Squatters

The first winter after we'd purchased the new piece of land up across the road from The Cabin, we discovered a pack of wolves had set up housekeeping in the crawlspace beneath an unfinished building on the far edge of the property. We discovered this unexpectedly. Not a good adverb to use in a sentence containing the phrase "a pack of wolves."

Nevertheless.

The property, and the building -- a small, whimsically-constructed house left half-done by the previous owners, a stoned artist from Queens and her series of drunken husbands -- had been abandoned for several years. Then we got our hands on it. The Compound was born.

Eager to get to know The New Land, my husband and I were trekking through the boreal stillness one December afternoon, when our dog became increasingly agitated. Pulling against lead with all her husky might, nervously snuffling the ground and yodeling, her hackles and tail stood punked-out in full mosh pit array as she dragged us through the snow. We soon realized the dirty ice clumps lining the deer trail we'd been following were not, after all, dirty ice clumps, but rather an orderly row of dozens of piles of wolf scat. Fresh wolf scat.

Q: Did you know wolves like to mark the entrance to their dens this way?

A: Now you do.

By the time we stumbled upon their lair, the wolves were long gone, possibly on a hunt, or at least well aware of Moronic White Man approaching like a Macy's parade through the trees. But tucked under the empty dwelling were the unmistakable signs of their habitation. Their very recent habitation. As we stared slack-jawed and prickly-scalped at the carpet of fur and the piles of bones and the intermittent dark splotches which could only be dried (drying!) blood, the husky began speaking in tongues. In a voice we'd not heard before. Ever. At which point we all three thought it best to hightail it, and did.

Back down below the road, inside the four worn but solid walls of The Cabin, we pulled off our boots and lit the lamps and fed the stove and uncorked the JD. Then we raised our glasses and, surrounded by the unmistakable signs of our habitation, listened through a cracked window all that long night to our displaced neighbors commenting on this new turn of events from far up in the jackpines along the ridge.

The pack never returned to its former homestead, a.k.a. The Wolf's Den. In our observation most of the wolves once so prevalent seem to have moved further back up into the bush, as North Shore Real Estate Madness bites deeper and deeper into what is questionably still called The Wilderness. Cellphones and ATVs and GPS units do not a wilderness make.

But don't get me started.

Decades before we showed up on The Shore, and after a long-time occupant had been relocated to a nursing home in another county, The Cabin itself was once abandoned. A family down-on-its-luck broke in one winter, and finding no one home, ala Goldilocks, stayed for a few years.

One of our first summers at Rendezvous, a local festival, we met an elderly member of this family, who regaled us with stories from those days. We learned the woman who'd eventually be moved to the nursing home had once opened up shop during the winter months, a sort of seasonal bar and grill, emphasis on bar. But realizing her clientele's penchant for drunken fistfights brought on by chronic cabin fever, she closed after only two short but memorable seasons. We'd found us a cabin -- a.k.a. Roadhouse -- with a past. Now it was our turn.

Once I glanced out the window at Roadhouse and saw a wolf trotting through the clearing toward The Lake. One year we heard rumors of a wolf with mange, and then my husband saw it, wandering along the path by the outhouse. And once, driving back late at night about a mile from our turnoff, my husband barely missed hitting a wolf as it streaked past in the headlights.

Q: Why did the wolf cross the road?

But these are stories of lone wolves. Twenty years ago, at the start of our Big Adventure, we heard the packs regularly. There's no way to describe this experience. Visceral. Primal. Transcendent. There's nothing to compare with stepping outside at midnight onto the porch of an old cabin, the black inestimable universe all around, and having the silence suddenly split by the voices of a pack of wolves moving through the darkness somewhere in the distance. Somewhere far in the distance, but close enough.

Enough to call us back, again and again, another couple of lone wolves looking for home.