Editor's Note

It was late May, but Yellowstone National Park was closed by snow. My friend Jim and I pitched a tent just down the road from the gate in a deserted campground and set out hiking up a steep hill, switching back through the trees until we came to a clearing and stopped dead.

Pieces of bone and tiny tufts of fur were scattered from one end of the clearing to the other. Two antlers lay about 20 feet apart.

"It looks like an elk exploded," Jim observed.

As we considered the forces of nature that could have accounted for such spectacular slaughter -- grizzly bear? mountain lion? -- we contemplated beating a hasty retreat. But the complete absence of flesh and the bleached quality of the bones suggested it had been quite some time since this elk had taken its last step. So we kept on climbing. Small patches of ice appeared, then merged into a shallow cover of snow. As we topped the summit, our sneakers disappeared in white drifts. The trees were widely spaced now, the light fading. I was preoccupied with the snow pouring into my shoes when a large, dark shape appeared between trees less than 10 yards distant.

I say "a dark shape," but that is a ludicrously inadequate description. It was a vast and timeless presence. A tear in the fabric of reality that transformed everything-- the light, the atmosphere, the very way I felt in my own body. Because that shape was something out of the primal past. A wolf. A big wolf. Gray and silver, at least twice the size of my lab-hound mix, with fathomless sable eyes in a large shepherd-like head. We froze, and the wolf trotted past without a glance, scampered up a rise into a copse of trees. Gone.

Now we turned back. Packed up, headed south. When we stopped for coffee and told our tale, the waitress looked us over and said: "There haven't been any wolves in Yellowstone for years."

And that's what all the books say. Eradicated by the 1940s. Only reintroduced in 1996. This was 1974.

So I understand the gentle skepticism of The Post's Bill Booth, one of my favorite writers and author of the beautiful story on buffalo watching in Yellowstone that begins on Page 14. "I was impressed with the size, color, height of the coyotes of Yellowstone," he e-mailed me. "They were in winter coat and seemed {lcub}hellip{rcub} very thick {lcub}hellip{rcub} and tall."

That did it. All these years I've wondered about my sighting and gotten nowhere. But I hadn't tackled the question for a while, not since the Google era. So now I typed: "Yellowstone wolf reported." And there, on a National Park Service Web site, I found it: "By the 1970s, scientists found no evidence of a wolf population in Yellowstone ... An occasional wolf likely wandered into the Yellowstone area however."

It was no coyote, Bill.

Tom Shroder can be reached at shrodert@washpost.com.