The Intimate Bond (4 page)

The Raven features prominently in creation tales in many Native American societies. To the Koyukon, he was a contradiction: “omnipotent clown, benevolent mischief-maker, buffoon, and deity.”
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Raven manipulated the environment, caused rivers to flow only one way to make them more of a challenge for paddlers. He created animals, devised mortality for people, caused difficulties for them. As one Koyukon remarked to Richard Nelson, “It's just like talking to God, that's why we talk to the raven. He created the world.”
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Animals were close to people, although they were different: they had no souls, which are different from an animal's spirit. But they are close to humans in that they display a range of emotions, communicate among themselves, and understand what humans say and do. The interaction between animal and human is intensely close, which means that the spirits are easily offended by peoples' disrespectful behavior.

It follows, then, in Koyukon belief, society that there is proper conduct toward nature, as powerful spirits will readily punish irreverent or insulting behavior, and waste. Killing animals does not offend, but living and dead animals must be treated with respect as a source of human life. If the hunter shows disrespectful behavior, he will have no luck. The Koyukon avoid pointing at animals, and speak carefully, not boastfully, about them. They must kill without causing suffering, and they avoid losing wounded prey. Strict rules surround the treatment of killed beasts. There are rules for butchering animals properly, and for the appropriate care of meat. Taboos surround meat consumption, and inedible animal parts are respectfully buried or burned.

The Koyukon consider the environment both natural and supernatural, to the point that it's a second society in which the people live. As they hunt and walk through the forest, hunters know that spirits surround them. Each animal is far more than just a beast sighted. It is a personality, known from stories in the Distant Time. As Nelson puts it, “It is a figure in the community of beings.”
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Everything in the Koyukon world that treats of animals dwells at least partially in the realm of the supernatural. In both the Kuyukon and the San, on the other side of the world, each band's shamans used their powers to control the spirits of nature, for
curing, and, as spirit helpers, to communicate with the protective spirits of caribou and other prey, attracting animals and creating abundance.

The Whim of Supernatural Power

In warmer environments, like those of Africa and Australia, hunting societies, both ancient and historical, relied heavily on plant foods of all kinds, with hunting being more of a sporadic activity, even in the game-rich landscapes of sub-Saharan Africa. Storage of fresh meat is a problem without the natural refrigeration of subzero temperatures. Contrast this with northern latitudes, where the hunter has always relied almost entirely on game meat or fish for survival.
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Winter storage is vital; the hunter must kill many more animals for food and for other purposes, because plant foods and vegetation usable for clothing or shelter are in very short supply most of the year.

Migratory species such as caribou and reindeer have been favored prey for thousands of years in the north during and since the Late Ice Age. They still are today, for basic hunting practices have changed little, even if the weaponry is radically different. Both migrate in large herds, the routes and strategic river crossing points relatively predictable. One might assume that the hunters followed the marching herds and harvested whatever beasts they needed. This conventional assumption is completely wrong, for reindeer move much faster than humans, unencumbered as they are by children and personal possessions. Much caribou or reindeer hunting involved, and still involves, ambushing and trapping them at strategic locations, especially in late summer and early fall, when the beasts are in prime condition. Far more is at stake than merely meat, for the hunter requires an equal amount of fat, making fat-bearing animals in prime condition a favored target, especially bucks in the fall, who may carry up to 20 percent of their weight in fat ahead of rutting season. Many northern hunting groups today would kill beasts for their fat, then abandon the carcasses to rot, except for the tongue and the marrow from lower leg bones, prized delicacies. Much of the year, does and fawns are preferred, while unborn fawns are much enjoyed—much to the consternation of today's conservationists. The same practices were probably followed in ancient times.

Then there are the hides, which serve all kinds of uses—fawn skins for underwear, buckskins for boots, for example. This is apart from the hides used for thongs, tents, bags, kayaks, and other purposes. Back in 1771, the naturalist Samuel Hearne estimated that every Chipewyan individual near Hudson's Bay consumed more than twenty caribou hides a year for domestic purposes alone.
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Again, there was huge wastage of meat, which was left to rot in the warm temperatures of late summer. These abandoned carcasses were a boon for scavengers such as ravens and wolves, both of whom followed reindeer herds throughout much of the year. The wastage was enormous, but not enough alone to cause the extinction of reindeer or caribou herds. Wastage was, however, inevitable, when opportunism, careful observation, and only partial consumption of the prey worked well enough to ensure survival. Success depended on weighing the many factors such as temperature, snow depth, and snow hardness, so that changing migration routes could be fathomed ahead of time. The alternative was starvation.

