The Story
The ice is barely made when the Cranberry Bay Pack, a family of gray wolves in northern Minnesota's Voyageurs National Park, travels along the shore past a trail camera, every member in a single frame.
That rarely happens, and the researchers who run the camera know some of these wolves by number. Two wolves carry ear tags. The lighter gray one is V083, the breeding male; the darker one is V084, the breeding female. Both wore collars from 2019 until that fall, when the collars dropped off.
The winter before, the pack was four wolves. Four pups followed in spring, and at least three made it to fall, perhaps all four. Three of the wolves in the clip are plainly pups. A fourth is harder to call. In the Voyageurs area, pups are the size of small adults by freeze-up and can travel with their parents and other pack members.
A pack is a family, built around a breeding male and female, their pups, perhaps last year's young and sometimes older wolves. Midwest packs average four to eight wolves in winter. If last winter's four are all still in it, three or four surviving pups would put this one near the top of that range.
Coats in the pack run from lighter gray to darker, rusty tones, and the species is often buff-tan grizzled with gray and black. Each fall a wolf grows a dense undercoat beneath its outer guard hairs. Big feet work like snowshoes, with hair between the toes to stop snow freezing there.
Freeze-up redraws the map. Around Voyageurs, frozen shorelines become wolf pathways, and wind-swept frozen beaver ponds often hold less snow than the forest. Early on, one wolf slips on the ice. In fall and winter, Minnesota wolves spend most of their time sleeping, resting or traveling, and little of it feeding. One by one they pass close to the camera, a black-tipped tail swinging out of the shot, while a straggler still stands at the edge of the new ice.
