I locked eyes with a wolf in the wild once. It was August 2020. We rented a cabin in northern Minnesota on Caribou Lake right on the edge of the Chippewa National Forest. It was 1am and I had just leashed the dogs up for their final pee of the night. I generally don’t think twice about what’s in the woods in Minnesota. Sure, there might be a Black Bear or a Timber Rattler – there could be a wolf, but a tourist on a trip up north isn’t likely to see one. On this night I could have been stepping out onto the tarmac at Humphrey Terminal or into a national forest. It was all the same to me as I grabbed a headlamp and a couple poo bags and hustled the dogs out the cabin door, trying to close the door fast to keep the bugs out, dontcha know.
The dogs were especially slow to do their business, dragging me to every weed island on the gravel road, begging me to let them explore beyond the banks of the road into the dark, dense forest. I felt a light breeze on my cheek as I fiddled with the headlamp. The dogs were supremely confident that the night existed only for their sniffing enjoyment. I was equally enjoying the crisp quiet of the pitch black forest road.
As the dogs found their perfect squat spots and completed their dalliance with defecation, I felt I’d had enough of the endless black of night in the forest. I bagged up the steaming piles of poo and turned us back towards the cabin. Just for a change, I pointed my headlamp to my left and shined my light into the forest. Illuminating the black beyond the road immediately raised my heart rate. I was surprised how deep into the trees my light penetrated, and surprised by a mix of fear and excitement at what I might see.
What I saw was a lot of trees. What I heard was a lot of silence – and the heavy panting of three dogs pulling on their leads, eager to get to their beds. When you look hard for something you almost never find it. I was tired of looking hard, and I could see the cabin and the glow of the entry light. I sighed and slowly turned my head back towards the center of the gravel driveway. That’s when I saw it.
Two eyes shimmering yellow-green. And the faint silhouette of a huge canine. The size of this beast took my breath away. I froze, my light shining in its eyes. It stared at me, at rest, at ease. We stayed this way for what felt like minutes but was probably seconds. I took note of the wind, it was blowing from us towards the wolf. I glanced at the dogs and saw three clueless and impatient beings. I glanced back at the wolf. It hadn’t moved.
I took a moment to consider if this wolf was alone or not. If it was comfortable with our presence or not. I was rapidly uncomfortable with the wolf’s presence. To the point that I decided to jog directly to the cabin and put the dogs in their crates.
I debated going back out alone – or with my son – to get another look at the wolf, but I decided against it. The encounter I had was just the right mix of awe and humility. The kind of experience that reminds you of your tenuous connection to the real world, the natural world. The size of this wolf in the vastness of night is something that still unsettles me when I think about it. The calm in its eyes makes me wonder about what it knows.
I may have cast a light on the wolf that night, but it remains a mystery to me. I remain a mystery to me.
“For Reasons Known Only To The Wolf“
The 1978 book by Barry Lopez, Of Wolves And Men, is dedicated to wolves – just in case you wonder which beings he reveres most. A close second may be the nomadic hunters he encountered in Alaska and elsewhere, living amongst the wolves. Both wolf and nomad are hunters. To be a hunter is to experience the world around you with heightened awareness. Lopez suggests that modern westerners are ill-equipped to even imagine what it’s like to be a nomadic hunter, much less to be a wolf. He also suggests that woefully incomplete observations of wolf behavior combined with a human need for meaning-making have greatly obscured the true nature of the wolf.
Lopez observed and interviewed many nomadic hunters in an effort to see wolves as they saw wolves. The hunters had deep knowledge of the wolves living near them, and while they knew certain things were true of most wolves, they saw them all as individuals with motives that were often mysterious. Lopez writes, “Nunamiut Eskimos believe that during winter a healthy adult wolf can run down any caribou it chooses, but it doesn’t always do this for reasons known only to the wolf. And perhaps the caribou.”
