D  e  s  e  r  t     E  x  p  o  s  u  r  e      january 2005

Getting Wolfed

Who's afraid of Deirdre Wolf? The controversial environmental activist and wolf-hybrid rescuer wants the world to know she doesn't bite.

Story & photos by David A. Fryxell

Before you can step into the pen with the wolves, Deirdre Wolf has to unhook the electric wire running all around the bottom of the steel fence. Another "hot wire" follows the top of the fence, so you need to duck as you enter--the wires are solar powered, but can still deliver quite a jolt.

Diedre Wolf

Each steel enclosure, bounding a full acre, costs upwards of $4,000. An ordinary six-foot fence is nothing to these animals, and Wolf--yes, that's her real name, which she had legally changed--says, "They'd rip through chain link like it was pantyhose."

This does not make you more eager to step into the pen with a half-dozen or so wolves, each half-again the size of most dogs and weighing almost 100 pounds. Their yellow eyes watch you like flashlights embedded in fur.

Here and in other pens around her 20-acre Wolfsong Sanctuary north of Silver City, backing on the national forest, Wolf has made a home for 23 "near-wolves" and wolf-dog hybrids. Nine are more than 90 percent wolf. She's rescued them from the exotic animal trade or from people who thought having a wolf cross for a pet seemed like a good idea at the time. Though Wolf adores these animals, she says, "Nothing would make me happier than if everybody stopped raising them."

As Wolf enters the enclosure, the wolves--for the sake of simplicity, let's call the whole mixed genetic bag "wolves"--cluster around the den they've clawed into the dirt at the base of a gnarled tree. Because they feel secure here, the den is much shallower than one would be out in the wild. Once the wolves spot the battered plastic bag of hot-dog pieces in Wolf's hand, however, they begin to edge closer.

Though she's as wiry and tough-looking as the steel in the fence, "Dee Dee," as her friends call her, would obviously be no match for the collective quarter-ton of feral energy coiled around her--and, just as obviously, she has no fear of the wolves. Even at an age when she's anticipating collecting Social Security, she hikes up to six hours a day with her animals, the exercise a healthy wolf requires. You can see the lean strength of a former bicycle racer beneath the bulk of her gray Timberland vest and above her dirty sneakers. Her pale hair sticks out like a halo, seemingly frizzed with Wolf's pent-up energy.

"They'll feel less threatened if you crouch or sit down," she says, spreading a bright Navajo blanket in the dust for that purpose. Almost immediately, one of the wolves ambles over and pees on the blanket. She scolds it--"They've never done that before!"

Wolf holds a hand out as if to pet one of the animals--it's brown, lean, yellow-eyed, nearly pure wolf--and it shies from her touch. "I want to show people the difference between dogginess and how elusive and shy these animals are," she says. "The more wolf they are, the more shy they are. You couldn't make them bite you." The only near-wolf in the sanctuary that she can pet is one she raised from a pup, bottle feeding.

One of the wolves, furred all in white like a small polar bear, won't even take a treat from her. She has to toss a chunk of hot dog several feet away before the wolf will run and gobble it.

Holding the bag of treats above the snuffling, nuzzling heads all around her, Wolf instructs, "When you feed them, open your hand very slowly. Make them work for it." She demonstrates, and a handful of hot-dog chunks vanishes into eager mouths. "Make them root their noses in it. Otherwise it'll feel like having your hand slammed in a car door."

Cautiously, you accept the bag and watch as the pack circles toward you. Taking a couple of treats in one hand, holding the bag high with the other, you slowly reveal your fisted palm to the barrage of prodding, licking faces. In a whirlwind of spittle, your palm is licked clean.
Wolf produces a camera and prepares to snap a photo as you reach into the bag for another round of treats.

"Congratulations," she says. "You've been 'wolfed.'"

       Several hundred visitors a year make the rocky, four-wheel-drive trek to "get wolfed" at Wolfsong Sanctuary, following the US Forest Service road beyond where Little Walnut Road gives way to dirt and then driving in a (usually) shallow creek bed. (One group of visitors was trapped for several hours when it rained and the creek rose.) A green street sign identifies the turnoff to the sanctuary as "Wolf Way." On the other side of her spread, a yellow diamond-shaped sign cautions, "Wolf Crossing."

There's no admission fee, though many visitors make a donation. In July, her busiest month to date, 45 visitors came and between them donated $900. But just feeding the wolves, with castoff cattle from livestock yards and, in hunting season, elk and deer scraps, costs $800 a month, so the sanctuary regularly runs in the red. Without community support, she says, it wouldn't be possible.

