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05/06/2026

UPDATE: We published the story of Dr. Ellen Marsh and the Lamar Canyon wolf pack three days ago. We told you about the fall on Specimen Ridge. About the eleven wolves who came to the ridge above her and howled for two hours and forty-three minutes until the helicopter found her. About 06 Female, who sat on that ridge and watched her, and who left — not before the helicopter came, but when it came. As if she knew when her part was done.

We did not expect what came next.

In seventy-two hours, this post was shared more than forty thousand times. Many of those shares came with comments. Some of those comments came from people who had been in the Lamar Valley. People who had watched 06 Female for years. People who knew things about her that we did not know when we wrote the post, and that change what the story means, and that we think you need to know.

This is the update.

The first thing you need to know is what happened to 06 Female after October 2003.

She continued to lead the Lamar Canyon pack for nine more years. She became, over that time, the most documented individual wolf in the history of Yellowstone research — possibly the most documented individual wild wolf on earth. She produced three litters of pups with her mate, 755M. She was known, among the researchers and the wolf-watchers who came from around the world specifically to see her, for one thing above all others: she could take down an elk by herself. Alone. Without the pack. An elk is not a small animal. An elk is not an animal that wolves typically approach without numbers. She did it consistently, repeatedly, with a precision that the research team described in their notes with the same word, again and again: extraordinary.

She was also known for something else. She was strategic. She thought. In the spring of 2010, when her newborn pups were in the den and sixteen wolves from the rival Mollie's pack invaded the Lamar Canyon territory, she did not stay with the pups. She ran — deliberately, directly into the path of sixteen wolves — drawing them away from the den, toward a cliff edge, and then disappeared into a hidden gully that her pursuers could not follow. The sixteen wolves stood at the top of the gully and could not find her. They left. The pups were safe.

She saved her pups by making herself the target and then vanishing.

The wolf-watchers who were on the valley floor that morning and watched through spotting scopes said they had never seen anything like it. The research team wrote it up carefully in the language that research requires — terms like "deceptive flight behavior" and "predator misdirection" — which is accurate and insufficient simultaneously, the way clinical language always is when the thing being described is something that looks, from the outside, like thinking.

The second thing you need to know is what happened on December 6, 2012.

In September 2012, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service removed gray wolves in Wyoming from the Endangered Species Act. The state of Wyoming immediately established a trophy hunting season. The Lamar Canyon pack, displaced from part of their territory by a rival pack that autumn, drifted east. They crossed the park boundary. Outside Yellowstone's boundaries, there is no protection. Inside the park, a wolf is a research subject, a tourist attraction, and legally untouchable. Outside the park, it is a game animal during hunting season.

754M — the beta male, 755M's brother, who had helped raise every litter of pups for three years and who the research team described in their notes as "gentle" in a way that field notes rarely use adjectives at all — was shot on November 11, 2012. He was the seventh wolf killed in the quota zone that season.

06 Female led the pack back into Wyoming to find him. She did not know, could not have known, that the quota allowed eight wolves in that zone and that she was the eighth.

She was shot on December 6, 2012. Fifteen miles outside the park boundary. She was six years old. She was collared — the GPS collar that the Yellowstone Wolf Project had fitted on her was recording her location every thirty minutes. The data from that collar, in the hours before her death, shows her moving east, toward the area where 754M had been killed, in a search pattern consistent with an animal looking for a missing pack member.

She died looking for someone who was already gone.

The hunter who shot her did not know who she was. He knew she was a wolf in a legal quota zone during hunting season. He knew she was the eighth wolf the zone allowed. He was legally hunting. He had done nothing wrong.

When the New York Times published her death, they described her as "a tourist favorite for most of the past six years." The wildlife photographer who had spent three years following her said to the reporter: "She was the most famous wolf in the world."

The research community's response to her death was documented in scientific publications in a way that scientific publications rarely document. Not in the data. In the language around the data. Small fractures in the professional register — the place where you can see, if you know where to look, what it costs to describe the end of something you have been watching for years in terms that a peer reviewer will accept.

Ellen Marsh was not in Yellowstone on December 6, 2012. She was in Gardiner, Montana — the north entrance town, where she had been living for years, where she could see the park from her kitchen window. She heard about it the same way most of the research community heard about it: by phone, from a colleague, in the early afternoon.

She has not spoken publicly about the day she found out. What we know is what she wrote, and what she wrote was almost nothing. The field journal entry for December 6, 2012 is four words.

