CHAPTER V.
STANDARDIZED WOLVES
Those who want to believe that wolves do not run in packs should read only the first two-thirds of this chapter. For believing in wolf-packs, read the sections “Crumbs for Believers” and “Wolves for Posterity.” The section “Wolves and Babes” can be read safely by believers and non-believers, for these are an entirely different (though standard) species and the nursing complex, save for one classic exception, seems to be confined to Hindu wolves.
To read all sections may prove not merely difficult but also confusing--may we hope even befuddling.
* * * * *
Everybody knows that wolves run in packs. One of the standard definitions of pack is: “A large number of predatory animals, such as wolves, banded together for the purpose of hunting their prey.”
That used to be an undisputed statement of the case. But now there is an argument about whether any wolf-pack ever really existed, with the scientists nearly all on one side, the general public nearly all on the other, and the sportsmen divided about half and half.
On the affirmative side we have the undoubted fact that “everybody knows,” especially in Russia, that wolves do run in packs. If you want to refresh your mind as to what Russian wolf-packs are believed to be like, you can do so easily and pleasantly by turning to Willa Cather’s _My Antonía_, page 63. The people Miss Cather is going to feed to her wolves are the very diet to which Russian wolves are most accustomed--a wedding party. There are six sleighs drawn by three horses each and carrying from six to twelve passengers. There is starlight on the snow and the road is through a forest. The first distant wolf howl does not drown the tinkle of the sleigh bells or the laughter of the wedding guests. But the rallying cry is answered from many sides, the leaders of the pack draw nearer, and fear grips every heart. The bride sobs on the groom’s bosom and the drivers lash their horses to breakneck speed. The rear sleigh upsets, the passengers sprawl out over the snow and the wolves are on top of them in a moment. The screams of horses being eaten alive are more dreadful than the shrieks of people whose entrails are being torn out. The cries of terror from the remaining sleighs are as loud as the cries of pain from the dying. The wolves are silent now--they have other work to do.
And so the story goes on for sleigh after sleigh in Miss Cather’s story, and in all the typical stories, until only the bridal sleigh is left. About forty or fifty people and fifteen horses have now been eaten, but the wolves are still hungry and going strong. There are hundreds of them, you see, and wolves have proverbially good appetites. Nothing will save the last sleigh but throwing the bride to the pack. This Miss Cather accordingly does, and so do half the other authors of tales. But it seldom happens that quite everybody is eaten. Somebody has to be saved, to give the narrator a chance to portray the survivor’s life of shame and remorse through many effective pages that lead to a distant and friendless grave.
Such tales as Miss Cather’s we usually consider to be “true in spirit” only, since they occur in novels, but we take them for sober fact when we read them in books of travel or in newspapers. The press stories excel the books in verisimilitude, for they tell us what is said to have happened yesterday or last week. They give the names of places that are on every map, they frequently mention the widow and orphaned children, they sometimes tell that the funeral of the fragments left by the wolves was conducted by the home lodge of Masons. There is every detail to prove that what you see in the _Sun_ (or the _Bee_ or the _American_) is really so.
If you look in the index to the news published by the New York _Times_, you will discover scores of authentic-looking wolf-pack stories. I have the space to reproduce here only a sample:
WOLVES DEVOUR 3 MEN IN NORTHERN ONTARIO
_An Elderly White Trapper and Two Indians Fall Victims to a Horde of Hungry Beasts_
Port Arthur, Ont., Dec. 27--A great roving band of hungry timber wolves has devoured three men.... Last Saturday an elderly trapper left his cabin in the woods seventy miles north of Ignace to mush down to the settlement for his Christmas mail.... There was no mail, however, and the old man said he would come back Christmas morning. At noon he had not arrived. The postmaster sent two Indians to follow the trail....
About two miles from the settlement the Indians found a spot pounded down in the snow. There was blood. Bits of dog harness torn to shreds were scattered about. In the midst of them the Indians found human bones. They hastened back to report their discovery. The lure of the bounty on wolves, however, urged the Indians to take the trail again, with extra ammunition. They sped behind the dog team into the woods as the villagers waved good-bye. They did not return.
Yesterday a new searching party departed. They found another patch trodden in the snow, with much more blood, about two miles from the first. The two guns the Indians had carried were lying in the crimsoned snow. Scattered about were bones, bits of clothing and empty shells.
The carcasses of sixteen dead wolves--some half eaten--lay stretched in a circle about the remains of the two Indian hunters.
I quote from the New York _Times_ of December 28, 1922. The story, from what is justly considered one of the world’s greatest and most reliable newspapers, gives proof of the cunning no less than of the ferocity of the North American wolf. Judging from the evidence, the pack must still have been hungry when they got through eating the trapper (perhaps he was small and skinny), so they lay in wait to finish their meal on the search party, which they evidently knew was coming. Then, still hungry, and fearing the size and prowess of the second search party, they reluctantly ate a few of each other for dessert before retreating into the shadows of the forest. That was discretion and admirable generalship. They fought when there was a chance to win, and then withdrew before superior numbers.
There are plenty of such wolf stories in the papers, and now and then others even more impressive. During 1926, for instance, in the pages of the New York _Sun_ packs of wolves held Italy under a reign of terror; a bit later in the New York _Times_ villages in Siberia were barricaded against wolves. Two million cattle and many people were killed.
Thus stands the evidence for the affirmative--wolves _do_ run in packs. They devour wedding parties in Russia and they eat trappers and Indians in Canada. They terrorize Italy and lay siege to towns in Siberia--in the papers, at least.
But there are skeptics who do not believe all they see in the papers or read in books of travel. These iconoclasts tell you that every story of a wolf-pack that you ever read or heard is fib, fiction, or folklore, and that there never has been a pack of wolves in Russia, America, or anywhere except in people’s imagination. That seems a hard position to defend, but they go at it valiantly. Their defense lies in both logic and fact. For the logic they ask you to consider the caribou-hunting wolf as a sample.
Their argument begins with the generally accepted fact that there are more than ten million wild caribou in Northern Alaska, Northern Canada, Northern Siberia and the Arctic islands. From these at least two million caribou are born every year; two million must, therefore, die, or the numbers would increase. Certainly less than 10 per cent of these are killed by human hunters. None die of old age and very few of accident or disease, for if a caribou is old or sick it moves slowly and is soon overtaken and devoured. This means that wolves kill every year a good many more than a million and a half caribou.
In summer, when their puppies are being brought up, the northern wolves live in part on eggs, fledgling or moulting birds, and rodents. But in winter the birds have flown south, the rodents are safe asleep in their frozen burrows, and almost the only thing a wolf can find to eat is caribou. I know how wolves kill caribou, and I can offer some personal testimony on wolves in general, for I was born on Lake Winnipeg in a wolf country; I was brought up among wolves and coyotes in Dakota before it became “civilized” and was split up into North and South Dakota; I lived for some ten years in the Arctic, supporting myself most of the time by hunting. I have shot wolves with a rifle and have seen hundreds of them either trotting quietly along or loping steadily in pursuit of caribou. I have seen the tracks of thousands following game, and have found signs of hundreds of tragedies where they had killed some bird or beast. I have asked dozens of Arctic Indians (Slaveys, Dogribs, Loucheux) and hundreds of Eskimos about how the wolf hunts, and there has been no divergence between what they have told me and what I have seen.
A wolf cannot run nearly as fast as a caribou, and must capture it by tiring it out. That is the essence of all I have seen and all I have been told. It means that, before it is killed, each caribou has to be pursued by the wolves from several hours to several days--nobody knows exactly how long. All hunters agree that (except for newborn calves) the youngest caribou are the swiftest and staunchest runners. The ones killed by wolves are therefore chiefly the old bulls and old cows. A cow may weigh two or three hundred pounds, and a bull three or four hundred, live-weight. Nearly half of that is waste. The wolves are, then, pursuing anything from 100 to 200 pounds of food. For, no matter how large the caribou herd may be when the chase begins, they eventually scatter, and the pack, if there is a pack, finds itself pursuing the single slowest animal.
Suppose, now, there are 200 or 300 wolves, as in Miss Cather’s heart-rending story. She provided hers with six sleigh loads of Russians, six to twelve in a sleigh, and three presumably fat horses hitched to each. That would make a square meal for even 300 wolves. But it would be far otherwise if the 300 followed a single 300-pound caribou for three days, or even one day. They would be so hungry that the beast, divided by 300, would be to the pack no more than a tantalizing appetizer. There would be nothing for it but to resort to another well-known habit of the fiction wolf and use their whetted appetites on each other--eating, let us say, a dozen to correspond to the soup course, a dozen for the fish, and two dozen for the roast, with at least another dozen of the youngest and tenderest for dessert. But the continued practice of dining on each other like that would soon reduce a wolf-pack below fiction and movie standards. In fact, you might as well do without a pack altogether; for it is scarcely worth the bother to build one up to the required size, just to have it disappear again in a few weeks by the members of the troupe swallowing one another.
Those who are trying to prove that the wolf-pack really exists will perhaps admit that the abstract logic of pack hunting seems a little faulty, but will insist, and quite rightly, that logic does not amount to a hill of beans when contradicted by facts. The pack stories, they will tell us, are simple truth. Newspapers may exaggerate, but the better ones never invent. Besides, nearly everybody has an uncle or an aunt who had a grandmother or grandfather that was eaten or nearly eaten by a pack of wolves.
That brings us to the evidence--are the wolf-pack stories true? To save time, we shall take at once the testimony of a group of scientists and practical hunters who ought to know because they make the study of wolves their profession--studying also the testimony of everyone they ever heard of who claimed to have seen a pack of wolves. They are Americans, too, and within your reach, so you can write postcards to them tomorrow and see what they really think. Don’t be diffident about asking. You are probably a taxpayer. They are your servants, for they work for the government that taxes you.
The branch of the government that studies wolves as a part of its business is the Bureau of Biological Survey at Washington, and the head of it is Dr. E. W. Nelson,[12] a lifetime student of wild animals. He was four years among Arctic wolves in Alaska (1877-81) and has himself studied wolves in Mexico and all over the United States. Furthermore, he has under him other men who have studied wolves, among them Edward A. Preble, who has spent much time in the sub-Arctic and Arctic forests and prairies of Canada. But more significant still, there is under Dr. Nelson’s successor’s direction the wolf-killing service of the United States Government. This is a body of men who hold themselves in readiness for telegraphic appeals from stockmen, usually in the West, who find their animals being destroyed by wolves. They come and exterminate the wolves “scientifically,” and the flocks and herds are safe again.
In gathering material for a book I was writing about wolves, I consulted Dr. Nelson. We agreed, first, that the accepted meaning of the word pack, when applied to wolves is _a large number of wolves that have come together to help each other in hunting_. In other words, one mother with her puppies would not constitute a pack. Dr. Nelson felt so positive about the nature of wolves in North America, from Mexico to the Arctic, that he thought I would be safe in denying flatly in my book that any wolf-pack ever existed on our continent. But, just to make sure that no different opinion was held among people of authority corresponding to his own, we formulated a letter which he addressed to certain scientific students of wolves, and to all his wolf-killers.
As to how many wolves had been seen together, the various replies naturally gave different answers, for experiences varied somewhat. But they ranged only from two to five. They were unanimous in reporting that if several wolves were seen together then these were always the mother with her puppies, or conceivably the father and mother with their puppies, and never a pack in the usual sense of that word.
Then what about the story of the wolves that killed the elderly trapper and the two Indians on the front page of the _Times_? Surely that was no family of puppies--sixteen dead wolves, killed by the Indians; a few, presumably, killed by the old trapper, and enough left over to eat up one white man, two Indians and part of sixteen dead wolves. To make the inquiry into the truth of the story official and more authoritative than if I were doing it myself, I suggested to Dr. Nelson that he write to Ignace, Ontario. For checking up, I wrote also to Mr. J. B. Harkin, Commissioner of National Parks, Ottawa, who was at that time (1922) in charge of the administration of the game laws of Canada, and therefore in a position to set in motion official machinery to find out about this wolf story. Thus I received the same replies from two directions, one through Dr. Nelson and the other through Mr. Harkin. They were, in substance, that no such man as the old trapper ever existed and that no white man had been killed by wolves. No such Indians as described existed there and none had been killed by wolves, whether in packs or otherwise, either in the vicinity of Ignace, or anywhere in the world, as far as anyone living in the vicinity of Ignace knew.
Hundreds of other tales about wolf-packs, published in newspapers or books, have been traced by the United States Biological Survey and by various students, including myself. In no case was evidence found to support them. Just try it yourself on the next American despatch you read. In spite of all the pretended details--the sorrowing family, the Masonic funeral--it will be reasonable odds to bet dollars to doughnuts that the story will turn out pure fiction, or at best will rest on testimony no court of law would accept as proof.
The case seems to be definitely settled against the wolf-pack in North America. But there still remains Russia. Well, why not let Russia remain? No one seems to have checked wolf-pack stories in Russia for everyone is so sure they are true. And perhaps they are. Besides, it is a distant country, and the fancy must somewhere have play.
The book on wolves which the July, 1927, _Mercury_ said I was writing is still being written (1936), or, rather, the evidence for it is still being gathered. We use here from that accumulation sample case histories which give the trend of the material.
Under a date line of Winnipeg, April 16, 1922, many or most Canadian newspapers printed a story which I read in the Ottawa _Morning Journal_ about the body of a trapper, Ben Cockrane, having been found torn to pieces north of Fisher River on Lake Winnipeg the previous Thursday. “He had been attacked by a pack of timber wolves. His bones and pieces of his clothing and a rifle with a broken stock were found nearby. Before being killed, Cockrane shot seven wolves dead and clubbed four to death, their bodies lying around his tattered remains being the only evidence of his fight for life.”
That story had a personal interest. For I was born on Lake Winnipeg and might, therefore, seem to have had as a child a narrow escape from the ancestors of the pack which destroyed Cockrane--we were there in the pioneer days back in the late 70’s, long before railways, when there was only an odd cabin along the shores of the lake and when presumably the wolves were even more numerous than now, and more predatory. Investigation would be simple, too, for I could write to some of our old neighbors or their descendants.
