220 Hunting the Grisly 



the European wolf; but it is certainly not 

 true of the wolves of certain localities. The 

 great timber wolf of the central and northern 

 chains of the Rockies and coast ranges is in 

 every way a more formidable creature than 

 the bufTalo wolf of the plains, although they 

 intergrade. The skins and skulls of the wolves 

 of northwestern Montana and Washington 

 which I have seen were quite as large and 

 showed quite as stout claws and teeth as the 

 skins and skulls of Russian and Scandinavian 

 wolves, and I believe that these great timber 

 wolves are in every way as formidable as their 

 Old World kinsfolk. However, they live 

 where they come in contact with a popula- 

 tion of rifle-bearing frontier hunters, who are 

 very different from European peasants or 

 Asiatic tribesmen; and they have, even when 

 most hungry, a wholesome dread of human 

 beings. Yet I doubt if an unarmed man would 

 be entirely safe should he, while alone in the 

 forest in mid-winter, encounter a fair-sized 

 pack of ravenously hungry timber wolves. 



A full-grown dog-wolf of the northern 

 Rockies, in exceptional instances, reaches a 

 height of thirty-two inches and a weight of 

 130 pounds; a big buffalo wolf of the upper 

 Missouri stands thirty or thirty-one inches at 



