Sometime in 2008 a young male wolverine left his home in the mountains of Idaho. No one saw him go. He probably went west and then south, keeping to the highest ground and powering over obstacles, as wolverines tend to do. He forded a major river, the Snake, and a major highway, 1-84, then had smooth sailing through the emptiness of eastern Oregon. Traversing a distance of 500 miles, he finally reached a forest near Truckee, Calif, in the central Sierra Nevada range. It had been decades since a wolverine roamed these woods. As the largest terrestrial members of the Mustelidae (weasel) family, wolverines are creatures of snow, cold and peaks, but especially of snow. Their thickly furred, bowling-ball bodies are perfectly constructed to retain heat during blizzards. Their paws, seemingly too big for their stubby legs, let them bound over the snowpack without breaking through. Sniffing a dead deer buried beneath an avalanche, a wolverine bores down like a tunneling machine on full throttle.
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