What is the central idea in "Of Wolves and Men"?

Of Wolves and Men passage: ( for anyone who needs it )

I imagine a wolf moving through the northern woods. The movement,
over a trail he has traversed many times before, is distinctive, unlike that of
a cougar or a bear, yet he appears, if you are watching, sometimes catlike or bearlike. It is purposeful, deliberate movement. Occasionally the rhythm is broken by the wolf’s pause to inspect a scent mark, or a move off the trail to paw among stones where a year before he had cached meat.
The movement down the trail would seem relentless if it did not appear
so effortless. The wolf’s body, from neck to hips, appears to float over the
long, almost spindly legs and the flicker of wrists, a bicycling drift through the trees, reminiscent of the movement of water or of shadows.
The wolf is three years old. A male. He is of the subspecies occidentalis,
and the trees he is moving among are spruce and subalpine fir on the eastern slope of the Rockies in northern Canada. He is light gray; that is, there are more blond and white hairs mixed with gray in the saddle of fur that covers his shoulders and extends down his spine than there are black and brown. But there are silver and even red hairs mixed in, too.
It is early September, an easy time of year, and he has not seen the other
wolves in his pack for three or four days. He has heard no howls, but he
knows the others are about, in ones and twos like himself. It is not a time of
year for much howling. It is an easy time. The weather is pleasant. Moose are fat. Suddenly the wolf stops in mid-stride. A moment, then his feet slowly come alongside each other. He is staring into the grass. His ears are rammed forward, stiff. His back arches and he rears up and pounces like cat. A deer mouse is pinned between his forepaws. Eaten. The wolf drifts on. He approaches a trail crossing, an undistinguished crossroads. His movement is now slower and he sniffs the air as though aware of a possibility for scents. He
sniffs a scent post, a scrawny blueberry bush in use for years, and goes on.
The wolf weighs ninety-four pounds and stands thirty inches at the shoulder. His feet are enormous, leaving prints in the mud along a creek (where he pauses to hunt crayfish but not with much interest) more than five inches long by just over four wide. He has two fractured ribs, broken by a moose a year before. They are healed now, but a sharp eye would notice the irregularity. The skin on his right hip is scarred, from a fight with another wolf in a neighboring pack when he was a yearling. He has not had anything but a few mice and a piece of arctic char in
three days, but he is not hungry. He is traveling. The char was a day old, left on the rocks along the river by bears.
The wolf is tied by subtle threads to the woods he moves through. His fur
carries seeds that will fall off, effectively dispersed, along the trail some miles from where they first caught in his fur. And miles distant is a raven perched on the ribs of a caribou the wolf helped kill ten days ago, pecking like a chicken at the decaying scraps of meat. A smart snowshoe hare that eluded the wolf and left him exhausted when he was a pup has been dead a year now, food for an owl. The den in which he was born one April evening was home to porcupines last winter. It is now late in the afternoon. The wolf has stopped traveling, has lain down to sleep on cool earth beneath a rock outcropping. Mosquitoes rest on his ears.
His ears flicker. He begins to waken. He rolls on his back and lies motionless with his front legs pointed toward the sky but folded like wilted flowers, his back legs splayed, and his nose and tail curved toward each other on one side of his body. After a few moments he flops on his side, rises, stretches, and moves a few feet to inspect—minutely, delicately—a crevice in the rock outcropping and finds or doesn’t find what draws him there. And then he ascends the rock face, bounding and balancing momentarily before bounding again, appearing slightly unsure of the process—but committed. A few minutes later he bolts suddenly into the woods, achieving full speed, almost forty miles per hour, for forty or fifty yards before he begins to skid, to lunge at a lodgepole pine cone. He trots away with it, his head erect, tail erect, his hips slightly to one side out of line with his shoulders, as though hindquarters were impatient with forequarters, the cone inert in his mouth. He carries it for a hundred feet before dropping it by the trail. He sniffs it. He goes on. The underfur next to his skin has begun to thicken with the coming of fall.
In the months to follow it will become so dense between his shoulders, it will be almost impossible to work a finger down to his skin. In seven months he will weigh less: eighty-nine pounds. He will have tried unsuccessfully to mate with another wolf in the pack. He will have helped kill four moose and thirteen caribou. He will have fallen through ice into a creek at twenty-two below zero but not frozen. He will have fought with other wolves.
He moves along now at the edge of a clearing. The wind coming down-valley surrounds him with a river of odors, as if he were a migrating salmon. He can smell ptarmigan and deer droppings. He can smell willow and spruce and the fading sweetness of fireweed. Above, he sees a hawk circling, and farther south, lower on the horizon, a flock of sharp-tailed sparrows going east. He senses through his pads with each step the dryness of the moss beneath his feet, and the ridges of old
tracks, some his own. He hears the sound his feet make. He hears the occasional movement of deer mice and voles. Summer food. Toward dusk he is standing by a creek, lapping the cool water, when a wolf howls—a long wail that quickly reaches pitch and then tapers, with several harmonics, long moments to a tremolo He recognizes his sister. He waits a few moments, then, throwing his head back and closing his eyes, he howls. The howl is shorter and it changes pitch twice in the beginning, very quickly. There is no answer.
The female is a mile away and she trots off obliquely through the trees. The other wolf stands listening, laps water again, then he too departs, moving quickly, quietly through the trees, away from the trail he had been on. In a few minutes the two wolves meet. They approach each other briskly, almost formally, tails erect and moving somewhat as deer move. When they come together they make high squeaking noises and encircle each other, rubbing and pushing, poking their noses into each other’s neck fur, backing away to stretch, chasing each other for a few steps, then standing quietly together, one putting a head over the other’s back. And then they are gone, down a vague trail, the female first. After a few hundred yards they begin, simultaneously, to wag their tails. In the days to follow, they will meet another wolf from the pack, a second female, younger by a year, and the three of them will kill a caribou. They will travel
together ten or twenty miles a day, through the country where they live, eating and sleeping, birthing, playing with sticks, chasing ravens, growing old, barking at bears, scent-marking trails, killing moose, and staring at the way water in a creek breaks around their legs and flows on.

The central idea in "Of Wolves and Men" is the interconnectedness of wolves with their environment and how they navigate their lives within it. It explores the wolf's behaviors, movements, and interactions with other members of its pack, highlighting their reliance on the natural world around them. This can be seen through the detailed descriptions of the wolf's senses, hunting habits, and social dynamics. Ultimately, the central idea is to provide an understanding and appreciation for the intricate relationship between wolves and their natural habitat.

The central idea in "Of Wolves and Men" is the interconnectedness and relationship between wolves and their natural environment. The passage describes the wolf's movements through the northern woods, highlighting its connection to the land, plants, and other animals. It explores the wolf's role in the ecosystem, its hunting habits, as well as its interactions with other wolves. The author emphasizes the wolf's senses and instincts, its adaptation to its surroundings, and the way it is influenced by and influences the environment in which it lives. Ultimately, the central idea revolves around the harmony and balance between wolves and the natural world.

The central idea in "Of Wolves and Men" is the interconnectedness and complex relationship between wolves and their environment. The passage describes a wolf moving through the woods and highlights various aspects of its life, including its physical characteristics, hunting behaviors, interactions with other wolves, and connection to the natural world. The author emphasizes the wolf's role in the ecosystem, as well as its ability to adapt and survive in its environment. Through this portrayal, the central idea that emerges is that wolves are an integral part of the natural balance and have a profound impact on the ecosystem in which they live.