At a certain point, I set up a tent a distance
away to get a few hours of sleep. While I was off
melting ice to make drinking water, the one-eyed
female approached and surgically slit open the
tent. She hauled all of my possessions onto the
barren ground, arranged them in a neat row,
then ran off with my inflatable pillow.
Eventually, the wolves lay down, and the pups
piled together in a downy mess. While they slept,I wandered. The migrant birds had flown south;
foxes and ravens were silent. Strands of muskox
hair, shed during the summer and smelling
sweet as fresh-cut grass, streamed across the
plain. Here and there ancient muskox skulls
sank into the soil, the thick bone yellowed with
lichen, the horns curling toward the sky. I felt
like a trespasser drifting through the rooms of
an empty house.
Hours later, the pack awoke and gathered in
their usual post-nap huddle, with lots of face
licking and tail wagging. It went on like this for
a while, love at the end of the Earth, until the
older wolves trotted off, heading west toward
prime hunting ground, leaving the four pups
alone with me. It seemed to confuse them, and
me. This was not necessarily trust, more like
nonchalance. I was neither prey nor threat but
some third thing, and the older wolves under-
stood this.
I can’t tell you which members of the family
survived winter, or whether they learned to hunt
together again. Odds are good they did, just as
odds are poor that all the pups lived. After the
last of the older wolves dropped out of sight that
day, the pups decided to get up and lope after
them. I followed, and soon all five of us were
lost. We wandered for an hour, and then along
some nameless ridge, the pups sat down and
began to howl, their little voices tumbling over
the rocks. jcarcass and fended off her older children, allow-
ing only the four pups to eat.
The older wolves begged, whined, shimmied
forward on their bellies, hoping for a mouthful.
She held firm, snapping and growling, while the
pups gorged, until their bellies swelled to the
size of bowling balls. It was probably their first
meal of fresh meat.
Eventually everyone was allowed into the feed.
The animals stuffed
themselves and fell
into the wolf version of
a food coma. At some
point after that, the
matriarch vanished.
She never returned,
and we never learned
what became of her.
By the time I sat alone with the pack, they
were still in disarray. It wasn’t clear who would
lead or whether the family would hunt well
together. Winter was just weeks away, the starv-
ing time. The young bright-eyed female who’d
nudged my elbow seemed eager to fill her moth-
er’s role, though she cared little for nurturing the
pups. And during her first attempt at leading
a hunt with the pack’s elder male, she’d been
flattened by a muskox.
A few hundred yards away I had watched as
the big beast lowered its head and dug at her
with its horns. I thought she’d been gored.
Instead, she bounced up and skittered away,
tail between her legs, and the hunt fell apart.
SAT WITH THE WOLVES
by the pond for nearly
30 hours, unable to tear
myself away, unwill-
ing for it to end. What-
ever decisions or stress
the pack faced, it was a
happy time. They played,
napped, nuzzled. I tried to keep them at a dis-
tance, but the wolves routinely wandered over
to inspect me. I could smell their awful breath,
hear their awful farts.
Their interest slowly faded, but it was so cold
that every hour I was forced to stand and do a
warm-up session of shadowboxing and jumping
jacks. My flapping and panting always lured the
wolves back. They would surround me, cock-
eyed and curious, and they must have sensed
I was nervous.
THE BRIGHT-EYED FEMALE WOLF LOOKED
ME UP AND DOWN. METHODICALLY. CALMLY.
SHE BARELY BROKE EYE CONTACT.
Author Neil Shea and photographer Ronan
Donovan were part of a team of filmmakers who
documented Ellesmere Island’s arctic wolves for
National Geographic WILD.ALONE WITH WOLVES 133