The Wolf's Last Gift

Some years ago, a couple of biologists living in the northern wilds rescued a wolf cub. For the next decade and a half, the man and woman devoted themselves to giving the wolf, a female, the best, most wolfish life possible, and to documenting it.

If, like me, you have entertained fantasies of what it would be like to have a wolf of your own, the documentary that the couple made would nip them in the bud. The inside of their cabin looked like a war zone. Cushions were ripped out and strewn everywhere. The rustic furniture had been chewed to pieces. There were holes in the floor where the wolf had dug.  It’s not that she was in the least aggressive; she was simply…active.

Winter and summer, every single day, the couple hiked endless miles to satisfy their protégée’s compulsion to roam. Whenever they weren’t trudging up and down mountains, they were scavenging for road kill and other sources of meat for the wolf, who flourished under their care. The couple, however, looked more haggard and worn with each passing year.

When the wolf grew old and died, they didn’t bury her. Instead, they carried her body to the top of a nearby hill and laid her on the ground, the way a wild wolf’s remains would have been left. Then they set up a camera nearby and made a stop-action video of the ensuing months.

In late summer and into the fall, as flies and beetles crawled over it, the wolf’s body seemed to flatten and sink slowly into the ground. Scavengers made off with a few bits and pieces, and then the snow came and covered everything.

In the spring, after the snow melted, the carcass had disappeared, and in its place there grew a thick, bright green patch of young grass, in the shape of a wolf.

Wolves At The Door

This time of year, in Vermont, all the outdoors tries to come indoors. 

People complain about the hordes of field mice that squeeze into basements, attics and walls, there to survive on cardboard and Christmas gift wrappings or quietly die and stink up the house for weeks.  Me, I think field mice are rather sweet, with their big heads and bright eyes, and if they didn't poop everywhere I'd love to make a pet of one and keep it in my study, like Beatrix Potter did.

My complaint is about wolf spiders, the kind that lurk under things and rush out unpredictably.  My horror of spiders goes back to the dawn of time.  I remember as a tiny child being taken on stage after one of my father's orchestra concerts to meet the harpist, a pretty lady who played a few arpeggios for me and was dismayed when I ran away screaming that her hands on the strings looked just like spiders.

Alone at home the other evening, I walked into the attached garage on my way to tuck the hens in for the night.  The moment I turned on the light a dozen black shapes scattered away from the door.  They seemed to be coming mostly from under the doormat.  Chills running down my spine, I rushed into the kitchen and grabbed my  fool-proof bug spray, a mixture of water and dishwashing liquid.  Unfortunately, the stuff is only fool-proof against ants, which it instantly kills.  Wolf spiders it merely annoys. 

My only other option being to set the house on fire, I chose to spray every spider I could reach and stomp them when they were half drowned. 

Then I ran back inside and Googled "how to get rid of spiders."  Turns out the internet is full of arachnophobes and people who want to help them.  There were many solutions offered, but the only one I could implement right away was to add tea tree oil to my soap and water spray, which I did, and sprayed until the door between the house and the garage smelled like an Australian forest.  Battle-weary, the surviving spiders and I retired for the night.

The next morning I went out and bought a box of borax and a can of Lemon Pledge--both remedies recommended on-line.  Back home, I stood a safe distance away and instructed the man of the house to lift the doormat.  A single spider was revealed, which he stomped on.  After he swept the area clean,  I sprinkled about five pounds of borax and sprayed the door with Lemon Pledge until it glistened. 

I had almost finished when a big spider came rushing out of a crevice.  I aimed a death ray of Lemon Pledge at it and it sort of crumpled, and I thought it was done for.  But that night, on my way to the henhouse, I saw it again.  I resprayed it, it recrumpled... I have not, thank heavens, seen it since.

I know that many of you gentle readers make it a practice of humanely catching spiders and releasing them into Nature.  I can see you shuddering at my draconian tactics.  I know that wolf spiders are mostly harmless, and live on bugs.  I know that they are sacred to the Goddess.

But I can't help it.  I cannot rest easy while they cluster blackly outside the door, scheming to join me in the living room.  I would much rather have real wolves at the door--nice furry panting wolves, with slanty eyes and bushy tails.  I would go out and, carefully avoiding eye contact, tell them firmly to go away.  Or, if it was a really cold night, I might, after shutting Bisou in another room, invite them to come in and sit by the fire a while. 