But the case was being handled so widely and with so much respect by the press that a formal approach seemed indicated, one above the suspicion of bias. Accordingly, two lines of inquiry were started, both of them official. Nelson, at my suggestion, inquired on behalf of the logical department of the United States Government. In Canada, Harkin was then in charge of wild-life investigation for his government and could use the machinery of the Dominion Parks Branch. When I placed the newspaper report in their hands I received friendly assurance that the case would be followed up both in their own interest and because of their previous association with me in similar studies.
Under date of May 22 Harkin wrote that an investigation had been made and that “Mr. Cockrane has stated ‘that the report of his death was grossly exaggerated.’” On May 31, Nelson, after like findings, wrote:
“This amusing climax to the ferocious wolf tale is similar to that of many other newspaper accounts of the killing of human beings by wild animals, which the Biological Survey has run down during the last thirty years or more. Such stories are almost invariably pure fiction.”
A third inquiry, made by a friend in the Hudson’s Bay Company’s office at Winnipeg, brought a statement that when their representative interviewed Mr. Cockrane he seemed annoyed and replied, I gather somewhat petulantly, that as long as he could remember there had seldom been so few wolves around as this year.
Sometimes when we trace the story of a pack devouring a group of school children we find that it all started when a small boy stepped on a dog’s tail and was bitten in the leg. There does not appear to have been even that much local base for the Cockrane fabrication.
The Ignace, Ontario, story (given above in its _American_ _Mercury_ form) has in my files considerable documentation. On January 2, 1923, I wrote Dr. Nelson in part:
“I wonder if you missed the interesting wolf story that appeared in the New York _Times_ for December 28th. In case you did, I am enclosing a copy.
“I am writing an article for publication in _Collier’s Weekly_ about fake wolf stories and especially about the great wolf-packs that gallop through our books and newspapers. Just as this article is being prepared for publication out comes another story. I am so sure that this one also is a fake that I am not holding up the publication of the article. However, I hope very much that you will be able to put a tracer on it and find out whether there is any truth behind this particular version.”
Dr. Nelson replied January 4:
“... I saw the New York _Times_ article copied in a local paper and at once considered it one of the typical wolf articles which appear in the press, particularly every winter.
“In order, however, to get definite information on the subject, I am writing to the postmaster of Port Arthur, Ontario, and also at San Ignace, sending them copies of the article and asking them what basis there is for a statement of this kind. I will let you know the results when they are received....”
I had written similarly to A. Brabant, Fur Trade Commissioner, Hudson’s Bay Company, Winnipeg, and to Harkin. Brabant, who later investigated for me more fully, gave preliminary reply January 6:
“I believe that the wolf story which was enclosed with your letter of the 2nd inst., is merely romance....
“As you are well aware, there are few, if any, cases of wolves attacking people....”
G. D. Russell, Postmaster of Port Arthur, Ontario, wrote Dr. Nelson January 17, 1923, in part:
“There have been similar stories circulated during the past years, but all have been found to be untrue, and while wolves are a serious scourge to wild animal life in the bush, and a source of annoyance to settlers in the back country, in so far as they are not averse to raiding their domestic fowl, yet the genuine evidence of men being killed by them has yet to be established.
“This recent story originated at Ignace, 200 miles west of Port Arthur. My personal opinion (and the consensus of opinion) is, that there is not the slightest foundation of truth in it.”
The Postmaster of Ignace, John Davies, wrote Dr. Nelson January 18, 1923:
“Your letter to hand, RE: the killing of three men by wolves north of Ignace. We in Ignace know nothing about this affair excepting what we read in the papers. I don’t think there is a word of truth in it. There are a lot of wolves which are doing a lot of damage among the wild game but so far as tackling human beings, I have never had any proof yet.”
The press discussion of the Ignace story was voluminous throughout Canada, particularly in Ontario. On January 18, 1923, Harkin sent me a quotation from “one of our local papers, under date the 17th instant”:
“... The scene of the tragedy was laid on a trail seventy miles north of Ignace. The names of the victims of the wolves were not given. Several old timers in Northern Ontario have ridiculed the story and have claimed that wolves are not man-killers. A Toronto man ... wrote to W. T. Thompson, dealer in furs at Ignace, asking as to the facts of the story.
“Mr. Thompson is quoted as replying: ... ‘Wolves are very numerous around here, but I have lived in this country for twenty-five years and have yet to hear of anyone being killed by wolves. During the past ten years, or over, I have been buying raw furs from trappers and Indians and have never heard any such tales that turn out true.’”
Reverberations of the Ignace yarn continued to reach me for several months. For instance, there came in a letter from an old friend, Inspector G. L. Jennings, of the Royal Northwest Mounted Police (now styled Royal Canadian Mounted Police), dated April 20, 1923. We shall use the main part of it in another connection but print here extracts from a cutting he sent taken from the Edmonton _Journal_ of February 10:
“Recently I read a letter concerning the habits of wolves. I had also read some time ago of a tragedy in the woods of our north country in which several men were pulled down and devoured by these animals,” says Dr. J. S. McCullough, writing in the Toronto _Globe_.
“In the gold rush of 1897 or 1898, when so many men made an attempt to get into the Klondike country via Edmonton, Athabasca Landing, Great Slave Lake and the Mackenzie River, I was one of a party which attempted a traverse from the Mackenzie River to Fort Norman to the Stewart or McMillan River over the divide. I was obliged to come back on account of sickness when we had got out about 60 miles on the trail. After dividing the supplies with my partner I made the trip back alone and as it was necessary that the onward-going party should have two tents I did not even have a tent to cover me on the return trip, but built little shelters of spruce, rolled in my sleeping bag with only boughs with a fire at my feet, and this slight windbreak to protect me from the winds and the wolves. Wolves there seemed to be in plenty, judging from the terrifying howls at night, but they were seldom seen. In my weakened condition from dysentery I made very slow time on my return trip to the banks of the river, six miles below Fort Norman, where there were several unoccupied, roughly-built log shacks. With 75 to 100 pounds on my sled I would drag along five or six miles, construct a stage and place my pack in safety, returning over the ground until I had all my stuff moved up. At this time of year and in this latitude I saw little of the sun, and frequently I made my move at night if the light was good and not much wind.
“I found the wolves very curious, following along on my snowshoe track, crossing and recrossing it, appearing at one side and ahead and then on the other side ahead or behind, always, however, in silence. I had been given to understand by Billy Paton, then of the Hyslop and Neaggel Trading Company, that the wolves never attacked a man, and so I traveled all alone, and very seldom with a weapon of any kind other than a light camp axe, and, although I was very lonesome and very weak and very down-hearted, I really never had any fear of the wolves. There was one that I became pretty well acquainted with, a very large and almost black fellow, who was afterward accidentally caught in a bear trap which had been set by an inexperienced miner by the name of Low Day. The trap was lost beneath the snow, and although Day knew about where it was, we were all afraid to hunt for it for fear of getting into it ourselves. The large, almost black, wolf that followed my trail like a ghost in some mysterious way sat down on his haunches right in the jaws of this trap, where we found him dead and frozen stiff.
“I think that those of us who put in the balance of the winter on the bank of the Mackenzie were all more relieved that the trap was thus discovered than at catching the wolf. What I have said here makes a very negative sort of wolf story, but the fact that I was out night after night alone and that every time I went back over my trail I saw fresh wolf tracks, and that through the long Arctic nights one could almost always hear the howl or bark of the wolf probably chasing hares, for the big game was driven away by the 40-odd men who had gone over the country, leaving hungry wolves and little else but hares and ptarmagan, would seem to prove that if ever the wolf would attack a human being the conditions were right for them to do so as I plodded my slow course back alone over this trail.
“... Personally I do not believe that the wolves of Canada ever attack a living human being. They would in time probably become bold enough to pick the bones of anyone dying or being frozen to death in the bush country. I have talked of wolves to many bushmen and never yet have I come across anyone who had bush experience but had an absolute contempt for the wolf so far as being attacked by him or them went....
“I can quite believe that a person who had been fed-up on wolf stories might take to a tree in fear when the wolves kept appearing and disappearing as they will do on the trail of a woodsman as he marches along at dusk, but I believe that it is only the wolf’s natural curiosity that leads to his follow-up tactics. The black tail or mule deer will often do the same thing if you pretend not to have seen him....”
The Cockrane story, as said, never gave us investigators a trace of foundation. One version of a basis for the Ignace story was contained in a letter of January 12 from L. M. Gleeson, of 416 Victoria Avenue, Fort William, Ontario, who wrote me on the letterhead of the Fort William-Port Arthur Rotary Club:
“Replying to your letter of January sixth, re wolf story from Port Arthur. I would say that the story was just a rumor. It originated, I believe, by a trainman running between here and Ignace, Ont., and as the story was re-told it was enlarged upon. I do know that the newspaper here tried for sometime to get a confirmation of the story direct from Ignace, but they were unable to do so. This story did not appear in our local paper although it was telegraphed outside....”
A theory of the Ignace yarn, published long after, makes it a fable devised for the good of a community. On January 16, 1933, the Portland _Oregonian_ printed a letter from Ada Alice Tuttle, summarizing investigations which she had made or was familiar with, the occasion being that the “Ten Years Ago” column had revived the story:
“The occurrence was investigated by several persons, Dr. (William T.) Hornaday among them. The explanation reveals the resourceful boss of a lumber camp, solving an acute liquor problem. It seems that a number of his men were in the habit of going to the nearest settlement to get drunk. So, remembering the effect produced on the youthful mind by the adventures of ‘Little Red Riding Hood,’ he also invented a fairy tale, suiting it to his audience by introducing plenty of action and lots of gore. ... They swallowed the yarn, hook, line and sinker, and after that stayed where they belonged, with the most admirable docility.”
As Dr. Nelson pointed out, the newspapers run dispatches on wolf-packs chiefly in winter. This, according to the stories themselves, is determined by laws of Nature. The rigors of the weather have banished or destroyed the wild animals on which the wolves customarily prey; besides, there is no doubt an increased metabolic rate, wolves, like people, needing some of the caloric energy from the food they eat for keeping themselves warm. In desperation the beasts gather in larger and larger packs and finally in extreme cases attack houses or even villages--the latter chiefly in some distant foreign country. In America they seem to confine themselves to attacks on people that are out in the woods. Usually we have to depend on word pictures by the survivors for information regarding these encounters, but on December 9, 1923, the New York _Times_ was able to publish in its rotogravure section two photographs from Sudbury, Ontario, giving the supporting testimony of a camera. One of the pictures showed two men standing knee-deep in snow as they defended themselves against a pack of wolves. The caption was “A Tragedy Among the Snows of the Far Northern Woods.” The summarized printed account said that, ammunition gone, two huntsmen were set upon by a pack of fifteen wolves. They fought them off, one using for a club the barrel of his gun, the other an axe. Before the battle came to a decision a third member of the hunting party arrived and was able to turn the tide with gunfire. The second picture has the description:
“The aftermath of a bloody battle in the wilds. Huntsmen binding up their wounds after hand to hand battle with pack of timber wolves from which they were saved by the timely arrival of a third member of their party.”
When I sent these pictures to Harkin for investigation, if he thought well of it, and in any case for comment, he replied that he was fed up with tracing stories of wolf-packs. It seemed to him a study of the picture indicated that the wolves in the picture had all been dead for some time. Apparently they had been allowed to freeze stiff in various attitudes and had then been propped up in the soft snow to give the semblance of an attacking wolf-pack.
Doubtless the three hunters were too excited during the battle and forgot about taking pictures. So they had to re-enact the adventure for the camera next day. The chief difficulty about that explanation was that some of the “wolves” looked a bit like dogs.
Sure enough, time proved that the doggy look of the wolves had its reason. On April 12, 1927, the Utica _Press_ carried a letter from B. H. Divine in which he said, in part:
“The New York _Times_ published a picture a while ago of two men with clubbed guns fighting for their lives against a pack of wolves. Following this up I received word from the Royal Canadian Mounted Police that the wolves in the picture were dogs very cleverly posed, and the whole thing was a fake.”
During the next years there were few American stories of note although striking accounts of packs and their depredations were printed from Europe--these we shall discuss farther on. The American scene brightened with January, 1926, when on the 17th the Chicago _Tribune_ presented to its readers the desperate situation then facing one of the territories of the United States:
ALASKA TO WAR ON WOLF PACKS WITH AIR BOMBS
Shrapnel from Planes May Save Game
Juneau, Alaska--(Special)--Dropping bombs from airplanes upon packs of big timber wolves is a method for destroying these game-killing brutes, now advanced and approved by Governor George A. Parks. A trial of the idea is planned for next month, generally known as the hunger-month of winter, when wild life is at its lowest ebb and gnawing pangs grip wolves, lynx and owls.
According to reports received at the governor’s office, female caribou, deer, and domesticated reindeers have been repeatedly attacked this winter by large bands of timber wolves. The destruction among the female caribou is appalling.
The bull caribou in winter round-up together, peacefully content, leaving the cows to protect themselves and yearling calves as best they can. All are antlered, but they lack the weight of caribou bulls, likewise the fighting strategy.
Air mail men operating in the Alaskan service have filed many reports of instances where packs of wolves, hearing and seeing the planes in the sky, gathered forces and raced the aviators, leaping and barking at the birdlike machines after the manner of dogs barking at pigeons. To the aviator it seemed that a large rock dropped into the packs would easily kill or maim many.
The plan proposed is to drop bombs loaded with shrapnel and dynamite into wolf-packs powerful enough to wreak terrific damage even hundreds of feet away in all directions. Trappers and hunters believe that the animals, seeing a bomb dropped, would instantly run to examine it, thus bringing about their own destruction.
Timber wolves weighing 250 pounds, seven to eight feet in length, have been killed by trappers this winter near Fairbanks. The same breed of animal infests the territory from Ketchikan, far north in the tundra, where herds of reindeer forage. The native herders report many encounters with prowling brutes eager to pull down young reindeer.
A powder manufacturing concern has offered bombs free for the unique hunting expedition.
The _Tribune_ account thus pictures not only a situation physically serious but paints a discouraging view of the moral deterioration of the Alaska bull caribou which were no longer willing to place at the service of the smaller and weaker members of the herd their superior antlers, greater weight and their fighting strategy.
