Searching the Museum of Vertebrate Zoology for the small mammals that were to figure in my story, I rolled out museum drawers, stroked the little pelts inside, handled the tiny skulls, then crossed each vole or mole or shrew off my list. I worked my way down to the last two specimens I wanted to see, big ones, a pair of wolverines. I made a couple of false turns down the museum aisles, then found the case with “Gulo gulo luteus” typewritten on the front. Gulo, Latin for “glutton,” describes the wolverine’s heroic appetite. “Size and proportions of a heavily built dog,” Joseph Grinnell and Tracy Storer write in Animal Life of the Yosemite. “Body stout; rather broad; legs short; feet big; tail quite short.”

The wolverine is a magical animal. It is the superweasel, the king of the family Mustelidae. It is the species in which weasel stamina, ferocity, implacability, and bad attitude reach apogee. At forty pounds, tops, the wolverine displaces wolves from their kills and faces down half-ton grizzlies. Eskimos trim their parka hoods with wolverine fur, because frozen breath is easily brushed from the hairs. The wolverine is the only mammal immune to arthritis -- or so my father used to teach. In a desert range like the Sierra Nevada, my father asserted, a single wolverine requires six hundred square miles of territory to sustain it.

These facts or factoids came, I suspect, from someone like Starker Leopold or Bob Stebbins, scientists from the Museum of Vertebrate Zoology whose grammar my father corrected when he was an editor at U.C. Press, and who became the core of his brain trust when he left the press for the Sierra Club. David Brower, my old man, was primarily an advocate of wilderness, and the wolverine was one of his wilderness parables. The moral was that the answer to arthritis might be out there, loping along at timberline -- tireless, supple-jointed, musky, indomitable -- but requiring six hundred square miles of wild country to wander in.

“The wolverine is a rare animal anywhere in the Sierra Nevada,” and it dwells only in the highest parts of these mountains,” wrote Joseph Grinnell and Tracy Storer. “In consequence there is but scant information concerning it locally and much of that is hearsay.” In their eight years of work in the Yosemite Transect, Joseph Grinnell and his survey team saw only these two, both trapped at the upper end of Lyell Canyon by team member, Charles Camp, in the survey’s fifth year.

On July 19, 1915, Camp and another team member, Gordon Ferris, set out three steel traps atop a rocky ridge, at 11,000 feet, between McClure Fork and Lyell Fork of the Tuolomne River. The ridge crest was four feet deep in snow. The traps were set at timberline on rocky, snow-free ground in a thicket of stunted whitebark pines. On Saturday evening, September 24, the traps were rebaited with chunks of marmot meat that had been ripening in what the team called the “stink can.” An additional piece of rotten marmot was tied to a nearby tree.

“The Lord hath sent us a wolverine,” Charles Camp, Grinnell’s colleague, wrote in his field journal the next day, Sunday, July 25. “Animal was found this morning. Was caught by all three traps. Struggled violently and bit stock of gun taking out a piece with a quick snap.”

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