Bison Funeral

Here is a photo of the bison mourning his relative,  killed by Yellowstone's Mollie Pack.  The picture was taken Kathy Vaughan, who kept her wits about her while all I could do was whisper, "OMG!  OMG!"

Notes From Yellowstone, Part The Second

June 12, 2012

In the park before seven, we saw a long line of cars stopped by the road, and people peering through spotting scopes and speaking in whispers, as if they were in church.

The Mollie Pack—named after Mollie Beattie, the director of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service who was instrumental in bringing wolves back to Yellowstone—had killed a bison cow during the night. There were two meadows bisected by the Lamar River between us and the wolves, so we had to use optical aids to see them well.

I counted eight to ten wolves around the carcass. Three of them were flung flat on the ground, looking exactly like Wolfie when he comes back exhausted (in a good way) from his stay at the B&B. But these wolves were not tired. They were full of bison, dozing off like fat uncles after a Thanksgiving meal. The others were ripping out huge slabs of meat, carrying them off, and returning for seconds. (Fact: a wolf feeding on a carcass consumes over two pounds of meat a minute.)

It takes a lot of energy to eat a bison. The wolves would dive into its entrails, and every once in a while you could see the great head lift off the ground or a hind leg jerk towards the sky as the pack struggled to tear off the meat.

Most of the wolves were “black,” which is actually a dark reddish brown, a relatively rare color except in Yellowstone wolves. The other Mollies had the typical German Shepherd black/gray/white coat pattern. The German Shepherd illusion was completed by the tracking collars that all the wolves wore around their necks. Their muzzles and ruffs and forelegs were covered in blood.

We stood watching for almost three hours. The meadow was like a stage, and the frieze of wolves around the carcass like a troupe of actors improvising on a familiar plot. A troupe of ravens waited in the wings for their turn at the dead cow.

There was a herd of bison nearby—there is always a herd of bison nearby in the park—grazing and apparently unconcerned about the Mollies. But gradually three bulls made their way towards the carcass, and  we watched in disbelief as the biggest one put his muzzle into the remains of his dead relative. For a while, it looked as if he were eating right alongside the wolves. Then he stood over the carcass, and the wolves had to dart under his belly and between his legs to get at the meat.

The first bison moved off and the other two took their turns, sniffing and pawing the carcass and trying to lift parts of it with their heads. Then the biggest bison returned to the kill and, goat-like, butted the wolves away. This was the ravens' cue, and quickly the carcass disappeared under their oscillating black forms.

The bison eventually moved off; the wolves returned; the ravens fled. We stood transfixed. What had we just seen? Bison grief?

Wary of anthropomorphizing, the next day we casually mentioned the scene to a park ranger. “That was a bison funeral,” he told us. “They do it whenever one of the herd is killed.”

Wolves do not often kill bison: bulls weigh 2,000 pounds and wolves a maximum of 140. It takes wolves a while to learn to kill bison, and for some reason the Mollie Pack has become especially adept at it. The ranger said that the adult Mollies are all females, accompanied by a few juvenile males. They need an alpha male, he said. But from what we saw, the Mollies are doing o.k.

I won't list all the other animals we saw during the rest of our stay. But I must mention the trio of black bears we ran into disporting themselves in somebody's backyard near our lodge. The mother must have had a recessive gene for coat color, because in the setting sun she was a luminous gold all over. Her infants were black, big-headed and clumsy, toddling around and trying to climb the guy wire of the utility pole.

There's only so long you can stand and watch these scenes. Then you either have to go eat breakfast, or you have to walk back to the lodge because it's getting dark. Or you can fly back to Vermont and sell all you have and move to Yellowstone and spend the rest of your life following the Mollies and the bison around the Lamar Valley until your time comes and you become another carcass on the meadow.

(Note:  for some reason, Blogger is letting me post, but not respond to comments.  Don't feel I'm ignoring you!)

Notes From Yellowstone, Part The First

(I'm posting these after our return to Missoula, since we didn't have internet access in Yellowstone.)

June 9, 2012

It took us three days to fly to Missoula—about as long as it would have taken to drive there from Vermont. When we finally landed yesterday, Missoula looked a lot like where we'd just come from: chilly and rainy, and bright green.

Today we drove to Yellowstone, to the Lamar Valley off the northeast entrance, a place known as “the Serengeti of North America.” This is where people come who want to see charismatic mega-fauna: grizzlies, bison, and (please God) wolves. Incredibly, it is much less crowded than the areas near the west entrance, where the geysers are. Me, I would much rather see charismatic mega-fauna than a geyser, no matter how faithful.

