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

Even if the wolf returns, its hold on this land could remain precarious. The wolf's greatest challenge remains how to survive nature's true superpredator: man.

The province of Quebec allows the hunting and trapping of wolves, establishing a gantlet through which wolves must pass to reach New England. As developers push into northern New Hampshire, Vermont and Maine, busier roads make life more precarious for a large predator.

It has always been so. Four centuries ago, Puritans no sooner had arrived than farmers began employing poisons and bounties to hasten the wolf's demise. In his book "The Condor's Shadow," ecologist David Wilcove describes a hunt in Pennsylvania in 1760: Two hundred settlers formed a circle in the forest and advanced, killing animals that stepped into their paths. The toll was stunning: 41 panthers, 109 wolves, 114 foxes, 198 deer, 111 buffalo and 12 wolverines.

A few years ago, Idaho's legislature declared wolf extermination a state goal. Michigan, Wisconsin and Minnesota are more welcoming, but even in those states, wildlife biologists worry that tolerance might dim as wolf populations swell.

"In Michigan, the wolf population has reached 400," said Jim Hammill, who retired from Michigan's Department of Natural Resources. "It could make sense to let the public take part in controlling the population through limited trapping and hunting.

"The biggest danger," he added, "is that the wolf population grows so fast that people lose respect for the animal."

New England remains at no danger of wolf overpopulation. Advocates recently succeeded in blocking the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service from downgrading the gray wolf from an endangered to threatened species.

"Without endangered status, the wolves could be treated as varmints and shot on sight," said Patrick A. Parenteau, a Vermont Law School professor who argued the case in federal court.

If anything, as one travels from one village to another in these northern lands, residents sound reconciled to the wolf's return. Lord, the bow hunter from Errol and a retired schoolteacher, walks the woods every day, even in the black-fly madness of late spring. He fishes, hunts, guts and skins. He's got a National Rifle Association sticker and another for "George W." -- he is no one's version of a lefty tree-hugger.

But he found himself moved by his close encounter.

"It looked at me and probably figured I was some big, sloppy moose -- then it just loped off," he said. "If these wolves are returning on their own four feet, who are we to stop them?"

Struhsacker listens to Lord talk and nods; the survival of wolves will depend on precisely such tolerance. She recalls, not so many years ago, when she stood at night in the woods of Yellowstone Park and first heard the wolf howl.

"I sat down and cried," she said. "I want to hear that sound again here."