Wolves are curious, rarely afraid, and quick to take off. In summer they live in family units, raising pups and are not a threat. Food is plentiful. In winter, hungry, and traveling in a pack, it might be different. Where I travel the wolves are mainly white, although I’ve seen grey, and a few black ones. I woke up with the smokey, half-awake feeling of being watched. And I was. She was looking in the tent. I rolled over in my sleeping bag, got my phone, and took her portrait. She kept watching. I sensed no aggression, or nervousness. I snapped one more picture and stayed in bed.
Barry Lopez in his book Of Wolves and Men is a good start for understanding our fellow traveler. Like ourselves, it’s easy to be mis-understood. Once an unfavorable narrative is in place, it’s hard to shift. Traditionally, the wolf was feared, associated with the devil, and evil. Child killer. An aspect of wild nature, dangerous, wolves were considered better off dead. Rather, we were better off when the wolf was dead. My first encounter occurred in a dream. I was very young. Where would I have seen the image of a wolf? In my dream, I’m running down a grassy slope ahead of a snarling pack of white fanged wolves. A rope appears from the sky. I grab hold and swing up. At the top of the swing, I let go and find I can fly. I’m saved. Later, I read White Fang by Jack London, and in Ernest Thomas Seaton’s Wild Animals I Have Known, the book’s saddest story is about Lobo, a legendary wolf, and his mate, Blanca. In modern times reading Doug Smith about the wolves in Yellowstone covers many facets, including ecology, context, history, and habits. No one knows wolves better.
Underlying people’s hatred of wolves is their real fear: wilderness, the unknown, the sheer unknowability of a wilderness, unkempt, vast, and un-civilized. There was a time when wilderness overshadowed everything. Today, there’s little left of either wilderness or wolves (except here). In a hundred years, if someone reads my books, or sees the films, they’ll say, ‘how quaint.’ It will be something in a museum, tidied up, and put to music. People’s deep fear of wilderness focuses on the wolf. If they can kill the wolf, one point for the human side. Not aware of their primal fear, people feel it, and focus on the wolf. What do they do with the wilderness inside themselves? Do they make it a friend? Repress it? Drink? Take it out on the world? Buy a gun?
In their deepest being wolves are like us: from their hearts that pump the blood, the mouth that eats, the liver and the bones that heal and grow on their own. We share these on-going systems, received without training, with every living thing. They just happen. We share this basic fabric of existence, a very spacious intimacy. Knowing this makes me more a fellow traveler than a stranger, and connects me to even larger, recurring, energies like stars shining, waves in the sea, and the random marks in marble.
I lay in my bag, half asleep, and remembered the first time I realized I only see the wind through what it touches. Never the wind itself. It rustles through the willows, ripples across the water, moves the clouds, invisibly touched my face. Then my thoughts traveled to how I rarely see an event unfolding in the arctic. I always arrive afterwards to find the fish bones on the rock, an explosion of feathers where a hawk struck a ptarmigan, the caribou carcass in the grass, the massive holes in the bank where bears dug for ground squirrels. Then I thought of the one time I did see an event unfold. At the bottom of Hawk Rapids, a mile long canyon with high stone banks (the cliffs seem taller because everywhere else is so flat). Present in that one mile is the Back River’s symphony compressed, all the themes present: power, calm water, rapids, eddies, strong current, shallow water and deep. It’s full of safe nesting sites for ravens, hawks, gyre falcons, and peregrine falcons. I always look forward to spending a few days there, poking around.
I’d spent most of a week at Hawk Rapids, and was on my way, bobbing in the big eddy at the foot of the canyon, looking back upriver, wondering when I’d get to come back. I had poured a cup of coffee from the small steel, silver thermos. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw something jump in the eddy. If I even blinked, it was would disappear. I froze. It was a grey wolf. She had not seen me and was swimming into the eddy. Seeing me, she swam back. She bounded up the esker beside the river, water flying off her body leaving dark spots on the rocks. I could see her strength, every muscle revealed under the wet, matted fur. She stopped at the top of the sandhill, sat down, and looked across the river. I looked across the river. A young caribou was walking a thin strip of sand, head down, nosing for tufts of grass, its front legs spread to get its mouth to the grass. The caribou was maybe two years old, and on its own. Being on your own in the arctic is not a recipe for survival. I wondered how many other wolves were watching.
My question was answered when a huge white wolf barreled out from behind a sand dune. The caribou jumped straight up and then launched itself into the river, the wolf right behind. Because its eyes are on the side of its head, a caribou has to swivel its head to see where it is going. Swiveling its head, the young caribou looked like it was violently disagreeing with its current situation. A caribou can out-run and out-swim a wolf. The wolf was falling behind, his head not even wet. I watched the white head move over the blue water, and could see his slanted, dark almond eyes. In the middle of the river, the caribou did a smart thing. It turned downriver, gaining an extra push from the strong current. The wolf had lost. He fell farther behind. I understood the plan I’d interrupted. The one I spooked would have swum across the river and forced the caribou to run inland, into the jaws of the bigger wolf hiding in the dunes.
The wolf in the river realized he had lost, but kept swimming. When he passed over mid-river I knew what I would do. I paddled out to join him. Nothing he could do but keep swimming. I paddled beside him. Then, I knew what I would do. I reached my right hand over his head and ran it down his neck. I felt the rough fur and the sand in it. Then, I did it again. I thought of the Plains Indians during battle who’d ride in to touch an enemy; just touch them, their highest form of courage. They called it counting coup. The wolf was not my enemy, but I had just counted coup on a full grown wolf.
I put the paddle down, and drifted, and watched the wolf swim to shore. He bounded up the esker, the spray off his body sparkling in the sunlight, the water leaving dark spots on the white rocks. I could see every rib and the strength in his legs. Halfway up, he stopped and looked back at me. In all my human interactions, I have never suffered the look of distain he gave me, “You touched me…!” and I said to myself, “Yes, I did..!” Then he was gone.
I screwed the steel top on the thermos. I couldn’t paddle. Thirty yards downstream was a large white boulder with a black raven sitting on top. He had seen the whole thing. As I floated by, I thought, I might have counted coup on a wolf, but how many times has death counted coup on me.
