The Man Who Lives with Wolves. Shaun Ellis
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Название: The Man Who Lives with Wolves
Автор: Shaun Ellis
Издательство: HarperCollins
Жанр: Биографии и Мемуары
isbn: 9780007327195
isbn:
There were so many things I loved about the army; it had taken me all over the world. I loved the challenges, loved being part of a crack team. It was exciting to be in control of heavy weaponry, but modern warfare is so removed from reality that much of the time I didn’t know what I was fighting for. I became more and more disillusioned. I had been brought up to kill for the right reason and to respect the animal I killed and to respect its place in the world. As a soldier I was part of an organization that killed for other reasons and I didn’t have an appetite for them.
The final straw for me was in Northern Ireland, where I did several tours of duty. The province was like a war zone. I remember walking down a street one day in uniform and having to defend myself from a group of children, no more than six or seven years old. They were screaming abuse and hurling broken bricks and anything else they could get hold of. I am sure the only reason they were doing it was because they had seen their parents and grandparents do the same, but there was so much hatred in their eyes. Those children should have been at home playing with LEGO, dressing dolls, or watching Sesame Street; they should have been anywhere but out there on those streets, because today’s bricks will be tomorrow’s bombs.
I don’t know whether I killed people in Northern Ireland. I fired in the course of battle and people died, but I’ll never know whether it was my bullets that killed them, and I don’t want to know. It was sickening enough to have been part of it. It was not the right battle to have been fighting and I found that very difficult to cope with. The people who wanted the army there didn’t appreciate us, and the people who didn’t want us hated us with such passion that all we did was fuel the situation. There had to be a better way and in the end, years later, they found it: they talked.
In the short time I had spent watching wolves I could see a stark difference between their aggression and ours, and I suspect that at one time, hundreds of years ago, there had been very little difference. Wolves have the power to kill and threaten to use that power all the time, but they only use it when they must. They will fight to the death to save their family and to preserve the food sources that will get their family through the winter, and they will be archrivals with other wolf packs, but they also respect their rivals and value them for what they do. We don’t value our enemies; in modern warfare, we don’t even have to see our enemies—we can kill them at the push of a button and most of us who are engaged in the fighting don’t even know why they are our enemies. The killing is pointless and needless—and the morality highly questionable. I had had enough.
Wolves had got under my skin and my mind was in turmoil. I felt nothing but contempt for my fellow man and nothing but admiration for these creatures that had admitted me into their world. Theirs was the world I wanted to stay in. It was safer than mine, more disciplined, and I had a greater sense of belonging.
So shortly after I left the army I found myself on a plane to America. It was insanity by any standard. I was going to meet a man I had never met, to work on a program for which I was not qualified, in a country where I knew no one, and I had sold every possession I owned to buy the ticket. The man was a Native American I had heard about, a member of the Nez Percé tribe named Levi Holt. He ran the Wolf Education and Research Center on tribal lands near Winchester, in Idaho, with a captive pack designed to teach people about wolves and give tribal members a chance to connect with their culture. He was also managing a controversial reintroduction program of wild wolves into the Rocky Mountains. It was run by a team of highly qualified biologists, and I didn’t have so much as an O level in woodworking.
It all began when I saw a documentary on television called Living with Wolves, which featured an American couple named Jim and Jamie Dutcher. They spent six years living with a captive pack in Idaho. The film was riveting; this couple had done everything I had done and had drawn all the same conclusions about pack structure, hierarchy, and the importance of family to these creatures. It was as though we had been living parallel lives. After six years their permit to house the animals had expired and they needed to find a new home for the wolves. The Nez Percé tribe had come to their rescue and in particular, Levi Holt.
I had never met Levi, but I had spoken to him on the telephone and told him I would like to go across to Idaho and study. He said that was fine but since it was a scientific program and I had no qualifications, I would have to do an internship so they could be sure I knew how to record data correctly and be able to support the biologists in the field. Then he told me what it would cost and mentioned a figure that audibly took my breath away. It was several thousands of dollars, and Levi picked up my reaction down the line.
“What’s the matter?” he asked.
“I’ve sold everything,” I said. “I barely have enough money for the airfare.”
“So what are you going to do?”
“I hear you have a captive pack that you use as ambassadors to teach people about wolves. I’ve worked in wildlife parks with captive wolves and maybe I could help out with them and that would pay my way through the internship.”
“There are only so many hours in the day,” he said. “How are you going to do it?”
“How about if I work all day and study at night?”
“Hang on a second,” he said. “Let me get this right. You want to come over here and work all day and study all night for your internship?”
“Yes.”
The phone went dead for what felt like hours while he went away to consult with colleagues.
“Okay,” he said. “Buy your ticket, come over, and we’ll see what we can do.” It wasn’t until later that I discovered how much they’d laughed at this mad Brit who was prepared to come over on a wing and a prayer on the promise of nothing but a tent to sleep in, but my idiocy had appealed to them.
A week later I was on the plane, and I admit I was terrified. I didn’t know what I had let myself in for. I had sold my car, my trinkets, my knives, most of my equipment and clothes, and had scraped together the money for the fare. If it all went wrong, I had nothing to return to.
I flew into Boise, the capital of Idaho, which lies in the southwest of the state, where I was met by a tall Texan cowboy named Rick who was married to Cathy, a volunteer at the Center with Levi. I was to spend the night with them and the following morning she would drive me up to Winchester. After a very pleasant meal and a comfortable night at their home, Cathy and I, and a friend she took along for company for the return journey, set off at first light for the reservation. Rick stayed behind to look after their young child. It was a drive of about 250 miles, and the slight flurry of snow we left in soon became a more serious storm. We stopped several times along the way to put snow chains on and take them off again when the road was clear, but by the time we hit the Rocky Mountains we were into deep snow and the chains were on permanently. We were now into wolf country—rocky terrain, lodge-pole pine forests, and snow-capped СКАЧАТЬ