a heedless killer. My encounter with the Elles-
mere wolves erased any lingering thoughts of
dogs. The bright-eyed female had examined
me methodically. Calmly. She barely broke eye
contact, and I glimpsed a radiant intelligence
far beyond anything I’d known in another ani-
mal. There was an unmistakable sense that, in
the depths of our coding, we knew each other.
I don’t mean any sort of personal connection.
She was not my spirit animal. I’m talking about
genetic blueprinting, a species-level familiarity.
Wolves are slightly older than modern humans,
and so were fully formed when Homo sapiens
emerged. It is no great stretch to believe that in
our youth, we watched wolves hunt and learned
from them, even while some became our pets.
Wolves, like humans, are also one of the most
successful and versatile predators on the planet,
and they live in family groups that are, by some
measures, more similar to human families than
even those of our closest primate relatives are.
As climate change transforms the Arctic into a
warmer, less predictable frontier, wolves will
probably adapt the way we would—by exploit-
ing new advantages and, if things go to hell, by
migrating somewhere else.HORTLY BEFORE I ARRIVED
on Ellesmere, the pack
lost its mother. She had
been maybe five or six
years old, thin in the hips,
slow to rise, and yet so
firmly in charge that when
my friends encountered
her, in August, they didn’t notice her frailty. She
was likely mother to every wolf in the pack except
her mate, a slender male with a bright white coat.
He was the group’s lead hunter, but she was its
center. There seemed no question about who led.
The matriarch hadn’t shown much interest
in my friends and their cameras, though she
allowed them intimately near her newborns,
setting a tone that would carry over into the
pack’s tolerance toward me. The crew told me
her final act, a week or so earlier, had been one
of unexpected devotion.
After several failed hunts (wolf hunts often do
not succeed), the pack managed to drag down a
muskox calf weighing about 200 pounds. They
hadn’t eaten a large meal for a while, and the
wolves gathered around, panting, exhausted,
ravenous. But the matriarch stood beside theN THE FROZEN POND THAT
day, the pack approached
slowly, heads low, noses
gathering scent. It was
early September, 27°F.
The brief Arctic summer
had ended, though the
sun still lingered in the
sky each day for 20 hours or so. True night, the
winter night that would last four months and
see temperatures fall to 60 below, was still a few
weeks away.
I was alone, unarmed. I would eventually ren-
dezvous with my friends, but for now they were
about five miles south. I sat on the ice, thinking
that a few times in my life I had been this soli-
tary, but I’d never been so vulnerable.
The wolves parted around me like smoke. Their
winter coats were coming in. As they passed,
markings that had distinguished them during our
filming loomed into close-up view—the yearling
male with gray hairs in his ruff, the female whose
left eyeball had been punctured, probably during
battle with a muskox. Black tips on the pups’
tails that would soon turn white. I could smell
the gravy of muskox blood they’d been rolling in.
The pups loped past at a distance, clumsy on
their enormous paws. But the older wolves drew
nearer. A bold female, probably two or three years
old, walked up and stood at arm’s length. Her eyes
were bright amber, her snout darkened with old
blood or perhaps burned trash from Eureka’s
dump, which the wolves were known to visit.
It was a jarring thought—she might have a
mustache of melted plastic—but it vanished
into the moment: A couple of feet away a wild
wolf was staring at me. I decided to keep still and
watched, enthralled.
I could hear gastric sounds, the wet squeeze of
a roiling stomach. She looked me up and down,
her nose ticking through the air as though she
were sketching. Then she stepped nearer, and
suddenly pressed her nose to my elbow. It was
electric—and I twitched. The wolf leaped away
and trotted onward, unhurried, glancing over
her shoulder as she joined the rest of her family,
busy burying their faces in leftover muskox.
It’s tempting to think of wolves as we do dogs—
companionable, limited, even cartoonish in their
appetites or tendencies. Partly this is because
they are visibly similar; partly it’s because the
comparison puts us at ease in the presence of a
creature that for ages has been mythologized as
132 NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC