31 Jan

It appears that Lake Superior and her weather will allow us to fly this morning.  After three days of blowing snow, the island is a clean slate.  The old tracks are filled in with wind-blown snow.  Any tracks we see will be fresh.  We have no idea what the wolves have been up to for the past three days, and we’ll be anxious to figure out whether we’ve missed an kills.

    In the morning, we found Middle Pack just a few miles west of the bunkhouse.  We may also have found most of the tracks that mark their path from the kill site where we’d last seen them three days ago to where we saw them this morning.  

    After a short while, overcast turned to increasingly numerous snow squalls.  We returned home by 11am.  After a cup of cocoa, the sky cleared, and we flew some more.  

    After cocoa, we found Chippewa Harbor Pack on the shore just south of Conglomerate Bay, just where we’d left them three days prior.  The stand-off finally came to an end, probably sometime during the past night.  The calf that Chippewa Harbor pack had attacked five days ago has finally died.  Its mother looked on from just about 40 meters away as Chippewa Harbor Pack fed on the calf’s carcass.  The wolves of Chippewa Harbor Pack were eating for the first time in about 10 days.  

   We found just three wolves from East Pack bedded between the base of Tobin Harbor and the Greenstone Ridge.  Later in the afternoon they began traveling southwest.  

   At about 2pm, we observed a pair of wolves meet each other in the middle of Moskey Basin just southwest of Daisy Farm.  A smaller wolf (probably female) came from the NE (East Pack Territory) and a larger wolf (probably a male) came from the general direction of Chippewa Harbor Pack’s kill site.  The wolves interacted for a few minutes and then parted ways.

     In the late afternoon, Don and Rolf flew.  They followed middle pack from Grace Harbor to near Feldtmann Lake as they hunted moose.  MP encountered and briefly chased five moose.  MP never even made contact with any of these moose.