In the summer of 1986, biologist L. David Mech crept over a hill on an island 500 miles from the North Pole and spotted a pack of white Arctic wolves. He’d spent days clambering over rocks and hiking across treeless ridges under 24-hour-daylight searching for a den. Few if any scientists had ever studied wolves at their dens. Mech had devoted nearly three decades to wolves, but rarely eavesdropped from the ground and never at a den. Now, 200 meters from his mattress, he counted one, two, three, four, five, six. Six five-week-old pups, along with seven adults, all unfazed by him and his ATV.
“It was the highlight of my life,” Mech later wrote in a National Geographic magazine. “After twenty-eight years, I had finally scored the Big One.” This marked the beginning of a renaissance in wolf biology that continues to this day; a renaissance that’s crept out of the Arctic and into wild and urban areas around the world.
Wolves are feared and revered from Norse and Roman mythology to Indigenous American tradition. In modern politics, they fracture public opinion over questions like What does it mean to conserve the wilderness? and at what cost to human lifestyles should we be protecting carnivores?
Wolves are elusive. Their internal and social lives are difficult to pin down. And our efforts to control them—even understand them—continuously turn up surprises.
Two recent books offer a rare lens into the lives of wolves. The Ellesmere Wolves, written by Mech and published in March, unfurls decades of observations of the world’s most tame wild wolf populations on the Canadian island of Ellesmere. Lone Wolf, from author Adam Weymouth, published in June, retraces the steps of Slavc, a wolf who famously journeyed across Europe alone in 2011 and 2012.
The contexts differ: Weymouth is a journalist following GPS data through beech forests, alpine prairies, and populated villages, discovering the grim political consequences of wolves’ success repopulating across Europe. Mech is a veteran field biologist documenting the world’s most remote Arctic wolves. Mech lived in close contact with wild wolves. He observed unprecedented behaviors around their dens like ambushing prey, and adults hugging chest-to-chest.
Yet, common themes emerge. Weymouth confronts the romantic ideal of a “lone wolf” who embarks on fiercely independent journeys. Mech, in his writings, confronts a wolf phenomenon that has transcended science into human culture—the alpha wolf.
“I think it's really crucial to kind of tell these animal stories,” Weymouth told me. “But I do think those stories are really hard for people to connect to.”
Seeing wolves like no other
Before ever stepping foot on Ellesmere island, Mech built his expertise studying wolfpacks on the remote Isle Royale in Lake Superior. He secured a grant from the National Geographic Society to spend a summer of 1986 in Ellesmere with a photographer and friend, Jim Brandenburg.
They scouted the territory in the spring and quickly realized that Ellesmere’s wolves were different from those in the lower 48. “Just before we had to leave on other commitments, we considered ourselves fully accepted, in fact almost befriended, by the pack,” Mech wrote at the time. (Mech is currently employed by the United States Geological Survey and was not able to speak with Sequencer for this story.)
When Mech and Brandenburg returned to Ellesmere a few months later, they rejoined the pack. The pack was unusually tame, which Mech credited to their isolation from hunters. He could observe the wolf family at their den from 50 feet away. Even after a few skittish moments between the humans and the wolves, the family didn’t abandon their den. Mech estimated based on old muskox and hare bones that wolves had used this den over 100 years ago.
Mech’s anecdotes make it all sound easy, but it’s fantastically difficult to study wolves in the wild.
The intimacy revealed wolf behaviors that no researcher had ever seen. Mech noted who in the pack cared for pups and how they played. One wolf, an adult he named Scruffy, appeared to be a designated babysitter. Scruffy once woke up, fetched a fox carcass for the pups to play with, then returned to sleep. Mech observed adult males and females “hugging” chest to chest, and nuzzling each other. He could measure roughly how much food adults regurgitated to sustain their pups. He clocked their daily rhythms, like hunting between 3:30 PM and 10:00 PM on clear days, or between 2:00 AM and 11:00 AM on overcast days in the High Arctic summer.
Then, Mech reported for the first time wolves ambushing their prey. Wolf experts had theorized for decades but never actually analyzed ambush tactics. Scientists tended to be skeptical because ambushing seems to require foresight and “higher order” purposiveness. But in Ellesmere, Mech observed young yearlings chasing Arctic hare along a ridge toward an adult wolf waiting to pick them off. ONCE?, He and Brandenburg watched seven adult wolves attack 14 muskoxen, including three calves. The wolves waited for the prey to approach—as if they knew the muskoxen would come to their area. A long chase ensued. The adults methodically brought down three calves. Scruffy and the pups’ mother (who Mech named “Mom”) immediately carried food back to pups at the den. Other adults immediately scarfed down their fill, and buried a cache of leftovers in holes they dug in the tundra before returning. One wolf who Mech believed at the time to be an “alpha” stayed out with the remains alone for hours.