She is gone now.

That is the entire entry. Four words. In the same handwriting as thirty-two years of meticulous field observations, careful measurements, behavioral notes that filled thousands of pages. Four words.

She is gone now.

The third thing you need to know is about 926F.

06 Female's daughter. Born in the spring of 2011 — two and a half years before her mother's death. She was a yearling when 06 Female was shot. She watched her mother leave the park and not come back, in the way that wolves watch: tracking, listening, the contact call sent out into a valley that sent nothing back.

926F eventually became the alpha female of what remained of the Lamar Canyon pack. She led them for six years. She had her own litters, her own hunting strategies, her own documented behaviors that the research team watched and recorded with the same care they had applied to her mother. She was not her mother — no wolf is the same as another wolf — but she had something of the same quality of attention, the same willingness to run toward the problem rather than away from it.

She was shot by a trophy hunter in 2018. Outside the park boundary. Legal. She was seven and a half years old.

After 926F died, only two adults remained in the Lamar Canyon pack. By 2020, the pack was no longer recognized as a Yellowstone pack. The territory that 06 Female had held for years — that she had hunted alone, that she had defended by running sixteen wolves toward a cliff edge and disappearing, that she had sat above in October 2003 and watched over a woman lying broken on a slope for three hours — that territory now belongs to other wolves, or to no wolves.

Ellen Marsh retired from field research in 2018. The same year 926F was killed. She has not published anything since.

She lives in Gardiner. She can see the park from her kitchen window.

We did not contact Dr. Marsh directly for this update. The story she told — the one in the field journal, the one she published only in careful clinical language that said everything except what it meant — belongs to her. We read the paper. We read the accounts of 06 Female's life and death from the researchers and photographers who were there. We read the four words she wrote on December 6, 2012.

What we can tell you is this.

On October 14, 2003, a wolf who had lived her entire life inside Yellowstone National Park came to a ridge above a woman who was dying on a slope. She sat there. She howled. She stayed. And nine years later, she left her territory to look for someone who was already gone, and she died doing it.

We do not know what to do with these two facts. We are not sure they can be reconciled into a single coherent statement about what wolves are, or what intelligence is, or what loyalty looks like in a species that has no word for it.

But we know the facts. And we know the four words.

She is gone now.

And we know that Ellen Marsh keeps the Specimen Ridge field journal in the drawer of her bedside table, not on the shelf with the others. And that she does not need to look at it. She remembers every word.

05/06/2026

05/06/2026

"In March 2014, a video went viral. It was filmed on a road in Yellowstone National Park and it showed a large herd of bison running. Not grazing. Not walking. Running. Down the road. Away from the park. Out of the park. The video's caption, supplied by the person who filmed it, read: 'Yellowstone bison running out of the park — earthquake warning?' The video was widely shared. It was also widely mocked. Scientists pointed out that bison leave the park regularly in winter in search of forage. They pointed out that the video proved nothing. They were right. The video proved nothing. What happened nine days later is what proved something. On March 30, 2014, a 4.8 magnitude earthquake struck Yellowstone — the largest earthquake in the park in thirty years. It was not the eruption that the video's caption suggested was coming. But the bison had left nine days before the largest seismic event in three decades. And the geologists reviewing the data afterward found something that the viral video had not captured: the bison had been moving away from the caldera continuously for fourteen days before the earthquake. The seismometers had detected nothing unusual until March 27 — three days before the event. The bison had started moving on March 16. Eleven days before the seismometers noticed anything."

The Yellowstone Caldera is the largest active volcanic system in North America. It sits beneath the Yellowstone National Park in northwestern Wyoming, and it is not, by any ordinary geological standard, a volcano. It is a supervolcano — a system so large that its eruption, when it eventually occurs, will not produce a cone or a crater but will collapse inward under its own weight, leaving a depression hundreds of miles across.

The last full eruption of the Yellowstone supervolcano was approximately 640,000 years ago. The eruption before that was approximately 1.3 million years ago. The one before that was approximately 2.1 million years ago. The pattern suggests a rough cycle of approximately 600,000 to 700,000 years. By that reckoning, the system is approximately at its expected interval for the next major event.

Geologists are quick to point out that "expected interval" is not the same as "due." The system may not erupt for another million years, or may never produce a full caldera collapse again. The uncertainty is the point. Nobody knows. The seismometers watch. The GPS monitors measure ground deformation. The satellites track heat signatures above the caldera. The system is more monitored than almost any geological feature on earth.

