MY WOLF-DOG, ANGEL

A story about Archie has to begin with his extraordinary mother, Angel. I named her Angel because she was the most beautiful dog I had ever seen. She was my dog in every sense of the word, because she bonded on me more than anyone else from our first meeting. I once had my Native Indian Totem Animals revealed to me, and my main totem is, of course, the wolf. I maintain this is why I always understood the very hearts and souls of our wolves. I talked to our wolves like they were people. I was truly amazed at the number of times that they appeared to completely understand what I was saying, and even more surprised at the number of times they acted completely appropriately based on something I had said to them. Angel and Archie were the most intelligent and intuitive dogs I have ever known.

My husband had told me many stories about his wolf-dog that he had owned when he lived in the deserts of California many years before. He told me that wolf-dogs were unique among the canine species in the way that they would bond with their humans, in their intelligence, and in their ability to adapt to their owners’ life situation. We had recently moved to Montana, also known as ‘Big Sky Country’, with towering mountains, rolling hills, dense forests rife with wildlife and wide-open spaces. Darryl thought we should have a dog, so when he saw a listing in the newspaper advertising wolf-dogs for sale for only fifty dollars, he told me we should check it out. The breeder was ironically located at Wolf Lodge in Idaho, which was well over an hours drive from our home in Superior, Montana.

I remember driving up a long, bumpy dirt road to the address in question and seeing a rather run-down little house. The lady was on her doorstep, ready to meet us. She warned us that the dogs had the run of her home, and that once she let us out into the back yard, to be prepared to have a dog pack milling around us the moment she opened the back door. I vaguely remember walking through a rather untidy kitchen to the back door, and as soon as we stepped into the yard, she quickly closed the door to keep the dogs from going inside. The back yard was a large, completely fenced area and dogs came from everywhere to surround us. There wasn’t any grass in sight, only a dusty and hilly dirt yard, and at least fifteen adult dogs of varying sizes milling around the three of us. Most of them were very friendly, but the black she-wolf who had given birth more than two months previously was still a little wary of people because some of her puppies had already been sold. We moved back into the house so we could talk, because the din of sixteen good-sized dogs barking, growling, milling around, whimpering, and howling was so loud and a bit overwhelming. The lady said that she had three puppies left and led us towards the living room to show them to us. The moment I started to move, one of the puppies came from a distant corner of the house and sat at my feet. I paused, and gazed down into inquisitive and curious brown eyes, but eyes that held a steady gaze and showed no fear. The breeder informed me that this puppy was a female and the runt of the litter. I could definitely see a size difference between her and the other puppies, as she had delicate, fine lines and less bulk in the body than the other two puppies; she was also very fluffy and grey all over, and as the breeder had mentioned that her stock was bred from the grey wolf, I assumed I was seeing her true color. I fell in love with her on the spot, so we paid the breeder and left.

Being new dog owners, we didn’t have a crate or a leash, so Angel rode home on my lap. We weren’t far down the road before she threw up all over me and the car. I felt so bad for her because she looked so miserable and unhappy during that car ride home. She did cheer up as soon as we got her home - until we gave her a bath. To our utter astonishment, our grey puppy turned out to be a beautiful, blonde puppy with reddish highlights throughout her fur, a black muzzle, black margins around her ears, and a light black blaze that started between her eyes and extended up her forehead between her ears. She was absolutely adorable and angelic, so I called her Angel. She looked exactly like a blonde German Shepherd puppy. At this point, there was no sign of the fluffy tail so characteristic of the wolf, but the breeder had explained to us that she would grow up to look like a short-haired wolf, complete with the classic wolf face, a short ruff and a fluffy tail. She did indeed, growing into a graceful creature with a long muzzle and a distinctly wolfish look with incredibly soulful brown eyes. She maxed out at fifty four pounds, but although she was small and delicate for a wolf, she was fearless and wild and stubborn!

