Running with Wolves. National Kids Geographic

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      What next? That’s what I asked myself as we removed the fencing and any trace of human activity at the cougar enclosure.

      I was itching to start another project. As before, I wanted to do something that would inspire people to care about wildlife. The best way I knew how to do that was to make another film about the hidden daily life of an animal. It would have to be an animal that was largely misunderstood, an animal that was rarely filmed in the wild.

      But, which animal?

      To help me decide, I thought a little vacation was in order. Not Disney World or a Caribbean cruise. No, I needed a sense of peace—the kind of peace I get from a place of quiet natural beauty, a place where I could clear my mind. I decided to return to the Wyoming ranch in the Absarokas.

      More than 30 years after I had spent the summer as a wrangler, I returned as a guest. For company, I had a stack of books about animals. I was going to pore over them for a few weeks in between hiking and fishing. Somewhere in the research and the inspiration of the mountains, I figured I’d find the subject of my next film.

      I didn’t know the answer would hit me like a lightning bolt.

      On the second day of the trip, I received a phone message that my cougar film, called Cougar: Ghost of the Rockies, had been chosen as the first episode of a nature TV series. I was overjoyed. I felt like a 16-year-old again, full of boundless energy.

      I had the irresistible urge to make a climb that had been one of my favorites as a teen. I remembered that the view at the top was spectacular. I stepped my way through a stand of white pines to the base of a hill. I scrambled up the rocky slope, hunched over to keep my balance. At the top, I stood up straight to take in the view. Suddenly, I froze like a statue.

      On the alpine meadow below me stood a gray wolf.

      In a flash, my mind raced back to that day 30 years earlier when I had seen my first wolf. Now, in the same area, I was looking at my second. Could this be a descendant? I wondered about the possibility as I raised my binoculars to get a closer look. That’s when he saw me. Unlike the wolf that stared me down years before, this one was skittish and ran away at the sight of me.

      In that brief moment, I knew that I had found the subject of my next film. I still didn’t know much about wolves, but I was about to begin a journey that would make me an expert in ways I never thought possible.

      The first step in that journey was to separate fact from fiction. And when it comes to wolves, I learned that there was very little fact and a whole bunch of fiction.

      Like most people, much of what I knew—or thought I knew—about wolves was based on the sayings, songs, movies, and fairy tales I had learned since childhood. A “wolf in sheep’s clothing” is someone whose pleasant personality hides sinister motives. In the fairy tale “Little Red Riding Hood,” a wolf devours a grandmother and tries to trick her granddaughter into a similar fate.

      Horror movies about werewolves—bloodthirsty half-man, half-wolf creatures—have been popular for generations. And who is trying to blow down the houses of the Three Little Pigs and eat the occupants? The Big Bad Wolf, of course!

      Such stories and sayings show the wolf as a tricky, ferocious, evil creature—one to be feared, hated, and destroyed. Among those who held such perceptions were ranchers, as well as farmers who raised livestock. If a cow or sheep went missing, wolves were usually blamed.

      Not that it never happened. These predators sometimes did kill a member of a herd, but the culprit was much more likely to be disease, weather, injury, or a predator other then a wolf, including domestic dogs.

      I wasn’t completely surprised to learn how make-believe stories fed people’s misconceptions about wolves. But I was astounded and alarmed to learn how false perceptions had affected the wolf population. From the mid-1800s to the mid-1900s, about two million wolves had been killed in the United States, largely because they were seen as a threat to livestock. In fact, in 1915, the U.S. government hired hunters and called for the extermination of wolves.

      It almost happened.

      The government paid hunters for each wolf they killed. By the time I started to research my wolf film, this beautiful animal that once inhabited forests and plains from Maine to California existed only in small pockets of the United States. At the most, no more than a handful of wolves roamed the entire American West. Even though they were protected under the Endangered Species Act of 1973, their numbers were still dangerously low.

      More importantly, attitudes about wolves had changed little, especially among the ranchers and big-game hunters who shared the environment with this animal. It was personally disheartening. These were my neighbors and friends, yet our views of wolves were very different. Many people still considered them to be aggressive killers. But the more research I uncovered, the more I saw wolves as curious, intelligent, and even shy. I knew they were getting a bad rap.

      I couldn’t really blame people for their attitudes, though. Myths die hard, especially in the absence of truth.

      In 1990, we knew surprisingly little about the nature of wolves. We had measurable facts—things that you could attach a number to—like a wolf’s size, how far it roams, how long it lives, things like that.

      We knew wolves live in packs, but we had little idea about how they live. We knew almost nothing about the secret, hidden lives of wolves. I needed to change that. I needed to show people a side of wolves they never saw, never even knew existed. Perhaps that information would help replace myth with truth.

      I felt the only way to discover that truth was to live with wolves.

      So, I decided to assemble a wolf pack to observe and film within the world’s largest wolf enclosure. I had no idea what I was getting into and how difficult the road ahead would be, but I knew that I was doing the right thing. I was certain that if only someone would take the time to listen, the wolf would tell its story. I was willing to listen.

      So was a certain zookeeper in Washington, D.C.

      Jamie and I had kept in touch ever since we met on a trip home from Africa three years earlier. She was as excited as I was when I told her about my plans to live with wolves. We both knew this was a much more ambitious undertaking than the cougar project, and she understood why I had to do it.

      In the early days of the project—before Jamie joined me in Idaho—I depended on her advice and support through letters and conversations. СКАЧАТЬ