Heroes and Hybrids: Part I
Edited by Allie Long
Welcome to part four of my series on Mattersville, a sustainable community built to house homeless veterans suffering from PTSD. You can read the first article, Cheyenne the Healing Wolf, here.
I want to begin this article by thanking Drew Robertson, Kristyn Hansen, Dylan Matkowsky, Mark Johnson, Ben Corliss, Randy, and Lydia Reed. They were kind enough to provide me with their time and to trust me with the retelling of their story, which I will share with you now:
“But he is not always alone. When the long winter nights come on and the wolves follow their meat into the lower valleys, he may be seen running at the head of the pack through the pale moonlight or glimmering borealis, leaping gigantic above his fellows, his great throat a-bellow as he sings a song of the younger world, which is the song of the pack.”
Jack London, The Call of the Wild
“It’s very easy to forget that these animals aren’t… dogs.”
I’m talking to Dylan Matkowsky, the program’s lead solar engineer, about the wolves of Mattersville. For the past couple of weeks, he has been designing a detachable solar awning for one of the community’s tiny homes, the Alpha House. Upon completion, the tiny home will be moved to Mattersville’s property in Hartsel, Colorado, where visiting directors can stay while managing the facilities.
Mattersville is currently home to two veterans–Randy and Will–but they recently welcomed a new breed of warrior to their ranks. In December of last year, Mark Johnson, founder of the Rocky Mountain Wildlife Foundation (RMWF), dissolved his organization and transferred many of its assets to Mattersville. This included solar panels, fencing, camper-trailers, and a pack of wolves.
You can read more about Mark Johnson’s story here.
Talking with Dylan, I wanted to know what it was like to work in such close proximity to these ancient symbols of wildness.
“You’ll just get into it and start petting them, and be like, ‘Oh, you’re adorable. This is great!’” Dylan imitated this absentminded petting over the phone. “But then they’ll growl, and you’re like, ‘Holy shit. That’s not… that’s not a normal, everyday growl.’”
Over the course of Dylan’s tenure at Mattersville, he’s had many opportunities to interact with the furry residents of the community. According to him, these experiences have left a lasting impression:
“It becomes very apparent, very quickly that they deserve a whole new level of respect.”
When I asked if working around wolves presented any particular challenges, he didn’t seem to think so. The work Dylan is doing doesn’t take place inside the enclosures, so the wolves don’t play a huge role. Still, when night falls on the property and you’ve still got work to do…
“It starts to get a little ominous when you’re out undoing an electrical panel by yourself and the wolves start howling. You’re like, ‘Hold on a sec,’” Dylan laughs. “I can’t tell if this wolf is on the inside of the [pen] or the outside of the [pen]. And it’s somewhat alarming, I’m not going to lie.”
A few goosebumps aside, the wolves are actually a big part of why Dylan reached out to Mattersville:
“It’s why I got involved with them in the first place,” Dylan hadn’t come to Mattersville originally for solar design. He’d sought them to get closer to animals and reconnect with nature–another example of how these wolves have had a continuing impact on the community.
Dylan introduced me to Drew Robertson, Mattersville’s founder and executive director, over Facebook in December of last year. When I first reached out to Drew, they were in the middle of transitioning the wolves over from the Rocky Mountain Wildlife Foundation.
Drew had been introduced to RMWF’s director Mark by Ben Corliss, affectionately referred to by Drew as his brother-in-law; although, their exact relationship is a little bit more complicated. I’ll let Ben explain:
“We call each other ‘brother-in-law’ because it’s easier,” Ben told me in our interview.
“He dated my ex-wife after we got divorced, and then they had their daughter together.”
Drew eventually received full custody of his daughter’s half-sister when his ex wasn’t able to take care of her anymore. Even though their mutual ex is “pretty much out of the picture,” Drew and Ben have become close friends.
“He and I raise the kids together. We co-parent together, and it’s pretty great.”
A Very Hairy Origin Story
Ben belongs to an organization called The Bearded Villains, an international association of bearded men–a beard club, basically–that is “dedicated to the betterment of mankind through fraternity, charity, and kindness.” To this end, Ben’s chapter of The Bearded Villains held a fundraiser last year for the Rocky Mountain Wildlife Foundation.
At the fundraiser, Ben met Mark. Even prior to his work with RMWF, Ben had been interested in wolves, adopting his own wolf pup named Domino. Later that year, when Mark was endeavoring to close down the foundation, he reached out to Ben, knowing that he had experience caring for these animals.
