A
RUMOR OF WOLVES
Animals Magazine
Snow falls thickly from an ashen sky. It's been snowing for three days now, and with no wind, the dime-size flakes drift softly earthward with a mesmerizing effect. They pile one atop the other, adding their feathery shapes to the geology of the snowpack.
Four or five feet of the white stuff cloak the rocks, stumps, and downed trees of the forest floor. I am sitting on a snowy log, eating a quick lunch of crackers and cheese. A ribbon of smoke rises from the cup of hot chocolate in my gloved hand.
Looking around, I notice that off to my left a section of woods has been removed by loggers, and a skidder trail twitches through the stumps to where it rejoins the main logging road about a quarter-mile away. This place is the Perry Stream valley in far northern New Hampshire , very close to the border with Quebec .
I get up, toss on my pack, and turn away from the cutting site. Ahead, a blur of muted color breaks from the trees. It's Jeff Fair, wildlife biologist. He's on snowshoes, following the track of some animal. Fair stops, peers keenly for a moment at the snow, scribbles a note, then moves on. I catch up and fall in behind him, partly because he is more expert in the art of tracking than I am, but mostly to let him break trail through the heavy drift.
There are many tracks in this section of forest. We cross the delicate signatures of fox, fisher, and red squirrel. A little while later we intersect a set of erratic, lunging craters in the snow left by a moose. Our own snowshoes –traditional wooden modified bearpaws-- leave a very pleasing trail. We follow the distinctive offset track of a pine marten for a while, and then enter another cutting site where, Jeff tells me, a pile of drifted-over slash might shelter a hibernating black bear. Quietly, we poke around a bit, trying to determine if anyone is at home down there under the snow.
As the pale afternoon light fades, Jeff and I recall that we have business here. We are not in Perry Stream to check up on the coyotes, deer, bear, moose, grouse, and other creatures great and small struggling to make their living here in these cold, snowy woods. We are actually in this overlooked corner of New England chasing a phantom. We are here investigating a rumor of wolves.
We enter an area of intense deer activity, a yard where the snow has been beaten down to pavement by their sharp hooves. This is where the gaunt animals wait out the long, difficult winter beneath the sheltering canopy of a thick stand of conifers. In short order Jeff and I jump half a dozen scrawny deer. The animals are desperately hungry, and we find pine saplings chewed to nubbins. Some young trees, slightly taller and tufted with needles at their tops, are so gnawed they look like spindly bottle washers.
Jeff picks up a coyote track. These animals, once native only to the Southwest, are now firmly established in the Northern Forest . Here, they fill the role of top predator, a position once occupied in these woods by the timber wolf.
The coyote track brings back the memory of a bitter-cold January day on the frozen West Branch of the Penobscot River in northern Maine . Friends and I were in the middle of a week-long snowshoe expedition from Northeast Carry to Caucomgomoc Lake . On that day I was out in front of the group breaking trail through heavy snow when I heard ravens croak, then saw the big black birds flap away from me, heading downriver and out of sight.
When I rounded a bend I saw two large eastern coyotes staring at me. They were about fifty yards away, and they were huge –the size of German shepherds, perhaps seventy pounds. I was startled at their appearance because they were so much bigger than the many western coyotes I had seen on trips through sagebrush country. I stopped in my tracks and stared back at them. The animals looked almost as much like wolves as coyotes, which was not surprising since Northern New England 's coyotes are predominantly wolf-coyote hybrids.
The animals bounded across the ice to the thick cover of the spruce trees, leaving behind the full-grown deer they had killed. Partially eaten, the deer was still warm when I reached it. The tracks in the snow told the timeless story of how the coyotes had chased the deer out of the forest and onto the ice where they had used their agility, skill, and teamwork to bring the deer down.
