“A wolf, it has been said, can hear a cloud pass overhead.”

A wolf’s senses are very keen. They learn early how to foretell rain and where water hides beneath Mother Earth. Most importantly, they learn to know of that wanton killer…Man. The Indians who know him well tell stories of skill and courage and give the name Wolf to their bravest and most special warriors.

If you skin a wolf, coyote or domestic dog you will find it extremely difficult to identify them anatomically. Before man started tampering with Nature and produced an array of different sized, shaped, and different colored domestic breeds of what we call dogs, almost the entire land surface of the Earth was inhabited by different kinds of dog-like animals. Each stayed in its own ecological niche.

It is purposeless to attempt a description of all types of Wolves and Dogs. Besides, nearly everyone knows what a wolf, or a dog looks like. There is, however, a very great misconception about the habits of all these animals. Wolves are more highly adaptive than most other mammals. They sometimes live alone, but mostly in family units, and other times in packs.

They are great travelers and being very rugged, they adapt quickly to changes in climate. Actually, much like my people — the Sioux — wolves are nomads, except in the breeding season when they use mostly permanent dens in which to raise their young. Man has driven them north to the boreal forests and the Arctic. There are really only three, and possibly no more than two, “species of Wolves; namely, the Wolf and the Coyote.

Now we come to a very strange impasse. Are all domestic dogs simply altered forms of the wolf, or are they descendants of some animal now totally distinct? If the latter is true, where are the fossilized bones of that animal? What ever the truth, we are confronted with the bizarre possibility that there is probably no such thing as a “dog” (in the strictest sense) and never has been. There are innumerable recognizable races of the wolf, and white, black, grey, brown, red, and yellow individuals are often mixed together.

Apart from the Coyote, who prefers the open prairies, the Wolf lives in almost every type of terrain from the bleak tundra to stony mountain tops, baking deserts, and forests of all kinds.