A Pack of Wolves Came After Glenn Villeneuve | Joe Rogan

There have been times when I ran out of food and I've literally tracked wolves and taken food away from them when they've killed caribou. What? Yeah. How many wolves were there? One time there was a lone wolf that got a caribou just ahead of me. He didn't have time to do anything except gut it for me. Literally. That's what they started eating is the guts and he had opened up its belly and pulled the guts out and the whole caribou was there. Wow. What happened that day? I was really hungry. We had run out of food. I was out there with my ex-wife and we had... And your kids? Had one baby at the time. So you're out there with a baby and you don't have any food. The baby was fine. She was nursing. And your wife doesn't have any food. Yeah. Well, we always had something to eat, just not enough. But I never ever had been out there when I didn't have something to eat every single day. Some days it was just one rabbit. Some days it was just one time again, which is very little food. But I've always been able to get something to eat. But this particular year, it was kind of early on. This was the winter 2006, 2007. I hadn't been out there that long. Made a miscalculation. I was counting on caribou showing up because so far I'd always seen a lot of caribou in the winter. But it didn't come. If I had known, I could have prevented the situation. But we had taken one moose in the fall. I'd killed a moose in September. And I thought, man, we got 500 pounds of meat. We're set. The caribou will come later in the winter. But it's amazing how much meat you can eat when you're not eating much of anything else. And all that I was eating at that time really was meat, fat, and maybe a cup of berries a day that I had gathered in the fall and froze. We went through that pretty fast. Found out that two adults can eat a large bull moose in three months if that's all you got to eat. I've eaten by myself a large bull moose in six months. Yeah. For people that don't know, a large bull moose is about 2,000 pounds. I don't think they're quite that big. But they're probably 1,500 pounds. You probably get 500 pounds of meat. So a Yukon moose is like 2,000 pounds? Yeah. People. They exaggerate too. They exaggerate a lot of things, Joe. But a big one, like a 60-inch bull? How much is that? Yeah. Something like that. That's actually what that bull was. It was about a 60-inch bull. Wow. That one was actually 57 if I remember. I don't pay too much attention to the exact measurements. So somewhere in the range of 1,500 pounds, which is like how many pounds of meat you think that is? I would guess that you probably are getting 500, 600 pounds of meat out of there. Are you taking the femurs and getting bone marrow out of them and doing all that jazz, too? Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. That's a really important part of my diet when I'm living off an animal is I like variety. And the animal has a ton of variety in it. One caribou will give you so many different options in terms of food if you know how to utilize it. I've eaten everything out of a caribou except the poop, literally. You can even eat part of the antlers. Really? Oh, yeah. In the spring when they're growing, they're soft on the ends. It's like a pickle. You skin them, you take the velvet off. In the last inch or two, it's got the consistency of a pickle. They're great. Really? You eat it raw? Yeah. I eat a lot of animals raw. I eat a lot of parts of a caribou raw. But anyway, you get a lot of variety because you eat all the organs, eat the eyes, eat the brain, eat the liver. You eat the brain. Oh, yeah. Really? Spinal cord. Whoa. Like I said, I've eaten everything except the poop out of a caribou, literally. I mean, you can even, the cartilage, you can get all kinds of variety. And it's nutritious. It's good for you. I mean, I learned about all this from the old people that used to eat this way. I wouldn't have, I would have been reluctant to eat certain things if I hadn't been educated by other people that you can do this. I was talking to this 90-year-old woman in Fairbanks, you know. And I asked her, so you eat the brains? Because I'm thinking, you know, mad cow disease, prions. Right. Yeah. She's like, oh, yeah, the brains are great. I did a little research. They've never found prionic disease in Alaska and any of the animals up there. So I was like, okay, I can start eating the brain. That's an issue that's happening more and more here in the lower 48. You're getting a lot of CWD, which is another prion disease. Very scary stuff. You know, there's parts of Wisconsin where my friend Doug Durin lives where, you know, 50% of the deer they test, test positive for CWD. Yeah. There's a real fatal disease and hasn't made the jump to humans yet, but they're very concerned. And you know, this is coming from the deer. Like you