How I learned to speak wolf

Deep in Yellowstone's Lamar Valley, George Bumann develops a sense of what wolves' howls can mean

- GEORGE BUMANN

I STOP SHORT OF TAKING MY NEXT STEP. Somewhere amid the squeak-crunch of snow beneath my boots and the footfalls and heavy breathing of our labrador, Hobbes, there is something else. The two of us stand motionless as I pull my wool cap up and away from my ears. I can't help but smile, noticing that both Hobbes and I are tilting our heads the same way, straining for the next sound.

There it is. This time, there is no doubt - it is the distant howl of a wolf. The faint sound is at the very edge of my hearing. Starting low, it reverberates and builds. It is not the vocalisation of a single individual after all, but howls from an entire pack. What I am hearing is the quintessential call of the wild emanating from some unseen corner of the upper Yellowstone River valley.

Anne Fernald, a professor at Standford University who specialises in children's language development, has deliciously referred to sound as “touch at a distance”. This notion strikes a chord with me, pointing to what can connect us with the more-than-human world.

My own explorations into the conversations of wolves began more than 20 years ago in the heart of Yellowstone’s northern range on the spectacular sprawling floor of Lamar Valley, the epicentre of the wolf recovery in the park that began in the mid-1990s. My wife Jenny and I lived in a small cluster of cabins - the only human outpost for several miles. During our first spring in the valley, the matriarch of the Druid Peak wolf pack gave birth to a litter of pups a few hundred metres to the east. We watched spellbound as the pack travelled, hunted, played, fed their young, forded rivers and streams, slept and, yes, howled. One thing was evident from the beginning - one howl was not the same as another. I couldn’t help but wonder, “What are you saying?” Fortunately I was perfectly placed to find out.