Read The Company of Wolves for Free Online Page B

pursuit. They are built for speed and endurance. Cats, on the other hand, are designed largely to lie in wait and take prey by stealth. Because they are built for speed, dogs walk on the very tips of their toes. Cats are slightly more flat-footed, a trait that allows them to maintain sharp claws, whereas dogs wear theirs down. Cats have wrists that turn, and with their extensible claws they can grab a prey and hold on to it while biting.
    Long legs alone don’t make a runner: runners need long noses. Long-distance running produces a lot of body heat, and, to vent that heat before it forces the animal to stop or damages the animal’s organs,dogs have long muzzles. Carnivores, like most of the mammals, don’t sweat. They cool down by panting. A large portion of a dog’s blood is pumped through the blood vessels of the nose. The
rete mirabile
, a network of blood vessels at the base of the brain, carries this cooled blood from the nasal passages across the arteries conducting blood from the heart to cool the brain. Thus, a dog’s long face is there not just to smell things but to chase things.
    Dog skulls tell yet more about evolution’s choices. Cats are shorter-muzzled and have, for the size of their jaws, a more powerful bite than dogs. A lion, for instance, can bite through the neck of a buffalo. Cats tend to hunt alone, coming together solely to breed. Only lions and cheetahs hunt in groups. The solitary habit probably explains, too, why the largest cats are larger than the largest dogs. A single lion or tiger or leopard can bring down a large prey that even a pack of dogs might be unable to tackle.
    Since dogs can’t deliver the quick fatal bite, they tend to hunt in packs. Their jaws are designed to nip and tear. When wolves attack a moose, one wolf may grab the moose’s nose and hang on while the much larger moose shakes him like a rag doll, trying to dislodge him. Meanwhile, other wolves are diving in from the rear to slash at the moose’s flanks. The operation may take hours. The wolves will withdraw and wait while the wounded moose stiffens or weakens from loss of blood. Death can be slow for the prey, and because this seems cruel and inefficient, it has earned wolves the scorn of humans.
    Much is made of a wolf’s fangs, but it is worth noting that a wolf’s canine teeth are not really all that distinctive. Big canines are relatively common among mammals. Several species of deer have diabolically overdeveloped canines that protrude over their lips. Pigs elaborate their canines into huge tusks that curl back toward the eye. Hippopotami have extravagantly developed canines curving into sharp tusks. It’s not the canines that make wolves special—it’s the teeth behind them, the carnassials.
    The teeth of dogs may also tell something about their social order. Dogs have four premolars, cats only two. Once a cat has stabbed or suffocated its prey to death, it can drag the prey to a tree or some safe place and eat without hurrying. But because they hunt in packs, dogs cannot. In a pack, there are fights over meat, and a slow eateramong fast eaters may be doomed. Premolars are useful for holding food, and for shearing it off quickly so that it can be bolted down. The dog’s extra premolars might have evolved as a way of coping with the darker side of sociability—the greed, jealousy, and envy that are the shadows of cooperation, love, and care.
    Coordinated pursuit requires greater intelligence. The wolf’s ancestors learned to track, to communicate with one another, and to read strengths or weaknesses in prospective prey. Wolves learn what to hunt and how to hunt it. There are wolves that live today among livestock but never seem to think of cows as food. Near Churchill Bay, Ontario, a wolf pack learned to distract mother polar bears long enough to kill and eat their cubs. In this century, Alaska’s Brooks Range wolves were almost eradicated by poisons, traps, and disease, and in the absence of predator