In most places they are not followed any more eagerly than are the other large beasts of prey, and they are usually followed with less success.

Of all animals the wolf is the shyest and hardest to slay.

It is almost or quite as difficult to still-hunt as the cougar, and is far more difficult to kill with hounds, traps, or poison; yet it scarcely holds its own as well as the great cat, and it does not begin to hold its own as well as the bear, a beast certainly never more readily killed, and one which produces fewer young at a birth.

Throughout the East the black bear is common in many localities from which the wolf has vanished completely.

It at present exists in very scanty numbers in northern Maine and the Adirondacks; is almost or quite extinct in Pennsylvania; lingers here and there in the mountains from West Virginia to east Tennessee, and is found in Florida; but is everywhere less abundant than the bear.