Mahihkan is the Cree word for wolf, Saunders tells me. He often shares Cree words on the daily itinerary board. Guests are excited to learn the Cree names of the flora and fauna they’ll be seeing, but it’s also important to Saunders to share his language.

He was just six years old when he was sent south to Brandon, Man., to attend residential school there for two years. “Everyone had to learn English, and if you were caught talking your language, you were strapped,” he shares. Later, as an adult, he relearned Cree by listening to the Elders. “When I was out on the trapline with my late uncle Stanley, he’d talk in Cree all the time and would tell me what each word meant and how to put them into a sentence. That’s how I got my language back — also from my mom and dad and aunties and other Elders. Even to this day, I repeatedly ask what some words mean until I get it.” 

When it comes to the land, Saunders’ wisdom is unmistakable. Early in the morning, we speak next to the crackling fire heating the cosy main lodge, coffees in hand, waiting for the sun to rise — the best time to spot wolves. His eyes dart around, keeping tabs on every movement outside through the large picture windows designed for wildlife viewing. In the first few days here, we’ve already spotted a wolverine, a cross fox and an Arctic hare. And, best of all, the pack of 12 wolves sleeping on the frozen Hudson Bay. 

“A lot of people read books and that to become experts. They haven’t been on the land to see what it’s really like,” says Saunders, who has spent every summer and fall for more than six decades on this coast. Here with the wolves, he says, it takes time.

Churchill Wild is calling these wolves Canis lupus nubilus, the Great Plains wolf or “cloud wolves.” One of five subspecies of grey wolf, this subspecies is presumed to have originated on the central plains of North America, but was nearly eradicated in much of its historic range by the 1960s. The population around the western Great Lakes region in the United States has bounced back, but nubilis is still considered by western science to be extirpated in Canada, where it once roamed the southern reaches of Manitoba and Saskatchewan.

In the morning, three days into our stay, a crisp hoar frost encapsulates the bare branches of the willows. They glisten in the sunlight against a clear blue sky. The wind whips the snow on the ground into sculpture-like formations. Ptarmigans dart across the crystallized landscape leaving wide tracks in the snow with their feathered, Muppet-like feet. Wolf tracks are everywhere, their prints double the size of my hand. 

Over the week, we learn how to follow the wolf tracks, noting which direction the pack is moving. Seated in snowmobile-drawn komatiks (otapanask in Cree), traditional Inuit sleds, we keep a close eye on the ground as we weave in and out of the willows along the Mistikokan River, dodging woody stalks of devil’s club and water hemlock. Through the pack’s crowded and forking tracks, we see how they travel together, break off into smaller groups or go solo and then come back together.

“The thing that I really try to stress, if I’m out with guests, is patience — that’s the one thing you have to have while you’re out there,” says Saunders. “A lot of old-timers I went out in the bush or hunted with, and I’d ask when are we going to see something. They’d tell me in Cree, just wait, be patient,” says Saunders. “Ganna papasi, which means don’t be in a hurry.” That concept is fundamental in Cree culture, he tells me.