Wolves

"They'll move in the storm."

These were the words spoken to me over a hot mug of orange pekoe tea, thickened with plenty of cream and sugar, around a glowing woodstove by a white-haired, old man two nights past. The wooden legs of his chair creaked as he leaned back and sipped at the steaming brew, his eyes looking back into years and memories that escaped me.

Now, I was standing outside my cabin after a fresh snowfall. It was night, and the clouds of a day-long snowstorm had just receded to reveal a three quarter moon and its gallery of stars radiating silver streams of pure cold into the atmosphere. My breath caught in my throat as I pissed beside the thermometer I had tacked to a small spruce tree. At -21C below my breath was white mist in the yellow light of the cabin window. Winter seemed to have truly arrived and my pulse quickened at the hushed, snowy silence and crisp air.

Dark, in the northern wilds, had a way of enlivening a persons being and I was standing still, my mind as quiet as the forest, when I heard their call. It rose into the night with a low droning, higher and higher until it fell off and was as soon picked up by a chorus of other voices, gaining in pitch and then exploding into a cacophony of fiendish yips and cackles.

As every time before, my heart beat faster and the hair on my neck and arms stood on end at the ghostly reaching of their song. There were confused feelings of primal fear and a strange longing to join the feral abandonment I heard in their sound. I closed my eyes and let the beauty of it and the place I found myself in, thrill me along with the knowledge that they were there where I hoped they'd be, at my carefully placed bait. The old man had been right - they were moving.

Tomorrow. Tomorrow would be the day. I hadn't set any snares out yet, just dragged a moose carcass and emptied a couple of hundred pounds of grease I had been given by some people in town. The old man said I shouldn't be in a rush, but that I should feed them a few times, let them get used to my presence and wait for fresh snow to set my snares. The tracks would reveal much. I needed to know them, to see from their sign how they were approaching the area, what made them excited and what caused them to hesitate. I had to enter their mind and know how they were thinking. I had to become a wolf.

Trapping, I had found over the past six years, brought you closer to the animals and the forest than anything else. More than canoeing, than hiking, than anything. You had to enter into the life of the forest to be a trapper. Be a part of it all. It's a slow, gradual transformation in vision and thought that seems to come by osmosis as you spend time out there, paying closer and closer attention to the animals and their habits, how these things change over the seasons and finally, after careful thought and reflection comes the understanding of why. Why do the beaver build their houses where they do? What makes them decide to leave an area? Why do lynx always seem to be found skulking the edge of the cedar swamps and tag alder thickets; marten, the heavy timber around grassy meadows? Why did the fox seem content to walk in my day-old footsteps along the trail but become wary and nervous when I stepped into the brush at the side of it? Most of these habits were related to one thing - food - but some of it was also fear.

What did a wolf fear? Man was the obvious answer, but there was something else, something far worse. That something was hunger. A large predator like the wolf required a lot of calories to stay alive and warm in the blistering cold and deep snow of the boreal winter. Starvation was their greatest enemy and they had perfected the art of the kill in order to keep that specter at bay, though in these rugged and unforgiving forests it was always sure to follow close at their heels. This was the one thing they feared more than man, would even drive a hungry pack into the fringes of a town to risk an easy meal on a dog or cat, because its intent was far more certain. It was death, slow and terrible and consuming. It was the sorrow of pups whimpering for milk that no longer flowed. It was the disintegration of the pack, the family.

Hunger was the one thing, or the fear of it, that would make a wolf bold enough to cross my tracks. There was no hiding my presence from them, everywhere I went I left my scent and with the snow, my prints were always obvious and visible. The only thing I could disguise was my intent. Of all of the things told to me by the older trappers out here, there were two things I was told not to do. None of my scent must be allowed on the snares themselves, the other was to never walk in on their tracks. I had spent hours carefully boiling my snares in spruce boughs and birchbark until they were stained and camouflaged with natural colour and smell, purchased a pair of special gloves to be worn only when setting them, and now I had to remember to watch my steps.

