Wolfish, page 34
It wasn’t just the mother wolf I was interested in, but also the human mother who encountered the wolf. Any guardian, suggests geographer Yi-Fu Tuan, knows what a powerful teacher fear can be. Not just as a force exerted in a person’s own life, but as a tool for taming and setting boundaries for those they are tasked to protect. “We forget that fear was and is a common reason for weaving close family ties,” wrote Tuan. A guardian both buffers fear and incites it, turning the volume up and down. In this role of shepherd, she is neither predator nor prey. She is both and neither. The body that stands between.
* * *
There was a mother wolf in Yellowstone whose den, one spring, ended up not far from a coyote den. Coyotes rarely den together, and they rarely bother wolves, who they are usually afraid of. But these ones, perhaps bold with the same cliquish spirit that animates teenagers with their friends, ignored the rules. Though wolf pups are fed primarily by their mother and father, they are also supported by other members of the pack, with older siblings and even other pack adults sometimes traveling to the den to regurgitate meat for a new litter. Now, whenever an older wolf walked toward the den, the local coyotes would surround the wolf like cartoon highway robbers. The wolves would have little choice but to regurgitate the meat, the equivalent of handing over their purses before dashing away. The coyotes fattened; the wolf pups did not.
One day, the mother wolf had had enough. She was O-6, a legendary wolf, one of the best hunters that wolf-watchers in Yellowstone had ever seen, a wolf who had once kept an elk trapped in the water for three days before being able to kill it. Now she left her own den and walked toward the coyotes’ den, flanked by her pack. I imagine them as a row of wildfire burning the distance between, coyotes watching as they kicked their thin red paws into the dirt. Once at the den, the wolf pack hung back; I cannot help projecting the breathless anticipation of the audience before a concert in the park. Ignoring the snarling, toothy attempts at defense by the coyotes, the mother wolf walked forward to the den’s tunneled entrance and began digging.
“One by one, she pulled out each of their pups,” wrote Carl Safina in his recounting of the incident. “One by one, she shook it dead.” In front of the coyotes and in front of her own pack, she ate each coyote pup. It is impossible for me not to imagine the coyote mother—or mothers—who looked on. Did they understand this was the action of a mother killing in defense of her own hungry pups? Or did they see a maniac? Or a wolf being a wolf? According to Rick McIntyre, the wolf researcher and observer who recorded the incident and has watched wolves in the park for decades, this was the only time he ever saw a wolf eat a coyote.
Just as the coyotes broke precedent to bother the wolves, the mother wolf broke precedent to eat her enemies’ young. The coyote pups she ate had likely been fed by meat meant for her own pups. To eat them meant she may regurgitate the meat to her own young, effectively restoring the calories to their intended home. It felt like a war of mothers, their fury and protectiveness so strong it had bent the habits of each of their species.
* * *
In Victorian poet Robert Browning’s “Ivan Ivanovitch,” a mother traveling by sled with her family through a snowy night is pursued by a pack of wolves. Despite her husband’s attempts to charge the horses forward, the wolves gain traction. At the front of the pack is a creature who, in the mother’s distressed recounting, is more like a human than animal predator: “Satan-faced … he laughs and lets gleam his white teeth,” his paws “on me … pry[ing] among the wraps and the rugs!” Though she tries to counsel her young boys, they keep crying. At some point a switch flips. As her frustration mounts, she can think only of all that is faulty about one “puny” and “sulk[ing]” child.
“Foolish boy! Lie still [or] the villain … will snatch you from over my head!” Her words are toothless. She is as unable to calm the squirming son upon her lap as she is to fight the wolves at her feet. By this point, in her retelling, she is offering excuses. “Who can hold fast a boy in frenzy of fear?” Her predicament is not just woman versus wolf, it is terror for her own body versus protectiveness for her young. Unlike that mythological mother from hearsay, this one does not push the car away as it rolls. First one boy is “snatched and snapped,” and then the “cursed crew” tumble out. Though she does not explicitly confess to tossing out her children, the choreography is between the lines. In saving herself, she has betrayed those she is responsible for in the worst possible way.