Angel was so stubborn, in fact, that we ran into some trouble trying to get her trained. She did not like the leash, so she would run away every time we tried to put it on her collar. We needed to get her house trained but she would refuse to walk on the lawn in our back yard. Darryl would carry her outside and as soon as he would put her on the grass, she would cry and whimper until he picked her up again. So, we attempted to paper train her in the house, as we had a kitchen with old vinyl flooring which was ideal for such a task. She preferred to do her business on the carpet, and she tore up the paper we laid down for her. Once she would take to the leash, I tried to teach her to sit and lay and heel. Angel was having none of it. As far as she was concerned, she was the boss of the house, and we could just do her bidding, thank you very much!

Darryl was becoming concerned, because he said that a wolf-dog could become a dangerous and unpredictable dog if you didn’t establish pack leadership. He explained that wolves in the wild ran in groups called packs, and that there was an alpha male and alpha female that bonded for life. The alpha male and female were the undisputed leaders of the pack, and the remaining pack members established a ‘pecking order’ that every dog understood. The alpha leaders ate first, lead the pack on hunts, bred and produced puppies, and ruled the pack absolutely. The remaining pack members understood their role in the pack and would submit to the alpha leaders. If these pack members didn’t show the appropriate submissiveness or respect, they could be chastised through a growl, the showing of teeth, or even a sharp nip. Although these actions never really hurt the animals, it would put them into an exuberant show of submissiveness and cooperation towards the alphas. We were just not seeing this spirit of cooperation from Angel, even when Darryl would gently ‘alpha roll’ her onto her side and growl at her in the same way the adult dogs in her pack would have done to correct her behavior.

Darryl recommended a radical treatment for Angel’s uncompromising attitude, and the breeder agreed. The plan was to return Angel to her dog pack. As she was the runt of the litter, she would be expected to submit to every other dog in the group. This would teach her that she was required to submit, and that her life with us was desirable when compared to submitting to sixteen other dogs! This was a ‘tough love’ form of treatment and a last resort, and I felt my heart breaking a little when we left her at the breeder’s house. She had a very sad look on her soulful little face. I assured her we would be back. We did come back in two weeks exactly. Angel was so incredibly happy to see us, she was bounding around and jumping up on us and she couldn’t get out of the house fast enough to get into our car! We saw a different Angel from that point on. She was still wild and stubborn, but she was willing to submit as long as we didn’t bring her back to the breeder’s house again. I was overjoyed to have her home and I know she sensed my happiness and was particularly eager to please me. So training started again in earnest.

I tried to train Angel to heel on the leash using a choke collar, but it didn’t work because even as a puppy she was incredibly wiry and strong. She would drag me around happily, without minding that she was almost choking herself at the same time. I bought a special harness that went over her muzzle which would tighten around her face if she pulled on me too hard. I could control her head with this harness, and so I taught Angel to sit, lay, come, and heel. Come was a particular challenge because she would get so fascinated by all of the nature around her. Our back yard was large and grassy and ended at the shore of a creek behind our house, and there were multitudes of interesting insects, birds, frogs, and even deer to chase. Montana had much to offer a curious, intelligent and playful little wolf!

As she grew, Angel became very protective of us. This was a desirable trait because we had always hoped she would be a first warning system for us. Montana still has areas of wilderness that are occupied by super predators such as cougars, bears, and wolves, and we were living right on the edge of this untamed land. Angel herself had a certain fearlessness and wildness that she maintained for her entire life. Although she had a smaller stature, she wasn’t at all aware of it. She was completely unafraid of other dogs, even other dogs that were much larger than she was. In fact, she had a certain disdain for other dogs, like she knew she was a wolf and was therefore superior to other dogs in all ways. For this reason, she always expected other dogs to submit to her, males included, and if they didn’t she was only too willing to ‘bring it’ and take on the other dog. One sunny day, I was walking her on the road above our house when this pesky white dog appeared on the road and started barking at us. He looked like a miniature American Eskimo dog, pure white and fluffy; he was known to me as a biter, and although not a large dog, being only about half of Angel’s size, he was fast and vicious. I, along with my neighbors, had stopped taking walks on the road before we brought Angel home because of the same dog. However, this day was going to be different. Angel took charge immediately. With the harness on her face, and the leash still being held by me, she ran up to the dog, deftly tripped him by grabbing his front legs with her jaws, and flipped him onto his back, then stood right over him looking down into his frightened eyes while he was prostrated with his legs facing upwards but tucked against his body. A low, constant growl was rumbling from her throat. Any attempt that he made to roll to one side in order to right himself and escape was met with a nip by Angel on that side. Any time he moved, she nipped him. Of course, he was simple enough to move many times, resulting in many nips applied so quickly that it stunned him back to his prostrate position and he remained immovable for a few seconds at a time before he moved again. He was unable to rise to his feet until Angel was satisfied that he got her message, which clearly was, "don’t you dare act aggressively towards my person unless you want to deal with me!" Honestly, although Angel’s nips were very likely failing to even penetrate the dog’s fur, let alone cause any physical damage, the dog was literally yelping, emitting piercing shrieks and whimpering so loudly that I was trying to cover my ears. He hightailed it out of there as soon as Angel let him up, and I am happy to report that he never bothered us again when we were walking on the road. In that neighborhood, Angel was unquestionably the alpha dog.

