Storyteller’s Remorse
In late August 2018 I traveled to the northernmost island in Canada to observe white wolves. These were an extremely unusual group of animals, and they had the distinction of being unafraid of humans. This alone was something, but beyond their fearlessness lay a subtler behavior that is perhaps best described as tolerance. Another way to put it is that the wolves of Ellesmere Island allowed humans to get close—really close. Up there it was possible to see into the marvelous, mysterious, and mundane details of their everyday lives.
If it isn’t immediately clear why this is extraordinary, consider that everywhere else on earth wolves flee at sight or scent of humans. This is so broadly true as to be nearly a natural law (though there are, always, some exceptions), and one consequence, for scientists, has been that it’s very difficult to study the animals. The wolves of Ellesmere, then, offered something so radically different that they were bound to attract attention.
By the time I arrived on Ellesmere, the wolves were well-known among a small group of researchers, filmmakers, and photographers, most of them professionals attached in one way or another with universities or organizations that could help carry the enormous costs incurred while working more than a thousand roadless miles north of the tree line. Distance, in other words, was a gatekeeper, just as Arctic cold was a foil. All this is to say that not many people visited the wolves. The small staff of a government weather station rotated in and out of their territory every few months, but they largely left the wolves alone. Between the late 1980s and the mid-2010s, a biologist named L. David Mech traveled to Ellesmere each summer to study them. And now and then a photographer or film crew would arrive to document the wolves. By way of comparison, 3 to 4 million visitors flock to Yellowstone National Park every year. Many, if not most, go hoping for a glimpse of a wolf.
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I had gone north to join a crew of three National Geographic filmmakers who’d spent the summer on the island. For two weeks we followed a family of nine wolves across the tundra. They were four adults, one yearling, and four pups only a few months old. Most of the time they moved so swiftly that we couldn’t keep up on foot, and so were compelled to trail them on ATVs.
We watched them play, nap, wrestle. We watched them hunt enormous musk oxen, streaking between the stampeding hooves like white lighting. At times the wolves drew so near to us that we could smell the blood in their fur, hear their stomachs whingeing in hunger. They were never aggressive, though they often tested us, playfully, by stealing things—gloves, bits of gear. During one prolonged encounter, where it was just me and the wolves together under the enormous sky, the adults made an unusual choice. They walked off to go hunting, leaving me alone with the pups. I don’t know what they were thinking, but over many years I have come to interpret it as an act of trust so powerful that it temporarily dissolved the boundary between our worlds. I still think of that moment, and wonder at its meaning, every day.
Months later, when I turned in the story I’d written about the experience to my editor at National Geographic, I felt strangely uneasy. The editorial process at the magazine is slow, sometimes onerous. There were tweaks to the text, a layout was assembled with photographs and a map. Captions were written, facts checked, experts consulted. During all this the feeling of weirdness grew. On the surface, none of my work seemed unusual. I’ve been a journalist for many years and I knew what to expect. Often the period before a story goes to press is one of happy expectation, even a rising thrill that comes with finally sharing something you’ve worked on for a long time.
This was different. The strange feeling lingered and for a while grew louder, but eventually my life moved on. I got busy with other projects, absorbed in the adventures of my young children. About a year later, just before the wolf story was published, the feeling resurfaced and now I understood it as dread. I understood that I about to betray the wolves.
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Writing and sharing stories about anything is almost always an act of both extraction and betrayal, no matter how well-intentioned. Journalists like me show up in a place, gather material, interview people, take notes, take photographs, take stock. We take and take and obscure ourselves behind a professional veneer. Then, days or months or perhaps years afterward, we assemble what we hoarded into some kind of narrative. Whatever stories we produce are far less complex and beautiful than the reality of life we observed. But, because life is messy, stories tend to be better organized. Stories give form to the world. They make subjects seem knowable and characters approachable. They make journeys appear repeatable. In some cases, stories read like an invitation.
I was about to invite tens of thousands of people into the intimate world of wolves. I had even helped create a map showing exactly where they lived, and how one might get there. Suddenly I couldn’t sleep. I was about to share an enormous secret. I racked my brain for things I might do, some sabotage I could deploy that would stop the story from escaping into the world. At the same time I knew it was far too late for that.
The first email arrived a few months later. The sender claimed to represent a wealthy European client who wanted to travel to Ellesmere Island to see wolves. Would I be willing to help, perhaps even to join? The scent of money was surprisingly tempting. I wanted to see the wolves again, but I had no means do do it on my own. What if? I recoiled in horror at my own reaction and deleted the email.
Others followed. They were mostly sent by people who seemed to mean well, who just wanted some help figuring out how to see wolves up close. I ignored them all. I told myself I was helping to keep the wolves safe, shielded from tourists and the kind of pedestrian curiosity that would surely turn bad. But of course all these people wanted was to do what I had done, to see the things I had told them about. And no matter what pretense I hid behind, I knew one of them would eventually find a way.
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A couple of weeks ago another email landed in my inbox. This one wasn’t from a person but a Google alert I’d set up long ago on the subject of Arctic wolves. It contained a link to a TikTok video that had been viewed 25 million times. In it a person lies belly down on snow-swept ice. He holds a camera and his hands are bare, though it’s obviously very cold. A pair of wolves approaches him. One of them sniffs at the man’s boot while the other pauses in front of the camera. It’s almost as though this wolf knows what’s expected. He drops to the ice right in front of the lens and rubs his cheek through snow, like a dog rolling in scent. It’s such an endearing moment, and it unfolds so close to the camera that you instantly wonder what the photographer captured.
Probably his images are out there, on Instagram or the web, but I couldn’t quite bring myself to look. Instead I searched for the company that had helped guide the photographer into that encounter. From what I could gather it’s a small operation, run by an Indigenous outfitter. He and some colleagues began bringing people north to look for wolves sometime in the early 2020s, which is to say a year or two after my wolf article was published and more than 30 after the first scientist began studying the wolves. I don’t meant to suggest that my story anything to do with the birth of this Inuit-owned business. I do believe, though, that my work was one more stone tossed into a rusty pail. Finally it, seems, the pail’s full and the bottom’s blown out.
If you search a little further into all this you, away from the outfitter himself, you find more trips advertised by other guides, each of them specifically aimed at finding wolves. There are two trips coming up in April, another in May. I have no idea how much they cost, or where precisely they will go. What I know is that you must hurry. Most of the spots are booked. Time is running out.
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