Although rescuing wolf hybrids would seem to be a pretty uncontroversial undertaking, Deirdre Wolf may be the most controversial person in Grant County. People react to her name as though they've touched one of the live wires surrounding her wolf enclosures.

To some of her neighbors, she's a troublemaker, a thorn in their sides who's brought God-knows-how-many howling monsters into their rural paradise. (You can almost hear them as they read this story: "Twenty three! Now she's got 23 wolves up there!") To ranchers and others opposed to the federal reintroduction of Mexican gray wolves into the region, she's the enemy personified--the very archetype of the wild-eyed environmentalist kook.

"With all the wolf-reintroduction controversy, I became the person to hate," she says evenly. "I have wolves, I'm named Wolf and I used to be a rancher, so I'm the worst kind of Judas."

Even the "Wolf Stories" she periodically runs in the Silver City Daily Press, little fables with a picture of some critter, sometimes raise eyebrows. The week of Thanksgiving this fall, she urged newspaper readers to give thanks for the rattlesnake. It is, after all, she argued, a useful predator in the balance of nature and courteous enough to warn before striking.

"Wolf stories" of a very different sort swirl about her like maddened hornets. Depending on whom you believe, she's been run off the road more times than she can count, her horse and dogs have been poisoned, her wolves have gotten loose and killed a small dog (Wolf says the culprit was actually a greyhound she owned). In warm-weather months, she sleeps outside with her wolves so she can hush them if they start howling, lest they give rise to another story about howling disturbing the neighbors.

The worst of the controversy erupted in early 2001, when Wolf was charged with two counts of aggravated assault with use of a firearm. Exactly what happened, again, depends on whose version of the story you listen to, but this much is clear: There was a dispute over a road through her property, which the county commission and county attorney declared a public road. Alex Thal--a rancher with a nearby allotment who's also the head of WNMU's Southwest Center for Resource Analysis and a vocal advocate for ranching and logging interests--and a partner lifted Wolf's locked gate off its hinges and drove through onto the disputed road in a one-ton flatbed truck. Wolf ran into her house and called 911, then returned armed with a .38. As Thal--who was carrying a rifle--testified, Wolf fired a shot two feet above the men's heads. Wolf maintains that she fired into the ground--where, she says, a metal detector later found a bullet, under the watchful eye of a TV news camera.

After $30,000 in legal fees, Wolf says, she "chickened out" and pleaded guilty to a lesser charge that got her probation. She now says one reason she took the plea was that she couldn't take the risk of going to jail for fourth-degree felony charges, which carried a maximum sentence of five years: What would have happened to her wolves? Otherwise, she says, she would have fought the charges, gone to jail if necessary and written a book there.

Thal says of the episode, "It was an unfortunate encounter, a needless event. But if a private individual shuts down a public road, the law says a citizen can remove that obstacle." He quickly adds, "I really hope that's behind us and we can work out access to the forest. I have no animosity toward her wolves, her lifestyle or anything else.

"I can't comment," Thal says, "on what makes her tick."

At first, Deirdre Wolf seems equally baffled by the question, "Why are you so controversial?" After giving it 24 hours of thought, however, she volunteers an answer: "Those that like me, love me adamantly. Those that don't like me, hate me because I'll take up their arguments--I'm not afraid of anybody."

By way of example, she recalls another confrontation, a few years ago when a new Forest Service official set out to meet the public. A prominent local rancher got up, as she tells it, and starting talking about how ranchers helped "open up" the West. Though Wolf had sat quietly through the meeting thus far, that popped her cork. "The West was not 'closed,'" she stood up to proclaim. "It was inhabited, and to open it up for our selfish purposes, we mostly slaughtered the people who lived there. In today's language, we'd be called 'terrorists.'"

She happily remembers the reaction to this diatribe: "If they still tarred and feathered people, I would have been tarred and feathered." She swallows a chuckle. "People don't have mediocre feelings about me."

And yet. . . as much as Deirdre Wolf thrives on controversy, takes to it the way her wolves would jump on a bloody carcass, in some dark corner of her wild, untamed soul she does care what people think about her.

That, to bring it back around to Wolfsong Sanctuary, is why she opened the sanctuary to the public. After the shooting incident. After unnamed enemies posted stories on the Internet, she says, "that I was a crazy lady living illegally in a shanty in the forest." After she'd see people in the grocery store recognize her and shy away, the way her wolves turn away from human touch.

