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The Drama of the Forests - Romance and Adventure by Arthur Henry Howard Heming
page 172 of 368 (46%)
afflicted with rabies or hydrophobia. No doubt everyone has read, at
one time or another, harrowing stories of the great timber-wolves of
our northern forest forming themselves into huge packs and pursuing
people all over the wilderness until there is nothing left of the
unfortunate community save a few odds and ends of cheap jewellery.
Even our most dignified and reliable newspapers are never loath to
publish such thrilling drivel; and their ignorant readers gulp it all
down, apparently with a relishing shudder; for the dear public 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
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