said, there's a lot of deer. And where deer and moose live together, the moose get it. We don't have any deer. So other than moose and caribou, that's why we don't have the prionic disease. Do you have no deer up there at all? Well, moose are a deer. A type of deer. Caribou are a deer, but we don't have anything other than moose and caribou. You don't have black tail, which would be a deer. Those are much further south. Down in southeast Alaska, I don't know the exact range, but nowhere near where I am. That's interesting. It's too harsh of a country. It's not the right habitat. Wow. So when you take this caribou away from the wolf, how does that go down? What happened that day was, thanks for reminding me, I've forgotten that story. That's what we were talking about. I had a trail up the mountain. There's a lot of snow in the winter, you know, two, three feet of snow. So you've got to have packed trails to walk efficiently, pack them down with snowshoes and stuff, and pretty much follow the same routes. I'm following my trail to go up the mountain looking for food that day, and I came on. There were no caribou around. I couldn't find a caribou anywhere. I didn't see caribou track for like months. They're migratory. And if they happen to migrate 10 miles away, I'm not going to see them. That's out of my range. I come on a track of one caribou. It's wounded. It's bleeding. It's being chased by one wolf, and it crosses my trail. So I start chasing. It was real fresh. It was snowing out, and I could tell that this has just happened. This injured caribou, this wolf is chasing it up this mountain. They're right ahead of me. I've got to follow this. Do you have a rifle? Yeah. Yeah. My rifle is my constant companion. I mean, that rifle goes just about everywhere I go up there. So I start just jogging up the mountain as fast as I can go. It's a 5,000-foot mountain, and this caribou is wounded pretty badly. He's bleeding almost continuously. And it's clear to me that if he doesn't make it over the top of that mountain, this wolf's going to get him. I mean, going down the other side, I don't know, but this wolf has a good chance of getting this caribou. This is usually the way they injure him. It takes time. It's not like they just run up and knock him down. Usually hamstring him, right? Yeah, they'll jump on their back. I see a lot of them injured on the big muscle right here on the back leg. Is that what you mean, hamstring? Yeah, right in here? Yeah. Yeah, they'll get them in there. You find a lot of caribou injured real bad that get away. They get away with big pieces of hide ripped off of them. I killed a caribou once that only had two good legs. It couldn't even walk anymore. Wow. I'm getting in the way. I start chasing them up the hill. They're kind of zigzagging up the hill. This caribou obviously doesn't know this mountain. It doesn't know where it's going. It heads in a direction where there's some cliffs on the other side of this ridge. I'm getting real hopeful at this point. I still haven't seen them. They're ahead of me on the mountain. Sure enough, the tracks come right up to the edge of the cliff, both the caribou and the wolf and go right over the top of the cliff. I'm like, there's no way that caribou survived getting down. I know this mountain like the back of my hand. I just sat down there and I listened. I sat there at the top of the cliff. Sure enough, it's real quiet out there in the winter. The Arctic is just dead silent. I start hearing the crunching in the snow of this wolf. He's down in the ravine and he knows I'm up there. He can sense that I'm up there at the top of the cliff and he wants to bug out of there at that point. He just walked up the other side of the ravine. I'm looking across the ravine and I see the wolf going up and I know, hey, that caribou is down in that ravine somewhere. He's just getting away from you. Yeah. Did they already know you by then? Because you had shot quite a few wolves. You had- I trapped a few. I shot a few, not tons, but- You shot a few on the show. One time on the lake where it's frozen and- Yeah. I didn't have a cameraman with me. That was actually- that story was told on the show and I documented it a little bit as much as I could with my little camera at the time. That day I shot three wolves, but that was a very unusual situation. Those wolves were actually trying to get me, which is almost unheard of. But this was years before that. This wolf and like almost every other wolf encounter I've ever had, every other wolf encounter I've ever had, the wolf wants nothing to do with you. I mean, the wolf knows I'm dangerous. And- How do they know you're dangerous? Are they having any interactions with other humans? Wolves know this all across North America. I've only been able to find two documented bona fide cases where wolves have killed humans in North America in recent times. There was this one guy, young guy up in Saskatchewan several years ago. There was one woman in Alaska that apparently was killed by wolves. It almost never happens. They just know that people are dangerous. They've been persecuted. I mean, there were bounties on wolves. I think it's in their DNA now. All wild animals, grizzly bears, they don't want anything to do with people. 