“When Mark decided to close, he contacted me and asked if I would adopt Kiska,” Ben recalled. “She bonded with my family when I went up there. We loved her to death.”
Mark asked Ben if he knew of anyone that’d be able and willing to take in the remaining wolfdogs and wolves. “Initially, they were trying to find individual homes. They asked me if I could help find homes for the other guys.”
Ben agreed. He reached out to Drew, since there were members of the Mattersville community experienced in handling and caring for wolves and wolfdogs. Originally, Drew propositioned to take two of the wolves and hybrids. He spoke with Mark over the phone to discuss the personalities of the dogs, and Mark convinced him to come over to the sanctuary and meet the pack in person.
Drew agreed, and they set up a day when Ben could come and pick up Kiska while Drew met the wolves. Walking down the row of enclosures, Mark introduced Drew to the wolves–Apache, Cherokee, Aurora, Nebulus, etc.–all the remaining wolves at the sanctuary. When they finished their tour, Mark turned to Drew and asked, “So, do you think you can do it? Do you think you can take all the wolves?”
At the time, Mattersville was still working through many tons of waste and wreckage left by the squatter village that had infested Sedalia before they moved in. Drew, Kristyn, the Bearded Villains, and an army of volunteers worked tirelessly, day-in and day-out, in order to restore the property to a livable state; could they afford to take on the wolves too?
Because of their location in rural Colorado, RMWF had to be off-grid. Coincidentally, an integral part of Drew’s mission at Mattersville was to create a sustainable community in terms of the environment, finances, and mental health. So, when Mark offered them the sustainable infrastructure of RMWF along with everything they needed to house the wolves temporarily while they built permanent pens, Drew ran out of reasons to refuse.
Besides, as Drew pointed out during my first interview with him, the wolf tours alone could cut out most of Mattersville’s recurring monthly costs.
Mattersville accepted and took on as many wolves as they were able in order to avoid the trauma of splitting up the pack. The wolves on the property are now being socialized as emotional support animals (ESAs) to help the veterans work through their PTSD.
Of the remaining wolves at the foundation, Mattersville took on nine: Apache and Cherokee (the alphas), Lady, Ranger, Autumn, Jupiter, Josie, Nebulus, and Aurora. Two of the wolves, who were labeled “hands-off” and who wouldn’t have made particularly good ESAs on account of one of them always hiding and the other ready and willing to tear off people’s faces, were given new homes.
“You said it took about a month-and-a-half to get all the wolves over?”
“It took about… two months.” Mark told Drew that he would be moving to Arizona in a month-and-a-half originally. The frostbite that forced him to shut down RMWF was taking a heavy toll that year, and he needed to move to fairer weather quickly to avoid becoming seriously ill.
But it wasn’t easy for Mattersville. “Even the fencing that he was giving us for the pens was frozen to the ground.” On the first day, they took Lady, Ranger, and Autumn so the Bearded Villains could come in and pull the fencing from the ground. The three wolves would stay in the temporary pens while they built more pens from RMWF’s fencing; then the wolves would move over to those pens, and the process would repeat.
On top of that, the volunteers were still cleaning up squatter trash as the new pens were being constructed.
“How much waste do you have left?”
“Um…” Before the Covid-19 pandemic swept across the world, Drew had two groups scheduled to come remove the built up junk from the property. “We found it easier to stack it all up on our quarter-mile driveway outside, so that we can plan strategic removal.”
Drew explained that since they were a sustainable organization, they’ve faced some unique challenges removing the hazardous waste from the property. Metal needed to be scrapped, plastics recycled or reused, and wood burned or repurposed to make structures for the wolves.
“We try and spend as little as possible when we have all of this construction material available.”
Meet the Pack
In addition to clearing out the ruins of a squatter paradise, the team has been busy constructing new pens for the pack. The fencing donated by RMWF only stretched as far as temporary pens. Now, they’ve begun construction on permanent enclosures with new fencing and all the bells and whistles.
Recently, the Mattersville team completed Autumn’s pen. The new pens they’re building include 12-foot posts shrouded in no-climb horse fencing to ensure that the animals won’t make it up and over their enclosures. Drew has taken the move as an opportunity to improve upon the wolves’ living quarters, digging dens into the ground with a Bobcat to rend a pathway through the earth and constructing tunnel-like burrows for the wolves to escape the elements.
“It’s making it look just… amazing.”
