To Kill a Wolf

THE TIME was drawing near when I would have to leave Wolf House Bay—not because I wished to, but because the wolves would soon be departing to their wintering grounds.

During late October, when winter begins to savage the bleak plains, the caribou turn their backs on the tundra and begin working their way down into the alien but sheltered world of forests. And where they go, the wolves must follow; for in winter there is nothing left upon the frozen plains for the wolves to eat.

From early November until April the wolves and caribou travel together through the taiga, the sparse borderline forests of stunted spruce and jackpine lying below the timberline. In years when the snow-shoe rabbits are abundant, the wolves prey heavily upon them; but always they stay close to the deer—since, in time of famine, only deer can save them.

Each wolf family travels as a group, but it is not uncommon for two or three small groups to come together into a single band. There appear to be no fixed rules about this, and such a band can break up into its component parts again at any time. However, there are upper limits to the numbers in a given band. Winter hunting requires a close degree of co-operation between several wolves if the hunt is to be successful; but if there are too many wolves they will not all get enough to eat from a given kill. A band of from five to ten individuals seems to be about the ideal size.

They do not appear to have fixed territories in winter. Each band hunts where and as it pleases, and when two strange bands meet they have been observed to greet each other and then go their separate ways.

A concentration of bands seldom occurs in any one area. How they manage to keep dispersed, and thereby avoid the dangers of too many wolves and too little food, is not known; but the Chippewayan Indians say it is done by means of urine messages which are left on every prominent point, rock, or tree around the lakes and along the well-used trails. The fact remains that, unless outright starvation sweeps the land, the nomadic winter wolf bands, moving at the whim of the equally nomadic caribou herds, somehow manage to avoid treading on one another’s toes.

For the Barren Land wolves winter is the time of death.

Once they have entered timber they are exposed to a concentrated, highly skilled, and furious assault from men. Trappers cannot bear them, for wolves not only compete for caribou but can wreak havoc with a trapline, springing the light traps used for foxes without getting caught themselves. Furthermore, most white trappers are afraid of wolves—some of them deathly afraid—and there is nothing like the whip of fear to lash men into a fury of destruction.

The war against wolves is kept at white heat by Provincial and Federal Governments, almost all of which offer wolf bounties ranging from ten dollars to thirty dollars per wolf; and in times when the value of foxes and other furs is depressed, this bounty becomes in effect a subsidy paid to trappers and traders alike.

Much is said and written about the number of deer reputedly slaughtered by wolves. Very little is said about the actual numbers of wolves slaughtered by men. In one case a general falsehood is widely and officially disseminated; in the other the truth seems to be suppressed. Yet one trapper operating along the boundary between Manitoba and Keewatin, in the winter of the first year of my study, collected bounty on a hundred and eighteen wolves of which one hundred and seven were young ones born the previous spring. According to law he should have killed those wolves by trapping or shooting them. In fact he did what everyone else was doing—and still does in the Far North, with the covert permission of Governments: he spread strychnine so indiscriminately over an immense area that almost the entire population of foxes, wolverines and many lesser flesh-eaters was wiped out. That did not matter since foxes fetched no price that year. Wolves were worth twenty dollars each for bounty.

Traps and poison are the commonest wolf-killers; but there are other methods in wide use as well. One is the airplane, a favorite of those civic-minded sportsmen who serve society by sacrificing their time and money to the destruction of vermin. The crew of a high-flying aircraft keeps watch for wolves in the open, preferably on the ice of a lake. When one is found the aircraft is flown low over him and the beast is pursued so long and hard that he frequently collapses and sometimes dies even before a blast of buckshot strikes him.

However, I know of one occasion when this method failed of its purpose. Two men in their own light aircraft had flown out from a large city to help rid the world of wolves. During previous hunts they had killed many, and the pilot had become adept at chasing the beasts so closely that his skis would almost strike them. One day he came too close. The harassed wolf turned, leaped high into the air, and snapped at one of the skis. He died in the ensuing crash; but so did the two men. The incident was described in an article in a widely distributed sportsman’s magazine as an example of the cunning and dangerous nature of the wolf, and of the boundless courage of the men who match themselves against him. This is, of course, a classic gambit. Whenever and wherever men have engaged in the mindless slaughter of animals (including other men), they have often attempted to justify their acts by attributing the most vicious or revolting qualities to those they would destroy; and the less reason there is for the slaughter, the greater the campaign of vilification.

