Please pack in soon and visit me!......Please pack in soon and visit me!......Please pack in soon and visit me!

Most true woodsmen of our far north will go along with my own in-field observations that few beasts are better equipped by nature to take a human life than the Canis lupus, Timber Wolf. Weighing from 80 lbs. to as much as 175 lbs. The wolf in general is a fast running, tireless, ravenous brute. Just perhaps no other wild animal in North America can equal its intelligence.

Hunting alone, it is more than a match for almost any other creature it is likely to encounter; and when it organizes into well drilled packs numbering upwards of 20, the lobo is by all odds the most terrible marauder left in our wild lands. Its stealth, its belly-crawling stalk, is sudden and calculated, fang-slashing attack are so adept that even an armed hunter might be struck down before he could fire a shot in defense.

Will a wolf attack? I am not aware of any bona fide accounts/proof which will answer the lingering question if indeed a wolf will attack. I have personally spent many years north of the Alaska Range and have encountered many wolves. I was probably aware of their presence only a small amount of the time but the wolfs killer-call will make the hair stand up on a persons neck three-fold. We will have to wait for testimony to base a verdict of guilt while leaving room for reasonable doubt in the meantime.

I have been told the story many times surrounding a missing prospector in the Yukon area whose mangled remains were finally discovered. The slashed clothing and the devored flesh pointed to onslaught by wolves. Careful scrutiny by Alaska State biologist(s) Randy Glover and Jack Iqua at the scene, however, revealed signs of Grizzlies as well as Wolves. One or the other was evidently guilty of killing a human. This testimony, though damaging, still leaves room for reasonable doubt...Was it the wolf ??

The account of Surveyor MacDonald of Fairbanks, Alaska is quite interesting to say the least. It seems that MacDonald was scouting a new route through the Cassiar Hills one day when a pack of wolves started howling around him. At first MacDonald paid no real attention, but after a circle of howls drew tighter, and when he saw one gray wolf coming right at him, he luckily scrambled up a nearby scrawny spruce. For two hours the wolves kept MacDonald treed. There is absolutely no doubt in his mind that they had marked him down for attack...The records are loaded with similar instances.... Efficient, Deadly, Intelligent, Perfectly Adapted.... Survivors.

"We reached the old wolf in time to watch a fierce green fire dying in her eyes. I realized then, and have known ever since, that there was something new to me in those eyes, something known only to her and to the mountain. I was young then, and full of trigger-itch. I thought that because fewer wolves meant more deer, that no wolves would mean hunter's paradise. But after seeing the green fire die, I sensed that neither the wolf nor the mountain agreed with such a view."

I have been privileged and quite excited to have had the golden opportunity to have lived and worked 300 miles north of the Arctic Circle on the northern circumference of the Brooks Range.

It seemed that I experienced sometimes several sightings per week of some form of contact with the wolves of this cold and crusty northern mountain range, either by aircraft sightings, on foot and/or while on snowmachine within my assigned 88,000 sq. mile jurisdiction.

As others have witnessed and recorded before me over the decades, I have had the rare opportunity to view the "Circle Of The Kill" on several occassions within the confines of the frozen Alaskan bush.

These gruesome sites are in the opinion of this writer vivid testimony of celebrations of death of countless barren ground Caribou killed by the resident wolf pack.

There on the frozen, crunchy northern fringes of the Brooks Range, silent, with intertwined trails (appearing to the outside observer) that the wolves and the caribou had danced together on a lily-white table cloth laid down by mother nature herself were a testimony of an endless hunt, an endless celebration of death.

With the passage of time I found myself drawn into this "Circle Of The Kill". Spending a considerable amount of time, circling the remnants of the kill as the wolves had done, attempting to read their story in the snow and studying spots of carnage, torn fur and hide, fragments of caribou flesh and vast amounts of solid frozen blood.

At the end of their dance lay the kill in its simplicity. I found myself wondering what could I have done to save this caribou? The answer was nothing at all. For within these parameters of life and death I was the outsider. This is the life of the wolf.

As I stood within the "Circle Of The Kill", I too as others before me lightly brushed up-against their secret.

Wolves understand death perfectly. That is the bright, cold wisdom that we see in their eyes. The thing that makes us afraid. Death is their art, their beauty, while it is our darkness and terror.

As a boy my grandfather told me on several occasions that if we had ever understood what the wolf knows, we've forgotten. Maybe we're drawn to the wolf because they remember.

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