Wolfish, p.1
Wolfish, page 1
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Table of Contents
About the Author
Copyright Page
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To all who have been trapped by someone else’s fear
On a digital map, OR-7’s trek is charted—by a GPS …
In the tourmaline dusk I go a same wilding path.
—NATALIE DIAZ, “WOLF OR-7,” POSTCOLONIAL LOVE POEM
But think!—a woman after all,
Contending with a wolf!
—ROBERT BROWNING, “IVAN IVANOVITCH”
Introduction
This is one of those stories that begins with a female body. Hers was crumpled, roadside, in the ash-colored slush between asphalt and snowbank. Eyes open and facing the road, a gaze that seemed to demand reciprocity. See me. Or at least that was what I told myself when I could not look away from the photograph, unable to close the tab on my computer. Unable to blink away the wolf.
She was two years old, a lone wolf, the Oregon State Police (OSP) report said. OR-106, the 106th wolf biologists collared in Oregon. She would have left her nearby pack for the normal reasons, looking for a mate or new territory. How could she have known her journey would end so soon, on a road six miles outside Wallowa, a town of about eight hundred people in northeastern Oregon? A “concerned citizen” notified authorities of her presence at 10:36 a.m. on the cool, clear morning of January 8, 2022. In the photograph OSP circulated on Twitter with a “Seeking #PublicAssistance” hashtag, she looks small, her legs slim. The fur on her belly is the color of cream, her tail a brush dipped in ink, a ridge of black painting her spine to her ears. Her body is the same palette as the snow beneath her, but her winter coat is plush and glossy. No signs of trauma or blood. The GPS collar a golden ring around her neck. Nearly ten days after her death, I would think of her while watching the swelling glow of a yellow moonrise. The full moon is often called a “wolf moon” in January because it’s the time of year wolves are thought to be hungriest. Hunger, said that old French proverb, drives the wolf from the wood. I hoped OR-106 had not died with a gnaw in her belly.
But how had she died? By the placement of her body, you would think her death was by car, and I wonder if that’s what the passerby thought when they raised the flag of alert that Saturday morning. A wolf being killed by a car could mean bad luck. Maybe someone leaving the bar too late, blood already toxic as they wove through the forest. I can almost imagine, in such a situation, how a driver could panic. Swearing in a frozen cloud of whiskey breath as they stepped onto the road to investigate the bump, unable to stand sentry as the wolf’s breath slowed, or maybe just unable to pick up the phone and call the collision in. I play this out in my head as if it will help me understand her death, but it doesn’t matter. OR-106 wasn’t killed by a car, the subsequent investigation found. She was killed by a gun: a human with a gun. Poached.
The root of the Greek word for forgetting, lethe, suggests an act of hiding. “[W]e could extend the image and say that to forget is to bury,” writes Lewis Hyde in A Primer for Forgetting. In this case, there would be two sorts of burials: one in which something is covered up and forgotten because “we can’t stand to look at it,” and another because something has been “revealed and examined, and … may be covered up … for good.” In the second form of forgetting, rites have been observed. Maybe that was why I could not close the tab on my computer; I wanted to make sure OR-106 could have the right kind of burial, if only in my mind. I wanted to bring her body rest.
