“We had been watching a long time without the slightest movement, when two of the horses became uneasy, tugging at the thongs and snorting. The clouds rolled off, the stars came forth and reflected more light upon the lake. Presently howling was heard in the distance, and Tchuck-a-boi declared that another pack of wolves was coming. When they approached nearer, those that had been keeping guard over us so quietly began to growl, and let us know that they were not far away. As it was now deemed absolutely necessary to procure some bushes, four of my men crept quietly along the shore of the lake, two being armed, and in about ten minutes they returned, each of them having an armful of fuel. The embers were rekindled, and material placed on them, ready to be blown into a flame the moment it was needed. The sounds we heard in the distance had ceased for some time, when suddenly there was a great commotion. The other wolves had come up, and the growling and snarling became furious. How much I wished for light, in order to witness the battle that seemed likely to ensue. For a time there seemed to be individual combats; but there was no general engagement, and soon all became still as before. Again we waited, looking out for more than half an hour, when the horses began pulling and plunging violently; but we could see nothing. The men now blew up the embers, and in a few minutes the bushes burst into a blaze, and then I saw a group of eight or ten wolves within fifteen paces, and others beyond. In a moment I gave them the contents of both barrels, the others fired at the same instant, and the pack set up a frightful howl and scampered off.” Atkinson found eight dead bodies next morning, and the bloody trails of many wounded that had gone off.
How would this party have fared if instead of warm weather, and the presence of a pack that merely desired to gratify their taste for horse flesh, and showed their willingness to brave fire and rifle-balls to this end, the steppe had been snowy and the animals starving? There seems to be no more doubt that a considerable detachment of Russian infantry was destroyed by wolves about fifty years ago in the passes of the Ural Mountains, than there is that the dragoon by whom Wellington sent his despatch after the battle of Albuera was eaten, together with his horse. “Daring as the wolf was in olden times,” says Lloyd, speaking of that found in Scandinavia, “he has lost nothing of his audacity at the present day.” In proof of which he collects from newspapers, parish registers, official reports, and the testimony of eye-witnesses, a statement of the ravages of wolves among domestic animals and human beings that almost equals those mediæval notices in which their evil deeds have been recorded from one end of Europe to the other. None of these, or rather, none the writer has met with, rival that recital given by James Grant (“The Wild Beast of Gevaudan”). French, Dutch, Belgian, and English journals, during 1765, were full of those events of which a brief abstract is inserted, and their prolonged occurrence finally came to be an affair of grave importance to the government of France.
In that year a beast, not identified as a wolf until after its death, created a reign of terror in the forest country of Provence and Languedoc, devouring eighty people about Gevaudan. “Qui a dévoré plus que quatrevingt personnes dans le Gevaudan,” says the official report. A drawing (from description) was sent to the Intendant of Alençon, and as this looked more like a hyena than anything else, it was given out that one of these brutes was at large. The province offered a thousand crowns for its head, the Archbishop ordered prayers for public preservation, and the commanding officer of the department scoured the country with light cavalry. These measures failed, and after a troop of the 10th dragoons had pursued it for six weeks through the mountainous parts of Languedoc, and though it was seen several times, had failed to come up with the animal, the reward was increased to ten thousand livres, and Louis XV. offered six thousand more. High masses innumerable were said, and cavalry, bands of game-keepers, and gentlemen with their servants, sought the monster in all directions. Hunters by thousands were in search of it for months, and in the meantime its howl was heard in village streets at night, children and women were killed in their farmyards, woodcutters lost their lives in forests, and men were dragged out of vehicles on the public roads by day.
At last the Sieur de la Chaumette, a famous wolf slayer, appeared upon the scene. His two brothers accompanied him, and they actually found and wounded the animal. The chase was taken up by him again, and he was joined by a party of hunters picked from the most expert foresters of fifty parishes. It was in vain, however, for they never viewed their quarry again. In September, 1765, the Sieur de Blanterne, in company with two associates, shot the wild beast of Gevaudan, which had ravaged a large region of Southern France for nearly a year. The carcass was sent to Paris, and proved to be that of an enormous wolf.
A creature capable of killing one man, is able, all things being equal, to kill a dozen or a hundred.
Wolves’ ravages are at present confined to places from which we have no reports, and that is the reason why public opinion always places such occurrences in the past. In all essentials wolves are potentially the same as ever, but their relations to mankind differ according to geographical position. In one place they are harmless and timid, in another they are aggressive and dangerous. Throughout the Arctic regions of the earth, where one might imagine that privation would render them audacious, they generally avoid the presence of human beings and are not often seen. Franklin, Back, and Parry have little to say about them, and it is the same with many other travellers in their northern haunts. Bush, Kennan, Cotteau, Seabohn, Collins, Price, etc., have no information of any importance to give. Even Dr. Richardson, the naturalist, passes them by nearly unnoticed, and Rink (“Danish Greenland”), in his collection of the “Tales and Traditions of the Eskimo,” is silent on this subject. All these authors, however, refer to other animals of the Arctic. Dr. Harris (“Navigantium atque Itinerantium Bibliotheca”) finds places for the bear, musk-ox, fox, wolverene, in his immense repository of facts and impressions, but none for the wolf.