When we search with our dogs, we are working with hunters, we are working with individuals, but most of us may be incapable of understanding what that means. There are most certainly things our dogs do for reasons only known to them.
The Root Of The Problem: “Culturally Patterned Sensory Screens”
Young Ole the doberman searches a section of the beach parking lot at Bryant Lake Regional Park on a sunny, blustery day. He starts right out of the crate, moving in ever widening circles, dancing in the fringes of odor swirling around my truck. He lets the breeze carry him away from my truck and across the parking lot. He is playing with the edge of odor, really getting to know it. Suddenly, Ole charges nose first into the wind as if the hide had just stuck out it’s tongue and taunted, “na-na-na-boo-boo you can’t catch me!” He gets even with the rear of my truck and stops as if someone shut off the lights and the room has gone pitch black. Ole gropes the air with his nose, casting and circling downwind from the hide. He splits his time between the ground and the air, searching for an explanation to the behavior of this most crafty odor source.
After a break and some toy play, Ole returns to the section of parking lot that led him in circles and starts casting in the wind again, racing over to my parked truck and tracing it’s body from the front driver’s corner to the rear bumper. At the rear bumper he drops his head and traces his nose around the ground like someone drawing a doodle while on a telephone call. He picks his head up and races along the truck towards the front bumper and beyond it to a grassy island. He passes a tree and briefly pops up on his hind legs and whips his head back and forth before dropping his nose to the ground. He nuzzles and nibbles at the fresh spring grasses as he follows the fractal pattern of scent through the yellow and green blades. He arrives at an exposed tree root and begins to probe it’s surface with his nose like a blind person “seeing” someone’s face with her hands. Ole traces the tree root back to the trunk, then dances his nose up and down at the base of the trunk, twisting and winding his body around the trunk as his nose learns every channel and trail formed by the shallow bark of the young tree. Suddenly, Ole’s nose is hoisting the rest of his body up the tree in an effort to source a smear of peanut butter, hot dog and chicken.
On page 82 of his book, Lopez cites anthropologist Edward T. Hall as the originator of the phrase “culturally patterned sensory screens”. Lopez is highlighting the differences between a Nunamiut hunter’s awareness of environmental details and a western biologist’s awareness. A Nunamiut hunter can literally see things a westerner cannot. He sees a robin at the top of a ridge with wolf hairs in his beak and knows a den is nearby. He sees tracks with the toes spread out and knows the wolf is rabid. The western biologist may miss these signs and more. Lopez makes these two key statements about Nunamiut hunters:
“When the Nunamiut speaks, he speaks of exceptions to the rules, of the likelihood of something happening in a particular situation. He speaks more often of individual wolves than of the collective wolf… he believes, too – and this seems quite foreign to the Western mind – that though equipped for it, the wolf is not a natural hunter. He must learn a good deal and work hard to become a good hunter.”
“The wolf the Eskimo sees is a variable creature who does things because he is a certain age, or because it is a warm day, or because he is hungry. Everything depends on so many other things.”
Of Wolves And Men, page 82-84
When we search with a dog like Ole, do we want him to fit our sensory screen or do we want to adopt his? I’d suggest adopting Ole’s sensory screen. This requires that you “leave your personal problems behind as though they were a coat on a hook”, to paraphrase Lopez. You must turn up your sensitivity to environment and expand your awareness to allow in all of the details Ole is taking in. To know Ole, you need to care about what Ole cares about.
Scent work folks are fond of saying, “No bombs blow up today if your dog doesn’t find the hide. Just have fun!” Yes, no bombs will blow up because your dog fails to find the hide. I’ll add to this: no one is taking you to court today to find out exactly how your dog was trained and exactly how he searches and exactly how many times he’s false alerted in his career so they can say your dog isn’t perfectly reliable to find bombs and only bombs.
Searching for bombs and testifying in court might lead a person to re-pattern a dog’s sensory screen. You don’t have to conform to those constraints! You don’t have to “westernize” your dog for the sake of saving lives and surviving court. You can let your dog learn and work hard and become a “good hunter”, and you can take the time to change your sensory screen, to fit yourself into your dog’s world.
