Contact!

NATURALLY I WAS disappointed that my first encounter with wolves should have turned out to be an encounter with nonwolves; but there were compensations.

The young man who owned the dogs was, so it developed, a trapper of mixed Eskimo and white parentage who possessed a cabin a few miles away. It was ideally suited to serve me as a permanent base camp. Apart from a small band of Eskimos including his mother’s family, living seventy miles away to the north, this young man, whose name was Mike, was the only human inhabitant in an area of some ten thousand square miles. This was excellent news, for it ensured that my study of the wolves would not be adversely affected by human intrusions.

Mike was at first inclined to treat me with some reserve—not to say suspicion. During his eighteen years of life he had never known an aircraft to land in his part of the Barren Lands, and indeed had only seen two or three planes before, and these had been passing high overhead. It was therefore difficult for him to absorb the fact that an aircraft which he had neither seen nor heard had landed me and my immense pile of equipment on the middle of his lake. In the beginning of our relationship he leaned more toward a supernatural explanation of my presence; for he had learned enough about Christianity from his white trader father to be on his guard against the devil. Consequently he took no chances. During the first few days he carried his 30–30 rifle in his hands and kept his distance; but soon after I introduced him to wolf-juice he put the rifle away, having apparently decided that if I was the devil, my blandishments were too powerful to be resisted.

Probably because he could not think what else to do with me, Mike led me off to his cabin that first night. Although it was hardly a palatial affair, being built of poles and roofed with decaying caribou hides, I saw at once that it would serve my purposes.

Having been empowered by the Department to hire native assistance, so long as the consequent expenditure did not exceed three dollars a month, I promptly made a deal with Mike, giving him an official I. O. U. for ten dollars to cover three months’ accommodation in his cabin, as well as his services as guide and general factotum. I was aware that it was a generous payment in the light of the prevailing rates which Government agencies, missions and the trading companies paid the arctic natives, but I felt my extravagance would be tolerated by the Treasury Department in view of the fact that, without Mike’s help, my own Department stood to lose about four thousand dollars’ worth of equipment as soon as the lake ice melted.

I suspect, from the nature of subsequent events, that the bargain I struck with Mike was rather one-sided and that he may not have fully grasped its implications; but in any event he provided the services of his dog team to help me move my supplies and equipment to his cabin.

During the next several days I was extremely busy unpacking my equipment and setting up my field laboratory—being obliged to usurp most of the limited space in the tiny cabin in the process. I had little time to spare for Mike, but I did notice that he seemed deeply preoccupied. However, since he had so far seemed to be naturally taciturn—except with his dogs—and because I did not feel it right, on such short acquaintance, to intrude into his personal affairs, I made no attempt to discover the nature of his distress. Nevertheless I did occasionally try to divert him by offering demonstrations of some of my scientific equipment.

These demonstrations seemed to fascinate him, although they did not have the desired effect of easing his distrait attitude which, if anything, got worse. Shortly after I showed him the cyanide “wolf getters” and explained that not only were they instantly fatal, but almost impossible to detect, he began to display definite signs of irrational behavior. He took to carrying a long stick about with him, and before he would even sit down at the crude table for a meal, he would poke the chair, and sometimes even the plate of food, in a most peculiar way. He would also poke at his boots and clothing before picking them up in the morning when he was getting dressed.

On another occasion, when I showed him four gross of mousetraps with which I intended to collect small mammals to be used in determining the identification of animal remains found in wolf stomachs, and then explained the method of boiling a mouse skeleton in order to prepare it as a museum specimen, he departed the cabin without a word and refused to take his meals with me from that time forward.

I was not unduly alarmed by his behavior, for I had some knowledge of psychology and I recognized the symptoms of an ingrown personality. Nevertheless I determined to try to draw Mike out of himself. One evening I inveigled him over to the corner where I had set up my portable laboratory and proudly showed him my collection of glittering scalpels, bone shears, brain spoons and other intricate instruments which I would use in conducting autopsies on wolves, caribou and other beasts. I experienced some difficulty in explaining to Mike what was meant by an autopsy, so I opened a pathology textbook at a two-page color diagram of a human abdomen under dissection, and with this visual aid was well into my explanation when I realized I had lost my audience. Mike was backing slowly toward the door, his black eyes fixed on me with an expression of growing horror, and I realized at once that he had misconstrued what I had been saying. I sprang up in an attempt to reassure him, but at my movement he turned and fled through the door at a dead run.

I did not see him again until the following afternoon, when, returning from setting out a trapline for mice, I found him in the cabin packing his equipment as if for an extended journey. In a voice so low and rapid that I had difficulty understanding him, he explained that he had been urgently called away to visit his sick mother at the camp of the Eskimos, and would probably be gone for some time. With that he rushed out to where his team stood ready harnessed and, without another word, departed at a furious pace into the north.

I was sorry to see him go, for the knowledge that I was now entirely alone with the local wolves, while satisfying from a scientific point of view, seemed to intensify the Hound of the Baskervilles atmosphere of the desolate and stormswept lands around me. Then too, I had not yet clearly decided upon the best method of approaching the wolves, and I would have been happy to have had Mike perform the initial introductions. However, a sick mother took precedence even over my scientific needs—though I am still at a loss to understand how Mike knew his mother was ill.

