It is quiet here at night. No traffic noise, no screaming and yelling drunks, no early morning construction. It's one of the gifts of living in a small college town in a rural area.

(chicory)
The sky has been clear the past few nights. Temperatures have been ridiculous—below zero at night, a few days straining to reach above single digits. Today was 21 degrees, and I walked around with a sweater on, but no coat. But the sky on these cold days is a mélange. In bright daylight, it's that chicory blue that makes me think that it should be warmer outside. The sun is shining, the sky is clear; my body knows it's below zero outside, but my memory thinks on summer days, those glorious 90 degree scorchers when I wander through the woods, looking for life. Stepping out of the house on a winter's day is like walking into an oven of cold: the air burns your lungs, makes the back of your throat hurt, and you think your breath has become ice shards on your tongue.

Sunset may be the most mystical of the sky states: the sun catches the ice crystals in the air, and everything floods pink and purple. You think you can see the air—and you can because all of those water molecules are hanging around in it, and you make a note to yourself that winter sunsets resemble Monet's painting of foggy London. Several times in the past month, I've looked up in the night sky to see brilliant Venus, round as a baseball, falling toward the open glove of the moon.

In the winter silence, it gets hard to remember sometimes that spring will return. That the trees are dormant, not dead. That colors will be added to the palette as the calendar turns over new leaves. And then, as it warms up, the night sky will fill with sound.

(peeper)

First, the peepers, the tiny frogs who sing and sing with all their might in hopes of finding a mate. As the spring continues, the peepers will peep down, but new sounds: the bullfrogs belching their love call, the crickets rubbing and rubbing their wings together, and the cicadas, who, I'm convinced could be used to drive one mad. The cicadas vibrate in my ears, and their sound is as much kinesthetic as it is auditory.

(Red wolf)

My instincts tell me that winter shouldn't be so quiet. Sounds are missing, and I wonder if we'll ever be wise enough to put back what we murderously took away. We have no keystone predators. The bobcats and the wolves have been hunted out of existence. The occasional black bear that we do have around here is more interested in rooting out garbage, or finding the bush full of black raspberries, than of any human prey.
Sometimes, on rare occasions, I'll hear the howl of a coyote. I've been here 16 years; it's only been in the past two or three that I've spotted live coyotes—the roadkill  ones I don't count. But the silence at night is indicative of an imbalance made by the white settlers that came here. Wolves are gone. Bobcats, gone. Now the coyote is beginning to move in as the keystone predator, but it is not big enough to bring down what needs to be hunted here. Its yips at night are anemic, and coyotes always sound lonely.

(Gray wolf)
We have more white-tail deer than you can imagine. They've become so used to humans that they will graze in your garden as you pull into your driveway, not even bothering to lift their heads to assess whether you present danger. The white tail survive the brutal winters here and give birth to twin or triplet fawns in the spring. The fawns are everywhere, too. Most of the time, they're with their mom, but on more than one occasion, I've come across a fawn hiding in some leaves in the woods, staying absolutely where his or her mother told him to stay. It's hard then not to want to touch them, but I remind myself that wild things need to be left to be wild.

I know that should we bring wolves back into this area, people would object. They would fear for their cats, their dogs, their livestock. But, I hate to say this, neither cats nor dogs should be running free—danger comes more often in the shape of two tons of steel, and it's the irresponsible pet owner who allows their pet to take their chances out on the road. As for livestock, well, yes, perhaps wolves would kill the occasional sheep or calf, but there are remedies for that. Any government that is committed to restoring the balance of nature in the woods knows that it will have to reimburse farmers and ranchers for their losses. Otherwise, it's not uncommon to hear a rancher say that he'll shoot the first wolf he sees—endangered species be damned.

Here, though, wolves will have so much venison to eat that they will aid us in the problem of our own making. The deer, cute as they are, have become nuisance. Some mornings, on my drive into work, I might count six or seven dead deer in a 20 mile stretch—and that was just the previous night's roadkill. On county roads alone, 265 deer were killed, and if you factor in the town, city, hamlet, village and assorted other roads where deer wander, the number may be tenfold. In addition, deer carry deer ticks, which cause Lyme Disease.

I read that the place that I am from is considering wolves to the wild. You see, it's not just the number of deer that go up when there are no keystone predators. The rest of the earth suffers too:

But the loss of the stealthy predators in the early 1900s left a hole in the landscape that scientists say they are just beginning to grasp. The ripples extend throughout what is now Olympic National Park, leading to a boom in elk populations, overbrowsing of shrubs and trees, and erosion so severe it has altered the very nature of the rivers, says a team of Oregon State University biologists. The result, they argue, is an environment that is less rich, less resilient, and — perhaps — in peril.

It's peculiar to think that killing a wolf will lead to the smothering of baby salmon, but such is the case.

No wolf=elk population overgrazing=erosion=muddying up of spawning streams=no salmon.

How long is it going to take before we get that lesson learned? Whatever we do to change the environment is going to come back and bite us in the ass—hard. It may not happen immediately; the results may not fully be felt until our grandchildren are grown, but isn't it time for us to quit living in this carpe diem, fuck-it-we're-all-going-to-die-anyway-so-let's-grab-what-we-can-while-we're- here universe?

I dream of winter nights, not too far in the future, I hope, that are silent no more. I long for a night when the winter moon makes the snow shine like polished glass, when I hear the baying at the moon by the packs of red wolves who cull the white tail herds of their weak and their old and their sick, strengthening the deer, strengthening the wolf, strengthening the forest, and the stream. I want to hear the sound of balance.

Because imbalance is deafening.