Wolverines run biologist ragged

WHITEFISH, Mont. – Author Doug Chadwick’s main characters are inevitably long in tooth and claw, with great, hairy, formidable reputations, wild and woolly and fiercely independent.

To bring them alive on the page, Chadwick has tracked the world’s last untamed reaches, listening for the growl of the grizzly bear, the song of the wolf and the whale, the silence of the snow leopard. He’s been to Congo, Siberia and the Great Barrier Reef, has described the vastness of beetles and the tiniest details of elephants.

A biologist by training, a popular science writer by sheer talent, Chadwick has what appears to be a bottomless curiosity, and a profound respect for the wild critters that form the rugged backbone of his work.

“I’m not doing this for any reason except to learn cool stuff,” he said. “Because I’ll never understand what makes people go; but with an animal, there’s at least some chance I can discover why it does what it does.”

Like a kid rolling over rocks just to see what’s underneath, Chadwick has rambled the four corners to uncover wonders for National Geographic magazine and for a growing collection of books, the latest of which is titled “The Wolverine Way.”

“The wolverine,” wrote Ernest Thompson Seton, “is a tremendous character … a personality of unmeasured force, courage and achievement, but so enveloped in mists of legend, superstition, idolatry, fear and hatred that one scarcely knows how to begin or what to accept as fact.”

In other words, a perfect companion for Chadwick.

Like the wolverine, Chadwick prefers Glacier National Park’s high mountain wilds – “uncompromisingly harsh but less troubled, physically riskier yet somehow more reassuring and far more free, this was a world that wouldn’t lie to you.”

For the past many years, Chadwick stayed upright on Glacier’s trails as a volunteer for a groundbreaking wolverine study. Coordinated by researcher Jeff Copeland, driven by biologist Rick Yates, the ambitious study headed straight into the bright white heart of winter, into terra incognita, with a plan to fill in blank spaces on the biological map.

With beaver bait and log-cabin traps, with radio collars and GPS implants, they hoped to part those mists of legend and superstition to reveal what facts they could.

“We were hunter-scavengers of new information,” Chadwick wrote. “Somebody had to get busy scouring big swaths of corrugated terrain the wolverine way, scrabbling across cliff faces, squirming under overhanging ledges, and probing fresh sign to see where it might lead.”

Where it led, finally, was into terrain not just uncharted but also unimagined, a wolverine world mapped by scent where Chadwick met the very definition of wilderness, contained in a 30-pound ball of muscle, teeth and attitude.

Forget the solitary wolverine of legend. These animals appear to be downright social, with mates traveling together far beyond the breeding season – apparently for the sheer pleasure of the company.

The dominant male traveled an endless circuit, den to den, visiting and perhaps delivering food to his harem. Later, he traveled miles with his juvenile offspring – not just unknown, and unimagined, but unheard of among mammals.

The data showed wolverines scaling sheer cliffs, making bold winter ascents of Glacier’s highest peaks, running the country as if vertical didn’t exist.

“At any given hour on any day,” Chadwick wrote, “a set of ordinary radio signals could suddenly reveal a side to the animals almost nobody had ever suspected.”

Wolverines are tireless and tenacious, wired with an Ice Age metabolism that allows them to travel staggering distances across unbelievably rugged terrain in blizzard conditions, day after day after day. Data showed them roaming territories that extended hundreds of square miles, eating miles the way they were rumored to eat everything else.

And yet, as a species, wolverines are a delicate bunch, running the knife-edged ridge of existence, increasingly cornered by roads and traps and guns and subdivisions and, most of all, by a warming climate.

“If wolverines have a strategy, it’s this,” Chadwick wrote. “Go hard, and high, and steep, and never back down, not even from the biggest grizzly, and least of all from a mountain. Climb everything: trees, cliffs, avalanche chutes, summits. Eat everybody: alive, dead, long-dead, moose, mouse, fox, frog, its still-warm heart or frozen bones.”

An inspiration, of sorts, for a middle-aged biologist-turned-writer who’s only now realizing he has more years behind him than before him – and so who’s thinking more about what he’ll leave than what he can take.

“I will never really know what it’s like to be one of these hunter-scavengers,” Chadwick wrote. “On my best day, I could never even keep up with any for long. I feel humbled when I’m in the mountains, and I think that’s as it should be.”