Never Cry Wolf
For Angeline—the angel!
Preface
When I began Never Cry Wolf thirty years ago, I intended to cast the wolf in a rather minor role. My original plan was to write a satire about quite a different beast—the peculiar mutation of the human species known as the Bureaucrat who has become the dictatorial arbiter of all our affairs. I also thought it might be fun to take the mickey out of the new high priests of our times, the Scientists, who now consider themselves the only legitimate guardians and interpreters of Truth.
With malice aforethought I deliberately set out to expose these new would-be rulers of our world or, rather, to let them expose themselves in the pages of a book. But somehow I found myself losing interest in their bureaucratic and scientific buffoonery and becoming increasingly engrossed with what had originally been my secondary character—the wolf.
Never Cry Wolf was not kindly received by some human animals. Because it is my practice never to allow facts to interfere with the truth and because I believe that humor has a vital place in helping us understand our lives, many self-ordained experts derided the book. Some dedicated wolf haters, including the far-flung network of those who kill for sport, went so far as to claim it was an outright work of fiction. Others brushed it aside, claiming it was invalid because its author was not a bona fide scientist with at least a doctoral degree. For the most part I ignored this yapping at my heels, but perhaps now is a good time to turn, if briefly, upon the pursuing jackals—which is what a proper wolf would do.
Never Cry Wolf is based on two summers and a winter that I spent in the subarctic regions of southern Keewatin Territory and northern Manitoba as a biologist studying wolves and caribou. For most of that period I was employed by the federal government of Canada, and a report on the wolf studies I conducted has been on file with my employer since 1948. As to my qualifications: I possess six honorary doctoral degrees, which suggests that at least six universities consider me and my work worthy of academic recognition.
While it gives me pleasure to have earned the right, on the basis of these honors, to be called Dr. Sextus, it gives me even greater pleasure to note that almost every facet of wolf behavior described by me has since been rediscovered by the selfsame scientists who called my studies a work of the imagination. Some imagination!
Unfortunately, my major contention—that the wolf does not pose a threat to other species and is neither a danger to nor a real competitor of man—remains largely unaccepted.
Until about four hundred years ago the wolf was second only to man as the most successful and widespread mammal in North America. There is extensive evidence to show that, far from being at enmity, the wolf and hunting man worldwide enjoyed something approaching symbiosis, whereby the existence of each benefited the existence of the other. But after European and Asiatic men began divesting themselves of their hunting heritage in order to become farmers or herdsmen, they lost this ancient empathy with the wolf and became its inveterate enemy. So-called civilized man eventually succeeded in totally extirpating the real wolf from his collective mind and substituting for it a contrived image, replete with evil aspects that generate almost pathological fear and hatred. European man brought this mind-set to the Americas, where, spurred on by bounties and rewards and armed with poison, trap, snare, and gun (together with new weapons provided by an enlightened technology, including helicopters and fragmentation grenades), we moderns have since waged a war to the death against the wolf.
Of the twenty-four wolf subspecies and races inhabiting North America at the beginning of the European invasion, seven are now extinct and most of the remainder are endangered. The wolf has been effectively exterminated in all of the south-central portions of Canada, in Mexico, and in almost all of the United States south of Alaska. However, until quite recently an estimated 20,000 still shared the forests and arctic tundra with multitudes of moose, deer, caribou, and elk. Now the use of aircraft, snowmobiles, and all-terrain vehicles has enabled such numbers of sport killers and resource exploiters to penetrate this relatively inaccessible region that the stocks of “big game” animals therein have been dangerously depleted. This has ignited a furious and duplicitous outcry from hunters, outfitters, guides, lodge owners, and other financially interested parties against the wolf: “Wolves are destroying the game animals—our game animals! The wolves have got to go!”
Who listens to this accusation? Governments listen. Most, if not all, provincial and state departments of fish and game are little more than Trojan horses of the sportkiller lobby. And that lobby is extremely well organized and funded. Its members bring almost irresistible influence to bear on governments to protect game animals from their natural predators so that sport killers can continue to find a sufficient number of live targets for their weapons.
The preponderance of expert, independent opinion (as distinct from that of hired-gun biologists employed by government game departments) agrees that the wolf serves a vital role in maintaining the long-term well-being of its prey species, is not a threat to human beings, is responsible for only minor losses of domestic stock, and for the most part will not even live in proximity to human settlements or agricultural enterprises. This is the truth of the matter.
We have doomed the wolf not for what it is but for what we deliberately and mistakenly perceive it to be: the mythologized epitome of a savage, ruthless killer—which is, in reality, no more than the reflected image of ourself. We have made it the scapewolf for our own sins.
