Many Glacier, March, 2006, Part II
Yates the Indefatigable
The gated-off road into Many Glacier during a typical windstorm when drifts pile ten feet deep in places and the asphalt is scoured bare in others. RICK YATES
Even when wind caves the ribs of a fawn The mountain, braced by blueness, is not stunned.
RICHARD HUGO
from Triangle for Green Men
FROM BROWNING, THE MAIN TOWN ON THE BLACKFEET INDIAN RESERVATION – and the only town with stoplights and paved streets anywhere near Glacier’s eastern edge – it’s an hour’s drive to the little outpost of Babb. The park begins five miles west of there. A gate marks the boundary, by the base of Lake Sherburne. It is locked over winter. To reach the ranger station in the heart of Many Glacier, officially shuttered for the season, you’ve got another seven miles of road to cover under your own power.
The prevailing airflow is from the Pacific. It washes up against the park’s western slopes and cools as it gains altitude, often condensing into clouds that unload their moisture as rain or snow among the peaks. Still moving eastward, the chilled air now wants to sink, and suddenly, there is all kinds of space to do that just across the Divide, where the mountains fall off onto the Great Plains. Like invisible floodwaters breaching a dam, heavy air spills over the heights, cascades through the passes, and comes pouring down the steep east-side ramparts known as the Rocky Mountain Front.
My favorite mountainscape lies here on the million-acre park’s eastern slope where a major valley is fed by four branches, each of which leads up to the crest of the Divide: Many Glacier with its necklace of icefields. It’s no place for human settlement. But the slopes suit plenty of mountain goats and bighorn sheep, along with grizzlies and black bears, wolves and coyotes, lions and lynx, an elk herd, scattered mule deer, and moose. Better yet, as I came to view things, the area seems to be just right for wolverines.
On the way to Babb, you may see Many Glacier reared up jagged and bright on the western horizon. Or you might find a curtain of snow-filled clouds hanging across the entrance to the main valley and hiding everything beyond. Held in check by a continental air mass over the Plains, the shroud doesn’t advance or retreat. It just looms and roils at the mountain-prairie border. It waits. The skies can be clear in Babb, sunny almost to the park gate, but you know that as soon as you step behind that curtain, you’re going to get tested to see if you’re wolverine-worthy.
In early March of 2006, I parked my car in the lee of the hill leading up to Lake Sherburne and made a final check of gear and supplies. Some went into my backpack, the rest onto a long plastic sled. Since I planned to stay for a month, the load was heavy with fresh groceries. It made an ungainly stack on the sled. I secured it with lashings, clipped the sled’s lead rope to the rear of my pack, and set off skiing. The temperature didn’t seem too bad – probably somewhere in the high teens (F) – but I could hear the hiss and roar of a gale on the hilltop ahead. Wind chill was going to drop the effective temperature below zero fast. With snowflakes starting to spin into my face, I put on goggles, pulled my hat down more tightly, buttoned the parka’s collar over my lower face, and headed in.
The worst spot would be where the air funneled off the end of the frozen lake. Five minutes later, I was in the thick of it, following a slot the wind had scoured through a drift that rose above my head. The curves and twists of the sides made this tunnel a turbine filled with whirlwinds of snow. There were no shadows, no distinct shapes to focus on for direction. The bottom slanted one way, then another. I could hardly tell up from down. It became nearly impossible to stand against the strongest blasts, much less make progress into them. Straining for all I was worth to get over a hump, I realized that it wasn’t only the wind holding me back. The sled had tipped over, and I was dragging it on its side.
After this happened several times, I stopped to rearrange the weight. My goggles were fogging up. I cleared them yet could still barely see to the end of the sled in the whiteout. Slipping off my gloves to undo the sled’s lashings was a mistake. My hands started to grow numb at once. As fast as I brushed snow off a knot with my increasingly useless fingers, new snow plastered everything over. The exposed skin on my face felt sandblasted and equally numb. My pants were pressed like a second skin onto the windward side of my legs, while the looser sections were snapping so hard that they stung. I’d forgotten to tie the draw cords on my parka hood together, and they were whipping my cheeks raw.
