The wolf is one of the animals which can only be hunted successfully with dogs.  Most dogs however do not take at all kindly to the pursuit.  A wolf is a terrible fighter.  He will decimate a pack of hounds by rabid snaps with his giant jaws while suffering little damage himself; nor are the ordinary big dogs, supposed to be fighting dogs, able to tackle him without special training.  I have known one wolf to kill a bulldog which had rushed at it with a single snap, while another which had entered the yard of a Montana ranch house slew in quick succession both of the large mastiffs by which it was assailed.  The immense agility and ferocity of the wild beast, the terrible snap of his long-toothed jaws, and the admirable training in which he always is, give him a great advantage over fat, small-toothed, smooth-skinned dogs, even though they are nominally supposed to belong to the fighting classes.  In the way that bench competitions are arranged nowadays this is but natural, as there is no temptation to produce a worthy class of fighting dog when the rewards are given upon technical points wholly unconnected with the dog’s usefulness.  A prize-winning mastiff or bulldog may be almost useless for the only purposes for which his kind is ever useful at all.  A mastiff, if properly trained and of sufficient size, might possibly be able to meet a young or undersized Texas wolf; but I have never seen a dog of this variety which I would esteem a match single-handed for one of the huge timber wolves of western Montana.  Even if the dog was the heavier of the two, his teeth and claws would be very much smaller and weaker and his hide less tough.  Indeed I have known of but one dog which single-handed encountered and slew a wolf; this was the large vicious mongrel whose feats are recorded in my Hunting Trips of a Ranchman.

General Marcy of the United States Army informed me that he once chased a huge wolf which had gotten away with a small trap on its foot.  It was, I believe, in Wisconsin, and he had twenty or thirty hounds with him, but they were entirely untrained in wolf-hunting, and proved unable to stop the crippled beast.  Few of them would attack it at all, and those that did went at it singly and with a certain hesitation, and so each in turn was disabled by a single terrible snap, and left bleeding on the snow.  General Wade Hampton tells me that in the course of his fifty years’ hunting with horse and hound in Mississippi, he has on several occasions tried his pack of fox-hounds (southern deer-hounds) after a wolf.  He found that it was with the greatest difficulty, however, that he could persuade them to so much as follow the trail.  Usually, as soon as they came across it, they would growl, bristle up, and then retreat with their tails between their legs.  But one of his dogs ever really tried to master a wolf by itself, and this one paid for its temerity with its life; for while running a wolf in a canebrake the beast turned and tore it to pieces.  Finally General Hampton succeeded in getting a number of his hounds so they would at any rate follow the trail in full cry, and thus drive the wolf out of the thicket, and give a chance to the hunter to get a shot.  In this way he killed two or three.