2015 Collection: Sporadic Notes from The Toy Factory #4 These Wolves Make This Land Wild.

"We heard wolves last night. They were 'way out there."

Now these wolves aren't coyotes, they're timbers; big gray wolves whose howls make the hair on the back of your neck stand on end, and make big city dogs grow timid in the dark even if they've never heard one before in their lives.

When the deer camp boys say they heard wolves, that's what they mean. And it's those gray wolves that make this land wild, make the darkness ominous; and make the place beyond cellphone reception hallowed ground, even as vapor trails criss-cross the sky 35,000 feet overhead.

I doubt those airline passengers think about that; about the desolate wild areas of NW Minnesota far below that even today rivals Canada's wild claim of untamed land. It's the timber wolves that do that, not the deer, the bear, the fox, the lynx.

Oh, yeah seeing a cougar may set your heart racing to be sure, but it's the wolves that elude your common sense that the woods we hunt, we think are safe; and the worst that can happen to a hunter here is falling through the ice and suffering hyperthermia; or breaking a bone, or two, far from immediate assistance.

So when I sit in a deer stand in the woods that I haven't hunted in years, -- and don't see a single deer, I just recall that they had heard 'wolves 'way out there', where I am now, sixteen feet off the ground."

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