Nothing would be gained by multiplying references, which might easily be given ad nauseam without finding that there was any particular change in their tenor. Enough have been already presented to show how utterly valueless are those sweeping conclusions upon the character and habits of wolves, which we are too much accustomed to see. The widest generalization on this subject that can be made with any approach to certainty, is that these animals, over and above their specific traits, are what their situations and the experiences connected with ordinary and every-day life make them. It is a well-attested fact that the wolf may be domesticated, and instances of this kind are not uncommon. Audubon, for example, saw them drawing the small carts in which Assiniboin Indians brought their peltries into Fort Union. Samuel Hearne (“A Journey from Prince of Wales Fort in Hudson Bay, to the Northern Ocean”) gives an account of certain things seen by himself, which seem to indicate that these animals occasionally bear like relations to savages with those which must have subsisted when they were first reclaimed. “Wolves,” he says, “are very frequently met with in those countries west of Hudson’s Bay, both on the barren grounds and among the woods; but they are not numerous. It is very uncommon to see more than three or four of them in a herd.... All the wolves in Hudson’s Bay are very shy of the human race.... They are great enemies to the Indian dogs, and constantly kill and eat those that are heavy loaded and cannot keep up with the main body.... The females are much swifter than males, for which reason, the Indians, both northern and southern, are of opinion that they kill the greatest part of the game.” This, however, cannot be the case, Hearne observes, because they live apart during winter, and do not associate till towards spring. “They always burrow under ground to bring forth their young; and it is natural to suppose that they are very fierce at those times; yet I have very frequently seen even the Indians go to their dens, take out the young ones and play with them. I never knew a northern Indian to hurt one of them; on the contrary, they always carefully put them into the den again; and I have sometimes seen them paint the faces of the young wolves with vermilion or red ochre.”
This statement of the friendliness existing between man and these beasts is unique. James Morier in the mountains of Armenia, Persia, and Asia Minor, Douglas Freshfield in the Central Caucasus, Atkinson, Prejevalsky, and Gill in Northern Asia, Forsyth, Hunter, and Pollok in India and Indo-China, and a host of witnesses in Europe and America, have given evidence to their destructiveness and to the enmity with which they are regarded.
There never has been any question with respect to the wolf’s intelligence. His sagacity and cunning are of the highest brute order; and although, if one looks at a longitudinal section of his brain, it appears poorly developed, when compared with that of a dog, resembling, to use Lockington’s simile, a pear with the small end forwards, the latter animal is probably not inferior to the former in natural faculty. “If we could subtract,” says Professor Romanes (“Animal Intelligence”), “from the domestic dog all those influences arising from his prolonged companionship with man, and at the same time intensify the feelings of self-reliance, rapacity, etc., we should get the emotional character now presented by wolves and jackals.” The former need to be wise in their generation, for it is but seldom that their “ways are ways of pleasantness,” and their paths are never those of peace. Their gaunt frames and voracious appetites have become common colloquialisms, and each has to match his astuteness against all the devices for his destruction that human ingenuity can invent.
Lloyd describes the amenities and virtues that adorned the character of a wolf cub belonging to Madame Bedoire; how it guarded her premises, made friends with her dog, went walking with its mistress, played with her children, and howled when she did not caress it. The biography of this blessed infant was written by a lady; Lloyd merely inserts the account. It had to be shot when it was a year old. He himself had a young she-wolf whose most noticeable actions seemed to be connected with her endeavors to get pigs within reach of where she was chained. “When she saw a pig in the vicinity of her kennel, she, evidently with the intention of putting him off his guard, would throw herself on her side or back, roll, wag her tail most lovingly, and look like innocence personified”; but if, as occasionally happened, the pig’s mind was impressed with these artless ebullitions of youthful joy, and it came near enough, the creature was done for. While Sir Edward Belcher’s ship lay in winter quarters a wolf haunted her vicinity. He sat under her stern, he beguiled the dogs away, he drove off all the game. Then they tried to kill or capture him, but in vain. When pieces of meat were fixed at the muzzles of loaded muskets, he fired off the guns and ate the bait. Seated upon a hill, just out of range, this “charmed wolf,” as the men called him, “narrowly watched the proceedings of those engaged in further schemes for his destruction, and exulted possibly in his superior wisdom.” Belcher’s sailors began to believe this animal to be one of the officers of Sir John Franklin’s lost ship, the Erebus. Dr. Rae reports the case of a wolf that cut the string fastened to the trigger of a gun before taking the meat placed in front of it. And Audubon relates that wolves watch fishermen in the northern lakes, pull their lines up, and appropriate the catch. They gnaw through heavy timber into caches and undermine dead-falls. They uncover and spring steel traps, and are as difficult to beguile as the wolverene—it is impossible to say more. Captain Lyon’s crew caught a wolf in a trap that pretended to be dead when the men who set it arrived. Wherever men carry firearms the wolf appreciates their effectiveness, and is perfectly well aware that his coat will not turn a rifle-ball. But while this exercises an obvious influence upon his general behavior, in most cases the ability to see the movements of his enemy seems to lessen his dread of what may happen. If several are together when fired at, they will scamper off; but it is very common to see them turn when they think themselves safe, and regard their adversary with strict attention.
