The Company of Wolves

Acclaim for
Peter Steinhart’s

THE COMPANY OF WOLVES

Peter Steinhart

THE COMPANY OF WOLVES

Peter Steinhart was a columnist for
Audubon
and is the author of
Tracks in the Sky, Two Eagles/Dos Aguilas
(both with photographer Tupper Ansel Blake), and
California’s Wild Heritage
. He lives in Palo Alto, California.

Books by
Peter Steinhart

Tracks in the Sky:
Wildlife and Wetlands of the Pacific Flyway
(with Tupper Ansel Blake)

California’s Wild Heritage:
Threatened and Endangered Animals in the Golden State

Two Eagles/Dos Aguilas:
The Natural World of the United States-Mexico Borderlands
(with Tupper Ansel Blake)

The Company of Wolves

A number of people gave me invaluable assistance in this journey, and I would like to thank them for having made this book possible. Thanks for opening up your stores of knowledge, your hospitality, and your patience to: L. David Mech, Diane Boyd, Rolf and Candy Peterson, John and Mary Theberge, Ed Bangs, Lloyd Antoine, Durward Allen, Charles Jonkel, Paul Joslin, Peggy Graham, Robert Stephenson, Anne Ruggles, Robert Wayne, Ronald Nowak, Norman Bishop, Renée Askins, Terry Johnson, David Parsons, Harry Frank, Victor Van Ballenberghe, Robert Ream, Mike Jimenez, Pat Tucker, and Bruce Weide. The errors that no doubt will creep into this book are not in any way theirs. But whatever good sense may creep in owes especially to their experience and generosity. Thanks to the Peninsula Conservation Center Foundation for its willingness to sponsor parts of this project, and to Dieter Walz for translating some difficult German. A special thanks to Neil Soderstrom, whose faith and persistence made this book possible.

No two species have a more tangled, more intimate, and more shadowy set of relationships than
Homo sapiens
and
Canis lupus
. In ancient times, we seem to have admired and perhaps even worshipped them. For centuries after that, we persecuted them, put out poisons for them, shot them on sight, told stories about them that frightened children and grown-ups alike, and all but exterminated them in the lower forty-eight states. Today, we argue over wolves. While we argue, wolves are returning on their own to Washington, Idaho, Montana, Wyoming, North Dakota, Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Michigan. There are controversial plans to reintroduce them in several other states. For more than a decade, people have been surreptitiously trying to reintroduce wolves into the wilds of California, Oregon, Utah, Montana, and possibly other states. There are bitter disputes over government programs to shoot wolves in order to increase the number of moose and caribou for the sake of sport hunters. Some individuals ill-advisedly keep wolves or wolf-dog hybrids, thinking they are helping to conserve the wolf. Dozens of books have been written about them, and dozens of television programs filmed about them. Even so, they still dwell in the realm of myth, for rarely does any human catch more than a furtive glimpse of a wolf in the wild—even in Canada or Alaska, where wolves are relatively abundant. In the absence of real encounter, there is invention. And we bring those inventions to our rare encounters—with real consequences for wolves and humans alike.

Consider the following:

Lash Callison is a seventy-eight-year-old retired hunting guide who lives in Fort St. John, British Columbia, rugged, mountainous country deep in the Canadian Rockies. Callison had a hunting territory
on the Little Toad River in the Muskwa Range, where he took dudes out to hunt sheep, grizzly, mountain goat, caribou, and moose. He doesn’t like wolves. “As far as big-game hunting, they’ll run the game right down,” says Callison. “If you ever was a big-game hunter or a trapper and had to make a living and you went in there after the wolves, you’d know what I’m talking about. You don’t see wolves very often. But if I saw them around here right now, I’d shoot ’em.”

Callison felt that his clients weren’t getting the big trophies they had been getting when he started guiding. He would tell local game officials that the government ought to get rid of the predators. “But the more you’d complain,” he recalls, “the closer they’d watch you. I said to my brother, The only thing for us to do is don’t complain, don’t say anything, and just take care of these wolves ourselves. That’s what we did. We got poison.”

They injected tallow or pieces of moose liver with strychnine and put it on the ice of a winter lake or along a mountain pass where wolf tracks had been seen. In summers, they buried bait where a wolf would smell it and dig it up—if they just left it on the ground, crows or jays would take it. In the snow, they would put baits under strips of moose hide and throw a little water over everything. The water would freeze, and the ice would keep crows and jays and smaller mammals off the baits, but wolves could pry them up. Callison carried out his own predator controls from the 1940s through the 1960s.

“Sure it was illegal,” says Callison. But wolves seemed so evil to him that legality hardly entered into it.

Today, Callison no longer hunts, but he still has the same sentiments about wolves. He sees the wolf as a competitor, and thinks it would be foolish of him to let the wolves take away the source of his livelihood. “Kill all these wolf off in the ranching country and the hunting country,” he says. “There’s plenty of other places for that wolf to go. Let ’em live out in the muskegs.”

Hugh Walker grew up in Shageluk, on the Innoko River in Alaska. A native American, he is working on a degree in social work at the University of Alaska. He tells a story his father told him. In the 1960s, his father and his uncle were shooting wolves from airplanes, hoping
to collect bounties and sell the furs. One winter day, he said, after following wolf tracks, his father and his uncle herded a pack of wolves out of the forest and into the open on a valley floor. Says Walker, “The wolves were heading for the timber and they got almost halfway over and they realized the plane was going to catch them. They turned around and faced the airplane and were jumping off the ground at it. Over the sound of the engine, my father and my uncle could hear the wolves barking and snapping. They were barking and screaming because they knew it was over. My uncle did shoot them. But from that day, they could not do that any more. They didn’t have the stomach for it any more after that.”