scissor me timbers

When ranchers in Utah's Rich County found eighteen sheep killed in March 2022, they assumed coyotes. USDA Wildlife Services flew a plane over the kill site and found something feeding on the carcasses that had only been confirmed in the state eight times in forty years. It was a wolverine. Utah sits at the extreme southern margin of the wolverine's North American range. The animal is built for the deep snow and high alpine of Montana, Idaho, and Wyoming, country above ten thousand feet where the winters last eight months and the terrain rejects everything that is not specifically engineered to survive it. A wolverine showing up in Utah's ranch country was not a routine predator complaint. It was a biological event. State wildlife managers had no protocol for it because they had never needed one. Biologists set specialized barrel traps near the sheep carcasses. Catching a wolverine in a live trap is considered one of the most difficult captures in North American wildlife management. The animal is trap-smart, solitary, covers enormous distances daily, and operates almost exclusively in terrain that humans struggle to access on foot. The odds of a wolverine walking into a barrel trap were close to zero. The next morning, a sheepherder found one of the trap doors dropped. Inside was a healthy, twenty-eight-pound male, estimated at three to four years old. It was the first wolverine ever live-captured by biologists in Utah's history. The team sedated him, packed his body in ice to keep his core temperature stable during the examination, fitted him with a GPS tracking collar, and released him into the deep snow of the Uinta Mountains. For researchers who had spent careers studying an animal they almost never got to see, that collar was the first real-time data source on wolverine movement the state had ever produced. The data that came back over the next twenty-five days confirmed what wolverine biologists in other states had documented but Utah had never been able to verify on its own ground. The animal logged over 195 miles of travel in less than a month. He did not drift south toward lower elevations or leave the state. He locked into the high peaks of the Uintas above ten thousand feet and ran massive looping circuits through avalanche chutes, rocky ridgelines, and snowfields deep enough to bury a man standing upright. The daily distances he covered would qualify as an endurance event for a human athlete on flat ground. He was doing it through the most physically punishing terrain in the state, in winter, alone, at elevation, without stopping. The eighteen dead sheep that started the whole sequence were never repeated. The wolverine moved into the high country and stayed there, operating in a landscape so remote and so hostile that the only evidence of his existence was the GPS signal pinging coordinates from ridgelines that no person had visited in months. The collar proved what the forty years of scattered sightings could only suggest. The wolverine was not passing through Utah. It was living there, quietly covering nearly two hundred miles of frozen alpine rock in less than a month, completely invisible to every human being in the state.

Catching the Intake Winds

Realized I didn't have a proper buckskin tribute. Back to GHT pages tomorrow!!

~ Larn

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yeah.

Delighted with my Tanthamore hockey au commission by @rottenapplefae! Thank you for your beautiful work to accompany my fic!

Soft Hands

Tanthamore hockey au kink fic - Rated E

Claymore’s hands are for scoring now, not fighting. Too skilled, her hands too valuable to be split wide like Kit’s so often had, broken and bleeding and raw against someone else’s jaw. Soft hands, coaches had drilled into her through the years, and Kit’s walls flutter and clench as she thinks of Claymore’s fingers, long and sure, filling her cunt in place of her own.

Color charts of undifferentiated (top) and specialized (bottom) plumage of different warbler species from Charles Keeler's Evolution of the colors of North American land birds (1893).

hungry to win

conch canaries

Sous La Glace, Georges Leonnec for La Vie Parisienne, 1926

She's a busy woman, all the time!

Are you a Soldier? On a quest for justice or revenge? Ready to fight and flee and raise your weapons?

Are you a Seeker, searching for something lost? Something that needs to be found before it is too late.

Or are you a Schemer? Do you have a day job that needs work and night shifts that keep you up until dawn doing the hard work it takes to change fates?

Show me your results! I wanna seeeeeeee