28 WOLF DAYS IN PENNSYLVANIA. 



in Northumberland and Sunbury. When the canal 

 was building in the early thirties they barked nightly 

 from the summit of Mahanoy ;Mountain. Mr. Ott 

 killed many wolves and saw numerous wolves taken 

 by other hunters. "They were yellowish grey in color, 

 lighter colored than the timber wolves of the west" 

 was the way in which he described them. In the West, 

 as a buffalo hunter in the seventies, Mr. Ott saw and 

 killed timber wolves. This all adds color to the suppo- 

 sition that perhaps the coyote had a narrow strip of 

 range east of the i\Iississippi as far as the mouth of 

 the Juniata. When this subject was referred to S. N. 

 Rhoads, of Philadelphia, the great authority on the 

 mammals of Pennsylvania stated emphatically that it 

 would be impossible to believe that the prairie wolf 

 (cants latrans) ever had a permanent habitat in Penn- 

 sylvania, or even in Ohio. In the old sporiing parlance 

 of Pennsylvania, the black wolf and the grey wolf 

 "howled," while the small brown wolf "barked." 

 Plunters ranked the brown wolf little above the 

 colishay or grey fox as a game animal, whereas they 

 fully respected the splendid qualities of its larger rela- 

 tives cams lycaon and canis nubilus. At times the grey 

 and black wolves imitated the hunting dogs and "bark- 

 ed," but their natural utterance was a truly melancholy 

 howl, the very personification of loneliness and wild- 

 ness, of night time and olden days. Audubon in his 

 "Quadrupeds of North America" describes vividly 

 how a farmer near Vincennes, Indiana, whom he vis- 

 ited, caught many black wolves in pitfalls. In the Seven 

 jMountains, in Centre and Mifflin Counties, the old 



