Over the Memorial Day weekend, my husband and I went backpacking in the Sawtooths. Usually, when we hike out this way, we’ll see wolf sign, or even wolves, but this time we only saw very old scat and not much of that.
This led me to mention that I’d read that Idaho would be culling its wolf population from 1500 to 200, and we proceeded to speculate that the wolves must have fled deep into the wilderness to avoid the cull. I was thinking about a dramatized story from the wolves’ point of view, about how the packs needed to retreat, but Ambrose took it another direction. He started making a song about it to the tune of Rush’s “The Trees” – one of his favorite songs.
He made some line suggestions, but I will admit I did not consciously retain them in memory. Instead, I let the concept simmer in my brain for a couple days before coming up with this:
Stirring deep in Idaho
They say the wolves have grown too many
And so the wolves must go
Is that the wolves are just too vicious
And have ranchlands in their sight
And they like the way they’re made
And they wonder why the ranchers
Can’t just build a better stockade
Since the wolves are marked to die
No creatures can scream oppression
When good folk turns a blind eye
To protect the rights of wolf
We cannot change their nature
And the ranchers have had enough
All due to human flaw
And the wolves, they will be slaughtered
By poison, gun and law