The Yellowstone landscape looks oddly manicured. The mountains and the meadows are covered in an even blanket of short green grass or gray sage. The pines rise straight up from this, each one outlined against the background with as much precision as the cedars in a Mediterranean cemetery. There is no underbrush.

Little streams crisscross the meadows, which are dotted with large brown rocks. Every once in a while one of these rocks staggers to its feet and begins to browse the bright green grass. The bison are rejoicing in this cool, wet spring. And behind every meadow and every hill rises a tall, jagged, snow-covered mountain, just like you the ones you see on calendars.

We stopped several times to let big herds of bison cows cross the road. Beside or behind each shaggy, dread-locked beast trotted a calf, short of neck and long of leg, wearing its brand-new, light-orange coat. Amazingly, the calves were all the same size. They must have been born on practically the same day. That must have been quite a day in those meadows. (And the day in the fall when they were all conceived must have been something too.) As a former dairy-woman, I checked out the cows' udders. Since bison are not dairy animals, their udders are small, and you have to look closely to see them under all that fur. I'm sure that they don't have any of those problems with ligaments that torment their high-producing Holstein cousins.

Our lodge is just outside the park, at the foot of a really tall mountain. There are a couple of friendly dogs—a chocolate lab and a beagle--that run around on the grounds. There are a couple of bison bulls who hang out in the area too, but we've been warned that they are “ornery.”

I remember the first bison I ever saw. It was in the Barcelona zoo, and I must have been four years old. It was lying down, but its head and shoulders towered over me, and I remember thinking that it must be a mountain. But then I saw its moist little eye peering at me, and I knew it was alive.

We've been told that this is a banner year for wildlife. Sightings of wolves abound. Wish us luck tomorrow.

June 10, 2012

Have I ever been this cold before? It's windy and snowing, and because we didn't want to check any bags on the airplane, we did not bring a full complement of winter gear, which we badly need.

Drove off in search of wolves in the afternoon, and kept stopping at the pull-outs beside the road whenever we saw people with spotting scopes trained on something. Sometimes we would be the first ones to stop (what's that black spot up there just below the tree line?) and get out of the van and set up our scope, and pretty soon cars would be stopping alongside us, and people would be asking what we were watching. We did this many times, alternately freezing and thawing out.

In this manner we saw: a horned-owl nest high up in a tree with a gigantic, fluffy, ghostly baby in it;  more bison—the cows and calves in companionable bunches, the bulls in pairs or in splendid isolation;  a black bear or two;  a mountain goat or two;  and, our eyes alerted by a running antelope, a grizzly lumbering along parallel to the road. We did not need scopes or binoculars to see that particular bit of charismatic mega-fauna.

We did not, alas, see a wolf. We were told that in this kind of weather they stay inside their dens. That is how cold it is.

Tomorrow we'll get up at the crack of dawn and try to spot a guy in a yellow SUV who supposedly lets people tag along on his wolf-spotting expeditions.  (To be continued.).

Up A Tree

As I related here a couple of months ago, last summer a neighbor who lives a mile away came across  a mountain lion batting around a woodchuck it had caught in her yard.  There is a trout stream and some woods between her house and mine, and the tracks of an enormous cat have recently been photographed in the mud beside the stream.  Fresh, clean water;  woodchucks and rabbits galore;  and woods for shade and shelter--for hungry mountain lions trekking to New England from the arid West, this is the promised land.

An invisible fence encircles our back yard and part of the woods.  It keeps the dogs in, but anything not wearing the right kind of collar can wander in at will.  A woman in a neighboring village found this out when she let her four Cavalier King Charles Spaniels out into her invisibly-fenced yard one night.  Three of them came streaking back.  The fourth eventually returned, covered in blood.  From the placement of the wounds, the vet guessed a coyote had tried to eat it. 

Every night when I let the dogs out into the dark, I think, how much bigger than a woodchuck is Bisou?

I was comforted this morning to hear that in California a German Shepherd had scared a mountain lion up a tree.  According to NPR, mountain lions are preyed on by wolves, and they seem to fear dogs that look like wolves.  So I am pinning my hopes on Wolfie, who really looks the part.  I know I can rely on him to scare anything away, chipmunk, fisher or bear, that hasn't been invited in.  But I'm not so sure about Bisou, who is right at his heels on his night patrols and who, if she encountered a mountain lion, might just think, in her scent-driven spaniel way, that he smelled awfully interesting, and should be investigated.