As 1993 draws on, it is clear that a massive and concerted new effort is being made by the sport killers to apply a final solution to the “wolf problem.” The last refuge of the species—the forests, mountains, and tundra of the North—is to be swept clean of this plague. In 1993 in Alaska, the Yukon Territory, and northern Alberta alone, terminal massacres of wolves from the air and on the ground are being planned or conducted by captive fish and game departments, supported by the hunting fraternity and by those others who make their profits from letting the blood of wild creatures.
There is a considerable likelihood that the unholy conspiracy of government “game managers,” self-serving politicos, and self-styled conservation organizations devoted to “enhancing” the supply of big-game targets will succeed. Only the most resolute and implacable resistance to this cabal of death dealers can now prevent the commission of one more major atrocity against life on earth—the annihilation of the wolf.
Farley Mowat
Port Hope
1993
Contents
Preface
1 The Lupine Project
2 Wolf Juice
3 Happy Landings
4 When Is a Wolf Not a Wolf?
5 Contact!
6 The Den
7 The Watcher Watched
8 Staking the Land
9 Good Old Uncle Albert
10 Of Mice and Wolves
11 Souris à la Crême
12 Spirit of the Wolf
13 Wolf Talk
14 Puppy Time
15 Uncle Albert Falls in Love
16 Morning Meat Delivery
17 Visitors from Hidden Valley
18 Family Life
19 Naked to the Wolves
20 The Worm i’ the Bud
21 School Days
22 Scatology
23 To Kill a Wolf
24 The World We Lost
Epilogue
A Biography of Farley Mowat
1
The Lupine Project
It is a long way in time and space from the bathroom of my Grandmother Mowat’s house in Oakville, Ontario, to the bottom of a wolf den in the Barren Lands of central Keewatin, and I have no intention of retracing the entire road which lies between. Nevertheless, there must be a beginning to any tale; and the story of my sojourn amongst the wolves begins properly in Granny’s bathroom.
When I was five years old I had still not given any indication—as most gifted children do well before that age—of where my future lay. Perhaps because they were disappointed by my failure to declare myself, my parents took me to Oakville and abandoned me to the care of my grandparents while they went off on a holiday.
The Oakville house—“Greenhedges” it was called—was a singularly genteel establishment, and I did not feel at home there. My cousin, who was resident in Greenhedges and was some years older than myself, had already found his métier, which lay in the military field, and had amassed a formidable army of lead soldiers with which he was single-mindedly preparing himself to become a second Wellington. My loutish inability to play Napoleon exasperated him so much that he refused to have anything to do with me except under the most formal circumstances.
Grandmother, an aristocratic lady of Welsh descent who had never forgiven her husband for having been a retail hardware merchant, tolerated me but terrified me too. She terrified most people, including Grandfather, who had long since sought surcease in assumed deafness. He used to while away the days as calm and unruffled as Buddha, ensconced in a great leather chair and apparently oblivious to the storms which swirled through the corridors of Greenhedges. And yet I know for a fact that he could hear the word “whiskey” if it was whispered in a room three stories removed from where he sat.
Because there were no soulmates for me at Greenhedges, I took to roaming about by myself, resolutely eschewing the expenditure of energy on anything even remotely useful; and thereby, if anyone had had the sense to see it, giving a perfectly clear indication of the pattern of my future.
One hot summer day I was meandering aimlessly beside a little local creek when I came upon a stagnant pool. In the bottom, and only just covered with greeen scum, three catfish lay gasping out their lives. They interested me. I dragged them up on the bank with a stick and waited expectantly for them to die; but this they refused to do. Just when I was convinced that they were quite dead, they would open their broad ugly jaws and give another gasp. I was so impressed by their stubborn refusal to accept their fate that I found a tin can, put them in it along with some scum, and took them home.
I had begun to like them, in an abstract sort of way, and wished to know them better. But the problem of where to keep them while our acquaintanceship ripened was a major one. There were no washtubs in Greenhedges. There was a bathtub, but the stopper did not fit and consequently it would not hold water for more than a few minutes. By bedtime I had still not resolved the problem and, since I felt that even these doughty fish could hardly survive an entire night in the tin can, I was driven to the admittedly desperate expedient of finding temporary lodgings for them in the bowl of Granny’s old-fashioned toilet.
I was too young at the time to appreciate the special problems which old age brings in its train. It was one of these problems which was directly responsible for the dramatic and unexpected encounter which took place between my grandmother and the catfish during the small hours of the ensuing night.
