Up North, the Cry of 'Wolf' Echoes With Anticipation

Predator May Be Getting a Toehold in an Old Neighborhood

New Hampshire woodsman Bob Lord came face to face with Canis lupus: "Oh, my God, what a beauty." (By Michael Powell -- The Washington Post)

ERROL, N.H. -- Somewhere out there, a Canis lupus roams.

Snow swirls in sub-zero cold, and across ice-locked Bear Pond a mountain spine rises. The north woods harbor moose and coyote, bobcat and lynx, and thousands of deer. And, quite likely, a handful of nature's great predator, the gray wolf.

"I saw him right there, standing broadside with that massive cranium," said Bob Lord, a red-bearded bear of a man, who jogged down this logging road last fall and came face to face with a wolf. "Oh, my God, what a beauty."

Lord, 58, a bow hunter, stuffs his bare hands into the pockets of his wool pants and surveys the frozen woods.

"This was their land," he said. "Welcome back."

Extirpated by man more than a century ago in every corner of New England, the gray wolf (aka Canis lupus ) seems on the verge of reestablishing a toehold in the 20 million-acre Great North Woods, a forest that extends from northern Maine to New Hampshire and Vermont and New York. Lone wolves appear to be wandering down from Quebec, Canada, reconnoitering these lands and disappearing again. No one knows when these wolves will find a mate.

But wildlife biologists say there is no reason that a wolf pack could not form here, perhaps very soon.

"When I look at the northern woods of Maine and New Hampshire, and see the abundant moose and white-tail deer, it's like a buffet for the wolves," said Douglas W. Smith, a National Park Service biologist and chief of Yellowstone's Gray Wolf Restoration Project. "It's the next best place for the wolf to return."

The return of the wolf to New England would cap a natural repopulation of the northern woods striking in its breadth and depth. A century ago, these forests stood nearly denuded of large mammals -- the moose population had dwindled to double digits because of overhunting, and the mountain lion, wolverine, marten and lynx had disappeared.

Now, thousands of moose roam these woods and marshes, and the lynx has crept back in.

John Harrigan, a ruddy-faced sheep farmer and the genially cantankerous publisher emeritus of the News and Sentinel in Colebrook, N.H., (Motto: "Independent but Not Neutral") bounces across frozen gullies in his pickup truck.

Somewhere, around the next corner maybe, he knows that a wolf lurks.