2026
She wasn’t the biggest wolf pup born to the alpha female. She wasn’t the most aggressive in play or in the fight over food. She was quiet and observing, getting drawn into play by her more rambunctious siblings after half-hearted efforts to dismiss their entreaties to join in the fun. The pack that she was born into numbered about 20 now, with the pup and her sibling adding 5 to the total. A mix of young and old, with females outnumbering males two to one. In other words, a typical wolf pack in Ontario’s iconic Algonquin Park, home of the Jack pine of Tom Thomson (and Group of Seven) fame, and the nearest point of natural nirvana to the almost 10 million human souls calling the megalopolis that was now called the Greater Toronto-Hamilton-Peterborough area (GTHPA) home in 2026.
Our little pup had not yet experienced humans, at least not in the flesh. Of course, like every other species on the planet, she had experienced the effects of humans as anthropogenic climate change. She was thinner – as were her siblings – than the last litter born to the pack. Food that used to be plentiful had become more challenging to acquire. Longer hunts, fewer prey animals, less successful efforts, and more slow-motion hunger. While the whole world was still recovering from the effects of the 2020-2021 Covid pandemic, the ‘dying out’ began out of sight (and certainly out of mind) of the average GTHPA resident.
Ecologists and others in animal-science and related fields talked a lot about the complex and fragile nature of the natural ecosystems around us in the years leading up to now. When the peatlands are destroyed for strip mining rare-earth minerals that power our smartphones and other devices, the caribou are disturbed and distributed widely in search of safer havens. The predators like the wolves follow suit, all the while dodging the helicopter cowboys blasting away in the name of ‘conservation’ as the wolves wander farther and wider in search of food.
It isn’t quite so dire for the wolves of Algonquin, a place very near and dear to the heart of nature lovers, scientists and chasers of creative muses. One such individual, combining all of the above elements, was a young undergrad doing her first ‘field assignment’, equal parts eager and terrified at the prospect of finally coming face to snout with a wolf, a species that she’d been obsessed with for as long as she could remember. For the moment she satisfied her curiosity by checking, once again, the video feed from the den where our female pup was born.
The pup had stared at the flashing light from time to time as she watched her brothers play. She was curious, too.
***
“Ish, have you finished the report? Ish? Hello, earth to Ish?” came the voice of Em, ringing out in raising crescendos.
“Yes. I sent you the report an hour ago. And then I started watching the feed again.”
“Well thanks for the report. The university will be using it to apply for funding for another 10-year research project on the Algonquin biosphere,” said Em.
“Including Algonquin wolves?” asked Ish.
“Yes. In fact, the wolves are a key area of interest for conservation groups and those concerned about the rising risk of wildfires in the northern parts of the Park,” stated Em.
“There seems to be some idea that we should be planning ‘what-if’ scenarios and back-up plans, just in case the wildfires that we’ve seen devastating just about every corner of the world start creeping into our little corner of heaven on earth.”
“What are the plans for the wolves?” pleaded Ish.
“There’s not a lot set in stone at this stage,” said Em. “It would have been great if we would have started this work twenty years ago, then we’d have generations of exposure and experience to better plot pathways through a future clouded in smoke from forest fires. But we’re doing the best we can at the moment to try to get caught up. You’re doing the work that you’re doing, capturing patterns of repeating behaviours among this breeding pair of wolves, where they like to den and how many survive from the litter, this kind of work will help us figure out ways to increase the population. And god knows we could use all the help we can get in that area. What was the most recent tally?”
“We’re under 500 again,” sighed Ish, knowing that the population growth efforts of the early 2020s came against a growing ‘famine’ as the bottom-of-the-food-chain prey animals experienced their own deaths and extinctions. A lot of hard work had barely kept the count at the same number that it had been a decade ago, and the projections for habitat loss, food insecurity and the growing risk of extreme weather events would surely challenge even the heartiest and most good-hearted of scientists and researchers. It sure challenged Ish.
