FOREST AND STREAM 
1225 
BAGGING THE NORTHERN TIMBER WOLF 
HOW A TRAPPER’S TRICK TURNED SHOT GUNS INTO RIFLES 
AND LAID A SCENT THAT DESTROYED THE GAME DESTROYERS 
By Fesco T. Ford. 
The Great Timber Wolf is a Magnificent Animal—But a Terrible Deer Destroyer. 
T HE pines had ceased 
their aerie whispering, 
the screech-owl’s omin¬ 
ous challenge was silenced 
and the bats were flitting 
ghost-like through the col¬ 
umned shades when for 
some untold reason I 
awakened. 
For a moment I lay— 
half somnolent—and was 
rapidly drowsing to the 
resonant borders of snore- 
land—when the sound was 
repeated. 
This time I sat up, in 
my blanket-padded bough- 
bed—so suddenly that my 
bunk mate, the Judge, was 
awakened—and impressed, 
for, instead cf his judicial 
“what’s the matter” in 
sonorous chest-tones, came 
the muffled whisper-query: 
“What’n Sam Hill?” 
I reached across, covered 
his mouth with my hand, 
as a noiseless injunction to 
silence, and sat, at strained 
attention, listening until 
certain that he chase was 
drawing nearer; then threw 
aside the covers hastily, but carefully, placed 
strips of birch-curl among the smouldering em¬ 
bers of the almost-dead camp-fire, and as they 
sparkled to leaping flame, added splinters from 
my slender kindling store, and followed these 
with bits of broken boughs, until the tufted 
boughs in the great pine beneath which we were 
camped stood forth in detailed tracery. 
The chase was drawing nearer—was hardly 
two hundred yards away when I seized my 
shoe gun, and after chambering a couple of shells, 
kn t beside the grim-faced Judge. 
.'he Doctor, in his own bed slumbered nerve¬ 
lessly until the wolf-chorus was almost upon us 
—and, just as an old doe, white-tail deer with 
a pair of half-grown fawns leaped straight into 
the firelight, and turned, at bay, not twenty feet 
from the flames, the Medico wakened, stared and 
listened in incredulous amazement, thumped him¬ 
self upon the nose to assure himself he was 
awake—grabbed the twin of my wonder gun, 
and, just as the wolf-pack broke through the 
bush screen, and halted—the chorus suddenly 
silenced, he leaped to his feet, yelled “Get out, 
you gray curs,” to the wolves, and was raising 
the gun to shoot, when I remarked casually: 
“Number eight shot at that range, would be 
about as effective, upon timber wolves—if they 
mean business—as would a handful of boiled 
beans, or a mouthful of corn meal mush.” The 
Doctor grinned, shrugged his shoulders and 
lowered his gun. 
When we looked again for the wolves, they 
were gone; but the deer-trio held their ground, 
preferring the unknown danger, to certain death 
in the outer darkness. 
Nor did they leave our protective neighbor¬ 
hood until the rising sun had sent the gray 
marauders skulking to the swamp thickets in the 
great windfall to the north of our hunting 
grounds, and then trotted on lakeward. 
They had, evidently, been running to the water, 
too late to have thus saved themselves, when 
our fire-circle served as a haven. 
As we were eating our morning meal, the 
Judge, who had been poking “fun” at the Medico, 
suggested to him: 
“I say Doc, can’t you chloroform some of 
those over-ripe partridges, and poison a couple 
of those lean, old, she-wolves, or the pack- 
leader?” 
“No!” answered the Doctor, soberly, “but I 
believe I can tallow some of our cartridges, 
and, can lay a trail for those gray curs to follow 
which should give us about half a dozen wolf- 
scalps as trophies!” 
“Tallow cartridges? Lay a trail?” queried the 
Judge, in amazed repetition. “What do you 
mean ?” 
“It’s as simple as the overruling of an ob¬ 
jection!” replied the Doctor, “I’ll show you, after 
luncheon!” and the Medico actually turned in 
his blankets, and, within two minutes was—er— 
breathing heavily; must have been that, for he 
never snores. He says so. 
After the midday luncheon, the Doctor turned 
to the Judge and said: 
“Now, Judge! If you care to bring me a 
chunk of that venison tallow which I saw, 
yesterday, in the cook-chest; a big iron spoon; 
and will build a handful of fire here at my feet, 
I will illustrate the backwoodsman’s art of tal¬ 
lowing, to make a shot-gun into an emergency 
rifle, I have some of the shells in my belt.” 
While the Judge was do¬ 
ing as he had been bidden, 
the Doctor removed the top- 
cards from four of his 
shells, placed the cartridges 
upon their butts in the soft 
leaf-mold; then after melt¬ 
ing bits of tallow in the big 
spoon, poured enough of the 
fat among the shot to 
cover them; replaced the 
top-card-wads, re-crimped 
the cases with his thumb¬ 
nail, then remarked, smil¬ 
ingly: “That’s the trick! 
Makes the shot-charge into 
a big, plastic bullet which 
may safely be fired, with¬ 
out injuring the gun, if fired 
from the cylinder bored 
barrel, and is not likely to 
spread a choked muzzle if 
the steel and workmanship 
are right; I’ve fired fully 
a dozen of them from the 
left barrel of my shot gun 
and it throws as pretty a 
pattern as it did when I 
fired the first shell from it. 
’Twill kill the biggest 
game upon this continent 
at from forty to seventy 
yards, shoots with rifle-like accuracy and instant¬ 
ly gives the small game hunter a big game of¬ 
fensive or defensive weapon, without carrying 
two guns.” 
“But how about that trail?” queried the Judge. 
“What’s that! Oh! I understand!” exclaimed 
the Doctor. “I’ve saved the heads, blood and 
entrails of the birds which we killed yesterday. 
All you need do is make a blood-trail-layer from 
a bit of cloth or a squirrel skin—just a little 
porous sack as large as the final joint of one 
of your thumbs, filled with crushed eyes, brains, 
and blood, and tied loosely below the ankle upon 
the outside of the foot, where it will strike earth, 
grass and brush as you walk, and it will lay a 
trail which a hungry timber-wolf can, and will 
follow at a run, day or night, and which will 
hold scent for hours in this variety of weather. 
I’ll wait until about four o’clock, and will then 
circle as widely as the time will allow before 
dark, to stand from that big rock just north of 
here.” 
“You gentlemen hunt grouse until about an 
hour before sundown, along the edge of the 
windfall to the east and south, then station your¬ 
selves upon the rock and watch for me—I may 
prove walking wolf-bait.” 
The Doctor, after affixing the bait-sack at his 
ankle, departed, at the appointed time, circled 
from the rock along the swamp’s edge a mile 
or more to the north, turned west along a brook 
trail over another mile or more, and then, just 
as the long cold black shadows were beginning 
to gray, swung back toward the appointed stand, 
about a mile distant. 
After walking a quarter of the distance he 
heard, far to his left, near the swamp’s edge, the 