“Now gallop, reach home and die…” she shouts to her husband. Behind her, the wolves are now occupied, “fighting for a share … too busy to pursue.” As the horse tugs the sledge into the night, the mother’s attention falls to the infant still in her lap. “I’ll lie down upon you, tight—tie you with the strings here—of my heart!” The prose is breathless, capped by exclamation point after exclamation point. This surviving baby, she says, will grow into a hunter. A man who will
… trace and follow and find and catch and crucify
Wolves, wolfkins, all your crew! A thousand deaths shall die
The whimperingest cub that ever squeezed the teat!
“Take that!” we’ll stab you …
The first time I encountered this poem, the horror of the mother’s ride brought acid to my throat. Not because she was so despicable but because I felt, in a choked, whispered way, empathy. I could imagine the scene like I’d seen it on film, but when I imagined her grief-carved face, I saw not malice but fury. Rage that she had to be both defender and aggressor while her husband had sat alone at the front of the sledge, insulated by the simplicity of cracking the whip.
On a reread, I stopped at the lines above. Galled not just by the mother’s behavior to her children but by her pledge of murder to the wolves—not to the pack who terrorized them, but to their own helpless young. Her vengeance was eye-for-eye. In fantasizing the death of wolf pups, she fantasized the hurt of a wolf mother. She had thought losing the ones she was supposed to protect would be less painful than losing her own life. She was wrong.
* * *
When I came across the blog of Candice, that young woman who flew to Alaska to teach and never made it home, I felt an echo. Not only had we both taken jobs in far-off places we had never before seen, we both seemed to juggle our propensities for adventure alongside our fear. We were dispersers, but anxious ones. Thinking of how Candice’s year had ended, I couldn’t help considering Chris McCandless, the nomadic hiker depicted in Jon Krakauer’s Into the Wild, who died of starvation in a rusted school bus in the Alaskan bush. Perhaps I had just always sensed part of the mythos of that state was that it could swallow you.
My mother’s brother, Ladd, had gone there as a young adult and never came back. Like McCandless, his communication with family while in Alaska had been sparse, and like McCandless, he had died alone—Ladd a few years earlier, in his bedroom with a gun on a Saturday night in January. In photos of them, they echo each other’s green-and-black checkered shirts. Though my grandparents organized a well-attended memorial service for Ladd in Montana, his friends arranged a local one in Alaska, too. Who came to say goodbye? Neither my grandparents nor mother ever saw the 2,300-person town of Dillingham, where he worked in construction during the last year and a half of his life. During his final month on earth, the nights outside his window had been nearly nineteen hours long. Weeks after his death, my mother received a bundle of odds and ends from his friends in the mail. Inside were two postcards with her name on them and no dates. “I’m doing very well,” he wrote. His handwriting fell across the body of the cards, with no room for an address or stamp.
“Some people feel like they don’t deserve love. They walk away quietly into empty spaces, trying to close the gaps of the past,” McCandless had written in his journal. He had orphaned himself from his pack, thinking he could survive on self-reliance alone. When humans invoke “lone wolves,” as with terrorists or shooters, we often suggest those wolves are, by virtue of their solitude, exceptionally dangerous. In a wolf’s life, the opposite is true. Dispersing wolves face increased threats from other packs, as well as the pressure of their own hunger. Biologists now believe wolves form such tight-knit social connections because they must eat. In many ways the strength of a wolf comes not from the size of its jaw but the interdependent choreography of its pack. Growing up, a pup learns not just self-reliance but how to coordinate a hunt, interact with outsiders, and take care of siblings. What is lost when we equate strength—or even bravery—with going off solo, and not the messy task of digging in to stay?
Candice did not travel to Alaska to live alone. She went to teach. That summer I led adventure camps for teenage girls, I almost did the same. The camp promised to place me in Washington, or Montana, or Alaska. No one in my immediate family had ever been to Alaska, and though a part of me wanted an excuse to go, a bigger part cowered. I was nineteen that summer, the age Ladd had been when he left. I didn’t want to hear my mother’s voice over the phone when I told her I was going. I didn’t have to. The camp placed me in Montana, a few hundred miles from my grandparents. Lying awake that first night, I listened to the rustle of sleeping bags and the slow whistles of breath coming from the twelve fifth-grade girls my co-leader and I were shepherding. Outside, a branch snapped. I would have ignored the noise as a child, trusting it was someone else’s problem. Now I had made it mine. Only later would I suspect the thing that tugged me toward the woods that summer was perhaps as primal as what had drawn McCandless. I did not want to go outside to practice being alone; I wanted to practice being in a pack. Not a pup, but a protector.