But it was encouraging to read that the very head of the Alaska territorial administration, Governor George A. Parks, was in charge of the relief operations. I happened to know he was in Washington and wrote him there February 19. His reply came dated February 23 from the office of the Secretary of the Interior:
“Concerning the clipping from the Chicago _Tribune_, I am at a loss to understand how it originated. I left Juneau, December 16, 1925, and have been in Washington since early in January. I never have authorized any such statement. It may be a fact that the bulls separate from the rest of the caribou herd during the winter, but my personal observation has been to the contrary. If any of the pilots in the Air Mail Service have filed reports as alleged in the newspaper account, these reports never have come to my attention. It would be most unusual to hear a wolf bark like a dog. There may be wolves in Alaska that weigh 250 pounds, but I do not know of any such records.[13] I believe that it is conceded generally that a wolf-pack usually includes only the members of the family--father, mother, and pups--and they separate about the beginning of the next mating season. I have no personal knowledge of any large bands of wolves, nor have I been able to find any authentic cases where bands of wolves have molested reindeer or caribou herds. Many times during my winter trips through Alaska, I have been told about the wolf-packs, but so far as I know the stories never have been founded on fact.
Geo. A. Parks
Governor of Alaska.”
Logically the Bureau of Biological Survey was concerned with the situation and its Chief, Nelson, wrote me February 24:
“The other day I had a conference with Governor Parks on various matters relating to Alaska and he showed me the copy of the Chicago _Tribune_ clipping of January 17, a copy of which you sent me, containing the weird tale of the plan to bomb wolves by the use of airplanes. Governor Parks was inclined to be somewhat exercised over the connection of his name with this absurd statement....
“Of course, the whole thing is an absurdity on the face of it ... there is no such abundance of wolves in Alaska as indicated in this article.... The claim that timber wolves weighing 250 pounds have been killed near Fairbanks the present winter is another evidence of the absolute unreliability of the article.”
This is trying to be a chronological statement but we are unable to resist the temptation to print from a Washington despatch of the _Associated Press_ as it appeared in the New York _Times_ of May 31, 1936:
“Plans for an airplane attack on savage packs of Alaskan wolves were worked out today by three Federal agencies....
“Last Winter, Governor John W. Troy cabled for help....”
It may have seemed a bit far afield in 1926 to go all the way to Alaska for stories of wolf-packs, so the _Associated Press_ in 1927, with a Chicago date line of January 24, had a story which one paper used under “Hunters to Renew Search for Wolves Near Chicago. First Venture Fails to Disclose Marauding Pack Reported by Farmers.” However, there was skepticism (that’s the difficulty of having the stories too near home) and Leroy Davidson, former chief of the Cook County Highway Police, was quoted:
“Wolves--bah! Last summer there was a camp of Campfire Girls in the forest preserve. They had three dogs--the dogs were a mixture of Airedale and police dog. When the girls broke camp they left the dogs behind. I also had an Airedale. He ran away and joined the other three. These four dogs are the ‘pack of wolves’ that are causing all the commotion.”
That pronouncement threatened at first to be a wet blanket. However, there is in my files a press cutting dated February 4 with the heading: “Fliers Hunt Wolves on Edge of Chicago. Posse Has Had No Luck.” So the story did keep going awhile.
When it requires ten days on the edges of Chicago to dispose of a wolf-pack, even with the assistance of the chief of the Highway Police, no wonder stories from Alaska have a considerable lease of life. Some of them promise to become, and to remain, a part of the source material of Alaskan natural history.
The year 1927 proved rich in American wolf tales, making up for the comparatively lean years since 1923. My favorite of that season, and of many years, I was able to trace through the help of my old friend Lee Smits, free lance writer and also columnist for the Detroit _Times_. It is not a story of a wolf-pack, but we digress a moment to place chronologically a striking episode of a lone Michigan wolf. We quote the St. Ignace _Enterprise_ of February 3, 1927:
LARGE TIMBER WOLF
Entered the Home of Robert Alexander and Attacked Woman and Children
Mrs. Robert Alexander and children were made the victims of a savage attack by a large timber wolf in their home in Brevort township last Wednesday. The animal, made desperate evidently by hunger forced its way through the doorway of the kitchen and made a rush at the children who were playing on the floor. Mrs. Alexander got between the wolf and the children and called to her husband to get a gun, and she also was leaped upon by the animal and borne to the floor. Before it could do serious harm Alexander appeared with a gun and first kicking the wolf from the prostrate form of his wife fired as the wolf made its escape through the doorway and slightly injuring it. It was making towards the woods when Mrs. Lottie Page, a neighbor, hearing the shot came out of her home with a loaded shotgun in her hand and seeing the wolf made a lucky shot killing the animal.
While wolves have been reported as being numerous in Brevort and surrounding townships, and have done considerable damage, this is the first instance that one has been known to have attacked a human being. The Alexanders are of the opinion that the attack was caused by starvation as the animal appeared to be weak from exhaustion.
On seeing this gem, I wrote Smits, who replied April 29:
“State Conservation Officer George Gish, Jr., who patrols the area in which the ‘attack’ occurred, called at the Alexander home and was shown the dead wolf. It was a small mongrel of the collie type, with a bob tail, a white blaze, yellow in color, weighing not more than 40 pounds. There is an epidemic of ‘running fits’ or ‘fright-disease’ among dogs, and this dog may have rushed into the cabin while delirious, or it may have merely been cold, hungry and lonesome. It was a male dog. The rumor that the animal was a timber wolf started when someone in the neighborhood ‘guessed maybe’ there was wolf blood in the dog. Not because of its appearance, but because it came out of the woods and acted strangely....
“... The story is from a paper at the county seat. It was carried extensively over the wires....”
Although chiefly known to the literary world for his novel _Spring Flight_, Smits is, among other things, one of America’s connoisseurs of un-natural history. So he could not resist going on:
“Not only can many bartenders and hotel clerks in the backwoods give you good wolf yarns--attacks on mankind--but old lumberjacks know, by direct hearsay, of some desperate encounters. The editor of the daily paper at Sault Ste. Marie, Ont., ... has for several years offered $100 for an authenticated report of a wolf attacking a person in the Algoma district of Ontario. No takers.
“The state prison at Marquette, Mich., fronts on Lake Superior and, although on the outskirts of a small city, is at the edge of a strip of wild country extending into rather large areas of swamp and timber and offering cover for a fugitive for hundreds of miles. Very few escapes are attempted, and the fear of wild animals is unquestionably a deterrent. One gang got loose and were rounded up because they made straight for roads and kept on them. They spent one night in the brush, with a few hares, porcupines and owls about them, and perhaps a fox or coyote, and said when they were caught that they all were sorry they ran away when darkness closed in on them. They had a terrible night. All city gunmen.”
That there are at times very special motives behind wolf-pack stories appears from a letter from B. H. Divine, published in the Utica, New York, _Press_ of April 12, 1927:
“To the Editor of _The Press_:
The following wolf story recently appeared in _The Press_:
‘Huntsville, Ont., March 31--While making his way to a lumber camp near Algonquin Park, Elwood Bloss was pursued by a pack of wolves. He fled onto the open ice, where the animals, 16 of them, surrounded him. Their howling attracted the attention of a game warden, who arrived before they closed on their intended victim. He shot seven before the pack fled.’
Upon writing to the authorities at Huntsville for the truth of the matter, I received the following letter from T. Muyhum, postmaster:
‘This story was first published here early in January last, but since that time it has been pretty thoroughly exploded.
‘The young man (aged 22) started out to walk six or seven miles to the railroad station early in the morning. The howling of some wolves at a distance frightened him so badly that he did not recover for some days. It was necessary to make some explanation of his condition, and the truth sounded so inadequate he built the story to suit his condition. It was soon into the papers, and after being contradicted from the pack end he acknowledged that much of it was not true.’”
For some reason there did not come to my attention until 1931 a support of wolf-packs by book reviewers and press commentators who relied on a volume published in 1929, _The Last Stand of the Pack_, by Arthur H. Carhart and Stanley P. Young. At last, said the reviewers, a distinguished biologist and student of wild life has spoken out, resentful about the sniping at wolf-packs by amateur naturalists.
Young was chief biologist of the U. S. Biological Survey, exclaimed the champions of the pack, in consonant triumph. They were right, for I looked him up in _American Men of Science_ and found this substantial record:
“... U. S. Govt. hunter, bur. biol. surv., U. S. Dept. Agr., Ariz., 17-19, in charge ground squirrel control work, 19, coyote control crew, southeast N. Mex., 20, asst. leader predatory animal control, 20-21, leader, Colo-Kans. dist., 21-27, asst. head div. econ. investigations, Washington, D. C., 27-28, prin. biologist in charge div. predatory animal and rodent control, 28-....”
The reviewers did not notice, but I did, a sensational angle. To have Young opposing Nelson was like Roosevelt falling out with Smith--the chief of a division of the U. S. Biological Survey opposing that retired chief of the Survey who had brought him to Washington. It was a delicate situation but I had to get Nelson’s view and wrote him discreetly April 28, 1932. He replied May 14 from California:
“... It will surprise me very much if he has recorded a pack of any considerable size beyond that which you and I believe to be normal (mother with litter of pups). I will look up the matter soon after I return and talk to him about it. Will then write you....”
An invalid, and busy though officially retired, Nelson did not communicate until March 22, 1933. There was to be no Smith-Roosevelt situation, it now appeared, for the retired Chief said:
“Under date of March 14, 1933, Stanley P. Young of the Biological Survey writes....
“‘With regard to your question on wolves, I heartily agree with you that the great packs of wolves such as have been often described in books and newspapers exist only in the minds of writers. In my experience the typical wolf-pack consists of the two parents and their young of the year. One is apt to see this so-called pack in the late fall and up until the early spring. Also it is possible in the formation of this so-called pack for two families of wolves to intermingle for a short time in the fall of the year, particularly if one family group is in close proximity to another, and a kill is in progress. My experience, even under these conditions, however, is to the effect that wolves of several families never unite in a long and friendly association....
“‘It is therefore possible from the foregoing that newspaper writers and authors have in mind the family groups of wolves rather than the packs of adults. However, these writers usually give the impression that these packs are made up of adult wolves. The greatest number of wolves in one litter that I have ever seen totalled eight. This pack was made up of the eight young, which were apparently whelped in early March, and the old female and old male.’”
Nelson felt Young was a bit too generous “in explaining what the writers have in mind in their tales of big packs. Really they are drawing from an inexhaustible store of ignorance on the subject. Probably less than 1 per cent of them ever saw a wolf in the wilds.”
The year 1933 closed on a note ominous for New York State. For the _Herald-Tribune_ of December 30 reported:
“Lithgow Osborne, State Commissioner of Conservation, has assigned Ray Burmaster, game protector of the Saranac Lake district, to exterminate the wolves which have been seen in the northern counties in recent weeks. Ten dozen snares and traps have been set in the wolf-infested areas and seventy-five skilled hunters and trappers will be employed. Wolves recently attacked two farm hands near Fort Covington, in Franklin County.... The pack now at large numbers from twelve to fifty.”
The New York _Times_, evidently not jealous, supported its rival the _Herald-Tribune_ by saying in an editorial of January 5 that: “... one pack hunting in Franklin County at this time is estimated at from twelve to fifty in number....” They added that: “An application has been made to the Biological Survey at Washington for the services of an expert wolf trapper to rid New York of the unwelcome visitors.”
I wrote the Conservation Department of New York at Albany January 5, and Lithgow Osborne, Commissioner, replied January 12:
“... we do not have any definite information to indicate that the wolves which have recently appeared in the vicinity of Owls Head in the Adirondacks are running in packs. We are sending one of our field investigators, Mr. Darrow, into the region which the wolves apparently inhabit, in an effort to determine just what the situation is. I shall be pleased to request a report from him as to whether or not the wolves are actually hunting in packs, and to see that the information is forwarded to you sometime early in the spring.”
The Commissioner’s follow-up slipped and I did not remind him for two years. On July 13, 1936, came a letter from John T. Gibbs, Deputy Commissioner. He mentions several reports on the Adirondack wolves “all of which resulted in our deciding that there were no packs of timber wolves in the Adirondacks.”
One of the reports was from E. A. Goldman of the U. S. Biological Survey. He had been in the region of the packs and “we crossed a fresh track of one of these canine beasts in a remote section of the forest. Owing to the softness and depth of snow it had been making slow progress. The track, about one day old, appeared like that of a rather small dog.”
Two animals from the supposed wolf-pack had been captured, but “general appearances indicated, however, that both are dogs.”
The skin and skull from another animal killed was sent to the American Museum of Natural History of New York. On February 15, 1934, H. E. Anthony, curator, reported that in his judgment the relics were those of a dog.
By 1935 the news magazine _Time_ had already secured a wide public for its news radio broadcast. They had enough nobility or were secure enough to print in their “Letters” of January 21, 1935, an indignant protest from Manitoba against what the correspondent felt was their nature-faking. Axel Nielsen wrote them from Cranberry Portage, Manitoba:
“Your radio representation of the wolf story (Dec. 21, 1934), was most unconvincing. Don’t let yourself be taken in by such stories....
“For 15 years I have traded and prospected in the North, over a vast territory, a belt 1,200 miles long by 500 wide, the top of all the prairie Provinces and beyond. I have met wolves, traveled with them, trailed them. They have trailed me too; they’re a curious lot. But my own sleigh dogs were ten times more dangerous.... Your terrified passengers were probably stretching the imagination valiantly, thanks to the nursery version of wolves in general.... In all my experience, all my questioning of Indians, whose language I speak fluently, I have never yet discovered a single wolf half as dangerous as the ordinary pasture bull, an irritable sow, or a gander.”
THE WOLF PACK IN THE OLD WORLD
The _American Mercury_, July, 1927, statement on the wolf-pack closed:
“The case seems to be definitely settled against the wolf-pack in North America. But there still remains Russia. Well, why not let Russia remain? No one seems to have checked wolf-pack stories in Russia for everyone is so sure they are true. And perhaps they are. Besides, it is a distant country, and the fancy must somewhere have play.”