We moved to a cabin in the woods that was made out of large, square railroad ties. In some corners of the house, you could smell the tar creosote used to preserve the wood. It was a solid little cabin with a metal roof, not fancy, but on a prime piece of property which was really a small clearing cut into the woods with the house, a large metal storage shed, a small toolshed, and an eighth-of-a-mile-long dirt driveway. It wasn’t fun to shovel during the winter when the snows came as it wasn’t uncommon to have two to four feet of snow dumped on us during one storm. This was, after all, the Bitterroot Mountain Range, and winter lasted for at least six full months of the year, from late October to late April. There was a patch of grass on the left side of the house, and we strung a fifty-foot wire with a sliding lead on it for Angel. Most of the time she lived in the house with us, but sometimes we had to leave her, and if the weather was good we would put her outside on her lead. The lead allowed her to move quite freely around the entire patch of grass that was our yard without allowing her to take off into the wilderness, which she had the tendency to do if she got the chance.

Due to the radical weather, we traded in our Saturn car for a Jeep Cherokee. It was ideal in the winter, and had a large space in the back where we could load Angel to take her on road trips. My husband has always been an avid fisherman and he loves to camp, so our furry family member enjoyed many trips with us.

THE SPRING BEAR AFFAIR

Our railroad-tie cabin had one weakness. Where the back door had been, a new addition made with two-by-fours had been built onto the back of the cabin. It was convenient because it allowed room for laundry facilities, but it was not as stable or solid as the rest of the cabin. I kept our fifty-pound bags of dry dog food for Angel in this room. When the weather was warm, the original cabin stayed fairly cool, but the addition, being far less insulated than the original structure, would get rather warm.

One spring day, we left with Angel to go to town. We purposely left the window at the end of the addition open so that the room wouldn’t get so hot. We returned to find our square rolling garbage cart overturned and garbage spread all over the front and right side yard and up into the woods on that side of the cabin. A nasty surprise met us when we went inside and peered into the addition. There was a huge mess all over the entire room; the window was pushed wide open, and there was dirt, feces, hair, and dog food clinging to the windowsill and spread all over the floor. There were dirty claw marks on the wall where the fifty-pound bag of dog food had previously sat, and it was torn wide open and lying in the middle of the floor. The smell was exceedingly unpleasant. I wrinkled my nose in disgust, but donned rubber gloves and got to work cleaning the mess while Darryl went outside to pick up the garbage. I managed to save some of the remaining dog food and rolled up the bag, placing it back where it had been before. It was clear to both of us that a bear had raided our cabin that day, and we decided to be more careful about leaving the window open during the day.

