Gordon Wiltsie

Looking south from the Carpathians toward the Transylvanian Alps.

CHRISTOPH'S MISSION with the Carpathian Large Carnivore Project is to investigate the biology and population status of Romania's three major species of predator—the wolf, the brown bear, the European lynx—and to explore measures that might help conserve those populations into the future. His immediate purpose, with this snow-trek toward Fata lui Ilie, is to use the cabin as a base for three or four days of wolf-trapping. The trapped wolves, if any, will be fitted with radio collars for subsequent tracking.

Since 1994, Christoph and his coworkers have collared 13 wolves, at least three of which have been illegally shot. Two have dispersed beyond the study zone, and four others have fallen cryptically silent, probably because their transmitters failed. One of the missing animals is a female named Timis, the first Carpathian wolf Christoph ever touched. Timis, the alpha bitch in her pack, was a savvy survivor, and she opened his eyes to the range of lupine resourcefulness in Romania. Originally trapped and collared in a remote valley near the city of Brasov, Timis and her pack soon relocated themselves closer and began making nocturnal forays into town. On Brasov's south fringe was a large meadow where they could hunt rabbits, and by skulking along a sewage channel, then crossing a street or two, they could find their way to a garbage dump, rich with such toothsome possibilities as slaughterhouse scraps, feral cats, and rats. In 1996, Timis denned near the area and produced ten pups. With the aid of a remote camera set 50 meters from the den, Christoph spent many hours watching her perform the intimate chores of motherhood. But times change and idylls fade. Timis disappeared, the fate of her pups is unknown, and in the enterprising ferment of post-Communist Romania, the rabbit-filled meadow is now occupied by a Shell station and a McDonald's.

At the time of our visit, only two wolves are still transmitting, one of which is a male known as Tsiganu, recently collared in another valley not far from Brasov. The wolf population of the Carpathians is sizable, but the animals are difficult to trap—far more difficult than wolves of the Yukon or Minnesota, Christoph figures—probably because their long history of close but troubled relations with humans has left them more wary than North American wolves. Romania is an old country, rich with natural blessings but much wrinkled by conflict and paradox, and history here is a first explanation for everything, including the ecology and behavior of Canis lupus. Go back 2,000 years, before the imperial Romans put their stamp on the place, and you find the Dacia, a fearsome indigenous people who referred to their warriors as Daois, meaning "the young wolves."

Just after World War II, wolves roamed the forests throughout Romania, even the lowland forests, with a total population of perhaps 5,000. They preyed on roe deer, red deer, and wild boar, but were also much loathed and dreaded for their depredations against livestock, especially sheep. In the 1950s the early Communist government, under a leader named Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej, sponsored a campaign of hunting, trapping, poisoning, and killing of pups at their dens to reduce the wolf population and make the countryside safe for Marxist-Leninist lambs. That anti-wolf pogrom worked well in the lowlands, which were more thoroughly devoted to agriculture and heavy industry. On the high slopes of the Carpathians, though, where lovely beech and oak forests were protected by a tradition of conscientious forestry and where dreams and memories of freedom survived among at least a few of the hardy rural people, wolves survived too.

The Carpathians also served as a refuge for brown bear and lynx. The bear population stands presently at about 5,400, a startling multitude of Ursus arctos considering that in all the western United States (excluding Alaska), where we call them grizzlies, there are only about a thousand. The wolf population, at somewhere between 2,000 and 3,000, represents a large fraction of all Canis lupus surviving between the Atlantic Ocean and Russia. Why has Romania, of all places, remained such a haven for large carnivores? The reasons involve accidents of geology, geography, ecology, politics, and the ironic circumstance that a certain Communist potentate, successor to Gheorghiu-Dej, came to fancy himself a great hunter. This of course was the pipsqueak dictator Nicolae Ceausescu, who for decades ruled Romania as though he owned it.

Born in the village of Scornicesti and apprenticed to a Bucharest shoemaker at age 11, Nicolae Ceausescu made his way upward as a gofer to early Communist activists during their years of persecution by a fascist regime. He served time in prison, a good place for making criminal and political contacts. He was cunning, he was ambitious and efficacious though never brilliant, he bided his time, sliding into this opening and then that one, eventually gaining ultimate control as general secretary of the Communist Party in 1965. He styled himself the Conducator, a lofty title that paired him with an earlier supreme leader, Marshal Ion Antonescu, the right-wing dictator who had ruled Romania during World War II. Ceausescu distanced himself from certain Soviet policies such as the invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968, and thereby made himself America's favorite Communist autocrat, at least during the administrations of Nixon, Ford, and Carter. His manner of domestic governance remained merely Stalinism in a Romanian hat, but for a long time the United States didn't notice.

Ceausescu's dark little shadow cast itself across Romania for 25 years, with the help of his Securitate apparatus of secret police and informers, which included as many as three million people in a nation of just 23 million. Such institutional menace wasn't uncommon in the Communist bloc, of course, but it may have weighed more heavily here, due to a certain wary, fatalistic strain in the national spirit. Romania under Ceausescu had a few brave dissenters, but not the same sort of robust underground network of dissidents that existed in the Soviet Union or, say, Czechoslovakia. There's a nervous old Romanian proverb, counseling caution: Vorbesti de lup si lupul e la usa. Speak of the wolf and he's at your door.

Ceausescu's industrial, economic, and social policies were as wrongheaded as they were eccentric. Though he was Stalinist in style, he had that self-important yearning for independence from Moscow, and so he pushed Romania to develop its own capacities in oil refining, mineral smelting, and heavy manufacturing. During the 1970s his industrialization initiative sucked off a huge fraction of the country's GNP and generated a big burden in foreign loans; then in the 1980s he became obsessed with paying off those loans and made the Romanian populace endure ferocious austerity in order to do it. He exported petroleum products and food while his own people suffered in underheated apartments without enough to eat. He instituted a systematization campaign, as he called it, which essentially meant bulldozing old neighborhoods and villages in order to force their inhabitants into high-rise urban housing projects, where he could better control the flow of vital resources. His systematization created a larger proletariat living amid ugly urban blight, and his industrialization resulted in some horrendous point-source pollution problems, such as the smelter at Zlatna and the gold-reprocessing plant at Baia Mare, which just recently let slip a vast wet fart of toxic sludge from one of its containment ponds into the Danube drainage, poisoning fish downstream for miles. But for some reason Ceausescu did not become obsessed with exporting timber, and so the Carpathian highlands remained wild and sylvan while other parts of the country grew grim.

The Conducator himself lived a life of splendorous self-indulgence and paranoia, like a neurasthenic king. He had food-tasters to protect him from poisoning. He had germ obsessions like Howard Hughes. He trusted only his wife, Elena, who was his full partner in megalomania and his chief adviser on how to govern badly. With her, he sealed himself away in palatial residences, letting the people see him mainly through stagey televised ceremonials. For bolstering his ego and political luster he depended also on occasional mass rallies, for which tens of thousands of citizens were mandatorily mustered to express—or anyway, feign—adulation. The last of those, on December 21, 1989, went badly askew and led to his fall. All the other Communist leaders who got dumped during that dizzy time, from Gorbachev down, were content to go peacefully, but Nicolae Ceausescu required execution.