Читать книгу Running with Wolves - National Kids Geographic - Страница 14

Long before the thought of living with wolves ever entered my mind, and even before I met Jamie, I honed my skills as a wildlife filmmaker. My first films were undersea adventures. I focused on the colorful fish that live among the reefs off the shores of my native Florida.

As beautiful and fascinating as I found the ocean, I was drawn to the forested mountains of the West. My teenage experiences as a wrangler fed my desire to film some of the animals that live there—like beavers.

These creatures are usually either underwater or in their lodges, making them tough to spot in the wild. So instead, for my movie, I built a beaver lodge inside a log cabin. I was able to film—from the other side of a large window—the comings and goings of a beaver family and show the world these quirky animals’ daily activities. I even filmed the birth of beaver kits.

The subject of my next film was a larger and decisively more dangerous animal. It was also much more elusive, almost to the point of being ghostly.

The cougar grasped the neck of the deer in her powerful jaws as she dragged the limp body through the dry pine needles and sparse clumps of grass. When she released her grip, the lifeless animal hit the ground with a thud.

The deer had been struck and killed by a vehicle—a certain tragedy for the deer and most likely a harrowing experience for the driver. For the cougar, it was a week’s worth of meals. But the food wasn’t only for her.

Three male cougar kittens watched with interest from the shadows of a nearby rocky perch. Their spotted youthful coats made them difficult for the naked eye to see. But my telephoto lens clearly caught their expressions, which seemed to say: “Here’s something new.”

Until this point, the six-week-old kittens’ nutrition had come exclusively from their mother’s milk. It was now time to wean them away from nursing. As carnivores, they needed to experience the taste of meat. This would be their first.

The mother looked up toward her kittens and sounded the call for dinner. Meow! Meow! Remarkably similar to the mewing of a household cat, the call of the cougar was nonetheless sharper, shorter, and more determined. To my ears it sounded like she was saying “Now! Now!” and was not about to take no for an answer.

The kittens dutifully heeded the call. Placing one furry oversized paw in front of the other, they gingerly stepped down from their perch toward this new lesson in survival.

Meanwhile, the mother prepared the meal the way mother cougars do. She cleaned a portion of the deer’s belly by removing the fur and tough skin with her raspy tongue and teeth to expose the fresh meat for her kittens. Then she took a few bites and walked away.

This was the part of the lesson the kittens had to learn for themselves—how to actually eat prey.

They approached the deer steadily but cautiously. One batted it with his paw, perhaps testing if it was really dead. Another tugged at one of the deer’s large pointy ears. He kept gnawing on the tough leathery appetizer, ignoring for the moment the entrée his mother had prepared on the other side.

The kittens not only had to get used to solid food but also had to learn how to chew and swallow it without eating the fur. Now and then, a kitten gagged, opening his mouth wide and releasing a harsh Ack! from his little throat.

I couldn’t help but smile behind the camera. It was thrilling to capture this brief snippet of cougar life. It was one of many rare glimpses into the hidden world of this magnificent animal. I was documenting behavior that few if any humans had ever witnessed. Every moment was new and surprising…and priceless.

How was I able to get such intimate footage of an animal that was seldom seen in the wild, let alone filmed? Not by chasing after it, that’s for sure.

I had better methods in mind. And the lessons I learned from making my cougar film would prove to be invaluable, especially when I began studying wolves several years later.

The idea to focus on cougars came from Jamie. I was in Washington for meetings while finishing the beaver film. As usual, Jamie and I met for lunch while I was in town. I wanted my next project to be about a big cat—perhaps cheetahs in Africa.

Jamie suggested cougars instead. These animals go by many names—mountain lion, puma, catamount. The idea intrigued me. I had never seen one in the wild, but I knew they were out there, roaming the same forests and mountainsides that I called home. I later discovered that Jamie had steered me toward cougars partly to keep me in the country. I was glad she did.

While planning the cougar project, I knew that I would have to bring the cougar to me. That meant filming in an enclosure—a large fenced-off area on the edge of wilderness. I didn’t want to fool anyone. I would make it clear in the documentary that I was using an enclosure, and in fact, make the enclosure part of the story. I’d let the viewer “in on the secret” by revealing how I was making the film.

I envisioned creating a semiwild situation in which a mother cougar and her kittens would be accustomed to my presence and allow me to film them without changing their behavior. While the cougars could not pursue large prey or roam without boundaries, they would be free to hunt small animals, communicate, show affection, and interact as a family.