Mech’s anecdotes make it all sound easy, but it’s fantastically difficult to study wolves in the wild. In Lone Wolf, researcher Hubert Potočnik, who first tracked Slavc, describes to Weymouth the painstaking lengths they go to trap and collar a wolf. Wolves can smell the soft traps from afar. Researchers must scour off any bit of rust, boil the trap in earthy forest detritus and a coat of wax before burying the trap through the winter, unearthing it in the spring, and concealing it under soil without leaving any human scents nearby. “The slightest change to their territory—a misplaced rock, an unexpected smell—puts them on edge,” Weymouth wrote. Even with these precautions, “[Potočnik] has found traps with a tidy shit deposited, impossibly, on top. Fuck you.”
But for Slavc in 2011, this trap succeeded. Researchers collared him and ultimately documented his journey from July 2011 to August 2012, where Slavc met a female (later named Juliet) and bred a new pack. “To me, it was quite clearly a love story,” Weymouth told me. The wolves “defied odds and walked across the continent and somehow found each other in 1000s of square miles of space.”
Weymouth pinned 635 GPS coordinates from Slavc’s dispersal. He first visited Lessinia, Italy, where Slavc lived in 2019, then walked the wolf’s path in stages starting in 2022. His goal wasn’t to merely follow Slavc, but to experience Europe as Slavc. “It is astonishing that a wild animal can be so flattened into data, and I wanted to breathe the life back into him,” Weymouth wrote. “What would I see if I situated myself, however clumsily, behind the eyes of a wolf?”
A Reckoning
In Europe’s early Middle Ages, royals loathed that wolves were eroding supplies of their hunting game. In 812 Charlemagne, the Carolingian emperor, instituted a system for eradicating wolves. The lieutenant de louveterie led a royal office for more than 1000 years that slaughtered the continent’s wolf populations.
Settlers in North America attacked the native wolf population with similar savagery. In the 1630s and 1640s, Massachusetts settlers could receive cash bounties and wine in exchange for killing wolves. Ohio settlers declared a “war of extermination” against bears and wolves in 1818. What is now the United States used to be home for hundreds of thousands (possibly millions) of gray wolves. By 1960, right around when Mech began studying wolves, the population had fallen to about 300 in the lower 48 states.
“The slightest change to their territory — a misplaced rock, an unexpected smell — puts them on edge,” Weymouth wrote. Even with these precautions, “he has found traps with a tidy shit deposited, impossibly, on top. Fuck you.”
Gray wolf populations rebounded to 7,500 in 2020, thanks to Endangered Species Act protections and sustained wolf reintroduction projects. Unlike North America, Europe’s wolves have bounced without direct reintroduction efforts. In the decade after Slavc’s journey, Europe’s wolf population increased by 58% percent to 21,500 individuals. Slavc and Juliet had an estimated 42 pups, potentially contributing to what are now about 17 packs in their area.
As they rebound, our understanding of wolves grows. Work from Mech and many others around the world has demonstrated how wolves learn and teach their peers. One study showed that different types of play reflect different social relationships within wolf packs. Another study showed how wolves outperform dogs in cooperative tasks. (Something that Mech saw with his own eyes while watching adults team up to take down muskoxen.) And biologists have learned how aging makes wolves less effective hunters, and how that can affect other animals in ecosystems like Yellowstone National Park.
Discovering how wolves learn, cooperate, and use unique tactics forced scientists to consider how sophisticated each individual wolf can be.
“Thus it is no surprise that as I worked closely with Ellesmere wolves, I would see each wolf as a different personality,” Mech wrote.
Both Mech and Weymouth have grappled with the gravity of wolves’ distinct personalities. Their personalities influence the ecosystem in ways specific to each wolf, and the ecosystem in turn influences each wolf uniquely. Mech observes “Scruffy,” “Brutus,” “Explorer,” and “Mom” as characters in a family of specialists. At one point in the summer of 1991, Mech noticed that Mom was no longer part of the pack. He wondered whether she had died. Until one day she reappeared and he realized that she had become an outcast after long being the matriarch. Over time, Mom worked her way back in.
Max G. Levy
Weymouth had identified with the type of “lone wolf” journey that Slavc endured—long solo trips in the wilderness. “I'd modeled myself a bit on that archetype through my 20s,” he told me. “I prided myself a bit on not feeling like I needed anyone.” In tracing Slavc’s footsteps across Europe, he reassessed the lone wolf’s status.
“A lone wolf doesn't intend to remain as a lone wolf,” he told me. “A lone wolf really just hasn't found what it's looking for yet.”