A somewhat comprehensive acquaintance with what has been said concerning this creature, disposes the writer to think, that the silence of explorers with regard to a beast that would naturally attract attention, is explained by Captain Ross (“Voyage to Baffin’s Bay”). In his first expedition the wolf is not mentioned among those animals described in the “Fauna of the Arctic Highlands”; but in his narrative of the “Second Voyage” he says, “the perpetual hunting of the natives seems to prevent deer, together with those beasts of prey that follow on their traces, from remaining in their vicinity.” Dr. John D. Godman (“American Natural History”) contradicts Ross flatly, and asserts that “in the highest northern latitudes ... wolves are very numerous and exceedingly audacious. They are generally to be found at no great distance from the huts of Esquimaux, and follow these people from place to place, being apparently much dependent upon them for food during the coldest season of the year.” Godman does not say whether his information was got at first hand, or taken from others, but there is no doubt as to the fact that he is wrong. High latitudes do not furnish permanent habitats for game. Reindeer or caribou are not only migratory, but wander constantly; the latter being, as Charles C. Ward remarks, “a very Ishmaelite” in its habits. The same is true of other animals upon which wolves subsist, and the idea of their living in any numbers upon Eskimo leavings is amusing.
Milton and Cheadle (“The North-west Passage by Land”) give much the same explanation as Captain Ross for the fact that wolves are so rarely seen in the far north. “Wild animals of any kind,” they inform us, “are seldom viewed in the Hudson Bay territories, unless they are carefully tracked up. They are so constantly hunted, ... and whenever they encounter man, are so invariably pursued, that they are ever on their guard, and escape without being seen.” Forced to range widely because the character of this region involves constant change of place upon the part of their principal game, and made wary to the last degree by perpetual hostilities, it might well be that travellers found them absent from those regions they explored, and scarcely had an opportunity to observe such as were actually in their vicinity. Thus Parry (“Journal”), who was struck by their shyness, says, “it is very extraordinary that no man could succeed in killing or capturing one of these animals, though we were for months almost constantly endeavoring to do so.”
Something, however, may depend upon local variety. Captain Koldewey (“German Arctic Expedition”) tells us that “the peculiar—species, he calls it—of wolf met with in other arctic neighborhoods is not found in East Greenland; neither is the wolf-like dog now dying out from disease.” Brown (“Fauna of Greenland”) takes the same view, but whatever the facts may be, dogs and wolves have sometimes been known to treat each other very differently. Sir Edward Belcher (“The Last of the Arctic Voyages”) saw a wolf, which he at first supposed from its appearance to be one of Sir John Franklin’s surviving dogs, come up to his own team on the sledge journey of 1853. “It did not quarrel with them.... Its habits were certainly very peculiar; it cared not for us, and frequently approached so near that it might have been shot, but was not disposed to make friends.” Even if the tameness of this animal had been due to starvation, that would not have accounted for the friendliness of Belcher’s dogs. General A. W. Greely (“Three Years of Arctic Service”) reports of his, that “whenever wolves were near they exhibited signs of uneasiness, if not of fear.” Captain Ross noticed that his dogs at Boothia Felix “trembled and howled” whenever wolves approached them. It is well known, however, that in the arctic, as elsewhere, these animals interbreed. Godman gives the following: “Scientia naturali multum versato et fide digno viro Sabina, se canem Terræ-novæ cum lupa coire frequenter vidis.” Theodore Roosevelt and others speak of the same thing as coming under their personal cognizance.
In high latitudes of America and Asia the wolf’s attitude towards man is inconstant to a marked degree. Much difference is doubtless due to influences both general and local, permanent and temporary, which it is impossible to ascertain from any accounts. The packs C. A. Hall (“Arctic Researches”) met with near “Frobisher’s Farthest,” and at J. K. Smith’s Island, manifested none of that timidity which has been remarked upon as the consequence of constant persecution. On the contrary, “they were bold,” says Hall, “approaching quite near, watching our movements, opening their mouths, snapping their teeth, and smacking their chops, as if already feasting on human flesh and blood.” Similarly, “eleven big fellows crossed the path” of O. W. Wahl (“Land of the Czar”) “one winter day, near Stavropol.” They merely inspected the travellers and went on. Colonel N. Prejevalsky (“From Kulja across the Tian Shan to Lob-nor”) saw but few wolves, and in his report upon the fauna of the Tarim valley, he remarks that they “are unfrequent, if not rare.” During his expedition (“Mongolia”), however, the Tibetan wolf, Lupus chanco, the same animal he thinks that the Mongols of Kan-su call tsobr, but really the common species under one of its many changes of color, was found to be “savage and impudent.” Captain William Gill (“The River of Golden Sand”) saw “here and there” on the broken and undulating plains of Mongolia near the Chinese frontier, “small villages surrounded by a wall to protect them from the troops of wolves that in the desolate winter scour the barrens of San-Tai.”