42 ON THE EDGE OF THE WILDERNESS 
gathering darkness. His southward journey had 
ended. 
The gamekeeper of the reservation was rather 
pale, and trembled a little. When you enter 
with a shotgun to kill a gray fox in your wild- 
fowl pen, and are attacked by a hungry timber 
wolf instead, an animal you never saw before in 
your life, it is rather disconcerting. But the 
gamekeeper took the body to his house over the 
ridge, and he and his two special assistants, called 
in for that one week to guard against deer poach- 
ing, skinned it. Later, he showed the skin to a 
visitor, who went away and told a newspaper re- 
porter about it. 
Then the newspaper told the public how a wolf 
had been shot in Western Massachusetts, the first 
one killed in the State, so far as anybody knew, for 
a century. And the public laughed, and said it 
was another “ newspaper story ”’; there couldn’t 
be any wolves in Massachusetts. Wolves are ex- 
terminated in that part of the world. Which 
only goes to prove that Hamlet was quite right in 
his remarks to Horatio. 