99.9% of the time. It's interesting you're saying that grizzly bears, where they're hunted, don't want anything to do with people. They're having a real problem with grizzly bears in places like Montana where they don't hunt them, where they don't have any fear. Many, many generations of no fear of human beings. And you're getting a lot of maulings because of that. Yeah, I wouldn't be crazy about walking out in a national park where you're not allowed to bring a gun. Yeah. Well, Montana in particular, they have a lot. But in this case, the wolf wanted out of there. It walked up the other side of the ravine. I watched it. It was about 300, 400 yards from me. When he got up to the top of the ridge, he stopped way, way up high above. I remember looking at him through binoculars, or maybe it was the scope of my rifle. I just remember him giving a yawn. He laid down on the ground when he knew he was safe way up there and he just gave a yawn and I could see his tongue. It was just like a dog. I could see him give this yawn. Like he had just climbed up this big mountain in about 10 minutes, you know? So I just walked around the cliff, went down in there, got that caribou. I actually made a backpack out of his rib cage to carry it home. It was cold. It was like 25 below. That was pretty brutal, getting that thing back to the camp from up on the mountain there. How heavy was it? I don't know. A lot of things I don't weigh, but I'd say a caribou like that probably weighs about 250 pounds, something like that. Obviously, don't take all of that weight at one time with me. I carry as much as I can. Did you have a backpack that, like a pack frame? I had a frame and I just stuffed everything in the... I remember it was so cold and I was so tired up there running up this mountain in the wind. It's dark. It's dark up there. There's no sun in the winter. I just remember getting the head off that thing, throwing the legs and stuff in the rib cage and throwing it onto that frame I had. It was all inside the big rib cage. Still had the skin on it and everything. Was the wolf watching the whole time? He was up on top of the mountain. I wasn't paying close attention to him after that. I don't know how long he hung out up there. I would think that you would want to keep an eye on that fucker. He knows he's stealing his food. I've done this other times. Wolves, I spent a lot of times around the wolves. This is in a lot of times. When the snow conditions are just right, you can actually keep up with wolves, believe it or not. I've stayed with wolves all day long, going eight or 10 miles. When the snow is deep enough, they start walking single file and every wolf in the pack steps in exactly the same track. Their stride when they slow down to a walk like that is just right for me. I can step right in their tracks. I don't even need snow shoes. Wow. If there's less snow, you can't keep up with the wolf. Their normal gait, they're trotting. You can't even come close to that speed. When the snow gets deep and they get single file, if you're in good shape, you can jog behind wolves all day long. I followed wolves. I followed a pack of 12 wolves one time, eight or 10 miles. They were hunting caribou right in front of me. It was another time I remember taking caribou meat away from a pack of wolves, which I didn't even see. They had killed the caribou, but there's a lot of brush and different stuff around. I discovered it because the ravens flew up off it. I went over there and judging by the tracks, there were half a dozen wolves around. I took that caribou that time, brought it home and ate it. But I had a lot of interactions over the years with the wolves and I never had wolves act aggressive to me. I've had them act curious. I've had them act scared. I've had them act indifferent. I never had wolves act aggressive to me until that time, January 2012, when a pack of 20 wolves literally took after me out on the lake and I did shoot three of those wolves. What was that about? Why do you think they were taken after you? It was a very unusual situation. First of all, there were 20 wolves in one place. That's unheard of up there. That's totally unheard of. The largest pack of wolves I've ever heard a count of that far north was 17 wolves and that was back in the 1970s. Usually there's five, six wolves in a pack up there. It's a real hungry country. It's hard for them to feed themselves if the pack gets bigger than that. They have to split up and go somewhere new. But I don't know what