"They were afraid of me. That wounded me to the core," she says. "Of all the things I own, the most precious thing is how I've lived my life."

So she set out to show her real life to people--the handsome log-hewn house she finished with the help of friends, the work she's doing to rescue unwanted animals, the importance of stopping the breeding of wolf hybrids, and, above all, the wolves themselves.

"That's why I opened the sanctuary to the public and started taking photos of visitors," she says. "I've gotten tremendous support from the community. I have people now who come and form a human chain to help tackle the wolves so the vet can give their shots."

Wolf turns so the sun behind her makes a frizzy yellow crown of her hair. The treats exhausted, the wolves have mostly loped away. One snowy animal hangs at her side, still hopeful.

She says, "I really wanted to show who I am and what I am. It's like when you plant beans. For every bean you plant, you get a whole bush. There are not many people who believe that any more."

        Do we have to state the obvious here? When Deirdre Wolf talks about wolf hybrids--"They don't belong to either world. They're not really wild animals, and they're not really tame"--don't you get the feeling she could just as easily be talking about herself?

"They're very difficult animals," she says. "Hybrids are like cats--they'll get into anything. They'll go right over the counter in your kitchen and 'unload' your groceries.

"Ninety-two percent of hybrids are dead before they're two years old--hit by cars, euthanized. They're just very difficult pets. The few who survive languish on a chain, just miserable. I've been working with them for 17 years, between here and Tucson, and maybe four times I've known a wolf hybrid that's really happy, in a really good home. The rest are just tragedies. It's a crime to breed them."

In Grant County, breeding wolf hybrids literally is a crime, though laws vary across the state. One of Wolf's rescued animals, in fact, belonged to a would-be breeder who made the mistake of advertising in the newspaper. When she gets the hybrids, she has the males neutered.  But people do breed them and try to sell them. "People will do anything for money," she says, "so they will continue to raise hybrids and lie about it."

There are two reasons people want wolf hybrids for pets, Wolf theorizes. One is the mystique of owning a wolf; people think it's "cool," but don't realize what they're getting into. The other is the macho appeal, idiots who want to drive around with a wolf in the back of their truck and scare the neighbors. She shakes her head at this folly: "Wolves are so high-strung that it takes a year before they can go into a car without throwing up." Drug dealers, similarly, have been known to want wolf hybrids as guard dogs. But wolves won't guard anything, she says--their nature is to run away.

As Wolf leads a tour of her sanctuary, every pen, every animal sparks a story, told rapid-fire as if she's afraid she won't get to tell them all. This wolf, alone in its enclosure except for a dog, was what she calls an "Army wolf." It was found on White Sands Missile Range, tied up and abandoned. After Wolf nursed it back to health, she took it along for one of her occasional presentations at local schools and it wound up pictured in the school yearbook. "He was a little afraid at first, being surrounded by 20 kids all at once, but pretty soon he was letting a kid ride on his back."

Why the dog in the pen with the "Army wolf"? "There's nothing sadder than a wolf alone," she explains, "so he has a pet dog."

She has a second "Army wolf," found by soldiers out on maneuver, scratched up and starving. The soldiers lured it with a burrito. The wolf spent three months in an animal hospital before coming to its new home at Wolfsong Sanctuary.

Over here, this whole batch of wolves she rescued from a "hippie couple" she spotted one day who were walking a wolf-dog and toting a backpack full of puppies.

Beside another enclosure, a jumble of stones is marked with a blue cross on which is written, "Thank You Grandmother Wolf." The "grandmother" buried there, Wolf explains, served as a substitute mother to all the wolves in that pen. The grave lies within wolf view for a reason: "They just can't stand it when somebody dies. I had to spend a week covering the grave, one shovelful at a time, so they could watch.

"If people knew how much wolves love one another," she adds, "maybe they wouldn't want to shoot them."

       Deirdre Wolf doesn't talk much about her early years, but what she does say suggests an upbringing not so different from that of the animals she's adopted. "I was a little wild child," she says, "living in the mountains with my drunken grandmother."

There's a picture, though, in one of the fat white notebooks she uses as photo albums, showing her as a smiling girl on horseback. "I really was a cowgirl. Behind my back they called me 'Mother Nature.'"

Eventually the cowgirl found a cowboy, a Native American man she married and lived with on a ranch in Texas. The title of the photo album devoted to this long-ago part of her life is "When I Was a Rancher's Wife." An inscription below the title reads, "My favorite cowboy always said, 'Our Creator had a pretty good plan. We ought not to mess with it.'"

