Читать книгу Wolf and Coyote Trapping: An Up-to-Date Wolf Hunter's Guide - A. R. Harding - Страница 16

"I have trapped and caught five old female wolves since I came to Iron County, Wisconsin, six years ago. Two of them I got in Michigan, Gogebic County, as I live almost on the line. There are times when you can see six or eight wolf tracks all going down the river or coming up at the same time. You can go again for a week and never see a track. I have followed them for a week, in deep snow on snow shoes, and never left their track, and in one week I set traps at 50 different deer that wolves had killed. I might have gotten a few more wolves but the fox, mink, cats, skunk, owls and "porkys" (porcupines) were bound to butt in. At one set I got a wolf, 3 foxes, 1 skunk, 1 mink and 10 porkys till June.

Two wolves caught a buck that would weigh 150 pounds, within 10 rods of my camp one night. The next morning there was not one pound of meat left on the bones.

I had a tent and one shanty in Gogebic County last winter, and I know the wolves killed 500 deer on the snow. How many fawns and does did they kill in summer time when you cannot see their tracks? The wild cats are not so bad, a fawn, rabbit or partridge makes a meal for them."

In the far north where the barren ground caribou is the principal game animal, and where wolves are plentiful, there can be no doubt that they kill large numbers of those animals. Musk oxen are also killed, and farther south the moose is killed by wolves, but it is our belief that the number is comparatively small. The moose is such a large and powerful animal that even a band of half starved wolves will, as a rule, pass it by, but there can be no doubt of the fact that they do kill them on rare occasions.

The elk is a great enemy of the wolf and it appears that they are seldom molested. Beyond all doubt the deer is the principal prey of the timber wolf.