And the bison have been here for approximately 10,000 years.

The American bison (Bison bison) has lived in the Yellowstone region since the end of the last ice age. A small population — approximately 23 animals — survived the near-extinction of the species in the late nineteenth century, hidden in the remote valleys of what is now Yellowstone National Park. From those 23 animals, the current Yellowstone herd of approximately 5,000 bison descended. They are the only continuously wild bison population in the United States.

They have been standing on top of the Yellowstone caldera for 10,000 years. Their feet touch the ground that sits above the largest volcanic system in North America, every day, continuously, through every season. The pads of their hooves transmit vibration to their legs, which transmit it to their nervous systems. They feel what is beneath the ground. They feel it with a resolution and a continuity that no human instrument can match, because human instruments are designed to take measurements at intervals, and the bison's feet never stop touching the ground.

The United States Geological Survey maintains detailed records of bison movement in Yellowstone. The records are compiled partly from visual survey, partly from the GPS collars fitted to a sample of the herd, and partly from ranger observation. In reviewing these records, a researcher named Dr. Karen Hickman at the Montana State University geology department found a pattern in 2018 that she described in a paper submitted to the Journal of Geophysical Research — a paper that was accepted but generated, in Hickman's words, "more controversy than I expected for what I thought was a fairly careful analysis."

The pattern: in every documented period of elevated volcanic activity in the Yellowstone system since records began in 1923 — defined as periods in which ground deformation, thermal output, or seismic frequency exceeded baseline by a statistically significant margin — the bison herd's center of gravity moved away from the caldera. Not dramatically. Not stampede-level movement. A gradual, consistent drift toward the park's periphery that, in each case, preceded the first seismometer alert by an average of 8.3 days.

Eight point three days. On average.

In 2004, during a period of elevated thermal output that the USGS described as "the most significant ground deformation event at Yellowstone since systematic monitoring began," the bison began moving on January 14. The first seismometer anomaly was logged on January 28. The period of elevated activity peaked on February 3 and subsided by February 10.

Fourteen days. The bison had been moving for fourteen days before the instruments noticed.

Dr. Hickman's proposed mechanism: bison hooves, pressed continuously against the ground, are sensitive to infrasound — low-frequency vibrations below the threshold of human hearing — produced by magma movement and hydrothermal activity at depth. The threshold for bison infrasound detection is not well-studied, but comparable studies of elephant infrasound detection suggest that large ungulates can detect ground vibrations of frequencies and amplitudes far below current seismometer sensitivity. A seismometer measures what it is calibrated to measure. The bison measure everything their feet touch, continuously, without calibration.

The USGS reviewed Dr. Hickman's paper. Their response was measured and somewhat terse: "The correlation noted by Dr. Hickman is statistically significant and warrants further study. We do not currently incorporate animal behavioral data into our volcanic risk assessment models."

They are not currently incorporating it.

The bison are not waiting for the assessment.

The 2014 video — the one that went viral, the one that was mocked — was reviewed by Dr. Hickman in 2018. She traced the movement of the bison visible in the video against GPS collar data from the same period. The herd began moving on March 16. The video was filmed on approximately March 19 or 20. The earthquake occurred on March 30.

The bison had been moving for fourteen days. The video caught day three or four of the movement. The seismometers caught nothing until March 27.

The bison were not running because of the video. They did not care about the video. They were running because of something they felt in the ground beneath their feet — something that our best instruments, calibrated to the finest tolerances of twenty-first century geophysics, did not register until eleven days after the bison already knew.

The Yellowstone herd has been standing on that ground for 10,000 years. They were standing on it before the United States existed. They were standing on it before the concept of a seismometer existed. They have 10,000 years of continuous contact with the most active volcanic system in North America, transmitted through the soles of their feet, processed by nervous systems that evolved to stay alive in a landscape that could kill them at any moment and has been trying, intermittently, for as long as they have been standing on it.

The caldera is still active. The USGS still monitors it. The GPS collars still track the herd. Dr. Hickman is still watching the data.

And the bison are still walking the same ground their ancestors walked 10,000 years ago — feeling, through 10,000 hooves pressed against volcanic rock, whatever is happening beneath.

They don't share the data. They don't publish papers. They just move, when the ground tells them to move, away from the center, toward the edge, toward whatever is on the other side of the park boundary.