Though they are merely filling the role nature designed for them, the rank of top predator is a heavy burden for coyotes. On trips through the North Country I have listened to otherwise perfectly reasonable men and women accuse the animals of pre-meditated wickedness, of moral depravity, as if coyotes were the Charles Mansons of the animal kingdom. One man in northern Maine showed me a grisly collection of fourteen dead coyotes, his body count through mid-winter. He had trapped and strangled the animals with piano wire snares. The stiff, furry forms were stacked like logs on a blue tarpaulin in his basement.
Fair and I break out of the forest and enter a beaver meadow, where we rendezvous with John Harrigan, the third member of our small party. Opinionated, yet personable and outgoing, Harrigan is a North Country newspaper publisher, and he keeps his ear to the ground. One thing he has been hearing lately is this: a strange creature, a large, black canine, has been seen haunting the woods in the vicinities of Indian Stream and Perry Stream .
Harrigan didn't dismiss these stories out of hand, even though the last known wolf in New Hampshire was shot in 1887. Instead, he explored Indian Stream on foot, and he found a den. He took notes and measurements, and later described what he had found to a friend, a biologist for the United States Fish and Wildlife Service. When Harrigan finished, the biologist told him he had just described the den of a wolf.
Wolves are essentially large wild dogs --in fact, they are the original dog. Some 12,000 years ago, humans began domesticating wild wolves and putting them to work. Today all dogs, from great Danes to dachshunds, are closely related to, and direct descendents of, the wild wolf.
One difference between wolves and dogs is that there is no record of anyone ever being killed by a wild wolf in the wilderness of North America . Domestic dogs, on the other hand, do sometimes turn on their owners and others. Although the incidents are relatively rare, domestic dogs are involved in hundreds of attacks on people each year in the United States . Some 20 people are killed annually in this country by domestic dogs. But whereas dogs rightfully enjoy their status as “man's best friend,” wolves continue to suffer from our misplaced fears and suspicions.
Wolves were once plentiful here in the Northern Forest . Indeed, wolves were once the most widely distributed mammal in the northern hemisphere. For millennia they co-existed with the moose, deer, caribou, beaver, and other animals that formed their prey base in this region. But from the time of the arrival of Europeans to these shores, wolves were profoundly affected by human activities. Bounty hunting, habitat destruction, and depletion of prey populations took a serious toll on their numbers. By the early 1900s wolves were completely gone from the Northern Forest .
The disappearance of the timber wolf is symptomatic of the loss of wilderness in the Northern Forest region. The top carnivore, and a species whose presence is a good indication of ecological well-being, the timber wolf requires healthy forest ecosystems to survive. That the wolf is not currently present in the Northern Forest suggests the forest ecosystem is incomplete and out of equilibrium. The explosive growth of prey species, including moose and deer, is evidence of this imbalance.
Prior to European settlement, moose were more common than deer in the Northern forest. And though wolves were also plentiful in pre-colonial times, for millennia the moose and the wolf maintained a balance. But by 1900, the wolf was a memory and the moose too faced extirpation from overhunting. At the turn of the last century fewer than two thousand moose wandered the forests of Maine , and there were fewer than fifteen moose left in all of New Hampshire .
When strict hunting regulations were put in place in the early decades of the twentieth century, the moose population began a very slow rebound. Moose numbers remained small all across the Northern Forest until the 1970s when large-scale mechanized clear-cutting began in earnest. Then, the new harvesting practices began creating huge swaths of succulent young browse where mature forests had once stood. The animals took advantage of this nutritional windfall, and during the next two decades the moose population grew exponentially.
With the wolf gone and no other large predators to help keep their numbers in check, the moose herd in Northern New England is currently estimated at more than 40,000 animals and still growing rapidly. And though the large gawky animals are popular with tourists, the high moose numbers are also a burden.
