Wolverine Tracks

For readers of John Vaillants The Tiger and Peter Matthiessens The Snow Leopard comes a personal exploration of one mans 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, hes back to search for the animal that escaped him. His father is long gone but the mountains are still thereand somewhere out there is a wolverine, an elusive creature of myth and mystery. In Hessens 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: theyve 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 reasonperhaps, like humans, just to enjoy the view. Over the course of a year, Hessen returns to the mountains in every season, but, since the passing of his father and sister, its no longer just a wolverine that he seeks. As Hessen walks and skis over peaks and valleys on the wolverines trail, spending his nights in silence with only the starry skies for company, he shares his biologists deep knowledge of flora and fauna through the changing seasons and in a changing climate. He also draws on literary explorations of humans and nature, wildness versus civilization, and, of course, wolverines, referencing writers including Thoreau, E. O. Wilson, Jon Krakauer, and Kerstin Ekman. Wolverine Tracks is a story about time passing, about change and loss in nature and in Hessens own life. Its also a book about what it means to be human in our tumultuous world, and the joy and power of being in nature.