Paula Wild - Return of the Wolf: Conflict and Coexistence

Conflict & Coexistence

Paula Wild

Copyright 2018 Paula Wild

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without prior permission of the publisher or, in the case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, a licence from Access Copyright, .

Douglas and McIntyre (2013) Ltd.

P.O. Box 219, Madeira Park, BC , V 0 N 2 H 0

www.douglas-mcintyre.com

Edited by Pam Robertson

Indexed by Allie Turner

Jacket design by Anna Comfort OKeeffe

Text design by Shed Simas / Ona Design

Printed and bound in Canada

Printed on FSC -certified stock

Endsheets: Wolf track at Howse River Flats, Banff National Park. Photo by Shutterstock/Autumn Sky Photography

Title page photo by Paula Wild. Photo on page vi by Dan Stahler, US National Park Service. Photo on page viii by John Cavers.

Douglas and McIntyre (2013) Ltd. acknowledges the support of the Canada Council for the Arts, which last year invested $ 153 million to bring the arts to Canadians throughout the country. We also gratefully acknowledge financial support from the Government of Canada and from the Province of British Columbia through the BC Arts Council and the Book Publishing Tax Credit.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Wild, Paula, author

Return of the wolf : conflict and coexistence / Paula Wild.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Issued in print and electronic formats.

ISBN 978-1-77162-206-6 (hardcover).-- ISBN 978-1-77162-207-3 ( HTML )

1. Human-wolf encounters. 2. WolvesSocial aspects. 3. WolvesEffect of human beings on. 4. WolvesFolklore. 5. WolvesEcology. I. Title.

QL 737. C 22 W 55 2018599.773 C 2018-903821-7

C 2018-903822-5

To my brother, Doug, and sisters, Kelly and Kim, the best packmates a human could ask for.

The study of wolves is actually one of discovering how the human mind works. Valerius Geist Their ears are like radar. They can smell a man from three to four kilometres away. And their eyes they can see through everything. Ion Maksimovic in Wolf Hunter

At first glance I thought it was a German shepherd. The colouring was just about right but the extraordinarily long legs ended in huge paws, the muzzle was long and blocky, and the head seemed too large for the slender body. It was beautiful and totally still. The dead wolf lay in the back of Gordie Boyds pickup. Boyd had been hired by the British Columbia government to trap and kill wolves on northern Vancouver Island. He had told me about the carcass and Id asked to see it. Even so, I wasnt prepared for the fascination I felt at my first close-up view of a wild wolf, and my confusion about why it had to die.

I never dreamt that thirty years later, just down the road, Id be sitting within a few steps of a young white wolf. It lay on the grass, head on front paws, staring at me intently. Barely daring to breathe, I returned its gaze. Minutes passed, thenpoof!it disappeared. It felt like the wolf had stared straight into my soul, and I wondered what it had seen there.

Seconds later, the small hairs on the back of my neck stood on end. I turned my head and there, on the side of the deck, was the white wolf. As silent as fog, it was creeping up behind me.

Nahanni isnt a purebred wolf, but pretty darn close. His owner, Gary Allan, who operates the education and advocacy program Who Speaks for Wolf, figures Nahannis DNA is 95 per cent or more Canis lupus (grey wolf). Weighing in at 23 kilograms (51 lbs), Nahanni is an Arctic wolf, and Allan says they have a reputation for being particularly wary of humans. Nahanni definitely fit that profile. Of the two four-month-old high-content wolf-dogs I met at Allans in August 2014, Nahanni always kept his distance, yet was the one that watched me the most closely. On my first visit, every time I went into the house, he jumped up on the deck to sniff the spot where Id been sitting. Once he squatted to leave a small brown turd at the former site of my derrire. A sign of welcome or a warning to stay out of his territory? At the time, I had no way to determine the nature of his calling card.

Nahanni, a high-content wolf-dog, is four months old in this photo. He gets his white coat from his Arctic wolf ancestry and, like many wolves and high-content wolf-dogs, is wary around humans, especially strangers. Photo by Paula Wild

While researching my previous book, The Cougar, I came across some intriguing information about wolves and knew I wanted to write about them. Id spent a day at Cougar Mountain Zoo observing the fluid body movements of three young cougars and the ways they related to each other and zoo visitors. I was after something more with wolves. I wanted to watch the way their muscles tensed and relaxed; touch coarse hair; peer at big teeth; and observe pack dynamics. To do all that meant interacting with captive animals. Allans four almost-wolves were perfect: they were of varied ages and degrees of familiarity with humans, and close enough that I could visit numerous times.

Ive often wondered how people and wolves initially related to each other and when those first encounters took place. Recent estimations of the appearance of early humans and wolflike canids indicate that some version of human and wolf may have shared the landscape for one to nearly three million years. While those dates are speculative, a set of foot and paw prints confirms that a wolf and a child, estimated to be a boy around eight years old, explored the same cavern long ago.

Rediscovered in 1994, the Chauvet-Pont-dArc Cave is located on a limestone cliff above an old riverbed about a two-hour drive northwest of Marseille in southern France. Although there are other caves in the area, Chauvet-Pont-dArc is by far the largestand, more importantly, contains hundreds of some of the oldest known and best preserved figurative cave paintings in the world. These ancient illustrations depict at least thirteen species of animals, as well as two partial human bodies. Fossilized bones and skulls of a variety of ungulates and predators litter the soft, claylike floor, which retains the impressions of human and animal tracks, as well as what are believed to be cave bear sleeping areas. Radiocarbon dating taken from prehistoric hearths and smoke residue from torches places the oldest art and mammal remains at approximately 30,000 years old.