The previous year I had tried to visit the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Forensics Lab, located in Ashland, Oregon, a few hundred miles from my home in Portland. I wanted to see a necropsy of a wolf because I’d heard scientists there worked to “build the story around the animal’s death,” and I thought I might have the same goal. Every medical student knows you learn a body by cutting it apart, and I was committed to learning the body of a wolf. It seemed like good luck that the lab near my house was also the hub where wolves from all over the country came after dying in mysterious ways, arriving frozen and “preserved so they don’t stink up the FedEx truck,” as a veterinary forensic pathologist told me. I did not like to think about wolves in those terms, but I have a taxidermist uncle in Montana who stuffs zebras shipped to him from Africa. I am used to side-eyeing the trucks that blaze by me on the highway, saying a prayer for whatever life their invisible cargo may have once held. I did not have to worry about seeing a frozen wolf at the lab, though, because my desire to visit did not prevail over the plague sweeping the world. Instead, I spoke with pathologist Tabitha Viner over the phone. She told me the key to doing a job like hers was to be intentional in her mindset. It was hard to roll up her sleeves and face so many creatures who had died, often defenseless, often at human hands. “My mindset is that every animal I get, it’s more or less an inanimate object,” she told me. “And it always has been.” She said she had worked on “a lot” of wolves over the years. If each one was “an inanimate object with a story to tell,” her goal was to untangle the “what” of their story, not the “who.” Definitely not the “why.”
A few months after I spoke with Tabitha, the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife (ODFW) notified OSP Fish and Wildlife Division troopers that they were getting mortality signals from a wolf collar. When troopers hiked into the woods to verify, they found a body. And then, nearby, another. Then another, and another, and another. Three males, two females. It was February 2021, and suddenly the whole Catherine Pack was dead, veins tunneled with poison in the same corner of northeastern Oregon where, almost a year later, OR-106 would be found too. In the months between, the carcasses of three more wolves would turn up, as well as a skunk and a couple of magpies. Tests at the forensics lab would reveal poison in each body.
Though hunting wolves is, as I write this, legal in Wyoming, Montana, Idaho, and Wisconsin, it is still illegal to kill a wolf in the western two-thirds of Oregon, period, and in far eastern Oregon—where these wolves had been found—unless the wolf is “in the act of biting, wounding, killing or chasing livestock or working dogs.” In a state with around 170 wolves, the mass poisoning of eight is significant, and has attracted coverage from national media. In the last twenty-one years, over thirty wolves are known to have been illegally killed in Oregon, while two additional wolves have died under mysterious circumstances; arrests and convictions have been made for only three of those thirty-two. In March 2022, the Oregon Department of Justice hired a special prosecutor committed solely to enforcing anti-poaching laws and investigating and prosecuting poaching crimes.
As I write this, the reward for information leading to a citation or arrest of the Catherine Pack poisoner is near $50,000, “a level that can make significant changes in a person’s life,” ODFW Stop Poaching Campaign coordinator Yvonne Shaw said in a press release. Nonprofit groups have pledged the bulk of that sum—enough for, as Shaw said, a down payment on property, or a college degree, or “a new truck. Or a new start.” In her words I hear the suggestion that, in leaking the identity of whoever would kill so many wolves, someone might actually need to hit the road. Find safety. Start over.
* * *
I wrote this book because I, like Tabitha, felt autopsying a wolf could help me figure out the story. The story I was trying to figure out was not “what” or “who,” but “why” and “how.” Why, in a time and place where wolves present no tangible threat to human safety, does a human kill a wolf—or eight—in the middle of a forest? In other words: What, when the shooter looked down the barrel of the gun, did he see? And when I imagined encountering a wolf in the forest, what did I see? There is always the creature in front of you and the creature in your mind. I think of the moment in the Disney movie of J. M. Barrie’s Peter Pan, when Peter loses his shadow in Wendy’s room. While he dives for it, peering under furniture as he tries to pin it down, his shadow rebels, leaping high against the wall, impishly eluding him until he wrestles it to submission and Wendy can sew it back on. The wolf in the forest does not know it, but he is haunted—hunted, even—by that shadow wolf in the shooter’s head. “Humans do not live with biological creatures as much as they live with beings constructed within human cultural frames,” wrote historian Erica Fudge. What shadows have we stitched for the wolf? This book is interested in the real life of Canis lupus, but also in examining the body of the “symbolic wolf,” as veterinary anthropologist Elizabeth Lawrence dubbed it. That wolf is a piece of cultural taxidermy, fabricated by humans with parts gathered across time and space, and howling first and foremost in our heads. The symbolic wolf is enormous. She appears screen-printed beneath a gold moon on the tourist-shop T-shirt; in the “lone-wolf terrorist” headline; blowing down the straw house of the “Three Little Pigs”; in Adolf Hitler’s Eastern Front headquarters dubbed the Wolfsschanze, the “Wolf’s Lair”; in Twilight and Game of Thrones; in the Lakota term for “a wolf’s day,” calle d such because she has created the fog and wind desired by traveling warriors. Because this symbolic wolf roams inside our minds, she looks different to me than she does to you. We have all been taught a certain kind of wolf; very often we have absorbed her, like osmosis.