Well, shit! I thought: Welcome to Many Glacier. Here I am – what? – less than half a mile from my car going hypothermic and getting beaten to death by my britches and some string. I started talking back to the storm while I finished shifting the sled’s weight. The situation was wretched but not truly dangerous. Not yet. I’d be fine as long as conditions eased past this end of the lake. They did, somewhat.
Although the blizzard continued, nearly as much snow was being whisked up off the ground as was falling from the sky, and that was a good sign in a way. The flakes weren’t piling up so quickly that I’d have to break a deep trail on the way in. I found patches of easy gliding between straightaways where gusts gathered strength until they threatened to topple me. My guess was that some were hitting 70 miles an hour.
Rather than fight a surge of headwind, I would plant my ski poles, lean forward onto them, and wait for the worst to pass before pushing ahead, knowing I might need all the energy I could conserve before the day was finished. I could always hang most of my burden from a conspicuous tree, hurry on with only light essentials, and ski back for the cache on a better day. I had no intention of doing that. But reminding yourself of good options is a useful distraction when you’re marching along feeling like a penguin pulling a plow.
A couple of miles later, Rick Yates appeared out of a squall, having come from the ranger station. With his help and the distraction of his company, the rest of the trip seemed almost routine. No setbacks, no drama. A little more silent penguin plodding toward the end, and we were there. By the time we’d finished dinner at the cabin and sunk into chairs by the wood stove, listening to the wind’s tantrums outside, being miserable seemed like something that happened to other people.
I’d been wolverining in Many Glacier for a good part of November and December during 2005 and for a few days in January of 2006. This was a home-coming to a familiar world, one more real in many ways than the one outside. uncompromisingly harsh but less troubled, physically riskier yet somehow more reassuring and far more free, this was a world that wouldn’t lie to you.
Yates had been on his own here in the valley for a while, operating the traps and carrying out surveys with his radio receiver. In particular, he had been tracking M1, who had carried an implanted radio since late January of 2003. From charting its signals, we knew that Big Daddy claimed more than half of Many Glacier as his territory as well as portions of several drainages across the Divide. He often traveled the same Many Glacier trails that we skied and hiked. His course took him past three of our four traps. Sometimes he ignored them. Often, he investigated the log boxes from the outside but left it at that. Then, after weeks of skipping by, he would suddenly climb in to get at the bait, as if he’d gone too many long winter miles without finding food and hunger had quenched his caution. Once in a while, we could hardly keep him out of the traps.
He’d been given a GPS collar earlier in the winter of 2006, but quickly got the annoying thing off. Where, was anybody’s guess. For all we knew, it rested up on the shoulder of some towering summit. The pricey package included a small VHF transmitter so we could find it with a standard radio receiver. No one had picked up its signal though, not even during an airplane flight. With luck, the transmitter had not died but only become buried by snow that muffled the signal, and someone could home in on it after the spring melt.
A detailed portrait of M1’s movements here in the core of the park in relation to those of the other wolverines was important to understanding how the animals distributed themselves over the landscape and how that in turn influenced the dynamics of the population – breeding success, survival rates, dispersal to new habitats, and so forth. If M1 was caught again, Copeland wanted Yates to try fitting him with another GPS collar, a tad more tightly.
From the beginning, the project’s success hinged on sophisticated scientific analyses and electronic technology. Impressive. But they weren’t getting anywhere without old-fashioned bushcraft. The different approaches converged at the trap sites. Picture an axe-hewn log box about six feet long by four feet wide and three to four feet high, half-buried by snow. Halfway along its length, a log arch straddles the box. A long pole rests lengthwise on the arch like a teeter-totter on a fulcrum. The front of this overhanging pole is connected by a length of cable to the front of the box’s heavy log lid. A second cable runs from the rear of the pole down to the teeth of a set of locking pliers attached to the rear of the box. The locking pliers’ release handle is attached to a wire that leads through a bottom log to the bait – typically a big chunk of road-killed deer or a skinned beaver carcass bought from fur trappers outside the park.
