Wolfish, page 23
When I read these statistics I felt a blooming pride for the students who visited the Trust and, according to Mike, changed their minds about whether the wolves were out to eat them. The children had unlearned their fear. But one day, watching a wolf toss a stick with a noise that sounded almost like a whinny, I realized that English visitors to the Trust could decide wolves were not scary without ever having to really consider encountering one in their yard. A visitor’s monthly donations to “adopt” an ambassador wolf could fund foreign rewilding efforts while the visitor remained, even unconsciously, in a hypothetical Not-In-My-Backyard nest. The wolves could come back, but they would come back on someone else’s turf. They could become someone else’s worry.
* * *
“A wolf may be more than he seems. He may come in many disguises,” Angela Lansbury’s character says to her adolescent granddaughter in the 1984 cult film The Company of Wolves, co-written by Angela Carter and based on her story of the same name. Framed within the dreams of a contemporary preteen who falls asleep in her family’s gothic English country home, the film corkscrews into a fairy-tale dreamscape of stone huts and peasant skirts, snakes twisting in the trees like some medieval Eden. The girl’s nightmare begins when her older sister, wide-eyed in a gauzy white dress, wanders off the path and meets a pack of wolves. When the animals emerge from the shadows, their Maraschino cherry eyes are the only thing visible, like headlights on a road where you have thought yourself alone. The girl is dead within seconds.
“Why couldn’t she save herself?” the younger sister asks her grandmother after the funeral. “You don’t know anything,” Lansbury says. “You’re only a child.” She explains that there are two kinds of wolves: those with “hair on the outside,” and, even worse, those with “hair on the inside,” who want to lure women into the forest. This grandmother doles out warning stories the way mine does wool socks, each story unspooling a cinematic vignette within the larger dream. Men are often deceiving women. People are often turning into wolves. There’s the man whose human face rolls off like strips of Twizzlers to reveal the snarling carnivore within, and the man whose wedding banquet is interrupted by a woman he once wronged, now a witch who turns the whole party into wolves, their furry bodies splitting through silk suits.
Most of the canines in the film are malamutes with fur dyed the purpled black of a bad wig. Some of the close-up shots, though, feature real wolves, some of the first to have lived with Roger and Tsa, the would-be stars of films such as An American Werewolf in London and Dracula. Tsa told me she accompanied them while Roger was in London or traveling for work. While filming scenes between the wolves and the young red-caped actress, the crew of In the Company of Wolves had a man with a shotgun, a man with a net, and a vet with a tranquilizer at the edge of the set, poised in case the wolves turned on the heroine. Instead of attacking, the animals spent their time afraid of a nearby duck. “They’re terribly shy,” director Neil Jordan said in an interview with an Australian broadcaster. “When you want them to look vicious, they don’t look vicious, and when you want them to look calm they bite your arm off.” Except they didn’t. No arms were harmed. The wolves were distractible, squirmy. I could imagine they wanted to run from the villainous roles they had been cast in and would thus perpetuate, but that would be projecting. The wolves just wanted to run.
* * *
One day Mike brought in a deer scavenged from the side of the road. He cleaved it apart and tossed a quarter of the rib cage over the fence. Listening to the bones split like fireworks, it was easy to forget I was watching eaters who had been born in captivity. The wolves ate the way I tried and failed to dance: without self-consciousness, ruled by instinct alone. Was watching wolves in an enclosure like watching humans in an airport, poised between anticipation and relaxation but essentially inert? Unless something flew over the walls of the enclosures, they did not stalk or hunt prey. They did not disperse, or roam for mates, or colonize uninhabited territory because their pack size was increasing, or travel an average of twelve miles per day. I speculated what this did to the wolfishness of them, just as I speculated what eating three meals a day of pre-frozen plastic supermarket bundles or sleek bottles of Soylent did to the humanness in us. All the while I rebuked my own romanticism. Surely food tasted no better for a wolf if she had procured it herself. Wolves were scavengers; they ate meat others had killed all the time. Meat was meat, bone was bone. And yet, might the wolf taste the chase inside the deer?
According to Joe, a self-identified “nice Somerset boy” who was getting a PhD in behavioral biology and who overlapped with me for a few days at the Trust, captivity had likely shifted the innate behavior of the Trust’s wolves. Joe’s movement-sensing wildlife cameras showed these wolves rarely used the area in front of the fence when we were not around, coming to drink from the trough but not to stretch their bodies as they did when under our gaze. He thought the daylight feeding schedules were probably altering their circadian rhythms, in turn influencing their hormones. I had come to observe wolves, but I was seeing them through the fun-house mirror of their own captivity.
Joe told me he thought the Trust was doing a good job, and was an invaluable resource for research and observation, for the public, and for these animals, who had become accustomed to humans in their first months of life and would thus never be able to live in the wild anyway. Still, it felt complicated. I read a story in a back issue of the Trust’s quarterly, Wolf Print, about a wolf who had crashed into one of the fence posts while playing with his sisters and damaged the top two vertebrae of his spine (“the same two as the late Christopher Reeve,” wrote the wolf handler who covered the incident). Instead of killing the wolf, the Trust had rehabilitated him with the aid of a hydrotherapy center designed for horses. The designated volunteer sat in the pool “with a huge wolf who when tired wrapped himself round [her] and held on for support,” in her words. The Trust, in this case, was both the indirect cause of the injury and the direct cause of its recovery. The volunteer called it one of the most surreal moments of her life.
