I marked one track, and from it we located others laid out in a gallop pattern.

Then curiosity kicked in and we stepped outside our small fenced yard to follow the wolves' trail. For some long moments after they passed we knelt motionless in the garden, at a loss for words. But we had never seen them- not until that misty August morning when they ran across our meadow. Since then we had been hearing them howl from the shoulder of our mountain and occasionally finding their tracks. Wolves began to recolonize our area in the early 1990s. This relationship has been eloquently elucidated across the ages in Paleolithic petroglyphs of dire wolves and other creatures sharp of tooth and claw and in medieval paintings of wolves menacing sheep. Humans also have a primal relationship with large predators. These discoveries give me pleasure and an unspoken awareness of the natural order of things. In spring, even before I see the grizzly lumber out of the forest to dig roots, I smell its ripe essence. I open the front door of my cabin and find wolf tracks pressed into the snow. Most of us have a landscape we intuitively comprehend. Landscapes shape us and speak to us on a primal level. From our cabin you can walk due east beyond the state forest lands and not encounter much more than federally protected wilderness for a hundred miles. Midway up the mountains, overgrown clear-cuts show up as yellow-green rectangles against the darker green of old-growth forest. As wild as the wildest places in the lower forty-eight United States, it isn't quite paradise, although the handful of us who live here think it comes close. We live at the base of a mountain in northwestern Montana. In less than two heartbeats they pierced the deep wood on the far side of the meadow, leaving a wake of quaking vegetation. One black, the other gray, the black wolf in the lead, they closed in on the doe's haunches. This drama unfolded not twenty feet from where my young daughters and I knelt in our garden peacefully pulling weeds, our pant legs wet with morning dew. Editor's Note: The following is an excerpt from Cristina Eisenberg's book The Wolf’s Tooth.Ī doe burst out of the forest and tore across the meadow, two wolves in close pursuit.

Wolves predators