Wolves!

I’d never heard a cow moose calling before. It was a strange sound indeed. Off the top of my head, I would have described it as the voice of a cow trying to howl like a wolf. I listened to it with a prickling scalp for about five minutes before deciding what it could possibly be.

I had driven two or three miles into the back country along a dirt road with an ATV. My surroundings were tall hardwood forests, areas of dense shrub-like willows, and the last few farmer’s fields before the land broke away down to the river. I was hunkered down on a strip of dry mudflat that used to be underwater, at the edge of a small lake. The lake had shrunk in the heat of summer and exposed this mudflat along its edge.

I had come here about an hour earlier, to visit the family of beavers that lived in the lake. It was a now a small pond. The lodge was situated 6 feet (2 m) off from the shoreline.

These beavers were very friendly, and curious. There were about five of them in this pond. They had swum within two or three yards/meters of me at times, and I had sat and watched them pulling up and eating cattail shoots. At this moment, there were two of them cruising around the pond, keeping an undisturbed but watchful eye on me.

The cow moose had stopped her bizarre bawling. I’m sure she thought she sounded all right, but she had given me quite a start at first. The sun had fallen down behind a rising curtain of gray-blue clouds, and the sky was softly pink behind them. It was getting very dusky, almost too dark to see. I was about to get up from my seat on the dried-out mudflat, when I saw a black shadow in my peripheral vision.

The air was dead still with not a flicker of wind. That was the only explanation for why this wolf trotted by the beaver pond just ten yards/meters from me. It hadn’t smelled me, and I had been motionless for the past twenty minutes.

It seemed like all my hair stood on end. I had never seen a wolf in the wild this close before. It trotted along the edge of the pond, not toward me, but about a third of the way around the pond in the other direction. It was a black wolf, moving as silently as a puff of wind. I could just make it out in the growing darkness. It came to a stop adjacent to the beaver lodge, puttered around a bit, then came trotting back.

I heard some snuffles and scuffing feet of more wolves within the tangle of willows edging the small clearing where the beaver pond lay. There was a whole pack. I didn’t feel the least bit afraid. As a general rule, wolves are more afraid of people than we are of them. The black one on the lake shore must have sensed me with some sixth sense, because it drifted out of sight all of a sudden.

I got up feeling vastly happy. It felt like a once-in-a-lifetime experience. And, it was nightfall on the edge of the wilderness; I needed to head home.

A couple of days later I came back to the lake with a trail camera and set it up overlooking the oat field that neighbored the beaver lake clearing. I did not think I would end up seeing wolves on the camera; I was targeting the dozen or so black bears that liked to feed on the oats. But when I checked the camera a week later, there was the pack. They appeared two days and nights in a row and then apparently moved out of the area.

Wolves are shy, secretive animals, and very wary of humans. I feel quite privileged to have been in the right place at the right time to encounter this pack.