Wolfish, page 2
Like others in the canon, this book unspools the relationship between a writer and a wolf. However, unlike some of those authors, I have never weaned a wolf pup in my backyard, nor have I ever immersed myself beside a pack. The wolf whose story I center in these pages has never seen me, has never known of my existence. In Cathy Park Hong’s essay collection Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning, she quotes filmmaker Trinh T. Minh-ha’s suggestion to “speak nearby” other cultures, not “about” them: “When you decide to speak nearby, rather than speak about, the first thing you need to do is acknowledge the possible gap between you and those who populate your [art].” The gaps in this book lie not only between me and the humans I speak with, but the wolves too.
Lakota hunters once stepped under wolfskins to hunt bison on the American Plains, but as historian Karen Jones points out, a writer can never step inside the wolf that seamlessly. I am not an academic nor a scientist, I am just one animal trying to see another. I may have approached the wolves first as an amateur, but the Latin root of “amateur” means lover. I, a person who loved animals but would never have self-identified as an “animal lover,” could not at first explain why I began tracking the path of one of contemporary America’s most famous wolves, and then not just him, but others too, right through the roadside body of OR-106. I became omnivorous for anything “wolf,” aware that whenever I heard the word—so often pronounced woof by even the sternest-faced adults—a hundred other symbolic wolves raced through my head, jostling for attention. I realized the problems of animalizing humans and villainizing animals are not discrete; the violence of one depends on and reinforces the violence of the other; so much of Western civilization was built on both. The New York Daily News’ 1989 headline that referred to the wrongfully convicted Central Park Five as a “wolf pack,” for example, relied on readers visualizing a vicious pack of bloodthirsty beasts, not a group of creatures cooperatively caring for their young. Inversely, the early-modern Swedish organization Jägeristaten’s choice to frame the civic fight against the wolf as a broader battle against foreign intruders depended on a baseline of xenophobia. This book believes we cannot untether the biological wolf from the stories told about it without also examining those associative, metaphorical stories—picking them up, holding them to the light, examining their seams. I am as compelled by the wolf as I am by the themes I grew up seeing the animal entangled with.
The late, renowned naturalist E. O. Wilson called this interdisciplinary approach consilience, the “‘jumping together’ of knowledge by the linking of facts and fact-based theory across disciplines to create a common groundwork of explanation.” This book circles the wolf as I “jump” between lenses of history, ecology, biology, anthropology, fairy tale, myth, and journalism, motored by the conviction that the associative leaps of the brain—between self and other, past and present, symbolic and real wolf—are not a distraction from understanding Canis lupus, but the tunnel we must pass through. “Symbols are problems when they reduce what shouldn’t be reduced, placing a significance not in what something is, but in what it brings up beyond itself,” writes Native essayist Elissa Washuta in White Magic. To understand the “wolf,” I look to what it brings up beyond itself. I cannot see the animal without seeing the dynamics of gender, race, colonialism, violence, environmental degradation, and capitalism that ensnare my conceptions of it.
If the wolf has often been a vessel for human fear, and more recently, a vessel for human grief about the environmental harm perpetuated by the globalized affluent West, this is a book that empties those vessels out. As Alfred Hitchcock told a biographer in 1970: “What frightens us today is exactly the same sort of thing that frightened us yesterday. It’s just a different wolf.” This from the man who knew just how much an audience would pay to watch a woman scream. Very often we speak of growing out of fears, as if the most important thing we can learn from them is how to slough them off, but stories about wolves are often stories about how we grow into fears and at what cost we bear them, both for the world and ourselves.
When I began writing this book, a storm of anxious fear had flooded my life. I couldn’t pinpoint when or how it arrived, and I wasn’t sure how to escape it. I kept writing because I was searching for the answers to those questions; I didn’t realize then that research and writing would become its own answer. In pausing to reflect on my relationship with fear, and the ways the emotion can be inflected by shame, guilt, astonishment, excitement, loneliness, camaraderie, and so on, I’ve demystified and defanged its burden. This is a book not only about peeling back the layers of what scares me—what so many childhood stories said were “wolf”—but also about learning to evaluate and shed them. We bear our fear as individuals, but those fears are born from the world. If I once wanted to rewire my worried brain, I now know the first step is to trace those wires outward, through time and space and story.
