Wolf dog

“ Public opinion has long been divided respecting the precise appearance and form of this majestic animal, and so many different ideas have been conceived of him, that many persons have been induced to come to the conclusion that no particular breed of dogs was ever kept for wolf-hunting in this country, but that the appellation of “wolf-dog” was bestowed upon any dog swift enough to overtake and powerful enough to contend with and overcome that formidable animal. ”

“ We have heard so many stories about Wolves attacking travelers and their horses that we have thought them full of ferocity and courage, when in fact they are the most cowardly of all our animals. Unless pressed by extreme hunger they never attack animals larger than themselves, and then only in packs. A cur dog, as a rule, can drive the largest wolf on the plains. Lean, gaunt, and hungry looking, they are the essence of meanness and treachery. Their long, bushy tails are carried straight out behind, but when the animal is frightened, he puts his tail between his legs just like the common dog. ”

“ The wolf is hardier, and more robust, than the dog, but less alive to the powers of intellectual discrimination: he is almost incessantly prowling in search of prey, and is himself, of all animals, the most difficult to conquer in the chase. ”

“ The wolf is hardly a dog within the meaning of the law, nor is the scalp-yielding coyote, whether he howls or merely sings and plays the piano; moreover, these are beyond the pale of civilization and outside the scope of our sympathies.
With the dog it is different His place is among us; he is with us and of us—a part of our life and love. ”

“ As a general thing, however, the wolf manifests a desire to run, rather than fight, for life, and when alone will frequently tuck his tail between his legs, and run like a stricken cur from a dog that he could easily crush out of existence. ”

“ During this march the dogs act as flankers and scouts by day and night, and do battle with the wolves, which know quite well the routes along which the sheep usually pass, and are on the look-out to pick up stragglers or raid the flock. The Spanish shepherds employ a large white shaggy breed of dog as guards against wolves. These dogs both lead the sheep and bring up the rear in the annual migration of the flocks to and from the summer pastures. In the west of America, now that sheep-ranching on a large scale has been introduced, wolf-dogs are bred to live entirely with the sheep. ”

“ There are no Gêlerts now to combat successfully with the wolf, if these ferocious animals were yet to be met with in our forests. The greyhound of this early period must have resembled the Irish wolf-dog of the present day, a larger, stronger, fiercer dog than we are accustomed to see. ”

“ Wolves have an inconvenient fondness for dog meat, and occasionally attack travelers. A gentleman told me that a wolf once sprang from the bushes, seized and dragged away one of his dogs, and did not detain the team three minutes. The dogs are cowardly in their dispositions, and will not fight unless they have large odds in their favor. A pack of them will attack and kill a single strange dog, but would not disturb a number equaling their own.
Most of the Russian settlers buy their dogs from the natives who breed them. ”

“ If he once gets inside a sheep-fold at night, he massacres and mangles right and left. When he has slain to his heart’s content, he goes off with a victim and devours it, then comes back for a second, a third, and a fourth carcase, which he carries away to hide under a heap of branches or dead leaves. When dawn breaks, he returns gorged with food to his lair, leaving the ground strewn with the bodies of the slain. The wolf even contrives to get the better of his natural enemy, the dog, using stratagem and cleverness in the place of strength. ”

“ They are especially fond of human flesh. When lying in ambush, their eyes sparkle through the darkness. Horses scent them from long distances; and fear of this terrible foe almost paralyzes them.
Wolf (Canis lupus) .—The fur of this animal is yellowish grey with blackish spots; in its lower parts its color is lighter. It is the size of a shepherd’s dog. Its whole appearance is [198] unprepossessing; its body is lean and long; its expression malicious; its ears erect. When it cannot obtain its favorite food, game or sheep, it feeds on mice, frogs, and carrion. ”

“ But wolves in Russia are considered vermin so these dogs do a good work in helping to exterminate the pest.
The Czar of all the Russias was himself interested in wolf coursing and is reported to have owned the finest pack of wolf dogs in the world.
The Alaskan dog teams are famous throughout the world; not only for the very material service that they render man in traveling over the frozen lands where not even a burrow could travel, but also because of the famous races that are held each year in Alaska. ”

“ The wolf, on the contrary, although he commits fearful ravages among the sheep and cattle, searches out the human being as his favorite prey. He conceals himself near the entrance to the village, and steals upon and wounds every passenger that he can get at. There are several accounts of more than twenty persons having been bitten by one wolf ”

“ These timber wolves of the north are immensely interesting brutes, tireless, powerful, unbelievably cunning. To follow their trail is to have increasing respect for their keenness, their vim, their hair-trigger way of meeting any emergency. Once when I was tracking a solitary dog wolf, an uncommonly big brute, and lazy after eating his fill of venison, I came out of the woods to a frozen lake, and saw him ambling along near shore a few hundred yards ahead of me. He happened to be passing under an icy ledge, utterly unsuspicious of man or danger, when a bullet struck the ice, ping! ”

“ When the young simpleton has been induced to come out beyond the farmyard, the wolf, throwing off his disguise of amiable playfulness, falls upon the dog and carries him away to make a meal of. In the case of a dog stronger and more capable of making resistance the stratagem requires two wolves; one appears to the dog in its true character of wolf, and then disappears into an ambush, where the other lies hidden. The dog, following its natural instinct, pursues the wolf into the ambush, where the two conspirators soon make an end of it. ”

“ They appeared to possess a considerable degree of strength, but to be too gentle to contend with so powerful and ferocious an animal as the wolf. They were mostly covered with white or gray, or occasionally black hair, short on the head, ears and feet, but long and silky on the body and tail. The forehead is elevated, and the muzzle lengthened and clothed with short hair. The attachment of this dog to his master and the flock is very great, and he has not lost a particle of his sagacity, but, where wolves are common, is still used as a sheep-dog. ”

