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When a wolf broke the silence of a quiet evening

When you live in the country you hear things. I’m not talking about gossip you hear from your neighbors (yes, we hear that too), I’m talking about things that wake you up in the middle of the night making you wonder exactly what you just heard.

Things get very quiet late at night. So quiet that you can hear traffic on highways miles away. Imagine living on Harmar Hill and hearing trucks shifting gears on I-77, that is how quiet it is on our little hilltop in Churchtown. We can hear the rumble of Globe Metallurgical 10 miles aways, and we can hear jets as they pass over our house at 30,000 feet.

When the neighborhood dogs start barking, they all chime in. Eight dogs within a one-mile radius will start in and sound like a live version of 101 Dalmatians. Eight dogs in a span of a mile. Let that sink in city folks. The country is a quiet place indeed.

The most unnerving sound is that of the coyote. Their yelping sounds are very loud when they break the late-night silence. They travel in packs, and they announce their location as they move. They can sound as though they are on your front porch.

The area was once full of a lot more sounds at night. When European settlers arrived here there were still elk roaming the riverbanks. Anyone who has heard the bugling of the elk can attest to how loud and how far of a distance their deep call can travel.

There were wolves here in 1788 as well. They were later heavily hunted because a high price was placed on their pelts. It was thought that by 1842 wolves were gone from Ohio. In addition to farm animals, wolves also hunted coyotes, and with the wolves gone, the coyote population began to increase to the point that they are now a nuisance.

No one told the wolves living in the hills near Churchtown they were extinct in the state. There were enough in the woods that in 1953 farmers staged a hunt in early December to keep them from killing their animals, including sheep.

There had been a pack of four wolves killing sheep. The wolves had caused around $1,500 in damage to area livestock that year, estimated the county dog warden, Dayton Goddard, according to an article in The Times. That would amount to more than 50 sheep. Wolves it would seem, kill sheep in such a way that sets them apart from coyotes.

Eleven farmers banded together and went looking for them. A 36-pound male wolf that measured 55 inches long was shot by Carl Schilling and Francis Peters on a farm owned by Albert Brooker.

One male wolf was killed the first weekend, but the farmers had seen a pack of at least four. The following weekend 100 men armed with shotguns headed out to find more of the wolves. They killed a single 38-pound female and scheduled even more hunts in the future.

This of course raises the question of what happened to the other wolves. Are their descendants still lurking out in the woods somewhere? Could they be feeding on deer instead of sheep? Could they be watching us all from the safety of the woods? Could our dogs all be trying to warn us of something when they bark at night?

Perhaps the country was just too quiet of a place for them, and they moved to the city, or perhaps they returned to where they came from, wherever that was. After all, they were already extinct for more than 100 years when the great wolf hunt of 1953 happened.

Art Smith is the online manager of The Times. He can be reached at asmith@mariettatimes.com. His column appears on Saturday.

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