The Good Rain: Across Time & Terrain in the Pacific Northwest (23 page)

To find a sea otter in the Northwest in the last years of the twentieth century, you go to the Seattle Aquarium, where a trained mammal does tricks for tourists. Otherwise, the animal that brought white men to this corner of the world has largely disappeared—officially extinct off the Washington, Oregon and British Columbian coasts for nearly half a century. A few transplants introduced under the protection of federal laws have since been placed in Northwestern waters, but their fate is uncertain. A recent spill from a barge carrying heavy bunker oil killed several of them; with their fur soiled, sea otters lose their coat of warmth and die a painful death from hypothermia. Otter Crest, on the Oregon coast, has no such creatures swimming near its beach. Nootka Sound, where Captain Cook first noted the easy-kill, big-money mammal, has no descendants from that era playing in its waters.

Sea otters have never caused great fear or awe. They backstroke through cold channels looking for new places to make water slides. They plunge to great depths, seeing how long they can hold their breath. They sing to their young, which gave rise to the myth of the mermaid; horny sailors, hearing the distant song of a sea otter mother to her pup, imagined a large-breasted amphibian calling them to shore. Few things are funnier
to one otter than sneaking up on another otter and biting the mate’s tiny ear. They never migrate, food is easy, the water’s always fine.

To be a comedian in nature is to have a short life. While the pursuit of spice and the cultivation of tobacco may have led to early colonization of the eastern part of North America, it was this mammal, among the most docile in all of nature, that was responsible for bringing the hordes of Boston and King George men to the Pacific Northwest. Once otter pelts replaced the nonexistent Northwest Passage as the only justification for sailing eight months around Cape Horn and up the Pacific Coast, it took less than half a century to kill most of them. By the 1820s, up to 500,000 otters had been caught and stripped of their thick, luxuriant hide. Thus began a pattern: as long as this land brought wealth to those who stepped ashore, it was prized. Winthrop, and others who said the lasting value of the Northwest was not extractive, were lonely voices until the time came when there was very little left to take.

Peter Pans at heart, sea otters shy away from early attachment; when at last they do breed, the females seldom produce more than a single pup. A standard ploy during the early nineteenth century was to snatch the baby, thus luring the mother out, who was then clubbed. The orphan, more often than not, died without the mother’s milk or drowned without the benefit of maternal swimming lessons, accelerating the decline of the species. But through it all the otters kept on their backs, balancing clams on their noses, playing pinch with Dungeness crabs. A large sea otter pelt, in perfect condition, could fetch as much as two thousand dollars in London during the early nineteenth century. Such money—one pelt could bring the equivalent of five years of wages and a stake in the bank—was earned from the simple task of slamming the skull of a smiling eighty-pound mammal. By the early 1820s the Hudson’s Bay Company was calling for conservation measures. Their network of trading posts, so English and orderly, so profitable and legally monopolistic, was in danger of losing its chief source of income. But by then it was too late.

Asked to assess the value of all land north of the Columbia River before the United States and England settled their boundary dispute, an American government expert wrote that “The country north and west of the Columbia, extending north to the 49th degree of latitude and west to the sea, is extremely worthless.” A marsh, thick with marine life, had no value. A mountain range with glaciers and streams and spires enough to fill an area twice the size of the Swiss Alps, was dispensable. A dozen rivers, each carrying enough salmon in a single run to feed every native and every Boston man in the new country at a single sitting, was a trifle.
The great problem with the area north of the Columbia was, as the American wrote, “There are hardly any furs.” Having depleted the Northwest of the first resource to be exploited here, the Boston men were already pronouncing it worthless.

Young Teddy Winthrop and three Clallam Indians arrived at the Nisqually Delta on a hot day in late August of 1853. Seattle, fifty miles to the north, was a mudflat with a handful of timber beasts and a waterfront whorehouse. Olympia, one inlet west of the delta, housed a few rotting territorial-government structures. But the Hudson’s Bay Company post at Nisqually, situated on land that had recently become American territory, exuded an air of permanence and authority. When Winthrop pulled up his canoe at the river’s mouth and hiked inland to Fort Nisqually, the company was already turning to agriculture, growing strawberries, gooseberries, carrots, potatoes and other vegetables in such quantities that they kept the other forts supplied with food and sold the surplus to the Russians in Alaska. Winthrop, gazing up at the twilight-pink flank of Rainier behind the ten-foot-high walls of the fort, found the setting enchanting. He wanted to get closer to this “giant mountain dome of snow swelling and seeming to fill the aerial spheres.” The Nisqually Glacier, one of the longest tongues of ice on the mountain and the river’s headwaters, gleamed in late sunlight. A climate barometer, the glacier has shrunk by more than a mile since then.

