Never Cry Wolf Page #2

My instructions are to track down

a specimen of Canis lupus,

dispatch it with a rifle

and examine the contents of its stomach.

April 16.

Warm days bring

a kind of peace and stillness.

If there are any remaining fears,

they stem only from the recognition

of my own staggering insignificance.

May 3. In pursuit of phantoms.

I hear them every night, have seen

their tracks and collected their scat.

So they must be real.

Agh!

Canis lupus arcticus.

The largest and rarest of the wolf species.

And its den.

The rules of the game are to choose

an observation post downwind,

out of the animal's field of vision,

gain your position and maintain it

without ever revealing your presence.

Outmaneuvered on all counts,

I opt to change the rules.

Reasoning that we're suspicious

of what we don't understand.

I decide to reveal

as much as possible about myself,

make a display.

I haven't seen the wolf in two days.

I know I was violating the distance

principle, moving so far into his territory.

But since he hadn't seemed afraid of me,

I hoped that I could...

I didn't take it personally.

This was a matter of principle,

a territorial dispute.

And he had fired the first shot.

# What never?

No, never

# What never?

# Hardly ever

# Hardly ever, ever sick at sea

# So give five cheers and one cheer...

Oh!

# I am the very model

of a modern major general

# I've information vegetable,

animal, and mineral

# I know the kings of England

and I quote the fights historical

# From Marathon to Waterloo

in order categorical

# I'm very well acquainted too

with matters mathematical

# I understand equations

both the simple and quadratical

# About binomial theorem

I'm teeming with a lot of news

# With many cheerful facts

about the square of the hypotenuse

27 cups of tea later, I completed

a two-acre circle around my tent,

including a 100-yard section

of the wolf's path.

What had taken me six hours

and 27 cups of tea,

he accomplished in just a few minutes.

At each of the places that I'd marked,

he made his mark on the opposite side,

indicating that my boundary

was acceptable to him.

And thus he granted me the space

for Lupus Base One.

I'm supposed to watch his behavior,

but all he does is stay

in front of his den and watch mine.

I can't remember ever being the object

of so much constant attention.

I now arise at 10:00 in the evening,

as everything becomes more active

during the long polar twilight.

In my notebook,

the wolf has become George.

The two are identical in color,

with the same contrasting

shoulder marking and long-legged gait.

But I've detected a difference,

and I've named her Angeline.

As George has become a family of five,

the reason for his long staring match

with me has lost its mystery.

It's well-known that wolves mate for life,

but knowing that has hardly prepared me

for their constant and varied

displays of affection.

Every evening George goes off

on his nightly rounds.

What he does on these excursions

remains a mystery to me.

Angeline always remains

behind with the cubs,

though I can see that she longs to follow.

It's perplexing.

The overall reason behind the study

is that the government wants final proof

that wolves are responsible

for the disastrous decline in caribou.

So far I haven't seen a single caribou,

or observed the wolves eating anything.

My own food supplies

are nearing exhaustion,

and the local environment

offers scant pickings.

Yet the wolves seem perfectly healthy.

I've done numerous scatological studies

and only turned up a smattering

of small mammal bones.

The whole question of sustenance

around Lupus Base One

has me completely mystified.

Angeline has given me the first clue.

In less than an hour

she's caught and consumed 23 mice.

My rough calculation:

one mouse every ten square feet.

Over 40,000 square feet in an acre.

That's 4,000 mice per acre.

The idea that a large animal

could live entirely on mice

will be greeted with skepticism,

unless I can perform an experiment.

Five wolves appeared today.

I expected one of the pack battles

I'd read so much about.

It was Angie who was

right in the middle of things,

asserting her position

as the dominant female.

The challenges and assertions

were mostly symbolic.

There was no real fighting.

But Angeline got her point across.

George was never challenged.

He just stood there

with his air of masterful certainty,

the alpha wolf of the pack.

Usually, only the dominant pair

mate and have offspring,

going to seek their own privacy

for that purpose.

Apparently, the time had arrived

to rejoin the pack.

There's a young brown wolf who seems

to be a particular favorite of the cubs.

I've named him Uncle Albert.

Now Angeline is free again

to join George on his nightly rounds.

July 12.

I wonder why it was that long ago

I became a watcher of things.

Always watching others do and feel things

I wouldn't or couldn't do myself.

Always standing off at a distance,

isolated, detached.

I envy the wolves

for how they experience the world.

Always in such direct contact

with their environment,

traveling through their territories,

alert and attuned to all the signs

coming in through their senses,

telling them where a rabbit

recently passed or the sweet water lay,

revealing a whole universe to them

that we can never really know.

But I sit behind glass lenses,

filling up notebooks and triplicate forms,

trying to capture the wolves

within the pages of my journal.

And what'll be done with the study

when I'm finished?

Once these wolves

have been exposed to my world...

what will happen to them?

There's a strange wolf

that I only see fleetingly.

He must be part of the pack,

but an outsider,

always following at a distance.

Perhaps another watcher.

Ootek thought you might need

some company.

Ootek?

Hello.

Really can't tell you how glad I am

to see the two of you.

It's been so long

since I heard another human voice.

You have any ketchup here?

No, I don't. I'm sorry.

I ran out a couple of weeks ago,

Here, have some fish.

Uh, no.

No, thanks. I don't eat fish.

What do you eat?

Actually...

I eat mice.

-You eat mice?

-Yeah.

It's an experiment, really.

You see, the wolves are supposed to eat

caribou. However, there are no caribou.

Basically, what the wolves

have been eating is mice.

So I'm conducting an experiment

to see whether a carnivore, a big animal,

can live on nothing but mice.

So I've been just eating mice,

and I'm doing fine.

-What does he say?

-He says, "Good idea."

Syringe.

There.

-What's that?

-Clamp. This thing? Yeah.

See the way this is set up here?

This is so it grabs ahold. You got him.

It's a gripper.

I know what that is.

They had them at the mines.

Yeah, that's right. It's a gas mask,

except that I use it for wolf scats.

The wolf scat has little tiny animals,

little tiny parasites.

And if you breathe these things in,

you breathe these little guys,

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