Now picture a wolverine climbing into the box and yanking on the prize. This pulls open the handle of the locking pliers, which opens their teeth, which releases the cable holding down the rear of the pole, which flies upward, allowing the front end of the pole and the heavy lid it has been keeping open to drop. Fast! Give a wolverine extra milliseconds, and it would be out in a blur. Two other devices, each with its own jury-rigged arrangement of wires and wood, come into play as the lid whams shut. The first is a small pole that falls into place beneath the log arch, locking down the lid. Second is a transmitter positioned so that the closing of the lid switches its signal from a slow pulse rate to a rapid one, alerting whoever is in the area listening to a receiver.
Except it’s getting dark. Or it’s after dark, which is when most of the wolverines we’d caught had gone in. You’ve been reading by the stove back at the cabin, warming your toes, and having trouble keeping your eyes open after a day of tracking. You know the temperature outside is sinking. Now, roused by the trap signal, you step out onto the porch to see how low the mercury has gone. If the clouds have cleared off and the starlight is glittering and the cold aches on your skin, you can tell before you even read the thermometer that the temperature might plunge below minus 10 F (minus 23 C) before dawn. You have no choice but to gear up and hit the trail. And when you get to the trap, all you’re going to do is “kiss the wolverine on the lips and let it go,” as Copeland first put it. The box is roomy enough to move around in, but keeping the animal confined through a bitter subzero night would still be unacceptable.
If it looks like a more typical night destined to stay above minus 10 or so, a wooden cave isn’t such a forbidding place for a wolverine to be stuck. Wolverines are used to being in dens and to crawling or digging into tight spaces after food. The trap is sturdy as a vault. You could use logs that stout to build a full-size cabin, and in fact I have. Why not leave handling the animal for the morning when you can see what you’re doing? The answer is, It’s a wolverine. Your box contains a beast that, whether a tough male like M1 or a smaller female, is more than capable of clawing and chewing its way out before dawn. If the night is nearly half over, you can take a chance and wait for daylight. If not, you’re obliged to strap on a headlamp and skis, hitch a sled full of gear to your pack, and go out to work with the captive, come rain, sleet, or snow.
The closest trap is less than a half-hour’s ski from the ranger station, the farthest a bit more than an hour away if the ice cover of the two lakes en route is thick enough to travel on. If it isn’t, you’ll have to break trail for yourself and your loaded sled through the woods at the base of Mount Allen. That trip can take twice as long. You reach the site and crack open the trap’s lid a couple of inches to shine a light in … and discover from the eyes shining back that it’s not a wolverine in there after all. Lynx and martens were always gnawing on our baits, and every so often a red fox conducted a raid. They often got a meal without consequences, since we tried to adjust the trigger mechanism so a real wolverine-strength tug on the bait was required to trip it. Just the same, team members had found all those other species waiting inside at one time or another, especially lynx.
We named one trap site the Boneyard, Boney for short. The other three – Fishercap, Swiftcurrent, and Josephine – were named for the lakes nearest to them. They became Fishy, Swifty, and Josey, respectively. Three days before I arrived, Yates picked up M1’s radio frequency in the area. The signal showed Big Daddy going to Fishy, staying quite a while, moving straight to Swifty, and hanging around there as well. Nothing came of it in the way of an alert that a box lid had closed. Following the paw prints later, Yates saw that M1 had been in both boxes and eaten a good deal of their bait. Uncharacteristically, he had done this gently enough to avoid setting off either trap. However, the night before I reached Many Glacier, the signal from Josey, the most distant trap, went into rapid-pulse mode. Yates skied the two-and-a-half-miles there to check the box and found M1 inside.
For safety as well as efficiency, Project members worked in pairs whenever possible. Yates faced trying to put another collar on M1 by himself in the dark and a drizzling rain. This would mean kneeling or lying on his side in the deep snow, pushing open the heavy lid just a crack, and holding it there with one leg while using his hands to manipulate a jab stick – a fiberglass pole with a syringe at the tip – to sedate the animal.