For many years I sought and found reliable information on conditions in what is now the U.S.S.R. from a learned and far-traveled officer of the Russian Navy, Commander N. A. Transehe, who was doing scientific work in New York. One of our conversations dealt with packs of wolves.
Transehe had journeyed through recognized wolf districts of Russia and Siberia so extensively that few could have had more experience. He never saw more than single wolves or a pair (doubtless male and female), except when it seemed clear that the group was one or both parents with a litter. I suggested that doubtless the wolf-pack, then, existed in Russia only as folklore, but this he considered did not follow at all. “I have lived in New York several years,” he said. “I have never been to Wall Street but I know there is a Wall Street. I have lived in the United States without seeing the Rocky Mountains but I know there are Rocky Mountains. It is that way with packs of wolves in Russia. They are of common knowledge.”
This was the considered view of a Russian whose judgment I had often found good. Also there were two of the foremost authorities on wild animals in the United States, who had expressed to me the feeling that Eurasian wolves might be quite different from ours and that we had better not get too dogmatic about their not running in packs or in general about their being just behavior replicas of American wolves. These authorities were the above-cited Nelson, in several letters and conversations, and C. Hart Merriam in a letter of December 9, 1924.
In 1926, with the hilarious Lake Winnipeg (Ben Cockrane) and Ignace yarns fresh in mind, I found myself an after-dinner speaker at a New York banquet of the Western Universities Club where Kent Cooper, then recently elected General Manager of the _Associated Press_, presided. The opportunity was too good, and I dealt with press faking, spinning yarn after yarn and alleging, in some cases not correctly, that these had been carried by the _Associated Press_.
On July 8, 1926, I received a letter from Jackson S. Elliott, Assistant General Manager, saying that the _Associated Press_ was making “use of the information you gave to us about the wolves not running in packs in order to have our own service as near accurate as possible.”
Three things seemed to me: that the _AP_ carried fewer American wolf stories during the next several years, that most American wolf stories in the press during that time were not of _AP_ origin, but that stories of wolf-packs from abroad failed to decrease in number.
Magazines were active in European tales. Through an article, “Russia of the Hour,” by Junius B. Wood, the _National Geographic Magazine_, for November, 1926, p. 521, said:
“It is only a step from Moscow ... into the wide open spaces. Wolves and bears still roam in the Moscow district, and when the dull winter dusk comes at 2 o’clock in the afternoon and the country is under its white mantle of snow, hunger drives them to prey on mankind.
“They boldly attack villages and, this year, even assailed a railroad train of cattle. No peasant ventures alone far outside his village, and one group of 20 men, fancying safety in numbers, was attacked by a wolf-pack. Several were killed and all seriously torn before the pack was driven off.”
The author proved to be a correspondent of the Chicago _Daily News_, with broad experience of travel, including Russia. I wrote him July 14, 1927, with interest in his picture of Russia under the Soviets, asking several questions, mainly ones that would enable me to check on the reports further:
On what railroad and near or between what towns was the cattle train attacked, whence did the information come, when did the attack take place? Could the author furnish corresponding information regarding the twenty men attacked? What further information could he give regarding wolves in Russia, as to their traveling or working in packs? What sources for still more knowledge could he suggest?
Wood wrote from Paris, France, August 31:
“Your letter of July 14, in which a certain unidentified group designated as ‘we’ requests further information concerning my reference to Russian wolves in an article in the _National Geographic Magazine_ has been forwarded to me here. From time to time this coming winter when I return to the U.S.S.R. I will be pleased to send you what information I receive on this subject as wolves are as active a source of news in that country as bootleggers are in the U. S. A.
“This information was taken from Soviet newspapers. The attack on the cattle train standing on a siding was later corroborated from other sources. The attack on the villagers went into details to the extent of giving the names of those killed. Both occurred in the winter of 1926-7. As I do not have my papers here and do not remember the names of villages, railroad, casualties and other details requested in questions 1, 2 and 3, I must postpone answering further until I return to Moscow and have opportunity to look them up.
“Your statement ‘You know, of course, that of all wolf-pack stories published by the American newspapers, more than 75 per cent are without any foundation whatever, and that most of the rest are based on some misapprehension’ indicates a clairvoyance worthy of your fellow explorer ‘Doc’ Cook. It is the first suggestion which has come to me that I ‘know’, or even admit such a theory. It is far from proven.... (I) have serious doubts of your impartiality on the gregariousness of wolves. Though entirely personal, my humble opinion would accept the version of unscientific but not blind natives, including rural correspondents, who are living with wolves in preference to scientists’ dogmas which appeal to publishers and lyceum managers....”
The letter then goes on to valuable and no doubt accurately quoted statements by Russians on wolves, ending with: “Packs are reported as varying from 5 to more than 100 which, while leaving the figures open to doubt, cannot be entirely an optical illusion.”
The promised letter of information from Moscow did not come, but I secured Moscow and general U.S.S.R. information from other sources. Waldemar Jochelson, distinguished Russian traveler and anthropologist, was then in New York and wrote me twice concerning the Wood article, July 27 and August 11, 1927. The letters do not say it outright, but there is to be inferred from them a view that wolf-packs do exist, or at least may exist. In this Jochelson resembles most Russians whom I know. But, again like most, he holds this belief, or this willingness to believe, in spite of, rather than because of, his own experience. He says in the August 11 letter:
“As to my own observations in Siberia before the railroad was built and in places far away from the railroad after its construction I may say that I never saw a single wolf in my numerous voyages except puppies taken from wolf’s den.
“I was told by my reindeer drivers of instances when single wolves attacking herds of reindeer seized calves in spite of the presence of the herdsmen. I remember one case when a reindeer of my team came running and fell exhausted at the entrance of my tent and the team driver told me that the reindeer was pursued by a wolf.
“Siberian hunters told me the following on the habits of the Siberian wolf. He does not like the woods, preferring the tundra and other open places, where he can see and smell his prey from a distance. Grown up wolves do not like company. Wolves have separate dens and she-wolves abandon their puppies when they become able to hunt for themselves.”
The outstanding foreign wolf tale of 1927, not so much in itself as in what it led to, was printed as an _Associated Press_ release by the New York _Times_, February 9:
CAUCASUS WOLVES BOMBED FROM AIRPLANE; HUNGRY PACKS INVADE TOWNS, KILLING PEASANTS
GENEVA, Feb. 8 (AP).--Wolves in the Caucasus have become so numerous that the military authorities there sent an airplane to the infested districts, where poison gas bombs were dropped on packs, killing 200 of the invaders, say reports received by the League of Nations.
Wolves are becoming a menace to the lives of peasants in remote regions of Russia, Poland and some other countries of East Central Europe, the reports say. Ferocious from hunger, these beasts, which have multiplied surprisingly, are reported as frequently making attacks on villages, and in some cases have killed and devoured helpless peasants.
Austria reports that one farmer kept twelve wolves at bay with an axe, wounding them all with powerful swinging blows, and that he was finally rescued by villagers, who saved his life by quick bandaging of bleeding arms and legs.
In the district of Vilna, Poland, packs of wolves, maddened by cold and hunger, descended on the town of Ostrovsk and boldly attacked the inhabitants, who, during several hours, were obliged to put up an organized defense with rifle and shotgun before the savage enemy retired. Poland is reported to have mobilized several regiments to carry on an offensive against wolves.
From Russia come even more terrifying stories. In the rural region wolves by hundreds attack villages and even boldly enter the smaller cities in broad daylight. At Verchofourye five peasants were slain by the beasts before the packs were driven off.
At Orenburg three packs entered the town from different points, throwing the population into a panic and forcing all to barricade themselves in their houses, from which they launched a steady fire, finally killing all the wolves, which tenaciously refused to abandon their attack.
Perhaps through too much Edgar Wallace and E. Phillips Oppenheim I got on this story a slant which appears from a letter written by N. M. Stiles, Foreign News Editor of the _Associated Press_, to their Geneva correspondent, Joseph E. Sharkey, on February 24:
“Please recall your Wolf story which you sent us by mail. We used it on February 8, but before it got to the wires we sent out a note to editors suggesting its elimination for two reasons, the first being that the incidents described were so extraordinary, the second being that the statement that wolves travel in packs has been disputed. However, although the story did not get on the wires, two of the New York papers nevertheless printed it--the New York _Times_ putting it in a box on the front page.
“Now comes a letter from Vilhjalmur Stefansson, in which he asks the following somewhat startling and curious question:
‘Do you suppose the wolf dispatch you carried about two weeks ago from Geneva could possibly have been some sort of a cipher message on behalf of almost any sort of secret organization? If so, you are the people to do detective work on its origin. I am putting out two or three lines to trace it from the pseudo-natural history point of view.’
“As you recall we cabled you for confirmation of the story, and you replied that the reports were received unofficially leanations (League of Nations) circles also printed widely Swiss newspapers.’ Now when you come to read this story with the thought in mind that the word ‘wolves’ might be a code word to identify some sort of an organization, as for instance an anti-Bolsheviki outfit, the dispatch does read most interestingly. One can imagine that the organization was putting these messages over on the Swiss newspapers.”
Meantime I tried to find out directly how the League was connected and wrote to the League of Nations Non-Partisan Association of New York City. Their librarian, A. G. F. Aylmer, replied February 24 that they could not understand how the wolf stories should interest the League, and while, like me, they had seen the press despatch, they had no direct information of any similar kind from Geneva. Their office would let me know if they found later that there had been some League connection.
The Stiles letter brought a reply from Sharkey, dated March 12. It puts the case reasonably and shows, particularly in the last of our quoted paragraphs, how normal it is in Europe to read, pass on, and believe wolf-pack stories.
“Answering your letter of February 24 concerning the wolf mail story let me say that this was founded on stories and despatches appearing in Swiss newspapers and on confirmatory talks with secretaries of the League of Nations....
“The League interest in the wolf reports is chiefly economic. The reason was explained to me at the time by ... member of the League information section....
“He told me about recent cases of wolf-packs attacking peasants in the outlying districts. I have never before heard disputed the statement that Russian wolves ‘carry on’ in packs. When I was in Siberia in the winter of 1918-19 a detachment of the British Hampshire regiment which ‘en-sleighed’ from Omsk to Ekaterinburg was attacked by a pack of wolves. The soldiers killed most of them. Participants told me the story personally and I wrote it at the time. The whole history of Russia shows that wolves, desperate with hunger, will attack in packs. The word pack means what it says.
“Since mailing you my story there has appeared a despatch from Constantinople declaring that wolves had attacked people in the outskirts. There is a general idea that the lack of arms in Russia (the Soviet government not favoring extensive arsenals in the outlying districts) has led to a big increase in wolves while the present severe winter has brought the beasts out into the open to secure food. I am sorry I have thrown away all my clippings. Certainly Mr. Stefansson’s theory is startling and interesting and I shall follow any new wolf despatch from a new angle, letting you know, of course, the result.
“The wolf narratives have created no stir in Europe whatsoever because they are regarded as entirely probable, given the circumstances outlined above.”
In due course a letter came from the Information Department of the League of Nations, dated Geneva, March 14, and signed by Arthur Sweetser. This letter vouches for the generally high character of the American press representatives at Geneva, the particularly high character of Joseph E. Sharkey, and the authenticity of the news conveyed by Sharkey so far as concerns its having been received by the League of Nations organization and passed on by them. The general tenor of Mr. Sweetser’s long and careful statement is that, without being exactly able to prove the truth of the stories, he really knows them to be correct, and that therefore the League is neither a victim of propaganda nor indulging in any when it passes on information of this kind. One section of his letter reads:
“... it is a fact that one of our officials has seen 6, 8, or 10 (he does not remember the exact number) despatches from Eastern European countries regarding the increasing depredations and boldness of wolves.... The official in question is a native of that part of Europe and his information, and the experience of his friends as to the habits of wolves, differs from that of Mr. Stefansson.”
On June 1, Sharkey wrote me from Geneva:
“... there may be an inherent difference in the wolves found in North America and those found in Russia, including, of course, Siberia. I personally spent three months in Siberia during the winter of 1918-1919, and persons who had long lived there frequently spoke to me about the depredations of wolves which seemed to run in packs....
“... I want to bring to your attention the testimony of a young Frenchman who with others was conducting an aeroplane trip over Ukraine during the latter part of the war.... He said: ‘I think I can throw some light on that question, for when I and my colleagues were flying over Southern Ukraine we distinctly saw a pack of wolves marching slowly and somewhat solemnly through an opening in the woods. The band seemed to have a distinct formation with one wolf striding some feet ahead of the main pack as if he were their leader. Stragglers were seen in the rear, but the whole band seemed to have a distinct and almost military formation under a distinct leader.’
“I have talked again with the Polish friend whose father did a good deal of hunting of wolves, and he repeated that there is no doubt but that in Poland, where the wolves run over from Russia, the animals operate in packs or groups.”
The _Associated Press_ received as late as March 23 pack despatches from Geneva, “where interest in news of wolf activity is chiefly economic.” One of the despatches closed with these three paragraphs:
“There is a general belief here that the lack of arms in the Russian country districts has led to a big increase in the number of wolves, while the severe winter has brought the beasts into the open to secure food.
“Despite the assertions of many naturalists that wolves do not hunt in packs those who have personal knowledge of wolf hunting, particularly in Poland, assert that wolves, desperate with hunger, will attack in packs.
“In the winter of 1918-19 a detachment of the British Hampshire regiment in Siberia which went by sleigh from Omsk to Ekaterinburg reported an attack by a pack of wolves. The soldiers killed most of the animals by rifle fire.”
These despatches, though I saw them through the kindness of the _Associated Press_, were not sent out to the newspapers--for the reasons given in the already-quoted letter from their Foreign News Editor. On June 22, Stiles wrote further:
“I have just read your article on wolves in the _American Mercury_, and am reminded that I intended to send you a mail story on the subject that we received some time ago from our then correspondent in Moscow, Mr. James A. Mills. We did not make use of it, as it was for the most part a denial of the wolf story that came from Geneva to which you called our attention and which we had already endeavored to ‘kill.’”
