The Great Gray Wolf, of Minnehaha Creek, only the wilderness could feed him, love him, lay him down, and those who knew him, heard of him, wished him gone (even their own kind), in the Great Northern Minnesota Wilderness, in the early 1960s. He strutted down little Minnehaha Creek, near the village in the woods, as he used to do unnoticed, roaring eupeptic hours, it was as if, when he was gone, he would leave his ghost, so we all believed, sculpted in shadow form, in every tree, swaying in the wind, he was the highwayman, the assassin, the gunslinger who fired rawhide pistols, the haunting hunter of the desert, the creek was his tavern, it was a branch of a nearby river, and upriver it was populated by men with a handful of laws, who had cabins, paid taxes, and who walked and smoked pipes and cigars, along those banks, those peripheral banks, damned if they were alone.

If alone, and if attacked, the beast could leap twenty-five feet when pursuing its prey. This one had voluminous fur, as thick as any Alaskan fur. This one was missing patches, as if to get rid of any loose fur, so that his enemy would not detect it, when he spotted his trail. It had deep yellow gold irises. He had many shades of gray in his fur, which made his observers think he was old, perhaps older than he actually was. With his long mussel, he would break the bones of his enemy, particularly coyotes and golden jackals. He had run with the dogs, on a few occasions, having some kind of instinctive heritage with them. Compared to the dog, the gray wolf has a larger paw size and longer legs, and this gray wolf tipped even that scale. Its tail bones were as hard as steel. Its long canine teeth grabbed its prey at 12,000 kPa of pressure, its main weapon. More than twice the pressure to crush bones than dogs. And his saliva prevented his wounds from getting infected and he had many scares.

This was the life of being scrutinized and searched for your escape acts, to be shot on sight and dragged out of the woods; the town needed someone, anyone, big enough with youth, strength, courage, cunning to walk those cold fields in winter, to search those dense forests, uncompromising, with rage to accomplish the task, to put the wolf on a gallows, on a branch of a tree, once and for all, and hang the beast, and finish it off.

Those days without tomorrow, gone where you could bravely walk with a rifle on your shoulder in the woods, in that 1200 acre forest where you ran wild, said it was your territory, like your grandparents used to do, and don’t expect calamity. And many hunters left their cabin and returned to the Twin Cities (St. Paul, Minneapolis), due to the fear that this beast instilled in them.

There was a young man, who had a sidekick, a girl, just the two of them, not counting the populist from the village, with the same blood, running through the veins, similar to that of the gray wolf, a slight tension from her at least. polluted and incorruptible. He was twenty-two years old and she was seventeen. And the old wolf, who can tell?

For four years he had heard the worst of all, about the gray wolf, bigger and older and with more malice than any other recorded and documented wolf: -it was a century before, that the Indians had a legend of such a beast, bigger, older, and ruthless enough to challenge all of humanity. The Chippewa Indians had lived in this area once, it was of men, white men, they didn’t live anymore, not black, not red, not yellow, now just white men, maybe that’s what created this hard stone wolf, to endure mankind, to sharpen their killing skills, more lethal than the dog, the bear, the big-horned deer, compelled by an intrinsic savagery of the ancients to take revenge, an incessant game of retaliation against the white man, with rules savages, which ended all the voices of conscience, the name of the give was to stop the breath of the other, forever, listen to the heartbeat, the steps and get your trophy. These were the burning legs, the heart and soul of the gray wolf, the almost immortal spirit, the drunken spirit, of the wolf; therefore, they needed an equal to the wolf, with human reasoning.

And so it seemed to the young man: one December morning – not only natural but quite fitting – to bear the task of finding, luring and killing the Great Gray Wolf, never having seen him – the young man swore an oath. He even came into sight and overlooked his dreams; therefore, he would search the woods without an axe, it was as if he already knew, he could cover the wolf with a cloak of death, the wolf with no name, other than ‘The Great Grey…’ and his nickname of ‘ghost’. ‘Perhaps he came to this conclusion because he had what the villagers called “bad luck in killing wolves, hunting or anything”, but perhaps it was simply that fate called him for a greater task. That had never occurred to the town-let populist, it never occurred to him.

No.: 559/28-12-2009