The Real Wolf

A family, not a gang

The gray wolf is the largest wild member of the dog family, and it once ranged across more of the Northern Hemisphere than almost any other land mammal. It lives in forest, mountain, tundra, steppe and dry scrub, and shapes its habits to each.

A wild pack is, at heart, a family: usually a breeding pair and their offspring of the last year or two, sometimes with an adopted outsider. The parents lead because they are the parents. The picture of a pack ruled by a snarling "alpha" who fought his way to the top came largely from studies of unrelated wolves kept together in captivity, and it describes wild wolves poorly. Most of the time a pack is cooperative and even affectionate. Its members sleep close together, greet one another with wagging tails and nuzzling, play long after they are grown, and share the work of raising the young.

Territory and the long trot

Each pack holds a territory and defends it. Its size depends on how much prey the land supports: modest where deer are plentiful, vast in the far north. Wolves mark their borders with scent at trail junctions and along well-used paths, and they patrol them often. Meetings between neighboring packs can be fierce, and other wolves are a real danger to a wolf.

Wolves are made for distance. Their usual gait is a tireless trot, and a pack may cover a great deal of ground in a single night without seeming to hurry. Young wolves leaving home travel farther still, crossing rivers, mountains and highways in search of a mate and a territory of their own. It is these wanderers that have carried wolves back into countries that had not seen one in a century or more.

Voices, scent and gesture

The howl is the wolf's long-distance voice. A lone wolf howls to find its family; a pack howls together to gather before setting out, to keep in touch when scattered, and to tell neighboring packs that the ground is taken. A chorus of a few wolves, each sliding between notes, can sound like many more animals than are really there. Wolves do not howl at the moon. They lift their heads because the sound carries better, as the page on the full moon explains.

At close range they use a wider vocabulary: whimpers and squeaks between parents and pups, sharp barks of alarm, growls of warning. Much is said with the body. Ears, tail, the set of the shoulders and the angle of the head all carry meaning. Scent completes the language, carrying news of who has passed, when, and in what condition.

Hunting and hunger

Wolves live mainly by hunting large hoofed animals: deer of many kinds, elk, moose, caribou, wild boar, wild sheep and goats, and in some places bison. They also take beavers, hares and smaller creatures, eat carrion readily, and in lands crowded with people will scavenge what they can.

Most hunts fail. A pack may test many animals before it finds one it can catch, and it tends to take the young, the old, the sick and the injured, because a healthy adult elk or moose can outrun a wolf or kill it with a kick. Wolves are often hurt by the animals they hunt. Their life follows a rhythm of feast and fast: a kill is eaten quickly and in great quantity, and then the family may go hungry for days.

A wolf's life

Wolves usually mate once a year, in late winter. In spring the mother gives birth in a den, often a burrow dug into a bank or a hollow among rocks or roots. The pups are born blind, deaf and helpless. After some weeks underground they come out to tumble about the den mouth, and later move to a sheltered gathering place above ground. Every member of the pack helps to feed them, carrying meat home in the stomach and bringing it up for the pups.

By autumn the young are traveling with the adults. Within a year or two most will leave, alone, to find a mate and found a family of their own. It is a dangerous journey. A wild wolf's life is usually short, and hunger, injury, disease, other wolves and, in most places, people end most of them long before old age.

Wolves and people

For most of history, wolves and herders have lived uneasily together. Wolves will take sheep, goats, cattle and other livestock where they can, and for a family whose whole wealth was a flock, one bad night could be ruinous. Fear followed loss. Across Europe and later in North America, wolves were trapped, poisoned and hunted, and many governments paid a bounty for each one killed. The wolf was gone from Britain and Ireland by the end of the eighteenth century, from most of western and central Europe by the twentieth, and from much of the United States as well.

In recent decades the story has begun to turn. Legal protection, the return of deer and other wild prey to abandoned farmland, and changing attitudes have let wolves spread back into parts of Europe from the refuges where they held on, in the Apennines, the Iberian northwest, the Balkans and the east. In North America they have recovered in parts of their old range, sometimes with human help. The return is welcome to many people and hard for some, especially shepherds, who now use guard dogs, fences and night pens much as their ancestors did.

Are wolves dangerous to people?

Wolves very rarely attack people. Healthy wild wolves are wary of humans and go out of their way to avoid them. Where attacks have happened, history points to a few causes again and again. The first is rabies, which destroys a wolf's caution and drives it to bite whatever it meets; many of the terrible attacks recorded in older centuries were the work of rabid animals. The second is boldness taught by people: wolves that have been fed, or have learned to find food around houses and camps, can lose their fear and become dangerous. In earlier times, hard winters, war and the custom of sending small children out alone to guard flocks also played a part. None of this makes the wolf a monster. It makes it a large wild predator, to be treated with respect and left alone.

From wolf to dog

Every dog alive descends from wolves. Long before farming, during the last ice age, some population of wolves began to live alongside human hunters, and over many generations their descendants became dogs, the first animal people ever domesticated. Exactly where, when and how this happened is still debated, and the wolves involved may belong to a line that no longer exists. What is certain is that the dog asleep by the stove shares with the wolf a great deal of its language: the play bow, the wagging tail, the flattened ears of apology.

It is one of history's quiet ironies that the animal people feared most in the wild is the same animal they took into the house and trusted with their children and their flocks.

How the wolf made the werewolf

Nearly every feature of the werewolf legend has a root in the real animal, seen through fear. Wolves are most active at dusk and at night, so the werewolf is a creature of darkness. They howl unseen from the edge of the woods, so the werewolf is a voice before it is a shape. They take livestock with a cunning that seemed almost human, so people wondered whether something human was behind it. A rabid wolf, raging, fearless and spreading sickness with its bite, looked like a creature possessed. And wolves that scavenged battlefields in times of war gained a dreadful bond with the dead, one that early medieval poets remembered when they set the wolf beside the raven and the eagle as a "beast of battle."

The wolf's kinder qualities left their mark too. Its loyalty to family, its long journeys and its place at the edge of the human world fed the stories of exiles and faithful knights told in the werewolf mythology pages. Many therians whose theriotype is the wolf find the real animal far more meaningful than the monster; the essay Wolves Are Not Metaphors makes that case, and the guide to canine theriotypes says more.

If you meet a wolf

Most people who walk in wolf country never see one. If you meet a wolf at close range, the usual advice is simple.

• Do not approach it, follow it or try to photograph it from close by, and never feed it.
• Stand tall, stay calm and keep facing it. Do not run, which can invite a chase.
• Back away slowly and give it room to leave. If it comes closer, make yourself look bigger, speak loudly and firmly, and throw something toward it if you must.
• Keep dogs close and on a leash. Wolves may see a dog as a rival or an intruder, and dogs are often at the center of encounters that go wrong.
• Keep small children right beside you, or pick them up.
• Report a wolf that seems unafraid of people, or behaves strangely, to the local wildlife authorities.

The aim is not to frighten the wolf out of the world, only away from you. Wolves that learn to keep their distance from people live longer, and so do the flocks.