The Mills contribution is valuable as a statement of the time from Moscow and is, of course, wholly authentic to the extent that it is a report of what was believed there then about wolves. We accordingly use more than three-quarters of it:
“Moscow, March 17.--Soviet Government officials were amazed at reports reaching the League of Nations recently that Russia was overrun with wolves to such an extent that in the Caucasus region the military authorities had to dispatch airplanes with poison-gas bombs to kill the invaders. The wolves had become so numerous and ferocious, the League reports said, that they devoured human beings and terrified whole cities and towns.
“‘A wolf story is always as good as a fish story,’ said a prominent Soviet official to the correspondent. ‘The more it is exaggerated, the better it sounds. But such stories ought to be left to those whom the late President Roosevelt called “Nature fakers.” It is in poor taste for a dignified, serious organization like the League of Nations to issue them. The story about an airplane being sent in pursuit of packs of these wolves is pure fiction. Russia has its share of wolves, but they are no more numerous nor savage than those of any other country.’
“That Russian wolves are no more abundant or ferocious than their brother-wolves in other countries, is however, not strictly accurate; for statistics show that not only are wolves on the increase in Russia, but their depredations are much more extensive and costly than formerly. The animals are also considerably larger, stronger and fiercer than the average wolf. The increase in their number is attributed to the peasants’ lack of rifles and shot with which to hunt them. It is only within the last year that the Government, yielding to complaints of the peasants that wolves were menacing their sheep and cattle, organized special detachments of professional hunters to exterminate the wolves, giving a premium for each animal killed.[14]
“The loss in sheep, cattle and horses caused by wolves during the last year is estimated at $6,500,000. A full-grown Russian wolf can easily kill a horse, cow, or even a bull. But he rarely, according to Russian authorities on natural history, shows sufficient courage to attack a man. Indeed, the wolf usually runs in terror at the sight of a human being. Even when travelling in large packs, these Russian experts say, wolves avoid meeting a man in daylight; they become dangerous only at night, when they may collectively attack a person along a lonely, dark road in the country.
“Throughout the day they usually sleep, wandering and hunting in search of prey only in the dark. At such times, say the Russian authorities, the most formidable weapon against the animals is not a loaded gun, but a simple flare of artificial light, like a burning match, a bonfire or an illuminated candle, wolves having mortal fear of anything resembling fire.
“Wolves always live in families--the father, mother, two young wolves born the previous year and two baby wolves born in February or March. Throughout the Summer and Autumn they never leave the neighborhood where their young were born. It is only during the mating season in December and January that the male wolves, seeking their female kin, form packs and roam for scores of miles at night.”
This statement would have been more convincing with the last paragraph omitted. For perhaps the Russians might err on packs when they were so wrong, or at least so far from what naturalists think they know, about mating habits and size of litters among wolves. The usual view is that instead of being whelped in pairs, as these Moscow informants had it, wolves are born in litters ranging up to twelve, and that they do not accompany the mother beyond six or eight months. It is a fresh contribution, too, that wolf-packs consist of males that are searching for females.
For the time being the packs had it--Sharkey’s suggestion (and Nelson’s and Merriam’s) that wolves might be different in Europe seemed to be carrying the day.
But there was the matter of wolves attempting to devour the Hampshire regiment of British troops on its sleigh journey from Omsk to Ekaterinburg in 1918-19. Sir Sidney Harmer of the Natural History Museum, South Kensington, was a student of animal habits and of animal lore. He should be able to get in touch with members of the Hampshire regiment, and I wrote him June 23. The Museum’s Keeper of Zoölogy, W. G. Calman, replied on the Museum’s behalf July 21 that the Hampshire story was fading “as wolf stories generally do when they are more definitely enquired into.” He forwarded a letter dated July 19 from H. M. Howgrave-Graham, who is Secretary of the Metropolitan Police of London and was (says _Who’s Who_) “Captain in the 1/9 Batln. Hampshire Regiment in India and Siberia, 1914-19.”
“I was in Colonel Johnson’s Battalion (the Ninth Battalion of the Hampshire Regiment) and it happens that I was in charge of the only party which made any considerable sledge journeys during the winter 1918-19.
“My party tried to get to Orenburg from Omsk but didn’t get so far. We went by train to Troitsk and from there we made two sledge journeys, one to Verkhne Uralsk and back and one to Orsk and back. I remember being told that we might see wolves and had hopes of doing so as we travelled a good deal at night. But we were disappointed and never saw or heard any signs of wolves at all....”
Junius B. Wood said in his above-quoted letter to me:
“Your statement ‘You know, of course, that of all wolf-pack stories published by the American newspapers, more than 75 per cent are without any foundation whatever, and that most of the rest are based on some misapprehension’ indicates a clairvoyance worthy of your fellow explorer ‘Doc’ Cook. It is the first suggestion which has come to me that I ‘know,’ or even admit such a theory ... unless you can show that you have tabulated and checked the individual inaccuracies of ‘all’ the newspaper stories which you so sweepingly include, I am extremely sceptical of your ‘75 per cent’ and have serious doubts of your impartiality on the gregariousness of wolves.”
It had never been my intention to claim that three-quarters of all cases had already been studied and found without any vestige of truth. What I meant was that several students whom I know, among them the Chief of the United States Biological Survey, had been investigating for years the cases which came to their attention and that three-quarters of these had proved without foundation--while most of the rest, and perhaps all, were based on misquotations, misunderstandings, and the like.
Particularly with regard to a distant and vast realm like the U.S.S.R. it is hard to study all the cases reported. With increasing frequency through my investigations I began to run upon the name of Sergius Buturlin as a lifelong student of Russian and Siberian wild life and as the foremost authority, among other things, on wolves. Accordingly, I wrote him July 14, 1927, requesting as much general information and as definite information as he felt like giving. He replied August 18:
“I began hunting when about 8 years old, now--I am sorry to say--some 46 years ago. And though my chief interest was always with birds, and my first ornithological paper was published (in _Okhotnichia Gazeta_ or _Hunter’s Journal_, Moscow) in 1888, I was, and am still, very fond indeed of big game shooting (bears, moose, wolves).
“I hunted much in the basin of middle Volga (governments of Simbirsk--now Ulianovsk--Penza, Kazan, Nijny, Nijny-Novgorod) in governments of Tula and Orel, in Livonia and Esthonia, in governments of St. Petersburg--now Leningrad--and Novgorod, in Kirghiz country (between Irtysh and Ob), Kulunda steppe, gov’ts. of Tomsk and Irkutsk, and in the north: Arkhangelsk and Olonetz gov’ts., Kolguev, Novaia Zemlia, Yakutsk, Verkhoiansk, middle and lower Kolyma, some parts of Chukchee-land and Kamchatka.
“As from 1888 on I was always an active contributor to almost all our hunters’ journals, Russian and German (we had _Baltische Waidmann’s Blätter_), and from 1898 always took part, as now, in the editorship of our best hunter’s periodicals, I had a vast amount of correspondence with our most experienced shooting men.
“I can fairly say that we have now too much wolves in our country, but I remember years--for instance, about 1900--when in my native Simbirsk gov. and Penza gov. they were as plentiful as now.
“And never in my life have I seen more than 14 wolves in one pack, and this only twice. And never have I heard a reliable account of such a case. And I have known many old and experienced professional trappers and hunters.
“Usual number is about 5-8.
“But I have seen--it was about half-past five in the morning on the 13th Oct. 1893, near my grandmother’s estate Lava in the middle part of Simbirsk gov., Sura basin,--when a pack of 5 attacked a herd of about 10,000 sheep, frightened about a thousand of them in a narrow ravine and in a few minutes slayed 153 sheep--without even taking away a single sheep, as I drove them away.
“I suppose if I didn’t happen to ride near by I would be informed afterward by shepherds that they were attacked by 50 wolves. It was of course too dark to see, but though there was no snow, the ground was soft from rains, and I could count all their footprints in the morning in the bush and woodland near this ravine.
“I am quite sure that wolves (at least in Russia and Siberia) hunt only in family packs, that is, papa, mamma, young ones of the year and often some ones of the previous brood. And this amounts to 5-8, more rarely 9-10, and quite exceptionally 14 specimens.”
Privately we had disposed of the Russian packs of the winter 1927 but in the newspapers they continued to do well. There appeared in Miami, Florida, (and no doubt elsewhere), a despatch which we copy from the _News_ of June 12:
“MOSCOW, June 11--Ten families were rushed to the Pasteur institute at Moscow from Kalujsky, a small village of the Kuban district, after a large pack of mad wolves had swept down the village street, invading gardens and even entering several homes, biting the residents.”
By now the _Associated Press_ was keen on wolves--indeed had been for six months when Stiles wrote on September 30 that there was in his office a Polish representative who believed stoutly in wolf-packs and that they had received (and, I gather, killed) a press despatch from Warsaw:
“Polish military patrol Russian border attacked by pack wolves dispersed them with gunfire.”
I had long been thinking to write my classmate John B. Stetson who was Minister to Poland. This gave occasion, and he replied June 8, 1928:
“A long time ago I had your letter regarding the possible attacks of wolves....
“While there is much talk about the danger of wolves attacking human beings and while people relate incidents which occurred to them when they have seen wolves which they thought were going to attack them, etc., it is extremely difficult to find specific instances when attacks have been made by wolves....
“I asked the Chief of the Frontier Guards to make an investigation of the various border posts to see if any attacks had been noted along the 1500 kilometer front between Russia and Poland. This region is wild and not densely settled. I enclose herewith the letter which I have received from him.”
The letter from General Minkiewicz had specific information on two cases of wolves, each time three in a group, that had been fired on by frontier guards.
As to whether wolves attack in large packs, the General says:
“Accounts of wolves attacking men sometimes appearing in the press have their origin in the phantasy of correspondents seeking sensational news.
“In a few cases, however, we have noted a very aggressive attitude displayed by wolves and, if they did not dare to attack me, it was only due to the fact that there were but few of them....”
The general commanding the frontier guard, then, had apparently never heard that (around September, 1927) “Polish military patrol Russian border attacked by pack wolves dispersed them with gunfire.”
Lee Smits had suggested my writing David C. Mills of the National Association of Fur Industries as likely to be informed on wolf-packs. Mills wrote from New York, December 9, 1927. A summary of his three-page letter is:
Vladimir Eitington (of Eitington-Schild Co., 226 West 30th Street, New York City) was once followed by wolves in Siberia until he camped and built a fire. He thought there might have been 15 or 25, “but he says that in the dark and under such circumstances, he could not make a rational estimate.”
Many animals have the following habit. Mills cites from his own experience wolves (two), coyotes (several), and bears.
Writer’s opinion, and that of his friend, is that wolves never kill people. Specially cited here is John B. Burnham, noted American authority on wild animals, former secretary of the American Game Protective Association.
Mills thinks that “common knowledge” of wolves and suchlike is usually wrong. Then he has his own summary:
“The information from Russian sources in re. the wolf myth is--
“1st There has never been a scientific investigation of the question.
“2nd That wolves, under ordinary conditions, do not attack humans.
“3rd That mad wolves sometimes enter villages and snap right and left at anything or anyone. I presume this means rabies, as that disease is also found in America among coyotes.
“4th That they have no knowledge of any authenticated case of wolves in packs attacking travelers in sleighs, etc., but do not know that it has never happened.”
In 1928, perhaps for variety, the newspaper wolf-packs transferred their chief European activities to districts other than hackneyed Poland and Russia. The American papers informed us soon after the New Year (we quote the New York _World_ of January 6) that:
“... eleven peasant girls of the Czechoslovakian town of Maramaros Sziget were devoured by wolves when returning from a neighboring village through the forest.”
The Consul General of Czechoslovakia gave preliminary reply to my inquiry on January 10, warning that stories of wolves “especially stories from Vienna are always greatly exaggerated.” On April 2 he wrote that “we have here the reply of the Administration of the Sub-Carpathian Ruthenia stating that the report of killing of eleven peasant girls by wolves in Maramaros Sziget is not true.” Further on the letter says that some wolves were seen near Maramaros Sziget in January “and this was the possible foundation for the wild report of _Neue Freie Presse_.”
November 7 the _Evening Standard_ of London, England, printed a Moscow despatch of even date:
“Wolves are becoming a menace to life in the country districts of North Russia and Siberia....
“... A pack of several hundred attacked a priest and his wife while they were driving from one village to another 100 miles south of Moscow.
“While his wife held the reins, the priest beat off the wolves with a whip. Suddenly a wolf bit one of the horse’s legs. It lurched forward, throwing the priest from the wagon. He was killed by the wolves. The horse carried the woman to safety.
“Similar attacks on persons are reported daily from all parts of the country.--International News Service.”
On this the Chairman of the Amtorg Trading Corporation, Saul G. Bron, wrote me November 25:
“These are termed in the Soviet Union as the ‘big Russian cranberry tree’ tales. Nevertheless, there is no doubt that malicious white-Russian propaganda agencies ... are working overtime and that the comparative scarcity of reliable information about the U.S.S.R. in this country makes a fertile field for the circulation of stories about uprisings, wolves roaming the countryside, etc.”
October 25, C. K. Ogden (whom H. G. Wells has since discussed in the Fifth Book of _The Shape of Things to Come_) wrote me from the Royal Societies Club, London. He told that the De Reszke cigarette had small prize cards in their packages and that the one on The Wolf said “dogs and wolves hunt in packs.” He wrote them and they replied:
“We are sorry that we cannot give you any zoological authority to maintain the view that wolves hunt in packs as stated on the back of picture No. 26 of our Zoological Studies.... The error will be corrected should we have a reprint of the series.”
Through laxity, or real failure of the sources, my wolf record is blank for Europe and Asia during 1930 and 1931--there is no account of tenderly-nurtured wolf children from India, of babies devoured in Siberia, of forays of Rumanian wolves into Czechoslovakia. But in 1932 the times were more abundant and my records are bulky.
On January 10, 1932, Duncan Campbell Scott, president of the Canadian Authors’ Association, descended to his more factual role of president of the Royal Society and wrote from Ottawa with concern for my wolf studies. He sent a press cutting headed “From Our Own Correspondent, Vienna, Sunday”:
“While an express train from Bucharest was snowbound near Zloty and awaiting help, a pack of hungry wolves bore down upon it.
“Having no firearms, the train staff emptied a luggage van and threw into it raw meat from the restaurant car.
