I stayed quietly by the car and listened in the pitch-black as Wydeven walked away, his boots crunching on the gravel of the forest road. I recently traveled with Wisconsin wolf biologist Adrian Wydeven far into the Chequamegon National Forest on a calm, starlit night to howl for wolves. Meanwhile, the fate of the wolf in Wisconsin seems as uncertain as ever, tangled in politics and court cases and a cultural divide that has brought the vitriol and divisions of current public discourse to the management of wildlife. Here in Wisconsin, another wolf hunt could be held in the next few months, though a Dane County judge has effectively blocked the hunt scheduled for Nov. Knowing that I am in a place where wolves live touches me deeply, stirring ancient, buried memory and giving me pause when I stand at the edge of a darkened wood in the wild, northern country where the packs roam and hunt and raise their young. It is a difference rooted in ecology but also in something less scientific. There is a difference between a forest where wolves walk and one where they don’t. They are not brethren, they are not underlings they are other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time, fellow prisoners of the splendor and travail of the earth.” In a world older and more complete than ours they move finished and complete, gifted with extensions of the senses we have lost or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear. “For the animals shall not be measured by man.
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