Wolverine Tracks: On the Trail of Memory and Meaning in the Wild

For readers of John Vaillant’s The Tiger and Peter Matthiessen’s The Snow Leopard comes a personal exploration of one man’s search for an elusive animal, and the comfort of nature in a changing, uncertain world. Fifty years after Dag O. Hessen encounters wolverine tracks on a ski trip with his father and follows them until they disappear down a steep passage, he’s back to search for the animal that escaped him.His father is long gone but the mountains are still there-and somewhere out there is a wolverine, an elusive creature of myth and mystery.In Hessen’s imagination, the wolverine is wilderness in animal form, representing everything lost to us in a nature that is being steadily reduced to a tame vestige of its former self.Wolverines have a reputation as vicious gluttons: they’ve been known to kill a reindeer, bite its head off, and then hang it high up in a tree like a trophy.Yet wolverines can also be shy and playful, skidding down slopes and scaling mountain peaks for no apparent