“Twenty or more wolves jumped into the van and began to fight one another for the meat. The doors were promptly locked and later the train proceeded on its journey to Kischinev, Bessarabia. On arrival 18 wolves were found alive, the rest having been torn to pieces.”
In view of the style of this despatch I have looked up Karel Capek in _Who’s Who_ and _Britannica_ but cannot determine from the brief sketches whether he was in Vienna during January, 1932.
How wolf stories rotate appeared two years later when C. K. Ogden sent me what is essentially the same tale--though with a new city of origin, a new date line, a few new frills. The cutting is unfortunately from an unnamed paper of London, England--I dare not guess which paper, though I think I recognize the style. It was from Budapest, December 19, 1933. Like the one of two years earlier it was “From Our Own Correspondent.” It ran:
“An unpleasant adventure which overtook the direct train from Bucarest to Budapest is reported from Bucarest.
“During the night the train was held up by snowdrifts and obliged to stand nine hours in an uninhabited part of Roumania. To the terror of the passengers a pack of wolves surrounded the train, and the situation was only saved by the wit of a conductor.
“An order was given that the luggage van should be emptied, and some raw meat from the kitchen was then placed in the van and the doors thrown open. When all the wolves were safely inside the van the doors were shut, and the train continued its journey with these unusual passengers.
At the station of Chrisina, in Roumania, the wolves were transferred to cages which had been prepared for them.”
It is usually difficult to trace stories from the Balkans, perhaps because their Ministers and Consuls there get tired of answering questions about all the strange things we print from their part of the world. For instance, I still covet the real truth on what appeared, as Special Correspondence, in the New York _Times_, February 28, 1932, from Bucharest:
“Two peasants on the way to market in Oradea Mare were attacked on the highroad today by a pack of starving wolves. They were unarmed and, after a brief attempt to beat off the animals with sticks, were pulled down, killed and partly devoured.”
I queried the Roumanian Legation on this but never had a reply.
I have had better luck with the northern countries, perhaps because there I know the ropes. The Director of the University Museum, Philadelphia, wrote March 21 on behalf of himself and one of his vice-presidents, passing on to me heartrending news:
WOLVES KILL GIRL IN FINLAND; INVADE VILLAGES FOR FOOD
Wireless to The New York _Times_.
“HELSINGFORS, March 4.--Villagers in Eastern Finland were terrorized this week by an invasion of hungry wolves, roaming southward from the frozen plains of Lapland.
“The beasts entered villages and even the outlying districts of towns in search of food. The young daughter of a farmer in middle Finland was attacked and killed by wolves while she was walking on a highway near her home. Her parents found only bones and fragments of clothing after the tragedy....”
I wrote Helsingfors, sending a copy of the _Times_ despatch. The Intendent of the Zoological Museum replied March 20th:
“... it is not true that a young daughter of a farmer was attacked and killed. A similar notice was found in our press, so that the telegram to New York is therefore explicable. By an official investigation, the whole thing turned out to be a manifestation of too vivid imagination--somebody had found a bloody rag on the road, and thus the story was immediately given. In the same way it is a real nonsense that the wolves had penetrated into villages and towns. The whole thing was about a couple of animals which killed a number of dogs before they were driven away and killed.”
The cruel ingenuity of man towards wolves is a defensive reaction to the cruel rapacity of wolves toward man. In fact, the wide dissemination of stories about packs is a necessity in justifying the extensiveness of the war we wage and the character of the weapons and tactics we use. We would not be half so successful in protecting the chickens of the farmer and the sheep of the rancher if we did not constantly circulate reports of how wolves will attack anything from a child playing on a cabin floor in Michigan to a regiment of British troops in Siberia.
Some of the methods used against wolves are commonplace, not worth describing, though we might name a few of them--trapping, shooting, the use of poisoned bait, the finding of dens and smoking out of the pups to be clubbed to death. One method is so peculiar that we describe it.
Under date of March 12, 1927, the _Associated Press_ received, but did not issue to the newspapers, information upon the extent and manner of wolf hunting in Poland.
“... for centuries wolf hunts have been carried out by Poles (1) by the aristocrats as a sport, (2) by peasants as a means of livelihood. The same method, which is gentle, as you will see, has been employed by nobility and peasant.
“A live pig is attached by a leather rope at the rear of sleigh or sled in which six or seven men take their places, all heavily armed. The sleigh is drawn by two or three horses. Two men devote themselves exclusively to protecting the horses from the onslaught of the wolves which, led from their lairs by the screams of the suffering and dying hog, rush in a pack after the swiftly moving sleigh. Two other men empty their rifles at wolves from either side and two others do their execution from the rear.
“... (Our informant) said his father has often hunted wolves, which attack in packs, after this fashion.”
I might have traced this account through my aforementioned classmate the Minister to Poland, and would have done so but for chancing upon remarks of Sir Albert Gray before the Royal Geographical Society of London as they are reported in that society’s _Journal_ for June, 1921, p. 445. They are to the effect that people continue holding strange, romantic, beliefs no matter how often these are exposed. He has in mind chiefly the idea that wolves run in packs and quotes the (for the time and place) annihilation of the idea by Baddeley in his _Russia in the Eighties, Sport and Politics_, (London, 1921). I was on the track of wolf-packs then and followed Sir Albert’s clue. I found the author demolishing the pack to his own satisfaction and that he also pays his respects to various beliefs regarding the methods of hunting wolves.
John F. Baddeley spent in Russia, of which a large section of Poland was then a part, most of the decade following 1879 and much of those years in hunting and in the company of sportsmen and naturalists. After denying that wolves ever go in packs and after denying also that wolves are numerous in Russia, he says, beginning on p. 149:
“The idea that wolves are very numerous in Russia has gained substance, also, from the very natural tendency of certain sportsmen to exaggerate their performances; and more especially is this the case in regard to that form of sport in which wolves and sucking-pigs are supposed to play the chief parts. According to published accounts--I have one or two before me but will not pillory the writers--you have only to take a sucking-pig (in good voice) and drive along the highroad in a sledge any winter’s night, trailing behind you a bundle of straw at the end of a string to represent piggy--who meantime must be made to squeal his loudest--to enjoy excellent sport with the numerous wolves that will assuredly come to the lure the first time of asking. Here again I am regretfully forced to say that I never knew a man of proved veracity who claimed to have bagged even one wolf by this method, while one honest friend assured me that he had tried it no less than seventeen times in places where wolves were known to exist, but had only once had a shot at what he thought might be one.”
It may be, as claimed by this author, that wolves do not swarm in from Polish forests at the squeals of a pig, but the belief that they do is useful. Faraway, in Michigan for instance, stories detailing the alleged Polish ingenuities will tend to lead American woodsmen to cleverness of wolf-killing that, in the long run, saves the local farmers a good many chickens and lambs.
A reporter friend tells that the wolf-pack is a standard joke among the foreign correspondents in Europe, certainly in Vienna, and he has passed on to me a crystallization of their attitude, as expressed by the correspondent for a London paper:
The yarn is that the Orient Express was held up by a pack of wolves. They began at the front end, eating the engineer and fireman, and proceeded towards the rear, devouring everyone as they went until, in the last car, they came upon a correspondent whom they spared on his promise that he would give them adequate publicity.
CRUMBS FOR PACK BELIEVERS
The evidence has been, then, that wolf-packs which come up to motion picture and folklore standards do not exist. But there still may be a foundation of reality upon which the imaginative and inventive have built their fabrications.
Students who scout the pack as ordinarily defined and pictured have nevertheless agreed on certain things which, by multiplication, magnification and misinterpretation, could start the pack idea going, or at any rate might keep it going.
Obviously wolf pups will remain with their mother until weaned. Doubtless the family breaks up before the young are quite full grown, or when they are between five and eight months old. There may be as many as twelve in a litter, fourteen by some views. When you meet stories of packs with five to fifteen in them you can thus have a true report of a family hunting, traveling or living together. If the story describes a “gigantic leader of the pack” you may be sure that a family is involved. With the even-sized pups taken for normal wolves, mama looks colossal. If there are two gigantic leaders, then papa must be traveling along.
A foremost authority for America, Nelson, and a foremost one for Eurasia, Buturlin, differ on one point, though only in degree. Nelson is somewhere between thinking it rare and thinking it improbable that last year’s pups will be found still traveling with their mother after this year’s become large enough to hunt; Buturlin thinks it rare but sees no improbability. Accordingly, when Nelson credits a report of say twenty wolves he is inclined to think that two families have come together accidentally for a few moments, or are only following each other accidentally instead of really traveling together. Buturlin feels these are probably one mother’s litters of two years and that they are in semi-permanent company.[15]
With such family groups for nuclei, the traveler’s tale, the peasant’s yarn which the reporter believes, become easy. Just multiply by ten and you have packs of 50, 100, 200. Zero is nothing. So what is a zero more or less in a good yarn?
There are methods other than simple multiplication which can lead reasonably to packs of great size.
In the Arctic and sub-Arctic I have stood at vantage points from which I could see in one, two, or several directions from me scattered wolves which, counted together, would make a “pack.” These are no more really a pack of wolves than the scattered and unconnected pickpockets of a city are a band of thieves. But assume the story is thrice repeated. First version: I saw 100 wolves from one place. Second version: Jones saw 100 wolves in one place. Third version: Brown says Jones saw a pack of 100 wolves.
It might happen that two wolf families scent a caribou or a band. Running up the wind they might so nearly come together, without really joining, that a careless observer seeing the two packs running in the same direction would take them to be one pack--this all the more because groups that are indubitably a mother with pups will sometimes string out half a mile as they lope in pursuit of caribou. But two families strung out, say a mile from the first to the last of them, would not make a pack in the sense of a band working systematically and semi-permanently together.
With considerations such as these in mind, we examine seemingly reliable testimony for considerable numbers of wolves having been observed together.
“Considerable” needs defining. The wolf-killing service of the U. S. Biological Survey were polled by Nelson and voted for two, three, and at highest five wolves being seen together, these always mother or parents with pups. Many have testified for seven in a family, however, among them the zoologist, Dr. R. M. Anderson, Chief Biologist, Ottawa, who has in Canada an official position similar to Nelson’s in the United States. A few apparently good witnesses have testified to nine. We are, then, chiefly concerned in this section with numbers larger than nine and with their interpretation--were they really together and then in what sense? How permanently were they together? Were they family groups?
My voluminous correspondence on packs was, as said, begun in 1922 when I realized that my own belief in wolf-packs, begun in _The Friendly Arctic_ (see that book’s index) was untenable. We have already used that part of the correspondence which attempted to trace packs reported between 1922 and 1936, finding all that could be traced wanting. We now canvass the rest of the evidence, using it in the main chronologically.
_The Encyclopedia Britannica_, Fourteenth Edition, says in its article on wolves that: “Except during summer when the young families of cubs are being separately provided for by their parents they assemble in troops or packs.”
That edition is dated 1929. Seven years before, on March 27, 1922, Anderson wrote to Nelson that during several years spent in Arctic and sub-Arctic Canada and Alaska:
“... I never saw more than seven wolves in any band nor did I hear of any larger bands than seven. A reliable Eskimo in my employ told me that he was once followed by nine wolves on a river near Herschel Island, and in the Joint Report, _Survey International Boundary, 141st Meridian_, 1918, there is a report of nine wolves seen in a band on the boundary.
“In that region the wolves are more often seen in bunches of two or three, or singly, and the bunches of five or more are probably an old female with her cubs of the year. Several that we killed out of such a band at Langton Bay were all immature....
“I have heard occasional vague rumors of larger bands of wolves in more southerly parts of Canada, but have never been able to verify any such reports....”
In passing on to me, November 25, 1922, the information given by Anderson, Nelson added:
“... I am satisfied that the stories of great packs of wolves banded together to pursue caribou or any other game are based on the fertile imagination of the writers and not on observations in the field. It is common knowledge that the wolves pair more or less permanently and are in no sense gregarious animals. At the end of each breeding season and until well into the following winter, my field experience and the information which has come to the Biological Survey from its large force of hunters destroying predatory animals in the western states, coincide in enumerating packs of wolves not exceeding the ordinary normal number of the two parents and the litter of the season which may vary from three or four animals up to ten or twelve. Such bands of parents and their young of the year hunt together until well into the following winter but with the approach of spring they separate to mate.... There is a bare possibility that in pursuing bands of reindeer or caribou, several of these family packs of wolves might accidentally come together in pursuit but such union would be purely fortuitous and of very temporary endurance.
“My observations and personal information obtained at first hand extends from the mountains bordering the valley of Mexico, north to the Arctic circle in Alaska and also the observations of our large corps of hunters numbering several hundred men, who, during the progress of their campaign against predatory animals in the western states have killed between four and five thousand of these animals within the last six years.”
Nelson wrote me January 4, 1923, after a fresh study of some Russian evidence, that clearly they have there the same situation as we have here, “the wolves running in family parties exactly as they do in North America, running in great bands only in literature and folklore.”
On January 18 Harkin sent me a long quotation from a story he had found in “one of our local papers, under date the 17th instant.” It is a long statement, generally claiming that wolves are not dangerous. A section bearing on our present theme is under the subhead “Whole Pack Fled.” In northern Ontario the sledge was crossing a lake, on a winter evening, toward an island:
“We were just making the point of this island, and what should we meet coming from the other side but a pack of wolves. We just met there. The leader, a big, grizzled, long-legged old chap, looked me over from a distance of about twenty feet; the rest of the pack ranged behind and alongside of him, their tails straight out for just about as long as it takes to stiffen them out with fear. Then they broke. They just flattened out on the ice and flew--twenty-one of them.”
We have used in another connection parts of a letter from Inspector Jennings of the R.C.M.P., Edmonton, April 20, 1923, one of the most informative of the whole wolf correspondence:
“... it appears timber wolves are becoming more numerous in the McKenzie Delta, but do not appear to be running in packs. At Baillie Island where a number were killed in the winter of 1921-22 they appear to be running in packs of from four to seven. We have also paid bounties at Tree River Detachment for wolves killed in the Coronation Gulf. C. Klinkenberg, whom you remember, told me in 1921, when I was North, of a fight he had with a she wolf and five yearling pups. He was attacked by all of them, and only by the fortunate appearance of his son with his rifle was his life saved.... The general impression is that such bands, or what may be called a band, is generally a family, and that it is only occasionally, when hunting for food, that two or more families might come together and constitute a real pack.
