Wayward Wolf in Wisconsin

Spring was just starting to come to the Driftless Area of southwest Wisconsin, the part of the Badger State untouched by the receding glaciers. And so, too, had the lone two-year-old female wolf. She, of course, had no concept of it being March. And having found none of her own kind in these wooded ridges and ravines, she might have turned back. But she was driven now by something else deep in her wolf being. Her instincts and her enlarging belly signaled the need to search out a specific spot, someplace hidden that could be dug out and enlarged into a dry den for her first litter. Normally born in May, her pups were to be a good month early.

The spot she found late that afternoon was high up on an east-facing wooded ravine. The steep slope was choked with impenetrable buckthorn and blackberry brambles. Only one narrow path from the creek rushing past 60 feet or so feet below lead up to the den entrance. Easily defended from any other predator, if the need were to arise.  Ledges of exposed Ordovician limestone and sandstone rose straight up another 20 or so feet above the den entrance.  Seeping ground water from above over time had worked to dissolve away the limestone wherever it found and followed fractures in the rock. Indeed, thousands of small cave-like openings now exist in the hills throughout southwestern Wisconsin. But these limestone openings and caves all were too damp for the wolf.

Near the top of this one particular ravine, though, the wolf did find an old burrow to enlarge in an exposed and much dryer of compressed sand. By the pungent odor still lingering, the wolf knew the den recently belonged to a family of badgers.  After an afternoon of digging, the wolf lay panting in the enlarged entrance to her new den. She rested and looked down upon the farmland and then beyond the fields and pastures to the large ridges and hills covered with oak, elm and other deciduous trees, so unlike the pine forests and tamarack bogs she had left in northern Wisconsin. And after her rest, she finished her digging by tunneling up the rest of the way through the sand, past something hard, and then out through the last layer of sod next to a large upright boulder high on the other side of the knoll. 

The wolf did not know the upright boulder by her new emergency den exit was the local Mueller family’s headstone.  She only instinctively knew she now was ready to protect the pups she’d welp yet that night, the pups she’d die for if it came to that.

The female wolf had always run to the left and slightly behind her larger mate. Five years old and almost jet black, he was a magnificent and efficient killing machine. Together, along with three other juvenile wolves, they had hunted as a pack for hare, grouse, whitetail and other meats in Wisconsin’s Nicole National Forest. They avoided man and the traps set by men for muskrats and beavers in the streams and for coyotes and fox on dry land. These men, trappers, did not particularly work so hard to cover their scent -- as other furbearers with less ability to discern man’s cunning were more easily lured and baited to these sets of their demise. 

As a nine-month-old her first winter, though, the female wolf herself had narrowly escaped the jaws of a relatively-small Victor #2 coil spring trap. It had been set specifically for coyote and was concealed with carefully sifted dirt in front of a small hole. The hole had been baited with a dead mouse and then misted by the trapper’s spray bottle of coyote urine. The wolf had not smelled the man scent in time, having focused so on the scent of coyote, her natural enemy. Her fast reaction, though, to the springing of the trap resulted only in a small portion of her front right foot pad being caught. Not intended for the size of a wolf’s foot, the trap was easily pulled off with a solid lunge back, but not before taking off part of the foot’s pad and leaving a permanent impression in her wolf mind.

But this past winter had been different. Many more men came to the forest, both with bigger traps and very large dogs.  These were beastly canines, much like the dogs that chased after black bears for the men, but only much larger and much faster. And one clear cold winter morning, a group of eight of these dogs had surprised the wolf pack. This was something new! The wolf pack had never been pursued like this before. Yes, an out-of-state deer hunter the previous winter -- waiting for his 30-point-buck along a logging road -- had illegally killed one of their pack mistaking it for a coyote. But this new situation was much different. 

This day, the three juveniles were the first to flee from the pack across an open snow-covered lake, only to fall in their tracks to the echoing booms coming from the long objects carried by the trailing and well-positioned pack of human hunters. It had been a planned ambush, not unlike what the wolves themselves had done and as their kind had done down through the ages to secure food for the pack.

The female wolf and her mate were successful in eluding the dogs that day. And for the rest of the winter, they hunted and ranged deeper still in the Chequamegon National Forest, further away from the men and their dogs. It was on a particularly cold mid-February day, though, when the mated pair again encountered man. The male was moving fairly fast along a well-packed deer trail in the deep snow when he ducked under a low limb and became hopelessly entangle in a human-made vine, a snare that tightened down on his neck. The trapper had positioned the limb at the just the right height so that deer would jump over it, leaving the noose ready for a wolf or very large coyote dodging beneath it. The bottom of the noose also was positioned a foot above the trail (well over the Wisconsin DNR’s minimum legal height of 10 inches), so that rabbits, raccoons and most other smaller furbearers would pass safely under it.

