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| Figure One -- Artist's depiction of a dire wolf (from thoughtco.com). |
Let me take you on a short adventure in my time machine. The year is 10,700 B.C. and the place is what we would someday call the Panhandle of Texas. The scene is from my book SHADOWS on the TRAIL. Three hunters in a Paleoindian tribe called the Folsom People are returning to their tribe at night. They believe that they are not alone. At this time in North American prehistory, humans and wolves were at pretty much equal footing in the food chain; Wolves had been around a lot longer than humans, but humans were catching up. I am pretty sure that a few Paleoindians ended up as the main meal for packs of voracious wolves while wolves also served as a meal source for Paleoindians. While the prehistoric humans had fire and spears to defend themselves against these formidable predators, wolves roamed in packs of ten, twenty or, even more wolves. It does not take much of an imagination to see the situation humans found themselves in. Here is a short scene from SHADOWS on the TRAIL.
Pahin stopped suddenly on the
trail and not paying enough attention, Chayton ran right into the back of the big
hunter. Chayton bounced off Pahin and then he collided with Kangi. The two boys
untangled themselves and stood alongside Pahin. Both boys were completely out
of breath and were wheezing. Their hands were on their hips. Pahin glared at
them; he was trying to listen to the night.
“Enila,” he told the boys to ‘be quiet’.
Chayton and Kangi held their
breaths. Chayton heard the croaking of a bullfrog near the creek and a chirping
cricket near the trail, but other than that, he heard nothing. Then, all three
hunters heard it, a wolf howling somewhere in the canyon. The hunters held
their breaths and listened some more, trying to pinpoint the distance and direction
of the howl. One wolf howled while another answered.
“We must hurry,” Pahin declared, “they
are behind us.”
The crescent moon was now high overhead.
Its light reflected off the scattered clouds, making the trail barely visible.
The three hunters ascended a knoll and from there they spotted the yellow
lights of campfires.
“There is our camp!” Pahin yelled
over his shoulder. “Run!”
Chayton managed to chuckle even
through his stressed lungs. He had never been happier to see a camp in his life.
He looked over his shoulder to make sure Kangi was still behind him. Adrenalin increased
the speed and the urgency of the hunters. The campfires grew larger.
The black wolf galloped
effortlessly along the trail like a demon of the night, invisible in the
darkness. The wind in its face curled its lips upward into a sort of wolf-like sneer
while exposing iridescent teeth. The monstrous animal no longer needed a scent
to track the humans, it had spotted Kangi. The black wolf turned its head and
snarled at the others, a warning for the pack to remain quiet. The lust of the
kill flowed through the gaunt body of the black wolf as it picked up its pace
to a full gallop.
What happened to the three hunters? You will have to read SHADOWS on the TRAIL
to find out.
Figure Two - Size comparison between a dire wolf and a gray wolf.
When I wrote SHADOWS on the TRAIL, I thought about using the now extinct dire wolf in the plot of the book. I did my research on North American wolf species around 12,000 years ago and decided I would either go with dire wolves or gray wolves in my book. Dire wolves had an advantage in body size over gray wolves. Fossil specimens of dire wolves indicate that they were around twenty-five percent larger than gray wolves. Dire wolves also had a more powerful bite than gray wolves. Based on bone structure analysis, scientists concluded that a dire wolf's bite was around twenty-nine percent more powerful than a gray wolf's bite. Fossil evidence also indicates that dire wolves were not as fleet of foot as gray wolves. Dire Wolves had a bulkier build and based on a smaller brain cavity scientists believe that dire wolves were probably less intelligent than gray wolves.
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Figure Three - Comparison between gray wolf skull on the left and
extinct dire wolf skull on the right (courtesy Dire Wolf Project). |
While gray wolves are social, highly intelligent, and efficient predators of both small and large game, it appears that dire wolves focused their hunting and scavenging on the large megafauna of the Pleistocene. When much of the larger megafauna went extinct in the Pleistocene, dire wolves followed in their footsteps and went extinct as well.
Over sixteen hundred remains of dire wolves have been excavated from the Rancho La Brea tar pits in southern California while only eight gray wolves have been excavated from the same tar pits. Even if the population of dire wolves at the time was much greater than that of gray wolves, the disparity in the number of fossil remains between the two species is striking. The fossil evidence indicates that a large part of a dire wolf's existence was based on scavenging large mammals stuck in the tar, and ultimately, they became stuck in the tar themselves. The lack of gray wolves in the tar pits might attest to a different hunting strategy for gray wolves or that maybe the species was intelligent enough not to get stuck in the tar.
Gray wolves survived into modern times by being efficient and intelligent predators while dire wolves faded into extinction with mammoths, short-faced bears, camels, wild horses, ground sloths, and several other species.
My final verdict was that gray wolves were more efficient predators than dire wolves, and therefore a more threatening species for my human characters in SHADOWS on the TRAIL.
In the other books in the SHADOWS on the TRAIL Pentalogy, one or both of these species returns for an encore performance.
Check them out.
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