Drew and the team are really stoked about the new living arrangements for these animals. The more I talked with them, the more I understood why: These wolves aren’t just pets to the staff and veterans onsite. They’re a family. A pack.
I wanted to learn a little more about their improvised family, so I asked Drew, Kristyn, and some of the vets to tell me a little bit about their new pack members.
The Alphas
“Have you ever seen a wolf with a beer belly?”
In the Alpha Pen, there’s a kiddie pool. A blue one, like something you’d find at Wal-Mart, and it sits in the pen with these two Arctic Timber Wolves like so:
“Apache can’t get inside it because of his belly,” explained Drew.
“He waddles,” Kristyn Hansen, Mattersville’s Chief Operations Officer, added, laughing.
That said, Drew says Apache’s lost a little weight recently since they gave him a bit more room to run around in. Plus the pen sits on a hill, so when they get to running laps, they’re doing it on an incline.
Apache and Cherokee are the two alphas, and as such, unsupervised access to their pen is limited to Drew, Kristyn, and the animal care directors. With them, the two wolves run around like puppies, but if they don’t know you–if they don’t yet respect you–it’s a different story.
“The alphas have to have an alpha. Before, Mark was their alpha.”
Mark shared this with Drew when he came to visit RMWF. If he was going to hand over the reins, Drew would need to establish himself as the new alpha first.
“Mark was explaining what he had to do, and he wanted Drew to go into the pen and bite Apache’s ear to show dominance,” Kristyn explained, holding back laughter at the memory. Drew, as you might imagine, was not thrilled with the prospect of stepping into the arena with Apache over the title of alpha. But then again, it wouldn’t have been Drew’s first rodeo with wolves.
As a boy, Drew spent summers at his dad’s place in Tennessee. Next door, a Native American couple, Tony and Rocque, owned a swath of land and two wolves, Wya and Thunder. Drew met the wolves one day with his father, who was helping the couple out with some work on their land.
Once his father was distracted with the work, Drew ran over to Wya, jammed his fingers through the fence, and started petting her.
“Something that I would extremely advise people against,” warned present-day Drew. “And I do advise people against when they come [to Mattersville].”
Of course, as soon as Drew’s dad and the owners noticed what Drew was doing, they swooped in like hawks. But they quickly realized that Drew wasn’t in any danger–in fact, Wya was licking him amiably, something she allegedly never did to strangers–and they marveled over the unlikely and speedy friendship the boy made with the animal.
Drew, none the wiser, was just as quick to strike off looking for Thunder, the partially wild wolfdog. Sooner or later, the animal materialized from the woods and bounded over to check out the newcomer. Their bond took a little longer to form.
Drew remembers thinking, “OK, you don’t like me. [So] I’m just going to sit still. Don’t eat me and we’ll be good.”
In time, Drew won over the wolfdog. “Being somebody that grew up with ADHD, that was actually kind of a therapy for me whenever I went out there.”
Rocque was the chief of his tribe, and he and Tony ran a program on their land for children of the reservation to come, camp out, and “work on [themselves].” Drew remembered going over to Tony and Rocque’s to spend the week camping out in the woods.
“With ADHD and the hyperactivity, [it was] very difficult for me to sit still for long periods of time. When it came to being around those wolves, I gave them all the time they wanted.”
“Sometimes I would just be lying around at night with nothing to do,” Drew explained earlier that they confiscated everything from him–his watch, his pager, even his books–when he came on to the property. “And then Thunder comes popping up out of the woods. At first, it was terrifying, and then it was like, ‘This is pretty cool, he’s just a big puppy!’”
Deprived of any electronics and surrounded by the Tennessee wood, Drew learned to run with the wolves and listen to nature. He learned to embrace his wildness. Flashforward to December 2019, Drew’s an adult staring down the possibility of wrestling an Arctic Timber Wolf for the title of alpha.
Luckily, it didn’t come to that.
“Did you end up biting Apache’s ear?”
“I didn’t have to. I was fortunate enough to where he just respected me in my role. It came very natural[ly].” He paused. “If you take any situation as the dominant moment, it was when I was in there with Lydia.”
Lydia Reed is the Civilian Peer Mentor Director of Mattersville, and one of the program’s mental health first-aid instructors. In her own words, she came to Mattersville to “[help] homeless vets and vets suffering from PTSD.” She had already spent time with the wolves, including Apache and Cherokee, and the wolves in turn knew who she was.
One day, when Drew decided that Lydia was ready, he took her into the Alpha Pen to formally make their acquaintance. On the weekends, Lydia works at an animal shelter, and having never met a dog she didn’t like, she wasn’t particularly wary of the alphas.
