This came from one of my email lists to which I subscribe, "The Other Syntax Discussion", but I thought it was too interesting to not post!!
In the last, decisive moments before a wolf pack lunges upon its prey, something extraordinarily peculiar occurs - something writer Barry Lopez has called "the conversation of death."
The pack will circle a caribou or a moose herd, in plain view, seemingly signaling their intent to kill. The prey animals will pause and make eye contact with the wolves. And then some inscrutable communication, a ritual exchange little understood by humans, passes between them.
It's as if the prey signal back, either their willingness to be killed, or their determination to survive. A wounded moose, safely hidden in the grass, may rise on shaky legs, as if deliberately giving itself away. Though it could likely hold the wolves off simply by standing its ground, it suicidally turns tail and runs - the very thing most likely to draw an attack.
Other times, a concerned moose will trot toward the pack, make eye contact, and the wolves will simply melt away into the forest, as though entirely distinterested. As if the prey animals fate had been decided by some mutual agreement, some ceremonial pact of long ago, between hunter and hunted. It's a conversation so naturally sublime, humans do not hear it.
That we find this behavior so curious demonstrates how little we know
about predator and prey in the wild - even though this intricate pas de deux of death, the sacred ritual of the kill, is central to the whole web of life.
- Stefan Bechtel
The Riddle of the Wolves
American Way Magazine
January 1995