The feeling of fear—like that of love—is innate and physiological, but also scripted, however unconsciously, by the culture we inhabit. In looking to bail myself out of my own fear, I went back to the beginning of those stories I had been told. Back to the big bad wolf. In Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents, journalist Isabel Wilkerson uses the metaphor of buying an old, crack- and leak-riddled house to describe America’s inheritance of its racist past. The structural damage was not the homeowner’s fault, perhaps, but sooner or later they must confront it. I could not engage contemporary debates about how to live beside the wolf without understanding the legacies of the symbolic wolf we tote—however unwittingly—through our hearts and minds.
One of the reasons I became interested in wolves was that I sensed “we” were too afraid of them, and I was interested in the (ir)rationality of fear. As poet and essayist Claudia Rankine points out, though, “Who is this ‘we’? Is it even possible to form a ‘we’?” To deny any predatorial potential from the wolf, as Mowat did, is to risk silencing the experiences and expertise of those living in what Linnell et al. define as “vulnerable, human communities.” Contemporary predatory wolf attacks are much more common, for example, in parts of Iran and India; we can expect human fear there might be differently calibrated. In studying how women think spatially about crime risk, social geographer Rachel Pain found that those who most fear crime are often already suffering in isolation—women least integrated into their neighborhoods, already marginalized by poverty or disability, generally aware of their powerlessness in the face of an attack, not to mention society writ large. “‘Fear’ involves such a complex set of emotions and cognitions that to label it with polarities such as ‘rational’ or ‘irrational’ has little meaning,” she wrote. Her scholarship is a reminder that fear will not be monochrome within the body, but also not the body politic. Conversations around the wolf are often framed as either “pro” or “against,” with media commentary spotlighting the polarization between the sides. This binary fails to capture the nuance necessary for sustainable relationships with the animal, which should acknowledge the biological “truths” of the species but also the effect local histories, cultures, and environmental factors have on how both wolves and humans behave. If fear occurs on a spectrum of rationality, the threat a wolf poses to a person—just like the threat a person poses to a wolf—is not a static thing. Wolves that live in colder climates, like Alaska and Russia, for example, are statistically larger than those in the continental United States; they may represent slightly more threat to humans. Just as there is no “one” human, there is no “one” wolf.
My wolf is not your wolf. My experiences as a cis white millennial woman with family in both city and country in the North American west have influenced the way I approach this animal and its symbolic representations, just as they have influenced my relationship with fear. Because the bulk of my encounters with predatory human behavior have occurred within heterosexual interactions, I feel most qualified to examine how popular language around the “wolf” informs and exposes those power dynamics, and vice versa. The book’s skew toward wrestling with dominant Western, white narratives around the wolf similarly reflects the limits of my own background—these are the stories I grew up with—as well as the reality that these stories have tended to carry the most visible, material sway (though, as philosopher Amia Srinivasan critically points out, those “outside of the anglophone mainstream have never been invisible, or ‘marginal,’ to themselves or their communities”). I thread my own life into this book not because I expect my experiences will speak for yours, but because others’ stories can be doorways. We step through not just to understand the storyteller, but ourselves. Consider this a chance for our minds to “jum[p] together.”
