One cannot but be intensely interested in the preservation of this herd of wood bison making here their last stand. The Canadian Government has shown a splendid spirit in its attitude toward every phase of the buffalo question, as its purchase of the Pablo herd from Montana now ensconced in the new Buffalo Park near Wainwright, in Alberta, as well as the measures for preserving these northern brands from the burning, conclusively prove.
Upon my chatting with Chief Pierre Squirrel, and admiring largely his magenta mosquito-veil, the astute chap tells me that he himself, back of Fort Smith a few years ago, saw a full-grown buffalo pulled down and the flesh literally torn off it by woodland wolves, strong brutes, he assured me, which weighed from one hundred and fifty to two hundred pounds each. A wolf shot on the Mackenzie last year measured from snout to the root of the tail sixty-four inches. The Dominion bounty on the timber-wolf is twenty dollars, but this is not an off-set to the native's superstitious aversion to killing this animal; the Indian's belief is that such slaughter on his part queers his hunt for a whole season. He never goes out with malice aforethought on a wolf-hunt, but if one of these animals crosses his track he may kill it, although always with inward foreboding. A man brought in a wolf to Fort Smith while we were there and throwing down his hunting gear said, "There, it had better all be destroyed, I will have no luck with it more." Shortly afterwards a fish-staging fell on his son, for which the dead wolf was held responsible. As the female wolf has from three to five young at a litter and as the mother buffalo gives birth to but one calf, Fate, in both birth-rate and death-rate, would seem to favour the smaller animal. It is up to the red-coated lads of the river-edge to appear in the drama as gods-from-the-machine. While one's sympathy is with the shaggy bison host, still one cannot withhold admiration for the grit and tenacity of the wolf. Archbishop Taché tells of the persevering fortitude of a big wolf caught years ago in a steel trap at Isle â la Crosse. Thirty days afterwards, near Green Lake, a hundred miles away, it was killed, with trap and wood block still fixed to a hind leg. The poor brute through the intense cold of a Northern winter had dragged this burden all those weary miles.