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Adapted from an article that appeared in Medical Economics, June, 1993, entitled "Six Months in the Wilderness Changed My Life."
Five a.m., alone, out on Crooked Lake, camped on a small island a quarter mile from the Canadian border and three days travel from the nearest town.
An unusual sound awoke me, but as I lie in my tent, all I hear is gentle whistling of the wind in the red pines above, a sound I have heard thousands of times before. Still, I did hear something.
Then I hear it again. Close. My God, they are really close. It is a sound as no other, resonating in the most primitive part of my brain.
Wolves!
A pack of them is howling and yapping across the narrow channel separating me from the American mainland. I listen, amazed, for a few minutes, and am able to distinguish several individuals by the pitch, location, and length of their call. Carefully, I unzip the door to my tent and quietly crawl outside, hoping for a chance to see them. I stand barefoot on the flat granite ledge rock and look across the dark water. The howling has stopped, and it isn’t yet light enough to see the pack. I think about launching the canoe and paddling over to the nearby forest, but my effort will make too much noise.
They’ll be long gone.
It’s warm for late September, but I’m shivering.
Wolves!
I scan the sky, reading the day’s weather for the border country. The north is clear, and I see Polaris, more than half way to the zenith. I am at fifty degrees latitude in the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness. There is no major city between my camp and the North Pole. I am "up north," where the wolves are.
Too excited to sleep any longer, I begin breaking camp. I walk over to a nearby jack pine tree, untie a yellow nylon line from the trunk, and slowly lower my pack from a branch fifteen feet off the ground, where I had hoisted it the night before, in order to discourage bears. I carry the pack to the kitchen area, light my small stove to boil water, and return to the tent to get dressed. The boreal forest remains silent.
After I am dressed, I strike the tent, folding it carefully and placing it with my sleeping bag in the bottom of the pack. The water is now boiling. After I turn off the stove, I again hear the wolves, now much further away, well down the eastern shoreline of nearby Friday Bay. I scan the southern sky. Orion is easily visible, but as I watch, thickening clouds are moving from Rigel up through the belt. There is a southerly flow in the upper atmosphere.
I then remember the distance I covered the previous day, paddling more than twenty miles, thanks to the strong south wind that pushed me down the Basswood River. I had never traveled that far before in a single day. I arrived at the campsite exhausted, the Sun barely above the flat horizon far down the lake. By the time I had pitched the tent, had dinner, and hung the food, it was well after dark.
The wolf pack is again silent, and I now feel a light wind on my face. South winds and warm autumn weather in the North Country herald a low pressure system and rain. I am still dry, but I know I better eat breakfast, finish packing, and get moving, for I have many miles of paddling ahead of me, and it is going to be a wet day.
Maybe that’s what the wolves were saying.
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