The Story
A Mexican gray wolf named Jean lies curled into a hollow of drifted snow, chin low, the white heaped around her like the rim of a bowl. It is broad daylight in winter, and she has settled in.
Jean lives at the Wolf Conservation Center, where she stands for the center's part in the effort to save her kind from extinction. The Mexican gray wolf also goes by lobo. Whatever the label, she is a gray wolf, Canis lupus, and her species carries its own gear for snow.
Every fall a dense undercoat grows in beneath the outer guard hairs. Wolves shed it by July and start regrowing it in mid-August, ready for the cold. Their big feet work like snowshoes, and hair between the toes keeps snow from freezing there. A drift that would chill a person through is, for Jean, a cozy place to bed down. Nest is the right word for it: the drift curves up around her body.
Her daytime stillness fits the species' habits. Gray wolves are mainly nocturnal, and their movements usually happen at night. In Minnesota, wild wolves spend most of fall and winter sleeping, resting or traveling, and surprisingly little of it feeding.
So she rests, nose low, the snow shaped to her body as if she had poured herself into it.
Then a crow calls. Jean's head comes up from the snow, and the nap is over, at least for now. Crows, it seems, make poor neighbors for anyone trying to sleep in. What she makes of the interruption, the clip does not say.
