I do love the wildlife we have here and pay close attention to it, but it's not the same.

Here we have no keystone predators at all, the last wolf was killed int he 1700's sometime and plans to reintroduce them give our mollycoddled farmers the howling fantods. As a consequence, our landscape is tamed and missing something, a presence whose echoes we can still hear.

18 months ago when visiting the US we went hiking in the backcountry around Yellowstone Lake. It was a 3-4 mile walk into the forest and up a hill into those magnificent old growth woods, the like of which we don't have here. We took bear spray and indeed a week or so before a bear was spotted in the area. It was great to be out and have the hairs on the back of your neck stand up knowing there were things in those woods that were you to bump into them could easily eat you. In that landscape we are not top predators.

People studying ecosystems and trophic cascades call this the ecology of fear, a deep seated response that has been passed for our ancestors walking the plains of the Great Rift Valley 200,000 years ago. This same feeling alters the way elk behave in areas where wolves have returned. It's a part of our being, and I'm glad to have felt it even if was only for that short time. It certainly makes you feel more alive.

In Utah last year we kept an eye out for mountain lions, but these are supposed to be very difficult to see (although a lady in a bar in Rapid City, S.D. once told us how she had to constantly scare off a mountain lion that kept coming into her back yard).