Before we went to bed that night, we carefully closed the window and locked the back door of the addition. We slept on a hide-a-bed in the living room because it was the warmest room at night as the wood stove was located in that room. Angel was curled up in her crate snoring softly, and I had drifted into a deep, peaceful slumber beside Darryl, lulled to sleep by the comfort of his presence, the warmth radiating from the wood stove, and the earthy smells that hung in the air. I suddenly awoke with a start. I could clearly hear some distinct scratching sounds at the back of the cabin. Becoming a little alarmed, I immediately woke Darryl. Both of us crept to the doorway of the addition. I turned on the light, and we carefully peered around the corner. There at the window was the face of a handsome cinnamon bear, his long snout perched on his paws which were curved over the outside windowsill. Darryl and I had no idea of the danger that we were in; in fact, we started cooing at the bear, because he looked just like a huge teddy bear with his fuzzy face on his paws, peering at us with his big, round black eyes over the windowsill. He was outside the closed window and other than watching us, he wasn’t moving, so at this point we weren’t worried. That was, of course, until we noticed the scratches that he had left on the window. It was evident at that point that he was trying to come in the window and finish the dog food that we had so generously left there.

Angel was there with us, looking rather interested in the bear, but she was not fearful, nor was she barking. However, when we started becoming a little anxious with the knowledge that the bear wanted to come inside to eat, she started pacing around, still without barking but with a watchful eye on the bear. Without warning, the bear suddenly dropped down and disappeared from view. Darryl told me to look out of the kitchen window to see if the bear walked by. Meanwhile, he went to grab our shotgun and started looking out the bedroom window to see if he could spot the bear. We turned on all of the lights in the house and started hurrying from window to window, trying to see where the bear had gone. I was coming into the living room from the kitchen to tell Darryl that I couldn’t see the bear, and I rounded the corner to find Darryl standing right in front of one of the large, single pane, plate-glass windows in the living room with his face about six inches from the glass, holding onto the shotgun with two hands and looking out onto the porch to see where the bear had gone. It was the middle of the night and pitch black outside, and as the bear was a dark cinnamon color, he was really hard to see. Suddenly, the bear rose up from all fours onto his two back legs right in front of Darryl, and Darryl made a sound that I can only describe as a cross between a squeak and a scream as his eyes followed the bear’s face to his massive height and he took two steps backwards. I stopped in my tracks behind him. The sound that Darryl had just made was really hilarious, but I failed to see the humor in it at that moment. My heart was pounding in my ears; the bear was enormous as he filled the entire left-hand side of the window, and quite terrifying as he snuffed at the upper windowpane with his front paws leaning on the glass. It was a miracle he didn’t figure out that all he would have had to do was tap the glass with his claws and the entire pane would have shattered which would have given him instant access to our living room! I was gaping at the bear with saucer-shaped eyes and beginning to sweat profusely.

Meanwhile, Darryl told me to call the local animal control officer. The phone was sitting on top of Angel’s crate, so I started to go over there to make the call when I felt Angel brush by me. She had her hackles up; she was growling and walking with a sense of purpose that I had never seen before. She immediately put herself between me and the bear. He simply towered over her in the window but Angel didn’t seem to notice. The bear dropped down to all fours and was eyeing Angel with distaste through the plate glass window. It was a terrifying look, as he had drawn his lips up and his enormous, yellowed fangs were peering out from under his raised lips. At first, Angel just lowered her head, bared her teeth, braced all four of her legs and glared at the bear, all the time emitting a low, rumbling, growl that reminded me of thunder when heard from a distance. Then I watched in horror as Angel started to rush the window, growling ferociously and barking at the bear. Darryl quickly told me to grab Angel and crate her so she wouldn’t incite the bear to come crashing through the window right on top of her. I did so, all the while talking and cooing at Angel, explaining what a brave and good dog she was so she wouldn’t think she was being punished, and then I called the the animal control officer.

As it was early morning, the officer was sleeping at home which was located only a few miles from us. His secretary answered the phone. I quickly explained that a bear was attacking our cabin and requested that she send him out to our place. She promised to contact him immediately, and asked me to explain from the beginning what had happened since we first saw the bear. As I was telling her the story, I saw the bear move away from the window to the left towards our front door. Darryl also made note of the bear’s movement. A few seconds later, we could slowly see our front door begin to open. The bear was tentatively pushing the door ajar with his snout. Darryl leapt over the couch, put his shoulder against the door, slammed it in the bear’s face, and threw the deadbolt as quick as a flash! The bear rose up again and was peering at Darryl through the tiny diamond-shaped peephole in the door. Darryl stepped back and pointed the gun at the door.

