Sequencer

Up close and personal with nature’s notoriously elusive carnivore.

In the summer of 1986, biologist L. David Mech crept over a hill on an island 500 miles from the North Pole and spotted a pack of white Arctic wolves. He’d spent days clambering over rocks and hiking across treeless ridges under 24-hour-daylight searching for a den. Few if any scientists had ever studied wolves at their dens. Mech had devoted nearly three decades to wolves, but rarely eavesdropped from the ground and never at a den. Now, 200 meters from his mattress, he counted one, two, three, four, five, six. Six five-week-old pups, along with seven adults, all unfazed by him and his ATV.

“It was the highlight of my life,” Mech later wrote in a National Geographic magazine. “After twenty-eight years, I had finally scored the Big One.” This marked the beginning of a renaissance in wolf biology that continues to this day; a renaissance that’s crept out of the Arctic and into wild and urban areas around the world.

Wolves are feared and revered from Norse and Roman mythology to Indigenous American tradition. In modern politics, they fracture public opinion over questions like What does it mean to conserve the wilderness? and at what cost to human lifestyles should we be protecting carnivores?

Wolves are elusive. Their internal and social lives are difficult to pin down. And our efforts to control them—even understand them—continuously turn up surprises.

Two recent books offer a rare lens into the lives of wolves. The Ellesmere Wolves, written by Mech and published in March, unfurls decades of observations of the world’s most tame wild wolf populations on the Canadian island of Ellesmere. Lone Wolf, from author Adam Weymouth, published in June, retraces the steps of Slavc, a wolf who famously journeyed across Europe alone in 2011 and 2012.

The contexts differ: Weymouth is a journalist following GPS data through beech forests, alpine prairies, and populated villages, discovering the grim political consequences of wolves’ success repopulating across Europe. Mech is a veteran field biologist documenting the world’s most remote Arctic wolves. Mech lived in close contact with wild wolves. He observed unprecedented behaviors around their dens like ambushing prey, and adults hugging chest-to-chest.

Yet, common themes emerge. Weymouth confronts the romantic ideal of a “lone wolf” who embarks on fiercely independent journeys. Mech, in his writings, confronts a wolf phenomenon that has transcended science into human culture—the alpha wolf.

“I think it’s really crucial to kind of tell these animal stories,” Weymouth told me. “But I do think those stories are really hard for people to connect to.”

Read the full story in Sequencer Magazine