Your daily bit of Alaskana

[layla]

So, this afternoon, off and on, I’ve been hearing what sounds to me like a dog howling, somewhere in the neighborhood. But I can’t get a good fix on it, because I only ever heard it from inside the house, while I was doing something else. By the time I stopped to listen and open a window to see if I could hear it better, it had already stopped.

I kept trying to figure it out, because it’s really cold today (-20F or so) and I was worried that perhaps a neighbor dog had got caught in a trap or accidentally left outside or something. I couldn’t hear it well enough to tell for sure, though, and I wasn’t even 100% sure it was an animal, because sound carries a long way when it’s this cold, and I often mistake snowmobiles for animal sounds — their rising and falling pitch sounds animate, until I stop and listen and can tell for sure that it’s a snowmobile somewhere far off.

When I walked Lucky in the afternoon, I made a point of roaming around the edges of the property, hoping to hear the howling again (if it was howling) and get an idea of where it was coming from. At the edge of our driveway, I found the kind of tracks that I have, in the past, assumed are wolf tracks: enormous dog tracks (~5″ across) in a straight line, as wild canine tracks tend to be. In winters past, I’ve only ever found a single set, but this time I was pretty sure there were two different ones. But again, two of our neighbors have large dogs, and I wasn’t entirely sure it might not be them.

For some reason I didn’t put 2+2 together until I was out, again, with Lucky at dusk, and heard the howling again, and this time I heard it well enough to tell that it was two different howls responding to each other at different distances, catching and carrying on each other’s signal, as Huskies sometimes do. And then the penny dropped and I went “Oh!”

What I’ve been listening to all afternoon is wolf talk.

Of course, I could have done without having this epiphany at dusk, a quarter mile from the house. XD

Originally published at Layla's Wordpress blog. You can comment here or there.

Comments

Re: Ooo...

[ysabetwordsmith]

Pure coyotes tend to be solitary and shy, not a threat to humans. But when they crossbreed with wolves and/or dogs, they can get bigger and more cooperative. Then if they're pressed into close contact with humans, they lose the shyness, and trouble results. Not good for anyone. It's a phenomenon from recent decades, rather than common historically.