Like most wolverines, M1 would interpret any opening of the lid as an opportunity to rush at the invader – to rage and roar and drip saliva and snap his formidable teeth, sending the message: I will rip you open if I can, and if I can’t, I will die before I yield. Then almost without fail, he would wedge his head and claws into the crack and try pushing the lid upward to escape. When Yates first reached the trap, he noticed that M1 had already butted his head against the closed lid hard enough to jiggle loose the pole brace that was supposed to lock the top in place.
During a wolverine study in a different area, a guy lifted the trap lid a crack and shined a metal flashlight inside for a better look. The captive bit it out of his hand. Crunch. Gulp. The flashlight was never seen again. Whatever was left of it went off with the wolverine when it was turned loose. After hearing the story, I liked to imagine the animal roaming at night, often the most active time for these hunters. I pictured the creature covering mile after mile in that inexhaustible wolverine lope, making sharp detours, scent-marking tree roots and trunks, weaving in and out of cubbyholes, and generally driving its nose through the terrain until it caught a fresh scent. Then it would suddenly stop and open its mouth wide, and rays of light would come out to sweep across the forest floor until they fixed on a victim. Any animal lucky enough to escape would spend the rest of its life retelling the tale of how it was once half-blinded by unholy beams that shot from a wolverine’s bone-mincing jaws.
Reacting to both the open lid and a probing pole, M1 was going to be a tornado of a target. Yates couldn’t afford a partial hit or broken-off needle. He had to jab M1 exactly right to be sure he was delivering the correct dose of two drugs mixed together – a muscle immobilizer and a tranquilizer. Even then, a wolverine might react unexpectedly to the drugs, depending on its condition. The dosage required to act on certain males, especially pissed-off ones, was sometimes way higher than the charts prescribed for their weight. An overdose could be corrected with a drug that reversed its effects – unless the animal failed to respond. That hadn’t happened yet but was always a worry. On the other hand, an underdose might leave Yates midway through the collaring process with an increasingly lively wolverine in his hands.
Rick Yates is a strapping man who stands six feet two inches with hulking shoulders and long arms that form a wingspan more than a match for his height. You’d want him at your back in a surly barroom. You’d want him with you whenever the high country turns testy because he is as strong as he looks with a will that is stronger yet, quick-witted, and brave – one of the most capable outdoorsmen I’ve ever met. More to the point, he is exactly who you’d want handling whatever situation developed at a trap site in Glacier’s backcountry.
He had worked for years on trail crews in the park, gone back to college for a master’s degree in wildlife biology while studying bald eagles in Glacier, and then signed on with the park again as a seasonal biologist. Among his other responsibilities, he handled problem grizzlies and trained rangers in bear capture techniques. Outside his seasonal park job, he trapped and surveyed grizzlies and black bears elsewhere in Montana and banded falcons and ravens in Greenland. Back in Glacier, he went on to conduct surveys of carnivores by skiing the back-country for eight winters to locate their tracks in the snow. For recreation, he did more skiing in the park and climbed its summits during the warmer months.
I could easily see Yates as a mountain man from a century or two earlier. Scotch-Irish by background, he hails from the hills of Virginia and wears his dark hair long and his beard bushy. Though he is a handsome fellow and honest to a fault, one eye takes on a slant and focuses a bit off kilter when he grows tired, giving him a slightly feral expression at times. Adding to this aura is the fact that Yates has a horror of throwing anything away, and that includes the shirts he continues to wear in tatters and favorite pants resewn so many times you can’t tell where the original fabric is.
One morning when I drove into the Many Glacier campground with a brand new volunteer, I saw Yates walking toward us on the road at his normal pace, which has some of the qualities of a fanatic on a special hurry-up mission from God, his upper body tilting forward to balance a ground-eating stride, long arms swinging from a shredded shirt, and hair flying in the wind.
“Oh boy,” I whispered to my companion as I rolled up the car windows and locked my door, “It’s that homeless guy that shows up around here. Don’t let him catch your eye or he’ll be hitting us up for something.” My companion gave Yates a final, quick glance, surreptitiously locked the door on his side, and then stared fixedly the opposite direction until Yates came up to the window and said, “You look pretty pleased with yourself, Chadwick. Did you pick up some wolverine signals on your way in?”
