He is still out there watching, the big white wolf.
I looked up as I started to set camp. The two wolves, the large white male, and a smaller grayish female had moved in to less than a hundred yards. Maybe I felt the burning of the eye of the predator, and that caused me to scan inland a little sooner than I might have. I watched the pair in fascination through field glasses, the best chance of my life to see wolves up close. When they broke the seventy-five yard barrier, I set the field glasses down. The pair closed, coursing in wide semi-circles, noses up, to pluck whatever scent the cold air might offer.
The possibility of a caribou or any other large prey holding in the low, close folds of the tundra this near my camp after the noise and motion I made pulling the canoe out on the rocks and setting up the tent struck me as remote.
What could they possibly be hunting? And then I knew.
I slipped the rifle at my feet out of its scabbard, opened the bolt, and dropped a cartridge from my coat pocket into the chamber. If I meant to start this thing, I wanted my rifle fully loaded with five of the long .35 caliber Whelen cartridges.
They edged closer, the smaller female in the lead. I talked to them in a calm voice just loud enough to carry on the wind. “You don’t want this. You don’t understand what I am.” They showed that classic style of a team of magnificent predators, who had long hunted together. They continued to cut their little semi-circles, forever working closer, stopping frequently to test the wind, to stare at this creature new to them. My strangeness meant nothing to this pair, the dominant predators of this country.
I had no chance to intimidate them.
I had lived among wolves all over the Arctic. Usual is a fleeting glance in the distance, a howl in the night, a track in the mud downwind of camp. Wolves understand what a man with a rifle represented.
These didn’t.
I asked myself how this had to end. Timing was the only uncertainty. Darkness would soon fall.
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I asked myself how this had to end. Timing was the only uncertainty. Darkness would soon fall. I couldn’t paddle long enough or hard enough to outpace them.Darkness would be their time.
In the night, groggy with sleep, I would fight for the alertness I couldn’t hold after a long and cold day of brutal paddling in the wind. Even if I woke before it was too late, I would have little chance against the pair in close and in the dark.
I dropped into a solid sitting position, looped the Whelen’s sling across my off-arm, tightened hard, put the bead on the chest of the closer wolf, the gray one, waited for her to pause to test the air one last time, and I pressed the trigger. She took off at the shot, but I had heard the solid thump of the 250 grain Hornady slug taking flesh. In preparation for the quick double, I stroked the bolt to recharge the chamber as I swung the rifle to place the bead on the big white wolf who stood unmoving, facing me, while with peripheral vision I kept track of where the gray wolf disappeared into a low depression.
I needed to press the trigger but couldn’t. To kill such a magnificent animal when I might not have to would haunt me. The decision not to shoot made, or delayed and with my eyes on the white wolf still out there in the open watching, I placed the cartridge I had instantly put into the chamber at the firing stroke back into the magazine and pulled another one from my pocket to fill the chamber. No sign of movement showed in the slight depression where the gray wolf disappeared.
I walked toward the depression slowly as the white wolf stood unmoving in good range. As I moved forward he dropped back to the low hill a half-mile out. He began to howl, a continuous mournful heart-rending sound. If ever before in my life I heard a sound so chilling, I blocked it out long ago. I fear him almost as much as what I have become.
♦◊♦
I have hunted all of my life. I have never been the hunted. Taking short, slow steps, I moved toward the depression with the scrub birches, where the female wolf disappeared. I looked over every inch of ground. In death or in hiding the way a relatively large animal can flatten itself is a thing that must be experienced to be fully understood. At the bottom of the depression, I found her, lung shot, stone dead. I checked for the open eyes before I approached.
For a moment again, I was a small child with my father, stepping up on a freshly killed groundhog. It was important to him that I knew how to do it right. I didn’t take my eyes off the white wolf or set the rifle down as I hoisted the female wolf on to my back. She represented too much wealth to abandon. Wolf hide is one of the few furs water won’t freeze in. Clothes fast rotted off my back. I’d flex and the back of a shirt would split.
I still had camp to set and darkness fell quickly.
Between the day’s paddling and the emotions I had just run through, I had little left. The skinning could wait for morning. By morning the meat would sour, but I still had a good load of caribou meat, worth more to me. I would have kept the wolf meat, if the area had any wood. To conserve stove fuel, I had been cooking the caribou less and less. If I had to, I could eat the caribou raw. I could get parasites, but nothing that couldn’t be treated. Wolf meat, unlike the caribou, almost certainly had trichinosis, and the only way to deal with that parasite is through hard cooking. Once a person has the trichinosis parasite, no cure exists, and it can be fatal.
The morning is otherwise calm with only a whisper of a breeze. A fog hangs over Dubawnt Lake and the surrounding low hills. Visibility extends only to several hundred yards. Ice formed in the night in my water jugs. |
September 1st, Tuesday, 5:23 A.M.—I woke to silence. Anyone who has ever watched even a small predator hunt a hole, or watched an animal like a groundhog, a chipmunk, or a rat emerge from his hole will have some idea of how I felt sticking my head out of the tent this morning. If the white wolf is anywhere still in the area, I saw no sign. With such an animal he will be seen when he chooses. When I stepped out, I disturbed the small gaggle of geese resting on the bank and they drifted offshore. If the wolf waits nearby, they don’t know about him, as if that meant anything; the wolf hunts the geese.
The morning is otherwise calm with only a whisper of a breeze. A fog hangs over Dubawnt Lake and the surrounding low hills. Visibility extends only to several hundred yards. Ice formed in the night in my water jugs.
I expected difficulty with sleep last night, but after yesterday’s hard paddle to take advantage of a fair day, when I didn’t even stop for a quick boil-up to cook caribou and make tea, I went to sleep as soon as I did a quick boil of a pan full of caribou. I didn’t stay awake long enough even to see a star, although, I finished dinner in the deep twilight. I dropped off to sleep to the sound of the white wolf, out there on his knoll howling, grieving for his lost mate. He kept it up most of the night. Anyone who doesn’t understand that animals don’t know grief hasn’t been around very many animals.
6:22 A.M.—That a wolf might be dangerous to humans is a holdover from ancient myth and fairy tale. With that first fleeting contact, they learn man is to be avoided. This Dubawnt country has not seen much human traffic. When Tyrrell traveled the Dubawnt in the 1890’s, evidence of the farthest penetration by the forest natives was well upstream on Markham Lake. The Black Lake natives of Tyrrell’s time didn’t even know their ancestors had traveled that far. Tyrrell’s party was well downstream of Dubawnt Lake before they came into contact with the Inuit, and then only in small isolated family groups.
If Farley Mowat’s People of the Deer can be accepted, his sources among the inland Inuit of the 1940’s suggested that there was a great inland lake, probably Dubawnt; though, none of the small band he had contact with had ever visited it.
Since the late ‘40’s, Dubawnt Lake has been visited by scientists and each year canoeing parties become more common. In several places, old fifty-five gallon gas drums liter the lake. People visit the lake regularly, if perhaps with wide intervals between visits, and these groups are large and noisy. A lone wanderer quietly drifting and looking may be something new to the animals.
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