Wolves knew what it meant when new tracks turned in on another and followed, it meant an intent to hunt, to kill, and my cover would be blown completely if I broke the rule. It was okay for me to cross their paths, but never to turn in on them and follow directly. If I did it right, the wolves would assume by my tracks, dragging the bones and hide of the moose into the brush, that the kill belonged to me and my returning presence was simply to feed on the bait myself. They would approach it as they would the kill of a temperamental bear, with wary movements and alertness in case I returned to the bait. They knew they were stealing from something dangerous, but they must not know they were being hunted.

After coffee the next morning I went to check my bait pile. I didn't get fifty meters from my cabin before I saw a track. Wolf. It was huge. It came out of the bush on the North side of my trail, just within sight of the cabin and paced back and forth and then turned around. It was odd, I had heard much more than one voice howling during the night but here was the sign of only one. As I worked my way west along the trail, the big prints kept reappearing, always from the North side and then running back into the forest. I thought about it as I made my way along the trail and reasoned that with the prevailing south winds that bring the heavy snows, this wolf was cutting large arcs to stay downwind, that way if I had been on my trail, he would scent me before I would see him. Every several hundred meters he had looped back to make sure he was still following my trail before stealthily pulling back into the heavy timber in wide, half-circles. Clever.

When I finally got to the bait, it looked like mayhem. The huge leg bones of the moose were dragged dozens of feet and chewed bare of all of the clinging meat. The snow was trampled flat in the center of the bait site and stained red with the bloody mess of a frenzied feeding. There were so many tracks near the middle of the bait that it was impossible to make sense of it. My heartrate jumped as adrenaline flooded my system. I could hear the snarls and yelps of fighting as the dominant wolves established hierarchy in the feeding ritual. I could smell the musk of their thick, wooly coats reeking sour with the smell of blood and the entrails they had rolled in. Their droning cry, wild and celebrant, rose again as they first scented the meat and fat I had laid out for them. I circled the bait on foot and let the signs colour-in more of the night's scene.

They had come from the west, where there were no trails but somewhere(I knew by satellite image) was a small, round lake with a wide buffer of meadow-grass. Likely a moose yard. They must have had their dens near it. It would be a good place to be in the late winter when it was unbelievably difficult to move in the snow that sometimes reached depths of 4 or 5 feet, when small game was impossible to chase and the cold demanded the thick, yellow fat of the moose. Moose would yard up in herds at such a lake, and the wolves could surround and pick them off as they struggled in the deep, heavy snow.

I passed a place where the whole pack had come squeezing through, between a big birch and a thick, distorted, black ash before pushing under the boughs of the low cedar that hedged the ridge the trail was on. From there they ran north and south along the trail, far away from the bait before cutting into the brush, all of the them fanning out and then closing the circle slowly, together towards the center. Finally they sprang in, not from the obvious open pathways, but most often pushing through the densest thickets, some of them crawling on their bellies under low hanging branches and began to feed.

I could hardly believe how wary they were. It was like they already had a sense of what I intended to do, with the way they avoided obvious snare points. It was unlikely these wolves had seen any traps before, knowing what I did about the history of the area. I knew the trappers whose lines surrounded mine, no one had been trapping them here for a couple of decades. Wolves were tough to catch - the toughest - and between five and eight hours of intensely focused labour to properly skin, flesh and board the hides. With the low fur prices, some trappers felt it wasn't worth the effort.

I stood and marvelled at them, at the contrast of their fierceness and their caution. Perhaps, I reasoned, they didn't want to be taken by surprise by other wolves or the only larger predator - the black bear - that might be hidden in wait for their arrival. Either way, it was fascinating behaviour and I was completely captivated as my imagination - as with words on a page - created images and a story out of the small signs.

That afternoon I returned with a dozen wolf snares I had picked up from the Fur Harvesters auction house in North Bay and meticulously set them over the fresh tracks in places they seemed least hesitant. Half of my snares were very far from the bait, where they had been circling the area and had been moving fast and freely. The rest were a little closer, hidden within the cedar boughs, or hanging by wire from wrist-thick poplars. All the while I moved with calculated footsteps, knowing every detail mattered.

