The back of our house looks on to a rocky mountain slope. Now and then we hear the bird-like cries of an Arctic fox calling, a sound half way between a howl and a bark. My son loves it. He calls back to the fox and sometimes gets a reply. And every once in a long while, we see our little fox scampering across the slope in the twilight, weaving between the rocks, or silouetted against the darkening sky. Every time we hear her cry, we throw the windows open and strain our ears for more.
“I want to see the wolf!” says my son.
“It’s not a wolf, darling, it’s a fox.”
He won’t see a wolf in Nuuk. There are no wolves in west Greenland, or so they say. Not so long ago I was told that there are only about sixty wolves in all of Greenland, and they all live in northeast Greenland. And while the Ministry of Environment has acknowledged that the odd wolf might, from time to time, make it from Arctic Canada across the ice to Greenland, wolves – they claim – don’t permanently live in north Greenland.
But apparently noone told the wolves that. This is a pack of twelve healthy wolves, young and old, that visited my husband’s field camp in northwest Greenland last week. Definitely wolves, not foxes.