With such a secretive animal, these behaviors would have been impossible to film in the wild. But in a large enclosure, I could film and record up close the sights and sounds that no one had ever seen or heard. Such an intimate look at this illusive animal would make people value it and want to protect it. That was my goal.

It was a tall order.

First on the to-do list was finding a site to build the enclosure. Working with a biologist, we found the perfect place—five acres (2 ha) of government land in the White Cloud Mountains of central Idaho.

The U.S. Forest Service granted my crew the land for a two-year study. The site was suitably rugged and included huge boulders, groves of aspen and pine trees, open grassy land, a stream, and a pond. We set wooden posts in the ground and connected them with chain-link fencing. Three tents just outside the fence would be our home for two years.

We also had a plan for the cougar’s food—roadkill. We arranged for local authorities to notify us when a large animal had been struck on the road by a vehicle. Then we’d head out, scoop up the carcass, and bring it to the enclosure for the cougar to find and feast on.

It was a good setup and a good plan. Now all we needed was a cougar.

After a long search, we located a 110-pound (50-kg) female. She had been raised in captivity, yet she maintained her wild nature. Perhaps she was a bit too wild or simply too much to handle, because the owner was going to have her put to sleep!

Upon hearing such disturbing news, the zoo in Boise, Idaho, bought the cougar. But the zoo had little space for her, and officials there were delighted to let us provide her with a home.

Two things made this cougar the ideal choice: One, because she had been raised in the presence of humans, she was already used to having people around. Two, she was pregnant. The kittens would be born in just a few months.

I could hardly wait. How does a mother cougar interact with her kittens every day? How does she care for them? What does she teach them? I had so many questions, and I wanted to capture the answers on film and show the world.

The pickup truck backed up to the entrance of the enclosure. It was a warm day in late spring. I let out a grunt as I helped ease the steel crate off the truck and gently onto the ground. I slid open the door of the crate and the feline mother-to-be walked out calmly without even looking at us.

Good. The less attention paid to us the better.

The bright sunshine made the cougar’s tan fur glow golden. Her impressive muscles flexed with each stride as she went about exploring her new home. Using her sharp claws and long tail for balance, she skillfully crossed streams on fallen tree trunks. Her powerful magnificence made me gasp. Then she trotted away into the aspens and disappeared. Compared to the pen in which she had been raised, this habitat offered boundless freedom.

We gave her a few hours to acclimate to the new surroundings, and then set off on foot to find her.

It wasn’t easy. With the cougar’s keen sense of smell and sharp eyesight, I’m sure she knew where we were practically at all times. By comparison, our senses were dull, and we had to look and listen with all the intensity we could muster. She knew how to hide just by being still. No doubt she was lying low, uncertain that we meant no harm.

Finally, we spotted her. She crouched in the tall grass barely 20 yards (18 m) away—a distance that she could close in two leaps if she wanted to.

We made eye contact. The big cat remained absolutely frozen, watching our every move intently. Suddenly I felt vulnerable, more so than I ever had. I knelt down slowly with my camera hoisted on my shoulder. My sound technician Peter, with his equipment, and my assistant Jake, carrying a large stick, did the same.

The cat continued to eyeball us from her crouched position. Then she raised and wiggled her hindquarters. That got me nervous. Anyone who has seen similar behavior from a house cat getting ready to pounce could guess what happened next…

She suddenly sprang.

We quickly rose to our feet, terrified. This wasn’t a squirrel or a fox coming our way; it was one of nature’s strongest, fastest predators, and she had us in her sights. We started yelling as loud as we could, “Hey! Hey!” and “He-yah! He-yah!”

I exhaled with relief as the cougar suddenly veered off in another direction. But, my relief was short-lived.

She stopped, turned around, and looked at us again. Was she going to make another run at us? My heart was pounding. My knees became almost too wobbly to hold the camera steady. But we stood our ground. Then without warning, she attacked.

With long strides, the cougar ran right at Jake and wrapped her muscular forelimbs around his waist. The force of the impact knocked the stick from his hands. He twirled reflexively to break away, but the cat held on, hopping on her hind legs to maintain balance as she also twirled. It was like a dance, but one that could have deadly consequences.

The cougar looked like she was going to climb up on Jake’s back when Peter ran to Jake with his microphone boom raised like a baseball bat. The threatening stance seemed to do the trick, because the cougar released her grip and ran off.

Jake was shaken but unharmed, a sign that the cougar did not intend to hurt him. She most likely was just playing a cat-and-mouse game, following her urge to stalk and test her skills. That sort of game can turn out badly for the mouse, so I was deeply concerned for the safety of my crew.

