Refuge with Wolves

Notes On Survival in an Age of Extinction

I’ll begin with the howl: the first time I heard it in person, on an October morning, years ago now, deep in some Missouri woods. A sanctuary—the wolves there as wild as captive ones could be, fed natural prey at irregular times and on alternating days in an attempt to mimic the unpredictability of life outside confinement. The sound of a vehicle’s approach is supposed to mean danger to these animals, or at least unpleasantness, and indeed once the vans are parked and we humans assembled, the wolves begin to signal their distress, their howls carrying from one enclosure to the next. It’s a sound I’ve never heard before, a sound I’ve somehow always known. Thousands of years ago, some scholars believe, wolves helped to domesticate humans, rather than the other way around—or rather, it happened simultaneously; we helped to domesticate each other. Wolves are said to howl for a variety of reasons: in love or in sorrow, in attempted greeting, or as warning to stay away. Artificial Intelligence has been heralded recently as a potential tool for translating the messages they convey, in the same way it’s being used to potentially decode whale songs and other such mysteries. “We are as gods,” Stewart Brand wrote in the Whole Earth Catalog, back in 1968. “We might as well get good at it.”

I could begin with a more human focus, perhaps; in any modern story involving wild animals and extinction, the human element is inescapable. I could describe the meeting held this past spring at a volunteer firehouse in rural Fairfield, North Carolina, population two hundred and fifty, hosted by a mediator hired by the federal government in a last-ditch effort to mend long-burned bridges there. Folding chairs, pitchers of sweet tea, an American flag on the wall in the shape of a cross. The men (they are mostly, but not all, men) come in from work, many with with dirt on their hands—these are the farmers, hunting guides, land managers. They’re ready to air grievances—and they do, for hours: about the impact of the red wolf recovery effort in the region, about government intrusion into their private lives. The mediator will introduce me to a term for measures that the least powerful in a situation take, sometimes—a term that originated with peasant resistance—as a way to make their voices heard: weapons of the weak. Poaching endangered animals is one example of such a weapon. “I see this has been incredibly hard on all of you,” she tells those assembled at the firehouse that night, with tears in her eyes.

I could begin, perhaps, with the dead wolf: in the photo the Fish & Wildlife Service agent shows me, it’s hardly recognizable as a wolf—its body coated in gray mud, its head partially submerged in a shallow puddle where it stumbled and fell, after being shot in the spine, and drowned in a few inches of cloudy water. An ethical hunter wouldn’t leave an animal like that, to die a slow and agonizing death. The criminal investigation into its demise is ongoing, unresolved, despite $15,000 pooled together by conservation groups as a reward for information leading to an arrest. The Service has yet to come up with an amount sufficient to convince historically tight-lipped locals to talk.

Begin, maybe, with the first wolf I glimpse in the wild, after years of trying. I’d taken to quoting Peter Matthiessen—in hope of someday approaching anything close to the Zen-like acceptance he achieves in The Snow Leopard—after each failed excursion, hours spent in a car with binoculars trained on empty fields: “I didn’t see a red wolf—isn’t that wonderful!” On this particular day, though, I do: the thirteen-year-old matriarch affectionately known as “The Old Lady,” trotting down a straight stretch of gravel road in the Alligator River Wildlife Refuge. I’m riding along with a Fish & Wildlife biologist, tracking the wolves’ general locations via their telemetry collars, but the sight is still unexpected and thrilling. Moments later, a photographer veers around our truck in a cloud of dust, startling her off into the brush.

I could begin with another chorus of howls—this one filmed from a half mile away, across the refuge’s fallow fields. Six members of the Milltail Pack calling to each other in the dusk, their noses pointed at the sky—the first time such music has been made in these parts for many years. I cry, watching the video on my phone, lying in bed with another headache, missing another day of my kids’ lives, unable to muster the energy to function like a parent should, to simply get up and be with them. I watch the wolves howling and I cry because it’s beautiful and because I feel sorry for my family and for myself and because I’m disgusted at how sorry I feel, I’m lucky, I could be dead (the pandemic still raging at this time), and the disgust and sorrow and headache and sickness blur together in a miserable loop. The beau geste effect is a phenomenon in which wolves’ voices shift in pitch, making the pack sound more numerous than they actually are, a trick to intimidate rivals. Beau geste is French, meaning “a noble but futile gesture.”

Should I begin with the first wolf I touched? Imagine—touching the rarest wolf in the world, indeed one of the rarest animals still in existence. I hold its rear leg for the veterinarian as she takes a blood sample. The wolf herself is not tranquilized in any way, a towel thrown lightly over her eyes and a padded Y-shaped instrument enough to subdue her. After the vet pulls out the needle, she presses my finger to the spot, as a nurse might a pad of gauze to a child’s arm, to briefly stop the bleeding. A few months later I’ll watch on a webcam as this same wolf takes her first hesitant steps out of an acclimation pen into the wild. Some weeks after that, biologists monitoring her progress will receive a notification from her GPS collar, the dreaded “mortality mode” that means she hasn’t moved in days—and later still they’ll find her body, washed up on the shores of the Albemarle sound. The cause of death will remain unknown, the necropsy unable to recover bullets or signs of poison, her carcass having deteriorated after some time in the water. At least she had a taste of life outside captivity, her former caretakers will say through tears. No—I’ll focus on that day at the sanctuary, recalling how after the health exam is over the wolf flees to the edge of her enclosure, as far from people as she can get. Only then do I notice the spots of red on my fingertip, from where I pressed against the wound. For the rest of that day, her blood stays on my hands.

I should begin at the beginning: the first red wolves I ever saw, under human care at the science museum near my house. How this new litter of pups, born into captivity during the previous Trump administration, had seemed like a tangible sign of hope, not only for this imperiled species, but the whole, burning world—and how, to quote Barry Lopez (who will become my guidepost, my patron saint of light in the darkness), with the discovery of these animals “deep appreciation and a sense of loss arrived simultaneously.”

So begins any unraveling: with an initial snag, however small, however inconsequential it may seem. So, too, begins the process of repair—the snag catches your attention, forces you to stop, look more closely.

Then, get to work.

Welcome to my SubStack

I’m venturing onto this platform (and off of other social media sites!) for the first time in search of community, and to share some observations from the research and reporting I’ve been doing over the past five years, focused on endangered red wolves and the ongoing saga of their recovery from extinction. Less than twenty of these animals remain in the wild, nowhere else in the world but my adopted home state of North Carolina, on a swampy peninsula just west of the Outer Banks that some predict will be underwater within 100 years. Their reintroduction here in the 1980’s was hailed as a ground-breaking, first-of-its-kind experiment in re-wilding, serving as a model for later predator reintroductions to Yellowstone and elsewhere, but the recovery effort is still mired in struggle The years I’ve spent reporting from the largely rural region have helped me see the complexity of such initiatives, as well as insight into the deep divisions of this nation.

I hope this newsletter—which will start weekly, or maybe bimonthly? let’s see!— might interest anyone seeking stories about perseverance in dark times; anyone inspired by people fighting to save things in danger of disappearing and the steady, noble work of those toiling in the conservation trenches. Anyone troubled or mystified by the ideological chasms in this country, or the seemingly impossible yet utterly necessary concept of coexisting. I hope you might find some solace here, or at least food for thought, and I look forward to conversations to come.

Thank you for reading!

Photo credits: 1. Robert Wilcox, Museum of Life and Science in Durham, NC. 2. Justin Grubb, Alligator River National Wildlife Refuge, Eastern NC. Courtesy of Red Wolf Gallery by Champions for Wildlife.