Aurora, aka Muffin, aka Growl Muffin, died peacefully in the lap of long time friend Gale Motter on the evening of January 29, 2001. She was one of a litter of three female pups born to Kaleah and Imbo in 1988. That was the year of three litters and Aurora grew up with ten other puppies. Of her immediate family she is survived by her litter sister Deneb, and her cousin Ursa. She and her sisters got off to a rough start. The day the pups were born, their mother, Kaleah, was involved in a severe fight with the alpha female Naima. Even when we removed Kaleah and her litter to a holding pen we suspected she was not giving the pups enough milk, so the three pups were removed a little early for hand rearing.

From the beginning Aurora was distinctive. Even among infant pups, who all have domed foreheads and short, blunt muzzles, Aurora's face was especially babyish. One of her photos from this period shows her looking very waif-like: big headed, pot-bellied, with huge solemn blue eyes, and a fuzzy infant coat. The photo is vaguely reminiscent of an Ethiopian famine relief poster child.

As the pups matured, little Aurora turned into a personality kid. She kept the fubsy baby face even as her sisters and cousins started to outgrow theirs. She could usually be found in the middle of things, stirring up wrestling bouts, competing for food, or inducing human foster relatives to cuddle her. One of my favorite memories of her involved Chinook as a puppy. Aurora, clamped on the tail of a napping Chinook, was trying to drag him around, but even then he was too big for her to do much with him. She did manage to keep her grip and walk in a circle around him when he woke, bewildered to find himself being slowly and incomprehensibly "spun" in place.

As the pups grew up Dr. Klinghammer wanted to place several at other reputable facilities. He was not sure he wanted to keep Aurora, who was showing signs of keeping her baby face rather than maturing into a typical representative of her species. Several of us wanted to keep her and promoted this idea. Aurora did her part, not only by looking like an adorable plush toy, but by being very happy to be cuddled.

When the pups were moved outdoors, Aurora's fate was decided by accident (or so Dr. Klinghammer wanted us to think). The holding pens of that era were connected by internal drop gates so that one staff member could shift animals from pen to pen while staying in the corridor. One fateful day, one of the interns was moving pups from one pen to another and the gate dropped accidentally, trapping Aurora's poor little paw. She screamed and limped away from the scene. The intern felt lower than a snake's navel. Aurora's paw swelled-evidently she had a couple of broken toes-and she limped pathetically for quite a while.

The technology did not exist to splint canine toes. It would be kind of like milking mice. You'd need little teeny equipment and when you were done you wouldn't have much. All we could do was offer sympathy and wait for "tincture of time" and "patient's tongue applied as needed" to effect a cure. Dr. Klinghammer opined disgustedly that we were stuck with Aurora-he did not want to pass on a "damaged specimen" to some other facility.

Eventually the swelling and pain subsided and Aurora began to race around like a quadrupedal bottle rocket again. I began to suspect that Dr. Klinghammer's disgust at being stuck with her was feigned. At intervals throughout the summer he would occasionally point out a turbo-charged little Aurora as she raced around, legs blurred, without the slightest sign of a limp, and remark in tones of faux outrage, "Look at that limp! We can't ever place her somewhere. She's a damaged specimen!" After declaiming this, he always cracked a huge grin with nothing faux about it.

Aurora remained a "baby face" all her life. We constantly had to explain her "different face" and many visitors had their vocabulary enriched with words and phrases like "neotenous" and "infant schema," and sometimes the less scholarly "inbred runt". One volunteer had to be cautioned to make sure visitors knew his explanation of Muffin's face (she chases parked cars) was a joke. More than one visitor looked at photos of the adult Aurora and wanted to know the name of the cute "puppy".

Though Aurora was not a typical wolf, she was valuable in several respects. With her pack mates she was often busy stirring up interactions. This was welcomed by our docents because she often did it during our open hours. Sometimes it was invitations to chase and be chased. Sometimes she harassed her female cousin, Vega, relentlessly. I will never forget seeing Vega, a large black female with burning gold eyes, fleeing from a creature who looked like a refugee from Bambi.

When she couldn't get pack members to join her in chases and wrestling, Aurora "played" by herself. One intern swore Aurora had imaginary friends. Another said she saw Aurora bow, inviting a clump of grass to chase her. Not only that, my informant solemnly averred that Aurora looked over her shoulder to see if the grass clump was following. Visiting student of canine behavior Thom Van Aken spent many a morning taking notes on the pack during Muffin's "childhood". While the others slept, Muffin engaged in riotous solitary play including, but not limited to, repeatedly leaping for objects laughably out of her reach. At the end of Aurora's hour long impersonation of a perpetual motion machine and tethered hot air balloon, Thom observed, "If she were a human child, her parents would have their hands full."

In 1991 Aurora double-denned with Altair, the alpha female. Altair gave birth first. She and Aurora both bonded with the litter and cared for them. When Aurora whelped a couple of days later it must have been too late for Altair to bond with them. Altair watched attentively and carefully took each pup as it was born and swallowed it. Aurora appeared not to understand what was happening. She still had Altair's litter, which she regarded as hers also, so this may have been why she did not appear to suffer at the loss of her own infants. A bonding of sorts took place between Altair and Aurora and for some time after, when Altair squelched the other females, Ursa and Vega, Aurora was often right beside Altair "helping" her assert dominance. By this means Muffin raised her own status at little risk to herself, a process we describe as "coat tailing" from the political phenomenon of which it reminds us-riding to political succession on another's "coat tails".

