Wolves in Missouri Swamps. 
Doniphan, Mo., Feb. 6 .—Editor Forest and 
Stream: Wolf hunting would be a very enjoy¬ 
able sport in southeast Missouri were it not for 
the vast amount of down timber that makes it 
difficult for the rider to keep his seat comfort¬ 
ably and also obstructs the view of the running 
wolf, so that when the sportsman hears the 
hounds he seldom gets sight of the quarry, so 
stealthily does it make its course through the 
tangle of immense treetops, canebrakes and brier 
patches of the swamps. 
For some reason timber wolves seem to favor 
the swamps more than the hills, so much so that 
only four miles from swamps and with a stretch 
of several thousand acres of wild timber lands 
right at my door, it is considered out of the 
ordinary to find any of these animals near me, 
except when they make a raid on sheep. This 
is done quickly by them and an immediate re¬ 
turn to the bottom country follows. The thickets 
are in abundance, but the timber wolf seldom 
lingers long enough to gain for himself the 
name of a hill resident. In our swamps they 
are very plentiful, seldom seen, but heard almost 
every night, and their work of butchery among 
young cattle, sheep and hogs is an infallible sign 
that civilization has made but little progress in 
ridding the sunk lands of these pests. 
The works of man appear to have favored 
conditions for the multiplication of these ani¬ 
mals rather than a decrease in their number. Be¬ 
fore the advent of man to these vast lands that 
are flooded each year, the timber country was 
open and free of thickets, and animals of this 
species relied on an occasional hollow log or the 
security of a dense canebrake for shelter. They 
had no fear of anything. Fleet of foot and with 
a cunning superior to any other denizen of the 
swamps made the resources at hand ample to 
keep them sheltered from inclement weather. 
The massive hardwood trees, oak, cypress, hick¬ 
ory, ash, sweet gum and others that are now 
almost equal in value proved a temptation to the 
lumber kings that could not be resisted. With 
the first attempt at conquering these wild lands, 
the cutting of the timber resulted in scattering 
thousands of treetops. A quick growth of under¬ 
brush followed in a few years. The forces of 
nature in the swamps prevent timber from per¬ 
ishing. but try to reassert themselves through a 
profuse growth of sprouts from the parent tree. 
In two years in this rich soil these are at least 
six feet high. 
Knowing this, you can reason out why the 
coming of man has made a safer abode for the 
timber wolf. I do not know of a single instance 
of a wolf of this country ever attacking a human 
being. Tales are often told of their ferocity, 
but they must be the creation of a very fertile 
brain or the persons are like those whom one 
of my old French aunts would speak of as peo¬ 
ple who love to see little boys have bad dreams. 
Even when in large bands the wolves have 
such fear of coming in contact with man that 
the danger of an attack from them is so small 
it is hardly to be thought of. Nevertheless their 
fear of man does not e.xtend to the latter's 
greatest of all companions—dogs, for I have 
known them to wipe out several packs of good 
wolf hounds in a short time. 
The Star Ranch Company at Neileyville was 
greatly annoyed by depredations of wolves on 
young cattle which resulted in sending for a pack 
of wolf hounds—namely, foxhounds, with now 
and then an outcross of blood^—to try to exter¬ 
minate these pirates of the swamps. Any other 
breed was almost out of the question, as the 
hunting must be done by scent and the varmints 
killed from stands the hunters had taken at 
known or supposed crossings. 
For some time success followed this mode of 
hunting and the ranch managers smiled as hide 
after hide was stretched on the side of their 
office. 
In time the dogs became over-confident of their 
powers, forgetting that man was the cause of the 
death of the wolves. The fascination of self-hunt¬ 
ing, so alluring to all strains of sporting dogs, 
was for a -while frequently indulged in by mem¬ 
bers of the pack. Presently the pack lost some 
of its members. The ranch owners never once 
placed the blame on the wolves, but breathed 
dire threats at natives who were supposed to 
have stolen the missing dogs. Again some of 
the pack would return badly mutilated, the blame 
placed this time on ferocious panthers or even 
bears, but the real cause was to be learned 
later on. 
