On the islands of Canada's west coast live wolves that may be genetically as well as geographically separate from their continental kin. We had just forded halfway across the mouth of a flooding tidal river on British Columbia's central coast, chesthigh in water, when the misty air around us suddenly erupted in wolf song. It was not the beautiful howling you often hear while sitting around a campfire in the backcountry, but rather an agitated barking intended to let us know, as intruders, that we should keep our distance. So we stopped, frozen in the middle of the powerful current, wondering exactly what we should do next. Then we saw Chris Darimont, a wildlife biologist working on BC's five-year coastal wolf research project, frantically waving at us from the opposite side of the river. "He wants us to go back," said Karen McAllister of BC's Raincoast Conservation Society, the study's primary sponsor. We needed no further encouragement. The two of us executed an abrupt turn and starting fordingback across the river to where, we hoped, we would no longer pose a threat to the pack's young pups.
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