Wood-folk comedies

by William J. Long

The sudden clamor scared him stiff. He listened a moment, his heart thumping as he remembered all the wolf stories he had ever heard; then he started to run, but stopped to listen again. The howling changed to an eager whimper; it came rapidly on, and thinking himself as good as a dead man he jumped for a spruce, and climbed it almost to the top. Hardly was he hidden when a pack of wolves, dark and terrible looking, swept into the open and ran all over it with their noses out, sniffing, sniffing. Suspicion was in every movement, and to the watcher in the tree the suspicion seemed to point mostly in his direction.

Presently a wolf yelped, and began scratching at a pile of litter on the edge of a thicket. The pack joined him at his digging, dragged out a carcass of some kind from where they had covered it, ate what they wanted, and slipped away into the woods. But once, at some vague alarm, they all stopped eating while two of the largest wolves came slowly across the opening, heads up and muzzles working, like pointers with the scent of game in their nose. And then my friend thought surely that his last night on earth had come, that the ferocious brutes would discover him and hold him on his perch till he fell from cold or exhaustion. Which shows that he, too, gets his notions of a wolf from the story books.

By northern camp fires I have listened to many other wolf tales; but these two seem to me the most typical, having one element of undoubted truth, and another of unbridled imagination. That wolves howl at night with a clamor that is startling to an unhoused man; that when pinched by hunger they grow bold, like other beasts; that they have a little of the dog’s curiosity, and much of the dog’s tendency to run after anything that runs away,—all that is natural and wolflike; but that they will ever chase a man, knowing that he is a man, seems very doubtful to one who had always found the wolf to be as wary as any eagle, and even more difficult of approach. In a word, one’s experience of the natural wolf is sure to run counter to all the wolf stories.

For example, if you surprise a pack of wolves (rarely do they let themselves be seen, night or day), they vanish slyly or haltingly or in a headlong rush, according to the fashion of your approach; but if ever they surprise you in a quiet moment, you have a rare chance to see a fascinating bit of animal nature. The older wolves, after one keen look, pass on as if you did not exist, and pretend to be indifferent so long as you are in sight; after which they run like a scared bear for a mile or two, as you may learn by following their tracks. Meanwhile some young wolf is almost sure to take the part that a fox plays in similar circumstances. He studies you intently, puzzled by your quietness, till he thinks he is mistaken or has the wrong angle on you; then he disappears, and you are wondering where he has gone when his nose is pushed cautiously from behind a bush. Learning nothing there he draws back, and now you must not move or even turn your head while he goes to have a look at you from the rear. When you see him again he will be on the other flank; for he will not leave this interesting new thing till he has nosed it out from all sides. And to frighten him at such a time, or to let him frighten you, is to miss all that is worth seeing.

Again, our northern wolf is like a dog in that he has many idle moments when he wishes something would happen, and in such moments he would rather have a bit of excitement than a bellyful of meat. During the winter he lives with his pack, as a rule, following a simple and fairly regular routine. At dusk the wolves stir themselves, and often howl a bit; then they hunt and eat their one daily meal, after which they roam idly over a wide territory, nosing into all sorts of places, but holding a general direction toward their next hunting ground; for they rarely harry the same covert two nights in succession. Before sunrise they have settled on a good place to rest for the day; and it has happened, on the few occasions when I have had time or breath enough to trail wolves to their day bed, that I have always found them in a sightly spot, where they could look down on a lake or a wide stretch of country.

If from such a place of rest and observation the wolves see you passing through their solitude, some of them are apt to follow you at a distance, keeping carefully out of sight, till they find out who you are or what you are doing. Should you pass near their day bed without being seen or heard, they will surely discover that fact when they begin to hunt at nightfall; and then a wolf, a young wolf especially, will raise a great howl when he runs across your snowshoe trail; not a savage or ferocious howl, so far as I can understand it, but a howl with wonder in it, and also some excitement. It is as if the wolf that found the trail were saying, “Come hither, all noses! Here’s something new, something that you or I never smelled before. Woooo-ow-ow-ow! what’s all this now?” And if the pack be made up mostly of young wolves, you shall hear a wild chorus as they debate the matter of the trail you have just left behind you.

Such an impression, of harmless animal excitement rather than of ferocity, must surely be strengthened when you follow it up confidently with an open mind. If instead of running away when you hear wolves on your trail you steal back to meet them, the situation and the consequent story will change completely. In some subtle way the brutes seem to read your intention before you come within sight of them. They may be ready to investigate you, but have no notion of being themselves investigated; they melt away like shadows among deeper shadows, and you are at a loss to know where they are even while their keen noses are telling them all about you.

The European wolf, if one may judge him by a slight acquaintance, is essentially like our timber wolf; but his natural timidity has been modified by frequent famines, and especially by dwelling near unarmed peasant folk who are mortally afraid of him. In the summer he lives shyly in the solitudes, where he finds enough mice, grubs, and such small deer to satisfy his appetite. In winter he is always hungry, and when hunger approaches the starvation point he descends from his stronghold to raid the farms. A very little of his raiding starts a veritable reign of terror; every man, woman or child whom he meets runs away, and presently he becomes bold or even dangerous. At least, I can fancy him to be dangerous, having been in an Italian village when a severe winter brought wolves down from the mountains, and when terrified villagers related specific and horrible instances of wolf ferocity. Whenever I searched for the brutes the natives would advise or implore me not to venture into the forest alone. The rural guards kept themselves carefully housed at night, and a single guard, though armed with a rifle, would not enter the woods or cross open country even by daylight for fear of meeting the wolf pack.

It was hard for a stranger to decide whether such terrors came from bitter experience, or whether, like our own fear of the wolf, they were the product of a lively imagination; but one was soon forced to the conclusion that where was so much smoke there must be some fire also. Moreover, as evidence of the fire, I found some official records which indicate that the European wolf may be so crazed by hunger as to kill and eat human beings. Such records inevitably pass into fireside tales, repeated, enlarged, embellished, and thereafter the wolf’s character is blackened forever. He is naturally a timid beast; but his one evil deed, done in a moment of hunger, becomes typical of a ferocious disposition. For, say what you will, the common man’s most lasting impressions of the world are not reasonable, but imaginative; they come not from observation, but from tales heard in childhood. That is perhaps the reason why Indians, in dealing with their children, always represent nature and nature’s beasts as peaceable and friendly.

Our pioneers brought many harrowing wolf tales with them to the New World, and promptly applied them to the timber wolf, a more powerful beast than his European relative, but wholly guiltless, I think, of the charge of eating human flesh even in a season of famine. Neither in our own country nor in Canada, so far as I can learn by searching, is there a single trustworthy record to indicate that our wolves have ever killed a man. Yet the tale is against them, and the consequence is, when a belated traveler hears a clamor in the darkening woods, that ferocity gets into his imagination and terror into his heels; he starts on a hatless run for shelter, and appears with another blood-curdling story of escape from a ravening pack of wolves.