“ Put a collie pup into a wolf den with a litter of wolf whelps and the old wolf will suckle him as her own. He will be brought up as a young wolf; will learn to hunt in the pack, and to stalk his game like a veritable wolf. Of course he will not be as fierce as his wolf brother, and he will still retain certain dog characteristics, but he will pass for a wolf in most particulars, while in two or three generations he will be a veritable wolf. ”

“ The wolf both externally and internally, so nearly resembles the dog, that he seems modelled upon the same plan; and yet if his form is similar, his nature is totally different, and so unlike are they in disposition, that no two animals [147] can have a more perfect antipathy to each other. A young dog shudders at the first sight of a wolf; and even the scent of one, though new and unknown, is so repugnant to his nature, that he will come trembling to his master for protection. ”

“ When the youngster, seduced by these overtures, responds to them, and leaves the friendly shelter of its home, it is immediately overpowered, and carried off. Against a vigorous Dog, capable of defending itself with success, the stratagem is different. Two Wolves arrange between themselves the following plan:—One shows itself to the hoped-for-victim, and endeavors to make the Dog follow its track into an ambuscade, where the second Wolf is concealed. ”

“ These men see the wolf at their door, preying on their neighbours' flocks if not on their own, and it is not so easy as it is here to make them believe that the ravenous beast is a harmless and useful watch-dog. ”

“ That wolves howl at night with a clamor that is startling to an unhoused man; that when pinched by hunger they grow bold, like other beasts; that they have a little of the dog’s curiosity, and much of the dog’s tendency to run after anything that runs away,—all that is natural and wolflike; but that they will ever chase a man, knowing that he is a [64] man, seems very doubtful to one who had always found the wolf to be as wary as any eagle, and even more difficult of approach. In a word, one’s experience of the natural wolf is sure to run counter to all the wolf stories. ”

“ The wolf is easily tamed, and even in its wild state has some of the peculiarities of the dog; for instance, a young wolf, when surprised and threatened by the hunter, will crouch and fawn like a spaniel. Mr. Bell tells of a she-wolf in the Regent's Park Zoological Gardens which would bring her cubs to the bars of the cage, that they might be caressed by the visitors ”

“ Only very young children, however, mistake the wolf for a dog, for there is that in its ugly eyes, set so close together and so sinister in their expression, that tells the elder ones that the creature before them is no dog, or, at any rate, not an honest specimen. Besides, nursery stories, fairy tales, and fables have taught them long ago the likeness of the wolf and its character, and the first look at the sharp snout set in gray fur reminds them of that face that little Red Riding Hood found looking out at her, one fine May morning, from under her dear old grandmother's nightcap. ”

“ She was about to press the trigger when Patsy gave her arm a sudden pull.
“Wait!” she cried. “Wait! Those are not wolves. They’re dogs; great big, wonderful dogs!”
[237]
CHAPTER XXVII
THE END OF THE TRAIL
Troops of conflicting hopes and fears waged battle in Marian’s brain when she realized that the pack approaching them on the run up the trail in the teeth of the storm were not wolves, but dogs. There are two types of dogs in Alaska; one, more wolf than dog, is the native wolf dog. This type, once he is loosed, leaps at the throat of the first reindeer he sees. ”

“ The wolf has all the attributes of the dog [Pg 226] except the nobility which necessarily comes from education. The tail always droops, never curling upwards as in the domestic dogs, and even when tamed they rarely wag the tail. ”

“ When the boy heard this, he felt very sad, and turned to go into the mountains in search of the dog. After walking some time he found the marks of its paws, and smears of red paint on the grass. But all this time the boy never knew that the dog was really the son of the Wolf Chief and had been sent by his father to help him, and he did not guess that from the day that he painted red paint round its face and on its feet a wolf can be told far off by the red on its paws and round its mouth. ”

“ The Dog has generally a shorter tail than the Wolf, and carries it more frequently curled over the hip, but the latter practice is not totally unknown to the Wolf, although that animal, when under the observation of man, being generally apprehensive of danger or on the watch, seldom displays this mark of satisfaction.” And again, “The resemblance between the northern Wolves and the domestic Dog of the Indians is so great, that the size and strength of the Wolf seem to be the only difference. ”

“ There are those who would gloss over the wolfs crimes by declaring it to be the brother of the dog, and it may be true enough that wolves learn to bark when fostered by canine mothers, that the dogs of the Arctic regions are in reality only wolves, and that till the white man came the Red Indian had no quadruped companion but the wolf. ”

“ The wolf, with all his meanness and skulking cunning, is the progenitor of man’s friend, the dog.
They belong to the same family, their breeding habits are alike, and the wolf is as surely the father of the dog, as was brute man, the cave dweller, the ancestor of the highly civilized creature we now know.
In the case of the man it has taken untold ages to bring about the change, and so it has in the case of the dog. ”

“ The sagacity of the wolf is so active, that, Scheffer reports, he will not attempt an animal, if a cord, or halter is round its neck, suspecting a trap. The wolf is about the size of a large dog, or three feet and a half long, and two feet and a half high; colour a light brown, with a mixture of black and grey; has a penetrating eye of a grey colour, which adds a wild appearance to the ferocity of his countenance. ”

“ For wolf hunting the French hounds are called into service, though it is difficult to break any hound to wolf scent, and nothing wears a dog out more effectually than a wolf chase. Good horses are required, too, for a wolf hunt is likely to mean a night out and a tremendous straight-away run over a wide area, and even when dogs and horses and hunters are of the best, an old wolf will usually give them all the slip. The beast has phenomenal endurance and cunning. For hours he will idle along just in front of the hounds, knowing they dare not attack him while he is fresh. ”