The Worm i’ the Bud

I QUERIED Ootek about the apparently inexplicable behavior of the band of wolves I had seen at the Eskimo camp, and in his patient and kindly fashion he once more endeavored to put me straight.

To begin with, he told me that a healthy adult caribou can outrun a wolf with ease, and even a three-week-old fawn can outrun all but the swiftest wolf. The caribou were perfectly well aware of this, and therefore knew they had little to fear from wolves in the normal course of events. The wolves were fully aware of it too, and, being highly intelligent, they seldom even attempted to run down a healthy caribou—knowing full well that this would be a senseless waste of effort.

What the wolves did instead, according to Ootek, was to adopt a technique of systematically testing the state of health and general condition of the deer in an effort to find one which was not up to par. When caribou were abundant this testing was accomplished by rushing each band and putting it to flight for just long enough to expose the presence, or absence, of a sick, wounded or otherwise inferior beast. If such a one was revealed, the wolves closed on it and attempted to make a kill. If there was no such beast in the herd, the wolves soon desisted from the chase and went off to test another group.

When caribou were hard to find, different techniques were used. Several wolves acting in concert would sometimes drive a small herd of deer into an ambush where other wolves were waiting; or if caribou were very scarce, the wolves might use a relay system whereby one wolf would drive the deer towards another wolf posted some distance away, who would then take up the chase in his turn. Techniques such as these decreased the caribou’s natural advantages, of course, but it was usually still the weakest or at any rate the least able deer which fell victim to the pursuing wolves.

“It is as I told you,” Ootek said. “The caribou feeds the wolf, but it is the wolf who keeps the caribou strong. We know that if it were not for the wolf there would soon be no caribou at all, for they would die as weakness spread among them.”

Ootek also stressed the fact that, once a kill had been made, the wolves did no more hunting until the supply of food was completely gone and they were forced by hunger to go back to work.

These were novel concepts to one who had been taught to believe that wolves were not only capable of catching almost anything but, actuated by an insatiable blood lust, would slaughter everything which came within their range.

Of the hunts I subsequently watched, almost all followed the pattern of the first one I had seen. The hunters, numbering from one to as many as eight individual wolves, would be observed trotting unhurriedly through the dispersed groups of deer, who almost invariably seemed quite unconcerned by the presence of their “mortal enemies.” Every now and again a wolf, or sometimes two or three, would turn aside from the line of march and make a short dash at some nearby deer, who would wait until the attackers were about a hundred yards distant before throwing up their heads and galloping off disdainfully. The wolves would stop and watch the deer go. If they ran well and were obviously in good fettle, the wolves would then turn away.

The testing was not haphazard and I began to see a pattern of selection emerging. It was very seldom indeed that wolves bothered testing the herds of prime bucks, who were then at the peak of condition, having done nothing all summer but eat and sleep. It was not that these bucks were dangerous adversaries (their great spreads of antlers are useless as weapons) but simply that the wolves did not stand a chance of closing with them, and they knew it.

Mixed herds of does with fawns were much more interesting to the wolves, for the percentage of injured, malformed or inferior individuals is naturally higher among the fawns, who have not yet been subjected to any prolonged period of rigorous natural selection.

Groups of aged and sterile does were also a favorite target for testing. Sometimes one of these old and weakened beasts would be concealed in the midst of a herd of prime and vigorous animals; but the wolves, who must have known the caribou almost as intimately as they knew themselves, would invariably spot such a beast and test what looked to my eyes like a hopelessly healthy and active herd.

Fawns were often tested more severely than adults, and a wolf might chase a fawn for two or three hundred yards; but unless the young animal had given signs of weakness or exhaustion within that distance, the chase was usually abandoned.

Economy of effort seemed to be a guiding principle with the wolves—and an eminently sensible one too, for the testing process often had to be continued for many hours before the wolves encountered a caribou sufficiently infirm to be captured.

When the testing finally produced such a beast, the hunt would take a new turn. The attacking wolf would recklessly expend the energy he had been conserving during the long search, and would go for his prey in a glorious surge of speed and power which, if he was lucky, would bring him close behind the fleeing deer. Panic-stricken at last, the deer would begin frantically zigzagging—a foolish thing to do, I thought, since this enabled the wolf to take short cuts and close the gap more quickly.

Contrary to one more tenet of the wolf myth, I never saw a wolf attempt to hamstring a deer. Drawing upon all his strength, the wolf would forge up alongside the caribou and leap for its shoulder. The impact was usually enough to send the deer off balance and, before it could recover, the wolf would seize it by the back of the neck and bring it down, taking care to avoid the wildly thrashing hoofs, a blow from any one of which could cave in the wolfs rib-cage like so much brittle candy.

The kill was quickly, and usually cleanly, made and I doubt very much if the deer suffered any more than a hog suffers when it is being butchered for human consumption.