It’s counterintuitive, but by letting your dog learn to become a good hunter, and by adopting your dog’s sensory screen, you will end up with a very capable, intelligent hunter.
Who is Poppy?
It’s a 60 degree day with full sun and a breeze weaker than my willpower in the candy aisle when Reeses are on sale. We’re following young Poppy the Portie as she takes us from the back of her vehicle on a journey to find a single hide a couple hundred feet away on a concrete post protecting an electric car charging station.
Today, Poppy is curious, thoughtful and deliberate as she follows the odor scattered about by the light and shifty breeze, attempting to make sense of the edge of odor and the direction odor is traveling. A week earlier, at a different location, Poppy set off from the back of her car to find a hide some 500+ feet away, with a strong consistent wind blowing odor right at her. With confidence and speed she cast herself to the right and left in dramatic fashion as she barreled down a slope toward a boathouse, a beach and a lake. She reached the boathouse and made a hard left turn around the corner of the building, making tight turns, whipping her head up and down and closing in on the location of source with enthusiasm.
Today is not last week. Today Poppy is not last week Poppy. Today Poppy eventually finds the hide on the post, but she only appears certain in the final few moments of sourcing.
Later in Poppy’s searching session we play a little game and let her watch as we pretend to hide the odor in trees, on benches and in the seams of sidewalk concrete, secretly leaving a hide behind for Poppy to find. Poppy is thrilled to search. She races through the search area – confident, yet careful – like a contestant on Guy’s Grocery Games who has just been told to find the aubergine in one of ten possible hiding places. This Poppy is not Today Poppy or Last Week Poppy. This is Now Poppy.
Lopez makes it clear that the people who understand wolves best are the people who have woven their lives into the lives of the animals around them. People who do not see themselves as above or superior to the animals around them. I’ll make the distinction here: superiority is not just manifest through domination, it is also manifest through misguided kindness.
Lopez details how wolves and humans (and bison, deer, coyotes, etc.) coexisted in North America for centuries. Nomadic hunters were never “responsible” for animals. As colonists settled the great plains they brought destruction and imbalance. Millions of buffalo were slaughtered. Ranchers took over huge plots of land for cattle grazing, then made up stories about the villainy of the wolf whenever they would lose cattle. Most stories are unverified. Wolves never decimated the populations of wild herd animals.
Three hundred years ago, hunters understood hunters. Today, we are not hunters. We try to understand hunters like wolves from a superior position, believing we can know their motivations and know them because we publish papers. Today, we act as if animals need saving. They don’t need saving. They need us to understand them and respect their place in the environment. They need us to recognize that we coexist in a complex system with them. They need us to study ourselves. To reconnect with the hunter in us so we can connect with the hunters around us.
Poppy is a dog. Poppy is not a dog. We don’t need more ways of knowing what Poppy is from someone studying dogs and writing a paper, or someone giving a presentation at a conference. We need more ways of knowing what Poppy is from being with Poppy. From caring about Poppy’s perspective and Poppy’s communication.
People say, “that wasn’t my dog” or “I didn’t have my dog today” or “my dog has never done that in a search” or “my dog normally searches with more energy”… All of these statements reject Now Poppy in favor of some past collection of behaviors that stands in for Poppy because we are not connected to the part of ourselves – the hunter – that connects us to Now Poppy.
We Look, But Don’t See
“I cannot, in light of his effect on man, conceive of the wolf as reducible.”
Barry Lopez
Dogs are not reducible. There is no better place to face this truth than in a blind search with your dog. If you are willing to truly partner with your dog and to let go of the control afforded you by start lines, boundaries, hide counts and time limits, you will be instantly humbled by the complexity of your dog’s communication.
If you can believe that your dog is both knowable and unknowable, you can successfully partner with your dog. You can make your scent work searches into a lifelong effort of aspiring to know your dog.
