A vocabulary of landscape — a landscape of words
1467 entries
wolverine
The wolverine is the largest land member of the weasel family, a heavily built animal about the size of a medium dog with an enormous head, powerful jaws, and feet that spread wide as snowshoes. It scavenges, hunts, and caches, covers vast distances over rough country, and can drive bears and wolves off a carcass. It lives in boreal forest and tundra across the northern hemisphere. It’s badass.
Etymology
The English name appears to be built on wolf with an ending, and the animal has collected an unusual number of others: glutton in older English and in several European languages, from a persistent story about its appetite; carcajou in French Canada, from an Algonquian source; and skunk bear in parts of North America, for the smell of its scent marking.
Notes
It caches food in snow and rock, and the cold and the chemistry of the cache preserve it for months, which is what lets the animal survive winters where nothing is being killed. Females den in deep snow and appear to require it, digging tunnels many yards long. Individual home ranges can exceed a thousand square miles, and a wolverine will cross a mountain range rather than go around it.