happened that year. I don't know if two packs combined. I don't know if the pack just grew to that size, but it was unheard of. Anyway, I'm up on a mountain. I look down at the lake. It's in January. It's just twilight in the middle of the day. I see this big brown spot on the ice. I'm like, what the hell's that? It's like out in front of my cabin about 500 yards. It's a big brown spot. First I thought it was water overflow that comes up through the ice sometimes when you get a crack. Get out the binoculars. I'm looking and holy cow. That's a giant pack of wolves that just took something down on the lake. I can see like one of them is breaking off, one of them is breaking off and then coming back over and I realize what's going on. There was very little snow that year. Even though it was January, it had been cold since September, but very low precipitation. There was only about maybe four or five inches of snow, so I could literally run down the mountain. I was down at the lake within 20 minutes and I went right to my cabin. I got my camera. I got my tripod. I'm like, this is phenomenal. I got to document this. I start walking across the lake out to where they are to get pictures of this. I get about 350 yards from these walls. I still don't know what the animal is that they got there. I can hear them. You can hear bones breaking and stuff. The wolves, it's just amazing. I start taking pictures and I run out of batteries. I'm like, oh shit, I ran out of batteries. I got to go back to the cabin. That's like 150 yards behind me. I turn around, I start walking back to the cabin. When I get about 30 yards or so from the cabin, I look back over my shoulder and the whole goddamn pack of wolves is racing across the lake straight toward me. I've never seen anything like it. I sprinted like Jesse Owens through the door of that cabin. I was only 30 yards from it. I turn and I look back out the window and these wolves came right up into my yard. They were 50 yards from the front door, 20 wolves. Whoa. Yeah. Like this is unheard of. Wolves are usually high-tailing it out of there when they see people. So I get my new batteries. I get the camera set back up. I go back out. By the time I get back out in the yard, they're back over at this thing they've killed like 500 yards away and I want to get more pictures of this. I got my rifle too, of course. So I start heading back over. When I get about 350 yards from them, I start taking more pictures. I got a great picture. You can pull it up maybe. Yeah, I'm going to see that. It's in the notes section on my Facebook page is a story, an unusual occurrence with the wolves. They're all eaten and I start taking pictures again. And after I take some pictures, first one, then two, then three, the wolves, they're like, I can see they stop eating and they're looking at me. They're like 350 yards away, but I can just see that they notice that I'm back out there on the lake and they're sizing me up kind of. And then I see some of them are just really slowly moving toward me, like walking a few steps and stopping and I'm thinking, hmm, yeah, I got my rifle and everything, but there's a lot of wolves there. How do I know they're going to stop when I start shooting? You know, so I decided maybe it's best just make a slow retreat and I started backing up and walking back toward the cabin and the wolves, it looked like they were slowly walking towards me as I'm walking toward the cabin. When I got about, if I remember right, it was a hundred yards from the cabin. Those wolves started galloping. All 20 wolves started galloping towards me from that. Oh, Jesus Christ. Oh, wow, look at this picture. Yeah, those wolves right there. They start galloping towards me and I dropped that tripod right there where I was. And I was a hundred yards from the cabin. They were 400 yards from me and I ran as fast as I could for the cabin because I thought, hey, if I start shooting, what if they don't stop? It's 20 wolves there. I've got four or five rounds of, if I had one in the chamber, I had five rounds of ammunition there. I ran for the cabin. I go in the door and just like the time before, they're right there in my front yard. I look out and they're 50 yards away. They're all milling around, 20 wolves. I'm like, Jesus Christ, this is amazing. I've never seen anything like this. But I'm safe and sound in the cabin. So I just collect my thoughts. I'm like, man, it's time to teach these wolves a lesson. If I let those wolves leave now, they're going to think I'm just food. I run away when they see me. I mean, I could be out there in the night, in the dark, not even know wolves were around, get ambushed by them or something. So I had to shoot some of those wolves. So I loaded up the gun, made sure everything was perfectly right, put some extra ammunition in my pocket, checked everything out. Okay, I'm set to go out there with