They have done this before. They will do it again.

If they start moving — if the GPS collars show the herd's center drifting consistently toward the north entrance, toward Gardiner, toward the road out — the USGS would like you to know that this does not necessarily indicate volcanic activity.

Dr. Hickman would like you to know that the last time the bison moved that way, the seismometers confirmed the activity eight days later.

She is not saying the bison predict eruptions. She is saying the bison feel the ground. And the ground says things that we are still learning to hear.

05/06/2026

"In 1997, a grey wolf crossed the Wyoming border from Yellowstone National Park and established a territory that overlapped with the eastern grazing land of the Harmon Ranch in Park County, Wyoming. The wolf was a young adult female — approximately three years old, 85 pounds, with a radio collar from the Yellowstone Wolf Project identifying her as F-206. She had dispersed from a pack and was attempting to establish her own territory. The Harmon Ranch ran cattle and sheep on approximately 4,200 acres. The wolf's territory, based on her GPS collar data, encompassed approximately 800 acres of the ranch's eastern range. This is normally the point at which a story about a wolf and a ranch becomes a story about a dead wolf. The Harmon Ranch had a dog. A large white livestock guardian dog named Patrol — a Great Pyrenees cross, approximately 120 pounds, seven years old when F-206 arrived. Patrol had been guarding the ranch's sheep flock for seven years without incident. He had never encountered a wolf. F-206 had never encountered a livestock guardian dog. When they met — as they inevitably did, in the eastern pasture, at some point in the late autumn of 1997 — what happened was not what either the evolutionary history of their species or the practical experience of the ranching community would have predicted. Nothing happened. They looked at each other. And then they went their separate ways. And then they shared a territory for six years."

Bill Harmon has run the Harmon Ranch since inheriting it from his father in 1989. He is sixty-three now. He is the kind of rancher who does not say a great deal and means what he says. He was not, in 1997, happy about a wolf in his territory. Wolves had been reintroduced to Yellowstone in 1995, and the subsequent dispersal of wolves into the surrounding ranchland had been a source of significant conflict between ranchers and wildlife managers throughout the region. The legal framework was complex and contentious. Bill's first instinct, when he confirmed via the GPS collar data shared by the Yellowstone Wolf Project that a collared wolf had established in his eastern range, was to call the Wolf Project and ask them to relocate her.

The Wolf Project told him they would monitor the situation. They told him that collared wolves were tracked, that any depredation of livestock would be documented and compensated under the federal compensation program, and that relocation was possible but was not standard practice unless depredation occurred.

No depredation occurred.

In the first month after Bill confirmed F-206's presence on his eastern range, he rode the fence lines daily. He found wolf tracks. He found the places where she slept. He found the remains of deer she had killed — white-tail, both of them, in the draw below the creek, well inside the natural prey availability of the eastern range. He did not find dead sheep.

He also found something he had not expected to find: in the draw below the creek, on more than one occasion, the wolf's tracks and Patrol's tracks were in the same location. Not overlapping — side by side. As if they had stood in the same place at the same time and faced the same direction.

He mentioned this to his wife, Ellen. She said: "Maybe they like each other." Bill said: "Wolves don't like dogs." Ellen said: "How would you know?" Bill had no answer for this.

By the spring of 1998, Bill had stopped riding the east fence daily. There was no reason to. Patrol went out every morning and came back every evening and the sheep were fine. F-206's collar data showed her moving consistently within her established territory, killing deer and the occasional elk, not approaching the main sheep pastures on the western range. She seemed to understand where the sheep were and to consistently avoid that area.

Bill had a conversation with a wolf researcher from the University of Wyoming named Dr. Sarah Ellison who was studying F-206's dispersal and territory establishment. He told her about the tracks in the draw. She told him she'd heard of livestock guardian dogs and wolves establishing what she called "tolerant co-existence" but that it was rare and poorly documented. She asked if she could set up a camera at the draw.

She set up a camera in May 1998. In the first thirty days of footage, the camera captured four instances of Patrol and F-206 in the same location within the same hour. In two of those instances, both animals were visible in the same frame — separated by approximately forty feet, both in resting positions, facing the same direction.

Dr. Ellison called Bill when she reviewed the footage. She said: "Your dog and the wolf are resting together." Bill said: "How together?" She said: "Forty feet. Looking the same direction." Bill said: "That's not together." Ellen, who was listening from the next room, said: "For a wolf and a dog it's basically holding hands."

