Wolves

Wolves are among the recurring nonhuman presences around Augustine and Iris at Lake Hazen. First heard howling from across the lake and the surrounding mountains, they later come close enough for one to brush against the hut. Their calls punctuate the settlement’s silence, while their growing familiarity to Augustine marks his own adjustment to living there: the animals remain independent neighbors, not dangers he must drive away.

First Calls at Lake Hazen

On the night Augustine and Iris arrive, the landscape offers little shelter from the wind. They eat inside an orange tent beside their snowmobile, then step outside to watch the aurora. As they sit in the dark, a wolf howls at a distance, followed by another answering from the other side of the lake. The calls enter a scene otherwise organized around the pair’s silence and their attention to the sky. The Wolves are not seen, but their voices establish that the lake is inhabited beyond the human camp.

After Augustine and Iris settle into a hut, he wakes during the night to the howls of a pack. He guesses that they are in the mountains behind the camp, perhaps investigating the abandoned snowmobile and marking it as theirs. That explanation is his conjecture, not a confirmed account of the animals’ purpose. Still, it gives their presence a clear relation to the fragile human settlement: the snowmobile, a remnant of the journey, lies within a territory the Wolves may regard as their own. Augustine decides that the vehicle can be theirs and falls asleep again. His response is practical acceptance rather than an attempt to confront them.

Neighbors, Near and Far

The distance between Wolves and humans narrows when one comes to the hut. During a bright stretch of the season, Augustine wakes to a large furry body brushing the tent wall. He first checks that Iris is still napping. Then he recognizes the sound as a wolf scratching an itch against the hut, with only vinyl and insulation separating it from his head. The closeness startles him, but he is largely unperturbed and goes back to sleep. The moment turns the Wolves’ earlier calls into a physical presence beside the camp without turning that proximity into an attack.

This encounter belongs to a wider change in Augustine’s sense of the place. He and Iris had arrived with the uncertainties of travel behind them; now the hut is their shelter, and the animals around the lake have become familiar features of its life. The narrative says that the inhabitants of the lake and mountains grow accustomed to the new human presence, and that Augustine gradually accepts his neighbors in turn. The episode with the wolf makes that reciprocal adjustment tangible, though it does not suggest that the animals have been tamed or that their behavior is predictable.

Howls Through the Seasons

Wolves remain audible as the seasons change. During the period of nearly continuous daylight, their faraway howls accompany Iris’s adaptation to life at the lake: she naps in short intervals, skates on the ice, and explores the island, while Augustine settles into a relaxed routine. The calls are one part of a landscape that includes a snowy owl and Arctic hares. Their recurrence gives the remote setting a life of its own, rather than making it only a refuge for the two human characters.

Later, as winter returns, the soundscape changes. The snow and ice reclaim the lake; the birds have departed, and musk oxen and caribou have returned to the tundra. Wolves still howl now and then, their calls interrupting the stillness. In the radio shed, Augustine finds the receiver’s static soothing because it obscures the unnatural quiet and the loneliness of the Arctic. The contrast is significant: the radio offers human-made noise without a human voice, while the Wolves’ distant calls confirm that living presences remain nearby. Their howls do not end Augustine’s isolation, but they give that silence a different shape.

A Measure of Augustine’s Adjustment

When Augustine speaks by radio with Sully, he describes the late-October darkness, the cold, and the birds’ departure, then adds that the Wolves are still there, still howling. He reports their continued presence as an ordinary fact of his surroundings, alongside the Arctic hares and the frozen ground. The account also recalls his earlier observation that the Wolves seem to have become accustomed to the human newcomers. What once registered as a possible claim on the snowmobile has become part of his concise inventory of life at Lake Hazen.

Wolves therefore serve as a recurring measure of both continuity and change. Their calls span the camp’s seasonal transformations, from the night of the aurora to the returning winter stillness; their sudden closeness tests Augustine’s comfort with the wild without producing a violent encounter. The book gives them no human motives or relationship with Augustine beyond proximity and his observations. Their significance instead lies in their presence outside his control: he and Iris have made a home at the lake, but the landscape remains shared with its other inhabitants.