Because we could not take time to manage our livestock effectively, wolf depredation upon free-ranging sheep and cattle was a significant hardship on ranchers before and during the turn of the century. Rather than trying to change management practices and strike a balance between the land and themselves, ranchers instead eradicated wolves completely, with the governments' aid. The last known wolf pack to den in Montana was in the 1930s. They were gone for sixty years, but now they're coming back. Biologists believe Montana's large deer herds are what's "luring" them back.

Public support is largely in favor of the wolves' return--two thirds of the general population and up to ninety percent of visitors to national parks, want wolves back in the United States. A balance must be struck this time, however, and that balance should be based on a human understanding of wolves: their biology, sociology and history. In the century before--and in all of our centuries before that one--we have rarely taken the time to pay attention to the wolf itself. Myths and misconceptions have surrounded the animal over the ages.

Wolves eat about nine pounds of meat a day. A typical pack of six wolves in Montana will kill a deer or elk about once a week. They like to hunt at night and sleep in the day. Usually, only one pair from each pack mates, once a year--the alpha male (the dominant male in the pack) and the alpha female. They have a long courtship that sometimes begins in the late fall and intensifies in January, and the pair then breeds in late January or early February. Gestation is sixty-three days--the same as for dogs. The pups, usually numbering six, are born in April. The pack spends the summer taking care of the pups. "Aunts" and "uncles" babysit the young wolves whenever the alpha female leaves the den. By the fall, the pups have grown so much that they're indistinguishable from the adults. They're ready to learn to hunt.

Wolves are loyal to both their pack and their mate; sometimes they mate for life. Stanley Young, a biologist in the Southwest, tells of trapping a male Mexican wolf. The wolf's mate return to the capture spot for sixteen nights in a row, until she too, was caught. John Murray, a writer in Alaska, tells the story of a pregnant alpha female in Denali National Park who strayed too far from her den. She had to stop on her way back and give birth out on the tundra, in a small depression out of the wind. It was twenty-four hours before she could move the pups, so the rest of the pack brought her snowshoe hares and stood guard to protect her and the newborn pups from any prowling grizzlies.

Wolves are full of passion and mystery. Mythology tells us that pricking oneself with a sharpened wolf's breatbone can stave off death. Native Americans say that wolves' howls are the cries of lost spirits trying to make it back to earth.

The fact that some humans will always be mystified, even terrified by wolves...the nearly unshakable depth of that knee-jerk reaction, the old culture--was made painfully clear to me one January, at a bar in Fairbanks, Alaska.

The winter-sadness that sometimes goes with that landscape in that season, was starting to set in, and at our table there were some hunters and nonhunters, some animal rights people, and some just plain environmentalists.

There was that long late-night, winter-depressed aura hovering, which, coupled with the general rage environmentalists sometimes find themselves rousing to whenever they're together and talking--their life's battle becoming a common ground for discussion--stories of atrocity being traded. Laments. Breast-beating. None of it was making anyone feel better, but it all had to said.

A friend who races sled dogs was sinking into the winter, trying to claw her way back up out of the winter's pull with her rage alone. She was talking about this guy she heard bragging in this same bar--some dentist from Anchorage, talking to his friend from Seattle about the "sport" of aerial hunting--chasing wolves across the tundra and plane--or sometimes running the wolves to near exhaustion and then getting out and throwing on the showshoes and hobbling the last hundred yards to where the wolves are backed up against a small bluff, panting, and shooting them in that manner, shooting all of them.

But this dentist and his friend from Seattle were talking about a flight where they'd never landed the plane. According to their brags, my friend said, they'd just cruised along behind the wolves, with full flaps down and the throttle cut way back, aiming into a heavy wind, riding right on the pack's back---just a few feet above it, following it, and gaining on it, sinking lower and lower, as the shooter leaned and labored out the window to get his gun into position.

The friend says the dentist was speaking with dumb awe, as he bragged: that that was the hopelessness, the utter life's despair hopelessness of it, that the dentist had been right there, so close, and yet had not been able to grip life's simple mystery, that what he was doing was wrong, that he was breaking up a social bond, that he was signing wolves' death warrant, the death warrant of our respect for our place on the earth, and for respect in all forms and fashions.

But the dentist was so close to understanding, my friend said. He had almost seen it, she said: just by the way he was talking, the awe in his voice, and his eyes--he had almost seen it.

"I was right there," the dentist was saying, speaking as if in a trance. "I tell you, Joe, it was like nothing I've ever seen or done--Joe, for a few seconds there, we were right with them, following right behind them--and the big leader looked back, and for a minute, Joe, following along behind them like that, it was like we were one of the pack."

Source:
The Ninemile Wolves.
"The Way Wolves Are," © 1992 Rick Bass,