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November/December 2001 issue	In this issue Table of Contents Editor’s Notebook Inside Story Feature: Intruding on wild lives À la carte Reverberations

In the headphones, John Theberge heard the wolf's radio-collar signal getting stronger and stronger and knew it could mean only one thing: a killing in the making. The wildlife researcher tensed with apprehension. The wolf was approaching through the inky Algonquin Park night — not toward Theberge himself but toward a pack of wolves in the forest nearby, to which this wolf was an outsider. Intensely territorial, wolf packs often attack and sometimes slay intruders in their domains. Theberge took off his radio headset: the pack was so near, the night so still, that the fight would be all too audible. But no snarls rent the night. Instead of a savage fracas, the intruder was quietly accepted, in defiance of all known wolf behaviour. How could this be?

Only a painstaking study of the wolves' intimate lives, travels, slaughter by humans and myriad other details could explain this tantalizing encounter. Having carefully fitted radio collars on the young male and some of the home-pack members in the preceding years, the team was able to track the late-night reunion. Blood samples taken by Theberge and analyzed by his colleagues at McMaster University in Hamilton showed that the intruder was actually the son of the pack's dominant female; a prodigal returning home after a three-year sojourn with a distant pack.

It was a short but telling moment in a 13-year study, a measure of the intimate glimpses that wildlife researchers can get of their subjects — when their work is careful, professional, ethical. The project went on to prove that the wolves were a distinct species of special concern and alerted the public to the unsustainable level of wolf kills by humans in and near the park.

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