No less powerful and primal than the moon`s tug on the tides, wolves have drawn Jim Brandenburg north for 20 years.
As a boy on the Minnesota prairie, he dreamed of what lay beyond N on the compass point. Wolves. Forests. Snow.
”It was a romantic thing as a child,” Brandenburg said. ”I have spent the last 20 years of my life pursuing wolves. They are so elusive.”
Brandenburg, a 45-year-old wildlife photographer for National Geographic, Life, Audubon, Smithsonian and other magazines, was in St. Louis recently to sign posters of his wolf photographs. A good-natured recluse attuned to the rhythms of the natural world, Brandenburg found the long hours in crowded shopping malls exhilarating and exhausting.
But enduring the rigors of self-promotion has been made easier knowing he is also promoting the cause of the wild wolf, Brandenburg said. He accepts it as another in a succession of inevitabilities that have intertwined his life with ”the most misunderstood animal I have ever come across.”
Since the publication in 1988 of his book of photographs, ”White Wolf:
Living With an Arctic Legend,” and a National Geographic/BBC television special about arctic wolves, Brandenburg has been sought after as a spokesman for the wolf.
”I can`t get away from the experience,” Brandenburg said. ”It keeps following me around, and people want more. It really seems to be changing peoples` attitudes about wolves.”
The wolf`s status as an environmental cause celebre has also brought Brandenburg a measure of wealth and a dollop of criticism.
”It has become almost an embarrassingly good living,” Brandenburg said. ”A lot of critics feel I am taking advantage of, riding the wave of, wolf popularity. What they don`t know is that for 20 years I didn`t make a nickel off that work, and all of a sudden they have some economic value.”
The first wild wolf in Brandenburg`s life was a fateful gift. He was working for a television station in Duluth, Minn., doing short features, and decided to go to an area where there were supposed to be wolves.
”I didn`t know you just didn`t go into a forest and look for wolves,”
he laughed. ”But on the first trip I saw a wolf and virtually walked right up to it and filmed it. That has hardly happened since.”
That was in 1969. A second fateful encounter was in 1986 as he waited for a bush plane to pick him up after shooting a story on an expedition to the North Pole for National Geographic.
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Walking alone in the soft half-light of the Arctic Circle in March, he stumbled upon a pack of white wolves.
”These white ghosts came out of the ice fog right at me, sat down a few feet away and surrounded me, and started howling,” he said. ”Instantly, I thought, `Here is my life . . . my story. I want to spend years with these creatures and tell their story.”`
Brandenburg spent the next three years on Ellesmere Island photographing and filming the wolf pack. The experience gave him a profound respect for wolves, and a soulful connection to them that he is hesitant to describe.
”It baffles you,” he said. ”I have worked with many other animals where you can see a countenance or an intelligence. But wolves are spooky. It is almost like they have another sense, they are so intuitive.”
Not everyone, of course, is eager to embrace the wolf, as anyone who lives west of the Rockies or in Europe knows. Brandenburg is deeply involved in a controversial federal project to reintroduce the gray wolf into Yellowstone National Park. Once a natural part of that ecosystem, wolves were exterminated by hunters and ranchers who are still adamant that the predators be banished.
In 1986, Brandenburg (whose first career was as a rock `n` roll guitarist) formed a group called Concerts for the Environment. Proceeds from concerts given by James Taylor, Paul Winter and Jackson Browne, among others, were donated to a fund to reimburse Western ranchers for any livestock that might be killed by wolves in Yellowstone. ”I am very proud of that,”
Brandenburg said.
Most of the time, Brandenburg is on the road photographing wildlife for nature magazines, or his own projects.
He is at work on two books of his own, and three stories for National Geographic, including a special issue commemorating the 500th anniversary of Columbus` discovery of America. For that story, ”the best assignment I ever had,” Brandenburg sought out ecosystems in the United States that have been largely untouched for 500 years.
Between trips, he lives a secluded life in northern Minnesota-prime wolf country-among the largest wild wolf population in the nation.
His home, Ravenwood, sits on 120 wooded acres adjacent to the Boundary Waters near Ely, Minn. Ravenwood is closed to the public to limit the disturbances to resident wolves and to give Brandenburg as much time as possible to read, write and study. He is at work on a book of his intimate and strange encounters with wolves and their chief allies, ravens.
”Of all the creatures I have run into, the wolf and the raven seem to have the most magic about them,” he said. That magic is well-documented in much Indian mythology, which affords wolves and ravens the highest respect.
”For many years, I wanted to be a scientist,” Brandenburg said. ”I didn`t have the brainpower for calculus and chemistry, so I fell back on painting pictures.
”My mission is to move people. It has a bigger effect in changing politics and attitudes.”
Brandenburg is also interested in a personal, spiritual exploration of the subjects he photographs. Although he shuns the New Age label some have pinned on him, he admits he is searching to rekindle the deep, forgotten connection between humankind and nature.
”To me, these photographs are like a prayer or an offering,” he said.
”The more we drift away from an attached sense of nature, the more we are getting to a point where we really can`t function. Somehow we have got to get back into a spiritual relationship between people and the land. That is the only way to save our culture.”