Gordon Wiltsie

A dark past and an uncertain future: Morosel, Aurica and Gheorghe Surdu of Magura.

THE FOLLOWING DAY, Christoph receives a disturbing piece of news by mobile phone from Marius: Tsiganu has been shot.

The details are still blurry, but it seems that a couple of boar hunters let fly at the wolf for no particular reason except his wolfhood. Probably they were poaching, since no gamekeeper was present, as mandated for a legitimate boar hunt. Tsiganu is wounded, hard to say how badly, but still on his feet at last report. Marius, having heard the shots, came upon the hunters a few moments later. Marius is still out there, Christoph tells me, following a trail of radio beeps and blood spoor through the wet snow. Before long he will either find Tsiganu's fresh carcass or else run out of daylight without knowing quite what's what.

A day passes. Still there's no definite news of Tsiganu. On the morning of the second day, I set out tracking with Marius and two project assistants.

We park the Dacia truck on a roadside above a village and begin hoofing along a farm lane into the foothills. We follow a snow-covered trail on a climbing traverse between meadows, along wooded gullies, beyond the last of the farmhouses and the last of the barking dogs, past two men hauling logs with a pair of oxen. Marius moves briskly. He's a short, solid fellow with good wind and a long stride. He cares about this animal—both about Canis lupus as a denizen of the Romanian mountains, that is, and about Tsiganu as an individual. But Marius is a home-bred Romanian forestry worker, not a foreign-trained biologist, and his attitude is complexly grounded in local realities.

"Last year the wolf was killing for me two sheep," he says as we walk. "Because the shepherd was drunk. Was like an invitation to eat." Some farmers moan about such losses, Marius says, but what do they expect? That the wolf, which has lived as a predator in these mountains for thousands of years, should now transform itself into a vegetarian? As for hunters who would offhandedly kill a wolf for its fur, he can't comprehend them. "Also I am a hunter," he says. He shoots ducks, pheasants, wild boar, and in self-defense he wouldn't hesitate to kill a bear. But a wolf, no, never. It's much nicer simply to go out with his dogs, hike in the forest, and know that in this place the ancient animals are still present.

Two miles in, we pick up a signal from Tsiganu's collar. The bearing is south-southwest, toward a steep wooded valley that descends from a castle-shaped rock formation among the peaks above. Farther along, we get another signal on roughly the same line, and now the tempo of beeps indicates that Tsiganu is alive—at least barely alive, because he's moving. Here we split into two groups, for a better chance of crossing his trail. Marius and I continue the traverse until we find a single set of wolf tracks, then back-follow them up a slope. The tracks are deep, softened in outline by at least one afternoon's melting, and show no sign of blood. Yesterday? Or earlier, before the shooting? They might be Tsiganu's or not. If his, is the stride normal? Has his wound already clotted? Or is he lying near death with a slug lodged against his backbone, or in his lung, or in his jaw, while his packmates have gone on without him? Are these in fact his tracks, or some other wolf's? No way of knowing.

So we hike again toward the radio signal, post-holing our way through knee-deep crust. We round a bend that brings us into the valley below the castle-shaped peak. Here the radio signal gets stronger. We stare upward, scanning for movement. We see none.

Marius disconnects the directional antenna from the receiver. He listens again, using the antenna cable's nub like a stethoscope, trying to fine-focus the bearing. Again a strong signal. So we're close now. Maybe 100 meters, Marius says. He tips back his head and offers a loud wolfish howl, a rather good imitation of a pack's contact call. We listen for response. There's a distant, dim echo of his voice coming off the mountain, followed by silence. We wait. Nothing. We turn away. I begin to fumble with my binoculars.

Then from up in the beeches comes a new sound. It's Tsiganu, the gypsy carnivore, howling back.   

David Quammen's most recent book is The Boilerplate Rhino: Nature in the Eye of the Beholder, a collection of Outside columns.