By Tom Stienstra
Sometimes the most important moments of your life can come and go without much thought. Then days, months or years later, you realize out of the blue what you missed.
This sequence played out this past week. The revelation felt like parting a window shade and getting a glimpse of a secret world.
The story opens in remote forest in Northern California, where on a wide game trail on a ridge, a bit muddy and with a few patches of snow, I came upon a set of wildlife tracks: about 4½ inches long, with the impressions of each toe marked with talons.
My first thought was they were from a mountain lion. The size was right (as that for a big dog), but lions withdraw their claws when they walk. I’d also seen deer prints in the area and my first theory was that a lion had been tracking the deer, and that might explain its extended claws.
But something was not right: The stride was roughly 25 to 30 inches. That would be the stride of a lion walking, not running or attacking. When lions run after a deer, that is when they extend their claws, and their stride can extend to more than 6 feet.
The prints weren’t from a big dog, for sure. There were no boot prints in the area, tire tracks on logging roads, or other dog prints anywhere for miles. In addition, as dogs smell new things, their prints tend to wander about. Lion and most wildlife prints instead go in a straight line, as the ones I’d encountered.
In addition, as it was gated, private land, nobody else had been in the area. I obtained permission for access from a timber company that owns vast expanse of forests, many managed for excellent wildlife habitat, with the promise I wouldn’t detail the locations to attract trespassers.
This was in the middle of winter, during the two-month drought, when many areas that are usually buried in snow and off-limits, were accessible. Lions, bobcats, coyotes and foxes do not hibernate, and with the surface soft and ideal for prints, it was a rare opportunity to try and find their tracks.
Through a winter of travel and adventures, finding those tracks crossed my mind only a few times. This past week, my friend Paul Chapman, the manager of the private timberland, provided a mind-boggling insight:
A wolf, tracked by the Department of Fish and Wildlife with a GPS collar, had been traced and followed by computer mapping to the area I had explored, he said.
The wolf was a female, Paul said, that the DFW had collared. As policy, the DFW does not release detailed locations of wolves with GPS collars to the public. Chapman, as a manager of privately owned forests with many wildlife cams and ongoing wildlife studies, is the rare exception.
With the fresh details, it’s now possible the tracks I encountered up on that ridge were from a wolf, not a lion.
This past week, when I got the news, the thought shortened my breath. I remember how fresh the prints were, perhaps even made within the hour. It would have been my first wolf sighting in California.
On a cold winter day in the wilderness, while I studied, traced and tried to tell the hidden tale of wildlife tracks, it’s possible that it was the other way around: a wolf, quiet and concealed, may have watched me walk past.