Naturalist R.D. Lawrence and the Wolves

One moonlit night in the early 1980s, when I lived in a farmhouse near Kirkfield, Ontario, I awoke to the psychic knowledge that there were wolves in the field out beside our house. I could tell that they were aware of our presence in the house, but that they respected that the house was our territory, and they knew that I knew that the field was part of theirs.

I had lived in an area away from most humans in my preschool years, and there had been foxes coming up near our house then. We would find their tracks and the tracks of the rabbits they were chasing in the snow the next day. As a child, I must have become psychically familiar with the foxes and, therefore, the wolves.

The next day after the wolves came, I went out and found wolf tracks in the snow. I followed them back to where they had come from, and they had entered the field through a low place under the fence and then from a bush across the road. I told some of the people around there, but they just dismissed them as being dog tracks. I still knew that they were wolves.

As it happened, shortly after that, I met the well-known Canadian nature writer and biologist, R.D. Lawrence, who had lived among wolves and written books about them, such as "In Praise of Wolves". He was then living a few miles north of us near Norland, Ontario. He told me that I was right - that there was a trail which the local wolves used and that it went right across our property!

R.D. Lawrence later got old and passed on, but he leaves a very valuable, natural legacy for Ontario: He showed by his positive example that animals can best be studied alive and free in their natural habitat, not in biology laboratories. He also bought a large property further north as a safe haven for wolves. Other naturalists have preserved it, and it is still there to this day.