The pond was opalescent at that hour, a mirror of the universe, and the wolves also seemed otherworldly in their happiness. Back and forth across the pond they chased, four pups scrambling after the puck and three older wolves knocking them down, checking their little bodies into frozen grass at the shore. In my notebook, in letters made nearly illegible by my shivering, I wrote the word “goofy.”

The largest wolf, a yearling male, was a bully at 70 pounds or so. The smallest, the runt of that year’s litter, was hardly bigger than a throw pillow, her eyes lined in black. A pair of ravens sailed overhead, and apart from their jeering, there was no sound on the tundra but