When I interviewed Pat, one of the Trust’s longest-standing volunteers, a septuagenarian with ivory hair spraying like uncorked Prosecco from his well-tanned skull, he told me the special thing about the Trust was it was one of the few places you could interact with a wolf where neither of you would have to feel much fear for the other. It was easy to forget about the fire extinguishers painted green to camouflage along the enclosure fences, which we intern/researchers were instructed to employ with loud noises if “something turned” while a staff member or volunteer was in a wolf pen. “Never say never,” Pat told us during orientation. Still, at the Trust, it was easy to think, Well, probably not. Perhaps the biggest thing Western folktales had distorted, Pat told me, was the fact that wolves were afraid of humans too. A young wolf will think everything is life-threatening until she is proved wrong. I thought of Angela Carter’s crossed-out line: “Wolves are cowards at heart.”
Fear is as primal as hunger. We are all born scared. The wolves at the Trust had grown up to believe they did not need to fear us, just as humans who reared wolf pups often believed they did not need to fear them. So often this instinct was wrong. I had heard about several Trust volunteers bitten by wolves over the years. And I had read about the wild wolves who, after previous exposure to humans, now approached the very hunters who shot them.
How much fear should you stoke to stay alive? How much trust can you afford before it kills you? My nerves were their own form of captivity, the summer days ghoulishly contorted through my own speculative anxiety. I didn’t like to watch myself recoil or change my pace on the dark roads, but at the same time it felt naive to just walk and whistle. How could I pretend the earth could never quake, the stranger could never follow me home, the wolf would never bite?
* * *
After returning to Alice’s in the evenings, I often jogged on a towpath along the Kennet and Avon canal. Constructed in the eighteenth century to expedite safe travel between Bristol and London, the wooded waterway had once been an artery of trade, but it now existed mostly as part of the UK’s vast “heritage tourism” network, carnival-colored residential houseboats tethered to the shore. The whole place felt like something out of Watership Down or The Wind in the Willows, a stage set for talking rodents drinking afternoon tea. One evening I decided to jog toward the Trust along the canal, then take the bus back along the highway. Twenty minutes in, giddy on endorphins and the purpling sky, I paused to take a photo on a bridge. I hadn’t seen a boat or a human in a while, and the canal was quiet except for the shuffling of poplar leaves and sprays of high-pitched birdcall. Raising a bare leg to the banister, I leaned in for a quick stretch.
The whistle hit me like a spitball. It is unmistakably human, this thing we call the wolf whistle. As I swiveled, trying to spot who had capsized my peace, my nerves tipped into rage. I wanted to run from the whistler and toward someone else, but I was in the middle of the bridge, and which way was that? I had no idea. Over a mile of woods sat on either side of me. The whistle came again, now followed by a low laugh. Someone was watching me panic. Just a dumb human finding entertainment, I told myself even as I started sprinting, turning in time to see two empty blue folding chairs partially tucked under the bridge. Probably just bored teenagers, I thought, and I told myself this for the rest of the run, heart yanking limbs through the darkening trees, as if it was any consolation, as if a teenager was too young to harm anyone at all.
* * *
David Burgess had been the kind of kid who would pull the wings off insects while their bodies still moved. He had grown into a dump-truck driver with brows like slugs and a glass eye from an air-pistol accident. “The man with the staring eyes,” the press would call him. He was nineteen years old, working a shift at a Beenham dump pit, when Jacqueline and Jeanette went for their bike ride. Had he just watched them pass and decided on a whim? He was gone from work for twenty minutes. In that time, he sexually assaulted and drowned Jacqueline and stabbed Jeanette before casting their bodies into a gravel pit at the Beenham Quarry. Soon after, his brother found him reading calmly in the staff hut.
When searches began for the girls’ bodies, Burgess joined in. He spoke with television reporters about the tragedy. He gave his condolences to Jacqueline’s father, the owner of the local garage. Months later, in July, a jury sentenced him to life in prison. “The ‘Average’ Boy Convicted of Savage,” read one local headline.
Once behind bars, Burgess confessed to a guard that he had killed Yolande the previous fall as well. When the officer asked why, his answer, allegedly, was “Because I felt like it.” He would go on to confess and deny her murder multiple times, as if even he could not decide what version of reality he wanted to endorse.