Upon the whole, it is doubtful whether wolves have been much diminished in numbers anywhere, except in places where the country has become thickly settled. While these creatures have solitudes to fall back upon, they make use of those great advantages in the struggle for existence which they possess. Their speed, endurance, and hardihood, the number produced at a birth, and their exceeding sagacity, qualify this race to fight the battle of life, hard as it is in most instances, in a manner that but few animals of any kind can equal.
There are two reasons why, in the midst of fragmentary notices and romances innumerable, authentic annals of American frontier life are so meagre in their accounts of what these beasts have done. The first is that our earlier settlers were men such as they have encountered nowhere else, and the wolves were soon cowed. In the second place, perils threatened those living on the border, which were so much more imminent than any which ever became actual through the agency of wolves that these beasts came to be disregarded. Those depredations and murders which they really perpetrated were only perpetuated in tradition, and when survivals of this kind came to be recast by writers who, besides being unacquainted with all the facts, knew nothing about the animals themselves, they at once assumed a form that was stamped with all the incongruities of crude invention, and served only to conceal more effectually that portion of truth upon which these poor fictions were constructed.
It is probable that all, who, having really observed the character of those wolves that inhabit what were once the buffalo ranges of the Northwest, and then going southward made the acquaintance of that large, yellowish-red wolf called the lobo, in Mexico, will admit that there is much difference between them. In the Sierra Madre two wolves are commonly considered to be a match for a man armed as these people usually are, and unless the whole population have conspired together for the purpose of propagating falsehoods on this particular subject, it must be believed that the lobo is often guilty of manslaughter. It has not happened to the writer to be personally cognizant of the death of any victim of theirs, but riding westward one day through the forests of that mountainous country lying between Durango and the Pacific coast, in the interval between two divisions of a large train of arrieros separated from each other by a distance of several miles, a woman and two children, boy and girl, were met. Struck by the beauty of the little girl, and knowing the way to be unsafe, some conversation took place in which the mother made light of those dangers suggested, and declined, with a profusion of thanks, an offer to see the party safe to her sister’s rancho in a neighboring valley. They had only a little distance to go along the ridge, she said, and would then soon descend to their place of destination. The wolves were like devils, it was true, but robbers were worse, and she had many times crossed there from her home without meeting with either. In short,—muchissimas gracias Señor, y todos los santos, etc., etc. Adios!
All of them were devoured a very short time after. Their clothes and bones were found scattered on the trail which they had not yet left before they were killed. The muleteers in rear who found these fragments collected and buried them, putting up the usual frail cross which is to be seen along this route, literally by scores.
This term lobo is indiscriminately applied in Spanish America to creatures that bear little resemblance to one another. The guara of Brazil is known under that name, an inoffensive, vegetable-eating animal, in every respect unlike the wolf in character and habits, and, according to Dr. Lund, specifically distinct from it in having the second and third vertebræ of its neck characteristically elongated. Emmanuel Liais, however (“Climats, Géologie, Faune du Brésil”), states the chief contrasts between those creatures in question succintly, as follows: “Au point de vue du régime alimentaire, les deux espèces du genre Canis les plus éloignées sont le loup commun d’Europe, animal féroce et sauguinaire, et la plus carnivore de toutes les espèces du genre, et l’Aguara ou Guara du Brésil—Canis Jubatus de Demarest, appelé à Minas-Geraes trés-improprement Lobo (nom portugais du Loup), et décrit par la plupart des ouvrages de mammologie comme le loup du Brésil. C’est cependent le moins carnivore de tous les chiens connus, et sa nourriture préférée consiste en substances végétales.”
As has been said, the wolf does not reach its highest development in hot countries. Wolves may be dangerous and destructive within low latitudes, as is the case both in America and Asia, but it will be found that when this occurs their range is generally confined to elevated regions in those provinces. Major H. Bevan (“Thirty Years in India”) states that “wolves are amongst the most noxious tenants of the jungles around Nagpore, and they annually destroy many children; but they do not commit such ravages as in northern India.” The same is true of the “giant wolf,” Lupus Gigas, that Townsend and other naturalists described as a distinct species; but this brute which has so evil a reputation in the highlands of Mexico, “the red Texan wolf,” as Audubon calls it, does not extend in the United States to the northern prairies; it only exists as a variety of the common species in the lower Mississippi valley, and farther south.