It was a traumatic experience for Granny, and for me, and probably for the catfish too. Throughout the rest of her life Granny refused to eat fish of any kind, and always carried a high-powered flashlight with her during her nocturnal peregrinations. I cannot be as certain about the effect on the catfish, for my unfeeling cousin—once the hooferaw had died down a little—callously flushed the toilet. As for myself, the effect was to engender in me a lasting affinity for the lesser beasts of the animal kingdom. In a word, the affair of the catfish marked the beginning of my career, first as a naturalist, and later as a biologist. I had started on my way to the wolf den.
My infatuation with the study of animate nature grew rapidly into a full-fledged love affair. I found that even the human beings with whom the study brought me into contact could be fascinating too. My first mentor was a middle-aged Scotsman who gained his livelihood delivering ice, but who was in fact an ardent amateur mammalogist. At a tender age he had developed mange, or leprosy, or some other such infantile disease, and had lost all his hair, never to recover it—a tragedy which may have had a bearing on the fact that, when I knew him, he had already devoted fifteen years of his life to a study of the relationship between summer molt and incipient narcissism in pocket gophers. This man had become so intimate with gophers that he could charm them with sibilant whistles until they would emerge from their underground retreats and passively allow him to examine the hair on their backs.
Nor were the professional biologists with whom I later came into contact one whit less interesting. When I was eighteen I spent a summer doing field work in the company of another mammalogist, seventy years of age, who was replete with degrees and whose towering stature in the world of science had been earned largely by an exhaustive study of uterine scars in shrews. This man, a revered professor at a large American university, knew more about the uteri of shrews than any other man has ever known. Furthermore he could talk about his subject with real enthusiasm. Death will find me long before I tire of contemplating an evening spent in his company during which he enthralled a mixed audience consisting of a fur trader, a Cree Indian matron, and an Anglican missionary, with an hour-long monologue on sexual aberrations in female pygmy shrews. (The trader misconstrued the tenor of the discourse; but the missionary, inured by years of humorless dissertations, soon put him right.)
My early years as a naturalist were free and fascinating, but as I entered manhood and found that my avocation must now become my vocation, the walls began to close in. The happy days of the universal scholar who was able to take a keen interest in all phases of natural history were at an end, and I was forced to recognize the unpalatable necessity of specializing, if I was to succeed as a professional biologist Nevertheless, as I began my academic training at the university, I found it difficult to choose the narrow path.
For a time I debated whether or not to follow the lead of a friend of mine who was specializing in scatology—the study of the excretory droppings of animals—and who later became a high-ranking scatologist with the United States Biological Survey. But although I found the subject mildly interesting, it failed to rouse my enthusiasm to the pitch where I could wish to make it my lifework. Besides, the field was overcrowded.
My personal predelictions lay towards studies of living animals in their own habitat. Being a literal fellow, I took the word biology—which means the study of life—at its face value. I was sorely puzzled by the paradox that many of my contemporaries tended to shy as far away from living things as they could get, and chose to restrict themselves instead to the aseptic atmosphere of laboratories where they used dead—often very dead—animal material as their subject matter. In fact, during my time at the university it was becoming unfashionable to have anything to do with animals, even dead ones. The new biologists were concentrating on statistical and analytical research, whereby the raw material of life became no more than fodder for the nourishment of calculating machines.
My inability to adjust to the new trends had an adverse effect upon my professional expectations. While my fellow students were already establishing themselves in various esoteric specialties, most of which they invented for themselves on the theory that if you are the only specialist in a given field you need fear no competition, I was still unable to deflect my interests from the general to the particular. As graduation approached I found that the majority of my contemporaries were assured of excellent research fobs while I seemed to have nothing particular to offer in the biological marketplace. It was, therefore, inevitable that I should end up working for the Government.
The die was cast one winter’s day when I received a summons from the Dominion Wildlife Service informing me that I had been hired at the munificent salary of one hundred and twenty dollars a month, and that I “would” report to Ottawa at once.
I obeyed this peremptory order with hardly more than a twitch of subdued rebelliousness, for if I had learned anything during my years at the university it was that the scientific hierarchy requires a high standard of obedience, if not subservience, from its acolytes.
Two days later I arrived in the windswept, graysouled capital of Canada and found my way into the dingy labyrinth which housed the Wildlife Service. Here I presented myself to the Chief Mammalogist, whom I had known as a school chum in more carefree days. But alas, he had now metamorphosed into a full-blown scientist, and was so shrouded in professional dignity that it was all I could do to refrain from making him a profound obeisance.
