Meadow Watcher

We had wolf fever that trip. A few days earlier the Junction Butte pack had put on a show for us across the Lamar, working a bull bison that had gone down, and after something like that you start believing your luck will hold.

So we were up early to test it. There was said to be a pack denning somewhere near Trout Lake, and my brother-in-law and I hiked out to scour the area for any sign of them. We found prints a good way past the lake. That was all we found.

On the walk back the sun was into golden hour and this tree was standing out in the meadow inside the loop trail, in among the last of the July wildflowers. Old, stately, alone — it reads as something set there to keep an eye on the place, which is where the title comes from. We’d seen a hawk sitting in it earlier that same morning.

I shot it from the trail at 150mm and didn’t go closer. Partly that was respect — the meadow is full of things that live there and I wasn’t going to walk through it for a better angle. Partly it was that I’d packed light for wolves and the 150-500 was all I had with me, so 150mm was as wide as I could go.