Perhaps the first bounty placed on a wolf’s head was in the sixth century, by Solon of Greece. Many Indigenous tribes have had close bonds with wolves for thousands of years, including the Haida and Tlingit in the Pacific Northwest, where I grew up. In their 2017 book The First Domestication: How Wolves and Humans Coevolved, ecologist and evolutionary biologist Raymond Pierotti and Indigenous nations studies scholar Brandy Fogg turn to Indigenous testimony to argue that wolves and early humans lived symbiotic, entangled lives, with humans learning hunting techniques from wolves.
“Each species recognized a skill set and emotional capacity in the other that would allow both to maximize their chances of survival and leaving more descendants,” wrote Pierotti and Fogg. They cite the language Indigenous peoples have used to describe wolves as evidence: “brother, grandfather, relative, companion, teacher, and even ‘creator.’”
Despite this evidence to the contrary, the wolf’s legacy as a symbol of danger—the beast to vanquish, the human foe—has persisted as the dominant Euro-American narrative. “The wolf is the only animal with a criminal reputation and record that has lasted for centuries and resulted in so many legal acts putting a price on its head,” writes human-animal scholar Garry Marvin in Wolf. In 2021, the Norwegian Institute for Nature Research published “Wolf Attacks on Humans,” a comprehensive report of what is known about alleged attacks worldwide. This report is the continuation of a 2002 report, where J. D. Linnell et al. surveyed some four hundred years of human history and concluded that attacks were “unusual but episodic,” with humans “not part of their normal prey.” Wolves, they had noted, are “among the least dangerous species for their size and predatory potential.” In their updated report, which surveyed the years 2002 to 2020, Linnell et al. summarize their findings by writing that a “very large proportion” of wild wolf attacks appeared to come from rabid wolves, with a small number being “defensive.” The remainder, clustered primarily in historic Europe and contemporary south Asia, were “predatory.”
Though this last category is arguably what contemporary North Americans visualize when they say they are “afraid of wolves,” the risk of death by wild wolf attack here is almost nonexistent. Most recorded predatory attacks have been on children, and isolated in specific windows of time and space, in areas “with almost no wild prey and poor, vulnerable, human communities,” the 2021 report notes. With rabies essentially eradicated in North America and Europe, the last eighteen years here have seen only twelve wolf attacks on humans, with two fatalities. In a place where millions of people and close to 75,000 wolves share the land, widespread fear and persecution of the animal—especially on the grounds of threatening human life—are evidently misplaced. “It is apparent that the risks associated with a wolf attack are above zero, but far too low to calculate,” the researchers note. They urge the public to consider wolves in the same category as large predators such as sharks, bears, crocodiles, and leopards. Worthy of caution, sure, but not execution.
Wolves have historically roamed nearly every ecosystem on earth, from the salmon-flush tidal waters of coastal Canada to the Indian subtropics, from the Italian Riviera to the Arctic Circle to the saguaro-strewn Mexican desert. Other than humans, wolves were once the most widely distributed land mammal across the globe. The Pacific Northwest’s oldest fossilized wolf remains were found in Oregon and are over 300,000 years old; the area’s archaeological signs of Homo sapiens are thought to be the oldest in North America too, but that evidence is only 16,560 years old. The wolf roamed here long before humans did.