Through the next several days I was subjected to something called “orientation”—a process which, so far as I could see, was designed to reduce me to a malleable state of hopeless depression. At any rate, the legions of Dantesque bureaucrats whom I visited in their gloomy, Formalin-smelling dens, where they spent interminable hours compiling dreary data or originating meaningless memos, did nothing to rouse in me much devotion to my new employment. The only thing I actually learned during this period was that, by comparison with the bureaucratic hierarchy in Ottawa, the scientific hierarchy was a brotherhood of anarchy.
This was driven home one memorable day when, having at last been certified as fit for inspection, I was paraded into the office of the Deputy Minister, where I so far forgot myself as to address him as “Mister.” My escort of the moment, all white-faced and trembling, immediately rushed me out of the Presence and took me by devious ways to the men’s washroom. Having first knelt down and peered under the doors of all the cubicles to make absolutely certain we were alone and could not be overheard, he explained in an agonized whisper that I must never, on pain of banishment, address the Deputy as anything but “Chief,” or, barring that, by his Boer War title of “Colonel.”
Military titles were de rigeur. All memos were signed Captain-this or Lieutenant-that if they originated from the lower echelons; or Colonel-this and Brigadier-that if they came down from on high. Those members of the staff who had not had the opportunity to acquire even quasi-military status were reduced to the expedient of inventing suitable ranks—field ranks if they were senior men, and subaltern ranks for the juniors. Not everyone took this matter with due solemnity, and I met one new employee in the fishery section who distinguished himself briefly by sending a memo up to the Chief signed “J. Smith, Acting Lance-Corporal.” A week later this foolhardy youth was on his way to the northernmost tip of Ellesmere Island, there to spend his exile living in an igloo while studying the life history of the nine-spined stickleback.
Levity was not looked upon with favor anywhere in those austere offices, as I discovered for myself while attending a conference concerning my first assignment.
A tentative list of the material requirements for this assignment lay on the conference table, surrounded by many grave countenances. It was a formidable document, made out in quintuplicate—as was the official rule—and imposingly headed:
DESIDERATA FOR THE LUPINE PROJECT
Having already been unnerved by the gravity of the gathering, I lost my head completely when the assembly began to consider the twelfth item listed in this horrendous document:
Paper, toilet, Government standard: 12 rolls.
An austere suggestion by the representative of the Finance Department that, in the interest of economy, the quantity of this item might be reduced, providing the field party (which was me) exercised all due restraint, sent me into an hysterical spasm of giggling. I mastered myself almost instantly, but it was too late. The two most senior men, both “majors,” rose to their feet, bowed coldly, and left the room without a word.
The Ottawa ordeal drew toward its end; but the climax was still to come. One early spring morning I was called to the office of the senior officer who was my direct chief, for a final interview before departing “into the field.”
My chief sat behind a massive desk whose dusty surface was littered with yellowing groundhog skulls (he had been studying rates of tooth decay in groundhogs ever since he joined the Department in 1897). At his back hung the frowning, bearded portrait of an extinct mammalogist who glared balefully down upon me. The smell of Formalin swirled about like the fetid breath of an undertaker’s back parlor.
After a long silence, during which he toyed portentously with some of his skulls, my chief began his briefing. There was a solemnity about the occasion which would have done justice to the briefing of a special agent about to be entrusted with the assassination of a Head of State.
“As you are aware, Lieutenant Mowat,” my chief began, “the Canis lupus problem has become one of national importance. Within this past year alone this Department has received no less than thirty-seven memoranda from Members of the House of Commons, all expressing the deep concern of their constituents that we ought to do something about the wolf. Most of the complaints have come from such civic-minded and disinterested groups as various Fish and Game clubs, while members of the business community—in particular the manufacturers of some well-known brands of ammunition—have lent their weight to the support of these legitimate grievances of the voting public of this Great Dominion, because their grievance is the complaint that the wolves are killing all the deer, and more and more of our fellow citizens are coming back from more and more hunts with less and less deer.
“As you may possibly have heard, my predecessor supplied the Minister with an explanation of this situation in which it was his contention that there were fewer deer because the hunters had increased to the point where they outnumbered the deer about five to one. The Minister, in all good faith, read this fallacious statement in the House of Commons, and he was promptly shouted down by Members howling ‘Liar!’ and ‘Wolf-lover!’
