The Fierce Green Fire

In his Thinking Like A Mountain essay, Leopold said:
Only the ineducable tyro can fail to sense the presence or absence of wolves, or the fact that mountains have a secret opinion about them.

My own conviction on this score dates from the day I saw a wolf die. We were eating lunch on a high rimrock... when we saw what we thought was a doe fording the torrent, her breast awash in white water. When she climbed the bank toward us and shook out her tail, we realized our error: it was a wolf.
 A half-dozen others, evidently grown pups, sprang from the willows and all joined in a welcoming melee of wagging tails and playful maulings...

In those days we had never heard of pasing up a chance to kill a wolf.  In a second we were pumping lead into the pack...When our rifles were empty, the old wolf was down and a pup was dragging a leg into impassable slide-rocks.

We reached the old wolf in time to watch a fierce green fire dying in her eyes.  I realized then, and have known ever since, that there was something new to me in those eyes - something known only to her and the mountain.  I was young then, and full of trigger itch; I thought that because fewer wolves meant more deer, that no wolves would mean hunters' paradise.  But after seeing the green fire die, I sensed that neither the wolf nor the mountain agreed with such a view.
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Later, of course, Leopold came to know that wolf-less lands meant many, many deer that browsed the trees and shrubs into the dust and often starved as they ate up the range.