In small hunting groups, the leaders were individuals with more than average strength, endurance, and hunting expertise, and who had the ability to gauge communal opinion and translate it into action. As a leader accumulated meat and other goods from his hunting skills, he redistributed his “wealth” to others in the band. There was no such thing as individual wealth, in the sense that there is with domesticated animals, where each owner seeks more beasts for him or herself. Leadership was ephemeral, and passed from one hunter to another in societies where the prey's reproduction lay in the hands of supernatural forces.
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Power over the supernatural, often in the hands of a specialist shaman, was all-important in societies where herds ensured the survival of humans. Contrast this with societies with domesticated animals, where people were or are responsible for perpetuating their herds.

To many hunters, the animals made themselves available at the whim of a supernatural power, a spiritual master who decided which animals would be provided for human consumption and then regenerated. This is why hunters treated killed animals with respect—to avoid offending the spirits. To northern peoples, the reindeer and caribou were immortal, unconquerable. In a real sense, to ancient and living hunters, such
as the San and the northern hunter, killing game is an act of renewal. As the flesh and hides are respectfully consumed or used, the soul of the dead beast is released to its spiritual master.

Following the Honeyguide

There are numerous examples of close interactions between wild animals and humans, which are certainly not domestication. They are loosely formed alliances of benefit to both sides, often inconspicuous and perpetuated for generations, such as that between the Boran cattle herders of northern Kenya and the honeyguide bird (see sidebar “Honeyguides and Humans”). The honeyguide locates bees' nests; the Boran open them. Such is the interdependency between the Boran and the honeyguide that the people consider killing one an act of murder.

In legend and folklore, animals were active players in the drama of creation and in the endless unfolding of daily life. These stories, like the experience of the hunt, passed by word of mouth, through tale, chant, ceremony, and dance, and hard experience from one generation to the next, a priceless archive of knowledge about animals when people lived in close intimacy with their prey. All this changed as animals reshaped human society.

Wolves and People

 

CHAPTER 2

Curious Neighbors and Wolf-dogs

Central Europe, a summer night eighteen thousand years ago. The Cro-Magnon hunters and their families eat by the light of the flames around a campfire. They throw discarded reindeer bones into the intense darkness without, perhaps an open space or the slope below a natural rocky overhang. As the flames leap higher, the band sees flickers from the wolf eyes that observe them from nearby. Everyone knows the beasts are there, waiting patiently until the people settle down for the night. Sometime later, the families wrap themselves in reindeer hides and drift into deep sleep. Quietly, the hungry wolves grab the discarded bones and carry them away, but the families are unafraid. They have no fear that the wolves will consider them prey, for the pack has stayed close to the band and lived off its discards for generations. Even children know individual animals by sight. Both humans and beasts behave unthreateningly, predictably, both social animals who rely on one another in inconspicuous ways.

At some point, after centuries of juxtaposition in bitterly cold landscapes, and also in warmer climates, in all manner of places, some wolves joined humans and evolved into dogs. Quite why they did so, and when, is a matter of ongoing debate, but we know that it happened long before we became farmers, settled in permanent villages, and herded farm animals, probably well before fifteen thousand years ago.

All the experts agree that the Eurasian gray wolf (
Canis lupus
) was the ultimate ancestor of domestic dogs. Genetics tell the tale.
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The mitochondrial DNA of dogs, inherited through females, differs at the most by a mere 2 percent from that of wolves, whereas that of their closest wild relative, the coyote, shows a 4 percent difference (see sidebar “Dogs, Wolves, and DNA”). It may well be more complicated than that, for interfertility between canids is commonplace, which would make for a more diverse ancestry.
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Fifteen millennia in the past, the world was in the final grip of the Ice Age. Enormous ice sheets mantled Scandinavia and much of North America; global sea levels were about ninety-one meters (three hundred feet) lower than today. A vast expanse of open, treeless steppe extended from the Atlantic deep into Siberia; an intensely frigid, windy land bridge linked Northeast Asia and Alaska. Nine-month winters were the norm, Europe and Eurasia home to a remarkable bestiary of cold-adapted mammals, among them aurochs (the primordial ox), bison, reindeer, and wild horses. Predators large and small abounded, among them the gray wolf and human beings, both of whom preyed on animals of all kinds. The humans were adept, ingenious hunters, popularly known as Cro-Magnons, named after a rock shelter in southwestern France where they first came to light in 1868.
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They first settled in small numbers throughout Europe about forty-three thousand years ago. For tens of thousands of years, wolves and people shared a challenging environment, not necessarily competing, but each closely observing the other, often at surprisingly close quarters. This juxtaposition led to profound changes in the relationship between them.