“Three days later my predecessor retired to civilian life, and the Minister issued a press statement: ‘The Department of Mines and Resources is determined to do everything in its power to curb the carnage being wreaked upon the deer population by hordes of wolves. A full-scale investigation of this vital problem, employing the full resources of the Department, is to be launched at once. The people of this country can rest assured that the Government of which I have the honor to be a member will leave no stone unturned to put an end to this intolerable situation.’”
At this juncture my chief seized a particularly robust groundhog skull and began rhythmically clacking its jaws together as if to emphasize his final words:
“You, Lieutenant Mowat, have been chosen for this great task! It only remains for you to go out into the field at once and tackle this work in a manner worthy of the great traditions of this Department. The wolf, Lieutenant Mowat, is now your problem!”
Somehow I staggered to my feet, and with an involuntary motion brought my right hand up in a smart salute before fleeing from the room.
I fled from Ottawa too … that self-same night, aboard a Canadian Air Force transport plane. My immediate destination was Churchill, on the western shore of Hudson Bay; but beyond that, somewhere in the desolate wastes of the subarctic Barren Lands, lay my ultimate objective—the wolf himself.
2
Wolf Juice
The Air Force transport was a twin-engined plane capable of carrying thirty passengers, but by the time all my “desiderata” were aboard there was barely room left for the crew and me. The pilot, an amiable flight lieutenant wearing a handlebar mustache, watched the load going aboard with honest bewilderment writ large across his brow. His only information about me was that I was some sort of Government man going on a special mission to the Arctic. His expression grew increasingly quizzical as we swung three great bundles of clanking wolf traps into the cabin, following these with the midsection of a collapsible canoe which looked like nothing so much as a bathtub without ends. True to Departmental precedent, the bow and stern sections of this canoe had been shipped to another biologist who was studying rattlesnakes in the south Saskatchewan desert.
My armament was loaded aboard next. It consisted of two rifles, a revolver complete with holster and cartridge belt, two shotguns, and a case of tear-gas grenades with which I was expected to persuade reluctant wolves to leave their dens so that they could be shot. There were also two large smoke generators prominently labeled DANGER, to be used for signaling to aircraft in case I got lost or—perhaps—in case the wolves closed in. A case of “wolf getters”—fiendish devices which fire a charge of potassium cyanide into the mouth of any animal which investigates them—completed my arsenal.
My scientific gear followed, including two five-gallon cans at the sight of which the pilot’s eyebrows shot right up under his cap. They were marked: 100% Grain Alcohol for the Preservation of Specimen Stomachs.
Tents, camp stoves, sleeping bags, and a bundle of seven axes (to this day I do not know why seven, for I was going to a treeless land where even one would have been superfluous), skis, snowshoes, dog harness, a radio transceiver and innumerable boxes and bales whose contents were as inscrutable to me as to the pilot, followed in due course.
When everything was in and securely roped down, the pilot, copilot and I crawled over the mass of gear and wedged ourselves into the cockpit. The pilot, having been thoroughly trained in the demands of military security, mastered his rampant curiosity as to the nature and purpose of my bizarre outfit and contented himself with the gloomy comment that he “doubted if the old crate could get airborne, with all that lot aboard.” Secretly I doubted it too, but although the plane rattled and groaned dismally, she managed to take off.
The flight north was long and uneventful, except that we lost one engine over James Bay and had to complete the journey at an altitude of five hundred feet through rather dense fog. This minor contretemps temporarily took the pilot’s mind off the problem of who and what I was; but once we had landed in Churchill he was unable to contain his curiosity any longer.
“I know it’s none of my damn’ business,” he began apologetically as we walked toward one of the hangars, “but for heaven’s sake, chum, what’s up?”
“Oh,” I replied cheerfully, “I’m going off to spend a year or two living with a bunch of wolves, that’s all.”
The pilot grimaced as if he were a small boy who had been justly rebuked for an impertinence.
“Sorry,” he mumbled contritely. “Never should have asked.”
That pilot was not the only one who was curious. When I began trying to make arrangements in Churchill for a commercial bush-plane to fly me on into the interior, my innocent explanation of my purpose, together with the honest admission that I hadn’t the slightest idea where, in the almost untraveled wilderness, I wanted to be set down, drew either hostile stares of disbelief or conspiratorial winks. However, I was not deliberately trying to be evasive; I was only trying to follow the operation order which had been laid down for me in Ottawa:
Para. 3
Sec. (C)
Subpara. (iii)
You will, immediately upon reaching Churchill, proceed by chartered air transport in a suitable direction for the requisite distance and thereupon establish a Base at a point where it has been ascertained there is an adequate wolf population and where conditions generally are optimal to the furtherance of your operations.…
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