One cold, dry night when the campers were asleep and I was filling out paperwork in my tent, two blinding eyes sped toward us on the gravel campground road. I vaguely remembered something I had read a few years earlier about two women being killed in their tent by the forward grind of a mad pickup driver. Let him try, I thought, suddenly drunk with conviction. I would wiggle out of the synthetic embrace of my sleeping bag and leap, superwoman style, onto the hood of the oncoming truck. I would save the girls, I would wake the neighbors, I would make the small-town papers. It had never felt so obvious.
A second later, though—did it stop? Turn around?—the night was quiet. If I felt flushed and foolish, I also felt relief. The next morning, the girls emerged from their tents, knocking against one another like wolf pups stumbling from a den. Their hair was wild, cheeks stenciled with the press of whatever clothes they were balling up as pillows, hauling out sleeping pads for morning yoga. Watching them through the dewy sun, a half circle of barefoot flamingos in flannel pajama pants, I felt a flood of both affection and nausea.
I was well acquainted with my own worries in the outdoors—grizzlies, lightning, rattlesnakes, rockfall, creeps, getting lost—but I had not anticipated how new responsibility would affect them. It was the cold eye of a magnifying glass in the yellow sun. My worry blazed. I worried I would string a bear bag in a too-dead tree and a branch would fall and smash them; that I would glance at the radio while driving and our van and gear trailer would drift off the highway and roll into a ditch; that I would use the wrong pan in a white-walled cowboy tent and the mouse shit would make everyone sick. I worried too about the aftermath. Their parents would hate me. The camp would fire me. I would have to move off-grid. I would become an alcoholic.
The irony was the job required me to hide it all. I never looked braver, or more fun. Years later, I told a friend those weeks of responsibility had been the scariest of my life. That I had not known my body could hold so much worry. “Of course you worried,” he said, laughing. “That was your job. That’s why things went well.”
* * *
The night after I turned twenty-five, just a few weeks before the 2016 presidential election, ODFW reported that wolves near OR-7’s den had killed an eight-hundred-pound calf, and later, that three wolves were eating it. OR-7 and his mate had seven pups that fall, and the wolf was resisting all efforts to have a new collar put on him, dodging the padded metal foothold traps baited with animal stink. By the end of the year, the pack had been blamed for four livestock attacks, which government biologists called “unusual” and “disturbing.”
When they finally trapped, tranquilized, and collared another member of the Rogue Pack, it was OR-7’s one-and-a-half-year-old daughter. They caught OR-7 too, but only in a nearby trail camera, his body aging, perhaps scraggly, still wearing the necklace of that old defunct collar. Almost immediately, biologists used his daughter’s collar to track the pack’s movement deeper into the Wood River valley, toward ranches where they had killed livestock before. “You feel helpless when you don’t have a means of protecting your animals,” one local rancher had told a journalist. He was referring to the reach of the Endangered Species Act in the western two-thirds of Oregon, which said a rancher couldn’t shoot a wolf without risking a year in jail and a fine of $5,000.
If the wolf issue was a “war,” though, as some proclaimed, who was winning? In the coming year, the body of a wolf would turn up nearby. Though not one of OR-7’s offspring, the latest poached wolf had dispersed from OR-7’s home pack in eastern Oregon. It seems likely they shared blood. This was the third federally protected and collared wolf killed recently in southeastern Oregon, including a young mother who had just had her first pup. When a breeding female dies, her offspring are often uncounted casualties too. Despite $40,000 in rewards put up by conservation groups and the Fish and Wildlife Service, only one of the three wolves’ killers was ever prosecuted.
Meanwhile, by early 2018, Ted Birdseye had lost three calves to the Rogue Pack. Though each had cost him somewhere between $5,000 and $7,000, he’d been compensated by the state for that. “For me, the loss is more about wasted life,” Birdseye told me. He loved his cows, and like a parent, he felt responsible. In September, he lost a dog. The prints of a female descendant of OR-7 were found nearby. By 2019 he had lost more animals to wolves than anyone else in the state. “For those couple of years, it really felt like war,” Birdseye told me. “Every night we’d all be wondering, ‘Are the wolves going to attack tonight?’” If a dog barked in the night, he’d jolt awake, poised to run outside.