The wolf never kills for fun, which is probably one of the main differences distinguishing him from man. It is hard work for a wolf to catch and kill a big game animal. He may hunt all night and cover fifty or sixty miles of country before he is successful—if he is successful even then. This is his business, his job, and once he has obtained enough meat for his own and his family’s needs he prefers to spend the rest of his time resting, being sociable, or playing.

Contrary to yet another misconception, I know of no valid evidence that wolves kill more than they can use, even when the rare opportunity to do so arises. A kill made during the denning season is revisited time and again until the last ounce of meat has been stripped from it. Often—if gulls, ravens, foxes and other scavengers are numerous—the wolf will dismember the carcass and bury sections of it at considerable distances from the site of the kill in order to preserve it for his own use. Later in the season, when the united family is freely roaming its territory, the band will camp near each kill until it is completely consumed.

Of sixty-seven wolf-killed caribou which I examined after the wolves were finished with them, few consisted of anything except bones, ligaments, hair and offal. In most cases even the long-bones had been cracked for the marrow content; and in some cases the skull had been gnawed open—a formidable task even for a wolf.

Another point of interest is that what little remained of most of these carcasses showed evidence of disease or serious debility. Bone deformations, particularly those caused by necrosis of the skull, were common; and the worn state of the teeth of many skulls showed that these belonged to old and enfeebled animals. Fresh kills, where the whole carcass was available for examination, were hard to come by; but on a number of occasions I reached a deer almost as soon as the wolves had killed it and, with inexcusable gall, shooed the wolves away. They went timidly enough, albeit unhappily. Several of these deer were so heavily infested with external and internal parasites that they were little better than walking menageries, doomed to die soon in any case.

As the weeks wore on toward the summer’s end, the validity of Ootek’s thesis become more and more obvious. The vital importance played by the wolf in preserving rather than in destroying the caribou seemed irrefutable to me, although I was by no means sure it would appear in the same light to my employers. I needed overwhelming proof if I was to convince them, and preferably proof of a solidly material nature.

With this in mind, I began making collections of the parasites found in wolf-killed caribou. As usual, Ootek took a keen interest in this new aspect of my work; but it was a short-lived interest.

Through all of recorded time his people had been caribou eaters, living largely on raw or only partly cooked meat, because of the shortage of fuel for fires. Ootek himself was weaned on caribou meat, pre-chewed for him by his mother, and it had been his staple food ever since he gave up mother’s milk. Consequently he took his meat for granted, and it had never occurred to him to turn an analytical eye upon his daily bread. When he saw me producing scores of varieties and thousands of individual worms and cysts from various parts of caribou anatomy, he was greatly surprised.

One morning he was watching in somber fascination as I dissected a particularly pest-ridden old buck. I always tried to explain what I was doing so that he would understand the nature of my studies, and this seemed to be as good a time as any to brief him on the subject of parasitization. Hauling a bladder cyst about the size of a golfball out of the caribou’s liver, I explained that this was the inactive form of a tapeworm, and that, if eaten by a carnivore, it would eventually develop into several segmented creatures about thirty feet in length, coiled neatly in the new host’s intestines.

Ootek looked sick.

“You mean when it is eaten by a wolf?” he asked hopefully.

“Nahk,” I replied, exercising my growing Eskimo vocabulary. “Foxes, wolves, even people will do. It will grow in any of them, though perhaps not as well in people.”

Ootek shuddered and began to scratch his stomach as if conscious of an itching sensation in that region.

“I do not like liver, fortunately,” he said, greatly relieved now that he had remembered this fact.

“Oh, these worms are found all through the caribou,” I explained, with the enthusiasm of an expert enlightening a layman. “Look here. See these spots in the rump meat? White men call this ‘measled meat.’ These are the resting forms of another kind of worm. I do not know for sure if it will grow in people. But these—” and here I deftly extracted some threadlike nematode worms, each ten or more inches in length, from the dissected lungs— “these have been found in men: in fact enough of them will choke a man to death in a very little while.”

Ootek coughed convulsively and his mahogany-dark face grew wan again.

“That is enough,” he pleaded when he had got his breath back. “Tell me no more! I go now, back to the camp, and there I will think hard of many things and I will forget what you have told me. You are not kind. For if these things be true, then surely I will have to eat fish like an otter, or else starve to death. But perhaps this is a white man’s joke?”

There was such a pathetic note of hope in his question that it roused me from my professor’s trance and I belatedly realized what I was doing to the man.

I laughed, if in a somewhat artificial manner.

“Eema, Ootek. It is a joke on you. Only a joke. Now go you back to camp and cook our supper of big steaks. Only,” and in spite of myself I could not restrain the adjuration, “make damn’ sure you cook them well!”