The fort was full of the commerce of dead-animal dealings.

Winthrop wrote: “Rusty Indians, in all degrees of froziness [sic] of person and costume, were trading at the shop for the three b’s of Indian desire—blankets, beads, and ’baccy—representatives of need, vanity and luxury.” He noted a great quantity of “otter, beaver and skunk skins and similar treasures.” Winthrop again enjoyed the civil company, imported wines and fine china of the Gentlemen running the company post. He obtained two horses for the trip across the mountains, another guide, this a Klickitat Indian from east of the Cascades, more hardtack and pork, some roots. The shopping spree cost him thirty dollars. Bedding down inside the fort at night, he heard the howl of timber wolves. Lucky man. The true call of the wild has not been heard in this part of the world for some time. The poison campaign which killed upwards of two million wolves in less than fifty years was already underway in the midnineteenth century. Even the Gentlemen of the Hudson’s Bay post at the Nisqually Delta, who showed some conservationist leanings despite
the nature of their business, took up one of the favorite weapons of the frontier—strychnine—against the wolves that attacked their livestock.

To find a wolf in the Northwest in the last years of the twentieth century, you must go above the Nisqually Delta to the bluff and travel south for about thirty miles until you reach a somewhat spooky warren of orange-eyed carnivores—Wolf Haven, it’s called. The Gray Wolf Valley on the Olympic Peninsula has no such creatures. Bounty hunters killed off the last wolves in the state fifty years ago in that valley, which is one big reason why helicopters are chasing goats in the Olympics this summer, trying to thin a herd that no longer has a predator.

At Wolf Haven, everybody has a beard. People who stay together long enough are supposed to start looking alike; a similar trend is evident at Wolf Haven, where peacocks perch from the misted branches of spruce trees, and the evening air is filled with the jabbering of humans trying to communicate with three dozen wolves. Two volunteers proudly show me their bite marks. One of them says, “There is no better feeling in the world than French-kissing a wolf.”

On summer nights when the sky is clear and the great black Out There is full of mystery, cars drive along the old Hudson’s Bay Company fur-trading trail, turn off into the woods and pull up at Wolf Haven. Here, the people take pictures and then gather around a big bonfire and howl. A whole gaggle of captive wolves howls back. And then the Wolf Haven leaders try to get everybody to howl together. A “howl-in,” they call it. It’s all part of the job of trying to remake the image of one of the most maligned creatures in history.

I walk among the wolves with their benefactor, a chain-smoking thirty-six-year-old man named Stephen Kuntz. He has a beard, a bit of a beer gut, a baseball hat with a wolf emblem on the front. His van carries a personalized license plate—WOLF 1. He stops to chat with Windsong, a female buffalo wolf who spends a lot of time on the rubber-chicken circuit, appearing before Rotary Clubs, at county fairs, in an occasional spot on the
Today
show. Nearby is a timber wolf named Rogue, retrieved from the garbage dumps of Portland, now learning to howl for the first time. The star of this sixty-acre spread is a white arctic wolf named Lucan. This ghost-colored carnivore was once an habitué of a rich man’s private zoo; upon his death, the owner left Lucan with Wolf Haven.

Steve Kuntz has spent the last thirteen years of his life living with wolves; on the whole, they make better companions than humans, he
says. His chief assistant, an earnest, bearded biologist named Jack Laufer, goes even further: “For me it’s easier to talk with these wolves than it is to talk with people,” he says. “They’re a lot more open and honest with their feelings.”

They share their feelings with you?

“When they howl, it’s vocalization, it conveys plenty. I can’t think of anything important that I can say which they can’t say.” Laufer speaks a few lines in English to Lucan, who says nothing. “What’s more,” he says, “wolves are a lot more compassionate than most humans. The pack—the community—is the most important thing to them. The pack always works together. They are monogamous. They breed for life. And they’re faithful. You won’t see a sadder thing than a wolf who’s lost a mate.”

