In my research of the fur trade, I read observations recorded by European men writing for history’s sake, men like James Isham in the 1730s and Andrew Graham 30 years later. One thing caught my eye and stuck with me was the wolverine. The wolverine was clever, difficult to trap, but highly valued due its coat’s warmth and frost-wicking quality. When the wolverine made a kill and had eaten its fill, it urinated on the remaining carcass to render it unusable by other animals, wrote Graham. He wrote of the wolverine following hunters as they set their traps; the wolverine ate the bait from the traps without springing them. Any bait the wolverines didn’t want to eat they simply dragged from the traps and discarded. Perhaps they were protecting fellow furbearers in their shared wilderness.
James Isham wrote in his journals, “Of all the beasts in the country there is none so much an enemy of the Indians as the wolverine by breaking their storages open and getting all their provisions away, being impossible to secure anything out of their way.” Isham made this written declaration but then quickly forgot that detail when strongly criticizing the Cree for not storing food for later use. The truth is, if we consider Indigenous storytelling, the Cree admired the wolverine for its sly intelligence and it became the trickster in many Indigenous stories, bringing humour and wit to the tale.
William Sinclair, my distant grandfather, also made comments about the wolverine. In his 1795 HBC post journal he wrote about dispatching five Englishmen to Three Point Lake House, due west of what is now Thompson in Manitoba, to fetch the remaining beaver furs left behind when they vacated that post the previous year. The men returned with only 132 beaver skins. The wolverines had broken into the stash and destroyed 150 of the skins, for no obvious purpose. In 1810, William wrote about going after a wolverine who had been caught in a steel trap and ran away with it. It took William six hours of hard walking to find the wolverine so as not to let the animal suffer and not to lose the valuable fur. William recorded every fur brought to his post in trade and very seldom was there a wolverine pelt in the mix.
I watched a documentary, Our Planet, narrated by David Attenborough. One can never watch too many documentaries with his voice and its lullaby quality. This documentary was focussing on the concept of change in nature and the constancy of change, which brought the locust front and centre. Locusts usually live a solitary lifestyle and can do so for decades. When conditions are right in normally arid regions, such as a sudden rainfall, the locust can easily lay its eggs in the softened soil, resulting in an upswing in their numbers. Science has no definitive answers for the extreme response, nor warning as the locust shifts its behaviour from solitary to swarm mode.
Spring in the northern hemisphere brings warm temperatures and rain as the land turns green. “One animal exploits the bloom in plant growth like no other,” said Attenborough. In Ethiopia, when plant growth is at its highest, locusts take advantage of this change. They march and as they march, they multiply ten times faster than previously, and then they strip the land bare, with their high numbers and extreme appetites. To find more food, the locust must keep moving. On foot, they devour every plant in their path. Upon exhausting their food supply, they now need new territory to feed on. To facilitate this, they change their form and grow wings and take to the sky. All they do is eat and fly and eat, in a continuous pattern. They form super swarms of 200 billion strong, moving further and faster. They travel hundreds of kilometers each day, covering country after country until they must cross the Red Sea. The swarm can clear the Himalayas to reach Tibet, bringing chaos with them. They keep up their monstrous behaviour until the season changes, bringing drought. When the food disappears, so do the locusts. It begs the question – why? What purpose does this strange extreme pattern serve for the animal kingdom, for the plants and for those who rely on them?
One simple explanation is that locusts convert plant material into protein, their bodies, which become a food source for other animal species. The same could be accomplished with fewer numbers. Does it have to be feast or famine? Science has no means to anticipate the cycle to predict when this swarming behaviour will erupt.
Perhaps the purpose of the wolverine and the locust are two reminders for the rest of us to be on our toes, to be vigilant in our preparation for the future, to take nothing for granted, and to be prepared for change. That being said, I am still puzzled.
wendistewart@live.ca
