Tom Gable has been tracking wolves since 2015 in the icy forest of northern Minnesota, where the thermometer drops below -30°C and the winters seem never to end.
His team fitted seven wolves from different packs with GPS collars within the Greater Voyageurs Ecosystem, a forested territory covering 2.338 km² bordering Canada. Every 20 minutes, the collar recorded a location: 72 points a day, for months. When they plotted all the routes on a map, something became clear in a way no one had seen before: each pack occupies about 155 square kilometers and defends its territory tooth and nail, with alpha males fighting whenever an intruder crosses the invisible line.
Only one young wolf ignored the borders and wandered across the entire map, exactly the behavior that precedes leaving the pack forever. And amid all the camera traps, the same project recorded a wolf fishing in a stream for the first time and storing the fish on the bank to eat later.