One Saturday afternoon old man Lafferty, 
who took charge of, the hounds, went in search 
of a missing dog. It was a dry fall, like the 
last one, so he rode across what was usually a 
flooded country toward a district known as the 
big hunting slough, a favorite place to find stray 
cattle, as a rank growth of juicy cane kept many 
cattle from the ranch-feeding stations where 
stacks of clover, timothy and redtop awaited the 
herd. Part of the hounds followed him—ten, if 
I remember the number correctly. Going 
through an open stretch of overcup and willow 
oak. the do.gs could easily be distinguished at 
a distance of a quarter of a mile. 
When Lafferty reached the center of this 
pasture his attention was immediately attracted 
by a noise made by one of the dogs similar to 
that made when one of the pack begins to sound 
its bugle for a cold trail. The leader, a herring¬ 
bone, bitch, had just opened up and entered a 
patch of waving brown sedge grass. Large 
dusky forms were seen to rise from their cover 
of grass and pitch into the baying pack of 
hounds. For an instant, to distinguish dog from 
wolves was impossible, and nothing but the 
noise of the combatants gave the ranchman an 
idea as to which side was to be the victorious 
one. The old man rode up as quickly as he 
could to where the battle raged, and there he 
saw wolves and dogs in a death struggle. A 
wolf would grab a dog by the hind leg while 
an assistant stood straight up, and as the dog 
turned from him to meet his assailant from be¬ 
hind, the latter cut his throat or so lacerated 
it as to soon put the poor hound hors de com¬ 
bat. The total annihilation of the ranch com¬ 
pany’s pack took but a few moments. Lafferty 
had a gun with him, but acknowledged that he 
was so rattled by the suddenness of the perform¬ 
ance that the thought of acting as protector to 
his dogs was entirely forgotten in the confus¬ 
ion. I saw him a short while afterward as he 
was riding home and he did not appear as though 
he longed to be a spectator again of such a novel 
encounter. 
Going to the scene of action I found most of 
the dogs had been cut about the throat as he 
described them to me, though three of them 
were badly lacerated around the abdomen. One 
old bitch, with entrails protruding, was trying to 
make her way back to the kennels. There were 
several wicked looking cuts in her abdomen. I 
washed her and sewed up the wounds as best 
I could with the crude instruments secured at 
a trapper’s shanty, but my efforts as a surgeon 
proved of small use, for she died the same night. 
What had given these wolves the courage to 
make such an attack may be conjectured. Fre¬ 
quently the dogs would get off self-hunting and 
possibly took the trail of some band which turned 
on them and whipped them. From the occas¬ 
ional performances the sly wit of these inhabi¬ 
tants of the swamp lands prompted them into 
reasoning that if a few of their members were 
able to kill or cripple a pair of dogs, a large 
pack should be able to massacre any ordinary 
band. 
A Poplar Bluff man, who kept a large pack of 
hounds, on hearing the fate of the ranch com¬ 
pany’s dogs, boasted that he would clean out 
every wolf in the district if no high water came 
before he could bring his avengers to the Neiley¬ 
ville swamps. Conditions favored him and he 
brought, his dogs. They met the same fate as 
the others. What dogs could not accomplish, 
poison accomplished; but there are still many 
bands of wolves left in the swamps and they 
cannot be lured to eat poisoned meats except 
during periods when snow has been on the 
ground for a long time and their usual feast 
of swamp rabbits is not at hand. This only 
occurs here about every ten or twenty years. 
I lived a few years in the swamps and heard 
the never-to-be-forgotten howls of the wolves 
night after night, but seldom saw any and rarely 
killed one. During my whole stay in the swamps 
I only killed four, three tawny big gray fellows 
and a black one. 
One Christmas day, during a period of high 
water, I saw three wolves pull down a half- 
starved range cow that was trying to make her 
way to the ridges in hopes of securing grass. 
Hounds were put on the trail, and as there was 
a heavy freeze, it made travel difficult for both 
the pursuers and the pursued. Finally after two 
hours the dogs began to bay—“treed.” Encour¬ 
aging the black horse I was riding into swifter 
action, I came across the dogs in a running 
cypress brake, cutting up antics, acting as if they 
were going to give something a good licking, 
then as quickly changing their minds, as if this 
