A Wolf At the Door, Tempting as Ever

We have a little stackwall building on the edge of the dog yard, affectionately dubbed “The Cat Barn.” (Long story, but suffice it to say that back when our kids were young we kept a pair of SPCA “rescue cats” at the homestead. They were very helpful with mice and squirrel control, but they were terrible on small birds. One lived to be 18 years old, we think, but there have been no cats here since.)  The Cat Barn is the toolshed for the dog mushing part of our lives. On its walls hang old plaques and trophies from our racing days; a shelf holds a library of veterinary manuals and training books; in a cabinet at the back are pills and potions and ointments, bandages and scalpels and sutures; on the wall opposite the woodstove hang drying work gloves, dog booties, coils of rope, and a few old Air Tindi pilot coveralls that have found their true calling at last, as summertime chore-wear.

By the door I’ve tacked up a couple of clippings and printouts that make me smile. There’s a beer box from the Yukon Brewing company flattened out and stapled up, because the painting of a panicked musher sprinting behind his runaway team is obviously the work of someone who has been there, done that. 

There’s a photo of my favorite U.S. President, Barack Obama, leaning on the handlebar of one of John Baker’s Iditarod sleds. It was taken in 2016, when Obama visited Alaska.  Fishing boats and salmon netting gear are hauled up on the Bering Sea Coast in the background. Obama is staring at John with a look of rapt focus, and John is clearly holding forth with a good Iditarod story, or maybe he’s tossing out some political lobbying, Kotzebue-style.

My favorite cheer-up poster is the photo of a big gray-white wolf, trotting head on through powder snow.  The caption reads, “Maybe I can get some food at that campfire.  What could possibly go wrong?” Beneath that, another line reads “10,000 Years Later:” above a portrait of two coiffured pooches decked out in matching pastel hats, complete with ear openings. The look in the eyes of those two dogs is a perfect mix of bewilderment and canine embarrassment. Because, well, oh, there is this way it could go wrong over the course of 10,000 years — or to be fair, maybe not wrong, but certainly sideways.

That quip from the big wolf surging forward through the snow – “Maybe I can get some food at that campfire” has been re-enacted with remarkable regularity here over the past four decades.  And it has been almost that simple and straightforward, even though we have not taken it to the obvious next step.  To me there is not the slightest mystery as to how wolves and ancient humans began the symbiotic romance that eventually brought us sled dogs, bird dogs, guide dogs, spoiled dogs, purse dogs, and crocheted baby-blue doggie hats.

At least every few years over our time here, sometimes in summer but usually in mid-winter, a young wolf has appeared out of nowhere and begun to hang around.  Most of these wolves have been obviously skinny, and they are shy but not terrified of us, or of our huskies. Nowadays, having been there done that a few times so to speak, we always note the start of this chain of events with a sigh. A sigh, because it is not going to end well. Day after day, night after night, these young wolves get bolder, and gradually the denizens of the dog yard get more and more at ease with them, and it has gone so far at times that we’ve seen a wolf emerge from a dog’s straw-filled house in the first light of morning, and realized that the larger and stronger Alaskan Husky — whose house it was to begin with —  had evidently spent the night curled up outside, in a dramatic display of hospitality.

Every time it happens, a little niggle in the back of my mind pipes up as I watch the wolf: “Maybe we could tame it.”

And of course, yes, maybe we could. But I went down that road many years ago here, not by taming a wild wolf but by raising a newborn wolf I had kidnapped from the wild. I wrote about that in a chapter of North of Reliance, and it’s a chapter of life that taught me a lot.  Not a chapter I will ever repeat, for it did not end well for anyone.  Like I said.  

We try our best to dissuade these hungry docile wolves.  Cracker shells, horns, shouting and waving. It almost never works. And, for some reason – and there, for us, lies the real mystery – these wolves that come by have never harmed a dog here. They are on their own, evidently, with no pack of older wiser adults. 

Perhaps someday this will play out differently. Almost every winter I hear of mushers losing dogs to a pack of wolves, right in the kennel.  Why not here?  

So many questions.  Did these vagrant youngsters disperse naturally from their family group?  Like teenagers heading off from Mom and Dad, determined to find their own way in the world or die trying?   Seems unlikely.  Or has something disrupted the pack, killing off the older wolves?  Again, seems odd, since nowadays there are no expert wolf hunters or even semi-active trappers left in the entire watershed of McLeod Bay — and very few left in the entire NWT.

Conjecture, anyone? Don’t be shy. dave@hoarfrostriver.ca is all ears.

Winter settles in.  Seventeen hours of darkness, temperatures dropping into the double and triple f-words: forty four below, fifty four below…  By now the cute starving photogenic wolf is making off with feeding utensils, and chewing up extension cords and plastic pails in its spare time.  This is not going to end well, but it is going to end soon.

Yes, it would end differently if we just decided to set a few choice tidbits out for the passersby. Night by night, month by month, maybe year by year, something would change and evolve, right before our eyes. To my mind that is certainly how this “dog thing” all got started oh so long ago. It’s as simple as can be.   There is no need to re-invent the wheel here. But I sure bet we could.