I had caught up to the present in the story, and the lady on the phone said, “Don’t shoot the bear. The officer will do that when he gets there, if necessary!”

I looked at the phone incredulously, put it back to my ear, and said, “Lady, if the bear comes into the house, Darryl is going to shoot the bear!”

There was a short silence on the other end of the line. I imagine it was hard to argue with that logic after hearing my energetic play-by-play!

The bear dropped down and moved away from the front door. He had obviously figured that the pesky humans in the house were going to prevent him from finishing his bag of dog food, so he lumbered off the porch and headed for the garbage can. Our large garbage cart was completely full, and he knocked it on one side with one blow that appeared like a right hook. Only his huge, dark rump was protruding from the can, and he stayed there enjoying his meal until the officer and his deputy arrived. Upon hearing the pick-up truck coming up the driveway, the bear pulled his massive body out of the garbage can and watched the lights coming up the road for a few seconds before moving away to the left and shuffling around the back of the house.

I didn’t know it at the time, but the bear was in our back yard at the edge of the forest, standing on his back legs with his front paws on a large pine tree which was several feet from the house. The senior officer came to the front door to talk to us briefly. He told me to stay in the house and asked where the bear had gone. Darryl pointed around back, and both the officer and his deputy, who were armed with long hunting rifles, disappeared into the inky darkness with Darryl close behind. Not long afterwards, Darryl came inside and I heard two quick reports from those rifles. The shots rang out and echoed in the darkness, such a stark contrast to the quiet, peaceful nature of the valley.

Darryl went outside to find out what had happened, only to discover the officer and his assistant backing their pick-up truck around the house. I didn’t find out until later when Darryl explained, but the officers had been forced to shoot the bear. The senior officer had warned Darryl that if the huge creature didn’t drop down and run away but instead moved towards the cabin, they were going to be forced to shoot the bear. Sadly, the poor animal ignored them and moved towards the house to resume his quest to obtain the dog food. This bear had had to be shot because he was now a danger to humans as he had lost his fear of people. Normal bear behavior would have had him scurrying away to retreat from the armed officers, but sadly, he failed to respond in the normal manner and instead approached the senior officer and his partner because they were between him and the house. One of the shots was a clean shot to the head which had killed the bear instantly. The officer had said that although the bear had a very healthy and thick fur coat, he was somewhat scrawny and malnourished. Apparently, he had failed to find enough food in the wild and had resorted to raiding garbage cans in order to survive. This situation was untenable because it brought the bear into close association with people, which greatly increased the risk of a bear attack on humans. I understood, but still I felt a sadness that I could not shake.

While the men talked a short distance away, I cautiously approached the back of the truck. I could not see the bear’s face, but instead regarded a huge heap of dark fur. Whereas in life, he had been so fearsome and so animated, a huge, hairy, muscular monster with enormous, yellowed teeth and long, curved, claws, the heap in the back of the truck was totally still. I sunk my hand into his thick fur while the tears streamed down my face. He was still warm. I backed slowly away from the truck and went back into the cabin.

I released Angel from her crate. She sniffed me all over as if to say, “Are you alright? Did that thing get you? You smell like him.” She licked the tears from my face. She had the most quizzical look in her eyes, like she couldn’t understand my intense emotions in that moment. Apparently, my husband didn’t, either. He told me gently that the officers didn’t have a choice but to shoot the bear. After all, Superior was home to many elderly folks who lived in these Montana back woods and it was just luck that the bear had decided to raid our garbage can, as we had successfully dealt with the threat (with some help, of course), and that all was well that ended well. I couldn’t help but feel like we had been solely responsible for the death of one of God’s creatures and this didn’t sit well with me for several days.

A few weeks later, another black bear came onto our property, presumably to raid the garbage can. Darryl grabbed the shotgun and placed a shot well above the bear’s head into the forest to scare it off. The bear stopped in his tracks, and with a startled look on his face, he whirled around and bolted off of our property. Darryl and I smiled at each other. Perfect bear behavior, I thought. The gloom that had followed me since our run-in with the other bear lifted. Angel was smiling and prancing around me when I returned to the cabin like she understood that somehow a pall had lifted. All was right in our world.