She stared at the faded poster of Tom Thomson’s immortal “Jack pine” that decorated the fieldhouse/bunkhouse that was home base for the research team. She had the same poster at home; well, at her parent’s home in her childhood bedroom. The Jack pine wasn’t like other trees. It was willowy and wispy and bent in funny ways. It wasn’t the prettiest tree or the biggest. But it seemed to be caught, frozen in mid-dance like a ballerina, with gaps and spaces in between the limbs that made the ‘fairy tree’ effect that much more effective. Tom Thomson, part of the famous Canadian Group of Seven nature artists, had painted his Jack pine only a few kilometres away, at the other end of Grand Lake near Carcajou Bay. Ish reminded herself to go there when she got a day off.
https://www.gallery.ca/collection/artwork/the-jack-pine
Ish turned her attention back to the feed. She could swear that the smaller one (a female?) was staring right back at her. She’d watched that pup for the past two weeks now, noticing as the distinctive black crescent-moon shape on her back hindquarters grew along with her. Ish figured the pup must be four months old now, fully (if reluctantly) weaned along with her littermates and now happily consuming whatever food Mom happened to be serving that day. Sometimes it was a rabbit. Sometimes it was a beaver. The pup wasn’t quite sure how they were different or supposed to taste but she liked them enough to growl her way to the family meal and ensure she snapped up as much as her hungry brothers. And she was growing. Her brown/grey fur, accentuated by her distinctive black patches, including the moon, was filling in as her body seemed to change and grow by the day. One day she’d be sneezing as her snout grew, which changed her sinuses along the way. Other days, she’d stumble as she played chase and tug-of-war, her paws and her legs going (due to growing) in different directions all at the same time.
“You still staring at the moon pup?” asked Em.
“Yes. And you can call her Luna, if you please,” smiled Ish.
“Ish! What have we said about falling in love and naming your subject animals?!’ said Em in a teasingly sharp manner.
“I know. But the crescent moon, the fact that she’s a wolf….”
“And the fact that you’ve always wanted a dog to name Luna but grew up in a house with an allergic brother,” interrupted Em, continuing (and doing her best to impersonate Ish imitating Ish’s mother), “ and, no, for the last time, you can’t trade your brother for a dog!”
2035
The smoke was thick and dark in the hills to the northwest of Grand Lake. The wildfire that had barely skirted North Bay had jumped to the northern fringes of Algonquin Provincial Park. And with the dry undergrowth, an unusual occurrence in this area of the lakes and rivers, helped the fires to speed up and spread. Faster than anticipated – and faster than could be imagined.
A lot of things had happened a lot faster than we could have imagined as we awaited the growing impacts of the climate crisis. Every projection seemed to need to be rewritten every year or so, updated to reflect data on species loss, habitat loss, rising sea levels, declining fresh water, rising global temperatures, and food insecurity.
For seasoned conservationists like Ish, who’d been studying the specific, local impacts of climate change on species in Ontario for more than a decade, the pace of change was staggering. She had read all the reports that suggested that in spite of all the good work being done over the past 10 years or more, many bad outcomes were going to come to pass. Ish had seen that, and was particularly concerned about the Algonquin wolves as she watched their numbers diminish as she had continued her field work through her undergraduate and graduate studies. The little fieldhouse near Grand Lake still had the Jack pine poster on the wall, and Ish smiled nostalgically as she remembered all the days and nights spent crawling through the underbrush or slogging through the mud to find a den and hide a camera.
With that thought in mind, Ish sent a message to her research assistant, asking her to pull out the “Relocation” plan and share it with the team. Better to be prepared, especially given with the weather forecast calling for hot, dry winds blowing from the northwest. Ish sent another message to her partner, advising that she was being picked up at the university in an hour and would be transported to the fieldhouse to join this year’s field team as a special representative from the Conservation Authority.
“Well, Luna, I’m not sure if we’ll see each other but I’m on my way,” thought Ish as she turned off her device, completed her packing and walked to the doorway.
***
Luna was nine now and had grown to her full size of 30 kg. She had been the alpha female of the pack for the past four years now. She was also the mother of three different litters, and took great care in the selection of their den. She had her favourite spot, a spot she had remembered from her own puppyhood, a place with lots of trees and a stream not far from where they slept. The food had been plentiful – not as much as any of the litter would have liked but enough to help sustain them – and the first few years of Luna’s life had been uneventful by wolf standards.
Luna, as the only female born to the alpha female, was expected to inherit the role when the time came, and had spent her days, months and years learning by her mother’s side. She’d watch and observe as her mother smelled the air to sense both prey and predators. She’d participated in the hunting, and had become skilled at working with her brothers to ensure that they brought home the dinner. And she’d helped her mother with the litters that came after hers, being a caring yet impatient older sister to a bunch of yipping, nipping and yelping pups.
Luna’s distinctive black crescent-moon patch over her back hindquarters remained as visible as ever, especially now as some of her brown fur had just begun turning white. She stretched out like a yogi, and pushed herself clear of the sleeping pups. She needed outside, she needed fresh air, and she needed to do all that before the pups started to mewl for their first feeding of the day.
