Doesn’t fish. Isn’t a cat.

August 02, 2008

Filed in: Alaska, The Way We Live Now

A couple of years ago I was walking Pip on a really dank and gray November morning. We crossed the culvert at the end of our street where a little stream trickles into the mighty Swellville river (that’s a joke—the river flows so slowly it’s legally in danger of losing its status as a moving body of water) when we were suddenly face-to-face with this, this thing—it was long and sleek and furry and throwing off the most awful karma.

It was very clear that this animal had mayhem in its heart. Seriously, the hair on the back of my head stood on end, and all for a creature that prolly weighed 8 lbs. The dog, an animal not known for her discretion, or her silence, was struck dumb. The three of us stared at one another for an instant before it slunk away and Pip and I hurried off to shutter our windows and mutter curses as we threw burnt offerings into the fire.

Turned out it was what they call around here a fisher cat, though, as the article I later read in AMC Outdoors pointed out, they a) don’t fish and b) aren’t cats. They do rip up the bellies of cats and small dogs and other various little mammals they can get ahold of. Lovely. They’re the littlest members of the weasel family, a group of mammals that are pretty hard to love when you’re looking at them nose-to-nose.

The biggest member is the wolverine. I have to be really frank here. Until we went to Alaska, I wasn’t 100% absolutely positively sure the wolverine was a real animal, like a real animal that still lives in the wild in this century, as opposed to something that died out in the Pleistocene era and only lived on only in the hearts of Hugh Jackman fans.

The day in Alaska that we went on our bear safari, we had lunch in a wilderness lodge in the Lake Clark National Preserve that had a stuffed wolverine that W and I could not stop staring at. I wish so much we had taken a picture (… but oh yeah! That was the day we had no camera at all! Duh.) Well, you’ll have to satisfy yourself with this pic.

They’re fascinating and terrifying to look at, and, apparently, still plenty wild in Alaska. They’re bigger than you think they’re going to be—like the size (and heft) of a hassock. They have really powerful forearms and claws. If they were people, they’d be those muscle-bound weight-lifters who are really big on top and teeny-tiny on the bottom. Also, they have a really scary teeth-and-jaws thing going. You can definitely picture them ripping things. Ew.

The lodge owner told us wolverines have been known to scare a bear off its kill. Also, according to that know-it-all Wikipedia, wolverines have killed moose before, which are obviously many, many, many times bigger, but not to worry—they’re only attacking weak moose in the winter when they’re most vulnerable. Phew.

They have no known natural predators—except two, the same two that pretty much any other wild animal has these days. 1) Humans encroaching on their habitat (wolverines are, surprise surprise, not sharers, and each one needs a pretty big chunk of land to do his hunting in) and 2) the Fish and Wildlife Service under the Bush administration (note they are not classified here as humans), which decided pretty much around the exact same time that we were learning about wolverines in Alaska that they don’t need any protection, even though there are only 500 or so (or, some say, considerably less) in all of Idaho and Wyoming and Montana.

You can read the Times’s op-ed on it here.

In the meantime, leave me to my fantasy: how fun would it be to introduce one of these fellers to the office-bound political puppets who’re making all these life and death decisions about this or that endangered species? Go get ‘em, wolvie, I’ve got your back.

Way back.