I run along behind Julia & Nugget as he takes for a 50 yard gallop along a sidewalk next to an athletic field between two schools. It’s a hot and windy day, and I’m observing Nugget blind with no knowledge of search area or hide placement (I do know there’s either one or zero). Nuggie clues us in to his plans by slowing down, stepping lightly with his feet and carrying his body high. He’s planning to change direction. Nuggie takes a hard left turn and pulls us across the field to the back of the school where he describes collecting odor to us in a small enclosed area with a utility shed and 4ft high retaining walls with chainlink fencing above them.
Nugget’s search is blind for me. I notice my mind running calculations based on everything I know about him and his relationship to searching for target odor. I expect Nugget to take us into the wind and run us along the school. He does.
About 2/3 of the way along the building he has a slight drop in his shoulder and a change in his head movement, then he switches into a gallop and drags Julia along the rest of the school wall, around the building corner, and past the school to a neighborhood where I guy is washing his cars in the driveway.
I know this behavior. Nugget is upwind of the building and giving us no behavior that would point to a hide nearby. We head back to the school, with Nugget out ahead of us like a Christmas reindeer trying to get the sled in the air. He pulls back to the part of the building where began his race to the neighborhood and just stands there in the shade
This is where I fail to let Nugget reveal to me how he is being with the experience of this search. Instead, I am thinking about where he had the shoulder drop and the head movements. It’s maybe 40ft away and there’s even a lamppost over there – good spot for a hide. I fail to see Nugget’s head and eyes as the rest of his body stands still. His head and eyes are alive and darting towards the building, but in a secretive way like a kid trying to get you to look at the whoopee cushion on the teacher’s chair before she sits down.
I make the decision to take a break and start heading back to the cars for a break, allowing for Nugget to override us and keep searching if he wants to. I decide he doesn’t really want to. I am wrong.
Nugget was standing near the hide and gesturing at it with his head and eyes and I couldn’t see the behavior.
We look, but don’t see.
“Why we should believe in wolf children seems somehow easier to understand than the ways we distinguish between what is human and what is animal behavior. In making such distinctions we run the risk of fooling ourselves completely. We assume that the animal is entirely comprehensible and, as Henry Beston has said, has taken form on a plane beneath the one we occupy. It seems to me that this is a sure way to miss the animal and to see, instead, only another reflection of our own ideas.”
Barry Lopez
I think we look, but don’t see, because we are not very often trying to comprehend the dog in the search. We are trying to comprehend the search itself. And, since the dog is quite irreducible, we give up on him and try our hand at arranging what we have in mind into a reasonable explanation of what’s going on in the search.
We miss the animal and see only another reflection of our own ideas.
“Prairie & River”
“They always moved, it seemed one day, in search of clues.”
Barry Lopez
A section of the book details a time when Barry and Susan shared their lives with two wolves. Barry deeply regrets the decision to keep wolves as pets, but his time with them changed his awareness. Barry walked with the wolves regularly throughout a 1000 acre woods. On these walks he took to imitating the wolves as they would sniff the air at the top of a ridge, or pause and listen for a deer mouse or grouse. He found a new awareness of his environment this way. He found this awareness invigorating.
When we search with our dogs, why oh why do we not want what they want?! Why do we not take interest in the ways in which they come to know things? If you use the word “distraction” when your dog is searching, I would invite you to replace that term with “increasing sensitivity to environment”. I would also invite you to truly want what your dog wants. To reach a plane of awareness where you expand your own sensitivity and deepen your understanding of your dog’s communication.
Mystery And The Wider View
“To allow mystery, which is to say to yourself, “There could be more, there could be things we don’t understand,” is not to damn knowledge. It is to take a wider view. It is to permit yourself an extraordinary freedom: someone else does not have to be wrong in order that you may be right.”
