The people from Ohio are gathered around the wolf playpen, anxiously awaiting the appearance of the wolf puppies. They’re getting their cameras and video recorders ready.
There’s little activity among the main wolf pack on this hot day. Imbo, the male leader (known as the alpha male), sleeps in the large fenced-in enclosure atop a wooden wolf hut, which looks like a flat-topped A-frame doghouse open at both ends. His subjects sleep on the ground beneath him. They don’t look imposing, little more threatening than sleeping Alaskan huskies.
“They look just like puppies.”
Kunch, Sloan, and Goodmann entered the pen on the 13th day. “Betsy was eager to see us and be greeted by us,” Kunch says, “because they hadn’t seen us in two weeks. We walked with the adults to the back of the pen so that they wouldn’t see what was going on, and Erich entered and retrieved the pups. The adults were a little agitated. They paced around. They knew something was up. Before too long they oriented toward Erich, but he was already leaving. Betsy ran immediately to the den and started searching. It was hard to watch her searching like that. To me, anyway, she looked kind of sad the first couple days. But she seems to have forgotten about it.”
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Kunch stayed with the pups around the clock for the first few days, sleeping on a mattress on the floor of the mobile unit. “They crawled all over me,” she says. “Then they’re more willing to accept nursing because they’re familiar with my smell.” If they rejected the nursing bottle, she held the nipple under her arm for a few minutes, covering it with her scent. She even stimulated the pups’ urination and defecation: the pups won’t excrete, and thus will die, unless their anal and genital areas are massaged. The wolf mother does this with her tongue. “We don’t take motherhood quite that far,” Kunch says. She used a wet paper towel.
The pack order is established through dominance fights. When one wolf defeats another, he or she assumes the higher rank and the other moves down. The fights for middle or lower rankings usually involve a lot of growling and wrestling until one pins the other, as Chani has just done. But when it’s a fight for the top spot, Klinghammer has said, it’s often a fight to the death. Mortal fights are exceedingly rare, because fights for the top spot are rare. But it’s a vicious sight, the hardest fact of life at Wolf Park. “You never get used to it,” Klinghammer says.
“The main thing with wolves is, if someone trips and falls they become prey,” says Klinghammer. “The wolf was in the backyard, unattended, on a chain. The little boy came over to play with him. He thought he was a dog. [The wolf had] been raised with kids in the trailer park. But the wolf knocked him down, and that’s prey and boom!” He claps once sharply. “It’s interesting that the mother and grandmother of the child understood. No one was mad at the wolf. It’s just a nightmare. We try to tell people not to have wolves. We try to educate them but–” Klinghammer tries to temper his irritation at the folly of humans with a little dark humor. “But I figure if a wolf kills somebody, they call me and I make money as a consultant. So I get something out of it. But it’s sad.”