Some scientists believe Slavc ended his journey once he smelled a female wolf. Weymouth’s experience on foot alerted him to other sensory cues. Slavc stopped his journey in a section of Italy with similar elevation, limestone, and beech trees as his Slovenian birthplace. Weymouth noticed the similarity in part because he coincidentally also was raised around beech. “Having spent several months walking through the really high Alps, which is all granite and spruce,” Weymouth said of his journey on foot, “The first time I saw a beech tree, I thought ‘Oh, that's nice.’ Surely Slavc must have felt that as well.”
Yet much like humans, despite their personalities, fundamental similarities arise in wolves no matter where they live. Ellesmere’s wolves share most of their behaviors with Eurasian wolves, red wolves, Arabian wolves two or three times smaller than them. And in Ellesmere, Mech observed behavior that challenged his own longstanding beliefs about wolves around the world.
“The more I associated closely with the Ellesmere wolves each summer, the more I wondered why I was calling the parents of my wolf family the ‘alpha male’ and ‘alpha female.’ I had long known that those animals had gained their status in the pack merely by mating and producing offspring, not by fighting or battling their way to the top of their family,” he wrote.
Mech popularized the concept of an “alpha wolf” in a 1970 book. He has since revised the theory to paint wolf families as complex networks of specialists and role players. The hierarchical “alpha” view reflected simpler realities for unrelated wolves held together in captivity. In the wild, packs are complex families.
“It's really persisted in the culture,” Weymouth says. The pseudoscientific ideal of “alpha” dominance festers in toxic subcultures that mangle standards of masculinity. It’s a tempting appeal to nature, that this is how an animal’s primal biology works. But it’s incorrect, forcing us to wonder why human culture, not wolves, prize dominance at the expense of cooperation. Only by studying Ellesmere’s wolves so intimately could Mech really rewrite the science.
Max G. Levy
The power of fear
At one point in the book, Weymouth believed he’d spotted a wolf, briefly, across a valley. It would be his only wolf sighting on the entire walk. He couldn’t be certain, but he felt no doubt that wolves saw him elsewhere.
At one point in the book, Weymouth met animals from Vienna’s renowned Wolf Science Center. He described a strangely uncanny familiarity. Every motion from their ears to their snouts felt like a pet dog. The researchers even taught the wolves tricks like shaking hands. “Its tail’s wagging,” Weymouth said. “You feel like you know how it's going to behave. You feel like you get it. Then it does something and you realize that actually you're not seeing eye to eye in any way.”
This almost primal resonance Weymouth felt may speak to an affinity between how wolves and humans operate. Wolves, like humans, prey on species larger than themselves. Wolves are the first animal that we domesticated. Many cultures view wolves as humanity’s spiritual kin. Yet our relationship with wolves is a tangled web strung taut with fear.
Outside of Ellesmere, wolves still avoid people, for good reason. One might argue that farmers of grazing sheep and cows in the United States and Europe—inheritors of Charlemagne’s ire—fear wolves for good reason as well.
While traipsing around in wolf country would scare most people, the fear that both Weymouth and Mech write about is not their own. Slavc surely had a more difficult journey across the continent than Weymouth did. “I had one bad encounter in 10 months of walking,” he says. “There were certain virtues of my being white and male and having a UK passport.”
He recalls the plight of a wolf in an armed, populated European countryside to the plight of asylum seekers denigrated by a reawakened menace of nationalism. Weymouth’s walk overlapped with the path of refugees fleeing North Africa and the Middle East into Europe through Greece. “A lot of the language that was being used by local people about the wolf and the migrant was very similar. We were here first. It's not that we don't want them, but we don't but we don't want them here,” Weymouth told me.
Some scientists believe Slavc ended his journey once he smelled a female wolf. Weymouth’s experience on foot alerted him to other sensory cues.
Mech does not worry about wolves’ ability to endure climate change and its environmental stress. They are adaptable, resourceful carnivores. In his book’s final chapter, however, Mech expresses concern about a continued conflict with humans. “To many rural folks … wolves are still the enemy,” he writes. “Humans have not yet learned how to live with or prevent those conflicts.”
Ellesmere’s wolves seem immune from this burden. The nearest domesticated animals are sled dogs living at an Inuit hamlet 250 miles away. The nearest recreational hunting activity is over 1000 miles away, according to Mech. But wolves outside of the High Arctic face human threats more as their populations resurge—and as policymakers deprioritize wolf conservation.
The wolf is an icon of Earth’s wild spaces. Yet what Weymouth learned by following in Slavc’s footsteps is that the presence of a wolf does not make a place wild. His trail followed bike paths and highways. It even encroached on an airport.
“Europe is quite a claustrophobic continent,” Weymouth told me. It’s been logged, paved, farmed, and lived in. The return of wolves to densely populated suburbs invites us to rethink how we can enact non-lethal coexistence. But as wolves wander into suburbs and farms, conflicts may simply be inevitable. “They probably need to be a bit more scared of us than they are,” Weymouth says.