In the three states—Maine, New Hampshire, and Vermont-- where moose are common, the animals are involved in hundreds of motor-vehicle collisions yearly. Some of these crashes result in human fatalities, and they exact a huge economic toll. For example, according to the Maine Department of Inland Fisheries and Wildlife, there were 2,126 moose-vehicle collisions in the state between 1996-1998. In those crashes 637 people were injured, including eight people killed. The estimated economic impact of those collisions was a whopping fifty-million dollars.
Moose also give farmers fits. The huge creatures break down fences and free livestock. They run through maple sugar tubing and spill valuable syrup --an important source of seasonal income in the north. They also trample the gardens of Boston suburbanites, and they wander down into Connecticut , where moose are establishing a resident population for the first time since the colonial era. State wildlife management agencies have responded by opening limited hunting seasons in an effort to stabilize their numbers. The moose hunts are popular, and they meet a number of social as well as wildlife management goals, but it's not clear that they have an impact on the actual size of the herd.
Hunter success rates in Maine have been extremely high. For example, in 1991 the state issued 1,000 permits, and hunters bagged 959 animals. Nine years later Maine increased the number of permits to 3,000, and 2,552 hunters were successful. In the meantime, moose-watching has blossomed into an important tourist industry, and few who travel the region hoping to see a moose are disappointed.
The flourishing white-tail deer herd in the Northern Forest is also much larger today than prior to the colonial era. When Europeans first settled in Northern New England , the deer herd was largely restricted to coastal regions –moose and woodland caribou occupied the interior. As wolves and caribou were hunted into extinction and the moose were nearly eliminated, the deer herd expanded spectacularly.
Today deer are found throughout the Northern Forest . Like the moose they are popular with both hunters and tourists. But white-tails are also widely considered something of a nuisance. The deer cause devastating agricultural losses totaling millions of dollars each year, they are a critical vector in the spread of Lyme disease, and they are involved in some 3,500 automobile collisions annually in Maine alone. Since wolves prey upon moose and deer, perhaps it's no surprise that some conservationists have recently been calling for returning the wolf to the Northern Forest to try and help reinstate a balance. But given the enormous impact of human activities such as logging and land development, it's not clear what, if any, effect wolves would have on the overall size of the moose and deer herds.
Still, for many the notion that the howl of the wolf may someday be heard again in the Northern Forest is exciting. And it's not out of the question. After centuries of trying to eradicate the animal, wolf restoration programs are underway all across the United States . In North Carolina , Wyoming , Idaho , and Arizona , wolves have been reintroduced into the wild. In northern New York and New England there are many people from across the social spectrum who believe that the wolf should be restored here too.
We kick the snow from our boots, climb into the cab of Harrigan's large black four-wheel drive Ford pick-up truck, then head north on Route 3 through the Connecticut Lakes region as the snow continues to fall. As we drive, Harrigan and Fair, both avid hunters, express their disappointment with the region's state game agencies because they feel the agencies stymie predator reintroduction programs. When I ask why the fish and game departments would interfere, Harrigan and Fair explain that it's because the agencies fear that their constituents –the license-fee-paying hunters-- are opposed. Harrigan, who shot a moose the first year New Hampshire re-opened its moose season, will have none of it.
"The agencies assume hunters are against wolves and cougars --not to mention coyotes, fishers, and foxes-- because they prey upon animals hunters regard as 'theirs,'" he says. "According to Fish & Game, wolf recovery is 'unfeasible' and 'unjustifiable' politically and economically. That assumption is totally out of step with reality, but it's still presented as 'official policy.' The truth is," Harrigan goes on, "a lot of hunters would really like to see the wolf back here, where it belongs." Fair nods his assent.
"Besides," says Harrigan, getting his dander up just a bit, "are we humans so mercenary that the life or death of a species depends solely on its supposed worth to us ? That unless they hold the cure for cancer or Alzheimer's they aren't worth protecting? It seems so. But I believe these animals have a basic right to exist."
