We've got a big pack (17 up to 21 at times) out at the cottage, ~8 kms. due West of the ON. border in MB.'s Shield country. They've decimated the area's deer population & are now turning to anything/everything they can find to eat. We've had 3 now come into the yard in broad daylight (mind you it isn't like a city yard, the 2 acres is mostly bush, trees & rock), eating the bread we put out for the birds & the last 2 times they tried to get my Lab to chase him back into the bush (after which it would probably be "Guess Who's Coming to Dinner"). They haven't crossed the Deadline in the yard, yet, but when they do, that's it. We usually find deer femur bones & scraps of hair in the yard come spring when the snow melts. None of the ones who have come into the yard have been pack rejects either, they're big boys in prime condition, unlike the old ones who hang out near the beaver dams or near MB. Conservation's camps where the idiots feed them table scraps.
Not too far away (~3 klicks as the crow flies) I've come across and wandered through what was presumably their used winter den in my deer hunting territory on my way to my bear stand in the spring. A 3 cornered spruce copse, about 50 feet per side, well-protected with a bit of a hill behind it a ways, and access to a creek that's open year-round & cedar bog on the other 2 sides, 1 corner piled with bones & hair, another piled high with dung & the third corner had hair & the weight of the snow had matted down the grass; I presume their sleeping area. Very similar to one of the final scenes in that movie Grey I saw last year. You could still smell wet dog even though most of the snow was melted.
Last year while hunting along one of the cuts from the tornado we had back in '07, I had sightings of 5 different wolves on either side of the cut about 30 yards in, which is right at the edge of visibility in the black spruce where I hunt. They walked with me for about 2 klicks until I turned to head back to the truck. I put the scope on 2 of them at different times & they just sort of melted back into the bush; they didn't run. I caught sight of them again, usually after I was no longer looking in their direction, but unusually, I could hear them walking all of the time.
Anyways, after reading the OP's story, it reminded me of something an old family friend, a white Russian now long since gone to his reward, told us many years ago at the cottage, when we asked him why he always carried a rifle in the bush while his wife picked mushrooms, because it was too early for deer season. He said that he knew there were timber wolves in the area (at that time there were few sightings and only rarely did we hear them at night back then) and that we were sorely mistaken in Canada if we believed that wolves do not consider two-legged animals to be meat. He told us he had lost 2 cousins in Siberia to wolves back before the First World War. That's stayed with me for fifty-some-odd years & I do believe it. We're starting to hear more and more of these stories that cannot be attributed to anything else.
BTW, I didn't take any cell phone pics, partly because I don't own one anymore since I retired, because they don't work at the cottage & partly because if I'm out & about, I don't feel like talking on the phone. I don't have the need to immediately tell somebody what I'm doing or snap pictures of what I'm doing to record the event for posterity on my computer. But then again, I'm getting to be more & more of a cantankerous old ba$terd anyways.
rolleyes