Half the night the male wolf fought the steel vine. Legally constructed to DNR standards, the snare’s loop stopped short of choking the life from the large male wolf. Had he been a stray hunting dog, he could have been released unharmed. So physically the wolf was not hurt; It was just his spirit that died that night. Finally, he just gave up fighting the vine, the first thing he had not ever been able to kill or defeat. The female wolf came up to him then. She too tugged on and bit at the steel vine until her mouth too bled. Then, she too gave up and just licked her mate’s muzzle before letting out a mournful howl that echoed through the Northwoods night. She then curled next to him until dawn. 

It was at daybreak that she first smelled and then heard the approach of man, a species she now knew she was powerless to fight. With a whine and one last look at her mate, the female wolf slunk off, breaking into a full-out run at the crack of the man’s .22 caliber rifle – a caliber just big enough to insure proper dispatch with minimal damage to the valuable pelt, again as required by the DNR. 

The female wolf ran effortlessly for two straight days to the southern edge of her pack’s territory. She then stopped, slept in a sheltered spot, hunted, killed prey and ate. This she did as she traveled ever further south through the end of February and into March, away from the land of pine and the humans that sought her kind with dogs, guns, traps and snares. Only she traveled more slowly as the days went by.

The female wolf had headed southwest, following the Wisconsin River. And she found it harder and harder to avoid man and the curious machines that carried humans along the hard stone-like trails between their human-made dens, their homes. And there were more dogs near these human dens, but most did not pursue her. The few she encountered close up had mostly turned tail and run. One, a large German shepherd, had tried to bluff and stand up to her, but she quickly rushed and broadsided him off his feet. And just as fast, her jaws crushed down and locked on his exposed throat until his life and most of his blood had drained away. After this, the wolf stayed to the densely-wooded river bottoms or the forested ridges whenever she could.

The female wolf had no way of knowing that this winter had been Wisconsin’s first legally-sanctioned wolf season in about a hundred years. The DNR -- much to the dismay of many wolf enthusiasts and animal rights supporters – had succeeded in getting the State Legislature to back its plan of harvesting a quota of 201 wolves out of an estimated all-time high population of approximately 880 wolves. 

By the end of February, though, when all was all said and done, hunters and trappers had removed 116 animals -- including the female’s mate and the three juveniles that had run with them. In the next two years, Wisconsin hunters and trappers would harvest another 411 wolves, before a Federal judge would once again order and place all Eastern Timber Wolves in Wisconsin, Minnesota and Michigan back on the endangered species list, immediately halting further wolf hunting and trapping in the three state – a decision too late in coming to prevent the demise of the female wolf’s pack that first wolf season in Northern Wisconsin.

This morning, the female wolf felt only the warmth of the rising sun on her rich fur coat as it shown down the six-foot burrow walls for a few minutes directly on her in this newly-enlarged den. And this morning, she also felt something new and warm as her three newborn pups nuzzled and suckled at her engorged teats. They were two females colored like her and a male carrying his father’s genetics, born about a month and a half earlier than normal for wolves. He, this male pup, had his father’s black coat. And even with his eyes yet closed, he fought his sisters fearlessly for their mother’s milk. 

(A 2007 international study team’s findings, funded by the National Science Foundation, connected the black and dark-phase wolves common in Alaska and the rest of North America to interbreeding with domesticated dogs belonging to the earliest North American ancestors of Alaska’s Inupiat people thousands of years ago -- which also is why black wolves are extremely rare across the European and Asian continents, in spite of what German and Russian folklore would have one believe!) 

Of course, the female wolf knew nothing of her mate’s genetic markers now identifiable through cutting-edge DNA research techniques. She had no clue that her mate was a living expression and product of a hybrid copulation between very-like species within the canid family that may have taken place back perhaps at a time when the last of the great mastodons still were being hunted with spears by North America’s earliest humans. The female wolf only knew, by some ageless instinct, her new maternal need to feed and to protect her newborn pups. And, without the help of her mate to bring food to the den, she would be driven to do this soon by herself.

There were lots of fleet-footed whitetails in southern Wisconsin, but it had been the smell of the newly-born Angus calf in the Mueller family cow pasture that had caught her attention that first morning. The cow, too, would fight for its newborn, but would eventually lose later that day.

The coyotes, of course, first were blamed, at least until DNR Warden Kyle Osborne a week later, while scoping the pastured valley with his binoculars from a resting bench atop the cemetery knoll, suddenly spotted something much larger than a coyote flash through the woods on the far ridge. They, the warden and wolf, then would get to know each other very well over the summer. Warden Osborne wasn't yet aware, though, that the wolf too already had spent considerable time silently watching him.

The wolf's nose had detected him the very first time he'd driven his Jeep Cherokee into the cemetery and parked not 10 yards from the Mueller family plot marker. This, too, was a man, the wolf knew, but one that somehow did not give off any indicators of being a threat. He carried no metal traps nor gun. Nor did he have any dogs. The wolf sat on her haunches and just watched from beside the Mueller family lot marker. She was one leap away from her emergency den opening and her waiting pups.