Dances with Wolves . . . For Real

Washington Post: At the Wolf's Door

At the Wolf's Door
With a Dog To Break The Ice, A Couple Moves In Next To Some Really Wild Neighbors
By David Brown
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, December 23, 2004; Page C01


On a trackless, nameless part of the Canadian Yukon a pack of wolves crossed a frozen river on the last day of May. Above them flew a flock of ravens, dreaming of carrion. Behind them ran a mixed-blood husky leashed to a middle-aged man and woman.

The wolves fanned out and crossed the thin, late-season ice without incident. Not so the homocanid pack, which took it single-file. The woman, Helen Thayer, suddenly found herself in frigid water, struggling to keep from being swept under the jagged edge of a hole she'd made in the ice.

With help from her husband and a trekking pole, she got to the river's edge. There, a strange thing happened:

As she shivered uncontrollably and changed into dry clothes, four ravens landed on the ground. They walked in a circle, no farther away than six feet, cawing softly. Although for weeks they had tormented the dog, dive-bombing and stealing his kibble, they neither bothered him nor were chased off. After 10 minutes, they flew to the top of a spruce tree and squawked.

Five wolves appeared on the far shore. A black one, the pack's alpha male, howled what seemed to be a confirmatory message. Then the ravens flew across the river and, with the wolves running below, disappeared into the woods.

"We really became one big happy family -- us, the wolves and the ravens," Thayer says as she recounts the story. "They did seem to be concerned about us."

Living with wolves. It's a goal with a strangely powerful pull, given that they're not remotely close relatives and they avoid human contact at almost any cost.

Perhaps it's the capacity for intelligence, sociableness and violence so like our own that draws us to wolves. Perhaps it's the scary omniscience of an animal that sees but is not seen. (Ask a child which picture in "The Polar Express" is most memorable and you're likely to be told it's the one of the passing train drawn from the wolf's view.) Or perhaps it's just that wolves are the wild version of the animals we know best, dogs.

For whatever reason, from the Romulus-and-Remus myth to the Arctic Gothic tales of Jack London to the confabulations of Farley Mowat, something about Canis lupus strikes a deep and atavistic chord in the human heart.

For Helen Thayer, the possibility of communing with wolves drew her into the harsh taiga of the Yukon Territory and the harsher ice pack of the Beaufort Sea for the better part of a year. It was one of a long string of astonishing adventures.

Thayer, 67, was in Washington recently to lecture at the National Geographic Society about living with wolves. "Three Among the Wolves," the account of the experience she, husband Bill, a retired helicopter pilot, and their dog, Charlie, had in 1994 was published earlier this year.

Thayer is an explorer-naturalist of a breed that in the modern age is more threatened than wolves. She is not a millionaire, an academic, a government scientist or the sponsored face of a large corporation. In the beginning, she wasn't even a writer. Instead, she's a self-taught, self-financed and self-effacing woman whose chief interest in life has been to do difficult and interesting things. Her adventures are a mixture of climb-it-because-it's-there feats of endurance and quasi-scientific efforts to satisfy her own curiosity.

In person, she is stocky, grandmotherly and confident in her intuition (which she says the wolves helped refine). Sitting in the lobby of a downtown hotel as men wheeling suitcases come and go, she observes: "People are so tense here. They really need vacations."

Her husband, 78, was back home in Washington state's North Cascades taking care of three new dogs ("We're up to our knees in beagles") and various barnyard animals. She wonders aloud whether she is dressed well enough for this Washington, noting that in hers "you turn up for dinner in your fleece vest. Here you turn up in your black suit, of which I don't have a single one."

Her fleece vest -- bright red, its nap virginal -- is beautiful, though. It's accessorized with a single enamel pin on the collar. It's from the Explorers Club, whose headquarters is in New York.

"They didn't use to let women in," she says without any edge in her voice. She was admitted in 1989. She got her invitation a year after she became the first woman to walk and ski solo to the magnetic north pole. She was 50 at the time, an ex-champion discus thrower, luge racer and climber looking for new challenges. That trip was the subject of her first book, "Polar Dream." She and her husband repeated the feat in 1992 as a way of celebrating their 30th anniversary.

In 1995 they paddled and walked 1,200 miles down the Irixana and Jaquare rivers in the Amazon rain forest, gathering information on traditional healing and medicine. In 1996, she became the first documented modern woman to walk the 2,400-mile camel route across the Sahara. In 1997, when she was 60, she took a 550-mile solo walk in Antarctica. In their last big expedition, she and Bill walked across the Gobi Desert in 2001 -- 1,500 miles in 66 days. They almost died of thirst, surviving only by desalinating water from otherwise toxic sinkholes.