Together, she and her "favorite cowboy" raised two children of their own, a pack of foster children, prizewinning dairy goats, champion horses and a houseful of exotic pets. When neighboring ranchers would find the offspring of some critter they'd recently killed, they knew right where to bring these orphans. Yellowing photographs show her husband with a pet coyote, a raccoon climbing his leg, an owl peeking out of a basket, a coyote begging at the supper table, children sleeping with various critters, the coyote ("Rufus," according to a caption) waiting for the school bus.

She points at a photo of Rufus the coyote with a raccoon. "See? If there's no competition, everybody can get along."

In 1979, her cowboy husband was crushed by a horse.

When she ultimately remarried, it was into a very different sort of life. She and her wealthy second husband lived in Tucson, near a house owned by Paul McCartney. She worked as a counselor with troubled teens--work she continues, in a different form, as a frequent volunteer for the Court Appointed Special Advocate (CASA) program.

And in Tucson, quite by accident, she started on the road to becoming Deirdre Wolf. "I was at a pet store," she recalls. "I had these Great Danes. I felt something staring at me, turned around and it was this wolf-dog. I'd always felt breeding them was a crime against nature, but what a beautiful animal!"

The owner was having obvious trouble with the wolf hybrid. "It's driving me crazy," the owner confided.

Wolf--this wasn't yet her name, of course--gave the wolf-dog's owner her phone number. "If you can't handle it, call me."

Two days later, she had her first wolf.

Not long after this, a friend who was working in a remote area for the Forest Service decided a wolf-collie cross would be the dog to have. Almost immediately, however, the friend was transferred to a different setting, and had to leave her wolf hybrid behind. It still lives with Deirdre Wolf, who has nursed it through the canine version of Lou Gehrig's disease.

Her growing interest in wolf hybrids led Wolf to a man who ran a sanctuary in the Tucson area. Soon she began helping him.

But about this time her second marriage unraveled along with her husband's bank account. He left her with a house she couldn't afford to pay the taxes on; she was, as she puts it, "just ooching along." When she finally managed to sell the Tucson house, she figures the conservation easement she'd put on it to protect a wildlife corridor knocked $400,000 off the selling price.

Wolf and two friends had decided someday they'd retire in Silver City, where she'd come for bike riding. The end of her marriage and her financial woes brought "someday" sooner than expected, and so in 1997 she began looking for a house here.

When she first saw it, the house at the edge of the national forest wasn't much more than the "shack" her opponents would later describe it as. Unfinished, it lacked flooring, cabinetry and the loft-like upstairs. Friends from Tucson came, slept outside, and helped her finish the house.

"Each part of this house reminds me of a friend," she says, ticking off who built what. "An old woman named Sue built that sink. . . ."

So she moved to Silver City with three Great Danes and nine wolves. But that was just the beginning. Soon after she relocated, the man with the wolf sanctuary in Tucson died. "I took as many of his wolves as I thought I could afford. I took the most wild, the most skittish, the ones I figured nobody would want."

And by this time she'd also taken a new name. "I'd been adopted and passed around a lot as a child, so I'd had a lot of different names. None of them had meant much to me. They already called me the 'Wolf Lady.' So I went to court and had my name legally changed to Wolf."

      Besides connecting with the community and showing people that she's nobody you need to run away from at the grocery store, opening Wolfsong Sanctuary to the public also serves to dispel the popular image of the "big bad wolf." A "European thing," says Wolf, that scary reputation has followed wolves from fairy tales to Disney cartoons to the current controversy over wolf reintroduction.

She contrasts that "Little Red Riding Hood" view with a Native American creation myth, in which animals emerged before humans and it was the wolf who taught people how to be people. In this story, people learned, like wolves, to mate for life, train their teenagers, respect their elders and always stay loyal to family.

And when they "get wolfed," people who come to Wolfsong Sanctuary learn that wolves don't seem so scary, after all. Some visitors come back again and again. Some cry. Wolf tells of a pair of hunters who got the tour, then grew concerned that the deer blood on their clothing might cause the wolves to attack when the hunters went in to feed them. "Instead, the wolves were licking their arms, their faces. It was a real education for them."

Wolf has captured such lessons in three more thick photo albums. She leafs through the pages, each one prompting a memory and a story. "This lady was 92 years old and fed the wolves. She told me, 'OK, take my picture. Now I can one-up everybody at the rest home.'"

