The Winter of 1958–1959

The Winter of 1958–1959 frames the book’s final account of organized wolf control in the Keewatin Barrens: aircraft carried government officers through the region to establish poison-bait stations, and the season’s last recorded operation brought that campaign back to Wolf House Bay. The epilogue records the attempt but not its result, ending with an occupied den, an uninspected control station, and uncertainty about what happened to the wolves.

The winter and its policy setting

During the winter of 1958–1959, the Canadian Wildlife Service employed several Predator Control officers to patrol the Keewatin Barrens in ski-equipped aircraft. Their task was to set out poison-bait stations as part of the agency’s continuing policy of wolf control. The account thus presents the work not as an isolated hunt but as an organized program extending across a large northern region.

The broader policy environment helps explain the campaign’s persistence. Provincial and federal governments offered bounties of ten to thirty dollars per wolf; when fur prices fell, the book argues, these payments effectively subsidized trappers and traders. A trapper working along the Manitoba–Keewatin boundary in the first winter of the narrator’s study collected bounty on 118 wolves, 107 of them born the previous spring. Though the law required trapping or shooting, he used strychnine over a wide area, killing foxes, wolverines, and other small carnivores as well. The book does not identify that episode as occurring in the winter of 1958–1959; it records it as evidence of the wider practices surrounding wolf control.

Control methods and competing pressures

Poison was one method among several. The account describes traps and poison as common wolf-killers, and aerial pursuit as another established practice: aircraft chased wolves across open ground or lake ice, sometimes until the animals collapsed. These methods place the winter patrols in a longer history of intervention in which technology extended the reach of hunters and government operations into remote country.

The book also complicates claims that wolves alone were responsible for pressure on big-game animals. In an earlier government-backed scheme, organized hunting parties were flown into the subarctic and charged for caribou safaris; aircraft could circle a herd on a lake and keep it bunched while hunters fired from the plane. That episode is distinct from the 1958–1959 patrols, but it sharpens the contrast between official efforts to kill wolves and the human hunting practices described elsewhere in the account. The period’s wolf-control policy appears within a wider system of government-supported exploitation, rather than as a response to a single, independently established cause of wildlife decline.

Field observation as a counterpoint

The book’s close observations of wolves elsewhere in the narrative provide a counterweight to the assumptions behind control campaigns. At a den, the narrator used a telescope from a concealed position roughly four hundred yards away; repeated observation, rather than a single encounter, became the basis for learning how the animals behaved. In one instance, after marking out a small claim that crossed a wolf trail, he watched a leading male stop at the new boundary, investigate a marked bush, and finally look toward the tent. The episode presents the wolf as an attentive animal responding to its surroundings, not simply as a target in a control program.

Other observations likewise resist the image of indiscriminate killing. The narrator watched hunts in which wolves tested deer and abandoned pursuit when the animals ran strongly; prime bucks were seldom challenged because the wolves were unlikely to catch them. He also records the family life of George and Angeline and the narrator’s early uncertainty about the role of the third adult, Uncle Albert. These observations belong to the book’s broader fieldwork, not specifically to the winter patrols, but they establish the detailed knowledge that the policy narrative sets against generalized claims about wolves.

The May 1959 operation and its unresolved outcome

In early May 1959, one of the Predator Control officers landed at Wolf House Bay and stayed in the vicinity for several hours. He placed several Cyanide wolf getter devices in suitable locations near a den that he determined was occupied, and spread strychnine-treated bait nearby. The return visit needed to inspect the station never took place: the early spring thaw prevented the officer from coming back.

The epilogue states plainly that the results are not known. It does not establish whether the wolves encountered the poison, whether any animals died, or what became of the occupied den. That absence of confirmation is the winter’s decisive narrative consequence. The book ends its account of Wolf House Bay not with a witnessed outcome, but with the record of an intervention whose effects remained beyond observation.