“I LOVE Christmas so much!”

Janine

The pattering on the tent this morning was not, for a change, bugs.

Rain. And a low, cold sky to match.

Janine woke up first, and seeing the situation, immediately declared a sleep in (without even consulting me! Outrageous!). But eventually we had to get up and decide whether this was serious enough stuff to make us reach into the bank and withdraw a rest day.

After breakfast, we were were still undecided. So we resolved to do the hike up the nearby esker we had planned the night before. From that high ground, we’d get a better sense of the weather and hopefully, see some wildlife.

Two for two.

As I crested the sandy bank, I was greeted by the fuzzy grey profile of a tundra wolf pup. He trotted up to another ridge, turned for one more look, decided we were not wolves and trotted away.

We pursued, and as we followed saw another pup a little further in the distance, not as curious as his sibling and already well on his way to his hiding spot.

We obligingly played the dumb tourists, giving our best wolf howls in an effort to convince the furballs that all we wanted to do was snuggle with them for a couple of hours and then release them back into the wild. All this got were brief pauses in the retreat, while the pups gave us a pitying stare before moving on.

Add wolf pups to the list of people who think they’re too cool for us.

But we were not to be denied! We had come a long way to see these guys and had paid a lot of money for Janine’s telephoto lens. Our howling pursuit continued.

Then momma showed up.

She was a beauty. Tawny white with a ripple of butterscotch around her collar. She’d trot back and forth in front of us, always the same distance away, keeping an eye on us and keeping up a dialogue with the pups.

We howled at her too.

Put momma wolf on the list.

By this time, the pups had gone to ground in the surrounding thickets.

Momma would howl to them (I recognized this howl from my own childhood in Newfoundland as “Stay where you’re at ’till I comes where you’re

to!”) and the cubs would respond with an almost child-like cry.

Evidently, momma was also calling for back up. As time passed, the tundra started to echo with the calls of more members of the family.

We stayed for a little longer, took some more pics of mom and half-heartedly looked for one of the pups, who was in some willows only a few feet away. But we didn’t want to stress out the animals anymore than we already had. They’d given us some time and we were grateful.

Time to go.

Momma trailed us all the way back to the esker, making sure our departure was genuine. After some milling about the den (littered with caribou bones, paw prints and fuzzy wolf poop, we headed back to camp.

The view from the denning site had reassured us that, while it wouldn’t be a postcard out there today, the rain was basically done and we could get a good paddle in.

The wolves energized us and we were upbeat and chatty in the boat, despite the grey weather. Two more wolves were sited throughout the day, as the Thelon transitioned from wooded shores to more wide open tundra.

At one point, it was noted that it was now exactly 5 months till our favourite day of the year – Christmas. And so we passed about an hour and a half discussing yuletides past, great gifts, favourite memories and best songs.

It seemed an appropriate topic of conversation on a day when the Thelon had given us such a cool present.

Jason

Sent from our satellite phone…live from the tundra!