We have entered Yellowstone Park.
We are driving through the Lamar Valley in the northeast portion of the park. Before mid-morning we have already seen a coyote eating at the side of the road, its nose red with blood. We have seen buffalo and elk and pronghorn antelope. We have seen four big horn sheep.
Now we are watching three wolves sun themselves in a great open meadow. They are about a quarter mile distant. One wolf has moved off slightly onto the snow, the others recline on a patch of bare, dark soil. In the far background a couple elk move among trees and the wolves pay them no attention.
Farther on, in another great, open meadow, we get glimpses, only glimpses, of two more wolves. We move on.
Is my sense that wolves are somehow noble and majestic - is this something within the wolves or is it something in me? Those who want to eliminate the wolf might say I suffer a silly romanticism; their sense of the wolf, they'd make clear, is entirely different. Partly the difference is a matter of how one looks at the world - do we think we are the masters of the universe, or do we think we share the earth with all God's creatures?
Now we've seen a red fox, too. Up close, no more than twenty feet from the road. It is snuffling about for mice under the snow cover. It pays us no mind.
...
According to Minnie Strong, young William Strong's mother, several hardy men pushed northward in 1849 from Racine County in southern Wisconsin into the Indian country, "to spy out the land and find out what advantages it offered for homesteading." The travelers followed rivers, old Indian trails, and the nearly obliterated tracks of Wisconsin's fur traders. They headed north, they headed north and west.
The men found a place that suited them in what is now Waupaca County, Wisconsin. Although the region had not yet been surveyed, claims were staked. Here is where the pioneer families would settle.
Two members of the party stayed behind to protect the claims until the others returned the following year with their families and belongings. One was an older man, the other was still in his teens. This youth was Minnie Strong's father, Columbus Caldwell, and was William Strong's grandfather. The two who stayed behind made a clearing in the woods and built a one-room cabin to serve as winter shelter.
"My father's dog remained with his master," Mrs. Strong has recorded. In the long winter evenings, the dog - named York - played a dangerous game with the big gray wolves of the vicinity. York would beg to be let out of the cabin. The wolves would come as near the light as they dared. A chase would begin, back and forth, wolves and dog, from the edge of the clearing to the edge of the cabin light. When York tired out, he threw himself against the cabin door, a sign he was ready to come in and rest by the fire.
To be continued....
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"The Northern Entrance" was published originally in North Dakota Quarterly.
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