* * *
The English countryside was supposed to be peaceful. That was the story I told myself, that I confronted as early as my first sunset at Alice’s, when my jog to a nearby pasture ended after a herd of thundering cows chased me under a barbed-wire fence and into a ditch of blackberries and stinging nettles. As a kid I loved England like a lazy groupie. I knew very little and felt very much, referring interchangeably to “England” and “Britain.” In sixth grade I bought a Union Jack–printed sweater and pinned its miniature flag above my bed. It didn’t matter I had never been, at that point—I had read I Capture the Castle, the first novel of 101 Dalmatians author Dodie Smith, falling in love with the life of its young protagonist, Cassandra, who lived in a decrepit Suffolk castle with her eccentric family in the 1930s. Published in 1948, Smith wrote the book while living abroad in California with her husband during World War II. Longing for her native landscape crawls like a vine through its pages. “What is it about the English countryside—why is the beauty so much more than visual? Why does it touch one so?” muses Cassandra’s father one day. We don’t get a clear answer, but later a character notes, “So many of the loveliest things in England are melancholy.”
I wistfully agreed, though my preteen self wasn’t sure why. I had always felt a kindred spirit between the gray drizzle of Oregon and England, but while the Pacific Northwest was shaggy and slightly monstrous—banana slugs the size of bratwursts, fifteen-story Douglas firs that dripped with acid-yellow lichen—the hilly patchwork of England allured me through its illusion of safety and order, its rolling pastures cut by low stone walls. Human touch was irrefutable in that cultivated landscape, but it was so obvious as to be almost beside the point. Any curiosity I felt about the state of England’s former wild was overshadowed by the fantasy of imagining myself as another, more mythical creature of the country’s heritage—an Austenian heroine running to meet a forbidden suitor through poppy-blown fields. Unlike Montana, where I spent so many of my childhood summers, I had no expectations for gawking at lightning or bison. In England I did not want the sublime; I wanted waves of sheep and bluebell-scented lanes. I wanted the gauzy golden days depicted in the first half of the Keira Knightley film Atonement—an effect, I later learned, achieved only by pulling a Dior silk stocking over the camera lens.
* * *
When scientists talk about the importance of predators in a landscape, they often mention the ecology of fear. It’s a concept that refers to findings that carnivores may be more environmentally critical for their nonlethal effects on prey than for their direct culling. Wildlife ecologist Joel Brown coined the phrase in a paper in 1999, four years after wolves were first reintroduced to Yellowstone National Park, and, incidentally, four years after Roger founded the Trust. It wasn’t until I read scientist Cristina Eisenberg’s account of watching a wolf pack move at a “slow lope, tails high” through a herd of watchful elk that the concept clicked. Because those Yellowstone wolves were not then hunting, the species could warily coexist. But in the moments after the wolves disappeared, the elk regrouped in a tighter huddle, heads raised and watchful as they resumed their meal. “Where wolves go around, the forest grows,” writes Eisenberg, summing a Romanian proverb. When they sense they have a reason to be afraid, deer and elk often change behavioral patterns. They may gather in clearer areas free of impediments for their escape, spending more time watching and moving and less time eating. Where fear shapes the herds, the herds can shape the landscape. Some willow trees in Yellowstone are stumpier in open areas compared to where terrain has visual obstacles. Songbird populations were shown to rise with the growth of new trees. Wolves don’t take full credit, but their return to Yellowstone probably helped. Scientists might disagree as to whether wolves deserve the label “keystone species,” but it seems clear their presence or absence combines with other factors to reverberate through, and shape, the landscape. This feedback loop is called a “landscape of fear,” which science writer Ed Yong defines as “psychological topography that exists in the minds of prey, complete with mountains of danger and valleys of safety.” One study found that after the wolf reintroduction to Yellowstone, elk herds nibbled shrubs less, leaving more berries for grizzly bears to bulk up on pre-hibernation. In certain places, and at certain points of year, these berries represented over half a grizzly’s diet. It looked like an increase in wolves could lead to an increase in bears.
Can you apply what has happened in the managed ecosystem of Yellowstone to the larger North American, or even global, landscape? Multiple biologists I spoke with were wary of how conservationists and the media oversimplified the “landscape of fear” narrative, referring to the wolves-singlehandedly-restoring-Yellowstone story as a form of “reciprocal myth making,” as virulent as the idea that predators are a violent scourge, field biologist Arthur Middleton wrote in a New York Times op-ed. Elk populations dwindled because of other reasons too, he wrote, citing severe drought, record-breaking warm temperatures, beetle infestations killing trees en masse, and the effects of natural gas drilling on migration patterns. Sure, trophic cascades existed, and in some places they were easy to trace, but to trumpet the wolves as a panacea to the land was to overlook problems that still needed to be solved. Environmental groups might spend more time helping local landowners live beside wolves, and less time talking about how the songbirds were being saved, he suggested.
When I spoke with Arthur, he told me he was particularly frustrated by how the story about wolves as big bad actors in the landscape neglected to acknowledge how powerful prey could be too. “Give the prey more credit,” he told me over the phone. “They can kick your face off or poke an antler in your guts.” He had walked into a snowy field once to find a big male wolf he’d been tracking dead in a splatter-paint of blood, with two clean holes through its body, one in the groin and one in the shoulder. It took him a minute to understand the “predator” had been skewered by the “prey,” the elk spinning its attacker around and around on its antlers. “The prey is pretty badass,” Middleton said.
