Wolf and Iron

It was a slow and dusty process, since he had to clean each book before he could identify it by the printing on its spine. There were a remarkable number of issues of magazines, like the National Geographic, bound in homemade covers. There was also a plentiful supply of books about the west in particular, particularly histories of the rise of the cattle industry.

But also, there were a fair amount of histories of the plains and mountain Indians of the west. Halfway around the room, he found what he was looking for, a respectably small number of books on wolves. He took these out, identified them one by one, and made a pile of them on the floor. It did not look like there were too many of them to be added to the load Sally was already carrying without putting her under too heavy a burden.

Eighteen books in all. He took them and left.

CHAPTER 20

Jeebee had time for reading in the days that followed for he continued to travel by night and lie up during the day. The first part of the daylit hours would necessarily be given to sleep, but after that there were always three to four hours before he felt safe to move again with the sundown.

In those few hours he first attended to whatever needed attention about packs and mounts and the welfare of the horses themselves, and refilled the emergency water bag that he carried fastened to his saddle from whatever fresh-water source was handy. He had gotten a large supply of the sterilization tablets from Paul, but realized that he was going through them fast.

Counting them now and looking at the rest of the days of the summer and possibly through the fall, he could see the point was coming where he would be reduced to boiling his drinking water as the only way left to be sure of its safety.

Still, for now at any rate, the time he had left over was at least a couple of hours a day, and in that time he absorbed as much as he could of the books from the library shelves in Neiskamp’s ruined house.

Academic habit made him begin by reading the reference lists, which all but one of the books provided, and then checking them against each other to see which of the volumes he had taken from Neiskamp’s house were most mentioned.

Only two of the titles had rung any kind of bell with him, though he had read neither book. One was Never Cry Wolf by Farley Mowat, for which he found only two citations, both of which referred to it as “semifictional”—which he knew to be academic shorthand for, “Don’t bother reading. Not a serious work.” The other was Wolf and Man: Evolution in Parallel by Roberta L. Hall and Henry S. Sharp, about which he remembered something. It might have been that a review had attracted his attention because of the idea put forth in the title, which intrigued him.

He read through the lot, beginning with the most-referenced works, L. David Mech’s The Wolf and a similarly titled volume by a Swedish-German biologist, Erik Zimen, and so working his way down his list.

When he finally did get to Never Cry Wolf, he recognized it as evidently the source of a movie he had seen once. Its authenticity may have been questionable, but he realized that besides being a fine work of writing, the author had produced a first-rate piece of prowolf propaganda. He tucked it away against some future day when Wolf’s survival in the cattle country of Montana might require a good bit of public relations.

Though Mech’s The Wolf was obviously—and from what he could see, deservedly—regarded by other authors as something of a Bible, there were several others that offered insights he could apply 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 Man and Wolf: Advances, Issues, and Problems in Captive Wolf Research. These, and Zimen’s excellent book, really began to supply him with the background his academically trained mind was reaching for, to give him a context into which he could fit his half-formulated speculations.

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