Then came the sleepless nights. Rising from my bed every few hours to stand with the cabin door open to the frigid air and listening while the cold raised goosebumps on my bare skin. All day I thought of them, and when I did finally sleep they were there at the fringes of my dreams.

I was with my mother in a strange house. Someone was sick and in hospital. It somehow fell to us to watch their place until he recovered and we stood in the kitchen drinking tea in the dark. Out the window, over the sink, I could see the moon and a small yard and hedgerow that separated the property from neighbours. My mother disappeared. I was alone. Suddenly, a wolf loped across the yard, glancing through the window as it went and meeting my gaze, knowing I was there, knowing I was watching. Then a long, ghostly howl was raised; another and another until the house was surrounded on all sides and the volume of their singing grew and grew until it was ringing through the walls. Everything was vibrating, the cupboards, the glasses, the furniture, all ringing out the same droning frequency. It filled me then, rising up through my feet and bursting out the crown of my head. A light flashed across my vision. I was blind but I could still hear their sounds. I felt them coming closer. Now at the doors and windows, now in the house, now their paws pounding the hardwood as they ran down the halls toward me…

I gasped and sat up in my log bed. My chest was heaving with heavy breathing and my body was drenched in sweat. It was 4am and everything inside the cabin was shadowed and silver with the light of the moon gleaming through the windows. I threw the covers back and let the cold air wash over me. It was a dream.

And then I heard them.

They were at the bait. My pulse began to quicken again. It must have been them in my dream. The sound had come through in my sleeping and brought them to me there, and then brought me to them in my waking.

I thought then of the first tracks I had seen. It had been the largest of them and I wondered at the strangeness, of how it alone had left the bait and the others and followed my trail all the way back to my cabin. It was like he was puzzling something, trying to see, or understand. Something was wrong about this pile of meat they had found in the woods. Suspicion stirred by instincts older than written history. Something was different and who was this creature that lived in the big den, this two-legged one that had left his tracks in the snow, who had dragged this moose into the brush and visited day after day but ate nothing?

That one wolf fascinated me. I sat up in my bed for an hour, letting the adrenaline the dream had flooded my body with abate and puzzled over him. I wondered about what made him different from the others. In my mind I imagined him to be the alpha, the one pup born with that extra quality that made him a leader. What were the differences between them that gave one the strength to lead, to think ahead, to think beyond itself to the well-being of the whole? It was in this moment that the wolves became people to me, not in an anthropomorphic way - humanizing them - but in the sense that they possessed individuality and personality that might be as diverse within their species as humans could be within their own.

I lay a long while, gazing through the window at the night sky and thinking of that one wolf and imagining what his story might be, how many winters he had seen, of what love and bitterness he had known in that time. It must have been nearly daybreak before I was pulled back into my sleep.

I woke late that morning, with the sun shining full through the window and took my time making coffee and a hearty breakfast of bacon, eggs and fried potatoes. I resisted the urge to rush out to check my snares. I wanted to savour the experience, to remember well whatever this day brought.

When I did finally head down my trail, I was dead calm. Though I could feel incredible anticipation swirling within me, I was like a stone in the center of it. The nervous energy I felt only heightened my senses. Everything was sharp and fresh as I passed bend after bend of my winding trail that travelled south and gradually west to the bait. I would not forget.

I had my gun with me and adjusted the strap over my shoulder while I let the machine roll without the throttle to the bottom of the next and final rise before my snares began. I was told there was a chance they might still be alive when I arrived if the snares had caught them too deep towards their chest and I had to be ready with a well placed bullet.

The first snare was empty and I idled down to a full stop, turned off the machine and listened. My trapping mentor had told me that I'd hear them if they were alive. He said that a wolf lunging in a rage made the heavy, aircraft cable of the snares sound like a guitar string that was about to break, that at my approach they would give one final, mighty effort to free themselves - and sometimes did. But all was silence and the silence was complete. There was no chirping of the whiskey-jacks, no hammering toc-toc-toc of the small woodpeckers, not even the boisterous cawing of the thieving ravens was to be heard. The past few weeks had turned the forest around my bait-pile into a veritable zoo, both on the ground and in the sky but now it was as though the forest was empty of life. All seemed to be holding its breath.

