Sequim Gazette Editorial and Letters to the Editor

Look into the eyes of a gray wolf and you see either the keystone species of the wild environment or a vicious, wanton killer of people, livestock and game.

One thing is certain: You'll never be quite the same.

I was privileged to know two men who'd stared long and hard into those yellow eyes and emerged, well, slightly crazed.

Herb Crisler doesn't have the legendary status he deserves in Clallam County. A Georgia boy who was drafted into the Army Air Corps in World War I to take aerial photographs of stands of spruce, he stayed on in Port Angeles as a wilderness guide and photographer.

Each spring, he and his wife would disappear into the Olympics with gear that included a 50-pound Pathé movie camera. Each fall, they'd emerge with film they shared in travelogues that soon became nationally renowned.

Walt Disney hired Crisler to film what became "The Olympic Elk," one of the first True Life Adventure documentaries that were the granddaddies of shows like those on Animal Planet.



Famous films

Later sent to Alaska to film "White Wilderness," the Crislers rescued an orphaned litter of wolf pups and brought them home. Lois wrote about the experience in her best-selling book, "Arctic Wild."

Although the experiment ended in tragedy when the wolves bred with dogs - all the animals were destroyed - it inspired the couple to found the Herb and Lois Crisler Foundation.

Its avowed purpose: Return wolves to the Olympic Peninsula.

I met the aging Crisler in the late 1970s. With a face weathered by years in the wild and a beard that cascaded down his chest, he was beginning to fail.

Still, he told me, "I remember when things had the pretty view."



Lone wolf of Loboland

My acquaintance with Crisler allowed me to interview Jack Lynch, who had spent most of the fortune he'd earned as a contractor on a pack of wolves from Pennsylvania.

They'd been sheltered by a doctor who accepted pups from hunters who hadn't the heart to kill them - even though wolf pelts brought handsome bounties from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, real treasures in those Depression years.

Lynch moved the pack to Gardiner, where he was forced to charge tourists admission to what he called Loboland.

When he was lucky, he was able to feed them road-killed deer. When he was hard up, he was forced to feed them dry dog food.

A wolf's digestive juices make short work of hair, hide and bone. Dog chow was a poor substitute.



Wolfman Jack

People who met Lynch came away thinking that he'd crossed the line from homo sapiens to canis lupis nubilus, the so-called buffalo wolves.

Veterinarian Jack Thornton, who writes a twice-monthly column for the Sequim Gazette, recalls how Lynch crawled into a wolf's den to administer an anesthetic prior to a critical operation.

Lynch himself told me how he had performed mouth-to-mouth resuscitation to save most of a litter whose mother was unable to nurture them.

With his gruff personality, hard-learned expertise and total devotion to his pack - Lynch amounted to an extra alpha male, he said - he wasn't popular with neighbors, especially those who wanted to develop property nearby.

One day he and the wolves simply vanished from Gardiner. He left no forwarding address and those who knew where he'd gone refused to reveal the location.

Drivers through Montana, however, notice billboards for a wolf preserve that sounds similar to Loboland.



Leaders of the pack

Crisler and Lynch would have found friends among the people who testified at a public hearing last Thursday in Sequim.

The speakers overwhelmingly supported moving wolves onto the Olympic Peninsula, especially into Olympic National Park.

Wolves once ranged throughout North America, from the small red wolves of the southern United States to the Mexican gray wolves, less imposing than the lobos, to the timber wolves of the Great Lakes and the arctic wolves of Alaska.



Call of the wild

Returning them to the peninsula and the park would restore a climax predator to the ecosystem.

It also would restore the howls of wolf packs to the natural sounds of the Northwest, a symphony to the ears of men like Crisler and Lynch.

Whether it can be accomplished is a question that currently has no answer.

I've looked into the eyes of wolves and felt their powerful pull on my emotions.

I've also looked into the wistful eyes of Herb Crisler and the feverish eyes of Lynch and heard their passionate pleas to restore wolves to the wild.

Perhaps I, too, am slightly crazed by the encounters with both wolves and their zealous admirers.

However, I think it's eminently sane to bring wolves back to the peninsula.



Jim Casey is the editor of the Sequim Gazette. It is purely by coincidence that he can be found staring at a full moon.