Antiwolf feelings at Brochet (the northern Manitoba base for my winter studies) when I arrived there from Wolf House Bay were strong and bitter. As the local game warden aggrievedly described the situation to me: the local people had been able to kill 50,000 caribou each winter as recently as two decades past, whereas now they were lucky if they could kill a couple of thousand. Caribou were becoming scarce to the point of rarity, and wolves were unanimously held to be to blame. My rather meek remonstrance to the effect that wolves had been preying on caribou, without decimating the herds, for some tens of thousands of years before the white men came to Brochet, either fell on deaf ears or roused my listeners to fury at my partisanship.

One day early in the winter a trader burst into my cabin in a state of great excitement.

“Listen,” he said challengingly, “you’ve been screaming for proof wolves butcher the herds. Well, hitch up your team and get out to Fishduck Lake. You’ll get your proof! One of my trappers come in an hour ago and he seen fifty deer down on the ice, all of ’em killed by wolves—and hardly a mouthful of the meat been touched!”

Accompanied by a Cree Indian companion I did as I was bid, and late that afternoon we reached Fishduck Lake. We found a sickening scene of slaughter. Scattered on the ice were the carcasses of twenty-three caribou, and there was enough blood about to turn great patches of snow into crimson slush.

The trapper had been correct in stating that no use had been made of the carcasses. Apart from some minor scavenging by foxes, jays and ravens, all but three of the animals were untouched. Two of those three were bucks—minus their heads; while the third, a young and pregnant doe, was minus both hindquarters.

Unfortunately for the “proof,” none of these deer could have been attacked by wolves. There were ho wolf tracks anywhere on the lake. But there were other tracks: the unmistakable triple trail left by the skis and tail-skid of a plane which had taxied all over the place, leaving the snow surface scarred with a crisscross mesh of serpentine lines.

These deer had not been pulled down by wolves, they had been shot—some of them several times. One had run a hundred yards with its intestines dragging on the ice as a result of a gut wound. Several of the others had two or more bullet-broken limbs.

The explanation of what had actually happened was not far to seek.

Two years earlier, the tourist bureau of the Provincial Government concerned had decided that Barren Land caribou would make an irresistible bait with which to lure rich trophy hunters up from the United States.^*6 Accordingly a scheme was developed for the provision of fully organized “safaris” in which parties of sportsmen would be flown into the subarctic, sometimes in Government-owned planes, and, for a thousand dollars each, would be guaranteed a first-rate set of caribou antlers.

During the winter sojourn of the caribou inside the timberline they feed in the woods at dawn and dusk and spend the daylight hours yarded on the ice of the open lakes. The pilot of the safari aircraft, therefore, had only to choose a lake with a large band of caribou on it and, by circling for a while at low altitude, bunch all the deer into one tight and milling mob. Then the aircraft landed; but kept under way, taxiing around and around the panic-stricken herd to prevent it from breaking up. Through open doors and windows of the aircraft the hunters could maintain a steady fire until they had killed enough deer to ensure a number of good trophies from which the finest might be selected. They presumably felt that, since the jaunt was costing a great deal of money, they were entitled to make quite certain of results; and it is to be assumed that the Government officials concerned agreed with them.

When the shooting was over the carcasses were examined and the best available head taken by each hunter, whose permit entitled him to “the possession of only a single caribou. If the hunters were also fond of venison a few quarters would be cut off and thrown aboard the plane, which would then depart southward. Two days later the sports would be home again, victorious.

The Cree who accompanied me had observed this sequence of events for himself the previous winter while acting as a guide. He did not like it; but he knew enough of the status of the Indian in the white man’s world to realize he might just as well keep his indignation to himself.

I was more naïve. The next day I radioed a full report of the incident to the proper authorities. I received no reply—unless the fact that the Provincial Government raised the bounty on wolves to twenty dollars some weeks afterwards could be considered a reply.