She stopped and suddenly began digging hard in the snow. Not far beyond them, a steaming hot springs had melted an open patch of ground, muddy and crusted at the edge with brown ice. Possibly a water hole in wintertime. Then the mama wolverine stuck her head in the hole she had dug and began to tug upward. Ah: a dead deer, buried under the snow near the spring. Patiently, with some more pawing and many hard tugs, the mother pulled it up out of the snow. Serious strength in that small body. She began to tear at the corpse, and her kits flopped around her trying to do the same.
One old name for the wolverine, Art said quietly as they watched, was the glutton. They always ate with great enthusiasm, it seemed, and usually tore their prey to bits and ate every part of it, including bones. They had a tooth at the back of their mouths that made it easier for them to tear flesh, and their jaws were so strong they could break any bone they came on. Gulo gulo was their Latin name, referencing this supposed gluttony.
“We’re lucky to see this,” Art said quietly. “Wolverines are still rare here. There weren’t any at all in the Sierra from about 1940 to the early 2000s. Then a few began to show up on night cameras near Lake Tahoe, but they were wanderers, and it didn’t look like there were any breeding pairs. Now they’re being seen all up and down the range. There were some re-introductions to help that along. Now it seems like they’re back.”
“Lots of deer up here?” Mary guessed.
“Sure. Like everywhere. Although at least here the deer have some predators. Mountain lions, coyotes.”
They settled in and shared time at the spotting scope. They watched the wolverine family eat. It was a somewhat grisly business. The kits were playful in the usual style of youngsters. This was their first year, Art said. Next year the mom would shoo them off. They weren’t graceful, being so low and foursquare. They reminded Mary of otters she had seen in zoos, the way otters moved on land; but otters were very graceful underwater. For wolverines, this was it. Not graceful. But of course this was a human perspective; they were also obviously capable, confident, happy on the snow. Unafraid. Wild creatures at home, back at home, after a century gone. Knitting up the world.
Mary moved away, stood watching. For a time she was distracted, thinking of Frank and the chamois and marmots. Then these animals brought her back. The kits harassed their mom, played in the usual style of the young. Such a deep part of what mammals were, playing when young. Did baby salamanders play? She couldn’t remember ever playing, her childhood was so far behind her— but no, there it was, she remembered. Kicking a ball in the yard and so on. Sure.
Then also the careless tolerance of the mom, ignoring her youngsters as they clambered on her, wrestled with each other, fell over themselves. They snuffed and worried at her underside, she knocked them away with a flick of her foreleg. They did have big feet, clawed pads like snowshoes, broad and long. Lords of winter. Nothing up here could harm them, nothing scared them. Art said people had seen them chasing away bears, mountain lions, wolves. Masters of all they surveyed.
Captain Art regarded them with a fixation Mary found pleasing. He was lost in it. They were in no hurry; this was the place to be. Again she thought of Frank in the meadow above Flims, but now it was all right, she could be grateful he had taken her up there, that he had introduced her to this man. It was getting cold, she felt the first pinch of hunger, she had to pee. But there before her, wolverines. It was a blessing.
Only when the sun dropped into the treetops did Art stir and lead them back to the airship. By then they were really cold, and warming up in the gondola was a kind of party. They flew east on the wind, looking down at the pink alpenglow suffusing the range of light.
North and east above desert, the Rockies, flat prairie, and then tundra. The border between the great boreal forest and the tundra looked ramshackle and weird; a lot of permafrost here had melted, Art said, creating what was called a drunken forest, trees tilted this way and that. Then lakes everywhere under them, more lakes than land. Flying over this huge wet expanse it looked like the Half Earth goal would be easy to reach, or was even already accomplished. Which was not the case, but one always judged by what stood before one’s eyes. In fact they infested the planet like locusts. No, that too was wrong. In the cities it looked like that, but not here. There were many realities on a planet this big.
The new port city on the Arctic Ocean, called Mackenzie Prime, looked like an old industrial site. A single dock six kilometers long, studded with cranes for handling container ships. The opening up of the Arctic Ocean to ships had made for one of the odd zones of the Anthropocene. Traffic was mostly container ships refurbished as autopiloted solar-powered freighters, slow but steady. Carbon-neutral transport on a great circle route, and as such not much to complain about. Also there were few to complain, at least in terms of locals; the total population on the coasts of the Arctic Ocean still numbered less than a million people: Inuit, Sami, Athapaskan, Inupiat, Yakut;