“In regard to the McKenzie District, an old prospector who has travelled from the headwaters of the Thelon River to the British Columbia boundary in the West states that while east of the McKenzie River wolves may be plentiful when Caribou are numerous, he has never seen them in what may be called a pack, although at times in the open several wolves may be seen together, but evidently working independently. Below Simpson and also on the Liard River in the Foot Hills, he has seen as many as twenty under one leader, but generally the pack is from five to nine. The band of twenty was following a moose track. At another time he states that when his party had killed a moose, shortly after, a large grey wolf was seen on the opposite side of the river. This wolf called a few times and was soon joined by others to the number of ten....
“One of my officers in February, 1916, while traveling on the McKenzie, about 30 miles below Simpson, came upon a band of seven, at a place where a moose had been killed the previous day.”
December 19, 1924, Nelson reaffirmed his lack of evidence for believing that two or more families ever made up a “temporary pack.” He also defined the terms under which, for sake of argument, he might concede theoretically, in the absence of evidence, that unions might take place.
“I am still skeptical about the formation of wolf-packs which are made up of two or more families hunting in companionship. I have no knowledge of any such combination, and knowing the habits and characteristics of wolves doubt this occurring except under what might be termed fortuitous circumstances. Two or more family parties of wolves might incidentally come together in the pursuit of the same game animal and join in the kill; but if they did so I should expect a fierce battle to ensue between the different parties of wolves, strangers to one another, just as would happen in the case of strange dogs. Furthermore, I believe that should two or more family parties of wolves thus come together in the immediate pursuit of game, they would promptly spread into their original units as soon as the kill was made or the chase ended. Wolves have much the same nature as dogs, and the hostility that strange dogs show one to another is a good indication of what might be expected on the part of wolves....”
C. Hart Merriam wrote January 12, 1925, quoting his own _Mammals of the Adirondacks_ (New York, 1882):
“Comparatively few wolves are now to be found in the Adirondacks, though twelve years ago they were quite abundant, and used to hunt in packs of half a dozen or more.... The amount of noise that a single wolf is capable of producing is simply astonishing, and many amusing episodes of camp lore owe their origin to this fact. More than one ‘lone traveler’ has hastily taken to a tree, and remained in the inhospitable shelter of its scrawny branches for an entire night, believing himself surrounded by a pack of at least fifty fierce and hungry wolves, when, in reality, there was but one, and (as its tracks afterwards proved) it was on the farther side of a lake, a couple of miles away.”
Merriam further quotes Theodore Roosevelt’s _Hunting Trips of a Ranchman_ (New York, 1885):
“According to my experience, the wolf is rather solitary. A single one or a pair will be found by themselves, or possibly with one or more well-grown young ones, and will then hunt over a large tract where no other wolves will be found; and as they wander very far, and as their melancholy howlings have a most ventriloquial effect, they are often thought to be much more plentiful than they are.”
In its care to avoid nature faking the _Associated Press_ refused to circulate a story which they received from Winnipeg and which Jackson S. Elliott, Assistant General Manager, sent along for my wolf files July 8, 1926. That account, however, runs well within family limits and so has the probabilities for it. The applicable section runs that “the hunter noticed a string of seven grey wolves crossing the prairie. He waited until they approached and was successful in bringing down five of them.”
The story seemed probably correct and gave a lead to further information, so I wrote A. Brabant, Fur Trade Commissioner of the Hudson’s Bay Company, Winnipeg, and received through him a valuable letter from their A. C. Clark, Norway House, Manitoba, August 3:
“Carl Sherman, the trapper who killed the wolves referred to, is at present in this locality, and I have been able to get the details of the story referred to.
“Sherman is trapping on the Hayes River, about 150 miles north of Oxford House Post. He was travelling north one day early in November ... and saw about 14 or 15 wolves making for the point on which he stood. When they got to within 75 yards of him, he fired and brought down the leader. By the time they got out of sight, he had killed five.... They were all full grown, and all males. The wolves were not dangerous, but made for safety, as soon as they got over the surprise of the first shot. The wind was in the wrong direction for the wolves to get the scent of Sherman.
“I can vouch for the above story being correct....”
This, then, is a remarkable story. The reader will find several things in which it contradicts, or seems to contradict, Nelson, Buturlin, and Anderson in so far as he was quoted (above) by Nelson. It fits badly with the rest of our evidence but is nevertheless impressively vouched for.
Information similarly difficult came in an undated letter July, 1927, from Fred B. Kniffen of the Department of Geography, University of California, Berkeley:
“... I have seen two wolf-packs.
“I had occasion to spend the winter of 1923-24 prospecting in the upper Tanana region of Alaska. I hunted considerably as caribou meat furnished an appreciable part of my diet and almost all of that of my dogs. One afternoon I was seated on a little hill about a quarter of a mile from a small lake. Through the natural pass below me the caribou had been passing at the rate of several hundred a day. As I watched, a file of wolves emerged from some brush on the opposite side of the lake, skirted the shore and went off in the direction the caribou were going. They seemed to be running roughly in a column of twos and I counted about twenty-eight in the pack.
“One night I was awakened by the howls of my dogs responding to those of some wolves. I stood in the doorway of my cabin and a little later could distinguish the forms of five wolves against the snow of the river, perhaps seventy-five yards away. The dogs were now growling, apparently in fear. One shot dispersed the wolves....
“These events all occurred in late winter. It is quite possible that an old she wolf and her pups may have accounted for a large part of this but the large pack could hardly be explained away in this fashion.”
Kniffen himself suggests a family explanation for his second pack. On July 14 I suggested in a letter to him that _possibly_ the first set were not a pack, either,--in the sense of having banded together for cooperative hunting. I said that: “The wolves you saw following each other, though there were twenty-eight, were (then) no more necessarily a pack than eleven college men walking towards an athletic field are necessarily the college team.”
The well-known and highly-regarded student of Canadian wild life, Tony Lascelles, wrote for the Winnipeg _Free Press_ of April 25, 1936, an article, “The Mammals of Manitoba.” A paragraph in it can be read as supporting the traditional wolf-pack--I did not so read it but thought others might. But Lascelles writes from Mistamick Lodge, Dauphin, Manitoba, May 15, 1936, with reference to his use of the key word, that “the pack is a family group and the maximum pack is a maximum family.”
With this we close the section of our discussion which is written for those who like to believe that even the seemingly most absurd folklore tale has developed from a nucleus of fact.
WOLVES AND BABES
The misanthropy of wolves, dramatic in their pursuit of wedding parties and in the siege of stalled trains, is particularly horrible toward little children. They eat them all up, rather jocularly in Red Riding Hood, grimly in our newspapers. See, for instance, the tragic story “Copyright, 1928, by the New York Times Company. By Wireless to The New York _Times_:
“RIGA, Jan. 1.--A woman of the Unciany district of Lithuania, riding with a child in a one-horse sleigh and pursued by a pack of wolves, made a desperate effort to escape, but after a short, sharp race the horse collapsed.
“The wolves tore the child from its mother’s arms, devoured it, and then fell on the mother. Some peasants, hearing her cries, hurried to the scene and rescued her, torn but still alive.
“As a result of the severe weather the depredations by wolves in many parts of Russia are unusually alarming. The Soviet authorities are carrying out an organized campaign against the danger by offering rewards for wolves’ heads. In some districts detachments of the Red Army are used.
“Packs of wolves have appeared in many parts usually immune, especially in the Crimea.”
Reporters naturally have time for cabling such stories but ministers at Washington and consuls-general in New York, though frequently kind and helpful, are at times so buried in humdrum that you cannot get them interested. I failed in tracing this despatch from Riga. Therefore we can but deal in likelihoods and refer to the Michigan story of February 3, 1927, reported _ante_--it was nearer home and so we were able to enlist the help of local investigators.
We are reluctant to pursue further this gruesome child-eating. The case against the wolf in this respect is indeed black enough, what with the inclusion of many babes among the people devoured already in this chapter by the ravenous hordes. We turn with relief to a brighter side of the case. In warm contrast are the maternally kind and otherwise friendly wolves that have nursed and cared for children, sometimes even twins, as in the case of Romulus and Remus. In our present century there is never a decade, there is seldom a year, when newspapers do not bring us well-attested cases.
Through the _Associated Press_ the New York _Times_ reported October 22, 1926 (from London, October 21):
“Two little ‘wolf girls’ were found recently living in a wolf’s den near an isolated village in Bengal, British India. The story is told by _The Westminster Gazette_, which received it from India, vouched for by the Rev. Jal Singh of Midnapur, Bengal, and Bishop Pakenham Walsh of Bishops College, Calcutta.
“Bishop Walsh relates that about the end of August, while visiting the Rev. Jal Singh’s orphanage at Midnapur, Mr. Singh recounted how he discovered the ‘wolf girls.’
“In a distant part of his district not long before, the villagers pointed out to him a path they avoided because it was haunted by demons. Investigation revealed a wolf den in which there were several wolf cubs and two girls, about two and eight years of age, both exceedingly fierce, running on all fours, uttering guttural barks and living like wolves.
“The supposition was that they were abandoned as babies by their mother or mothers and were found and adopted by the she wolf. With much difficulty, the children were rescued, but the younger died soon afterward.
“The elder child survived and is now at the orphanage. She was gradually weaned from her savage ways, but she fought fiercely against wearing clothes, and tore them off even after they were sewn on her. For a time she refused to be washed and ate with her mouth in a dish. Eventually she was taught to use her hands and say a few words.
“She still is weak mentally and neither cries nor laughs, but is gentle with animals, preferring the company of dogs to children.”
Sir Sidney Harmer, British student of wolves, wrote November 15, 1926, that the _Westminster Gazette_ had told him they knew the bishop of the story existed and believed the wolf children also were real. Sir Sidney closed:
“I have myself no information on the subject, and I do not know of anyone else who could help you. We are inclined to be a little sceptical.”
I never did get farther with the investigation of this particular case.
Reports that were traced, though not by me, appeared several times the next year. The first, “Copyright, 1927, by The New York Times Company--Special Cable to the New York _Times_, Allahabad, British India, April 5,” said that:
“Herdsmen near Miawana, seventy-five miles from here, found a small Indian boy supposed to be about 10 years of age, in a wolf’s den. From marks in the den it was obvious that the boy had been living there. He was unable to talk or to walk properly, but went on all fours, lapped water and ate grass.
“The boy was brought here, put in a special lockup and supplied with food and medicine. At night he barked, bit himself and other people and had to be tied down. He is very thin and emaciated, but his limbs are otherwise well formed. He has a terrible scar on one side of his face, as if he had been mauled by some animal.
“He has been taken to Bareilly for treatment at a mental hospital.”
The _Times_ furnished a supplementary note:
“This is the third case of Rudyard Kipling’s ‘Jungle Book’ hero, Mowgli, in real life which has been discovered in India within the last ten months. Last September Bishop Walsh wrote to the Indian _Social Reformer_ of Bombay of the case of two little girls who had been found by the Rev. J. Singh in a wolf’s den near Bengal. They revealed the same characteristics as the boy described in the Allahabad dispatch. One of them soon pined away and died, but the other rapidly became ‘humanized’ in Singh’s orphanage at Midnapur. It was supposed that the girls, as is sometimes the case in India, had been abandoned in the jungle by their parents on account of their sex and had been mothered by a she wolf which had just been deprived of her young.
“The same explanation would not account for the presence of the boy in a wolf’s den near Miawana.”
Further news, similarly special and copyrighted, came by wireless from London and was published April 27:
“Further information is now available about the so-called ‘wolf-child’ whose discovery near Miawana, British India, seventy-five miles from Allahabad, provoked so much discussion. Some travelers tell of similar discoveries extending back many years, but medical authorities are inclined to dismiss them as fables.
“The boy found in Miawana is judged to be between 7 and 12 years old and in general appearance is said to be little different from an ordinary child, but in his actions betrays signs that are declared to point to his bringing up with wolves. He can stand up and walk, but sometimes prefers to crawl, sitting on his haunches with legs curled up and propelling himself forward with the palms of hands....
“He is said to display certain instincts even lower than those of his alleged foster parents....”
On July 10, a long, undated communication marked “London,” said that:
“News of the discovery of another alleged wolf-child in India has started a brisk controversy here over the authenticity of such children. No previous wolf-child has occasioned so much stir in scientific quarters as has the boy discovered by Indian herdsmen a few weeks ago in a wolves’ cave near Miawana, seventy-five miles from Allahabad.
“Some of the best known medical men in London have called the story incredible. Old Indian army officers have replied by asserting that they have actually seen wolf-children....”
whereupon the _Times_ devotes more than a column to a statement generally in support of the India despatches. Among those in favor is:
“Rudyard Kipling, whose Mowgli of the ‘Jungle Book’ is the best known wolf-child in fiction, has for once withdrawn his veto on newspaper interviews, and is quoted as saying that wolf-children ‘are by no means impossible.’ The author goes on to say:
“‘There have been other instances of them. They say that the Miawana boy crawls on the hands and knees: I think it much more likely that it would be the knees and elbows. That was the way of the other children who, like Mowgli, were adopted by wolves and knew all the mysteries of the jungle. That way leaves their hands free to seize their prey and to defend themselves.’”
This long article, dealing with many cases of wolf-children, says that:
“... the one commonly known as the Secundra wolf-boy, is the best authenticated case within the memory of living man. This boy was captured in 1867 by a shooting expedition in the unfrequented jungles of Bulandshahr. The hunters surprised a stray wolf, which they followed to a small mound of earth with a flat-topped rock sticking out of the mound. A small, strange-looking animal was asleep in the sun on the rock. To the amazement of the hunting party, it proved to be a boy, who leaped from the rock as soon as he saw the hunters and, running on all fours, disappeared into a cave along with the startled wolf.