Helen Thayer was born in Auckland, New Zealand, in 1937, the only child of a couple who had a 10,000-acre sheep and cattle ranch. Her parents were athletic -- her mother a champion tennis player, her father a fair soccer player. She helped with chores and kept 25 chickens herself. New Zealand is a famously do-it-yourself culture. She designed and made her own wedding dress.

"I just had a wonderful childhood. I don't know how it could have been any better."

As a girl she ascended Mount Egmont (now Mount Taranaki), a dormant, ice-capped volcano 8,261 feet high, wearing crampons and roped to a line of climbers. It made an impression.

"It was a big climb for a 9-year-old. It sort of sealed my lifestyle as an outdoor person."

As it turned out, she was in the right place. Lesley "Dan" Bryant, the mountaineer largely responsible for turning the attention of New Zealand climbers to Mount Everest, was headmaster of her high school. She took climbing lessons from Edmund Hillary and went on trips to New Zealand's Southern Alps with him and other instructors, including George Lowe, who was on the support team when Hillary and Tenzing Norgay summited Everest in 1953.

Throughout her childhood, she admired her parents' ability to set goals, make detailed plans and be persistent. ("I was a strange teenager. I wanted to be just like them.") She now has a business, Adventure Classroom, in which she gives motivational talks to schoolchildren. There are three things she wants her listeners to remember: Reach high, plan for success, don't quit.

A year after graduating from college in Auckland, where she studied laboratory medicine, she married an American helicopter pilot, Bill Thayer, who was in New Zealand doing agricultural spraying. They decided early on not to have children. His job was dangerous, and she had ambitions as an athlete and mountain climber. Neither career seemed a terribly good pairing with parenthood.

In 1961 they moved to Guatemala for four years. Bill worked as an aerial sprayer of bananas and cotton and Helen spent much of her time throwing the discus.

She had competed in the Commonwealth Games for the New Zealand national team; in Guatemala she competed for that country in the Caribbean games. When she and Bill moved to the United States in 1965, she was for a time the third-best female discus thrower here, with a personal best of 204 feet when the world record for women was about 212.

She quit the discus in the early 1970s and took up luge. Strong legs on a compact 5-foot-2 frame, combined with a certain fearlessness, made this a logical next event. In 1975 she was U.S. women's champion. But she eventually quit that sport, too, fearing a crash might injure her so badly she wouldn't be able to mountain-climb. (In 1999 she was one of 25 sportswomen of the 20th century honored at a reception in the Clinton White House.)

After Guatemala, she and her husband moved to Washington state, where they owned and ran a dairy farm with 100 registered Holsteins. They sold it five years later -- "It was all work and it just barely paid the bills" -- and moved onto a smaller piece of land that over the years has accommodated dogs, cats, sheep, goats and alpacas. Her husband went back to flying and Thayer taught skiing in the winter and worked part time in a hospital laboratory.

Seeking new challenges at a stage in life when endurance rather than peak performance was likely to be her strong suit, she got the idea of becoming the first woman to reach the magnetic north pole in a solo, unsupported assault. Her success -- after 364 miles, hauling a sled loaded with supplies -- laid the groundwork for much of what's happened since.

She became a writer and a public speaker. She also got interested in polar ecology, particularly wolves and bears. She was interested in what appeared to be voluntary food-sharing -- altruism, in a word -- among Arctic species. She wanted to get a closer look at wolves on their home turf.

Bill Thayer shared her interest in wolf behavior, and by this time had become an enthusiastic participant in his wife's adventures. He says he never felt dragged along. Decades before he'd given up a safe and predictable job as a fireman on the Santa Fe Railroad to become a pilot.

"I was someone who wanted to see the other side of the mountain, too," he says.

The problem with the wolf project was that the animals are extremely humanophobic. A brief sighting is considered a success. Prolonged, up-close observation is virtually unheard of. But the couple had what they thought was a possible key to the lupine kingdom -- their dog Charlie.

A husky mix with a gray wolf great-grandparent, he'd been offered to Helen by Inuit who feared she couldn't survive her solo polar trek without a dog to sniff out polar bears. The two bonded during that expedition; she believes Charlie saved her life at least once.

The couple learned of the existence of a wolf pack whose den was in the Yukon Territory about 250 miles north of Dawson. They set out to find it in the spring of 1994.

