Brochet, a northern Manitoba settlement and the narrator’s base for winter studies, is where the book brings ecological disagreement into direct contact with local experience and government policy. After arriving from Wolf House Bay, he finds that wolves are widely blamed for the scarcity of caribou. His attempt to place that accusation in a longer history of wolf predation meets anger rather than persuasion.

Setting and Arrival

Brochet serves as the narrator’s winter base after his work at Wolf House Bay. The settlement is not merely a point of departure: it is where the decline in caribou becomes an immediate economic and political grievance. Local opposition to wolves is described as strong and bitter, shaping the terms in which the narrator’s observations are received.

Caribou Decline and Local Conflict

A local game warden explains the scale of the change through the caribou catch. As recently as two decades earlier, local people could kill 50,000 caribou each winter; by the time of the narrator’s visit, they were fortunate to kill a couple of thousand. Caribou had become scarce, and wolves were unanimously held responsible. The figures are presented as the warden’s account of local experience, not as an independent census.

The narrator responds that wolves had preyed on caribou for tens of thousands of years without decimating the herds before white settlement at Brochet. His argument does not calm the dispute: listeners either ignore it or become angry at what they regard as his partisanship. The contrast between the community’s remembered abundance and his long ecological timescale makes Brochet a place where the same decline supports opposing explanations.

Investigation and Government Response

Early in the winter, a trader enters the narrator’s cabin excitedly and challenges him to seek proof of wolf attacks at Fishduck Lake. A trapper, the trader reports, has seen fifty caribou killed on the lake’s ice, with little of the meat eaten. The narrator accepts the challenge and travels there with a Cree companion. They find twenty-three caribou carcasses. The visit connects Brochet’s heated accusation to an observed scene elsewhere in the region, while the difference between the trader’s reported number and the count at the lake remains part of the episode.

In a later incident, the narrator radios a full report to the proper authorities and receives no reply. Weeks afterward, the provincial government raises the wolf bounty to twenty dollars. The narrator presents that increase as the only possible answer to his report, though he cannot establish that the government intended it as a response. Brochet thus anchors a larger irony in the account: evidence gathered against the prevailing blame does not produce an acknowledged reply, while policy moves toward greater pressure on wolves.