Aurora was in the pack until late in the winter of 1993-1994. This meant she got to live in the Turtle Lake Enclosure for about four months. During that time she was repeatedly harassed, principally by Vega. Often the culprits were Socrates and sometimes his brother Kiri, then in their first winter. We were not too worried because they did not bite her hard, but it must have been harder on her psychologically than we realized. One evening in February volunteer Brian Bailey and Dr. Klinghammer found her, alone, yet running tail tucked in fright. She had recently been mobbed, but had only one small cut on her temple. As she ran and whirled and snapped in near panic, there were no other wolves near-they had all run across the frozen pond. Dr. Klinghammer decided Aurora had had enough. With help from Brian, he got her into the airlock. She ran straight in, trembling, and then vomited. They leashed her and led her to a holding pen, officially retired from the pack.

For several weeks Aurora paid little attention to what was going on around her and was listless, though she continued to enjoy petting from humans. During this period, when we took her for walks she never made any attempt to approach the new pen. She explored the area around the Klinghammer house and the barn and the little area with the rainwater runoff stream. We took to hiding treats for her to find and worked on trying to coax her into the office. Gradually her natural effervescence began to reappear, a few bubbles at a time.

At some point during these first weeks out of the pack, she noticed that her next door neighbor, an old neutered male named Kuro, was punctiliously greeting her and even indulging in a little mild courtship, striking poses. She threatened him and from then on spent time intermittently stalking him and threatening him through the wire. Despite her less than cordial behavior, Kuro continued to be a gentleman and greet her nicely. He was also indirectly responsible for her introduction to fast food. He was getting anti-inflammatory medication to help his arthritis and he preferred it in a knock-off of McDonald's Sausage McMuffin. Aurora successfully wheedled tastes from me. When Kuro had to be put to sleep months later, Aurora acted quite deflated again, and could be described as lonely.

Fortunately we had another solution-Monty's low content wolf hybrid Tatanka, who thought female canines were wonderful. Unfortunately he was big and rowdy. This was not reassuring to Muffin. When, after introductions went smoothly, we turned them loose in one of the enclosures, Tatanka started chasing Aurora. She got frightened and froze, tail slightly tucked and averting her gaze. Wolves would have pinched, shoved, and provoked her into responding in a way that would egg them on to chase and grab her. Tatanka instead began bowing and barking. Muffin stayed very still. Tatanka lost interest and wandered off. Aurora unfroze. They came together again and again Tatanka chased Aurora. They repeated this sequence: when Aurora became frightened, she would stand still and refuse to move. Tatanka quickly stopped trying to provoke a reaction and wandered off. For a while it looked as if Muffin could not believe that he was locked into such a simple sequence. She kept freezing, sometimes when she did not appear to be very frightened. It looked as if she had found that this rather doggy distant relative had a reliable on-off switch and kept testing it. After a while she became completely comfortable in chase games with him-whenever he got too rough or aggressive or excited or all three, she simply froze until he calmed down and wandered off. They got so companionable that Tatanka got occasional invitations to "tea parties" in Aurora's pen. We could leave them together for several hours. Aurora usually decided he had worn out his welcome after a day or so of togetherness. She took a very dim view of his attempts to appropriate her leftovers so we did not wait to see what he'd do when her food was freshly delivered.

After several years, we phased their visits out. Aurora's eyesight was waning, which made it harder for her to interact with other canines in a way that was safe and enjoyable for her. (Tatanka was given a dog for his very own and devoted many hours to that dog, Kiwani, when his visits to Aurora were curtailed.) At this point, interactions with humans acquired more importance for Muffin. We were still a source of social stimulus, and a means whereby she could explore new areas or "shop" for pig ears in the gift store. She went on many walks with an entourage of seeing-eye humans.

Despite her small size and considerable malocclusion (in the form of an overbite), Aurora did get to go on bison demonstrations. We tell the audience we stack the odds in the bison's favor. When there are tiny calves in the pasture one way to stack the odds is to put in wolves who are less than enthusiastic about bison. One day when we had a calf less than twenty four hours old and we had promised a demonstration, we put in Aurora and her father, Imbo. Imbo was never very interested in hunting bison, though when we put him in with several black wolves, some of the young bison singled him out ("One of these things is not like the others...") and chased him around, resulting in a dramatic demonstration of a different sort. When paired as hunters, Imbo wandered off and took time to smell the roses, er, clover, and Aurora stayed close to us humans (one human said she heard Aurora singing the Jiminy Cricket song-"I'm no fool, no siree, I'm gonna live to be ninety three, I'm lookin' out for you and me 'cause I'm no fool....") refusing to go near the bison.

Sometimes the bison came to Aurora. One year a calf walked quietly up behind her. Aurora didn't notice until the calf nose-nudged her rump, boosting a surprised Muffin off the ground an inch or two. Then the calf, tail high with excitement, ran back to its mother, as if to say "I touched a wolf. I touched a wolf!"

That sentiment has been shared by many others of the human species.

Gentle, trusting Aurora was "interactive and user friendly" long before such descriptions were common. Diminutive in size but not in spirit, she was the first wolf generations of staff, interns, volunteers, and sponsors met. Unassuming, unthreatening, she left many previously nervous visitors with lasting good impressions. We have no statistics on how many interns and volunteers she safely taught rudimentary wolf handling techniques, how many children she greeted as an ambassador for her species, but it was a great many. Every once in a while you meet an individual whom you will always remember vividly and who has a profound effect on you. Aurora was such an individual. One of her friends, former staff member Margareta Fong, said she did not know of another wolf at Wolf Park who gave so much pleasure to so many in her lifetime.
 
               Pat Goodmann