As she slunk under the bushes that covered up the front of the den, Luna noticed that the light was different, darker than it should be for the waking hours. She looked left and right at the sky, seeking out the light source that would normally be bright and ready for the day. It was hidden behind a cloud. A dark cloud, with red tips, that smelled of the air by the fire pits at the campsites where humans visited. Luna took another sniff, and the heckles on the back of her neck rose up. She ran back to her den.
***
The transport arrived at the fieldhouse from a circuitous route, navigating around the worst of the fire and going off-road (and on-water) when necessary to avoid the absolute heart of the blaze, now bearing down on the Algonquin Radio Observatory near Lake Travers, about 25 km away from where Ish had now landed. As she stepped outside, she was overwhelmed by the acrid smoke and haze that was already wafting into the camp from the Lake Travers burn, driven by 40 km/hr winds and the bone-dry ground conditions that a summer’s increasing heat (and less-than-anticipated precipitation) had cured perfectly to act as kindling for the inferno. She dashed inside to join the team as they planned phase one of Operation Relocation.
***
Luna took the opportunity of the pups having a post-feed nap to slip outside to check the surroundings and search for any convenient food sources. There were no convenient food sources – but there was more smoke, more haze and more darkness. A lot more. As she took a moment to take care of business, she wandered a bit farther than she would normally dare with the sleeping pups to check out the creek while getting a sip of water. The water was cool and welcome, clearing Luna’s throat and reducing her body temperature in the midst of a hot (and getting hotter by the minute) day. But then she heard a ruffling in the distance which woke her from her reverie and sent her hurrying back to the den.
***
“This is the Algonquin Radio Observatory. We are surrounded by the fire on three sides and have no choice but to evacuate. We repeat. This is the Algonquin Radio Observatory and we’re about to be overtaken by the fire.”
The call echoed out over the messaging system as Ish and the team sped to the den site. Ish knew the site like the back of her hand, having been the first one during that first spring almost ten years ago to have summoned the courage to sneak into the den and plant the camera. And she’d been back almost every year since, either as a student or as a conservation officer.
“The den should be just up the hill once we’ve crossed the creek,” shouted Ish. “Keep an eye open for the female; she’s definitely going to be on high alert, if not outright panicking. I know that I would be.”
***
Forest fires are almost animals unto themselves. They live, they breathe, they consume, and they act both incredibly scientifically and incredibly irrationally at the same time. They leap and dance, alitting and lighting at the whimsy of the winds. And now they were alitting (and lighting) too close to the fieldhouse, and too close to the majestic (if gnarled and tattered) Jack pine that locals said was the inspiration for Tom Thomson 100+ years ago.
***
Nothing in Luna’s experience, nothing that she’d learned at her mother’s side, had prepared her for this situation.
This was a completely new and completely dangerous situation, as the den started to fill with smoke and the pups started mewling out of both fear and hunger. Her eyes raced to the front of the den and the redness that emanated from the outside. She inherently knew that “here” was no longer safe – and she needed to get herself and the pups away from here as soon as she could.
***
Nothing in Ish’s experience, nothing that she had studied or watched, had prepared her for this situation. This was a completely new and completely dangerous situation. Her team was accompanied by a group of volunteer firefighters, who had agreed to join the Operation Relocation to help carve paths through fires to the dens. But they could only do so much, and the lead, a woman named Leah, shouted to Ish that they’d have maybe 30 more minutes before they’d need to evacuate themselves or risk becoming casualties of the blaze.
The team was about 500 metres from the creek when Ish noticed her, and noticed the distinctive black crescent-moon shape over the back right hindquarters.
“LUNA!” screamed Ish, although no one could hear her over the raging fire, what with the crashing of trees and the whirling of air as the oxygen was being sucked up into the fire’s atmosphere.
***
The ground cover on the opposite side of the hill that acted as the dugout for the den was already on fire, and spreading rapidly to the top. Luna had already completed three trips from the den’s opening to the opposite side of the creek, taking a pup each time to the only place that she sensed might be safe. She was turning back after dropping off the third pup, the third male to the safety of the creekside, and readying to charge back up the hill when she heard a human voice call out from close at hand. She turned to the human, locked eyes and then looked down to the soaking bundle at her paws. She looked back up at the human and then dashed across the creek and up the hill, disappearing out of sight as she burst through the burning bushes just then engulfing the ground cover at the den’s opening.
***
“QUICK! GRAB THE PUPS,” shouted Ish and she sprinted towards the creekside.
As she looked up, the entire hilltop seemed to burst into flames.
***
There wasn’t much left of the fieldhouse when Ish and the team returned, so they gathered whatever had survived the blaze and took the pups and the rest of the foundlings to the mustering point.
