Mistakes - Crappy First Impressions

One day, I accidentally spied on my boss while he was on the toilet.

the Visitors Center

My first job ever as a wildlife biologist in training was as an intern at the Wolf Education and Research Center near Winchester, Idaho. Back in 2004, this place still housed the remaining pack members of the Sawtooth Pack, a somewhat famous captive pack raised by photographers/filmmakers Jim and Jamie Dutcher. They spent two years with these wolves in an enclosure in the Sawtooth Mountains, making a documentary about life in a wolf pack. When the project ended, they talked with the Nez Perce tribe and got some tribal land set aside to house the wolves for the remainder of their lives.

By the time I got around to working with them, only five wolves remained: the three pups from the famous alpha pair Kamots and Chemukh (named Ayett, Motoki, and Piyip) as well as Motomo, the alpha male, and an ex-alpha named Amani. (Amani lived by himself in a separate pen. It's a long story, but he had to be neutered to go with the other male who lived in that pen, named Matsi, who died a year before I got there. A neutered male would be pretty quickly killed by the rest of the pack.)

My duties as an intern were to conduct regular "enclosure walks" with the wolves to check on the enclosure and on the wolves' health and behavior. I also led guided tours for visitors, ran the Visitors Center, and did various other projects like making interpretative displays and helping build a new cook shack for the interns. For a first job, it was pretty cool. There was some drama, as is to be expected whenever you put three college girls in a confined space for a summer with a somewhat moody supervisor (who also lived on site), but it was worth the pretty rare experience of getting to wake up to the sound of wolves howling every single morning.

The coolest part of the job was definitely living in Wolf Camp. Because the Center was on Nez Perce tribal land, everything had to be designed with the idea that it could easily be removed if the tribe required it. Thus we had no electricity, no running water - nothing. We lived in wall tents on site, mere feet from the main wolf enclosure. We used a cook tent for food (and later the cook shack, which had actual wooden walls instead of canvas) with a propane stove and water jugs hauled in regularly from Winchester, and every morning we had to clear off the mouse droppings from the countertops so we didn't get Hantavirus. Every so often we would go to WERC's main office in Winchester to do laundry and take a shower.

And I loved it. I remember my tent fondly. Since I was the first intern to arrive for the summer, I got the "assistant biologist" tent (since there was no assistant biologist that summer), which was a bit bigger and nicer than the other intern tents. It was also a bit more private. From the parking lot, you walk south down the Wolf Camp road to the three intern tents all  bunched together near the cook tent, then on south past the outhouse, and then on to my tent. Further down, closest to the wolf enclosure, was my boss's tent.

Well worth the 1/2 mile walk.

There were specific rules about life in Wolf Camp, one of the most important being how human waste was disposed of. Whenever we had to pee, we could just pee on the road, but whenever we felt the need to produce solid waste, we had to use an outhouse. I usually would just walk the half mile to the nice composting toilet at the Visitors Center whenever I felt the need arise, because the outhouse in Wolf Camp wasn't especially nice. It was just a big oil barrel with a toilet seat on top of it, enclosed on just three sides because the south side had to stay open so sunlight could hit it and speed up decomposition. Used toilet paper couldn't go in the barrels, so you had to put it in an empty coffee tin and burn it when you were finished.

The wonderful, glorious composting toilets.

This particular adventure occurred one of my first nights in Wolf Camp. As I said, my boss was kind of moody (I can imagine why, what with the constant turnover of annoying young interns), and because I had issues of my own, he didn't really like me very much from the get-go. Still, I wanted to make a good impression.

One night just before bed I decided to have a pee, so I strapped on my headlamp and walked out of my tent to the road. I scanned the road to the right (toward my boss's cabin) and to the left (toward the outhouse) to make sure nobody was coming down the road, when something caught me eye.

There, up the road, were a pair of eyes looking back at me.

I knew instantly that it was an animal of some kind. Humans don't have the reflective tapetum lucidum that produces the bright eyeshine of most wild animals. My heart leapt up into my throat and I stared hard at the lights, trying to figure out what the animal was: a deer? A bobcat? A black bear? And then, seconds later, a second set of eyes appeared, glowing out of the darkness, unblinking.

I probably stared at those lights for a good three or four minutes. They didn't move, just kept staring right back at me. Of course, I had my headlamp on, and it didn't go far enough to illuminate the animals and I was sort of scared to turn it off. After all, I was in the middle of freaking Idaho - the first time I'd ever spent any long amount of time away from a comfortable city house - and if something was going to eat me, I wanted to know what it was first.

But somewhere through all this staring and glaring, I suddenly remembered: my boss has two cats. And they follow him around wherever he goes.

The moment that thought crossed my mind, the outhouse - at which I had been shining my headlamp for the past three or four minutes - lit up from within in a bright orange glow, as my boss torched his toilet paper. And the open part faced south. Almost directly toward me.

Instantly I rushed back into my tent and blew out my kerosene lamp. I waited in silence. Seconds later I heard the crunch-crunch-crunch of my boss's footsteps passing my tent to go back to his cabin. I prayed he wouldn't stop in, and he didn't, luckily. I also prayed he somehow wouldn't know that the person shining a light on him as he did his business was me, but... there wasn't really anyone else around I could blame it on.

The next day, he took me and another intern to the visit the wolves. As we knelt in front of the fence, the wolves sniffing and licking our hands through the chainlink, my boss was telling us something about the history of the Sawtooth Pack - I don't remember what - when he abruptly turned to me and said, "If you want to watch wildlife at night, you should know they don't really like when you shine a bright light on them."
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EPILOGUE
As of July 2013, the Sawtooth Pack is no more; Piyip was the last remaining member, and he finally died at the ripe old wolf age of 17. WERC now houses a pack of wolves rescued from a roadside zoo, and it continues to carry out its mission of educating the public about an animal that, even today, has a pretty bad reputation (seen Frozen yet?).

 Clockwise from upper left: me with Amani; Ayett (alpha female); Motomo (alpha male); and Piyip (both bottom photos). I never got a good picture of Motoki, who was my favorite.