Sunday, September 25, 2011

Howl



That's no hoax. That's an Arctic Wolf I found at the Shubenacadie Provincial Wildlife Park (zoo). I was trying to figure out how to climb the fence to get in there when in the distance a train whistled. This caused the gray wolves in the next pen to howl The chain reaction caused the Arctic Wolf to whine a little and then howl too in response to the train. They were born and raised in captivity yet retain this elemental assembly call. Somewhere out there, they suspect, are others of their kind living different lives and their howl summed up their mournfulness. Or maybe that is me projecting my own wishes onto them.
The few visitors stopped to listen, holding their breath. The howl means something to everyone and its echo is in danger of being lost or at most it will merely answer the call of the log train rolling into Halifax.
Then a loud child came along wearing a Toy Story t-shirt and dirty baseball cap. He pointed.
"Wook at the fox, mommy! Wook at the white fox!"
"It's a wolf," I said under my breath, a tear for the future rolling down my hollow cheeks. "It's an Arctic Wolf."

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Isn't this the idea, breed them in captivity and then when the genetic line is strong enough take a bunch out to the wild?
WeRo

Oggy Bleacher said...

I think the idea is to send the pups out to other zoos.

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Man in the Van by Oggy Bleacher is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported License.