Lupo

Lupo, the wolves in the novel, occupy the aftermath of the hunters’ destruction of the bison: they feed on abandoned carcasses, while Charley Hoge treats them as enemies to be poisoned. Their presence makes the hunt’s consequences visible beyond the animals killed for hides, and links the valley’s altered landscape to a campaign of violence against its scavengers.

Predators and the Bison’s Fate

Miller describes the bison’s fate as divided between human hunters and wolves: an animal that escaped the hunters might, once weakened, be taken by wolves. His account makes predation part of the valley’s ordinary order, even as the hunt rapidly overwhelms that order. The wolves are not presented as responsible for the slaughter; they enter the story as scavengers and predators within a landscape transformed by human killing.

The contrast is sharpened by the carcasses left across the valley. More than three weeks after the first bison was killed and skinned, wolves had torn flesh from some remains, leaving exposed bones pale and bright. The hunters’ waste thus becomes a food source, but also a danger: Charley’s strychnine may kill wolves that reach poisoned meat or keep them away from it.

Charley Hoge’s Poison Campaign

Charley goes among the remains with a tin of fine white powder, and Miller identifies his purpose as wolf hunting. He explains the method: scatter strychnine over raw meat and leave it around camp for several days. Miller also distinguishes this practical use from Charley’s personal animus. In his account, Charley sees a dead wolf as the death of the devil itself, giving the poisoning a moral and almost religious charge beyond protecting the camp.

The campaign’s reported results remain inseparable from Charley’s own words. When he later claims that he killed all the gray wolves with strychnine, the statement confirms his perception of the campaign as a completed extermination, but the novel offers no independent count of the wolves or verification that none survived. The difference matters: his certainty is evidence of his fixation, not a measured account of the valley’s wolf population.

Scavengers in a Commercial Landscape

The wolves’ access to bison remains is part of a wider pattern of discarded animal matter. Near the end of the expedition, Miller learns that hunters are selling bison meat to the railroad company while leaving the hides to rot where the animals were skinned, exposed to flies and gray wolves. The market determines which parts of the bison are worth carrying away; what it rejects becomes food for scavengers or waste under the sun.

This context complicates the hunters’ treatment of wolves. The animals are described as a threat when they approach camp, yet the hunting economy also leaves carcasses and scraps for them to consume. Lupo therefore marks an ecological consequence of the hunt that the commercial accounting does not include: even as the bison are reduced to meat, hides, and abandoned remains, other animals are drawn into the human-created field of danger.