Nick Jans: Holding on to What Little We Have


Sometime early on, maybe the third time
Sherrie and I and all three dogs went out, the balance of our understanding
shifted. We’d moved in behind the island and brought out the flingers. A few
minutes in, one of my tosses went awry, hit a patch of hard pack and kept
rolling toward the shore. As we were wondering how to get the ball back, the
wolf darted in, pounced, and made off with it. He pranced along the shore,
tossed it in the air, and batted it with his paws—movements any dog would
understand. He sure as hell knew about toys: objects with no food or direct
survival value that become, through social agreement or individual whim, the
focus of play.

Here was a chicken-or-egg conundrum. Was
the wolf following the dogs’ lead, or were our dogs engaged in a behavior
inherited from their not-so-distant ancestors? After all, chasing and fetching
rests just a shade away from predatory instinct. Play makes total sense for complex
social creatures like wolves, if viewed from a purely evolutionary stance.
Tussling, toy play, and chasing provide development of valuable survival skills,
and helps cement the social structure vital to a successful pack. And what are
dogs but our custom-tweaked, toned-down versions of wolves, shaped through
generations of breeding to suit our varying whims?

One recent study shows a scant .02%
difference between the genetic packages of wolves and dogs. Hard to imagine,
but Dakotah herself was 99.98 percent wolf, including, you might suppose, the
part of her that loved pursuing and catching things and delivering them back to
her pack, in a faint echo of the chase. Granted, precious few wolves have
regular access to tennis balls. But wolves of all ages, from captive to totally
wild, do engage in play, together or alone, and often with objects that fit the
definition of toys—an old antler, a ptarmigan wing, whatever suits the moment.

 About
fifteen years ago, while on a solo late-winter trip into the upper Noatak
valley, several wolves had approached my camp. I’d spooked two of them by
trying to get a better camera angle when I should have held still. I was
trudging back toward the tent when I realized, with a start, that I had
company. Half-hidden by a clump of brush, head up and relaxed, a reclining gray
male stared off down the slope, pointedly ignoring my presence, an underhanded
stone’s toss away. Finally he yawned, rose, stretched, and made casual eye
contact as if to say he saw me, and couldn’t possibly care. Suddenly he stared,
gathered, and pounced—on a ground squirrel or marmot, I was sure. 

Instead, he
came up with an ordinary hunk of willow, the sort of stick any Lab might pick
up and lug around. The wolf turned and gave me a sidelong glance, shaking his
head and the stick with that familiar canine look-what-I’ve-got posture, an
invitation to a round of keep-away. Then he paraded off down the slope like a
drum major, the branch crosswise in his jaws. Toy-oriented play? No doubt of that,
but something more. By virtue of my proximity (which, I think, triggered the
event) and that sidelong glance, I’d been included in the game, if just for a
moment— in play as a social gesture between species, like ravens and wolves
playing tag. It was a foreshadowing moment that would be completed years later,
in the form of the black wolf. The tennis ball incident was far from the last
time that wolf would cross into dog-human playtime. A few days later he
snitched another ball from us that he carted off, and every now and then over
the next months and years, stories would make the rounds involving the wolf,
games of fetch, and episodes of toy filching. His pattern of larceny proved
what some had maintained all along: you just can’t trust a wolf.

Whatever passed that day, we have a token
to call us back. Years later, that yellow, fist-sized orb that the wolf stole
and eventually dropped rests among Sherrie’s keepsakes, bearing the puncture of
a single tooth. Next to it, a tuft of Dakotah’s tail hair; and a hand-sized
paw-print from the wolf, cast in plaster. We hold what little we have, as if it
were enough.

Nick Jans is a longtime contributing editor to Alaska Magazine, and a member of USA Today’s board of editorial contributors. He’s published hundreds of articles in a wide variety of magazines, from Readers Digest to Rolling Stone.  He’s also contributed to many anthologies and written 11 books. His latest two are Once Upon Alaska (a children’s book with photographer Mark Kelley) and A Wolf Called Romeo (Houghton Mifflin, July 2014). Upcoming projects include a just-completed collection of essays and a long-simmering novel. A former resident of both the arctic and Juneau, Nick and his wife, Sherrie, now make their home in the Chilkat Valley north of Haines.  

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