to form their own. These wanderers naturally seek their own kind, and dogs will do in a pinch, especially for a young, lonely wolf. My friend Seth Kantner had a female black wolf show up at his Kobuk River cabin several times, apparently trying to make friends with Seth’s big, semiferal sled dog, Worf—though the dog would have none of it; whenever she appeared, he gathered all his bones in a pile, lay on them, and growled. The ancestors of the Inupiat I lived among encouraged occasional interbreeding in their sled dog bloodlines. Probably it was also unavoidable, when a wolf slipped into a group of tethered dogs and found a receptive mate. You can glimpse echoes of wolf in many upper Kobuk and Noatak huskies, especially the few remaining larger, old-style work animals—dogs like Worf.

  In fact, this wolf’s very color was a testament to the intermingling of wild and domestic canids. Cutting-edge research on genetic markers by an international team of biologists, funded by the National Science Foundation in 2007, has positively linked the black, or dark-phase, color in wolves (common in North America, extremely rare in Europe and Asia) to interbreeding with domestic dogs belonging to early Native Americans thousands of years ago, no doubt including not just wolves coming near humans to breed, but a few escaped dogs gone feral, à la Jack London. Wolf-dog hybridization continues to this day, both by human design and natural chance. Thus, this black wolf was a living, breathing expression of the longtime, ongoing genetic feedback between the species.

  All well and good. Mating between viable species, understandable. Hanging around for a while, sure. A little sniffing and socializing, why not? But playing? This dances-with-dogs bit seemed like some Disney subscript. Then, abruptly, the dog lost interest and wandered off to nose something, as if they weren’t quite speaking the same language, and it had tired of thumbing through the phrase dictionary. It trotted back toward the woman, the wolf moved away, and I skied forward. The woman waxed casual and New Age about the whole deal. Oh, she assured me, they’d been meeting the wolf on and off for days now, and from the first, he had “offered himself in play.” Was this the first wolf she’d ever seen? Oh, yes. He was quite an “old soul.”

  Old soul my ass, this stuff just didn’t happen—not in Alaska, not anywhere. I might as well have witnessed a talking rutabaga. But it was no use trying to impress upon her the rarity of her experience, and after all, the philosophy behind her attitude reminded me: what was, simply was, and you might miss the moment wondering how or why. My old Eskimo hunting companion, Clarence Wood, once snapped me out of my tendency toward overanalysis with a narrow-eyed squint and disgusted mutter: “Too much think about bullshit.”

  But I was far less interested in the woman’s interpretation of events than in the wolf, which had by then faded back to the willows on the lakeshore, a half mile away. Just on the ice edge, he lay down, head up, front paws out—a calm, receptive position. The woman with her dog skied on down the lake, and I eased in the general direction of the wolf, closed the distance inside a hundred yards, set up tripod and camera, and started shooting once again. Of course, I knew that trying to get a decent image of a reclining wolf at that distance in murky light was as futile as trying to root a marmot out of a rock pile. But even a second-rate chance at a free-ranging wolf is rare enough that I burned through three rolls of professional film (I hadn’t quite gone digital yet) in twenty minutes. All were destined for the trash bin, but I kept squeezing off shots. Most pros I know would have done the same.

  I skied home, thoughts folded inward. I’d just caught my first glint of light on the mystery. Maybe dogs were the main attraction for this guy, rather than just a sideshow. There hadn’t been as many skiers and pets out as usual due to the cold and the relatively new ice of the lake, and I’d been going early and late to deliberately avoid human traffic. Surely there had been interactions between the wolf and other dogs, maybe fitting the same pattern with Dakotah and the New Age woman’s husky mix. On the other hand, he didn’t go loping up to just anyone. I’d already seen plenty of dogs and people cross the lake with no wolf appearing, or with him just watching from a distance, much of the time without even being seen, or maybe mistaken for a dog (which he was, repeatedly). But for some reason, he’d approached those two women and their dogs a few days before; Sherrie, Dakotah, and me the next day; and this woman and dog at least several times. According to body language, all seemed like social encounters, lacking the least overtone of aggression. If he approached, and how close, would probably depend on recognizing individuals and on circumstances—physical cues, mood, and nuances only he would understand. If nothing else, wolves are masters at decoding intentions. That general thought was another reminder: I needed to slow down even more, lean back, and ease my grip on what I wanted—or at least, thought I did.

