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| Their brother, Wolf 6530, stayed with the pack until he was nearly two years old, and then he went traveling. For three months he investigated the forest just to the west. Then he headed northeast, and by August he was near Alice Lake, about forty miles from home. He stayed in this area for five months. Researchers hoped that he would find a mate here and establish his own territory. But early in 1985 he returned to the Perch Lake Pack; he remained with them for two months, passing the date of his third birthday. By June he was back at his Alice Lake hunting grounds. That same month, on a canoe trip in the Boundary Waters Canoe Area, we were thrilled to find fresh wolf tracks and droppings on a portage that we later learned was just three miles from the point mapped by researchers for Wolf 6530 at that time. Much as we would like to think that our paths crossed then, we had seen wolf signs in that area before. It is possible that while there Wolf 6530 found himself unwelcome in territory already occupied by a pack, and that that is why he resumed his travels. Aerial tracking spotted him twenty miles to the southwest in July, fifteen miles farther in August, and twelve more miles to the southwest and very close to his home territory by September. But later that month, Wolf 6530 covered the distance back to the Alice Lake area, and he was still there in October. Then his signal was lost. His whereabouts were unknown until he found the frozen deer carcasses at our place, twenty-five miles southeast of his last recorded location and forty-five miles east of the Perch Lake Pack. |
| Now young, well-traveled Wolf 6530 lay on our floor, frightfully sick. His breath came in growling wheezes. Again he got up, painfully, and leaned right against the stove. The smell of singed hair filled the room as Gary rushed to pull him away. The wolf staggered to the center of the room and collapsed. Three times he stretched across the floor in rigid spasm. After each horrible rattling breath came a terrifying moment of no breath. Then, convulsively, a gurgling gasp. But he hadn't the strength to cough and clear his lungs. He wasn't getting enough oxygen. His lips and tongue turned blue. We sat close beside him and strained with him as he struggled to breathe. He pawed at his mouth. He tried to get up, and did, partway. He lay with his head up and breathed more easily, but then came another convulsive wave. We hung on each long moment between the breathing out and gasping in. But then one of the moments stretched out way too long, and Gary's touch could no longer stir him. Kneeling by his head we could see his eyes change. The focus was lost, and the yellow faded as the pupils became huge. We could look way into them and see the sunrise light reflected in a green blaze. |
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| We sat there a long time, grieving. And we looked at him closely. A thick winter coat had hidden the extent of his emaciation. Beneath it his bones protruded. He weighed fifty-five pounds but should have weighed at least seventy-five. There was a tear on his lower lip, an old wound. His feet were supple, the pads squeezable and spongy beneath their calloused surfaces , and the fur tufts between his toes were silky. The wolf's right foot had lost three pads. On the left foot one pad was mutilated. These, too, were old wounds, noted in Mech's records since 1983. Mech believes they were probably the result of the wolf's getting caught in a fox trap, pulling the trap loose, and wearing it until the toes sloughed off, a hazard for all Minnesota wolves during the trapping season. We went out to see what the wolf's tracks could tell us about his last night.We found that although he had wandered all over the woods behind the clearing during the previous week and had made seven beds there, this last night was the only time that he had come toward the house. He had walked to the base of the toboggan run and had climbed all the way up the long, steep hill and then followed the snowshoe trail around behind the building. |
| There he stood, then turned and went back down to the clearing. Later, he had curled up under the big spruce tree just long enough to make a slight depression in the snow. Then he came up the hill again, all the way up that steep killer of a hill, taking small steps but no sitting stops until he was again behind the house. There he shook himself, and bits of lichen and twigs that had clung to his fur flew across the snow. Then he turned onto the terrace, walking close beside the house, and squeezed between the bench and the house, where a tuft of woolly wolf hair still hangs from a bent nail. And then he was at the window with that haunting wolf face and those insistent thumps. After our outing we were more puzzled than ever about what might have prompted the wolf's visit. He had spent so much energy when there must have been little energy left. If it was a random, delirious act, it seemed more likely for him to have gone in any direction but up that steep hill. We snowshoed out to the road and drove to town to call Dave Mech, hoping for some answers. Mech knew exactly who we were talking about. The wanderings of Wolf 6530 had been of great interest to him, and this information about the wolf's final travels and death would be a valuable addition to his records. An autopsy later revealed that this wolf had died of a fungal pneumonia, and Mech was able to document a natural cause of death that had been virtually unknown among wild wolves. To have contracted the pneumonia, Wolf 6530 must have been stressed in some way. Quite possibly he was undernourished to begin with. Prey animals-few and far between here-are hard to come by in the winter, especially for a lone wolf suffering the nagging pain of an old injury. |