#Alaska wolfpack logo cracked#

Up here, wolves were never driven to the edge of extinction by humans. Weather station personnel see them often, and large groups of wolves have been reported wandering through the station grounds.Īnd my friends on the film crew had essentially embedded with the pack I came to know for a few weeks, using ATVs to follow their relentless movement.ĭid this human contact somehow make them less wild? Is the measure of an animal’s wildness equal to the distance it keeps from humans? The Ellesmere wolves are separated from their relatives living on much tamer landscapes to the south, such as Idaho or Montana, by far more than distance. David Mech spent 25 summers observing wolves here. Beginning in 1986, the legendary biologist L. This isn’t to say that the Ellesmere wolves never encounter people. One of their two-year-old sisters returned to encourage them, and the biggest, boldest pup jumped in first, and the others soon followed. They whined and paced as the pack moved on. But the pups’ encounter with a stream proved challenging. A thousand miles past that stands the nearest plant you would actually recognize as a tree.Īt about eight weeks old, the four pups were beginning to be able to follow the rest of the pack as they roamed their territory. Otherwise the nearest community (population 129) is Grise Fiord, 250 miles to the south. A weather station named Eureka is pinned to the west coast and maintains a year-round staff of about eight. The landscape is so remote, and in winter so cold, that humans rarely visit. It’s why I traveled to Ellesmere Island, high in the Canadian Arctic, joining a documentary film crew. There is probably no other place on Earth where this would happen.

And after a few moments they decided to come closer. The wolves watched me silently, but they were talking to each other with flicks of their ears, the posture of their tails.

#Alaska wolfpack logo cracked#

The carcass they’d been feeding on, a muskox many times larger than me, lay nearby with its rib cage cracked open, the bones splayed like a fan against the sky.

However playful they’d appeared a few minutes before, these were wild wolves. I shivered again, and this time it wasn’t from the cold. Humans aren’t usually the objects of such appraisal, though my body seemed to recognize it way down beyond thought. This is a difficult sensation to describe-the lock-on moment when a group of predators sights you and holds your gaze for a dozen heartbeats. Then, one by one, the wolves turned and looked at me. As though they were stunned by the rudeness of it. The rest stood watching, heads cocked to the side. Eventually the puck skittered into the grass, and the largest pup chased it down and chomped it to pieces. A pair of ravens sailed overhead, and apart from their jeering, there was no sound on the tundra but the voices of wolves and the click of claws on the ice. The smallest, the runt of that year’s litter, was hardly bigger than a throw pillow, her eyes lined in black. The largest wolf, a yearling male, was a bully at 70 pounds or so. In my notebook, in letters made nearly illegible by my shivering, I wrote the word “goofy.” Back and forth across the pond they chased, four pups scrambling after the puck and three older wolves knocking them down, checking their little bodies into frozen grass at the shore. The pond was opalescent at that hour, a mirror of the universe, and the wolves also seemed otherworldly in their happiness. In the blue light of an early Arctic morning, seven wolves slid across a frozen pond, yipping and squealing and chasing a chunk of ice about the size of a hockey puck. This story appears in the September 2019 issue of National Geographic magazine.