Before she left, Ish poked her head into the room that used to house the bunkhouse. There was just one wall standing, although it would eventually come tumbling down.
The poster was gone but the metal frame remained.
***
Not far away, the charred remains of a gnarled and bent Jack pine sat unnoticed amidst the carnage.
2063
The wildfires of the mid 2030s and early 2040s that devastated most of the northern Algonquin forests had shocked Canadians to their very core. Something so special, something so iconic….something that we so carelessly allowed to be destroyed by our human-driven climate change.
Except, the forest wasn’t destroyed. It was damaged and it was hurt and its populations of trees and birds and animals and the like had been greatly reduced. But nature is resilient, and thanks to the help of some prescient humans, nature had managed to stage a comeback in the northern Algonquin forests. While the fires were truly cataclysmic, the self-preservation instincts of the animals coupled with the herculean efforts of scientists, researchers and conservationists (not to mention the billions of dollars invested by governments, civil groups and private citizens alike to REGROW THE ALGONQUIN) had ensured that there would be a future for the forests, animal species and the broader biosphere of the Algonquin National Park.
“Twenty eight years ago, I stood right here at this spot when all that remained of the camp that I knew so well were smoking embers,” said Ish, adjusting the microphone to compensate for the open air setting for the ceremony. “I was here, as part of a team dedicated to protecting species at risk. I started studying Algonquin wolves in high school and was lucky enough to be able to make that work my life’s work. Someone once asked me why I liked to study wolves. And I said because they weren’t panda bears or polar bears. They weren’t cute by our classic definition. They were considered, at best, pests that needed to be controlled. They were misunderstood but so incredibly complex once you got to know them. A whole unique sub-species here, with unique traits and behaviours only found in these wolves.
“And twenty eight years ago, I was here on a rescue mission, a mission that had been planned well in advance and executed without flinching by the team that welcomed me. We braved flames and smoke and danger to reach a den that we knew housed four pups and one female. We watched as that female braved flames and smoke and danger as she brought her third pup to the safe side of the creek – and we watched as she without hesitation dashed back up for the last pup, disappearing forever into the smoke and haze.
“Twenty eight years ago, on this very spot, I cried tears of loss for that female and that pup – and I cried tears of gratitude that we had at least saved three pups that would soon join the rest of the survivors in rehabilitation zones. And today, I am here to happily report that this spring’s census has reported a significant up-tick in new births, and we’re so very pleased to announce that we’re currently estimating the total number of Algonquin wolves to be in excess of the 500 wolves that we counted before the fires. Given the devastation that I witnessed – that we all witnessed – I wasn’t sure that it would be possible.
“But thanks to dedicated people like you, we were able to make the preparations, execute the plans and begin the difficult and delicate work of rebuilding a paradise lost. And while the trees will take decades to regain their density, and while the survivor species take the time to adapt and adjust to the new ecosystem that is growing around them, a quick look around demonstrates what is possible when we work together, humans with humans AND humans with nature. Together, we’re a resilient and unbeatable combination!”
The crowd broke into loud and boisterous applause as Ish stepped back from the microphone, adjusted her hat and took her seat with the rest of the dignitaries.
***
Nature truly is resilient. Forest fires reshape the forests but generally do not kill them.
Species that were at-risk can be nursed back from the brink with careful stewardship. And an animal’s self-preservation instincts are powerful tools that can help them find back doors out of dangerous situations.
***
Although she was nearing retirement, Ish prided herself on keeping up with the youngest team members, be it on an excursion or by becoming proficient at the newest technology. As she entered the fieldhouse, the assembled team of eager (and probably scared) young student-scientists rose to their feet and gave Ish a standing ovation. She laughed a bemused smile and tried to quiet the throng by asking to see the latest feed.
“Doctor D…,” said Siobhan, one of the students, before being interrupted.
“I’m just Ish,” said Ish.
“I’m sorry. Ish, would you like to see this feed?” added Siobhan. “It’s from a den near where you rescued the three pups.”
As she peered into the screen, Ish noticed that the litter had four pups, all seemingly healthy by appearance (and corroborated by the most recent exams). The lighting was so much better and the resolution that much sharper than Ish remembered, but then again it had been almost 30 years since she sat in a fieldhouse just like this watching the feeds.
And then the mother appeared, returning to the den with a rabbit dinner for the hungry pups.
“Can you zoom in any more, please?” asked Ish breathlessly.
As the female turned to the camera, Ish saw that her brown and grey coat covered the majority of her body, with the exception of a black, crescent-moon shaped patch over her right hindquarters.
The mark of Luna. The mark of survival.
