Mowat is sent north to investigate wolves

Farley Mowat is sent north to investigate wolves after the Department of Mines and Resources turns public complaints about disappearing game into a national inquiry. The assignment begins as an exercise in bureaucratic damage control, but its journey from Ottawa to the Keewatin Barren Lands exposes a widening gap between official claims and the human pressures bearing on caribou and wolves. In the field, Mowat encounters evidence that complicates the charge against wolves and redirects the investigation toward the people and policies shaping the northern landscape.

Political Pressure and the Official Problem

The commission arose from a dispute over why hunters were returning with fewer deer. Mowat’s chief said that, within a year, the Department had received thirty-seven memoranda from Members of Parliament conveying constituents’ concerns. Fish and Game clubs and ammunition manufacturers were among those supporting action against wolves; their case joined the complaint that wolves were killing the deer with the hunters’ experience of finding fewer animals on their trips.

The Department’s predecessor had offered a different explanation: hunters had increased until they outnumbered deer by about five to one. When the Minister repeated that argument in Parliament, Members shouted him down as a liar and a wolf-lover. Three days later, the predecessor retired. The Minister then publicly promised a full-scale investigation into the supposed carnage being inflicted on deer. Mowat’s assignment followed this reversal: the inquiry was commissioned not after a settled scientific finding, but after an explanation of human hunting pressure had become politically untenable.

The dispute sat within a broader campaign against wolves. In 1973, several North American wolf races were virtually extinct, and the continental United States outside Alaska probably held no more than 1,200 wolves. Minnesota authorities had proposed killing 200 wolves annually, while increased access to remote Canadian forests by aircraft and snowmobiles had enabled more hunters to reach big-game animals. As game numbers fell, hunters and businesses dependent on hunting again demanded wolf control. Quebec’s late-1972 contest, which sought 5,000 dead wolves and offered wolf jawbones as prizes, made the political climate surrounding the investigation especially stark.

The Commission in Ottawa

Before Mowat could leave for the field, he had to pass through the Department’s formalities. Military ranks governed its offices: staff used titles such as Captain, Lieutenant, Colonel, and Brigadier, while employees without official rank could invent one. At a conference about his first assignment, an official requirements list was prepared in five copies and headed for the Lupine Project. Its provisions included twelve rolls of government-standard toilet paper. When a Finance representative suggested reducing that quantity, Mowat’s laughter drew a cold response from two senior officers, who rose and left the room.

The final briefing gave the assignment the gravity of a national emergency. Mowat’s chief sat behind a desk strewn with groundhog skulls and explained the political history of the wolf complaint. He told Mowat that the wolf was now his problem and directed him to begin work in the field at once. Mowat rose, saluted involuntarily, and fled the office. That same night, he left Ottawa aboard a Canadian Air Force transport plane. His immediate destination was Churchill town, on Hudson Bay’s western shore; his ultimate objective lay farther into the subarctic Keewatin Barren Lands.

Field Evidence and a Reversal of Blame

The investigation brought Mowat into contact with the practical economics of trapping. Mike acknowledged that he killed caribou to feed his fourteen dogs and himself, and to use carcasses as bait for fox traps. He estimated killing two or three hundred caribou in a year, perhaps more. He said that other trappers, Indigenous and white, also needed caribou to keep their dogs fit for work; fish could serve as substitute food when necessary, but left the dogs weak and sickly and unable to haul loads effectively.

Mowat compared that admission with information collected by the Department. There were 1,800 trappers in parts of Saskatchewan, Manitoba, and southern Keewatin within the Keewatin caribou herd’s winter range. In an Ottawa poll, trappers and traders had denied killing more than one or two caribou a year, while blaming wolves for killing deer in enormous numbers. To estimate the possible scale of human harvest, Mowat halved both the number of trappers and Mike’s stated annual kill before multiplying them. The result was 112,000 caribou killed by trappers in the area each year. He recognized that he could not use the figure in his reports without risking an unwanted reassignment, but the calculation showed how official inquiries could solicit information while leaving its implications difficult to publish.

The inquiry’s environmental context also included direct persecution of wolves. In winter, wolves entering timber faced an organized assault by men. Trappers resented them for competing for caribou and disrupting fox traplines; fear could sharpen that hostility. Provincial and federal governments offered bounties, commonly ranging from ten to thirty dollars per wolf. One trapper received a bounty for 118 wolves in a single winter, 107 of them young born the previous spring. The account also describes indiscriminate strychnine use that killed foxes, wolverines, and other flesh-eaters across a large area. Such evidence placed wolf control inside an economic and political system, rather than treating the wolves’ alleged predation as the only cause of ecological change.

Disease, Panic, and the Meaning of the Assignment

The investigation’s wider account of wolf numbers likewise challenged the image of an unchecked predator. Food scarcity, reduced litter sizes, and disease could limit populations; when ecological balances were disrupted and food ran short, epidemics of rabies, distemper, or mange could rapidly reduce wolf numbers. In 1946, low lemming numbers coincided with a change in Keewatin caribou migration that left much of the southern region without its usual herds. Hunger affected people and animals, and rabies spread from foxes to wolves.

That outbreak produced a revealing contrast between a sick animal and the story told about it. A wolf in Churchill town was reported by an Army corporal as an enormous attacker, prompting Canadian and American military contingents to scour the area. In the ensuing confusion, eleven husky dogs, an American private, and a Chippewayan man were casualties of the vigilantes rather than of the wolf. A wolf sighting from an Army aircraft proved to be the Hudson’s Bay Company manager’s cocker spaniel. On the third day, a truck killed the actual wolf, which had become too sick to move. Yet later recollections transformed the episode into an invasion by packs and a community under siege.

These findings do not establish that every claim made in the field was formally accepted by the Department. They do show why the commission matters in the narrative: a mandate framed around proving wolves responsible for declining game sends Mowat into circumstances that expose competing causes, concealed human harvest, official incentives, and the force of fear. The assignment begins as an order to investigate a wolf problem; its consequential turn is toward examining how the problem itself has been constructed.