Holdfast: At Home in the Natural World

Howling With Strangers

m 13 Howling With Strangers All 128 of us want to hear a wolf howl. So we are overflowing the bleachers and crowding around the edges of a room facing a picture window. Children sit on their heels under the window, their noses pressed against the glass. A young woman bounds in, wearing a plastic name tag like flight attendants wear. “Hi, I’m Cheri, your wolf specialist, and I’ll be talking to you today about our wolf ambassadors.” She is carrying a plastic tub filled with props: a gray wolf pelt, the skin from its face pressed flat, its eyes squeezed shut, its nose cracking off. A black wolf pelt. The leg bone of a moose. “Seven bites is all it takes for a wolf to crack through this bone,” she says. We gasp—the bone’s as thick and white as firewood. She has a plaster mold of the pawprint of a wolf, “as big as my hand with the fingers curled in,” Cheri says. She holds up the mold and then holds up her hand, the fingers curled in. We gasp again—that big! The wolves lounge around in front of the window, penned in by a hurricane fence that we can see plainly through the trees.They look a lot like dogs to me, but I don’t know what I expected. I can’t imagine one of those things circling menacingly around a moose. But maybe the wolves aren’t that impressed with us, either. If they are looking through the window, the wolves will see the flat-nosed children, of course, and a German TV crew—tall young men charging around, jostling for position—and rows and rows of people much like myself—middle-aged, middle-income, middle-American, middle- 14 m Holdfast weight and holding. Like a raisin in all that pudding, there is a thin man with waist-length bronze hair holding a baby in a porkpie hat. We pass the moose bone from hand to hand, up and down the rows. Then a deer’s leg with the fur and hoof still attached, the knee tendons blackened and curled. Here comes the black wolf pelt, its legs dragging out behind.The passing is solemn, silent, disconnected from any meaning that I can determine, like some ancient rite. Cheri talks cheerily. “We have four wolf ambassadors,” and she starts to name them: Lakota, Lucas . . . Behind her voice, we hear a distant fire engine. Suddenly, a wolf jumps to the top of a rock, lifts its head, and begins to howl. It’s a reedy sound like a clarinet, rising and falling away in a minor key. The sound silences Cheri, who stands still, smiling.The siren wails and another wolf joins in, so it’s a trio now—two wolves and a fire engine—a-wooee, a-wooee, a-wooee. Some people start to laugh, but stop themselves—this is supposed to be serious stuff. The man with the hair has his eyes closed and his chin up; he looks like he’s having a religious experience. For its part, the wolf stands on the rock in a classic pose, pointing its muzzle to the sky as if it has seen its own promotional T-shirts. Every time Cheri starts to talk, the wolves and the fire engine kick in, howling, and drown her out. Everyone is smiling. I think we have heard wolves howl before, Frank and I, from our bed. When we first came to the Minnesota woods, we asked about wolves at the national forest headquarters. The young woman there wanted to help. “Oh yes, you can hear them everywhere, even in the center of town. They’ll be far away, of course, but you can hear them.” Then she lowered her voice. “They may not sound like what you think wolves sound like. They sound like violins. So if you wake up in the middle of the night and you hear violins, don’t go back to sleep.” Sure enough, that very night, we heard the sound of a single violin. We elbowed each other, then we lay stiff in the dark, our eyes wide, big smiles on our faces. Howling With Strangers m 15 Don’t ask me why this is so important. Don’t ask me why we are now standing with a half dozen strangers outside the Wolf Center on a clear...