this gun and talk to these wolves about this situation. And I go back out and they were back at the moose. It turned out to be a moose they'd killed. They were back over there at the kill. So I thought, well, it'd be a lot safer if I shot from close to the cabin, rather than go out there on the open ice. So I'll just see if I can lure them back over here. And I started running back and forth right in front of my cabin on the ice just to get their attention. And sure enough, it worked. The whole pack of 20 wolves started racing across that lake in a full gallop straight toward me. I couldn't believe it. I was right in front of my cabin. I just run back and forth like 50 yards out to my little water hole in the ice and back to the cabin a few times. And they just started running right at me. So I sat right down there on the bank on the shore, right, you know, 15 feet in front of my porch and started shooting. I think if I remember right, the first one I hit was 264 yards. I measured it all off the next day. It was kind of interesting just checking out the tracks and seeing what had happened. I hit three of them. Yeah. What happened when one got hit? They stopped at the closest tracks to me were about 40 yards, you know, when it was happening, it was happening so fast. I was just sitting down, you know, braced shooting. I remember reloading after I shot five times. It all happened so fast. But then the next day when I had time, I went out there and looked at all the tracks and measured everything and sized up a situation, figured out where I'd hit different wolves and stuff. And I wrote that all down. That's what I was mentioning in the notes section there. My Facebook page, that story because I wanted when it was fresh in my mind to really have the details because I knew right then that something happened to me that doesn't really happen to people. I mean, to get, have a pack of wolves come after you is a very unusual occurrence. You could read all over the place that wolves don't attack humans, you know. I've read that many times. But they have. They have. At least a couple of them. Well, particularly historically. Historically. I mean, the whole little red riding hood, that's all because they were trying to warn children about wolves. Yeah. Now, when you found these wolves and you, like, when you started shooting and you hit one, did the other ones freak out? Did they realize what's going on? They started putting on the brakes. Like I said, the first wolf I hit was over 250 yards. I think it was 264 yards, something like that from me. Some of the tracks came about 40, 40 to 50 yards from me before they had stopped. They were doing U-turns, you could see. They were all just milling around. When I was reloading, I just remember seeing all these wolves milling around in front of me, like, running around in circles. I was like, holy cow. I'm reloading. I remember shooting one more time as they were headed away, but they all took off. They headed into the woods and one of the wolves that I had hit was paraplegic, but he was still going on two legs. So I ran in... Since find him. Yeah. I ran in the cab. The other two had just dropped immediately. One of them was hit right in the head, but I ran in the cab and grabbed my .22 because I didn't want to put a big 30-06 hole in this wolf that was paraplegic. I chased him down, caught up with him, shot him with .22. Then I could hear all the other wolves howling and howling. They're like probably almost half a mile away from me. By then they were up in the woods on the other side of the lake. I ran over to what they had killed. This was the first time I saw it. It was a year and a half old bull moose. It was still all there. The legs were still on it. I got pictures of it and stuff. They had just started eating it, not long before I started photographing. Are the pictures on your Facebook page? Not of that moose. They put those on LBZ, I think. What's LBZ? Life Below Zero. When they showed that story, that was way back, that was six years ago. That was one of my first stories. That's a different moose. I got charged by one out there one time. So when you find the wolves that you did shoot and you shot and killed three of them, do you eat them? You know, I ate some of those just because I was lawn food. I don't like to eat wolf meat if I can help it. I'm going to eat them. I'm going to eat them. I'm going to eat them. I'm going to eat them. I'm going to eat them. I'm going to eat them. I'm going to eat them. I'm going to eat them. I'm going to eat them. I'm going to eat them. I'm going to eat them. I'm going to eat them. I'm going to eat them. I'm going to eat them. I'm going to eat them. I'm going to eat them. I'm going to eat them. I'm going to eat them. I'm going to eat them. I'm going to eat them. I'm going to eat them. I'm going to eat them. I'm going to eat them. I'm going to eat them.