  A few days later, the wolf was still out there, and Sherrie and I believed all the more that he’d evaporate the next nanosecond. Christmas vacation was coming on, and we had reservations for a week on a Mexican beach. Canceling out was Sherrie’s idea. There was no sense, she told me, in going anywhere when we had this, right here and now. You’d have to know her, with her frost-sensitive Florida roots and sagging tolerance for rain forest darkness, to understand what she was giving up. I’d already dug out my snorkeling gear and flip-flops. Yet it was an easy call for both of us. Puerto Vallarta would still be there a year from now. The wolf wouldn’t. This was already damn near the wildlife viewing opportunity of a lifetime. Just seeing him a few times more, we told each other, would make staying worthwhile.

  One thread of conversation elbowed out all others those days: the wolf. What was going on with him? Where had he come from, and how had he ended up here? Sighting a single wolf wasn’t at all unusual. In fact, more than half of my wolf encounters over the years, as well as most of the thousands of track sets I’d crossed, had been lone animals—though probably single only for a brief period. By their nature, wolves are social creatures, bonded to a tight-knit family group with whom they hunt, socialize, collectively raise young, and defend pack territory. Despite that cohesion, individual wolves or pairs frequently break off to hunt solo, or patrol the pack’s territory for anywhere between a few hours and a few days. This wolf could easily have wandered down out of the mountains on a solo ramble and was about to rejoin his group.

  Too, he could have been one of those young, solitary dispersers, a wolf on the move, looking for a mate and territory, to start a pack of his own. This wolf certainly seemed adolescent, in both action and body—gangly, a bit goofy if you knew what to look for, and with unworn teeth. He wasn’t a wolf born this past spring (he wouldn’t be on his own yet, or so large at six or seven months). That made him at least a year and a half, and probably no more than a year or, at the most, two years older than that—a spot-on profile for a dispersing wolf, having left home as our own subadult children do.

  Not only young wolves, but also grown adults, established pack members, have been known to break away, for reasons we can only guess at. Some individuals will strike out on their own, traveling huge distances on an apparent whim. Alaskan studies utilizing tracking collars have recorded lone, dispersing animals (the large majority of them young males) routinely covering distances of three hundred to four hundred linear miles. Alaska Department of Fish and Game research biologist Jim Dau says, “The data suggests a high probability that some dispersers may travel five hundred miles or more.” As a recent lower-48 example, consider wolf OR-7, whose solo, GPS-recorded rambles through western Oregon and northern California have made national news and garnered him his own following. The glacier wolf was likely to have come a far shorter distance. On the other hand, he was hardly your usual Alexander Archipelago wolf�
�the relatively diminutive subspecies of Canis lupus that inhabits the Southeast Alaska and British Columbia coast and offshore islands, usually topping out under eighty pounds. This wolf was more than half again as large, a fact that hinted at a different origin—from the Alaskan or the Canadian interior, where the wolves are among the largest in the world, their genetics apparently honed by hunting moose in deep-snow country. He could conceivably have emigrated a thousand-plus miles south, like me, from my old haunts in the upper Kobuk, or maybe just trotted twenty-five miles over the Coast Range and the Juneau Icefield from the Canadian side. As for his coloration, wolves range from black to nearly snow-white, with the most common color being (as the species name suggests) some shade of gray, with liberal sprinklings of tan, black, white, and brown mixed into their thick, multilayered coats. Up to 50 percent of Alexander Archipelago wolves—a notably high percentage, compared to the rest of the state—are the dark phase, ranging down to jet-black (again, an expression of that ancestral dog-wolf marker gene, possibly emphasized through natural selection for shadowy rain forest conditions). So the color of this wolf perhaps hinted at a local origin, while his size suggested a wolf from somewhere else.

  All that musing aside, there was one further theory to explain the wolf’s presence. In March of 2003 another black wolf—a pregnant female—had been hit and killed by a taxicab as it crossed the Glacier Spur Road, less than two miles from our door. That wolf—now in a glass case at the Mendenhall Glacier visitor center, frozen in a stiff, unwolflike pose and a glassy stare—was a possible, even probable family member. The black wolf we saw might well have chosen to stay, searching for a missing mother, sister, or mate.

  No matter his origin, the black wolf had chosen a precarious hangout, on the fringe of Alaska suburbia. At his back were mountains and glacial snowfields stretching across the Coast Range and down into the dry interior of Canada; north and south, on the Alaska side of the border, remote, near-vertical coastal rain forest. He could choose any direction, yet he remained, pressing against the glass of a world filled with strange sights, sounds, and scents: cars and airplanes, boxes full of people, blazing lights and blaring commotion, and an ever-expanding maze of asphalt spilling down to tidewater. He could go almost anywhere and avoid us—for the rest of his life, if he wanted to.