The Story
Nikai lies on the bark mulch and howls anyway. The white gray wolf tips a long white muzzle skyward, while Silas, grizzled tan and gray, stands above and opens his mouth on a note of his own.
Both are captive-born gray wolves at the Wolf Conservation Center in South Salem, New York, where they work as ambassador wolves, helping teach the public about wolves and their role in the environment. The woods behind them are just turning, green going to yellow on a clear autumn day.
Silas wears the coat the species often shows, buff-tan grizzled with gray and black, with a dark band across his shoulders. Nikai is close to pure white. In Yellowstone, gray and black wolves turn up about half and half, and white is the rare one.
Through forest a wolf's howl can be heard about 11 kilometers away; across open country, about 16. Pack members use it to communicate, to advertise a territory and to coordinate social activities.
The International Wolf Center describes two kinds of howl. A defensive howl keeps the pack together and strangers away, guarding pups and kill sites. A social howl helps wolves find one another and rally, and possibly just have fun. With these two a body length apart, finding each other is hardly the point.
Then Silas swings round to face the trees, and a moment later walks past the lens so close that he fills the frame, head low, amber eyes on the camera. His tail hangs down behind him, black at the tip, the way a wolf carries it: straight out or down, never curled. Nikai stays down on the mulch as he goes.
