Daylight Savings time is great. Today I woke up easily at 5:30 am. I had a half an hour to pull myself together before the kids got up, and Denali and I were ready to run from the bus stop. We got to Warrens road, all was sunshine and light, she pounced off into the brush while I cranked the music on my headset.

Off I went with the Best of the Carpenters, feeling energetic like I am 11 years old, singing loudly “son of a gun, we’ll have big fun, on the bayou.” ( note….*I was smart enough not to admit to knowing the words of the nerd songs back in 5th grade, I figure I’m AOK alone in the woods now.)

Then I looked up and into the eyes of two of the most beautiful huge wolves I’ve ever seen. They were trotting down the road and they stopped, tails up, to look at me. I stopped singing (but Karen Carpenter continued in my ears), my jaw dropped. They were mostly white, with gray saddles, and they stared at me calmly for awhile. Like maybe they were sizing up my spandex and bright red sweatshirt thinking “predator, prey, or what ???”

I was sort of embarrassed for a second. They were so cool, and I was such a…..gaper (from the vocabulary of my friend Toby–working at Keystone one winter…for the well dressed loud novice Texans)
Then I hollered for my oblivious bounding domesticated lab. And the wolves dissolved into the woods–where they obviously rule.

We had a great run, you know, on top of the world looking down on creation. Only once Denali flushed a grouse and it flew straight at my head (just like the owls on the Harry Potter movies) so that I had to duck. We got back to the part where the wolves had been, and I could tell by the way Denali ran in circles sniffing the road, with her dander up, that they were still around. I tried to be really still and scan the woods for a horizontal line in the distance—I tried to move my head only after my eyes led the way, like a deer hunter, like a predator. But I didn’t see them. So I shrugged, and headed back to the car.

Denali and I love it on that road. But those regal white strong monster wolves reminded me that those woods are clearly not OUR terriotry.