The two Wolf Haven leaders go through the numbers: wolves used to inhabit all of North America above the 30th Parallel, but now they’ve disappeared in every state but four; wolves were not only poisoned and gunned for bounty, they were set on fire; during the height of the cattlemen’s poison campaign, a thousand wolves a day were killed; Oregon does not have a single wild wolf; Idaho has six, and Washington has zero. I correct them: Last summer, while exploring a meadow near the moraine of the Carbon Glacier on Mount Rainier’s north side, I looked across the flower fields and saw a gray timber wolf,
Canis lupus
. His tongue out, tail down, the wolf strode across the meadow, moving at a fast clip. I snapped a picture, backpedaled, then headed for higher ground. Like everyone, I grew up with the myth of the man-eating wolf, the lecher with bad breath, a devil in disguise.

The image problem, I think, has to do with the wolf’s appetite. There is no getting around their love of fresh, raw meat; after a kill, usually carried out by a pack closing in on a lame animal, a single wolf can eat up to a fourth of its body weight. They sometimes kill more than they can eat. The sight of eight wolves bringing down a deer—nipping at the thighs, then going for the jugular—is blood-spurting violence of the type seldom discussed at Audubon Society meetings. The Indians, for the most part, were not afraid of wolves and attributed spiritual qualities to them. Lewis and Clark ate wolves during the lean days of their cross-country expedition. It wasn’t until the wagon trains came west with livestock in the 1840s and ’50s—presenting an easy meal for the wolf packs—that
Canis lupus
became the homesteader’s worst enemy. In some counties of the West, it was against the law
not
to put poison on the fence post.
Yet, as Kuntz and other neo-wolf lovers point out, there is not a single documented case of a healthy wolf ever attacking a human.

“Of course, I’ve been bit a couple times—feels like somebody smacked you on the hand with a hammer—but that was from playing around,” says Kuntz.

Wolves still are hunted in British Columbia, often from helicopters by sportsmen who’ve paid up to $15,000 in a lottery. The provincial government says the aerial hunts are necessary because too many moose, caribou and mountain sheep are being killed by the wolf packs of British Columbia, whose numbers may be as high as five thousand. Some biologists accuse the government of hiding their true intentions; they say the game managers who approve the wolf kill want to build up the herds of trophy animals in British Columbia, where hunting is big business. During Expo ’86, the wolf kills were stopped; 20 million people visited Vancouver with nary a peep heard about the helicopter hunting. In the years since, however, the kills have resumed.

Much of the change in attitude has come about because of people like Steve Kuntz, who calls his captive wolves “ambassadors for their lost brothers in the wild.” A native of Trenton, New Jersey, he was the kind of kid who put a frog in his pocket and then kept it in his room until his mom forced him to get rid of it. He once had a snapping turtle for a pet, but preferred big dogs like German shepherds. On his own at age thirteen, he never finished high school, moved all over the Northeast, and then to the Southwest, where he lived for a while in a hippie commune. Working a construction job in Colorado, he saw an ad in the paper offering a stray wolf pup for sale. He took the pup home, named it Blackfoot, and became quite attached. It was a buffalo wolf, one of the descendants of the great packs that used to attack bison on the plains east of the Rocky Mountains. Kuntz treated Blackfoot like a dog, keeping it on a leash, taking it for walks. But something was wrong.

In Washington with his wife, Linda, and Blackfoot, Kuntz looked up a man, Ed Andrews, who kept several wolves on his property. Andrews was having a hard time holding on to the property and the wolves at the same time, so he turned his pack over to Kuntz. Reluctant at first, Kuntz and his wife soon took on the manners and attitude of orphanage owners—bring us your stray wolves, your zoo rejects, your urban misfits. The early years of Wolf Haven were lean, but then they started the howl-ins. In an age of theme parks, the idea of sitting around a bonfire under spruce trees with a bunch of wolves and howling at the moon has terrific
appeal. Tourists come by the carloads, entering the grounds as curious, usually neutral visitors and leaving as true believers, heads full of the new gospel of the wolf. The wolves inside the mesh-wired compound are their own best pitchmen. They play tag. They kiss each other. They bite each other’s ears.