The Lone Wolverine: Tracking Michigan's Most Elusive Animal

February 24, 2004, First Sighting

February 24, 2004, First Sighting ✦ ✦ ✦ The snowstorm had started around 2:30 p.m. on the previous day, dropping from the sky in thick white ›akes throughout the night all across the ›at expanses of Michigan’s Thumb. It was still coming down steadily at 2:00 a.m. when Aaron Schenk stepped out of the Verona bar where he played in a weekly pool league. There were few other cars out this late, so the trackless rural road was barely visible through the snowy haze in front of his headlights. It made for a long, slow drive home. He was glad when he reached home and could shut the door behind him and head for bed. By early morning the harsh winter storm had passed, laying down in its wake a six-inch blanket of fresh snow across the open landscape— the kind of snow that stretches out like thick, heavy dust across the open ‹elds then drifts up high at the fence lines and the occasional narrow woodlots between two farmers’ ‹elds. Aaron Schenk woke to the sound of the phone ringing at 6:30 a.m. “I know you’re up. You coming out hunting today? Look out your bedroom window to the south about 100 yards. You’ll see me parked on the road.” It was his brother, Ryan, sounding too eager and excited for so early in the morning. Aaron shook himself awake, peering out the bedroom window to see Ryan’s truck down the road, just as he’d said. “I’ve got a big track out here—something we’ve never seen before.” For the past year, there had been a rash of uncon‹rmed cougar sightings around Bad Axe, but the Schenk brothers hadn’t put much stock in those reports. In Michigan, cougar sightings are more popular than UFO sightings and just as elusive when it comes to hard evidence. People were always asking the brothers to put their dogs on a sup17 Map 2. The trail 1. The canals, the wolverine’s sanctuary 2. Aaron Schenk backtracks the wolverine to this location 3. Aaron and Ryan Schenk ‹rst check out the wolverine’s tracks 4. Ryan’s dog Brandy catches the scent of the wolverine, and the “chase” begins 5. Harold Grifka’s dog, Pluto, trees the wolverine 6. Jeff Ford’s research site 7. Jeff Ford’s residence posed cougar, but they always rolled their eyes, more amused than irritated . There were plenty of coyote hunters in the county, and if there was a cougar in the area they’d have known about it sooner than the general population. But that morning, driving home from his third-shift job at a small local machine shop, Ryan Schenk himself had spotted something unusual in the fresh white drifts along the rural roadway. Aaron was skeptical but he knew better than to dismiss Ryan’s suspicions . Quickly, he dressed and headed out to join him. Standing there along McMillan Road next to his favorite hunting buddy, Aaron had to agree. The tracks were like nothing the two brothers had ever seen in all their years running their hounds after coyotes, foxes, and other game animals. “It didn’t really look like a cat track to us, but then we ended up trying it anyway,” Aaron said later in recalling the day. “One good old hound he [Ryan] had was the only one that would even accept this track. Must be because it was something they didn’t recognize or it scared them, but none of the dogs would have anything to do with it. But we put old Brandy on it, and she just went in. As she got close enough, the chase began.” They couldn’t get a look at it, but whatever it was it refused to leave the cover of the one-mile section of woods where the dogs ‹rst roused it. It ran the dogs in circles, round and round in the woods, trying to lose them. It was after 9:30 a.m. by then. The brothers were using two-way radios to communicate as they worked the track with the dog, circling around but never quite closing in. A pair of neighboring coyote hunters heard the radio chatter and joined in, intrigued. Unable to resist the lure of this “mystery” hunt, Johnny Boland Sr. and Jim McKnight were soon part of the chase...