Confirmed livestock depredations in Oregon had increased ninety-four percent between 2019 and 2020, and over half of those were attributed to OR-7’s Rogue Pack—in 2020, they killed sixteen times. Through late summer and early fall of that year, ODFW agency staff coordinated a night patrol to keep vigil ninety-nine nights in a row, using infrared cameras to track wolf movements and “haze” them out of livestock pastures, attempting to scare them off with noise boxes, cracker shells, bright lights, and loudspeakers. Sometimes they were successful; other times the wolves killed anyway. Why did OR-7’s pack keep attacking domestic animals? Did he himself play a role? “As wolves grow old or if they are injured, they are unable to hunt traditional wild prey as they have in the past,” ODFW biologist Russ Morgan had told a reporter.
By the time I visited Birdseye’s ranch in 2021, he had a three-mile-long, 7,000-volt electric fence around his pasture, purchased through a combination of crowdfunding from a local environmental nonprofit and federal and state funding. Birdseye acknowledged the project on a wooden sign he had built to face the road, shaded by a miniature shingled roof: Home of OR-7 and the Rogue Wolf Pack. Like many of the ranchers I met, Birdseye defied stereotype. He was a sixth-generation livestock producer, but he had a copy of The New Yorker next to Ranch magazine on his kitchen table, and on a chair in the study, the pelt of a wolf he had once got as a pup from a neighbor and raised as a pet (“Otter, because as a pup she looked like one, all small and sleek”). “I suppose it’s karma,” he’d told me with a chuckle when I reached out to stroke her fur. “First I kept a wolf captive, and now I’m being punished by them.” As we spoke about the depredations on livestock and dogs, his fifth-grade son, who stood stork-like at the edge of our conversation in dusty, knee-torn jeans, seemed to remember every death. I’d forget he was there—he’d be bent over, petting one of the many dogs in the yard—then he’d raise his buzzed head, voice steady and eyes unblinking, to correct his father on a detail.
“You’re right, son,” Birdseye would say, nodding, his shoulder-length gray curls knocking the red bandanna scrunched around his neck, his voice full of solemn, grateful approval. Then he’d look at me, shake his head, crack a smile. “I swear, sometimes kids know best.” Kids, I thought, who had learned how to raise something, then, when it died, to let it go.
* * *
I visited Birdseye during a week I spent driving between southern Oregon and northern California, visiting a few of the ranches OR-7 or his offspring had walked through. At the time, I was reading Gretel Ehrlich’s book The Solace of Open Spaces, about working on a Wyoming sheep farm, and it was reminding me how little so many city dwellers understood about the people who raised their meat, their leather, their wool. “In a rancher’s world, courage has less to do with facing danger than with acting spontaneously—usually on behalf of an animal or another rider,” wrote Ehrlich. She described how, if a cow was born sick, a rancher might take her home and warm her, massaging her legs until daybreak. “Ranchers are midwives, hunters, nurturers, providers, and conservationists all at once.”
Thinking about ranchers as both protectors and producers made me think of an art exhibit I had encountered on a research trip to China. Stoned on jet lag and air pollution, I had staggered into a glass-cased modern art museum in Shanghai and stopped in front of a photograph of a woman in a white nightgown submerged in a milky blue pool. Her lips rose just above the waterline, while a small dolphin swam out in a puff of pink blood from between her legs. This was “I WANNA DELIVER A DOLPHIN,” a “synthetic biology” project by Japanese designer Ai Hasegawa that included the interior cross-section of a woman’s three-dimensional plastic torso. Instead of a fetus inside the curving belly, there was a tiny dolphin, snug as a pea in a shell. “With potential food shortages and a population of nearly seven billion people, would a woman consider incubating and giving birth to an endangered species such as a shark, tuna or dolphin?” writes Hasegawa on her artist website. “This project introduces the argument for giving birth to our food to satisfy our demands for nutrition and childbirth, and discusses some of the technical details of how this might be possible.”