Wolfish: Wolf, Self, and the Stories We Tell About Fear is the story of the hunter and the hunted. It is the story of the girl in the forest and the creature in the cage, about who gets to be predator and who gets to be prey. It is about my obsession with an animal, and about how it impacted my reckoning with the things that scare me, both personal and cultural, as I learned to live beside them. It is about growing up in increasingly unlivable habitats, and about the lies and lessons we tell about our fears, which is to say, about one another. “After decades of advocacy for wolf conservation using all possible means to sell the goal of wolf recovery, it is now necessary to start advocating for compromise between wolf and human interests,” wrote Mech and Boitani. As humanity sprawls even farther from city centers, it is likely the wolves who prevail will be bold, exploratory, and adept at living in our shadow. Sightings of wolves will likely increase, as will wolves experimenting with anthropogenic food sources. This does not necessarily mean predatory conflict will rise, but it does mean our knowledge about wolves and how to live with them should increase. The wolf does not live apart from us, in some “pure” wild space, but, increasingly, beside us. To look at what it means to share habitat with the wolf is to consider how we share it with all fellow beings, human and animal and other.
Research suggests wolves howl as a mode of connection. A wolf will howl after feeding, but also, sometimes, out of loneliness. This book is both the howl you make when you think you are alone and the howl that answers to remind you that you are not. Let this book be an invitation. See the tracks in the snow, the size of your palm. Notice how they make your heart feel. Walk with me.
1
Adventure v. Wolf
It was winter when she crossed. Maybe she found a bridge of ice, maybe she snuck across Brownlee Dam, or maybe there was only current. Maybe she just swam. At the depths of Hells Canyon, the river that separates Idaho and Oregon is milky and knotted with rapids. At one end, over the reservoirs just south of the dam, the water is nearly a mile wide. The wolf would have chosen her path carefully. She did not flirt with risk, not like a coyote; she knew what she could do. A wolf can swim up to eight miles at a time, paddling like a dog after a stick, the skin between her toes enough webbing to help push her through a current. The Snake is the largest tributary to the Columbia River, its waters an echo of the agriculture it has slipped through heading west from Wyoming. The wolf could not know it, but all through the river there were traces of cow. Fertilizer, sediment, manure. Water that had once been blue was now often sea-glass green with algae.
It was 1999, and the wolf was in the belly of Hells Canyon, the deepest gorge in North America, 2,000 feet deeper in some places than the Grand Canyon. From the sprawling plateaus and high pastures above, the canyon feels unfathomable, as if the northeastern border of Oregon has just unzipped rocky, sagebrush-strewn cliffs to reveal a world over a mile deep beneath mud-slick layers of limestone and lava, 300-million-year-old products of underwater volcanoes. This is the homeland of the Nez Perce, the Nimiipuu, who know the canyon as a place of shelter carved by Coyote. Their stories tell how Creator made wry Coyote the teacher of human beings, but the wolf, hi miin, belonged here too. This was her land. When white men appeared—those who would later hunt the region’s wolves to extinction—they had taken this same route, and the Nez Perce named them for it. Sooyáapoo, they called the invaders. Across-the-water people.
As the wolf shook the river from her back, droplets constellated in the frozen air. She was a yearling, nearly full grown, the runt of her litter. Almost waist high on a grown man, her weight around sixty-five pounds, her coat the gradient of stone, the color, perhaps, of that day’s January sky. Her winter underfur was so thick the cold did not even reach her bones. She was a descendant of the Canadian wolves reintroduced to Idaho just a couple of years earlier as part of an effort to restore the American gray wolf populations that had been slaughtered to extinction in the early twentieth century. Around her neck, the radio collar given by the Idaho Department of Fish and Wildlife (IDFW) was a dull and nearly forgotten weight. B-45. That’s what they were calling her. The forty-fifth wolf to be collared in Idaho, one node of a federal wolf recovery program that the Nez Perce tribe was working with the IDFW to implement.
