Dead Wolf Selfie
Sky Island Journal: Issue 6, Fall 2018
One
The passenger train creeps into the heart of North Dakota. Rickety rail and a constant procession of freight trains carrying oil and coal make for slow speeds and frequent stops.
Outside the observation car window stretches an endless sea of virgin prairie grass and herds of buffalo so thick that they seem to form one giant amoebic mass that threatens to engulf the horizon as if to digest the few small clouds that linger there. The feeling is of breath and blood and limitless space.
And then my eyes blink through into the modern era, the mechanical now, and the prairie becomes coal and oil in the form of GMO corn and soybeans arrayed in GPS guided rows upon the sterile, chemical-stained ground, and the black amoebic mass of buffalo is foreshortened into an endless passing parade of tanker cars, their sides dripping with the dark toxic lifeblood of civilization.
The word sabotage comes close but misses the mark. It evokes a dark gallantry, careful backroom plans, cunning craft. We are not saboteurs. We are neither cunning nor crafty. We fight for no higher cause. We know of no higher cause than our own greedy oblivion. Self-immolation comes closer—a symbolic sacrificial suicide—but it too falls short, with hints of faith and virtue. Imagine killing a lover because you were overwhelmed by your own feelings of compassion. Imagine your lover’s dying breath forgiving you.
Imagine a sea of dead coral or a forest of driftwood.
Two
When the image popped up on my screen, the visceral effect was immediate and without prolog. I almost doubled over. The caption in black and bold font beneath the image was “No it’s not a bear. It’s a 152-pound wolf!” The creature’s head faced the camera at an angle that was not quite right. It was like one of those Victorian age death photos: a daguerreotype showing the corpse of a young child seated on her mother’s lap with her eyes taped open. Only it was a high definition digital color image and the dead emptiness of the wolf’s gaze was unmistakable. Kneeling on the ground behind its enormous lifeless black-furred body was a puffy-faced young punk decked in Walmart camo and leaning against a high-powered hunting rifle. For a brief moment, I wanted someone to shoot him with his own gun, I wanted to see the bloated pride drain from the shit-eating grin on his face as he bled out on the ground next to his trophy, I wanted to see a faded sepia tone photo of his body propped against a tree with his eyes taped open and staring blankly at the camera.
OK, so maybe for something more than a brief moment.
The civilized human approach to predation is in many ways the antithesis of that practiced by other predators. Other predators go after the weak and the sick. It is the lame deer that the wolf pack shares, it is the sick wildebeest that the lion pride tackles, it is the slow fish at the tail end of the school that is eaten first. But civilized humans go after the strong and the healthy. We throw the puny fish back and keep the big mature ones. We shoot for the largest buck with the most antler points. These two predation strategies—take the young and the weak versus take the mature and the strong—impact prey populations in dramatically different ways. When you take the weak and the sick, you have removed their ability to propagate their weakness and sickness into the next generation, and the population as a whole becomes stronger and healthier. When you take the strong and mature, you remove healthy breeding adults in their reproductive prime and leave behind the small and weak and the reproductively fragile, which interferes with the natural replenishment of the species. The result is a population that as a whole becomes physically smaller and weaker, and population numbers can decline precipitously. Or perhaps the developmental progression is altered. For example, in response to industrial fishing, heavily harvested ocean fish have evolved to stay small and to mature more quickly so that they can reproduce before the fishnet removes them from the gene pool. The average adult cod is considerably smaller than it was even two decades ago.
But the dead wolf in the image was not a victim of predation. Civilized humans hunting for sport are not predators, at least not in the way that that term applies to wolves or leopards or sharks or rattlesnakes or spiders—or to uncivilized humans hunting for food. A predator hunts out of necessity. Although I have witnessed crows killing ducklings for what looked to me like sport, predators typically hunt as a biological imperative. Killing for food is one thing, and hunting deer or elk for their meat can be a way to reconnect with essential parts of our authentic humanity that have been hidden beneath the asphalt and touchscreen circuitry of the modern world. But sport hunting—killing an animal simply for the enjoyment of the act itself—is a response to psychological deficit. Civilized humans kill for sport in response to their lack of wholeness; they hunt in response to a powerfully felt sense of personal deficiency. Ten thousand years ago, killing a bear-sized wolf would have had profound spiritual significance. It would have been an event worthy of reverential reflection by the hunter and calm circumspection by his friends. Today it’s a selfie-worthy photo op in attempt to placate an insatiable ego; a pathetic attempt to fill an emotional vacuum—a psychological blank space that results from living a shallow and inauthentic life.