Wolverines
By Ernest J. Finney
Saturday morning, and Sunflower and I were on the porch watching Little move back and forth from the road to the house. He was scraping up a couple days’ worth of dead squirrels and coming back with his shovel to drop them into a cardboard box. Moonstar was sitting in her rocker reading the six-page county newspaper slowly, as if she were memorizing each word. It was early October; the mountains were cooling off. The last of the black oak leaves were sailing down like yellow butterflies migrating south. This was the in-between weather time for the Sierras—quick storms, some thunder, some lightning strikes, but rain enough to put out the fires before they got a start. Rain drops as wet as a half a glass of water each, and the next day eighty-one degrees.
Gray squirrels were about the dumbest mammal in the forest. They lurked along roads and when a car passed they made a dash to dive under the tires, stopped just short of getting crushed, then reconsidered, dashed again and died, crunched between the rubber and black top into flattened lumps of fur. Neither Sun nor I would think of asking, “Little, why are you collecting gray squirrel corpses?” He’d have the satisfaction of giving us that information when he was good and ready, the shithead. Moonstar put the paper down and looked over at the box of flattened squirrels. You could almost see her coming back to the porch from wherever she’d been while reading the paper. She made a point of treating Little the same as she did her other children. “Little, what are you doing?” she asked.
“Getting some bait for a trap, Mother.”
This was unusual. Little was a vegetarian now and a Buddhist and would not eat anything with eyes or kill anything at all, even mosquitoes. As a teacher should, our mother waited for Little to go on. “This carrion will be my bait to get a photograph of a wolverine.” I kept my teeth clenched so my jaw didn’t drop. Sunflower laughed. Little ignored her.
Moonstar thought the answer over. It was 1985; there hadn’t been a verified sighting of a wolverine around here in 100 years, probably. Everyone knew that. I knew in some places trappers killed wolverines for their pelts, but also to get rid of them because they robbed traps; pound for pound they were the most ferocious animal in the forest. But not this forest. Not until you were in Canada or maybe Washington would you see one, if you were lucky. I’d come upon a specimen once in the San Francisco Zoo, lying on the cement floor of its cage like a dead rug. It didn’t look like the killer of the forest.
This is an excerpt of “Wolverines”