Not that it kept us away. Each day, we entered the enclosure to look for the cat, to observe and film. She never attacked us again. Maybe she just wanted to send a message during that first encounter. Message received!

We kept our distance and she kept hers, at first. But each day we inched closer and closer. Soon she got used to our presence and we reached a level of comfort and trust.

In fact, as time went on, the cougar even displayed affection. She would sometimes press her body against my leg and purr. It wasn’t a quiet purr like a household cat makes; her purr was more like an idling motorcycle.

At other times, she would stalk and chase us in a friendly game of cat and mouse. Well, friendly to her—we were the mice. We had gotten used to these games and were no longer fearful. But, we were always on our guard and watchful of any sudden change in behavior.

Our trusting relationship developed just in time, for soon the cougar gave birth to three male kittens.

We found the den amid a sheltered rocky outcrop. The kittens were just minutes old. Their spotted fur blended in with the ground, offering some protection against other predators. The helpless kittens’ eyes were closed and their little ears lay flat against their head. The newborns would remain blind and completely dependent on their mother for 10 days.

One by one, she gently picked them up by the scruff of their neck in her jaws and laid them in a soft bed of pine needles. Then she cleaned them with her large, rough tongue. When a kitten cried out with a squeaky rahr, rahr, the mother gave a few more reassuring licks.

These were the intimate sights and sounds I most wanted to capture, like the mother nursing her kittens—a tender moment perhaps never seen with cougars in the wild. There were many such moments of peace and tranquility between parent and young. There were other moments of high-energy training between teacher and student.

For instance, one day I watched with keen interest as a kitten tugged at one of his mother’s ears while she lay on the ground. Playing along, she gently laid a massive paw on his head like she was petting him. Then he saw her tail—a long rope of fur waving lazily in the air. It was like the tail was daring the kitten to grab it. The kitten took his chance and pounced. He bit and pawed at the tail for a few seconds, until his mother decided enough was enough and brushed him aside.

Every moment of play was actually a valuable lesson. The growing kittens were learning how to stalk and take down prey by sneaking up on each other and play fighting. These bouts were like friendly wrestling matches, but with teeth.

By autumn, the kittens were learning to hunt real prey, from mice in the fields to ducks on the pond. They were becoming increasingly wild, too.

They hid from me more often, and hissed when I approached. I was glad. One day they would be released into the wilderness, and I didn’t want them to get too comfortable with people. I didn’t want them to get used to having a harmless camera pointed at them, either. Hunting cougars is legal in many western states, and the next piece of equipment that was pointed at them might be a rifle.

When I started the cougar project, there was no guarantee of success. A lot could’ve gone wrong. The mother might never have accepted me, or the crew, into her world. She may have chosen to hide her young from the watchful eye of my camera lens. Or she may have turned aggressive, making the project too dangerous to continue.

Fortunately, none of these things happened. We were able to show the cougar not only as a powerful hunter but also as a nurturing parent and a patient teacher. We even revealed the sounds of the cougars’ world—from the chirps, purrs, mews, and growls of their language to the shoulder-shivering scrapes of the sharpening of the mother’s claws against a tree trunk.

The following spring, the young cougars reached the age when they normally go their separate ways. They were ready.

The mother was too familiar with humans to survive in the wilderness, so she was taken to a large preserve to live out her days in safety. The young cougars had a less predictable but more natural future.

We flew them by helicopter to a remote area of Idaho. Thanks to instinct and lessons learned as kittens, they were now self-sufficient and able to live a truly wild life. They stepped from their crates and never looked back. In a few days, the brothers would head in different directions to establish their own territories. They were free.

My cougar adventure was over, but theirs were just beginning.

What next? That’s what I asked myself as we removed the fencing and any trace of human activity at the cougar enclosure.

I was itching to start another project. As before, I wanted to do something that would inspire people to care about wildlife. The best way I knew how to do that was to make another film about the hidden daily life of an animal. It would have to be an animal that was largely misunderstood, an animal that was rarely filmed in the wild.

But, which animal?

To help me decide, I thought a little vacation was in order. Not Disney World or a Caribbean cruise. No, I needed a sense of peace—the kind of peace I get from a place of quiet natural beauty, a place where I could clear my mind. I decided to return to the Wyoming ranch in the Absarokas.

More than 30 years after I had spent the summer as a wrangler, I returned as a guest. For company, I had a stack of books about animals. I was going to pore over them for a few weeks in between hiking and fishing. Somewhere in the research and the inspiration of the mountains, I figured I’d find the subject of my next film.

