The Wolf Within: The Astonishing Evolution of the Wolf into Man’s Best Friend. Professor Sykes Bryan

to the den.

      Over the following months he saw that, while wolves certainly did kill caribou, they only did so at certain times of the year. The rest of the time, for example when the caribou had moved to their own summer feeding grounds in the far north, Mowat was surprised to find that the wolves lived almost entirely on mice, lemmings and ground squirrels supplemented by the occasional pike or lamprey ambushed as they made their way up the narrow channels of the muskeg to spawn.

      Many things impressed Mowat about the wolves he lived with that summer. He admired their close and amiable family life, their ingenuity at finding food, and their tolerance of his presence. What impressed him most of all was their ability to communicate with other packs over long distances. One day towards the end of the summer as the first frosts iced the muskeg moss, Ootek, Mowat’s occasional Inuit companion, drew his attention to a barely audible sound on the wind.

      ‘The caribou are coming,’ he whispered. He had heard the faint cries of a wolf from an adjoining territory announcing the returning migration of the caribou from the north. Ootek gathered up his hunting gear and set off to intercept the herd, returning a few days later loaded down with fresh meat. Ootek related another story from his childhood on the tundra. Following Inuit tradition, when he was five years old his father, a powerful shaman, took the boy to a nearby wolf den and left him there. For twenty-four hours the young Ootek was fed by the wolves and played with the cubs, supervised all the while by one of the adults. Was this a modern example of the same sentiment behind the origin of the twin tracks of adult wolf and human child laid down on the floor of Chauvet cave some 30,000 years earlier?

      I could have chosen any number of reports of humans and wolves living in close harmony in the wild. While none of these extends to witnessing the mutual cooperation on a hunt as I have imagined from the European Palaeolithic, the familiarity that the Inuit have with the wolves with whom they share the Barren Lands of Manitoba is a far better guide to understanding how we first grew close to the wolf than any amount of malicious falsehoods about their homicidal savagery.

      Eventually Mowat’s sojourn with the wolves came to an end and he returned home. He had found no evidence that the wolves were solely responsible for the fall in caribou numbers. It never made any sense to imagine that they were. After all, wolves had hunted caribou for tens of thousands of years before humans arrived in North America. Far from providing the excuse that his employers and the powerful hunting lobby were searching for to justify the final extermination of the wolf from the whole of North America, his report rather proved the complete opposite. It was filed under ‘For Active Consideration’ and never seen again.

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       Friend or Foe?

      In light of these and many other very positive first-hand accounts of mutual interaction between wolves and men, how can we explain the fear and loathing that have been so prevalent in our recent history? Indigenous peoples like the Inuit and many Native American tribes certainly do not share it. They have retained an intimate relationship with Nature and often feel that the spirits of man and wolf are one and the same. For most of us who have lost touch with the wild world, the wolf became our enemy as soon as our ancestors abandoned hunting and took to raising animals for food. This has been a long process that began in the Middle East some 10,000 years ago. A conflict of interest between man and wolf began the moment that humans plucked animals from the wild and forced them into domesticated servitude. To hungry wolves, following their natural instincts and unrestrained by their instinctual taboo on attacking humans, domesticated animals were easy prey.