The wolverine was a female. The rifle stock from which she bit a chunk was black walnut. In the museum collection she is designated MVZ Catalogue No. 22120. On rolling out her tray, I hoped to find her thick, frostproof pet, but the skins of the larger animals, it turns out, are kept elsewhere -- down in what is called the Pelt Room. (Click here for Audio story). I found, instead, a number of small cardboard boxes. Inside the box marked 22120 was just a skull, which I lifted out. It was heavy in my hand, which figured in a wolverine. The teeth were blunt, a characteristic I had read about in Grinnell and Storer. What surprised me was the big sagittal crest running down the middle of the cranium. This tall keel of bone must have anchored huge temporal muscles. It explained how No. 22120 had bitten so easily through the black-walnut stock of Camp’s rifle.

“Uttered no sound but occasional grunts,” Camp wrote in his journal. “Was not easily killed.”

A Yosemite wolverine's last moments, captured by Grinnell team members. Photo: Courtesy of the Museum of Vertebrate Zoology

The next day, July 26, 1915, Camp began taking up his high-country traps in preparation for a move to a new site. At his first setting of steel traps, at about 10,000 feet, in a meadow where a creek crossed the Donahue Pass Trail, he saw a large animal jumping around in the traps. The Lord had sent him a second wolverine, a male this time, caught by his hind foot in a no. 4 trap. Camp was surprised at how easily the wolverine climbed a lodgepole pine. The animal had some of the agility of one of his smaller semi-arboreal cousins, the pine marten or the fisher. Gripping the trunk with the heavy, semi-retractable claws on his huge snow-adapted feet, he scritched up into the tree as high as the trap chain would allow.

“When I approached closely,” Camp noted in his field journal, “he would lunge at me uttering hoarse growls something like a badger and wrinkling up his nose exhibiting his blunt teeth. On several occasions he started to dig throwing up earth at a lively rate and then rolling over on his back in the cool earth and putting his paws up in the air. Twice he sat up on his haunches with his fore feet on his belly like a bear.”

“When I approached closely,” Camp noted in his field journal, “he would lunge at me uttering hoarse growls something like a badger and wrinkling up his nose exhibiting his blunt teeth. On several occasions he started to dig throwing up earth at a lively rate and then rolling over on his back in the cool earth and putting his paws up in the air. Twice he sat up on his haunches with his fore feet on his belly like a bear.”

There is something strange and unsettling about this performance. What was the wolverine thinking? His final act was being observed by two human beings, Charles Camp and a colleague, Charles Holliger, who were slapping at mosquitos as they photographed him. As long as the humans kept their distance, the wolverine was not obligated to lunge at them, and he seemed content to goof around in a world of his own. Was he digging to escape underground, like a badger? Did he stop only upon realizing that no salvation lay in that direction? Rolling on his back in the cool earth, with his paws in the air -- what was that about? The wolverine was oblivious, in some peculiar way. Was this just wolverine fearlessness, or did the wolverine, recognizing that the end was near, choose to enjoy his last moments in the cool earth of his home range?

“The iris of the wolverine is black and when the pupil is distended the green aqueous humour makes the eye look green in the right kind of light,” Camp noted of the male. “This wolverine was larger, livelier and much harder to kill (by choking with n. 16 galvanized wire) than the one we caught yesterday.”

The big male is catalogued as MVZ No. 22121. I found the box with that number, resting next to 22120, opened it, and lifted out the skull. The male’s skull was much more robust than the female’s, with a sagittal crest almost twice as tall as hers. The muscles attached to the crest must have been Swarzeneggerian. Camp wisely did not proffer his rifle to this second wolverine. On the evidence of this bony crest, the male was equipped to bite through the black-walnut stock and the steel barrel.

In my life I have seen just one wolverine, loping away from me down a gravel beach of a fiord in southeast Alaska. In this distance-devouring gait, a wolverine has an odd rocking-horse motion, its hind end held high. My father, who spent the 1930s and 1940s in wolverine country, rock-climbing above timberline in the Sierra, with many first ascents in Yosemite, never saw a wolverine. In the 1950s, when I was a boy summering in the High Sierra, an encounter with wolverine was still considered a remote possibility -- the odds somewhat better than meeting a yeti -- and I kept an eye out, wishfully. Today no biologist in California, certainly none at the Museum of Vertebrate Zoology, believes that any wolverines survive in the Sierra. None has been seen for decades. No portrait of a wolverine has been snapped by remote camera at any of the bait stations throughout the range. After Camp’s two 1915 wolverines, two subsequent wolverines came into the museum’s collection, both from the Sierra, one caught in 1919, the other in 1921. After that the record is blank.

Wolverines are solitary animals that mate in winter, after a short courtship, then go their separate ways. Charles Camp’s two wolverines were caught in mid-summer, well after the time for wolverine romance, yet it is natural to wonder: Given the rareness of Sierra wolverines, even a century ago, and given the proximity of these two at capture, is it possible that 22120 and 22121 were a breeding pair -- perhaps the last in these mountains?

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