A Million Years with You (35 page)

I had a strong interest in caribou but seldom saw them. Sometimes I did, though, as I wrote in another unmailed letter to Steve.

 

Today a caribou appeared in the valley where my camp is. She must have seen me, she took an alarm position, i.e. with one hind leg stuck out, then came up to investigate me. Then she seemed to change her mind and headed up the valley. I thought I'd have another look at her so I crept up to a ridge overlooking the valley. She was gone. How
could
I lose a caribou in that vast landscape, I wondered. I turned to go back and saw her standing right behind me, as curious about me as I was about her.

 

I like to think about that. Probably I was the first human being she had ever seen. If the Kalahari showed what the world was like before the Neolithic, Baffin Island showed what the world was like before there were people.

 

Now and then the wolves would visit my cave, but only when I was sleeping. How did they know? That's hard to say, because their den, where they spent most of their time when not hunting, was about two hundred feet away and my cave was on the far side of my hill. But they never came to see me when I was awake. Here's another letter to Steve.

 

The wolves are lovelier than ever. Yesterday I was going up to my lookout post when a wolf coming along the stream saw me. I stopped dead but the wolf kept looking. She then proceeded to the den, taking the course of least visibility. When she got to her hill, her pups rushed at her. She regurgitated for them, then rested about an hour, then started back along her trail, sniffing very carefully and marking here and there. She squats and lifts one leg a little to do this, like female dogs do when they're in heat, and it means they're marking, not just peeing. I expected her to reappear on her old trail, but she did not, nor did she appear on any hillside. I figured I had lost her and as I was tired, I went back to my camp, forgetting to bring my head-net with me.
[The head-net was for mosquitoes, which were frightful.]
What she had done was to creep up under the hillside and wait for me to leave, whereupon she investigated the place where I had been and ripped up my head-net. I found it later full of holes and white fur. But the wolves don't seem to mind me. I thought that after this they'd move the pups to another den, but they didn't. Still there today, white and beautiful as ever.

 

Another time they found my only sweater, which I had carelessly left on my hill, and they tore it to shreds. That caused a problem. I was cold without it, so I had to devise a garment with my only towel.

The wolves' treatment of the head-net and sweater raised an interesting question: Why didn't they do the same to me? They hunted all the time, I was easy prey and also about the size of a young caribou (I weighed about 125 pounds), and my carcass could have saved them much labor. But needless to say, this never happened. I can't have seemed dangerous, because the only other people they might ever have seen were Dr. Pimlott and his students. My guess is that it never occurred to them to hunt me. Nobody knows why not. Dr. Pimlott and others studied wolf predation at great length, and if I remember rightly, they found only one instance of wolves attacking a person, an instance involving a man who, for whatever reason, disguised himself as a bear cub and rolled around in a field as if he were helpless and wounded. He was attacked by wolves, but whose fault was that?

Mostly the wolves were something like the Kalahari lions who didn't hunt the Bushmen. But those lions knew what people were and the wolves of Baffin Island didn't, because with the exception of Dr. Pimlott and his students, people had never lived inland on Baffin. Even so, not even the young, less experienced wolves hunted me, although all the grown wolves together were working very hard to feed the current litter. They could easily have hunted me if they wished. I had no way to defend myself, because unlike some people who venture into places owned by other species, I would not have dreamed of taking a weapon or harming those who lived there.

So perhaps I was something of an anthropologist after all. When you visit people of other cultures, you aren't supposed to hurt them. I was later to learn that while I was watching my wolves, one of the graduate students was trying to trap some other wolves, perhaps to tag them, but managed only to trap one wolf by a few of her toes, which she chewed off. The wolf had gone but her toes were still in the trap. How was she supposed to make long hunting forays without toes? An anthropologist would not do something like that.

 

Sometimes I hiked around the area to see where the wolves were going, following their trails that led from the den. One trail went past a lake. On one side of the lake the ground was boggy, but on the other side a big hill of bare rock formed a bank, and there the trail disappeared. I looked more closely and saw a little ledge on the rock, a few inches under the water. The wolves had chosen not to wade through the bog, but instead crossed the lake by walking on the firm footing of the ledge. And because the ledge was narrow, a trail was worn into the rock.

It took me a moment to understand what I was seeing. Worn into the rock? Wolves had done this, I felt sure, as the ledge was too narrow for caribou. Also the trail led back to the den, an unlikely choice for caribou. But wolves would use that trail mostly in summer, not only because the lake was frozen for the rest of the year, but also because in late summer the pups would be too big for the den and the wolves would move them to one of their camping places on the tundra. After that they would have no reason to visit the den, or perhaps even to use the trail, until the following spring.

How long it had taken for a few padded feet to wear a trail into a rock? Wolves came to Baffin Island so long ago that they had formed their own subspecies. I don't know how long that took, but it was long enough for a few wolves to wear a trail used only in summer, and not every day, in a rock that was under water.

This also said something about the den. If the trail had been used for a very long time, perhaps the den had been too. A good den is a prized commodity and can be used for generations, and the den I was watching was one of the best. A den must be deep in stable earth that won't collapse—a tunnel perhaps thirty inches or more in diameter and about fifteen feet long in the side of the hill with a room at the end which could be thirty cubic feet in size or even larger, big enough to hold several pups and their mother. All in all, to make a den, about a hundred cubic feet of earth must be moved at least twice, once to get the earth out of the hill and again to scatter it a bit, so no big pile develops to indicate the presence of a den or to collapse and fill up the entrance, trapping those inside. Because most wolves already have dens, new dens are often made by a newly mated pair hoping to start a pack of their own, so all this digging might be done by two wolves with their front paws. The mouth of a den doesn't look like much, but what's underground is an astonishing achievement.