With each step, her saucer-sized paws splintered the lattice of icy crystals that frosted the earth. Turning tail to the river, she climbed into the snow and the vanilla-scented air of hundred-year-old Ponderosa pines. If a bald eagle cut the sky above her, she heard it. If a rabbit threw itself into a snowy burrow, she smelled it. A wolf can average eight to ten hours a day of travel, often moving in the seams between night and day. Ten miles, twenty, thirty, forty, more. She had left her family in east-central Idaho to look for the three things any young wolf needed to survive—a mate, a meal, and defensible territory—and she did not know that in climbing onto this far shore of the Snake, she had crossed a border. Not just a state line, but a line of history. Because she had been fitted a year earlier with a radio collar, her movements were legible to humans, and she was now superlative: the first known member of her species to step into Oregon in over fifty years. As in much of continental America, wolves had not lived here since the state’s last wolf bounty was paid to a trapper in the 1940s. When B-45 arrived, she came as both the dawn of the future and a relic from the past. “[B-45] seems to me a title ill-suited for a majestic animal, and more appropriate for a chemical used to color breakfast cereal,” wrote one skeptical editor of an eastern Oregon newspaper. When the Nez Perce tribe and an environmental conservation group held a contest to name her, “Freedom” won. A local conservationist began to call her “Eve.”
Though gray wolves were protected by the Endangered Species Act in 1974, law is a conceptual shield. It can mean very little in the quiet of America’s trees, where the “3S treatment”—“Shoot, shovel, and shut up”—can reign. But B-45 was lucky. Even as she made headlines, she traveled on, leaving her scent against trees, telephone poles, and fence posts. She walked a hundred miles from the state line, up and over the snow-clotted forests of the Blue Mountains, back and forth across Interstate 84, somehow, then toward the headwaters of the John Day River. “She appears to be doing normal wolf stuff,” U.S. Fish and Wildlife Rocky Mountain wolf specialist Ed Bangs told the Oregonian.
It should have been no surprise wolves would reenter the state the way B-45 did, just as guests will enter a house party if a door is ajar. Nearly a century earlier, after elk were driven almost to extinction by white settlers, their repopulation had caused a similar spectacle. “His place is in parks and museums, preserving the memory of Oregon undeveloped,” wrote one northeastern Oregon sheep rancher in 1912. “Civilization and savagery cannot occupy common ground. The one must give way to the other.” It had taken time—wariness from sheep farmers who worried about competition for their herds—but eventually, the elk had been reaccepted: a cherished Oregon citizen. Now the wolf was the trespasser. Specifically, B-45.
Looking back, Oregon biologist Mark Henjum saw her arrival as a turning point, not just for wolves but for how people talked about them. “[B-45] really tipped the scales to where wolves became a real issue,” he told a reporter. Local officials struggled to know how to react. Could an animal be invasive if it had once called a landscape home? “She presents a somewhat odd situation for us because Oregon is not part of the wolf recovery effort,” another ODFW biologist told a local newspaper. Officially, the state wasn’t anti-wolf, but they weren’t pro-wolf either. They urged caution: this wolf could get in the cyanide traps ranchers used for coyotes, or could mate with a dog, spawning a potentially dangerous dog-wolf hybrid. There was no management plan, but to do nothing, said livestock producers, was to let a predator walk free—toward their cattle, toward their lambs.
* * *
When B-45 stepped through the mountains, I was an elementary-schooler across the state in Portland, all braids and freckles and red Converse high-tops. I did not know a wolf had come back into Oregon because it had never occurred to me they had ever disappeared, that we had ever killed them off. In her New York Times Magazine article about mass insect extinctions, journalist Brooke Jarvis quotes a Danish bug-counting survey that describes the disorienting, indescribable sense that “something from the past is missing from the present.” I wish I could say I felt the loss of predators from the forest, but born into the loss, I accepted it as the norm. We do not grieve the things we have never learned to love. Scientists call this inability to register change “baseline theory.” Because I did not understand the ecosystems I hiked through with my family had been curated by a government-funded extermination campaign of native predators, I assumed wolves were out there in some distant shaggy forest, waiting with owls and bears beneath a peachy moon. The animals’ presence seemed both distant and guaranteed. Like a soulmate, I assumed one day our paths would cross.
Fifteen years later, when I began researching the wolf, I felt motivated by a handful of factors, but none was instinctual awe about the animal. Mostly I had become jumpy, and because I did not trust my fear, I was ashamed of it. It struck me as supremely unfair that in so many stories and sayings, the wolf had been made shorthand for the threat.
