No matter, over the next years Shaun’s life revolved entirely around wolves. Lacking any professional qualifications and viewed with suspicion by some professional biologists, Shaun has lived with wolves, has brought up a family of wolves, and in the process he felt as though he had almost become a wolf himself. For two years he was alone with a pack of wild wolves in the forests of Idaho. He had travelled to that part of America to work at a wolf education centre where a captive pack was kept in order to educate visitors and to disabuse them of the wolf’s thoroughly undeserved reputation for savagery. After a while Shaun realised that he could never really understand the enigmatic animal only by working with captive wolves, so he packed his rucksack and set off alone into the forest.
Shaun knew there were wolves living there – they migrated every year down from Canada and across Montana into Idaho. But he did not know exactly where they would be. Three months passed before he saw any sign of a wolf. Then, one day, he saw the unmistakable paw print of a large male in the soft mud by the side of a waterhole. In the weeks that followed he heard the chilling chorus of a howling pack drifting through the night.
Eventually he caught a glimpse of his first wolf, a large black male, as it crossed the track some hundred metres ahead. The wolf looked at him briefly before trotting off into the forest. Weeks passed and Shaun saw the black wolf more regularly as if it were sizing him up, whether as a meal or a mere curiosity he could not be certain. A few weeks later, the black wolf reappeared with four others, two males and two females – a real pack. Slowly, day by day, week by week, the wolves became more confident until one day the big male came up to Shaun, sniffed him and suddenly nipped him just below the knee.
Although it was painful, Shaun knew from his experience with captive wolves that this was not a bite in anger. Rather like shaking hands, it was a way for the wolf to introduce himself.
All wolf packs maintain a strict hierarchy. As a rule, only the dominant pair, the alpha male and female, breed, while the other wolves are given supporting roles in the pack. Generally speaking, the other wolves are the siblings and offspring of the alpha pair. Whereas the alpha female is the undisputed leader of the pack, it falls to the beta animals, one rung down in the hierarchy, to maintain discipline and to organise the defence of the pack when it is threatened. It was the beta male, the enforcer, that sized Shaun up and gave him that painful bite, not in anger but as an introduction. The encounters between Shaun and the wolves became more and more frequent over the next weeks. After six weeks he felt that he had been accepted by the pack as an ‘honorary wolf’. He was given the job of what he describes as a diffuser, a calmer of nerves. Like any other family, wolf packs can argue, and they have sharp teeth and claws with which to make a point. Shaun’s role, as he saw it, was to make sure these petty squabbles did not get out of hand.
‘Why,’ I asked him, ‘were you not attacked?’
‘Because I was useful. Also I suspect because the wolves could learn from me, something they needed to do, surrounded as they were by wolf-hating bloodthirsty hunters.’
Shaun’s joy at being accepted by the pack was severely tested one day when, without warning, the beta male suddenly lunged at him and knocked him to the ground. The wolf stood over him, fangs bared, and growling. Here is Shaun’s account of his terrifying experience.
I suddenly felt this was the end. Up to then I had trusted them completely not to harm me, but in that instant I remember thinking OMG they are this creature after all. They are going to kill me. He kept pushing me back with nips and growls into a hollowed-out tree then stood outside snarling. What a fool I’ve been, I thought to myself, they have been biding their time “fattening me up for Christmas” so to speak. But the fatal attack never came. I was there pinned down for an hour and a half then, just as suddenly as the attack had begun the wolf backed off. He called me with a low-pitched whimper and went into a very appeasing body position as if to apologise. It was as if it had suffered some kind of psychosis, turning into a killing machine and then back again.
It took me a while to come out, and that is when he led me down the path to where I was going. There by the stream were the unmistakable marks left behind by a huge bear. Not only did he save my life but the episode reinforced my original belief that I should always trust them.
After that, Shaun spent the remainder of his two years living peacefully with the pack.
Others like Shaun have found themselves strangely attracted to wolves and sought out their wild company. Sometimes they have written about their experiences and their books have become bestsellers. Farley Mowat was one such author.2 Mowat was a government biologist dispatched in the 1960s to the Keewatin Barren Lands of northern Manitoba for eighteen months to report on the falling numbers of caribou and confirm, as was widely thought, that wolves were to blame for this decline.
The shortage of caribou was worrying the powerful hunting lobby that pressured ministers to do something about ‘the Wolf Problem’. The ‘problem’ boiled down to an insistence by hunters, guides and lodge owners that wolves were destroying the big game on which their businesses depended. According to the hunting lobby, it was well known that wolves had an insatiable appetite for killing way beyond the need to feed themselves, although the blatant irony of this conviction was lost on the hunters. Mowat’s mission was to investigate the accusations and report to embattled ministers.
Like Shaun Ellis, it was a long time before Mowat encountered his first wolf. Attracted by what he thought were the pathetic cries of a young dog in distress, he set out to find the source of the whining. In order not to scare what he thought was a wolf cub, he tracked the whelps from behind a gravel ridge. Peering over the crest, he found himself only two metres away from a fully-grown Arctic wolf. For a few seconds each stared into the other’s eyes and Mowat fell under the same hypnotic spell that had entranced Shaun Ellis. The wolf was the first to break free from the spell’s grip. He leaped into the air and, with an effortless trot, vanished into the crepuscular gloom of the Arctic dusk.
In the succeeding weeks, as Mowat got to know the wolves better, he realised that, far from being the active observer, it was he, the human, who was being studied by the wolves. More than once after vainly scanning the horizon in front of him for signs of his ‘quarry’ he would turn around to see two or three wolves resting on the ground a few metres away, just looking at him. Like Shaun Ellis, he was aware of being weighed up by the wolves, but for what purpose he could not be sure.
As spring turned to summer, the tundra was streaked with long lines of caribou sauntering north to their summer territory, and Mowat had a stroke of good luck. From the top of an esker, a gravel ridge deposited by melting ice, he located a den with four young cubs playing outside with no sign of the parents. A curious cub, catching his scent, began to approach when suddenly, and with a piercing howl of alarm and warning, an adult returned. Mowat lost his footing and tumbled down the side of the ridge, ending up in a tangled heap at the bottom. Half expecting the big male, the ‘enforcer’, to clamp his enormous jaws around his throat at any moment, Mowat turned over to look up the slope. He saw not one but three adults standing in line abreast, peering down at him with amused delight. When they had seen enough of this hilarious performance they turned and silently withdrew out of sight.
Later that night, safely back in camp, it dawned on him that all the stories he had been told of wolves as savage and demented killers were completely untrue. Earlier, these animals had the hapless Mowat completely at their mercy and yet they did nothing to threaten him, even though he was close to their own cubs. After this, his view of the mission on which he had been sent changed completely. He lost all fear of the wolves, moved out of the fetid cabin he was occupying and, leaving his guns behind, pitched his tent close 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