“The hunters were either unable or afraid to go further; but, feeling that something ought to be done, they returned to Bulandshahr and consulted the Magistrate. They were advised to go back to the cave and smoke out the wolf and its weird companion. This they did. The wolf was shot as soon as it rushed out and its companion was pounced upon and captured after a severe struggle, during which several members of the party were bitten. Two wolf cubs were also killed and the party returned to the Magistrate to claim a reward for the dead wolf and the dead cubs, and to exhibit the human being they had captured.
“The wolf bounty was paid and the wolf-boy was sent to the Secundra Orphanage. He was thought to be about 7 or 8 years old. For a long time he tore off the clothes that were supplied him and persisted in eating his food from the ground. As the years went by he became more docile and eventually was baptized, taking the name of Sanicher, which is Hindustani for Saturday, the day on which he was captured. His head was small, his forehead low and narrow; his eyes were large and gray and restless. He squinted incessantly and when walking lifted his feet high like a man walking through wet grass, his entire body moving in a series of jerks as he stepped along.”
Interest, sympathy, resentment were among the feelings commonly expressed by those who wrote “Letters to the Editor” during the outstanding wolf-child year of 1927. An undated cutting from the New York _Times_, probably around July 15 or 20, has a letter from Jacqueline Nollet:
“Have men for ‘humanity’s sake’ the right to take this Miawana boy away from his mother-wolf and from his brotherly playmates, from the jungle’s new and enthralling life, and to condemn him instead to an existence devoid of companionship and a life of utter misery...?
“Since the wolf-man is no longer free to pursue his own mode of living and is considered as a near-animal, could not the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals interfere and have a law voted to the effect that a child saved from starvation, loved and protected by the wolves against ferocious beasts, might be left to live with his wolf family? And if the boy must be taken away from the wild, could not man take a lesson and be as merciful as a wolf and spare the life of the foster-mother and her cubs?
“Let us hope never to see repeated the act of the magistrate of Bulandshahr who planned and rewarded the murder of the wolf family of the Sanicher boy....”
The scientists were more hard-boiled. For instance, Herman B. Sheffield, M.D., of New York City, wrote July 10, evidently fresh from reading the long historical summary in the _Times_ of that date:
“Judging by the article on the ‘New Wolf Child Found in India,’ I surmise that there are still a large number of civilized people, including scientists, who seriously believe that ‘wolf-children’ exist in reality instead of in fiction. As a matter of fact, such ‘wolf-children’ are frequently met in daily practice and are nothing but microcephalic idiots.
“These children are born with small, often dome-shaped, heads in consequence of undeveloped, small brains. Owing to their extreme restlessness and awkward power of locomotion, their habit to hop from place to place often resembles that of a rabbit, goat or monkey.”
As the _Times_ reported, there was keen interest in London. The Over-Seas League was naturally concerned and published in their journal _Over Seas_ a statement by “A Member” which says that:
“Valentine Ball (previously quoted) mentions that he asked an eminent surgeon of his day what he thought of all these stories, and the reply was, ‘I don’t believe any of them.’ The medical profession of to-day seems to share this lack of conviction....
“No one, apparently, has ever found a child living in an animal’s lair and left it there, returning from time to time to observe how it was progressing and to find out how it was fed. There is no trustworthy evidence to show that the children so far reported as wolf-children have ever survived for more than a few hours or days away from human care before they were discovered and restored to such care. There is no recorded case which could not be explained on the theory that the child had wandered from home or been abandoned within a day or two of its being rescued, and it is a well-known fact that Indian mothers will sometimes ‘lose’ in the jungle mentally defective children, which goes far to account for the imbecility of all so-called wolf-children....
“All the stories of alleged wolf-children rest on native evidence, and native evidence is by no means always to be relied upon as faithful records of fact. The world of reality has its limits. The world of imagination, especially of Eastern imagination, is boundless.”
Somewhere in the reports on most children nurtured by wolves there is comment that, even after they had been taught by their human captors to eat meat, they continued fond of roots, and even of grass. Is it possible, then, that the wolves which bring up children are of a kindlier disposition than ordinary wolves for the reason that they are vegetarians?
WOLVES FOR POSTERITY
As said at the beginning of this chapter on wolves, we write for every shade of belief. This last section is for a group first in our thoughts, because largest--the lovers of romance, the enemies of the cant of science, the vast multitude of free believers in the freedom to believe.
True, the attacks on the wolf-pack are numerous. But what do they amount to? They are not campaigns by great armies, they are at most guerrilla warfare. More accurately, they are sniping.
For example, the chief of a biological survey writes letters to a friend of his, poohpoohing wolf-pack stories, and the friend perhaps shows them around a bit. Not half of the few who see the letters will be affected--everybody knows what scientists are, a self-elected Brain Trust dictating to all of us as to what we may and may not believe. If the letter is shown in any place like a smoking room, it is talked down by several who know people who know other people who have been treed, pursued, or at the very least scared half to death by immense packs of wolves.
Or a pack story in the newspapers gets a large head on the front page; the denial comes a week later in small type on an inside page where no one reads it. Again the pack triumphs.
The disgruntled may have for a time the active support of a news-gathering organization, as above mentioned for the _Associated Press_, but the most they can do is to caution their own direct employees to be careful. They may not dictate to their affiliates, as, for instance, the _Associated Press_ trying to dictate to the _Canadian Press_ or to _Reuter’s_. Besides, they could not hold their own as purveyors of readable news if they left to rivals the wolf-children of India, the sieges of trains by wolf-packs in the Balkans, or that increase of wolves in the U.S.S.R. which (everybody at that time agreed) resulted from the substitution of communism for capitalism.
You may manage, perhaps, to get printed a diatribe against packs in a highbrow journal, as I once did in the _American Mercury_. But you cannot make new disbelievers in wolf-packs by addressing the readers of such a magazine, for the badge of their sophistication is that they are disbelievers already in whatever the rest of the world believes. If you ever made nearly everybody sceptical on wolf-packs the _Mercury_ clientele would start believing in them--which is, of course, a digression.
We shall close this chapter with a triumphant, because sufficient, proof that wolf-packs are a reality. To accomplish this we use the democratic method, adjudication by majority vote.
We shall have support for wolf-packs from that most popular appeal to the people, our greatest of weeklies, the _Saturday Evening Post_, with its millions of sold copies and no doubt several readers per copy. We shall have on our side, too, the most orthodox and the broadest appeal to the scientists, which is through the American Association for the Advancement of Science and through their kind of affiliate _Science Service_. They do not have so large a membership as that of the _Post_, but it is effective since it overlaps but slightly the circle of the _Post’s_ readers. The members of the Association include most professors and other teachers of science in our various schools and colleges, most scientists in the employ of commercial companies (at least those in the higher brackets), and most of those employed by the national, state, and other governments. Their official journal, _Science_, goes to every library of consequence in the United States, and widely through other countries. _Science_ is read for excerpts and for ideas on behalf of newspapers and magazines. Then a great many of the papers subscribe to _Science Service_, and even use it.
If we can show that the _Post_ and _Science_ (including _Science Service_) are on the side of the wolf-pack, we have it winning hands down.
On January 9, 1932, C. B. Ruggles had in the _Post_ an article, “Neighboring With Wolves.” We are told, or given to understand, in this and other of his _Post_ contributions, that Ruggles yields to few in the extensiveness and intensiveness of his northern lore. He has not merely been in Alaska; he has actually lived there. He must have been way up north, for he tells about the sun that “it would, for one hour and fifteen minutes, skirt the earth’s rim before sinking below the horizon for another twenty-odd hours of opaque-lidded slumber.” We have been told a little earlier about a Light of Delusion--“The Eskimos call this kind of light Woosha Kua”--which plays strange tricks with your eyesight. Still, apparently, it was not, in the Ruggles judgment, due to the Woosha Kua that he saw wolves pursuing caribou in great detail and that “There were twenty-seven wolves in the pack.”
About this time I happened to give a talk before a small group at the University Museum, Philadelphia. I must have said something about wolf-packs and the Director, Dr. Horace H. F. Jayne, must have given my address to Max C. Goodman, of 3143 West Diamond Street, Philadelphia, who in turn must have written to C. B. Ruggles, at Freedom, Oklahoma, telling that Ruggles and I seemed in disagreement on wolf-packs. These things are inference, for there is a gap in my records. I have, however, a copy of a letter from Ruggles, dated January 19, 1932, sent me by Goodman, which runs in part:
“Nature causes wolves to gather in monstrous packs in all parts of the wilderness the last part of December or the first part of January. Eskimos call these large wolf-gatherings, ‘KA-MA-CHUA’ (Mate choosing season) for this is about four or five weeks prior to wolf mating time and the Eskimos as well as the Northern trapper believe nature has brought these gatherings about for the young and unmated wolves to choose their mates, believed for life.
“I am writing you the above for the sole purpose of you taking it up with the greatest and most noted naturalist that you might find. If you should find that Mr. V. Steffenson’s statement is false, kindly investigate other positive statements that he has made regarding the Arctic....
“I hope to hear from you again and in regard to the results of your investigation of my statement as well as the investigation of the statement of V. Steffenson.”
Goodman was to submit the Ruggles statement and mine about wolves to “the greatest and most noted naturalist that you might find.” So I wrote Goodman on January 25 a letter in about 90 per cent disagreement with Ruggles and taking substantially that position contrary to his which is stated in the first section of the present chapter. Goodman submitted this letter and the Ruggles one, which we quoted just above, to the often-mentioned Chief of the U. S. Biological Survey, Dr. E. W. Nelson. Nelson wrote Goodman from the Hotel Johnson, Visalia, California, February 10. Again we quote in part:
“Your letter came to me just as I was preparing to leave Washington for California--hence, the delay in my reply.
“I have been interested by the letters from Ruggles and Stefansson and am in complete accord with the statements in Stefansson’s letter. Mr. Ruggles appears to be imbued with the old folklore idea about huge packs of wolves roaming wild regions of the North.
“In common with most people, as a young man, I had the same ideas derived from the commonly published misstatements on the subject. Then for more than twenty years as a field naturalist, much of the time in wolf country and later for more than that length of time administrating the field work of other naturalists and hunters in wolf country, I came to a definite knowledge that the typical wolf-pack consists of the two old wolves and their young of the previous spring. These ‘packs’ may number from three to more than a dozen animals, according to the number of survivors of the litter of young. Sometimes a wolf may have a dozen young. There is no doubt that, by chance, two or perhaps more litters might come together, but such association would be extremely brief. I have never known or had definite information of such an instance and it is given as a mere possibility.
“For many years, the Biological Survey in Washington investigated every published account of devastations and of the killing of people by wolf-packs in the United States and Canada by writing to the postmaster or others living near the scene of the alleged work of wolf-packs and without a single exception, they proved to be purely imaginary.
“Under my direction, one of the best field naturalists in the Government Service spent more than a year in the Tanana River country of Alaska in the very district where Alaska papers published accounts of great wolf-packs destroying caribou and although he traversed that country in various directions in winter, he saw only occasional wolf tracks in the snow and never a sign of the alleged packs....
“My information is from my own observations and from hundreds of other reliable men in the field in wolf country.”
Once more there is, superficially, a defeat of the wolf-pack. Really the pack won, for the _Post_ is read by several million people of the type who believe what they see in that sort of publication, while the quadrangular Goodman-Nelson-Ruggles-Stefansson correspondence could have had an effect upon only one of the four. Ruggles knew already there were packs, so we could not convince him there weren’t. Nelson and I knew there weren’t any, so Ruggles could not convince us there were. Goodman remained the only one who may have been affected, and he may have swung either way. I believe Dr. Jayne saw the correspondence, but from his record I think he was likely enough prejudiced already against the pack. Perhaps a dozen or two of Goodman’s friends saw the correspondence, and perhaps some of them were influenced. If so, they may have gone in either direction. Therefore, the balloting, _Post_ readers against some of the letter readers, must have gone something like a million to one in favor of the pack.
The authenticity of the wolf-pack might have been secure for years on the strength of just the one Ruggles article in the _Saturday Evening Post_. But they have carried more articles by Ruggles, and may have carried further eyewitness testimony. Then certainly there are many journals, only a little down from the _Post_ in their sway of the public mind which have borne witness. Packs are going strong in the movies and, as shown heretofore, they appear frequently in the daily press. The general verdict is, therefore, clear.
But we said above that we would range scientists with the true believers. This we do by referring to the previously described journal _Science_, from which we quote in part an item that appeared in the issue of February 28, 1936:
“Wolf fighters, skilled in warfare against these voracious pack-hunting beasts, are asked for in an emergency wire from Governor John W. Troy, of Alaska, recently received at the Department of the Interior.... Vicious gangs of wolves have been raiding the reindeer herds owned by natives of northern Alaska.... Native hunters have proved unable to cope with the animals, but it is believed that about four hunter leaders, each with a few assistants, could in a swift campaign break up the marauding bands.”
Thus we have the official journal of a foremost scientific body vouching for wolves as pack-hunters, as being in gangs and in bands.
But a testimony from Canada is in a way more striking than any can be from the United States, for wolves are by common consent more numerous and widespread there. As in the United States, the Canadian Government takes special cognizance of them, for they prey on flock and fowl. There is, then, _Bulletin No. 13, New Series_, Dominion of Canada, Department of Agriculture, “The Habits and Economic Importance of Wolves in Canada,” by Norman Criddle. On p. 6 we read:
“Parent wolves live in pairs during the summer months, but as the young develop they form with them small bands, which meeting with other families in their wanderings, acquire the proportions of packs. These packs break up again in February....”
We close our case by repeating and insisting that attacks on wolf-packs are not serious--they are no more than sporadic sniping.
The _Saturday Evening Post_, _Science Service_, and the Department of Agriculture of the Dominion of Canada, powerful and worthy of all respect and confidence, are in this relation spokesmen too for a popular and a scientific multitude. The wolf-pack, then, is secure even as things stand. But conditions are bound to trend steadily in their favor. As living beasts, wolves are getting fewer with the colonization of the wilderness, but wolf-pack stories do not thereby get fewer--witness how they come again and again from districts where wolves no longer exist. The fewer the living wolves the less the chance of their being so studied that evidence against the pack habit can be gathered. Finally there will be no wolves left, except in zoos. The belief in packs will have survived the means of refuting it. It will have become a truth.