Wolves as Wilderness
Nonfiction essay by Amanda Peacher

The sun has not yet summited the peaks of the Sawtooth Wilderness when we stir in our tent. It’s a chilly July morning in Central Idaho, quiet except for the gurgle of the South Fork of the Payette River. Here, only miles from the headwaters, the South Fork might still be called a creek. Downriver it becomes a raging fury of rapids that causes an adrenaline rush for even the best of Idaho’s boaters. But from our campsite, the South Fork feels private and friendly.
My watch says 7:20. Plenty of time to cook breakfast and enjoy the sunrise before I start my workday as a wilderness ranger. My partner Cristina has come with me on a three-day backpacking trip. In the sleepy gray of this first morning, we hear a rustling in the brush.
“Deer,” says Cristina softly. In our mesh tent, we sit up on our elbows and watch the doe pass. Her long legs step carefully but quickly along the riverbank. It’s not often that we see wildlife in the Sawtooths, so spotting even a deer is a special event.
Suddenly, silently, I see a large smoky-gray animal emerge from the brush across the river. It is a wolf. I’m suddenly fully awake. The wolf glances at me casually and follows in the same direction as the deer.
“A wolf!” I whisper, pointing. Cristina bolts up, but the wolf’s bushy dark tail disappears into the trees before she spots it. I unzip my sleeping bag and dash out to the rocks along the riverbank to see where it went. In five summers working for the forest service in the Sawtooth Valley, I’ve never spotted a wolf in the wilderness. Nor have many others—although wolves once again roam much of Central Idaho, they are elusive and sightings are rare.
The wolf has disappeared. “I think it’s gone,” I say, perched on a granite slab in just my socks and my long johns. In that moment my excitement is eclipsed by disappointment—I want Cristina to see the wolf, too.
Then, on the opposite side of our tent, about twenty yards away, I see a second wolf appear. “Another one!” I say. Cristina stands and we watch as the wolf hurries by in full view. This one is sandy-colored and petite—probably a female. It turns its head to look at us briefly without breaking its stride.
My stomach flutters. As the wolf gazes in our direction, I suddenly feel like prey. The river separated us from the first wolf, but only a few pine trees stand between this second wolf and us. Cristina feels the same sense of intimidation. She crouches down, still keeping an eye on the wolf. I instinctively reach for my work shovel. “Whoa,” one of us mutters. We watch the wolf for a long ten seconds as it passes through the clearing near our tent.
Intellectually, Cristina and I both know that the wolves have no interest in the two of us as prey. Both wolves seem to be pursuing the deer that we saw moments before. So I’m surprised that our initial delight at seeing wolves is followed by a smack of fear. The visceral, face-to-face experience of wolves is more intimidating and real than the romanticized notion I had of them before. No wonder that generations of pioneers felt so threatened by these predators.
Perhaps such moments of intimidation can make our time in the wilderness more wild. Encounters with large, sometimes scary predators are a part of being in wilderness. Following this moment of fright is a sense of humility. I am in the wolf’s domain. I am a visitor who does not remain.
Experiences with wolves or mountain lions, or perhaps a booming thunderstorm waited out huddled under a rain fly are reminders that humans are not the only powerful, intimidating, and potentially dangerous force on this earth. When we enter the wilderness armed with high-tech gear, GPS units, detailed route giveaways and sat phones, it’s easy to feel indomitable. Still, sometimes we are forced out of our fancy tents and comfortable sleeping bags to encounter wilderness head on, with a mixture of terror and delight, in only our socks and long johns.
As Cristina and I hike our way further up the South Fork of the Payette River, we look for signs of the wolves. We see paw prints bigger than our hands in the sand from the smoky-colored wolf. We find deer and elk prints in a meadow with more wolf tracks nearby. And, right along the trail, we find seven or eight piles of wolf scat. One particularly fresh heap contains hoof shards from a deer kill.
Our trip is imbued with the sense that the predators are all around us — that we are tiptoeing through their territory. Are the wolves watching us, hidden in the brush as we hike along the diminishing South Fork Payette? We can only guess. Such is the mystery of wilderness.