Part 1: Tracks in the Haze
The dust that’s been chasing us swirls around the headlights and spills over the tires as the pickup skids to a stop. By the time I’ve cursed the cheap, Jetboiled coffee I’ve spilled across my lap, Wendy’s already flung the door open and is gliding around the back of the truck. From the driver’s seat of a half-ton Dodge going 35 miles an hour down a gravel road in the faintest morning light, she’s seen something I missed. Her eyes dart to the forest and then back down the road. The wolf was just here. It is still close.
I walk around the tailgate and find her huddled over a fresh pile of wolf scat, still steaming in the cold. Finding wet feces is akin to striking gold in certain corners of the wildlife tracking community, and tracker that she is, Wendy is staring at a warm, squishy mother lode. She picks up a stick and prods to investigate.
“You’ve got to be fucking kidding me,” she says under her breath.
Sure enough, there it is: deer hair, bone fragments. Still a little tarry. It had been eating organ meat. In the twenty minutes since we first came down this section of the route, the wolf had emerged from the woods, left its mark, and vanished. Wendy squints and says, “Four,” to no one in particular. Remembering I’m there, she points to four nearly imperceptible sets of tracks that show where the pack had crossed our own and then faded back into the ponderosas and larch trees that are just starting to turn for the fall.
“Just because you can’t see them doesn’t mean they’re not there. The only