In a kind of controlled "Call of the Wild," Charlie got progressively more wolflike over the six-day hike to the wolves' territory as he and they exchanged sightings and howls, and detected each other's urine scent-markings. When they got to the den, the Thayers were a bit like grandparents who don't speak the local language. They turned to Charlie and said, in essence: "You know a little wolf -- go find out what's happening."

The outcome of that suggestion was far from certain.

"Quite often wolves just kill the dogs if they come around," says wolf biologist L. David Mech. "That would be the usual thing. But of course there are exceptions to that."

Mech, 67, has worked for the U.S. Geological Survey since 1969, and has been an adjunct professor at the University of Minnesota since 1973. He has written nine books, most of them on wolves, and for many years has observed wolves on treeless and nearly peopleless Ellesmere Island in northernmost Canada. His sojourns, however, have been far shorter than the Thayers' months-long stay. In fact, he thinks they hold the record.

For whatever reason, there was rapprochement this time. It may have helped that the interlopers showed impeccable manners, crouching low and averting their eyes to avoid highly threatening pupil-lock at crucial moments of confrontation. Boundaries were as sharply drawn as between the Koreas (although the Thayers could have done without the dog's scent-marking of the tent). Charlie, meanwhile, showed that he was the alpha of the homocanids -- holding his tail erect and baring his teeth at times -- which seemed to impress the wolves. Over a summer, camped just a hundred feet from the pack's den, they became the weird but increasingly lovable neighbors.

Like many orthodox naturalists, they declined initially to name the nine wolves they observed, not wanting to humanize them. But this became burdensome for efficient note-taking, so they were soon talking about Alpha and Mother (the breeding pair); Beta, the graybeard teacher; Denali, the male hunt leader; Yukon and Klondike, yearlings; and Omega, the lowest-status animal, whose role was to be picked on and yet still fully participate in pack activities.

Over the course of the May-to-October sojourn (interrupted by two short resupply trips) Bill, Helen and Charlie witnessed most of the essential pack activities.

They saw them leave to hunt and come back with prodigious amounts of food -- great bloody quarters of moose and sheep. (This refuted Farley Mowat's discredited observation that northern wolves survive mostly on a diet of rodents.) They saw the wolves share food with ravens, which might have functioned as hunting scouts. And like first-time grandparents, they were thrilled to finally see the year's two pups let out of the den and introduced to the neighborhood four weeks after birth.

There were tears all around when winter finally came and it was time to part.

"With the wolves watching, we left the meadow we had called home for almost six months, and the wild family we had become a part of. As we stepped across the stream, we saw Mother and the pups sitting dejectedly on our tent's spot. The teenagers, who had now grown into two elegant young adults, gathered near Mother and the pups. They all gave a mournful howl," she writes in "Three Among the Wolves."

The Thayers subsequently went 150 miles farther north into the high arctic, trekking across the treacherous Beaufort Sea in late winter as the ice started to move. They observed wolves following -- and scavenging from -- polar bears far out on the ice pack. Charlie was again a lifesaver.

He smelled or sensed polar bears long before they were visible. One time, leashed, he drove a bear away. Both Bill and Helen carried cut-down 12-gauge shotguns loaded with slugs, which they never had to use. Nevertheless, "it's a comfort," she says unsentimentally. Equally important, the dog was able to smell open water -- and keep his human charges from it -- during a harrowing, fogged-in breakup of the ice. (Charlie died last year at what Thayer believes was age 23.)

On both the tundra and the ice they saw (as they'd hoped) wolves sharing carcasses with other animals -- polar bears, grizzlies, ravens and foxes. They also saw what they believe was an adult wolf teaching two young ones how to look up and find an airplane when they hear an engine drone -- an insight learned from what the Thayers believe was the loss of pack members from aerial hunters. What isn't clear, though, is whether these and other observations have added to our knowledge of wolf biology.

The Thayers don't publish in peer-reviewed journals. Their descriptions, while carefully made, are not systematic in a scientific sense. Mech, for one, is disinclined to see in several species' serial feeding on a carcass the shared knowledge that they're all in it together.

"If there is high motivation to eat, the wolves would defend the carcass," he says. "But if they have already eaten, there is less motivation to fight the bear. They both end up feeding on it, but grudgingly."

Thayer's own observations suggest that boundary-drawing, rather than togetherness, is the rule in wolf culture.

In her book she describes a scene in which one of the wolf pups breached the urine-marked line between the pack's den and the trio's campsite. He wandered over to the dozing Charlie, tugged at his fur and tried to engage the dog in play. Charlie got up and gently nosed the pup to the edge of his territory, where the little one was handed off to the waiting Alpha.

Good fences make good neighbors, even when the fences are made of bodily fluids.