The location is important. The den I watched was on the sunny side of a hill in a large basin, with more hills all around. Nothing could approach without being seen. The den was above a stream where the wolves could drink. The stream also served as a fence for the pups, who couldn't cross it. If they tried to follow an outgoing wolf, the wolf would cross the stream to scrape them off. Alone, they'd stand on the bank, tails drooping, watching their parent or older sibling grow small in the distance. When the departing wolf was out of sight, all the pups would trudge back to the den and go down the tunnel.

In short, the place was exceptional, a treasure. No wonder wolves use the same dens for generations, refreshing them by digging out more dirt from time to time. And those who used it must also have used the underwater trail worn into the rock. It's quite an experience to see very old things made by animals, but there they were, the trail, which may have been used for centuries, and the den, which, judging from a small amount of fresh dirt at its mouth, was not new—far from it—but was probably cleaned up a bit when the wolves moved in.

 

Most of the time I'd lie on my stomach on top of my hill and watch the wolves with binoculars. I think I was happier there than I had ever been before, or at least happy for a longer time. I felt joy, pleasure, serenity, and wonder, especially wonder, because the wolves were so much like us. Wolves became wolves at about the time that we became people. Their two-parent families are like ours, and they hunt in the daytime just as we do, for the same kinds of game that our ancestors hunted. Given a difficult climate and helpless young who must be kept warm, there are not many ways to live by hunting. Wolves and people made the same choices.

The choice, of course, is to leave the infants at home while the adults forage—just the opposite, say, of some of the ungulates whose infants stand up and follow them right after birth. Referring to the wolf/human practice, an anthropologist called it “the bird's nest arrangement” because, of course, many kinds of birds also forage from a nest, a home base where they leave their infants, just as hunter-gatherers forage from an encampment where the children and the old people stay.

As for the wolves, the babysitter was merely a guardian, not a playmate, as he would sleep on top of the boulder where the pups couldn't pester him. Many hours or even days later, another adult would come back from the field with food in her stomach. The pups would burst out of the den and rush up to her, and she would vomit the food to feed them. She would then become the babysitter, and the wolf she replaced would come down from the rock.

The two adults might greet each other briefly, but not always. I found this fascinating, as to me it showed their unity. The adults were in this together, committed to months of hard, skilled work, and they didn't need to prove anything to one another. Everybody knew where he or she stood in the hierarchy. Never once did a wolf show dominance or hostility toward another wolf, because the social order seemed acceptable to all of them. The five adults were as tight as a clenched fist.

Because of this, and because four of the wolves were always hunting individually, so that an incoming wolf would spend only a short time with the outgoing babysitter when they changed places, they were far apart most of the time and had little interaction. But the distance didn't seem to matter, because in their minds, I think, their pack was always together.

Now and then the wolf at the den might howl. A moment would pass, and then, from an enormous distance, would come the faintest possible howl—another wolf answering. For whatever reason, the wolf at the den had been thinking about the other wolf. Many years later, it was learned that a component in a wolf's howl serves as the name of another wolf. The wolf in the distance heard her name and answered. The only time I heard all the wolves howling together was on the day we arrived, when all of them needed to take action.

When a returning wolf arrived at the den, the babysitter would prepare himself. He would stretch, then walk around a bit, perhaps trying to decide where to go, or perhaps not quite ready for the difficult work that lay ahead. He might drink from the stream. Then he would cross the stream and choose a direction, trudging at first, as if he were reluctant to get started, then gathering himself and moving a bit faster until he broke into the businesslike, ground-covering jog of a wolf with a far destination. Soon he'd be out of sight. By then the wolf who had just come in would have fed the pups and gone to sleep high up on the boulder, and nothing would happen for hours.

 

I'd lie on top of the hill with my binoculars, waiting. Every twelve hours or so, three ravens would fly overhead. They always came from the west, which meant they were making a big circle. I say the west, even though when you are that far north, the only direction is south. But when I was looking at the den, I couldn't actually see the sun unless I turned my head slightly, and the ravens came from the left. At home, that would be west.

Every time the ravens passed, they'd look down at me carefully, sometimes circling for a better look, and for years after that I'd wonder if they remembered me. I liked to think of my image in the brain of a raven, somewhere in the Arctic sky. Ravens have good memories, and not many unusual things other than me were available to look at, so I was hopeful.

The perfect tundra stretched as far as the eye could see, and the wind blew so quietly I couldn't hear it, but I could feel it on my skin. The sun was always in the zenith, so it was always midmorning. If no wolf appeared for many hours, that was fascinating. The long absence of the wolves spoke of the hardship of hunting.

I especially remember the return of one wolf who had been hunting. She'd been successful. She lowered her head and vomited some chewed-up meat. The little crowd of pups bolted down the food and begged for more.

The wolf might have had more food in her stomach, but if she did, she was saving it for herself. However, I'd seen the mother wolf throw up twice for the pups, as if in response to their begging, and although the wolf in question wasn't the mother, I wondered if the begging might be softening her. She looked down at the pups for a moment, perhaps reconsidering. But after a long pause, she must have decided that she needed the nourishment herself, and she jumped up on the boulder. Discouraged, the pups went back in the den.

The adult was worn out. She fell fast asleep. I watched her. She slept for nine hours without moving. Then she sighed, settled her tongue, shifted her legs slightly, and went to back sleep, again for nine hours without moving.

All this time I watched her. At last another wolf came up to the den and fed the pups a little belch of something, perhaps a lemming or two. Most of the pups therefore got nothing, and they looked up at the newcomer, pleading. The newcomer didn't offer any more. The hungry pups cried. The sleeping wolf woke up, stood up, shook herself, jumped down off the rock, urinated, sniffed here and there for a moment, then trudged off slowly across the tundra to hunt and feed the pups again.