WOLF DAYS IN PENNSYLVANIA. 85 



barn to feed the stock, they were surrounded by the 

 howling pack and marooned in the stable all night. 

 This historic old structure is still standing. T. L. 

 Eckel, a noted surveyor in Sugar Valley, Clinton 

 County, in the old days, and father of J. D. Eckel 

 mentioned above, often related how he was compelled 

 to keep his campfire burning brightly all night in 

 Sugar Camp Gap to prevent the packs of howling 

 wolves from coming too close to his sleeping quarters. 

 In the Pennsylvania forests, especially those in the 

 Northern and Northwestern counties, are many iso- 

 lated rocks, known as "elk rocks." On these huge de- 

 tached boulders the elks held the attacking packs of 

 wolves at bay. Colonel Noah Parker has vividly de- 

 scribed finding the skeletons of wolves about these 

 rocks, showing the elks' victories in these conflicts, 

 but sometimes he came across the bones of the antler- 

 ed monarchs lying among the skeletons of wolves, 

 showing that both the attacked and the attackers 

 paid the death penalty. Nick Montarsi, a popu- 

 lar young Italian, residing in Clinton County, who for- 

 merly acted as a "Butteri," or cowboy, on the Italian 

 Campagna, says that the reason the big white woolly 

 Italian wolf dogs, which are themselves partly wolf, 

 wear collars covered with sharp iron spikes is that 

 when the wolves attempt to catch them by the throat, 

 their jaws are lacerated by the spikes, and in their 

 agony they are driven away by the wolf dogs, thus pro- 

 tecting the flocks and herds from their fierce foes. 



