00-KOO-HOO PLAYS THE GAME 149 



a few odds and ends of cheap jewellery. Even our most digni- 

 fied and reliable newspapers are never loath to publish such 

 thrilling drivel; and their ignorant readers gulp it all down, 

 apparently with a relishing shudder; for the dear public not 

 only loves to be fooled, but actually gloats over that sort of 

 thing, since it is their hereditary belief. 



When I was a boy, I, too, thrilled over such nonsense, and 

 when I made my first trip into the forest I began to delve 

 for true wolf stories, and I have been delving ever since. So 

 far, after over thirty years of digging, I have actually dug up 

 what I believe to be one authentic story of an unprovoked 

 wolf having actually attacked and killed a man. On several 

 occasions, too, I have had the satisfaction of running to cover 

 some of the wolf stories published in our daily press. I 

 read a few years ago in one of Canada's leading daily papers — 

 and no doubt the same account was copied throughout the 

 United States — a thrilling story of two lumber-jacks in the 

 wilds of Northern Ontario being pursued by a pack of timber- 

 wolves, and the exhausted woodsmen barely escaping with 

 their lives, being forced by the ferocious brutes to spend a whole 

 night in a tree at a time when the thermometer registered — 

 below zero. I am sorry I have forgotten the exact degree of 

 frost the paper stated, but as a rule it is always close to 70 or 

 80 degrees below zero when the great four-legged demons of the 

 forest go on the rampage. 



THE WOLVES AND GREENHORNS 



Several years later, when I was spending the summer at 

 Shahwandahgooze, in the Laurentian Mountains, I again met 

 Billy Le Heup, the hunter, and one night when we were listen- 

 ing to a wolf concert I mentioned the foregoing newspaper 

 thriller. Billy laughed and acknowledged that he, too, had 

 read it, but not until several weeks after he had had a chance to 



