XIV. CATCHING WOLVES WITH FISH HOOKS 



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W. DICKINSON is very fond of relating the 

 ^ following remarkable anecdote, which he has 

 written out and which is reproduced verbatim : 

 "I will try to give you an account of a hunting and 

 fishing trip when we caught two wolves with a fish 

 hook. On May 14th, 1872, the writer started out to 

 find a den or nest of young wolves. As there had 

 been numerous losses of sheep slaughtered by wolves 

 over a territory of about fifteen square miles, we had 

 learned by experience that somewhere within this ter- 

 ritory there was a den of wolves consisting of two old 

 wolves and a litter of whelps. On this point we were 

 dead certain. But in what locality was this den ? From 

 experience we had learned that these cunning brutes 

 would not kill sheep at this season of the year within 

 three or four miles of their den, and as three-fourths of 

 this territory was a solid forest and the den might be 

 outside of this territory, as wolves have been known to 

 go fifteen or twenty miles from their den to kill sheep 

 when they were rearing their young. In the south- 

 western part of this territory and a mile and a half 

 from any neighbor's lived an old German by the name 

 of Adam Martin, who kept quite a flock of sheep, win- 

 tering annually from 60 o 100 sheep. His farm was 

 on top of the mountain, and the east side of his farm 

 adjoined an abandoned farm of three hundred acres 



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