Another family brought their grade-school-age son to "get wolfed," but also brought a 14-month-old baby with white hair. When the baby's pink hood fell off and the wolves saw her white hair, they were transfixed. The baby, too, wound up "getting wolfed": "The wolves would take the weenie from her and then clean her up, because it was a baby.

"They're not afraid of tiny children or really elderly people," Wolf adds. "Anybody who's fit and hardy, though, makes them very shy."

Shy wolves were certainly not on the minds of wolf-reintroduction opponents at a packed hearing in Silver City in 2000, when relocation to the Gila National Wilderness was first proposed; Mexican gray wolves were initially reintroduced in Arizona in 1998. Speakers voiced concerns that wolves might endanger tourist attractions and hiking school groups. "It's just a matter of time before we have wolf-human interaction," warned Jon Swapp of Greenlee County, Ariz.

The draft of a Five-Year Review of the wolf reintroduction program is currently open for public comment, and four open houses will be held late this month for the public to ask questions: Jan. 26 in Truth or Consequences, Jan. 27 in Glenwood, Jan. 28 in Alpine, Ariz., and Jan. 29 in Phoenix. The announcement of the Five-Year Review notes bluntly, however, that the program "is a matter of law, as has been discussed on numerous occasions at a variety of venues. . . . Comments regarding position statements only (e.g., like/dislike; agree/disagree with the Mexican wolf reintroduction project) will not be considered relevant to this review."

While the effects of wolves on livestock and ranchers' livelihood will nonetheless continue to be hotly debated, the initial fears of wolf attacks on humans have not been borne out. "It isn't natural for a wolf to hurt people," Wolf insists. "Scientists say a wild, healthy wolf has never killed anyone in the United States."

The exact number of documented wolf attacks on humans varies depending on which source you consult, but most place it in the single digits. A review of wolf attacks worldwide during the past 400 years, The Fear of Wolves edited by John Linnell, concluded that no human had been killed by a wolf in North America in the 20th century.

L. David Mech, a wildlife research biologist who has studied wolves for almost 40 years and written three books on the subject, notes, "It is clear that wolves could easily kill a human if they so desired. Yet, at least until recently, no one has ever turned up dead, missing, eaten or even seriously injured by a nonrabid wolf during all the many millions of visitor days in our national forests, parks and other wilderness areas where wolves reside. In fact, even the 'close calls' between wolves and humans in North America have been rare enough to warrant documentation in scientific journals."

Mech goes on to examine a handful of recent incidents with wolves, which he ascribes essentially to cases of mistaken identity: The wolf was actually attacking the person's dog in one instance, for example, or was apparently confused by the person's prone position in a sleeping bag in another.

T.R. Mader, research director of the Abundant Wildlife Society of North America, has gathered anecdotal evidence of nearly two-dozen wolf attacks involving humans since 1888, ranging from scary encounters in chicken coops to a teenager who stuck his arm through a zoo fence. But Mader concedes that such attacks are rare in North America compared to Asia, for which he credits our forefathers' commitment to protecting their livelihoods along with the availability of inexpensive firearms.

It's also true, according to Mech, that wolves are afraid of humans, who have "so thoroughly persecuted" them for so long. (Cases of wolf attacks in India seem to be due to wolves that have lost their fear of humans.) None of a wolf's natural prey, he adds, walks on two legs, which may be significant.

The statistics bear out Wolf's concern about breeding wolf-dog hybrids, which have been known to attack and kill humans--but that's apparently their canine side coming out. According to wolf experts at the Woodland Park Zoo in Seattle, there have been 12 human fatalities in the past 20 years from attacks by hybrids. (Dogs kill 15 to 25 people every year and, according to the Centers for Disease Control, about 800,000 people annually require medical attention for dog bites.)

       No one questions that wolves do attack livestock. But Deirdre Wolf's dismissal of this toll infuriates ranchers: "Cattle are product," she likes to say. "If you get reimbursed, who cares who eats the beef? What other business gets paid for its losses?"

Alex Thal, who's an economist, wrote his dissertation on the whole concept of compensating for the losses from such government programs, an idea sometimes called "windfall for wipeouts." If people want wolves reintroduced, he says, it makes sense for them to voluntarily contribute to a fund--in this case, administered by the Defenders of Wildlife--to offset the damage to livestock. He says, "It's a good concept in theory, but there's a structural problem. By the time the bureaucracy gets around to checking out a rancher's claim, there's often no remains of the cattle if there were any to begin with." Wolf depredations, Thal notes, are not as easy to document as when, say, a passing train hits a wayward steer.

