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never tested for rabies, its behavior strongly suggests that it was rabid. Naturalist and editor George Bird Grinnell said he had looked for years for an authentic case of a healthy wolf attacking a human and found only the story of an eighteen-year-old Colorado girl who met a young wolf while herding milk cows at dusk. She called out and threw a stone at it, and the animal took her by the shoulder, knocked her down, and bit her on the legs and arms until her brother came to her rescue and killed the wolf. That wolf was not tested for rabies, either. J. W. Curran, editor of the Sault Ste. Marie
Daily Star
, for years offered a $100 reward to anyone who could prove he had been attacked by a wolf in the Algoma district of Ontario, but never had to part with his money.
    The fact that wolves kill has always colored humankind’s view of them. We have a hard time separating killing as necessary predation from killing as moral outrage. Real reappraisal of the myths of wolf ferocity did not come until scientists began to think of them in ecological and evolutionary terms, and thus changed the moral basis of the question of killing.
    An ecological view states that, if nothing died, all the earth’s available materials would be locked up in a kind of carbon freeze. If nothingate plants, they would simply become huge masses of wood and coal sitting glumly over the millennia. At some point, all the available carbon would be tied up in living plants, and nothing more would be born. Death is nature’s way of making things continually interesting. Death is the possibility of change. Every individual gets its allotted lifespan, its opportunity to introduce change through mutation or culture, its chance to try something new on the world. But time is called, and the molecules which make up leaf and limb, heart and eye are disassembled and redistributed to other tenants.
    A considerable portion of the creation is devoted to the disassembly and redistribution of organic materials. Soil-dwelling fungi take apart the wood of trees, and bacteria consume what the beetles and fungi don’t get. Many creatures don’t wait for others to depart voluntarily: they kill and eat living organisms. Predation is a fact older than mammals, older than reptiles, older than the tooth or the claw or blood itself. Single-celled organisms in primeval pools hunted and gobbled each other with abandon. Predation is today the rule, rather than the exception, among vertebrates. Few fish, amphibians, reptiles, or birds live exclusively on plants. Among North American mammals, the only vegetarians are beaver, porcupine, hares and rabbits, pikas, manatees, pocket gophers, elk, deer, antelope, moose, bison, bighorn sheep, and mountain goats. Even creatures we expect to be meek have predatory moments: chipmunks have been known to kill mice, and one observer has seen deer consume fish.
    An evolutionary view sees the wolf as the product of a long line of evolutionary choices.
    Two hundred million years ago, reptilian ancestors began to connect the lower jaw to the skull by means of a cheekbone hinge, enabling an individual to chew food into small bits, exposing more surface area of food to digestive enzymes, and thus allowing quick digestion. That development enabled creatures to heat their own bodies efficiently and gave rise to warm-bloodedness. That ushered in the age of mammals.
    The earliest mammals were small nocturnal creatures, living in a world of fierce, quick, predatory dinosaurs. They probably relied more on scent than sight, and were furtive, secretive, and probably drab in color. They were more frequently prey than predator.
    But, as often happens, the drab get even. About sixty-five millionyears ago, the large dinosaurs disappeared. Many scientists believe that an asteroid hit the earth, throwing up huge dust clouds that blotted out the sun and reduced photosynthesis to the point where food resources for the larger vegetarian reptiles crashed. Creatures that