Oregon's `Wolf Lady' Operates Crash Pad For Lone Predators

WALDPORT, Ore. - When her white wolves turn their noses skyward and answer the nighttime howls of the coyotes in the neighboring hills, Lois Tulleners knows her sacrifices are worth it.

Since creating her wolf sanctuary in the Coast Range east of Waldport, she has lost a building to fire and been drained of most of her money.

But she feels lucky.

"I have so much peace and satisfaction and joy," she said.

Tulleners, a lean woman whose face and hands are weathered by long hours of outdoor work, stresses that wolves are shy and passive animals who have never attacked a human in the wild.

On this day, her 45th birthday, vultures circle, eyeing the carcass of a roadkill deer inside the fenced enclosure where four Arctic wolves laze away the sunny afternoon in the shade of a tree.

"My goal is to give them the happiest and safest life I can for the rest of their lives," she said, "and to teach people wolves are necessary to the Earth. They were here long before we were."

The sanctuary is believed to be the only one in the world specifically for Arctic wolves, and one of only two wolf sanctuaries in Oregon.

Tulleners started the nonprofit White Wolf Sanctuary in April 1998. It was the culmination of a dream that began 15 years ago in California when she helped care for a friend's wolf hybrid. Over the years, her curiosity about wolves has become the focal point of her life.

Divorced with no children, Tulleners had the freedom to pursue jobs in zoos and wolf sanctuaries where she could be near the powerful animals and observe their complex social structure and engaging personalities.

Ten years ago, she moved to Seal Rock and used her savings to buy a beach house with some acreage. She began caring for her first two white wolves, both sent to her by a sanctuary where she had worked.

The first wolf, a female named Kyenne, was a pup when she arrived eight years ago, rescued from a roadside zoo in New Mexico. The second, now a 5-year-old named Havoc, arrived a few years later after authorities seized him from a man in Indiana who was trying to domesticate him through beatings.

Too many people try to make pets of wolves, which have an untamable wild streak, she said. These are often the animals who end up in sanctuaries, without the skills needed to survive in the wild and needing care for the rest of their lives.

Tulleners decided her sanctuary would specialize in Arctic wolves, a gray wolf subspecies whose natural range is in the Arctic Canadian islands and Greenland. She says the worldwide population of Arctic wolves, now about 200, has dwindled because of declining caribou populations.

She finally found the land she was looking for - 60 acres, surrounded by timbered Siuslaw National Forest hillsides east of Waldport. It's the perfect blend of rugged beauty and isolation she sought, at the end of a two-mile dirt and gravel road through a locked gate.

Tulleners sold the beach house, fenced off 10 acres for Kyenne and Havoc and built a structure within the enclosure to serve as her office and a shelter for the wolves. She set up housekeeping with Lupus, a creaky 13-year-old malamute-wolf hybrid, in a 55-year-old cabin with no plumbing.

"I took baths in that washtub over there," she said.

Two more wolf pups - Nepenthe and Ventana - showed up a short time later, sent by Minnesota authorities who had rescued them from a man illegally raising them to be killed for their fur.

"My blood boils inside," she says, recalling the conditions in which the young wolves lived - in cages so small their tails are permanently bent. The two pups arrived in poor health, but they've grown into energetic 1-year-olds who frolic with the others in the twilight hours.

"That's when all hell breaks loose," she said. "They just play and play and play, running like lickety-split until it's dark."

She's provided space to two other Arctic wolves that were owned by a man who kept them on fenced acreage in Florida, where they learned to hunt and kill rabbits. After the man died, Tulleners kept the wolves until January, when they were relocated in Canada.

"I went with them and cried a lot," she said.

Her tears welled from mixed emotions: sadness at losing the animals, joy that they were going free.

"That's where they belong," she said. "They deserve to be free . . . the way God set it up."

Tulliner's day begins with the first feeding at 5:30 a.m. After that, she cleans the enclosure, administers vitamins, trims nails, cleans ears and hauls in road-kill carcasses sent by road crews.

She plays with the wolves, works with them face to face, sometimes even sleeps with them - always careful to observe the rules: Don't try to dominate the wolves, she says, yet don't appear too subservient. Don't wear cologne or glasses. Don't act macho. Respect them and their moods. And know when to get out of the enclosure.

"You can't play with them very long," she said. "They'll just knock you down and drag you around like a toy."

Tulleners' operation sustained a setback Nov. 1, when a shelter and office building valued at $50,000 burned down after she lit a propane heater.

Volunteers are converting an old barn into a better shelter inside the new fencing, but she needs more lumber to finish the project.

The fire and her dwindling savings - the animals cost about $100 a day to feed - sometimes leave her discouraged. But Tulleners said she has never thought of quitting and parting with her wolves.

"I couldn't do that," she says. "I've never lost hope. I just can't. This is for life."