Barry Lopez
If we start scent work from a place of “this is right and that is wrong”, we are denying mystery and the wider view. This does not seem like such a bad thing, until we find ourselves at the edge of our understanding and we realize that there is nowhere we can go to escape mystery. A recent scent work competition was held near the Wisconsin dairy town where my dearly departed uncle was the floor mopper cum CEO of the Ellsworth Creamery Co-op. Some of the competition searches were in a goat barn – a clean looking goat barn. Many people struggled with the mystery of their dog’s behavior during searches in that barn.
Some people fought the mystery with cues to get back to work, yanks on the leash, or feet wedged between barn floor and dog nose. Some people begged the mystery for mercy, pleading with their dogs for a return to what is “right”, bribing their dogs with treats. Some people experienced the mystery of the search as a free-fall into a deep dark canyon of wrongness.
In the book, Of Wolves And Men, Lopez distinguishes between “real knowledge” and “facts” when suggesting that we humans need to get out into the wild and pay more attention to animals. Real knowledge is a knowing that comes from participating, from being among animals in natural settings. Facts are assemblages of data we can use to “know” something without ever participating in that knowing. Facts are often gathered under the guise of “independent”, “non-invasive”, “impartial” methodologies. Real knowledge – participatory & perspectival knowing – is transjective, meaning it comes from a relationship co-created by the subject and object and it transcends the subject and object.
Wolf Ceremony: Transgression and Transcendence
Page 129 of Barry’s book details the ceremonies that some tribes used to initiate young members into adolescence. There are terrifying aspects to the ritual, with tribal members donning wolf masks and acting ferocious, and young people receiving ritualistic cuts on their arms. The purpose of the ceremony is to go through the experience of fear in the face of the most prominent predator of the land, the wolf, and to emerge with the wolf’s powers and the wolf’s traits.
John Vervaeke uses the term “serious play” when talking about the process of relevance realization. This process puts us in touch with the sacred, with mystery and wonder, but it also involves transgression and a facing up to the terrifying limitations of our being. If we can move through the transgression – if it is the optimal balance of awe and terror – we can transcend our current way of being and experience an insight, become fundamentally changed and see the world in a new way.
Serious play is possible to enact in scent work. I’ve witnessed searches where terror and awe lead to transcendence. I set a competition search where competitors got no response from the judge – no ‘yes’ or ‘no’ or ‘where’. There were 8 hides. This was the first experience of this kind for most if not all of the competitors. Terror gave way to awe as the competitors emerged with the powers of the judge, becoming self-judging scent work teams.
Form A Scent Work Tribe
“The wolf was the one animal that, again, did two things at once year after year: remained distinct and exemplary as an individual, yet served the tribe. There are no stories among Indians of lone wolves.”
Barry Lopez
I have witnessed and experienced the transformative power of forming a scent work tribe. And I’m not talking about the people you share your class with (although they could be your tribe), nor am I talking about your parking lot buddies at the trial. A scent work tribe is a group of people and dogs who agree to place the dog at the center of the scenting universe. It’s a group of people & dogs who participate together in searching experiences of awe & terror, swapping roles and seriously playing. It is a group of people & dogs who aspire to be wise, not to win.
The Lost Way Of Knowing
Barry Lopez died December 25th, 2020. The Detour podcast released a memorial episode with a 2015 interview where Barry talks about removing roadkill from the side of the road and finding a more dignified resting place for it. He speaks of the possibility that the dead animal was an elder in its community, and that with its death, a way of knowing may be lost.
In the book Apologia, Lopez highlights the possibility that the “ones you give some semblance of burial, to whom you offer an apology, may have been like seers in a parallel culture. It is an act of respect. A technique of awareness.
An act of respect towards Barry would be to cultivate a technique of awareness for the living. To understand your dog as possessing a way of knowing that may be lost when he dies. Barry left behind books and interviews to preserve his way of knowing. May your dogs way of knowing be shared through each and every search you do together.
Consider it an act of respect.
Happy Sniffing!
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