The Word I Will Not Use about the Wolf

I saw the alpha female walk down the road with the sheep leg in her mouth. I will not pretend we were not in the car even though in the picture you can’t tell we were in the white Subaru on the dirt road. I saw the alpha female walk down the road past a line of cars, past hand after hand, holding phones out the windows. I will not pretend that I knew what was in her mouth. I thought it was a ptarmigan, forgetting that in September, the ptarmigan would not be white. My eyes knew flesh, even torn, despite bald spots, hide hanging, which I took for feathers. Collared, tracked, plotted in bits and numbers, statistically analyzed, even her scat gathered in plastic bags turned over for scrutiny, her tracks filled with plaster, preserved in the visitor center shouting please touch me, she was never alone. Not the kind of alone we imagine. And I was as unalone too. I watched the wolf while I was wearing a seatbelt in the passenger seat. Casual, she padded beside the still cars on the road in front of the mountain. September, bright blue and hot. We sat until she was not in our rearview. Later the ranger told us she came to her den in the tundra and the pups ran out and ate, howling small howls in celebration while the cars, stilled and shut off sat rocklike in the road. She didn’t care. She didn’t look toward the cars. She didn’t feel our need for her to be real, as real as the sunlight pounding through our windshields, as real as the ragged tooth of the big mountain so clear in front of us. That was the road we were on. She was a wolf. A park wolf. Important wolf. Alpha wolf. I remember another alpha female trapped just outside the park boundary a few years before. A Toklat wolf. Important wolf. The last of a particular beautiful, like the crisp September sun before the mute dark of winter. I will not use the word mourn. None of us who sat and watched deserves it.