But once they’d entered the enclosure, things took an unexpected turn:
“Apache, for no good reason whatsoever, decides to walk up to her and test her.”
He trotted up to Lydia, rose onto his hind legs, and put his front paws on her shoulders. His eyes level with her own, Apache started to growl.
“At the time, it felt like it was playful. It didn’t feel threatening, when he was right in my face,” Lydia recounted. “But I wasn’t sure. That wasn’t the only scary part: not knowing.”
Fortunately, Drew was quick to respond, his instinct as pack leader taking over.
“I had to grab him by both sides of his face and [pull] him off of her.” By acting quickly and decisively, he was able to deescalate the situation and answer Apache’s challenge. “I took him off of her, and he responded to me the way I was hoping, which was getting off and letting her out.”
Lydia was safe and likely never in any serious danger. She explained to me that she understood his challenge as being playful. “I wasn’t scared when it happened. But as soon as I was out of their pen, it kind of hit me. It could’ve been…,” She paused. “Yeah.”
Drew held Apache back while Lydia exited the enclosure. He told me that the way he held Apache wasn’t threatening but dominant. Once Lydia left, Drew hung back with the alphas. Apache circled back around and tried the same move with Drew, reaching up to post his paws on his shoulders, but Drew pushed him off. After that, the wolf stood down.
“He was testing his grounds that day,” Drew explained. “He wanted to see whether or not we’re going to react and run away because that’s what the test is: Are you going to react negatively if I do this or are you going to let me get my way, which shows me that I’m in charge?”
The Escape Artists
When you come to Sedalia, CO, for a wolf tour, the very first stop on your hike is the Sky Pen. Perched atop a Rocky Mountain ledge, overlooking the vast, arid landscape, the Sky Pen is there to do the impossible: contain Nebulus and Aurora.
“It’s a little game they play.”
Drew’s referring to an escape gambit the wolves run in order to bust out of the enclosure.
“Nebulus will ram the gate if you open it, and Aurora–being the more slender one–will slip out like a little noodle,” Drew explained. “Then you go to try and grab her, and Nebulus barges again. Then they’re both free.”
On their first night at Mattersville, the resident escapologists were resting in their temporary pens from RMWF. Someone–likely a volunteer–had accidentally left the door to the pen slightly ajar, enough that the two were able to leverage it open.
Kristyn was the first to react, but in chasing the wolves through the dark, a misplaced step found her tumbling halfway down the side of a cliff.
“I might’ve peed a little.”
Her son, Aiden, was looking on during the incident. “My mom’s fallen off a cliff! She’s going to die!” Kristyn imitated her son as he ran to Drew for help.
“Oh my god, is she dead?” Drew reenacting Aiden and himself in the moment.
“Uh, I don’t know. She went over there.”
“Do I go to the bottom, or do I go to the top?” The mock panic in his voice rose, “Tell me what I need to do right now!”
But before Drew could do anything, Aiden saw the wolves burst forth from the darkness, running pell-mell towards Drew.
“I decide to try [to] block Nebulus and he runs right through me.” In hindsight, this plan lacked a certain coup de chance, resulting in Drew receiving a coup de patte from Nebulus, and the coup de grâce arriving when Drew was knocked to the ground by the excited wolfdog. After that, they tabled the idea of chasing down the hybrids. Instead, they tried flexing a different muscle:
“We stopped looking around for them and just put some meat out. Aurora walked right back into the pen, like she knew where she needed to be.”
Once she was back in her temporary pen, Aurora howled once, calling her pack member back into their new home. Emerging from the dark not long after, Nebulus rejoined her in the pen.
Meanwhile, Kristyn was still cliffside waiting for rescue.
“How far did you fall down?”
“About halfway. But every time I tried to climb back up, I just slid down further.” After the wolves were secured, someone with the proper gear was able to come down and help her back up. This and other similar foibles have earned Kristyn the nickname “Bruiser” around the property. Still, her indomitable spirit and good sense of humor has endured the tests of time and toil.
“If I die, at least I die doing what I love,” Kristyn joked, still imitating herself stranded on the cliffside.
Lady & Ranger’s Beauty Salon
Elsewhere on the property, in the Borealis Pen, you can visit Lady and Ranger’s Beauty Salon. Lady is another escape artist; she dug, climbed, and jumped over her temporary enclosure anytime she had the chance. The crew had to swap out Nebulus and Aurora, and give the Borealis Pen to Lady, since the Sky Pen wasn’t tall enough to contain the leaping wonder.