Back at Josey, Yates paced and beat his hands together for warmth – the gloves he liked had gradually been reduced to fragments of leather encased in duct tape – and weighed the circumstances. Handling M1 alone in the dark was inviting bad luck. The weather was getting sloppy wet, and the hour was late. M1 wouldn’t suffer if left for the rest of the night. However, the trap surely would. This guy was a log demolisher. Usually, wolverines in a box trap stopped chewing when they heard noises outside. As long as we stayed nearby speaking loudly from time to time, the logs stayed in one piece; that was the rule. But M1 was an exception. Yates remembered a time he caught this wolverine and was talking at him through the slightly opened lid, trying to get him to quit biting away at the box’s corner. M1 gouged out a fresh chunk of wood, spit it to one side, and sank his teeth in for another bite, glaring straight at the man all the while. He might as well have flipped Yates off with a middle toe.
Captured another night at Fishercap, M1 had chewed free by morning. But he didn’t leave until he’d enlarged his escape hole so he could haul out the carcass and take it with him. Judging from his tracks, he then shot straight from Fishy to Josey, where the trap lid was down. F2, one of the females M1 mated with, was caught inside. He began chewing his way in toward her. While he might have wanted the bait, the story we told ourselves was that he was working to free his girlfriend, which may well have been a motive. He and F2 appeared to have a close and enduring bond.
Not surprisingly, we had to rebuild the boxes every so often. It was a chore, but the shredded logs actually testified to the wisdom of Copeland’s choice to use this funky mini-log cabin of a trap. Besides being a cold conductor, a metal barrel or cage would have edges or seams that a wolverine might break teeth and claws on. Two other metal devices used in carnivore studies, a cable snare or a steel trap with padded jaws, would cause the same problems. Worse, a wolverine could tear joints and ligaments fighting those legholds. When nothing else worked to free it, the animal might pull off trapped toes or chew away its whole foot. What a wolverine would not do is cease struggling. In Copeland’s capture system, only the wood got hurt.
Yates came to a decision. He propped the small pole back in place to hold the trap lid down and heaped snow on top to make it heavier – harder for M1 to jiggle. After packing more snow between the lid and the rest of the box so it might freeze in place, he left for the ranger station. Yet Yates was by no means finished for the night. At the cabin, he grabbed the battery-powered AM/FM radio we played for music and news, and then he skied back to Josephine. There, he tuned the radio to an all-night station, wrapped it in a plastic bag to keep out the drizzle, and set it under a tree near the trap to serve as a surrogate human voice. He and Copeland had heard about this technique from Scandinavian wolverine researchers during a visit to Norway. The distraction might slow down M1’s breakout efforts. Even if it didn’t, the night was now far enough advanced that the male would have to work nonstop to chew out by morning. Yates skied home to the ranger station to catch a bit of sleep. At daybreak, he was back on the trail to Josey.
M1 was still there. In the end, Yates managed to sedate him without much trouble. Needing room and light to fit the new GPS collar carefully in place around the male’s neck, Yates lifted him out of the box and laid him on a heat-reflecting space blanket with a foam pad atop it. He draped his coat over the wolverine because the immobilizing drug lowers body temperature and wouldn’t fully wear off for a while. The rain was changing to sleet with a strong wind behind it as the weather started to swing toward blizzard conditions. Yates stood by shivering until M1 began to stir. At that stage, he placed the wolverine back in the trap. Two hours would pass before Yates thought it safe to release him, sure that the male was fully alert and active, able to handle whatever came his way on the slopes. At last, Yates made the ski trip home to the cabin. Then he headed down the valley to meet me.
The following morning, Yates the Indefatigable came hurrying down from the cabin’s second floor, where we had an omnidirectional antenna positioned to pick up signals from all four traps. He woke me with the words, “Josephine’s going off.” We grabbed gear and a breakfast bar and hit the trail. In an ordinary winter setting, we would have been able to glide along the track Yates had broken during his recent commutes. In Many Glacier, a ski track rarely lasted long before fresh snow and winds obliterated it.