If I, like many children in North America, inherited fairy-tale stories that portrayed the wolf as a figure of fear, I was of a demographic that eventually absorbed the story of the wolf as a creature to fear for, less the hunter than the hunted. Though legislative policies and taxpayer-funded extermination led to their essential extinction in the continental United States by the mid-twentieth century, the environmental movement that followed ushered in a new lupine rhetoric. Beginning in the 1960s and 1970s, many conservationists, primarily in North America, espoused the belief that wolves held no danger to humans, a radical shift in the “symbolic biology” of the wolf, to borrow philosopher Noel Carroll’s terminology. Rather than framing the wolf as beast, writers portrayed it as a totem of wilderness, a reminder of the wildness pulsing within the spine even as one commuted to a dead-eyed desk job. “Saving the wolf” became a strategic fundraising lever for nature-facing nonprofits, a way to plumb the “guilt, vague environmental concern, and resources of people, especially in cities, who wish[ed] to do something for wildlife and ‘the environment,’” write Steven H. Fritts et al. in Wolves: Behavior, Ecology, and Conservation.
Farley Mowat’s 1963 bestseller, Never Cry Wolf, framed as a nonfiction account of his time observing wolves in subarctic Canada, was the first piece of popular literature to cast the wolf in a positive light. The book and follow-up Disney movie stirred tremendous support for the persecuted creature, but they also furthered misconceptions, such as the belief that wolves eat primarily mice, not caribou. Such oversimplifications propped up the Western-centric mindset Linnell et al. describe as “overtly optimistic,” rebutting “the historic or present day reality from other parts of the world” by suggesting wolves are incapable of harming humans. Mowat later admitted to fabricating much of his story to rally sympathy for Canis lupus. He excelled at shifting public opinion, and though some wolf advocates will argue his rhetoric was a necessary overcorrection—helping to pave the way for a climate where wolves could reestablish a foothold in the United States—the shadow Mowat stitched to the wolf replaced one myth with another.
For humans grieving the mass loss of other species on our warming earth, the return of the wolf can feel like a narrative of redemption, a promise that, like the tree that cracks through the concrete, “nature” will prevail. “The wolf situation in Oregon is extraordinary because the animals are coming back on their own—a rare example of a large predator actually expanding its range instead of, as is the more common pattern, diminishing ever closer to extinction,” wrote journalist Alastair Bland in a 2012 Smithsonian article. What is at stake in this redemption narrative, though, is not just the animal’s expanding population, but a particular fantasy of restoration-as-reparation. As if white man’s state-sanctioned slaughter of the wolf in the twentieth century—not to mention continual habitat destruction and fossil-fuel production since then—might be remedied if he could only bring wolves back in the twenty-first. Whether stoking fear, anger, admiration, grief, or guilt, the wolf is a pressure point in our psyches. The real animal, of course, could not care less.
I began researching the repopulation of wolves through the American west for my undergraduate environmental studies honors thesis in 2013. I was attending Bowdoin College in Maine at the time, and I had heard from an acquaintance back home that a journalist had gotten a death threat for reporting on wolves who were reestablishing themselves in Oregon. I didn’t understand how people were so riled up about an animal, and something about it made me—a conflict-averse, indecisive, weigh-both-sides Libra who had never thought much about the wolf before—decide to dive in. I understood the wolf had become a metonym for conflicts about public land, government intervention, and that oft-proclaimed cultural “urban-rural” divide, but I thought the riddle of cohabitation could be solved if I just shared the scientific reality of the “real wolf.” It turns out, though, that many people have written books about wolves, and they had already done that extraordinarily well. It is almost a cliché to allude to this at the beginning of a new wolf book—“more books may have been written about wolves than about any other wildlife species,” world-renowned wolf biologists David Mech and Luigi Boitani write in their introduction to Wolves: Behavior, Ecology, and Conservation—and a glut of lupine-related scholarship, journalism, and storytelling always begs the question: Why one more?
