Puppies Playing in the Snow

One day we spent hours watching the Slough pack wolf pups playing. They had staked out a resting spot between two beautiful pine trees high on a snow-covered ridge. The spot was about three-quarters of a mile from the road, so we had a good view of their antics with our tripod-mounted spotting scopes and binoculars.

The area between the trees was flat, dirty, and snow-trampled. When we arrived and trained our viewing apparatus on the spot, the wolf pups were curled up napping, looking like a scattering of black and gray and grayish-brown boulders. Just watching them lying in the snow gave me the shivers, although I knew their thick coat with its guard hairs was keeping them nice and warm – the cold dampness of the snow would never reach their skin. They had been born in March, which happened to be the same month my Irish Water Spaniel puppy Boomer had been born, and Peg estimated that they were about Boomer’s size as well – some 60 pounds each, and a little taller than two feet at the shoulder.

As we watched, one of the pups uncurled from its nose-under-tail napping position and did a yoga-like stretch to unkink everything from neck to tail. Then in sauntered through the snow and pounced unceremoniously on one of its snoozing siblings.

The snow exploded, and the intertwined pups rolled together like a couple of Hollywood stuntmen down the steep slope, creating a miniature avalanche. One of them broke away and tried to scramble back up the slope, but was brought down from the rear by the other, and they tumbled further down the incline, nearly vanishing in the deep snow.

Their siblings were awakened by the tumult. A couple of them uncurled just enough to sit up and watch their siblings’ antics. I wondered if they wanted to join in, or were watching to make sure they didn’t become the next target.

I had read that the alpha male and female were the only pair in a pack to have young, and that all of the other adults and subadults in the pack would participate in raising the litter: hunting for them, playing with and teaching them, and even babysitting for them. I was hoping to catch a glimpse of the “auntie” or “uncle” in charge of this wild bunch, but all of the wolves we saw were about the same size, meaning they were part of the litter.

The two wrestlers made their peace with each other and began working their way back up the slope to the level resting area. A trio of the other pups stood up and sniffed noses and wagged tails, then vanished over the crest of the ridge. Peg and Ellie had been betting that there was a kill from last night’s hunt just out of our sight up there.

Sue enough, one of the pups reappeared in a few minutes later dragging what looked like a tree branch through the snow. Viewed through binoculars, the long brown object was a meaty haunch of elk, and it left a trail of blood as it was dragged through the snow.

One of the wrestlers had been resting beneath a tree; it now bounded over to its sibling and grabbed the trailing end of the haunch, dashing away with a flap of skin before the haunch’s owner could mount a proper defense. Another sibling came bounding over, but the haunch’s owner dropped its prize and stood four-square over it, snapping and snarling and lunging at the interloper, who beat a comically hasty retreat.

The haunch owner dragged its prize close to the left-hand tree’s trunk and settled down for a feast. A couple of other wolves came up over the top of the ridge, their muzzles and chests looking a bit dark, as though stained with blood. Some of their siblings exchanged sniff greetings and then disappeared over the ridge themselves, presumably to pick at the remains of the feast.

There was so much coming and going over the ridge, and so much wrestling and play-bowing and chasing through snow-banks, that we never did get an accurate count of those wolf pups. In the months after I got home, I watched Boomer put on another ten pounds and grow a couple of inches longer. And although he’s quite large for an Irish Water Spaniel, I still think about those wolf pups, which have doubled in size my encounter with them.