Two eyes glowed like incandescent limes in the night. I was headed for my tent on an island in Saganaga Lake last Sunday when I caught the eyes in the beam of my headlamp. It was early evening, just past dusk.
I called to my partner, Jeff, who popped out of his tent and took a look. The eyes remained on us, perhaps 20 yards away, for a few more seconds. We waited to see what would happen.
Without a sound, the light in those eyes was snuffed out, and we were aware of a furred creature wheeling away from the spot.
“Fox,” Jeff said.
It vanished almost instantly into the night.
As improbable as this seems now, amid the rapid meltdown, we had made a winter camp on Saganaga Lake, at the tip of the Gunflint Trail, just a week ago today. The snow was 18 inches deep in the woods, the ice 30 inches thick on the lake. The woodstove in the tent radiated welcome heat.
The appearance and disappearance of the fox was one highlight of our four days in the winter woods. That night, I awoke about 3 a.m. to hear a distinct whining not far from where I slept. Our friend was back, I figured.
In the morning, Jeff said he had heard the fox sniffing through the canvas wall of his tent. Not long after, he heard - or felt - the fox rubbing against one of the tent’s tie-out lines as it left.
Fox tracks were present the next morning on every trail we had stomped out in camp.
I remember a friend of mine, solo camped in the canoe country one October, saying that a wolf had come to visit one night. A dish rag had been hauled to the edge of his camp and chewed on, he said. He was sure it had been a wolf. The offering it left in the middle of camp was unmistakable.
Certainly, foxes are not uncommon in the boreal forest, and wolf sightings are far more common than they once were. Still, they are not commonplace.
It is one thing to see such a critter while driving or from your picture window at home. But it is something entirely different to be living in a tent some distance into the wilderness and experience such an encounter.
It is not that we fear for our safety. We don’t.
What’s most compelling about the kind of moment we experienced on Saganaga is that we were the visitors. We were the ones who had ventured into the fox’s domain - and the wolf’s and the moose’s and the otter’s. We were, that night, several miles from the nearest other humans, our tents tucked among the white pines on an island surrounded by a vast realm of ice and snow and forest. We were tiny specks of warmth and life amid a natural system that was getting along fine before we arrived. We were unnecessary, of no added value in that scenario.
That is why we go out there in winter, I think. Sometimes the intent is to drill holes and catch lake trout, yes. But mainly we are there to immerse ourselves in a silent and ancient landscape, and to sense for even a few days the magnitude of a healthy natural system.
When you awaken in the middle of the night and step outside into a white world splashed by moonlight, where the stars seem to hang just beyond the pine boughs and where the silence is utterly complete, you cannot help feeling both humility and gratitude. It is nearly impossible not to think that, in spite of the wrongs we humans inflict upon the land, that ultimately it will endure. We may not, but it will.
I lay in my tent that night, snug in my cocoon, thinking about the fox. Where was he now? How was he getting by? Would he pounce upon a vole? Would he, by stroke of fortune, come upon the remains of a wolf-killed moose and enjoy leftovers? Or would he travel all night, laying down his single-file tracks, and never come across a morsel of nourishment?
I wished him well. But that wasn’t likely to change his fortunes one whit.
Sam Cook is a Duluth News Tribune columnist and outdoors writer. Reach him at (218) 723-5332 or scook@duluthnews.com . Read his blog at samcook.areavoices.com or find his Facebook page at Sam Cook Outdoors.
