more directly to what he had observed in his personal relationship with Wolf. One was a volume edited by Harry Frank and published as recently as 1987, entitled
All but about three of the books he had gathered helped him enormously. It was a curious process, as if a patch of desert, suddenly supplied with water, had begun to sprout in all directions and develop into a green and growing place. He had had absolutely no idea that so much work had been done toward understanding Wolf and his kind.
At the same time it was frustrating. Most of the more scholarly writing left him vastly more informed, but irritatingly much more conscious of how much there was he did not know about the wolf. His limited experience with one member of the species was not enough even to let him make full use of the data that he found in the books, he told himself.
He had been observing Wolf closely all these weeks. But from what he read, Wolf would be a different sort of character if he was an established member of a pack. A lot seemed to turn upon Wolf’s age. He remembered the bulky, scruffy look of Wolf when he had first seen him. If he was understanding what he was reading at all well, this thick, untidy coat and appearance of bulk fitted a wolf still in his youth, possibly no more than a year old, for all his adult size.
If that were the case, Wolf was now much closer to being the sort of person who could partner with him. From those readings that compared wolves with dogs, he gathered that the social behavior of the adult dog was similar in many ways to that of the immature wolf, still agreeable and not yet prepared to challenge adult authority for a place in the status order. Apparently, it was quite common for adults of a domesticated species to retain characteristics found only in juvenile members of their wild ancestors. The books called it “neotenization.” The contrast he had drawn for Merry between childlike dogs and Wolf as an adult person was closer to the mark than he had imagined.
He thrust firmly aside, for the moment, a desire he felt budding within him to speculate on the human race in this light. He had enough to do.
Jeebee knew almost nothing about Wolf’s early history, but some of what he read for the first time helped him make some educated deductions. There was nothing wrong with Wolf’s eyesight, so it was unlikely that he had been orphaned or taken from his mother before he was about ten days or two weeks old. Wolf pups deprived of mothers’ milk before that age apparently tended to develop cataracts.
Of course, Wolf might have been fostered into a litter of nursing dog pups, but the dog owner would probably have left him with the mother until he was weaned at five or six weeks of age. But in that case, Wolf would not have taken to Jeebee the way he had.
Wolf pups who remained with their mothers more than about three weeks after birth apparently lost the capacity to form lasting attachments to human beings and soon began to react to humans much like any feral wolf would. This was documented, even in cases where the mother was herself completely tame. Jeebee reasoned that the same thing would happen if a wolf pup were fostered on a mother dog. So Wolf had probably been hand-raised by the cattleman called Callahan, beginning no earlier than two weeks of age and no later than three.
The books also taught Jeebee that wolves who were raised only among humans were afterward seldom able to establish normal associations with other canines. So Wolf’s relationship with Greta was strong evidence he had been allowed at least periodic contact with other dogs, beginning shortly after he was weaned. Thinking back to Wolf’s behavior with the dogs at the whistle stop, Jeebee now considered it altogether likely that some of the older dogs—possibly including the collie type Wolf had killed as they escaped—had also been residents of the small ranch where Jeebee acquired the jacket that had first attracted Wolf’s attention.
In contrast to wolves, said the books, dog pups apparently passed through two such sensitive periods, or “windows”—one of which allowed them to develop normal social bonds with other dogs, and the second of which allowed them to form attachments to humans.
Dogs were therefore capable of forming “dual identities” and, in this respect, were more flexible than wolves, living quite happily in two worlds. Unlike a dog, even a hand-raised wolf never really lived in a human world.
As one writer had explained it, wolves raised by humans—or in very early association with humans—treated humans as wolves. That is, they seemed to expect humans to honor the same instinctive conventions that governed the social life of wolves. Jeebee guessed that this might be the root of the popular myth that any wolf would eventually “turn on its owner” or “revert” to wild behavior. It also went a long way toward explaining a number of things about Wolf’s actions and general behavior.
But while the books explained much, they did not explain enough, at least to Jeebee, to provide the handle he needed for an overall understanding of Wolf’s character.
There was so frustratingly much in these pages that he knew he was not getting. Information that seemed to lie below the surface of the words, invisible and sensed, but not seen. He asked himself if this was his imagination, and answered himself that it was not. There was knowledge there—his years of searching for answers on the academic level had trained a sensitivity into him, a nose that told him when there was information to be discovered.
His problem, Jeebee thought, riding northward under the stars as he moved into the middle of July under the nearly always clear sky, was mostly that same lack of experience on his part.
The problem was that the people writing the books knew what they were talking about, and they were writing mainly for readers who in most cases also knew what they were writing about. Jeebee did not. He had no context into which to fit much of his new information, and as a result, individual facts wandered loosely in his mind trying to partner with other individual facts and finding holes in every fabric his mind attempted to fit them into, as a pattern to explain Wolf.
He crossed Montana’s southern border to the west of Warren, and moved on northward, crossing highway 310 again and passing to the east of Bridger. The country now was either hills and mountains or open, rising range, with very little tree cover. As Paul had advised, he avoided the Crow Indian reservation, now east of him, and swung in fairly close to Silesia. He also passed close to Laurel, but went unusually wide once more around Billings —or what had once been Billings.
There was an uneasy feeling in him that in this part of the country even cities as large as Billings might have survived the crises that had destroyed the cities further east. Billings might still be dangerous at some distance out. To be on the safe side, he headed generally north toward Broadview and Slayton, swinging around the western side of Molt and up through the Halfbreed and Hailstone Wildlife Refuges.
By this time a lot of what he had come to read had had time to soak and work in the back of his mind. As a result, one conclusion was obvious. He would have to work with whatever the books had been able to tell him, and try to apply as much of that as he could to what he had only half understood, by more and closer observation of Wolf.
Happily, Wolf was not spending so much time away from him now. The other showed up frequently during the day and often for short periods traveled along with Jeebee himself. It was the difference in their speed of travel that caused him to veer off as much as he did, Jeebee guessed. Wolf’s normal traveling pace was a trot that was perhaps a mile to two miles an hour faster than the walking speed of the two horses. The horses traveled at roughly three miles an hour, which was also a human’s normal walking speed. But it was not sensible for Jeebee to push them at any faster rate.
The thoughts that had been growing in him from his first acquaintance with Wolf, however, continued to grow. The books, specifically the writings of Harry Frank, had also told him one other remarkably fascinating thing, that the “mind” of the wolf seemed to be sharply divided into two separate systems.
The higher and—to Jeebee—more interesting system harbored a humanlike intelligence. The sorts of tasks wolves had performed under laboratory conditions suggested capacities comparable to the abilities of dolphins, which had stirred so much popular interest in the 1970’s. Compared to their domesticated cousin the dog, for example, their abilities to solve complex problems were truly remarkable. Jeebee himself had seen Wolf use what he could only think of as deception, by “pretending” to play so that he could work close to, or attract the curiosity of, some small animal he hoped to catch.
He had also seen Wolf puzzle out the problem of crossing a small but very fast-running river. A tree had fallen across the river and was partly supported by a rock in midstream with its further end high in the air above the