The relationship — if that is what to call it — continued for six years. The camera at the draw captured dozens of interactions over that period. Not play. Not grooming. Not the proximate physical behaviors that are typically cited as evidence of animal bonding. Something more restrained: a consistent tendency to be in the same general location, during the same general hours, moving in compatible directions. As if they had negotiated a shared understanding of the territory that neither could articulate and neither violated.

F-206 never killed a sheep on the Harmon Ranch. In six years, with approximately 800 acres of overlap between her territory and the ranch, she killed four deer, two elk, and one rabbit on Harmon land and nothing else. Bill received zero compensation claims. Zero depredations.

Patrol died in January 2003. He was thirteen years old — well beyond the average lifespan of a large livestock guardian breed. His kidneys had been failing for three months. He died in the barn, in his usual spot, on a Tuesday night. Bill found him Wednesday morning.

F-206's collar data on Wednesday morning showed her at the east fence line of the Harmon Ranch. The east fence line — the boundary between ranch property and the public land that formed the outer edge of her territory. She was not inside the fence. She was at it.

She was there Thursday. Friday. Saturday.

Bill called Dr. Ellison on Friday. He told her where the collar data was showing F-206. Dr. Ellison was quiet for a moment and then said: "Tell me what happened on Wednesday."

Bill told her. Ellison said she would drive out. She arrived Saturday afternoon. She and Bill rode out to the east fence line. They found F-206 at approximately 200 meters — close enough to confirm visually, far enough to avoid disturbing her. She was lying in the snow at the fence. Not pacing. Not howling. Lying.

She stayed at the fence line for three days — Wednesday, Thursday, Friday. On Saturday, when Ellison and Bill rode out, she had moved. She was gone.

She appeared in her normal territory locations on Sunday and Monday. Her pattern resumed as if it had not been interrupted.

Dr. Ellison's field notes from Saturday, January 11, 2003:

"F-206 was not at the fence line when Bill and I arrived at approximately 2 PM. I cannot determine the exact time she left. Bill noted that her presence at the fence line for three consecutive days immediately following the death of the livestock guardian dog Patrol is, at minimum, an anomaly worth recording. I want to be careful about what I claim this means. I can say: a wolf spent three days at the boundary of a territory it had shared with a dog for six years, beginning the day after the dog died. I can say that this is not typical wolf behavior in relation to territory boundaries. I can say that we have no other documented proximate cause for the behavior. What I cannot say — what I should not say in a scientific document — is what I actually think. What I think is: she knew. And she came to the fence because the fence was where they met, and where they were closest, and she didn't know what else to do. I know that is not science. I also know it's what I think."

F-206 was last tracked by the Wolf Project in 2006 — nine years after her arrival on the Harmon Ranch. She was approximately twelve years old, which is near the upper end of the typical lifespan for a wild wolf. The collar battery failed. She was not seen again.

Bill got a new livestock guardian dog in 2003 — a young male Great Pyrenees named Porter. Porter has been at the Harmon Ranch for twenty-one years. He has never encountered a wolf. F-206's territory was not established again after her disappearance. No wolf has denned in the eastern range of the Harmon Ranch since 2006.

Bill keeps a copy of the camera footage from the draw in a folder on his kitchen shelf. He has not watched it since 2003. He doesn't need to watch it. He knows what it shows: a dog and a wolf, forty feet apart, looking the same direction.

He says, when anyone asks about it: "I don't know what they had. I know the sheep were fine for six years. I know Patrol was happy. I know the wolf didn't bother us. And I know she was at that fence for three days after he died." He pauses. "I don't have a word for what that is. I don't think there is one. I just know it happened."

05/03/2026

She was missing for eleven days. When she came back, she was fine. She was better than fine. She was warm, well-fed, and smelling like a bear.

In October 2017, a couple from Edmonton named James and Sandra Kowalczyk-Breault were camping in the Pocahontas campground area of Jasper National Park in Alberta — the last days of the autumn camping season before the park's campgrounds closed for winter. They had their tabby cat, a seven-year-old male named Mercer, with them. Mercer had camped with them every autumn for five years. He was familiar with the Jasper backcountry. He was, James later told Parks Canada wildlife officers, "the most outdoors-experienced domestic cat I have ever known, which is a very specific type of confidence in a cat."

On the evening of October 6, Mercer did not return to the tent at his usual hour.

