not only
loves to be fooled, but actually gloats over that sort of thing, since
it is their hereditary belief.
When I was a boy, I, too, thrilled over such nonsense, and when I made
my first trip into the forest I began to delve for true wolf stories,
and I have been delving ever since. So far, after over thirty years of
digging, I have actually dug up what I believe to be one authentic
story of an unprovoked wolf having actually attacked and killed a man.
On several occasions, too, I have had the satisfaction of running to
cover some of the wolf stories published in our daily press. I read a
few years ago in one of Canada's leading daily papers--and no doubt the
same account was copied throughout the United States--a thrilling story
of two lumber-jacks in the wilds of Northern Ontario being pursued by a
pack of timber-wolves, and the exhausted woodsmen barely escaping with
their lives, being forced by the ferocious brutes to spend a whole
night in a tree at a time when the thermometer registered -- below
zero. I am sorry I have forgotten the exact degree of frost the paper
stated, but as a rule it is always close to 70 or 80 degrees below zero
when the great four-legged demons of the forest go on the rampage.
THE WOLVES AND GREENHORNS
Several years later, when I was spending the summer at Shahwandahgooze,
in the Laurentian Mountains, I again met Billy Le Heup, the hunter, and
one night when we were listening to a wolf concert I mentioned the
foregoing newspaper thriller. Billy laughed and acknowledged that he,
too, had read it, but not until several weeks after he had had a chance
to investigate, first hand, the very same yarn; for he, too, had been
trailing wolf stories all his life.
It so happened that Le Heup's work had taken him through the timber
country north of Lake Temiscamingue. While stopping one day at a
lumber camp to have a snack, three men entered the cookery where he was
eating. One of them was the foreman, and he was in a perfect rage. He
had discharged the other two men, and now he was warning them that if
they didn't get something to eat pretty ---- quick and leave the camp
in a ---- of a hurry, he would kick them out. Then, just before he
slammed the door and disappeared, he roared out at them that not for
one moment would he stand for such ---- rot, as their being chased and
treed all night by wolves.
When quiet was restored and the two men had sat down beside Le Heup at
the di
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