On February 28, 2008, a researcher from Oregon State University discovered a thing that many thought had vanished: a wolverine in California. The wolverine was filmed via remote camera at an image acquisition station designed for a smaller member of the weasel family, the marten.

This was the first known wolverine in California since 1920. The wolverine is an incredibly rare animal, with only perhaps 100 left in the lower 48. They dislike roads and development, clinging only to the wildest realms in Montana, Idaho, Wyoming, and Washington (all states with considerable roadless acreage and the space a wolverine requires) It is, without equivocation, an animal that is in deep peril.

As a writer of science fiction and fantasy, I love the idea of exploration. Of looking up at the Milky Way and wondering what is possible, and how all of that is possible. The idea of crafting an interstellar spacecraft, or sending out a Mars Rover is exhilarating, and something we must do. There’s high drama in the future, in possible habitable planets, and the unknown universe. This is what powers the thrumming heart of science fiction.

But sometimes, what we’ve known aligning with what should be, here, on our planet, is just as rewarding. And sometimes, these confluences emerge like ghosts from between dark rows of pines, eyes aglow. As is the case with the last California wolverine.

That we know of…..