Thal, who serves on an interagency task force addressing such issues with the wolf reintroduction program, says there are other problems with simply reimbursing a rancher's lost "product." Wolf attacks on livestock can take a bite out of a rancher's profit margin as well--a return on investment that's typically pretty slender in the first place. Cattle that have had to flee wolves can be chased to the point of exhaustion, says Thal, and learn to run from "anything and everything, running into other pastures and disrupting the rancher's ability to manage that livestock.
"There's an inordinate amount of attention paid to the loss of the wolves, and a lack of respect to the loss of livestock," he adds. "It's not the same as an urban person with a pet, but these animals are still part of the family. Ranchers will go out in below-zero weather to check on calves' birthing."

Deirdre Wolf admits she's added fuel to the fire of the local "wolf wars," writing letters she describes as "scathing" to the Daily Press. "If you're pro-wolf, the letters will make you laugh. If you're anti-, I want them to make you so mad that you'll write another stupid letter, which will cause the scientists to write in and correct them.

"I've revealed and made fun of opponents' ignorance, really rubbing their noses in it," she goes on, adding perhaps needlessly, "I've made a lot of enemies."

For his part, Thal has no interest in rising to the bait. "I don't want to contribute to creating a bigger wedge," he says, "when what I'm really trying to address is creating a positive outcome for those who have been victimized."

The ultimate solution to the wolf controversy, he believes, lies in wolf populations recovering to the point where the animal is no longer on the endangered-species list and can be managed like other predators. In the meantime, Thal says, "I don't think people will calm down until Fish and Wildlife does an adequate assessment in terms of the effect of wolves on livestock production. There are remedies if we can set down the polarization and look at the cold, hard facts instead of glossing over them."

Deirdre Wolf is more interested in what she sees as the balance of nature. Before wolves were reintroduced to Yellowstone, she says, elk were grazing riparian areas bare and coyotes were so overpopulated that the mortality rate of their pups was 50 percent. "One thing gets off and everything falls apart. It's much healthier with a decent population of predators."

       Despite her efforts to reach out to the community, don't look for Deirdre Wolf to start shying away from controversy. "I'm not going to change," she says. "I've lived by the tenet--it was Joan Baez' husband who said it--that if you see something wrong and don't do something about it, you're worse than those who are doing the wrong because you know it's wrong."

She has the same kind of absolute commitment to the animals she's rescued. "I won't warehouse them in little tiny pens, with no quality of life." Even if it were legal she would never sell any of her wolf hybrids, although, she says, "I have a standing offer on the big white one for $2,000."

Wolf shakes her head, nope. "If they're here, they're here for life. They're bonded to me and to each other. You don't split up a family--they'll mourn."

Wolfsong Sanctuary is small in numbers by the standards of other places that rescue wolf hybrids, but of course she runs an underfunded, one-person operation that's nonetheless committed to making homes for animals in enclosures that cost $4,000 and up. She knows of other sanctuaries in Colorado, a large operation in Rodeo, NM, and another near Gallup, NM. There's also a USDA-licensed research facility in Thoreau, NM, near Bluewater Lake, called Raised by Wolves.

The name of that facility makes Wolf smile. "The truth is, if you were raised by wolves you'd be neat, clean, respectful and prepared with life skills."

Sitting now in the warm, woodsy glow of her living room, she remembers reading about a little girl--in Life or Look magazine, she's never been able to track down the long-ago article--who seemingly was literally raised by wolves. "They found her in the forest, all dirty, with leaves and sticks in her hair. She growled and bit and screeched when they tried to grab her, and the wolves were frantic. People kept saying, 'Surely she couldn't have been living with the wolves?'

"I recognized that this child did not want to be rescued," Wolf says, a bit dreamily. "She had bonded with the wolves."

In the years since, Wolf has tried off and on to find those old articles and to track down whatever became of that little "wolf girl," whom she figures must be about two years her junior. "She's probably in an insane asylum, because she couldn't adjust to living with humans."

Outside, something has stirred up the dogs, whose barking has gotten the wolves howling. Wolf stands up and moves to the window to listen. The wild music rises like a warm breeze, and just as suddenly is gone.

Deirdre Wolf lingers at the window for a moment, then resumes her story of the little wolf girl. "I'd like to find her and bring her here," she says. "Maybe being here would help her.

"The wolves were keeping her alive."

Visitors to Wolfsong Sanctuary should call 388-4738 to make an appointment. Transportation can be provided if necessary. Admission is free, but donations are accepted.

 

David A. Fryxell is editor of Desert Exposure.

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