wolves eating a muskox carcass in Ellesmere Island

Inside the harsh lives of wolves living at the top of the world

Our writer spent 30 hours traveling with arctic wolves and gained a new appreciation for these predators of the tundra.

Wolves pick at the remains of a muskox. To get this image, photographer Ronan Donovan placed a camera trap inside the carcass. The pack returned to feed on and off for a month.
This story appears in the September 2019 issue of National Geographic magazine.

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

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