Harrigan says he hopes to see the wolf pull an end-run on the system and re-establish itself here in the North Country on its own, without any help from humans, thereby avoiding the political wrangling and divisiveness that accompanies official restoration programs. The chances of that happening may be slim, but it's not impossible. Canadian wolves migrating south into Glacier National Park re-established themselves as a viable population in the northern Rockies in the 1980s. Minnesota wolves spread into Wisconsin and Michigan and re-established populations in those states on their own. It could happen here, too, as the events of August 31, 1993 suggest.
On that day a mature black female timber wolf was shot by a bear hunter in the Maine Woods west of Baxter State Park . The shooting came as something of a surprise to wildlife managers because the wolf had been officially extinct in Maine for over a century.
But that dead wolf, and another trapped in eastern Maine in 1996, merely confirmed what many local hunters, guides, and outdoorsmen and women had known for quite a while: that wolves have been turning up in the Northern Forest in recent years. A game warden in northern Maine told me about the wolf that dashed across a logging road right in front of his truck. A wildlife professional, he has no doubt about what he saw. The elusive Perry Stream wolf, and another wolf whose tracks wildlife researchers kept encountering one recent winter in the woods north of Baxter State Park, were other individuals who had probably negotiated the difficult journey down from Quebec.
Paul Matula, Head of Research for the Maine Department of Inland Fisheries and Wildlife, speculated that the wolf shot west of Baxter State Park was a migrant from Quebec . "The Maine woods are within 75 miles of wolf territory in the Quebec Laurentians," he told me when I spoke with him on the telephone. "That's not very far for a young wolf to travel while exploring new territory." Indeed, wolves have been known to use huge areas --1,000 square miles and more. The animals may travel up to 500 miles in search of new range.
Matula mentioned that the animal may have crossed the Saint Lawrence River during the winter. The wolf might then have traveled through the settled agricultural region along the river's south shore to the Maine Woods.
"If Canadian wolves knew how much food was available down here, more of them might make the trip," Matula said, citing Maine 's deer, moose, and beaver populations that have surged due to lack of predators. He said these animals would provide the wolves with a healthy prey base.
For some reason, perhaps merely the longing to see new country, individual wolves have made the difficult journey across the Saint Lawrence lowlands. They ran a dangerous gauntlet of settled farms and small villages. But for them the crossing was worth the risk, and others will surely follow. Perhaps Harrigan is right. Perhaps the wolf will establish itself again here, without any help from us.
But if they make the trip, what will they find?
Most importantly, they will find vast areas of unsettled open space. In the Northern Forest there are millions of acres without paved roads, without villages, without dwellings of any kind. To the surprise of just about everyone I talk to, Maine contains the largest uninhabited region left in the lower forty-eight states. There is room here for wolves, cougars, caribou, wolverines, and lynx –animals that once roamed these forests. This is a large unfragmented wildland, perhaps the last best place in the country to attempt ecological restoration on a significant scale. This restoration need not have an adverse impact on humans, for even though logging (along with tourism) has long been the region's economic mainstay, if given the chance wolves would still thrive here in these immense unpopulated reaches. Wolves and people are both prospering in Minnesota 's Superior and Chippewa National Forests , where timber harvesting continues at relatively high levels.
In the meantime, while we humans debate the relative merits and drawbacks of restoration, the wolves keep showing up --here, there, one by one.
Harrigan pulls the truck to a stop next to the snow-swept surface of a frozen lake. We can barely see the dark spruce on the opposite shore through fleeting rifts in the snow.
"This is where the last caribou in New Hampshire were seen in 1905," he says, nodding to the frozen expanse he identifies as Second Connecticut Lake . I look out over the lake through curtains of snow and imagine a pack of wolves shadowing caribou over the soft white surface.
"An old man named Atchison told me about it when I was young,” says Harrigan. “He said he saw eleven caribou crossing Second Lake in a snowstorm, on a day just like this. He watched until they vanished in the falling snow. They were the last ones, and they were never seen again."
