am a wildlife biologist. I learned about the wild behavior of wolves by studying hundreds of them in the field for two decades. I have written a stack of scientific reports in my career, but most people find them a bit boring. Science research includes hypotheses, methods, discussion, and conclusions all based on logical argument that is written in a way to help convince other biologists they are reading the ‘truth’ – at least as far as science is concerned. Unfortunately, good science has little to do with good writing. So, no matter how I arranged or stacked my publications they could never really tell what I have learned, what I know, what I think, and especially how I feel about wolves. To tell my story, I wrote this book. I had to shift away from presenting precise facts and arguments, and allow myself to write about what I know and think and feel. This shift was hard at first with many drafts and deleted files to show for it. I hope this book captures what I intended to say.
There is a Chinese proverb that goes, “Tell me and I'll forget; show me and I may remember; involve me and I'll understand.” I introduce each chapter with a narrative or short story. Here I have freely mixed real wolf events I have seen with historical fiction to spark and engage your imagination and interest. My hope is that by the end of the book you will understand more about the biology of the wolf and how this exceptional predator – and ultimately we humans – fit into the Yukon landscape, the very last remaining mountain wilderness of North America.
For the prehistoric chapters I have had to imagine the wolf and where it fits into this ancient world through narratives. Most stories are based on real wolf behavior I have seen in the wild. Some events are based on what other biologists have written down or told me about. My imaginary events, or ones like them, probably happened long ago because the modern Yukon wolf – Canis lupus – is similar to the ancient wolf of the past. How modern wolves behave today can help us reconstruct an understanding of how wolves lived in the Yukon long before there were people in the landscape.
The first section of the book is about history. We will take a journey through Yukon time and space, and the wolf is our vehicle. The journey begins at the height of the last ice age. Wolves roamed the vast ice-free plains of Beringia preying on a multitude of large mammals and competing for the spoils with some of the most dangerous large predators that ever lived. The second chapter is set on the Old Crow Flats 12,500 years ago; a time when the landscape and plant communities were rapidly changing and the wolf faced the greatest extinction of mammals ever known. Chapter Three is set 7,500 years ago – after the great continental ice sheets had disappeared and forests were spreading through the Yukon. The land was filled with caribou and a host of new mammals including elk, bison and moose. The fourth chapter explores the idea of the wolf as ‘provider’ to Yukon native peoples, and why it became important in mythology and a spiritual animal for many tribes. In Chapter Five, I have invented a fictional encounter on the frozen Yukon River during the Klondike gold rush between a pack of wolves and Jack London , a writer who went on to shape our collective notions about wilderness. Chapters Six and Seven follow social change in the Yukon from 1900 to the 1970’s when people regularly turned against the wolf using bounties, bullets, and strychnine to reduce competition by wolves for valuable fur and big game.
The second part of the book is titled Understanding. It focuses on the things I have learned from studying Yukon wolves. These chapters explore the relations between wolves and caribou, Dall’s sheep, and moose – their main prey. There are also chapters about how wolves interact and compete with ravens and also grizzly bears – their archrivals. We will go inside the cockpits of planes and helicopters to see how my team snow-tracked wolves in winter and captured and radio-collared wolves to study their movements, predatory behavior, and survival. Another chapter explores the relation between wolves and water, an often overlooked, but critical element of Yukon wolf habitat. The last chapter is about contemporary wolf control. I was part of three such programs between 1982 and 2000. As a biologist, I helped find and shoot wolves from the air, but I also pressured the end of a government poison campaign, and I pioneered the first non-lethal methods to control wolf numbers more humanely. I will explain why I no longer believe that broad scale killing of wolves is biologically justified and the wrong thing to do to increase moose and caribou populations for people. So, to begin, let’s return 20,000 years to a desolate, wind-scoured mountain ridge at the edge of the living world. There is an ancient wolf pack on it.
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