When I was a child, I loved the legend of Romulus and Remus, the twins raised by a she-wolf in the forests of Italy. It gave a strange sense of authenticity to my favorite wolf story of all—the adoption of little Mowgli into a wolf pack, in Rudyard Kipling’s Jungle Book. And then came Jack London’s Call of the Wild, which not only reinforced my love of the wolf, but gave me a passionate longing to spend time in the wilderness with these magnificent animals.
It is unfortunate that wolves have been so hated and so feared. There are very few authenticated accounts of wolves attacking human beings in North America. Occasionally they will take livestock because, of course, we have moved farther and farther into their wild hunting grounds. And because of this, along with fear, they have been horribly persecuted in Canada, the United States, and Mexico—trapped and poisoned and hunted with bows and arrows, spears and guns. Even attacked from the air by people in helicopters. And in light of what we now know, thanks to numerous wildlife biologists who have spent years observing them in the wild, the all-out attempt to eradicate wolves can be seen as tragic, unjustified—and in a way extraordinary since they are indisputably the ancestors of “man’s best friend,” the domesticated dog.
There are three species of wolves in North America, of which the gray wolf is the best known. Then there is its close cousin, the Mexican gray wolf. And the red wolf, the subject of this chapter. The three species have many similarities in behavior. A pack typically comprises a breeding pair and their offspring—yearling pups from a previous litter and the pups of the season. They are most active in the early morning and evening when they hunt as a pack. Small cubs, of course, stay in the den—initially with their mother—and other pack members return to feed them by regurgitating meat.