I didn’t know the answer would hit me like a lightning bolt.

On the second day of the trip, I received a phone message that my cougar film, called Cougar: Ghost of the Rockies, had been chosen as the first episode of a nature TV series. I was overjoyed. I felt like a 16-year-old again, full of boundless energy.

I had the irresistible urge to make a climb that had been one of my favorites as a teen. I remembered that the view at the top was spectacular. I stepped my way through a stand of white pines to the base of a hill. I scrambled up the rocky slope, hunched over to keep my balance. At the top, I stood up straight to take in the view. Suddenly, I froze like a statue.

On the alpine meadow below me stood a gray wolf.

In a flash, my mind raced back to that day 30 years earlier when I had seen my first wolf. Now, in the same area, I was looking at my second. Could this be a descendant? I wondered about the possibility as I raised my binoculars to get a closer look. That’s when he saw me. Unlike the wolf that stared me down years before, this one was skittish and ran away at the sight of me.

In that brief moment, I knew that I had found the subject of my next film. I still didn’t know much about wolves, but I was about to begin a journey that would make me an expert in ways I never thought possible.

The first step in that journey was to separate fact from fiction. And when it comes to wolves, I learned that there was very little fact and a whole bunch of fiction.

Like most people, much of what I knew—or thought I knew—about wolves was based on the sayings, songs, movies, and fairy tales I had learned since childhood. A “wolf in sheep’s clothing” is someone whose pleasant personality hides sinister motives. In the fairy tale “Little Red Riding Hood,” a wolf devours a grandmother and tries to trick her granddaughter into a similar fate.

Horror movies about werewolves—bloodthirsty half-man, half-wolf creatures—have been popular for generations. And who is trying to blow down the houses of the Three Little Pigs and eat the occupants? The Big Bad Wolf, of course!

Such stories and sayings show the wolf as a tricky, ferocious, evil creature—one to be feared, hated, and destroyed. Among those who held such perceptions were ranchers, as well as farmers who raised livestock. If a cow or sheep went missing, wolves were usually blamed.

Not that it never happened. These predators sometimes did kill a member of a herd, but the culprit was much more likely to be disease, weather, injury, or a predator other then a wolf, including domestic dogs.

I wasn’t completely surprised to learn how make-believe stories fed people’s misconceptions about wolves. But I was astounded and alarmed to learn how false perceptions had affected the wolf population. From the mid-1800s to the mid-1900s, about two million wolves had been killed in the United States, largely because they were seen as a threat to livestock. In fact, in 1915, the U.S. government hired hunters and called for the extermination of wolves.

It almost happened.

The government paid hunters for each wolf they killed. By the time I started to research my wolf film, this beautiful animal that once inhabited forests and plains from Maine to California existed only in small pockets of the United States. At the most, no more than a handful of wolves roamed the entire American West. Even though they were protected under the Endangered Species Act of 1973, their numbers were still dangerously low.

More importantly, attitudes about wolves had changed little, especially among the ranchers and big-game hunters who shared the environment with this animal. It was personally disheartening. These were my neighbors and friends, yet our views of wolves were very different. Many people still considered them to be aggressive killers. But the more research I uncovered, the more I saw wolves as curious, intelligent, and even shy. I knew they were getting a bad rap.

I couldn’t really blame people for their attitudes, though. Myths die hard, especially in the absence of truth.

In 1990, we knew surprisingly little about the nature of wolves. We had measurable facts—things that you could attach a number to—like a wolf’s size, how far it roams, how long it lives, things like that.

We knew wolves live in packs, but we had little idea about how they live. We knew almost nothing about the secret, hidden lives of wolves. I needed to change that. I needed to show people a side of wolves they never saw, never even knew existed. Perhaps that information would help replace myth with truth.

I felt the only way to discover that truth was to live with wolves.

So, I decided to assemble a wolf pack to observe and film within the world’s largest wolf enclosure. I had no idea what I was getting into and how difficult the road ahead would be, but I knew that I was doing the right thing. I was certain that if only someone would take the time to listen, the wolf would tell its story. I was willing to listen.

So was a certain zookeeper in Washington, D.C.

Jamie and I had kept in touch ever since we met on a trip home from Africa three years earlier. She was as excited as I was when I told her about my plans to live with wolves. We both knew this was a much more ambitious undertaking than the cougar project, and she understood why I had to do it.

In the early days of the project—before Jamie joined me in Idaho—I depended on her advice and support through letters and conversations. I still remember the joy I felt as I wrote her with some thrilling news.