James and Sandra searched the immediate campsite area. They notified the campground host. They notified the Parks Canada visitor center. They posted notices. Over the following eleven days, they extended their stay, checked daily, and found no sign of him.

On October 17 — eleven days after he vanished — Mercer walked back into the campsite at approximately 7 AM and sat in front of the tent.

He was in excellent condition. Not merely alive — in better condition than when he had left. His weight was normal. His coat was clean. He had a small dried scratch on his left ear that had already healed. He was calm. He was, Sandra said, "acting like a cat who had been somewhere perfectly reasonable and had returned on his own schedule."

He smelled strongly of a large mammal. Not dog. Not deer. Bear.

James notified the Parks Canada wildlife team. An officer named Parks Wildlife Technician Elspeth Moreau-Charbonneau came to the site. She confirmed the scent — she had handled bears frequently enough to recognize the specific musk. She noted that the scent was in Mercer's fur, not on his paws, which would indicate external contact, but distributed through his coat, which indicated proximity contact over an extended period — the way an animal smells when it has been sleeping against another animal.

She pulled the data from a Parks Canada wildlife monitoring camera that had been positioned at a known black bear denning area approximately 600 meters from the campsite.

The camera had a motion-triggered image record for the eleven days of Mercer's absence.

Of 847 images captured over eleven days, 23 showed a tabby cat. In 19 of those 23 images, the tabby cat was in the vicinity of — or in direct contact with — a large adult female black bear who had recently excavated a pre-den site. The bear was in her pre-hibernation period — building the fat reserves that would sustain her through a four to five month denning period.

In 11 of the 19 images showing contact: the cat was sleeping against the bear's body. In 4 images: the cat was eating from a food cache that the bear had accumulated. In 3 images: the bear's head was oriented toward the cat in a posture consistent with mutual grooming contact.

In one image — captured at 2:47 AM on October 14 — the cat was asleep on top of the bear's back, and the bear's head was resting on the ground, eyes closed, also asleep.

Elspeth Moreau-Charbonneau filed her incident report with Jasper National Park's wildlife division on October 19, 2017. Her report included the 23 camera images. The conclusion section read: "The subject domestic cat appears to have voluntarily associated with a pre-denning adult female black bear for a period of approximately 11 days, during which time the cat utilized the bear's food cache, body heat, and apparent tolerance as resources. The bear's behavior toward the cat in all 23 images is consistent with neutral-to-affiliative response — no threat displays, no predation behavior, no displacement. The cat's behavior is consistent with purposeful resource-seeking — the bear represented warmth, food proximity, and physical safety in a cold-weather environment in a way that exceeded what the cat's domestic camp situation offered. Whether the bear derived any benefit from the association is not determinable from camera data, though the absence of any agonistic response over 11 days suggests the association was, at minimum, not aversive."

She added, in a handwritten note to the file: "I have been doing wildlife monitoring in Jasper for nine years. I have 847 images from this camera period. Mercer appears in 23 of them and in every single one he looks like he knows exactly where he is and exactly what he is doing. He does not look lost. He does not look captured. He looks like a cat who made a sensible decision about where to spend eleven days in October and is now ready to go home."

Mercer returned to Edmonton with James and Sandra on October 18. He continued to camp at Pocahontas campground for the following three autumns, until James and Sandra's health made the trips impractical.

In each subsequent October, Elspeth pulled the denning area camera data. In October 2018, 2019, and 2020, Mercer appears in the camera images — on the same denning area, with the same identified female bear, who was confirmed by ear tags each year.

Each time for approximately ten days. Each time in the same posture against the bear's side.

Each time, on the day the Kowalczyks broke camp to return to Edmonton, Mercer walked back from the tree line and got into the car.

James told Elspeth, when she called him to report the 2018 images: "He always comes back with us when we leave. He just — also visits. I've stopped trying to explain it. He has a bear. Some cats have mice. Mercer has a bear."

Elspeth, when asked by a Jasper wildlife biology student in 2022 what she made of the images, said: "I make of them exactly what the camera data shows. A domestic cat spent eleven days with a pre-denning black bear, voluntarily, repeatedly, across four years. The bear allowed it every time. The cat returned to his owners every time. Nobody trained this. Nobody arranged this. It happened because a cat made a decision in October 2017 that turned out to be a very good decision, and he kept making it every October after that. I have no framework for this. I have very good photographs."