the cowboys
surprising them when gorged to repletion on the carcass of a colt or
calf, and, in consequence, unable to run, so that they are easily ridden
down, roped, and then dragged to death.

Yet even the slaughter wrought by man in certain localities does
not seem adequate to explain the scarcity or extinction of wolves,
throughout the country at large. In most places they are not followed
any more eagerly than are the other large beasts of prey, and they
are usually followed with less success. Of all animals the wolf is
the shyest and hardest to slay. It is almost or quite as difficult to
still-hunt as the cougar, and is far more difficult to kill with hounds,
traps, or poison; yet it scarcely holds its own as well as the great
cat, and it does not begin to hold its own as well as the bear, a beast
certainly never more readily killed, and one which produces fewer
young at a birth. Throughout the East the black bear is common in many
localities from which the wolf has vanished completely. It at present
exists in very scanty numbers in northern Maine and the Adirondacks; is
almost or quite extinct in Pennsylvania; lingers here and there in the
mountains from West Virginia to east Tennessee, and is found in Florida;
but is everywhere less abundant than the bear. It is possible that this
destruction of the wolves is due to some disease among them, perhaps to
hydrophobia, a terrible malady from which it is known that they
suffer greatly at times. Perhaps the bear is helped by its habit of
hibernating, which frees it from most dangers during winter; but
this cannot be the complete explanation, for in the South it does not
hibernate, and yet holds its own as well as in the North. What makes it
all the more curious that the American wolf should disappear sooner
than the bear is that the reverse is the case with the allied species of
Europe, where the bear is much sooner killed out of the land.

Indeed the differences of this sort between nearly related animals are
literally inexplicable. Much of the difference in temperament between
such closely allied species as the American and European bears and
wolves is doubtless due to their surroundings and to the instincts they
have inherited through many generations; but for much of the variation
it is not possible to offer any explanation. In the same way there are
certain physical differences for which it is very hard to account,
as the same conditions seem to operate in direct