Medicine of the Wolf Page #2

your car keys

should be taken away from you,

because you're far more likely

to get in a car wreck,

you shouldn't step in an airplane,

you shouldn't go outside if there's

lightning anywhere nearby,

these are all far, far more common

causes of injury and death.

And so wolves, simply, uh, are

not a threat to human beings,

it's just a... it's a

silly thing to think so.

The wolf made a decision

to join the human family.

Somehow, someway, because they fit in.

Why did the wolf come into the human

family 40... 50... 60,000 years ago,

and the cat didn't, or the horse didn't?

Because it seemed to be a little

more of an easy partnership.

They blended in a little bit better.

That was a decision that the wolf made

for sustainability and survivability.

Do you think there are

more dogs in the world

than wolves right now?

How many millions and millions

of dogs are there in the world?

That's... that's the wolf.

The wolf decided that somehow.

It's clear that the evolution

of the wolf to the dog

has had a huge impact on man.

Think of the many gifts from the wolf.

Seeing eye dogs, service animals,

even companionship.

Scientific studies have even proven

that people live longer that have dogs.

And the wolf is more intelligent,

has advanced senses, and a bigger brain.

We're similar to them,

they're not similar to us.

It's very interesting, because I mean,

we learn our initial programming,

a lot of it, we learn from them.

On average, a wolf walks for

about eight hours of every day,

and they can walk at quite a clip,

they can walk

at four to six Miles an hour,

and so if you wanna know what

it's like to be a wolf, walk.

And just keep walking, and walk and

walk and walk. Walk day after day.

This is a big, big part of what the life

of a wolf is all about, is walking.

It's the simplest thing.

And the next most important thing

is... is also something that's very,

very closely related to humans,

is just that wolves live in

families, they live in packs.

And a pack is basically a family unit,

and while wolves spend about eight

hours of every day walking,

they spend about eight hours of every

day socializing with their pack mates.

And so if you like living

in your family,

and if you like walking, you have a

great deal in common with wolves,

and the next most important

thing to know about wolves

is how it is that they get their food.

They eat things that are

generally bigger than them.

Sometimes up to 10 times their size.

And so wolves capture their

food, whether it's a moose,

or a deer, or an elk, they do it

by killing it with their teeth.

Imagine killing something that's 10

times your size with your teeth,

and that's the only way

you're gonna get to eat.

And so it's incredibly heroic,

it's incredibly dangerous

uh, to be able to get food in this way.

Um, wolf is capable of living

to about 12 years of age,

but their life expectancy

is about four years of age,

and one of the most common

causes of death is starvation,

the inability to get enough food,

and it's just because it's

really hard to kill something

that's 10 times your size

with your teeth.

I grew up in this hunting culture

where you defined

your worth, in some ways,

by how many pheasants you could shoot,

or how many ducks you could get,

and what kind of a trophy you could get.

The biggest buck

with the biggest antlers,

and if you could go shoot a wolf,

pfft, you're a real man.

One day I found myself heading north

with some friends

from Hardwick, Minnesota,

they were probably 10

years older than me,

they were going to go wolf hunting.

Okay, it's not the ultimate animal,

maybe it is back then.

There was a bounty on wolves.

A 50-dollar bounty.

What does that mean?

It means that, culturally, it was

a value to kill them, right?

So us naive prairie kids...

I imagine they were in

their 20s, and I was 15...

let's go up north, go look for

wolves, and go hunt them.

So I had a m-1 carbine,

world war ii vintage

that I got from NRA,

but I was a young boy

expressing my cultural norm,

and if I could go up and kill a wolf,

I would be the hero of my town,

it'd be in the newspaper,

there'd be pictures.

So I went up north with

my friends and looked,

walked through the woods, and... scared.

Scared that I'd see a wolf,

scared that I wouldn't.

I was good shot, and if I saw

one, I might have killed it.

Didn't see one, didn't see any tracks.

To me, the ultimate question is,

why do you kill the things you love?

I think it's a primal thing.

It's a male thing.

Uh, we go back 30,000 years

to the cave paintings

in Glasgow and Southern France.

Picasso said it's the most

beautiful art man's ever created,

we can't even equal that.

They love them, but they killed as

many as they could to eat them.

So it's in our genes, I mean, for

thousands and thousands and thousands

and thousands of years, we hunted.

We forget that sometimes,

I think, in this century.

It wasn't that long ago,

we depended upon

the weapon bow and arrow,

atlatl, spear, gun,

to go out and keep our families alive

and keep ourselves fed.

Well we haven't evolved past that,

we still have that strange

kind of an instinct

we wanna quest, we wanna hunt,

it's very powerful.

Most of the stuff of what we do in life

is a gradual slide into a consciousness,

or a point of view.

Some of us reach those points

where something happens

one day and it changes,

and you meet someone,

you read a book, you watch a movie.

This particular day, I was 14 years old,

up in a state park

near Luverne, Minnesota

where I grew up, and I was a

fox hunter at this point.

I killed fox for a living,

and I liked it.

The most... one of the most

exciting times of my life.

Yet, I love fox.

Outwit them.

Not easy to kill a fox,

they're very smart.

You have to be pretty good

at tracking and watching,

and you have to be a good shot.

But there's a certain point you

evolve somehow, you change.

The camera just happened

to come into my life somehow,

as the artist.

I was up in the blue mountains

with my camera, instead of my gun,

and I saw a fox off in the distance.

Well I learned from an old

friend of mine, Jeff Cooney,

10 years older than me,

that did the same thing,

how to squeak like a mouse

to make the fox think

there's a free meal,

so I hid behind a rock and went...

The fox came running, I peeked up,

just as the fox came within

maybe 10 feet,

made a click with my three-dollar

plastic Argus camera,

I was like, "wow, that's amazing."

Then I got a picture back a week later.

You take it to the drugstore... black

and white film, it's a process,

they come back with a little print,

and magic.

I shot the fox.

I captured, there's my trophy.

There's my bragging point.

I don't have a fox skin,

I have a photograph.

This is even better.

I can put it on the wall

and the fox is still alive.

It didn't take long.

From that moment on,

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