Howling Wolves?

When dogsledding teams come into the vicinity of wolves, is it a mess of quadrupeds gone wild? Or is it a howling good time?

I've gone dogsledding. Boy have I gone dogsledding.

After you've spent five days in midwinter mushing through the deep woods and across vast lakes, you start to wonder.

It was 40-below at night.

The bright sunny days warmed nicely, but caused you to work up a sweat.

Five days of sweating, five nights of sleepless freezing in a tent. Is this fun?

A challenge-yes. Different-for sure. Fun? Probably not.

But that's a story for a different day.

What I'm wondering today is this: each night, well after we'd bedded down, a coyote or a wolf or something out there in the wilderness night would howl, and thirty dogs would answer in chorus.

Now, I don't know what that coyote or wolf was thinking, but if I were him/her/it, I'd have been thinking, "Creepers, it's a pack of them, let's get outa here!"

Which makes me wonder about this "Mush with Dogs, Howl with Wolves" program being organized by Ely, Minnesota's International Wolf Center.

I mean, I always thought if you wanted to observe wolves, you had to sneak up on 'em.

And, there's no way a pack of mushing dogs is sneaking up on anyone, least of all a den of wolves.

But, you can bet they'll be howling at each other.

Anyway, I'd travel up to Minnesota or out to Yellowstone just to see how those dogs and wolves relate to each other. Forget the humans-you know they'll be at once fascinated, a bit frightened, and probably a touch too anthropomorphic for my taste (not to mention a tad cold in the northern woods in mid-February or early-March).

But, what will those dogs and wolves do? Sounds to me like it'd be fun to find out.

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