At the Wolf's Door

With a Dog To Break The Ice, A Couple Moves In Next To Some Really Wild Neighbors

Helen Thayer with Charlie, who for almost a year was her canine guide to the world of wolves and polar bears in the Canadian far north. (Bill Thayer - Bill Thayer)

On a trackless, nameless part of the Canadian Yukon a pack of wolves crossed a frozen river on the last day of May. Above them flew a flock of ravens, dreaming of carrion. Behind them ran a mixed-blood husky leashed to a middle-aged man and woman.

The wolves fanned out and crossed the thin, late-season ice without incident. Not so the homocanid pack, which took it single-file. The woman, Helen Thayer, suddenly found herself in frigid water, struggling to keep from being swept under the jagged edge of a hole she'd made in the ice.

With help from her husband and a trekking pole, she got to the river's edge. There, a strange thing happened:

As she shivered uncontrollably and changed into dry clothes, four ravens landed on the ground. They walked in a circle, no farther away than six feet, cawing softly. Although for weeks they had tormented the dog, dive-bombing and stealing his kibble, they neither bothered him nor were chased off. After 10 minutes, they flew to the top of a spruce tree and squawked.

Five wolves appeared on the far shore. A black one, the pack's alpha male, howled what seemed to be a confirmatory message. Then the ravens flew across the river and, with the wolves running below, disappeared into the woods.

"We really became one big happy family -- us, the wolves and the ravens," Thayer says as she recounts the story. "They did seem to be concerned about us."

Living with wolves. It's a goal with a strangely powerful pull, given that they're not remotely close relatives and they avoid human contact at almost any cost.

Perhaps it's the capacity for intelligence, sociableness and violence so like our own that draws us to wolves. Perhaps it's the scary omniscience of an animal that sees but is not seen. (Ask a child which picture in "The Polar Express" is most memorable and you're likely to be told it's the one of the passing train drawn from the wolf's view.) Or perhaps it's just that wolves are the wild version of the animals we know best, dogs.

For whatever reason, from the Romulus-and-Remus myth to the Arctic Gothic tales of Jack London to the confabulations of Farley Mowat, something about Canis lupus strikes a deep and atavistic chord in the human heart.

For Helen Thayer, the possibility of communing with wolves drew her into the harsh taiga of the Yukon Territory and the harsher ice pack of the Beaufort Sea for the better part of a year. It was one of a long string of astonishing adventures.

Thayer, 67, was in Washington recently to lecture at the National Geographic Society about living with wolves. "Three Among the Wolves," the account of the experience she, husband Bill, a retired helicopter pilot, and their dog, Charlie, had in 1994 was published earlier this year.

Thayer is an explorer-naturalist of a breed that in the modern age is more threatened than wolves. She is not a millionaire, an academic, a government scientist or the sponsored face of a large corporation. In the beginning, she wasn't even a writer. Instead, she's a self-taught, self-financed and self-effacing woman whose chief interest in life has been to do difficult and interesting things. Her adventures are a mixture of climb-it-because-it's-there feats of endurance and quasi-scientific efforts to satisfy her own curiosity.

In person, she is stocky, grandmotherly and confident in her intuition (which she says the wolves helped refine). Sitting in the lobby of a downtown hotel as men wheeling suitcases come and go, she observes: "People are so tense here. They really need vacations."

Her husband, 78, was back home in Washington state's North Cascades taking care of three new dogs ("We're up to our knees in beagles") and various barnyard animals. She wonders aloud whether she is dressed well enough for this Washington, noting that in hers "you turn up for dinner in your fleece vest. Here you turn up in your black suit, of which I don't have a single one."