Tinder for timber wolves
Matchmaking for damaged wolves
Thanks to everyone for joining me on these adventures, I love having you (virtually) along for the ride, even as I’m dodging horses and buggies to get there. (Oh my friend just wait.)
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You hear them before you see them.
Wolf sniffing us out. In the wolf’s case, they likely smell us before they see us.
It’s not just the howling. It’s the rustling, the yelping, the little sighs and grunts.
One wolf wouldn’t shut up: his companion had had a little trip to the vet, nothing serious, but now was in isolation for a couple days to heal, which meant his companion was in isolation too. He missed her. He wanted us to know about it.
We heard all about her. About how they didn’t need to be next to each other to know what the other was doing. About how she let him chase the squirrels and that was OK because something about their damn twitching tails drove him crazy — so fluffy! — plus he kind of liked her sitting there, looking all regal. Also, she had an old injury from the zoo where she used to live. She had told him all about it, he could still smell it on her when she first arrived, the rotten meat they fed her, the times when they didn’t have enough money to even feed her that.
Discussing matchmaking with wolves.
He hadn’t appreciated her when she first showed up in his home, a fenced off area of a couple of acres right up next to another area with a few more wolves which was next to another area and so on. The fences were always getting reconfigured, the wolves moved around, looking for partnerships. He had had a big fight with his previous partner, he wasn’t ready for someone new, especially not this scruffy half-starved stranger.
But over time, nursing her back to health gave his life a little meaning again. He found he liked sharing the idiot squirrels who never learned. He’d even give her the head if she asked, but she never did. She knew he loved squirrel brain.
So now that she was gone, he let Tom and me and our private guide for the morning know he wanted her back. Pronto. It wasn’t the same without her.
The wolf reserve is normally booked up months in advance. The private tours are done like Taylor Swift tickets — you book those the first day of the month, first come, first served. I’ve never had good luck with that kind of thing. I told Tom Pluck about it and I knew we both wanted to go, but I feared it would never happen.
Which is why I nearly had a heart attack when, just a couple days before, I saw they had a private tour cancellation on April 1st. Pluck could make it. But could I?
It’s a longer drive from DC. I’d be working pretty late on Friday, the tour was at 9:30 am in Saturday.
I decided to book a hotel halfway there — near the crab fries place we visited on the bald eagle trip. For once I’d be prepared!
You have no idea how dreamy my morning was going to be. I was going to do yoga. I was going to drink my coffee in long, deep drafts while staring into the middle distance. I was in a concrete wasteland off of I-95, but other people would hear the ocean crashing on the shore just by watching me eat breakfast.
It was pouring when I woke up. Rain so violent it did, in fact, sound like the ocean crashing against my window, but not in a peaceful way.
There must have been a crash on I-95, a terrible one. All I know is that Google wouldn’t let me get close, not within miles — instead it took me on a wild backroads trip through northern Maryland and Lancaster, Pennsylvania. I took a two-minute shower, spilled some awful hotel coffee down my gullet, threw my bags in the car, and even so Google informed me I’d be a half hour late.
I called Tom, who was great about it. Don’t die, he advised.
I didn’t really care about dying at that point I just didn’t want to inconvenience anyone, but I did figure that he sounded less panicked than I was and I should probably listen to him.
I’ve never driven through Lancaster, PA before, have you? I thought the whole deal with the Amish was some cute thing, like sure, every once in a while you might see some “local color” along the way, a sign advertising fresh eggs in a Germanic font or something.
But no.
The Amish were *out*. They were on the hoof. It might’ve been pouring but that wasn’t going to stop the Amish from their buggy promenade.
My nephew, who is, as you might remember, in Taiwan, called. There is no one I should take a call from in a rainstorm, racing to see wolves while dodging Amish horse-and-buggies, and there is only one person from whom I will take a call. That person is my nephew in Taiwan when he wants to talk through college options. (He’s going to University of Chicago! Congratulations!!!)
I got to the wolf reserve at the stroke of 10 am, exactly half an hour late. I had miraculously not killed anyone, not even a buggy horse. Tom and the guide had waited for me and were incredibly gracious. Even the rain was nice about the whole thing, taking a breather just as we started our tour.
Tom and guide looking at wolves.
It’s impossible to encapsulate what it was like, being taken around and introduced to almost 50 wolves. Or at any rate, it’s impossible for me to encapsulate it — Tom Pluck does a great job in his post, Man is Man to Wolf.
As he points out, this was our fourth adventure together, and there’s another to come: a kayaking trip around the “ghost ships of the Potomac.” Fingers crossed we survive that one on multiple levels.
At any rate, if I tried to write a post like that, it would have the same feel as if I wrote up a cocktail party for slightly damaged people: “First I met Freya. She’s very adventurous and they’re still trying to find a good partner for her. Then we met Sprit and Maka. They get along great but they have to separate their food — they’re not big on sharing food.”
(Later, over beers, scotch eggs, and fries — looking at wolves apparently gives you a wolfish appetite — Tom and I agreed we’d both be the kind of wolf they’d have to feed individually. Great at getting along! Not great at sharing food.)
As Tom mentioned his post, our guide, who’s been volunteering there for over a decade, teared up a little talking about the wolves.
The last wolf we saw barked at our guide and wouldn’t stop barking — apparently since he had been gone for three months in the pandemic, now this wolf barked every time he saw him, for as long as he was in sight. It’s been a year and a half since he’s been back in some capacity, and the wolf keeps barking — abandonment issues for sure.
I know why we want to keep and capture wolves as pets, of course I do. I know why I want a wolf the same way I know why I want a falcon: I want freedom, I want their power and glory. What a hellish dance this is, that the moment we try to grasp an animal’s freedom, it vanishes.
After it vanishes, after the damage has been done, Wolf Sanctuary of PA keeps taking in the injured, the abandoned, the half-starved, the lame, even just the overly-friendly-to-humans, providing a home, loving the wolves, feeding them. The wolves aren’t wild any more, they aren’t free, but they are fed, and safe, and they are wolves. They are not expected to be companions or accessories or actors1 or anything other than wolves (or sometimes wolf-dogs). And that was good to see.
One piece of good news that friend-of-the-newsletter, Michael, shared with me: lions were believed to be extinct in Chad, but a lioness has recently been spotted there. She is part of the northern lion subspecies, of which there may be only around 1,000 left.
The WCS says that the region "saw a period of ruthless, organised poaching more than a decade ago, but has since benefitted from a very strong commitment to conservation by the governments of both Cameroon and Chad".
"This has produced better protection of the national parks and wildlife populations are now starting to recover," the organisation adds.
On that note, wishing you all a very wanderful week. Please let me know your thoughts in the comments, especially if you run across any news about efforts to preserve animals or the environment that are working and that you’d like to share.
True! Two descendents from the wolves who acted in the Blue Buffalo pet food ads now live at the Wolf Sanctuary of PA. The puppies flubbed their screen tests, poor things, and Hollywood gave them the metaphorical axe.
an aside, from Nabokov, not particularly germaine, but what the hell--I'll go with it.
Literature was born not the day when a boy crying wolf, wolf came running out of the Neanderthal valley with a big gray wolf at his heels: literature was born on the day when a boy came crying wolf, wolf and there was no wolf behind him. That the poor little fellow because he lied too often was finally eaten up by a real beast is quite incidental. But here is what is important. Between the wolf in the tall grass and the wolf in the tall story there is a shimmering go-between. That go-between, that prism, is the art of literature.
in some ways, we humans are like these wolves; lamed, damaged; captives of our environment, struggling to find the right mate