When I found my next snare empty as well, I began preparing myself for total failure. It had happened often enough in the past. When I first started trapping Lynx(or trying to) I learned that sometimes trapping was a lesson in not just physical but mental endurance. My first season chasing them was utterly disheartening. Snare after snare was found empty, until it felt like it was impossible to catch one. I had to endure a complete emasculation of my self-confidence, and then keep setting traps by raw willpower because my faith that I'd ever catch one had run completely out. Still, I did it, and eventually during my second season, I caught one, then another, and another and another; each time learning new things about them and continually refining the details of my snaring until I could actually set a snare and rest in confidence, knowing it was done right.

I was preparing myself for a similar experience with wolves, telling myself that it would be alright, that the time and effort spent wasn't wasted but was just laying a foundation of knowledge that would help me catch them next year, when my mental speech was cut short. My sinking heart was electrified as my eyes caught the sight of blonde fur near the far side of my bait pile - I had a wolf.

I wanted to turn inside out, to rush in and see it, but I forced myself to stay calm. There were still nine other snares that I had not checked. If I had one wolf, I might have more and those ones might not be dead. I needed to do this right from start to finish. I wouldn't even let myself smile as I walked back to the four-wheeler, and swung my leg over the seat to finish the check. I counted the next group of snares as I rounded the corner to the other side of my bait slowly, being sure not to miss any of them. There was nothing, but I didn't care. I was elated beyond belief at even having one wolf, and I could barely contain the thrill I felt as I pulled up beside it, but when I turned off the machine I saw another heap of fur, far down the trail where I had set my last snare. It was grey and big - very big.

It's incredible size, noticeable even from this distance, made me forget all about the wolf inside the bait site. I slid my rifle off of my back and into my hands and walked cautiously towards it without even taking a second glance at the first wolf. When I reached it, I was entirely dumbfounded. It was massive.

It was a male wolf with a giant frame that was sprawled partially on the trail and in the trees. Grey and blonde and tan, with a bristling mane of black and silver hackles that looked to me as fearsome and beautiful as any lion of Africa's. The snare I had caught him in was an odd set and a total shot in the dark on my part. I was about 70 yards from my actual bait pile when I set it, on the opposite side of the trail, in the heavy brush where the biggest set of prints had gone down off the trail and away from the bait. After that it had scent-marked a small balsam tree and kicked up a pile of snow and dirt in an act of dominance that seemed to claim ownership of the whole area. These were the same prints, I was sure, that had followed the trail back to my cabin the other night. This was the wolf that had haunted my waking and sleeping thoughts. I had caught him - the Alpha.

I took the time to let it all sink in. All of the work and time spent in the past few weeks that had led up to the triumphant moment I now found myself basking in. I sat there in the snow and stroked the thick fur and marvelled at the animal whose life I had taken. The animal I had been studying and envisioning for so long. It was here. It was real. I had done it.

There was no fanfare, no trumpet from the sky to announce my accomplishment. Just the cold silence, the slow moaning of the wind and the quiet thud of snow sliding off the boughs of the swaying trees, but in my heart, in my mind rose a single sound, piercing and clear - the deep, resonant howl of the timber wolf and all it had come to mean to me.

I hope you enjoyed the read. These small stories, blogs - whatever they are - come from my heart; I share them out of a passion to create and see others inspired to make their own connection with the Wilderness. If you found value in your time here, and are inclined to do so, you can help keep me writing by buying me a coffee!

About The Author

A bounty of fish from a solo canoe trip down the Makobe River, Temagami.

For Clint Zold, the pursuit of authentic Wilderness experiences has led him across landscapes both far and wide. Whether paddling the ancient Nastawgan of mystic Temagami, hiking the lonely mountains of the West, or snowshoeing the hunting grounds of his trapping territory in the Arctic Watershed of Northern Ontario - Clint is truly at home in the wild.

Living off-grid on the banks of the Mattagami River; the canoe, axe and snowshoe have become his daily companions in a semi-subsistence lifestyle where food, warmth and water come from the land around him. His passion for Wilderness is only equaled by his desire to share it with others

Clint ZoldDecember 26, 2023