Featured in Nature Canada      January-March 1985, pp34-38

by Suzanne Kingsmill It was dusk in the boreal forest. Fresh snow lay deep on the ground and heavily weighted the boughs of the evergreens, creating a strange and eerie silence. The tracks of a snowshoe hare meandered through a nearby thicket. On the far side the owner nibbled at the twigs of a willow, having recently roused himself from a daytime slumber to browse for food during the long cold night.

Unseen by the hare, a silent grey form crept over the ridge above the thicket and, under cover of bushes and shrubs, moved slowly down the hill. The lynx blended into the shadows of the fores Her long, luxurious salt and pepper coat made her look far bigger than she actually was. The cat crouched behind a fallen jackpine, six metres from the hare. She had crept as close as she could. Suddenly, in a blur of motion, she exploded from cover and bounded after the hare, her hind quarters rising above shoulder level as she plunged through the snow, lond legs and huge, spreading paws preventing her from sinking too deeply. The hare, alerted to the danger, darted into the woods and was lost from sight. After three quick bounds the cat stopped pursuit and stood still in the snow, gazing into the darkening forest, a solitary and remote creature of the north woods. It wasn't until noon two days later that the scientist found the pawprints in the snow. He had never actually seen this lynx. Lynx are wary, secretive beasts, usually hunting alone and during the dark of night. But the scientist was a determined sleuth. For a week he had followed his quarry through remote country, covering large stretches of dense boreal forest. The lynx had circled around a home range of 12 to 18 square kilometres, leading the tracker over ridges, down gulleys and through close to inpenetrable thickets and windfalls. It had been an unusually frustrating week for the tracker. He had spent two days holed up at base camp during a particularly savage blizzard. Now the snow lay 20 centimetres deeper and the bushwhacking was made more difficult by the quicksand-like quality of the fluffy snow. The lynx tracks, one almost directly in front of the other, vanished over another ridge. Sighing in resignation, the tracker trudged up the rise, occasionally tripping over the tips of his snowshoes and plunging face first into the side of the hill. At the top of the ridge the tracks disappeared into a ravine filled with a dense thicket of young willows. The tracker thrashed through shoulder-high brush, the whiplike ends of the branches slapping at his face. At length he came upon a well-packed depression in the snow. It was the lynx's day bed; she had slept and rested there, curled up near a game trail, ever hoping for that lucky meal to hop by. The distance between this day bed and the one last used by the lynx was just under eight kilometres, an average nightly jaunt for her. The tracker had kept at least a day behind so as not to scare her. This, combined with her nocturnal habits, meant that the chances of sighting her were not good. However, for one brief, fleeting moment he had seen a male lynx skirting the boundaries of the female's territory. The cat had been standing in a grove of jackpines, his elegant long black ear tufts contrasting with his large yellow eyes. A flaring facial ruff practically met under his chin in two black points and his short black-tipped tail twitched as he turned and fled into the forest, his large feet and long legs out of proportion to his body. He was large and gangly like a greyhound -- an oddly fluffy greyhound made mostly of fur. But when he moved, his disproportionate body had assumed a harmony of motion. The tracker envied that ease of motion, particularly as he entered a forest clearing. In the deeper snow, the going was so laborious that he began to sweat even in the frigid air. He rested against a tree and noted where the lynx had urinated on a fallen log: it was one of many scent posts, used by the cat to mark her home range. The tracks led off into the shelter of the woods, and tracking became much easier under the protective branches of the pines where the snow cover was not so deep. Suddenly the tracks veered off into a ravine, becoming erratic as they moved from bush to bush. The tracker's weariness fell away. He could just make out the prints of a snowshoe hare in a small clearing. This was it: the hunt. He knew the lynx had not eaten in some time, that she needed to eat at least every 48 hours to keep her strength up. The hunting had been poor even before the blizzard struck. Then the snow was weakly crusted -- even the lynx, with her great mop-like feet, had frequently broken through. And when every second paw breaks through with a resounding crunch, stealth is impossible. He had seen the marks of her failed stalks in the snow. But this time, the snow was deeper, softer. She had made a close approach, slinking so low that her stomach had left drag marks in the snow. Choosing her route with great care and placing each paw slowly and deliberately into the snow she had crept up to within striking distance of the hare. The hare stopped feeding, its nose and ears twitching as it listened for a danger it sensed but did not see. It hopped several metres and stopped. The cat pounced; the hare responded a split second later, its tracks suddenly far apart where before they had been bunched. The distinct and separate pawprints of the stalking lynx gave way to large craters in the snow, spaced one to two metres apart, in some places obliterating the tracks of the hare. At the fourth crater the chase ended.