The weighty problem of how best to make contact with the wolves hung fire while I began drawing up my study schedules. These were detailed in the extreme. Under “Sexual Behavior” alone I was able to list fifty-one subtopics, all requiring investigation. By the end of the week I was running short of paper. It was time to get out and about.

As I was a newcomer to the Barrens, it behooved me to familiarize myself with the country in a cautious manner. Hence, on my first expedition afield I contented myself with making a circular tour on a radius of about three hundred yards from the cabin.

This expedition revealed little except the presence of four or five hundred caribou skeletons; indeed, the entire area surrounding the cabin seemed to be carpeted in caribou bones. Since I knew from my researches in Churchill that trappers never shot caribou, I could only assume that these animals had been killed by wolves. This was a sobering conclusion. Assuming that the density of the caribou kill was uniform over the whole country, the sample I had seen indicated that wolves must kill, on the average, about twenty million caribou a year in Keewatin alone.

After this dismaying tour of the boneyard it was three days before I found time for another trip afield. Carrying a rifle and wearing my revolver, I went a quarter-mile on this second expedition—but saw no wolves. However, to my surprise I observed that the density of caribou remains decreased in an almost geometric ratio to the distance from the cabin. Sorely puzzled by the fact that the wolves seemed to have chosen to commit their worst slaughter so close to a human habitation, I resolved to question Mike about it if or when I saw him again.

Meantime spring had come to the Barrens with volcanic violence. The snows melted so fast that the frozen rivers could not carry the melted water, which flowed six feet deep on top of the ice. Finally the ice let go, with a thunderous explosion; then it promptly jammed, and in short order the river beside which I was living had entered into the cabin, bringing with it the accumulated refuse left by fourteen Huskies during a long winter.

Eventually the jam broke and the waters subsided; but the cabin had lost its charm, for the debris on the floor was a foot thick and somewhat repellent. I decided to pitch my tent on a gravel ridge above the cabin, and here I was vainly trying to go to sleep that evening when I became aware of unfamiliar sounds. Sitting bolt upright, I listened intently.

The sounds were coming from just across the river, to the north, and they were a weird medley of whines, whimpers and small howls. My grip on the rifle slowly relaxed. If there is one thing at which scientists are adept, it is learning from experience; I was not to be fooled twice. The cries were obviously those of a Husky, probably a young one, and I deduced that it must be one of Mike’s dogs (he owned three half-grown pups not yet trained to harness which ran loose after the team) that had got lost, retraced its way to the cabin, and was now begging for someone to come and be nice to it.

I was delighted. If that pup needed a friend, a chum, I was its man! I climbed hastily into my clothes, ran down to the riverbank, launched the canoe, and paddled lustily for the far bank.

The pup had never ceased its mournful plaint, and I was about to call out reassuringly when it occurred to me that an unfamiliar human voice might frighten it. I decided to stalk it instead, and to betray my presence only when I was close enough for soothing murmurs.

From the nature of the sounds I had assumed the dog was only a few yards away from the far bank, but as I made my way in the dim half-light, over broken boulders and across gravel ridges, the sounds seemed to remain at the same volume while I appeared to be getting no closer. I assumed the pup was retreating, perhaps out of shyness. In my anxiety not to startle it away entirely, I still kept quiet, even when the whimpering wail stopped, leaving me uncertain about the right direction to pursue. However, I saw a steep ridge looming ahead of me and I suspected that, once I gained its summit, I would have a clear enough view to enable me to locate the lost animal. As I neared the crest of the ridge I got down on my stomach (practicing the fieldcraft I had learned in the Boy Scouts) and cautiously inched my way the last few feet.

My head came slowly over the crest—and there was my quarry. He was lying down, evidently resting after his mournful singsong, and his nose was about six feet from mine. We stared at one another in silence. I do not know what went on in his massive skull, but my head was full of the most disturbing thoughts. I was peering straight into the amber gaze of a fully grown arctic wolf, who probably weighed more than I did, and who was certainly a lot better versed in close-combat techniques than I would ever be.

For some seconds neither of us moved but continued to stare hypnotically into one another’s eyes. The wolf was the first to break the spell. With a spring which would have done justice to a Russian dancer, he leaped about a yard straight into the air and came down running. The textbooks say a wolf can run twenty-five miles an hour, but this one did not appear to be running, so much as flying low. Within seconds he had vanished from my sight.

My own reaction was not so dramatic, although I may very well have set some sort of a record for a cross-country traverse myself. My return over the river was accomplished with such verve that I paddled the canoe almost her full length up on the beach on the other side. Then, remembering my responsibilities to my scientific supplies, I entered the cabin, barred the door, and regardless of the discomfort caused by the stench of the debris on the floor made myself as comfortable as I could on top of the table for the balance of the short-lived night.

It had been a strenuous interlude, but I could congratulate myself that I had, at last, established contact—no matter how briefly—with the study species.