148 THE FUR TRADE OF AMERICA 



next the Northern wolf, smaller than the big timber wolf, but with 

 a silky hair that can be bleached or dyed to imitate blue or white 

 fox, with a tail that sells for best boas. At the foot of the list is 

 the coyote, meanest of all the tribe, a skulker, whose brush can be 

 dyed for boas. 



All have the same characteristics. They litter 5 to 6. They 

 hunt in packs. They prey on all other fur-bearing animals. They 

 are treacherous to their own kind and will kill a mate, or disembowel 

 their own young. They kill for the lust of killing and are as great 

 a peril to stockmen's herds as to the traps of the hunter. There 

 is no closed season for wolf and there is little danger to human life 

 from any of the wolves except the big timber wolf ; and that danger 

 is so great it is only denied by study chair naturalists. The largest 

 specimen of any timber wolf I have ever seen is in the Government 

 museum of Ottawa. He is larger than any Newfoundland dog; 

 and in my early days at Rat Portage, or modern Kenora, before it 

 was a pleasure resort for Winnipeg, I know of a trapper's skeleton 

 being found with nine such timber wolves skeletons round him in a 

 circle, which tells its own tale of what happened. Round James' 

 Bay in Labrador and from Norway House to Hudson Bay, such 

 tragedies are not uncommon, though the victims are usually children 

 or a squaw, who has been benighted on the trail. I recall the late 

 Lord Strathcona telling of his sensations when such wolves looked 

 through his cabin window up at Battle Harbor, Labrador; and I 

 know a Hudson's Bay chief factor, whose family was followed for 

 hundreds of miles along Mackenzie River, when they were coming 

 out by dog train one winter when rabbits were scarce and the wolf 

 packs were attracted by the smell of the frozen fish carried to feed 

 the dogs. 



The sooner wolves are exterminated, the better for all other 

 fur bearers ; and the most of the Provinces and Western States pay 

 a bounty for wolf scalps. It used to be a bounty for wolf tails ; but 

 the crafty Northern Indian sometimes brought tails from which the 

 game wardens could not swear the wolves had been killed. 



