The Winter Wolf

Aldo Leopold was a young Forest Service man in the Southwest when he and his companions fired into a pack of wolves crossing a river. He reached the old wolf in time to see, in his words, "a fierce green fire dying in her eyes." He had assumed that fewer wolves meant more deer and a hunter's paradise. Watching that fire go out, he wrote, he sensed that neither the wolf nor the mountain agreed.

Decades later he turned the memory into "Thinking Like a Mountain," in A Sand County Almanac, published in 1949, the year after his death. Its best-known line is this one: "Only the mountain has lived long enough to listen objectively to the howl of a wolf." His argument, drawn from slopes stripped bare by too many deer, was that a wolf is part of how a landscape holds together, and that taking it out does not tidy the place.

That howl is the subject here. A wolf throws its head back against a pale ground, and its silhouette is filled with a winter night: a full moon, spruce heavy with snow, a stream holding one bright thread of light, and a geyser cone breathing steam in the distance. Nothing in the picture hurries. The animal is simply being heard.