Never Cry Wolf Page #4

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.

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