From the start of our trip, it was snowing and blowing heavily even in the forest. Our early progress where the trail wound through the lodgepole pines and bare white trunks of aspen was uninspiring. I readjusted the daypack’s weight on my shoulders and fantasized about a steaming cup of coffee. We picked up speed crossing Swiftcurrent, the first frozen lake on the way. That the wind picked up too was a lousy sign because we were still somewhat sheltered in the lee of the massif called Grinnell Point. After three-quarters of a mile, the route from the lake’s upper end climbed a hill. At the top, we could receive a straight-line radio signal from any wolverine at the trap site. Adjusting the receiver, Yates nodded to himself and said, “It’s M1.”
We dropped down to Josephine, the second lake, and started the exposed journey toward its head. Instantly, the trip turned Antarctic. We were now in a colossal bowl cupped at one end by the walls and spires of the Divide. The rainy weather Yates endured earlier had created an icy crust on the encompassing snowfields. Not much of the fresh snow was sticking to it. Instead, it was being swept down the slopes onto the lake. It wasn’t collecting there either but skating along the ice to create a ground blizzard. The spindrift was so intense I lost sight of Yates when he moved farther than 20 feet away. For a while, I wasn’t sure I was still going the right direction. All I could do was try to orient myself relative to the angle of the snowflakes streaming by until the outline of a familiar peak showed through a swirl of white.
Avalanches had thundered off the ridge between Grinnell Point and Mount Grinnell, swept over the goat cliffs on the southeast face, and fanned out onto the lake ice. Rock chunks and uprooted trees lay scattered halfway to the opposite shore. We skied between them. The ice was so thick most places that we could have driven a tank over it. Even so, there were weak points near the lake’s edges and over upwellings. Always expanding or contracting with fluctuations in the temperature, the frozen surface was like a live skin, and it creaked, groaned, sang, shrieked, pinged, and gave off gunshot noises as it changed thickness. I couldn’t help tensing up when fresh ice talk came ka-zinging through old seams and new cracks nearby. My subconscious insisted on interpreting each noise as another warning that I was someday going to step on the wrong spot and break through.
On glassy stretches, the storm skidded me around a little, but I’d learned the secret to making progress upwind where the ice was polished and slick. It was to chart a course like a sailor, tacking to port for a while, then to starboard, using the metal edges of your skis like a keel. You wouldn’t have to beat into the weather forever, and you knew that when you were ready to return, you could hold your jacket open wide like a mainsail if you wanted, and start whizzing homeward so fast you’d scare yourself.
When we reached the head of the lake and started to deal with M1, trying to check his collar and condition, listening to him seethe, feeling him hit the front of the log box in a rush, my senses were buzzing so loudly that I couldn’t string two thoughts together. He never calmed down. But I eventually did – at least enough to recognize that Big Daddy wasn’t actually sucking all the air out of the woods. It only felt that way.
He wasn’t truly huge for a dominant male wolverine. Nor was he glossy and sleek like a male in his prime. He was on the lean side at the moment and a little worn-looking, beginning to show the touch of age. Old scars marked his muzzle. When he’d bared his teeth during one of his snarling lunges, some appeared chipped and none too sharp. Despite the adrenaline flowing through me, this wolverine all at once seemed a lot more real – maybe one of the toughest animals in the world, maybe near-mythic in his deeds – but an animal nonetheless, dealing, like everyone must, with the challenges of time. Later, while we kidded about who was going to kiss M1 good-bye, I surprised myself by how much I did wish for good things to happen to him. Yet instead of being able to help him directly, all I had was this sham power to free him after interrupting his life.
Upon our return to the ranger station, Yates went in the door first. I was still taking off my skis when he came back out, saying, “Fishy’s going off.” The trap by Fishercap Lake wasn’t far. We were low on energy, and it cost a fair amount of calories just to keep warm in the storm, so we took the time to down a sandwich and a cup of tea before leaving. I asked Yates how many times M1 and other wolverines in the area had been caught altogether. In the four winter seasons since they began trapping in 2002/2003, team members had made something like a hundred captures involving l9 different wolverines, he replied.
