Poisoning Wolves near Wolf House Bay

Poisoning Wolves near Wolf House Bay was a government wolf-control operation carried out in early May 1959. Its significance lies in the contrast between the deliberate placement of lethal baits beside an occupied site and the epilogue’s final uncertainty: the officer could not return to determine what, if anything, the operation killed.

Policy and Campaign Context

During the winter of 1958–1959, the Canadian Wildlife Service continued its wolf-control policy by sending Predator Control officers across the Keewatin Barrens in ski-equipped aircraft to establish poison-bait stations. The operation at Wolf House Bay was therefore not an isolated response to a local incident, but part of a planned campaign extending across the region.

The book situates that campaign within a broader system of incentives and hostility toward wolves. Provincial and federal governments offered bounties generally ranging from ten to thirty dollars per wolf; when fur prices fell, the bounty could function as a subsidy to trappers and traders. Wolves were also resented for competing for caribou and for disturbing fox traps, while fear of wolves intensified the impulse to destroy them.

The account contrasts official concern about wolves’ alleged impact on game with the scale and methods of human killing. One trapper collected bounty on 118 wolves in a single winter, 107 of them young, after spreading strychnine across a wide area. The poisoned bait also killed foxes, wolverines, and other carnivores. Elsewhere, wolves were pursued from aircraft until they collapsed or were shot. These examples establish the practices surrounding the Wolf House Bay operation without demonstrating that the same consequences followed there.

The Operation at Wolf House Bay

In early May, one of the control officers landed at Wolf House Bay and remained in the vicinity for several hours. Having determined that a den there was occupied, he placed several cyanide wolf getters at suitable nearby locations and spread additional baits treated with strychnine.

The choice of an occupied site made the operation especially consequential: the baits were laid close to a den known to be in use. Yet the account gives no description of an animal taking the bait, and it does not report a death. Its facts concern the officer’s arrival, assessment, and placement of poison, not a confirmed outcome.

Interrupted Follow-Up and Unknown Results

The officer could not return later to inspect the control station because the spring thaw began early. Without a subsequent check, the fate of the baits and their effects on the wolves remained unverified. The epilogue states plainly that the results are not known, and the operation ends in that evidentiary gap rather than in a reported count of animals killed.

Significance in the Epilogue

The episode closes the book’s account of Wolf House Bay with a record of renewed state intervention. Earlier observations at the site had depended on patient watching: the narrator selected a concealed position roughly four hundred yards from the den and used a telescope to search for the wolves. The later control visit reverses that relation. An officer arrives by aircraft, identifies the occupied site, and leaves poison nearby; the wolves’ response is never recorded.

That unresolved ending also reflects the wider imbalance in the book’s account of wolf control. Human policy and methods are described in specific terms, while the biological consequences of this particular operation remain beyond the available evidence. The poisoning is established; its results are not.