Review by Mack Hassler
“The Lord will guide you continually…. And make your bones strong….Your ancient ruins shall aise up the foundations of many generations….
Isaiah 58: 8, See also Genesis 2: 15-25
As I prepare to write these reviews of what seems to me a new and important regional literature in out great American tradition. I find it useful to read in two general areas . The Modern Press (today a piece on making allegators into pets in Australia appeared in The New York Times (15 July 2025); and the Ancient Hebrew scriptures.
Dead Moose on Isle Royale is a great narrative by one of the great experts on the diminishing packs of predator wolves that still range for their prey across our Northwest forests, in particular the small pack that make their way accross the ice bridge from Canada to our Isle Royale where they can still prey on Moose in order to survive. It is important to learn if there are still enough kills for the pack to survive. Otherwise we must drop some pup wolves in to repopulate the pack With my love of creation stories, it is nearly a biblical tale of communication (in this case, by rudimentary scientific means of tracking and analyzing the prey in order to protect our own”chosen” race of animals With Holden’s skill and with the modern language of science we can nearly communicate.
The island itself is so large and so hard to get to from Canada, just a handful of miles but hard for animals to swim in the summer and a difficult ice bridge for only a few months in the winter so that the number of species of mammals living in the forests of the island is small. It is nearly a prototype of the Garden where God experimented with his own creation Holden describes the similarity of the island experiment to the Garden of Eden experiment early in his book, “…an ideal laboratory for observing a single predator- single prey dynamic you could not do much better….there is no other spot on earth quite like it. (p 6) Most of Holden’s chapters are accounts of how the volunteers work during one week each year as “citizen scientists “ on this project. But his most dramatic chapter titled “Look for Dead Moose, Find dead Wolf (chapter 10) seems to me almost Biblical in its resonance – “a wolf from a pack to the East decided to poach a bit a bit of the moose another pack had killed” (p. 47). The volunteers find the poacher murdered by angry wolves. This is the Cain/Abel story We know hos the two-body experiment worked out East of Eden—sin and death and eviction (Genesis 4).
Most of Holden’s narrative is much less dramatic in its resonance. He very carefully describes who the volunteers are, some young as we would expect but some old, and many return year after year. Their time on the island is very rugged out door camping and work. The beauty of Dead Moose on Isle Royale may not be the resonance with creation and the notion of experimenting with survival and death but the details and the fine maps and black and white photos about the work of the citizen volunteers to determine scientifically how to prevent extinction for the wolf packs. Holden’s book is good publicity for the volunteer experience and for keeping the species of wolf from going extinct in this remote and rugged hunting ground of theirs. It should also help some of our more fragile species as mere tourists in this special and remote location far across the Big Lake from Houghton. My wife and I made the trip on the big boat from Houghton years ago – much too old and feeble even then to volunteer. We heard lectures on the boat over, stayed in well-constructed dormlike rooms and did some hiking on good trails at the Eastern end of the Island— never venturing “off trail”. I recommend the Book and the Trip.
Dead Moose On Isle Royale: Off Trail With the Citizen Scientists of the Wolf-Moose Project by Jeffrey M Holden (Michigan State University Press, East Lansing Michigan 2025) 189 pages, pbk, n.p.