Obviously, not every day was as busy at the trap sites as this one, but the project’s success rate was extraordinary by wolverine-catching standards. Fur trappers have described these animals as the Holy Grail. By that, they mean that in addition to being the second-largest North American mammal that they can legally take in steel jaws nowadays (the wolf is the largest, where legal) and the one with the most fearsome reputation, the wolverine is legendarily mysterious, elusive, and above all, wary of traps.
Yates added that when he and Copeland fell into conversation with trappers and described the Glacier Wolverine Project, a common response was, “I don’t believe you. Wolverines are experts at avoiding our sets even though we’re careful not to leave a speck of human scent on them. They’re the wiliest things in the woods. No way could you ever catch them a bunch of times.”
The scientists had a reply, though they wouldn’t always say it out loud: “But you see, there’s a trick … We don’t kill them.”
Were we about to add to our wolverine capture total? On the way to Fishy, we punched in different frequencies on our radio receiver. The trap’s signal came in loudly, but we couldn’t pick up any electronic chirps from a tagged wolverine. Farther along where the trail led over a stream and on through lodgepole stands with an understory of serviceberry brush, we came on fresh coyote tracks. A hundred yards from the trap site, Yates looked down and announced, “Well, it’s not a coyote.”
He had intercepted a line of tracks twice as large. A wolverine’s paw prints look a bit like those of a young grizzly bear, showing the five long-clawed toes and part of the heel. But in snow this deep and loose, all we had to go on were holes filled almost to the top with wind-driven powder. We couldn’t be sure they weren’t from the four-toed footsteps of a lynx. Of the nonwolverine species that raided Fishy, the worst offenders were these tufted-eared cats with big, snow-shoe paws of their own. I expected to see one up close in a few moments.
When caught in our traps, however, lynx rarely growled. The big log box near Fishercap Lake was growling a bad-dream growl, the kind of foreboding rumble that in movies makes you silently shout to the character on the screen: Don’t go in there! Whatever you do, don’t … open … that … door …
We opened the box’s lid. Yates sometimes called wolverines werewolverines or just wereverines, partly for the way they seemed able to disappear and rematerialize at will while we were tracking them, but partly for that growl. The wolverine in the gloom of the box wasn’t one he recognized. It didn’t have any of the colored ear tags we routinely put on captured and radioed animals either. Though it kept up its growling, it didn’t rush at us to thrust its jaws through the slight opening. Yates guessed from its appearance and its reluctance to charge that this was a young animal – probably a yearling exploring the outer limits of its parents’ territories and possibly a ways beyond. If he was right, this wolverine would become sexually mature in the months that followed. The time was coming for it to leave the area where it had grown up and try to carve out a territory for itself.
Yates rummaged through his daypack and pulled out an Argos collar, a very lightweight satellite radio device compared with the bulkier GPS units. It doesn’t store data in its own circuits. Orbiting satellites record its locations and periodically relay the data in batches to stations on Earth. A researcher can tap in a code and download the information onto a personal computer from the comfort of a warm office.
The drawback was that this small device provided readings accurate to within only a few miles rather than a few feet. That was fine for following birds or whales that migrate thousands of miles, and it served well enough for other species when you only needed to keep tabs on their general whereabouts. It wasn’t ideal for most wolverines, but Yates thought a yearling on the verge of dispersing to try to find a home of its own made a reasonable candidate for an Argos collar. We’d settle for learning roughly where our captive ended up – and whether or not it survived the journey.
We planted our skis upright in the snow like posts and strung a big tarp between them, fashioning a sort of lean-to shelter against the snowfall and wind. Once in a while, a burst would tear through the slight clearing so fast that it literally stole my breath away and I had to draw in hard to fill my lungs again. Yates sedated the yearling – a male – and recorded the usual measurements, then fitted him with color-coded ear tags and the Argos collar. For the second time in two days, he took off his jacket to cover a wolverine and stomped around shivering until he was sure the young male was coming out of the drug all right. We placed him back in the log box, locked down the lid, and skied to the cabin to warm up. Two hours later, we skied back to Fishy and let the fully recovered wolverine loose. Fare-thee-well, newly anointed M20. Keep in touch.
