Wolverine
Aiton's Encyclopedia (1910)
wul-ver-en', literally a little wolf, the common glutton of Europe and northern North America . It is a large, strong animal belonging to the weasel family, but it walks on the soles of the feet instead of on its toes. It has rough, dark hair with pale stripes on the sides. It walks like a small bear, and looks like a large shaggy skunk. It inhabits forest regions. The pelt is valuable, especially for robes and rugs; but the animal's sagacity is such that it is difficult to trap. It follows the trapper's trail, springing traps and stealing the bait without being caught. It devours the choicest portions of animals in the traps and ruins their pelts. The wolverine and the fisher are the especial dread of the North American trapper. There is no satisfying a wolverine. It will break into a cabin and proceed deliberately to destroy and defile all that it cannot eat. It will scatter a package of rice, and strip bedding into shreds. A person seemingly could not show more destructive ingenuity. Cruisers, surveyors, and trappers frequently find it desirable to cache, that is, to bury, a part of their provisions against the return trip. No other animal has equal sagacity in finding a cache. Other animals satisfy their hunger and leave, but the wolverine takes a malicious pleasure in destroying everything in reach. The French call the wolverine the carcajou. In Wyoming it is called the skunk-bear. The Indians of Washington call it the mountain devil. Michigan has been nicknamed the Wolverine State.
What Has Changed in the Last Century
Aiton's 1910 account is largely a trapper's portrait, and the wolverine's habits it describes are real enough — raiding caches, springing traps, fouling what it cannot eat — though biologists now read the fouling as scent-marking to reserve a carcass from competitors rather than malice. What has changed most is the animal's range and status: the wolverine is gone from nearly all of the contiguous United States, with only a few hundred thought to survive in the northern Rockies and Cascades, and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service listed that population as threatened in November 2023, citing the loss of the deep spring snowpack females need for denning. Michigan is still the Wolverine State, but the one wild wolverine confirmed there in modern times was found in 2004 and died in 2010. Globally the species, Gulo gulo, remains widespread across the boreal north and is not considered endangered.
Written for this edition, 2026.