“You’ve seen the old version of The Lion King, right?”
“Yeah.” I had.
“You know that really dopey hyena? That’s her face.” Grinning ear-to-ear, tongue lolling out to the side was the image of Ed the hyena that Drew had conjured.
“She’ll lick your face off,” Kristyn and Drew both said.
“In the same pen with her, there’s Ranger. He’s a hairstylist by trade,” Drew joked. “He has an affinity for hair–it must be a pheromone in our shampoos or whatever–but he just wants to get all in it.”
Even with complete strangers, the affable wolfdog will bury his nose in their manes and start to twirl it around, effectively curling their hair. As soon as they’ve got the time, Drew says that they’ll be building a makeshift salon chair for the enclosure. At “Ranger’s Hair Salon,” visitors can come and get their hair curled by Ranger, while Lady, “the esthetician,” gives them a facial.
Matty the Mattersville Wolf Pup
Eat your heart out, Donnie Wahlberg; there’s a new kid on the block, and he’s twice the heartthrob you ever were. Matty the Mattersville wolf pup has ascended to the throne of community mascot and ambassador, and it’s easy to see why:
That is a good boy. A really good boy. Here’s a picture of Drew and Matty, locked in an intense staring contest:
Of course, it’s not all fun and games for the ambassador. Matty spends much of his day socializing with the other bipedal and quadrupedal denizens of Mattersville:
“What does socializing look like for Matty?”
“He’s spent very little time alone; let’s just say that.” Drew and Kristyn have taken on primary care of the nearly two-month-old pup, and Mattersville’s Pack 22 members–the community’s elite wolf-handling group–are required to socialize with him and begin developing a lifelong bond.
Matty has even met the pack’s alphas, Apache and Cherokee. Drew took the pup up to their enclosure and let them go “nose-to-nose” through the fencing.
“They wanted to adopt him,” remarked Kristyn.
“They wanted to adopt him,” Drew agreed. “Like, come on, just let him in here for a little bit, we’ll take care of him.”
On Matty’s first night in town, he slept in the Alpha House–a solar-powered tiny home–with Gus and Randog, the current hybrid ambassador. Once renovation is completed on the Alpha House, Randog and Matty will move in permanently, as the tiny home has been fully optimized to house both humans and hybrids. Jake Castagnaro–another friend of mine from NC–has been constructing a custom bed frame to store wolf kennels underneath the mattress.
From what I can tell, Matty and Randog have already become close friends:
“He chases Randog around like he’s his best friend, and Randog spends most of his time running in the other direction, saying, ‘leave me alone!’”
Drew explained to me that wolfdogs are separated from their mothers much earlier than nonhybrid dogs, because they need to start bottle-feeding to socialize with humans.
“When we received him, it was the day that he started eating dry food.”
Matty came from a shelter in Indiana–the same shelter that reached out to them about Kody, another hybrid that Mattersville has taken in. The shelter contacted Susan Weidel from W.O.L.F., a wolfdog rescue network and sanctuary, because they were worried that Kody’s former owner–who was recently released from prison–would attempt to steal back Kody from the rescue, despite having abandoned the wolfdog on multiple occasions in the past.
Susan Weidel also put Mattersville in contact with Mission: Wolf; who helped Mattersville and RMWF rehome Merlina, the “hands-off” wolfdog; and she set Mattersville up to adopt Randog, their current co-ambassador. When they reached out to Mattersville about Kody, the country was in full quarantine mode.
“Fortunately, rescues are still effective, so we were able to travel unimpeded.”
Kristyn and another volunteer, Brett, made the trip from Sedalia to Indiana to collect Kody. Over the course of their communications with the shelter owner, he offered to give them Matty as a thank you for adopting Kody and to show his appreciation for their mission as both a sanctuary and veteran community.
He also knew that nonprofits were taking a hit during the COVID crisis and that the adoption of a wolf pup could really help keep interest and revenue going during tough financial times. Besides, after speaking with Drew, it was clear to the shelter owner that Mattersville was a place where Matty would not only thrive but also bring a lot of joy to people in dire need.
Get Involved
Join me tomorrow for part two of Heroes and Hybrids, when we’ll be answering the question: Can wolves as emotional support animals help veterans suffering from PTSD?
In the meantime, if you want to get involved, you can sign up to volunteer or make a donation on their website.
