36 WOLF DAYS IN PENNSYLVANIA. 



wolf is very strong, quick and active. If a lone wolf 

 gets up to a buck deer with antlers the wolf will juke 

 and dodge around the buck until he gets a snap or two 

 at that buck's gambrel joints. At a single snap he will 

 have one leg of that buck useless and a snap or two, at 

 the other gambrel joint, and that buck's hind legs are 

 useless. He will stand on his gambrels instead of his 

 hind feet. Now he is an easy prey for that wolf. Just 

 one throat hold and that buck is a dead deer. The only 

 good trait of the wolf is, the old male will not leave 

 the mother wolf to take care of her young; he is al- 

 ways with her, death being the only thing to separate 

 them. Still, many men think the wolf ought to have 

 been protected by law. Not any of that for me, but I 

 think that the bounty laws are superfluous and a waste 

 of the State's money." The sheep-killing wolves 

 which Mr. Dickinson describes doubtless would have 

 been less destructive had not man decimated the deer 

 and other of their natural sources of subsistence. 

 These gray wolves were probably the type which 

 Mr. S. N. Rhoads calls canis Mexicanus nitbilis. 

 In size they were the largest of the Pennsyl- 

 vania w^olves. In Williams' Civil and Natural 

 History of Vermont, published in 1797, the weight of 

 a Vermont wolf is given as 92 pounds. A large speci- 

 men of the European wolf mentioned in the same 

 work is given as 69 pounds 8 ounces. Harlan, in his 

 Pennsylvania Natural History, evidently refers to the 

 brown wolf when he says : "The wolf in Pennsylvania 

 is reddish-brown color, the hair being tipped with 



