A wolf unable to traverse such obstacles is hemmed in to almost-sure starvation in too narrow a slice of country. As a matter of survival, any Southeast Alaska wolf must navigate water, whether liquid, frozen, or a mixture of both: mountain rivers etched with canyons, waterfalls, and glacial sluices fierce enough to drown a bear, and current-torn fjords that themselves must sometimes be swum. Angling toward Tern Island, just north of the Big Rock, the wolf read his way across the lake via the one avenue where passage was still possible, drawing on all he’d learned of ice, and on the echoes of what his forebears knew. He gathered and leaped over a moat of shore melt, onto a pan of solid ice, and picked his way, testing with nail, nose, and eye, at times almost crawling to spread his weight, once backtracking around a spot he must have judged uncertain. I watched from afar as Romeo stood on the westernmost point of the Dredge Lakes beach, gazing toward the opposite shore. Where the glacier’s furrowed edge met the lake, currents bored dark, ever-widening holes the past autumn’s calved icebergs, caught in place, began to creak free. The lake flexed with spring’s rising flood, a patchwork of standing water and failing ice, riddled with sun-rot.
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