His name caused fear and trembling at the dawn of the 20th century! The Curampo Valley echoed ominously in the minds of the frightened inhabitants of New Mexico, the land of the prairies, the Apaches and the famous Rocky Mountains, which, admittedly, changed with each roar of the locomotive, but there were still distant parts of the wilderness that man did not touch or tame. One of the heroes of our story, Ernst Seton, was a true lover of nature and a great painter educated in London. However, like most contemporaries, naturalists, he used to kill them from time to time and hang their representative remains on the wall. And Lobo, the king of the Kurampo Valley, was not just a huge and fearless wolf, when they whispered that he had almost supernatural powers. He was, above all, insatiable. In just a few years, over two thousand domestic animals were found in the jaws of the king and his five subjects. The number could have been much higher if the shepherds, who hated him from the bottom of their souls, did not do everything to get his head around him. First they chased him with hunting chases, then they set hundreds of traps for him, poisoning cattle and scattering their remains in the valley. In vain. The legend of the terrible and elusive wolf began to take its breath away and circling houses, barns, taverns and churches. On the thin line (red) between fear and respect. And then Ernst Seton ran into the whole story, as the last hope of the locals. Renowned as a seasoned hunter and author of several manuals on wolf hunting, he often openly boasted that one of his ancestors had killed the last British wolf. The locals offered him a thousand dollars for Lob's head, but he replied that he would come from Canada for free. Phil at the Pile of Traps That fall of 1893, there was an unprecedented crowd at a small train station in the Kurampo Valley. Residents greeted the famous wolf hunter with torches and shouts "Hurray! Hooray! " It was the beginning of the story of one of the most incredible hunts in history. Ernst Seton spent the first day of the hunt touring Lob's kingdom and looking for the most suitable place for the final showdown. As night began to fall, he saddled his horse and pitched a tent on a suitable hill surrounded by winds and the sounds of the valley. Then he sat by the campfire, trying to focus on what was in front of him, to figure out a way to defeat a beast that no one had been able to do before. Encouraged by the stories of the locals, he remembered how a famous Texas gamekeeper - equipped with an elephant rifle, the best horse and a pack of large and dangerous dogs - rode to Kurampo and quickly returned on foot, with only a knife in his hand and a butchered dog. and came. He also remembered two hunters who tried their skills only a few months ago. The first believed that he would finish it off with a completely new odorless poison from France, while the second hunter, a Canadian, was determined to use poison from Italy, blessed by an Indian sorcerer.

With the first rays of the morning, Seton was convinced that he knew how to defeat Lobo. He will also use poison, but different from his predecessors. He believed that he was a real artist. To reduce the chance of wolves smelling human wolves, they will first cut the meat into thin slices using gloves, and then use a syringe to inject the lowest possible dose of venom. He will scatter the poisoned meat in the valley in concentric circles, without getting off his horse, so as not to leave traces of a man and warn the wolves to notice him.

And when he went on a tour the next morning, sure he would find at least a few corpses, he had something to see. Lobo took the bait, all four poisoned steaks. But instead of eating them, he simply piled them up, stacked them on top of each other, and then left his feces on top. "As if he wanted to humiliate my intention," Seton later wrote in his diary. The ridicule of the invisible The first failure did not shake him. He continued his hunt vigorously, this time setting up dozens of hellish metal traps across the valley. He buried them deep in the ground, using gloves, while wiping his marks on the surface with deer fur. But the wolf seemed to continue to make fun of him. He magically discovered traps. He did not manage to understand how he succeeded, but he succeeded. Each time he saw carefully dug traps that were then assembled without loot. It was as if from somewhere, invisible, he was making fun of his hunter. And so the days turned into weeks, and these into months. Seton often spent hours crouching in a bush or at the top of a bay, watching birds, moles and bison cruising the plains unhindered. He painted them, noted their habits, their number, their place and importance for natural balance. As if hunting a scary wolf was sometimes not important to him at all. Why was there no place for Lobo in his notes at the time? Especially since his manual on wolf hunting was a must-read at the time. He realized that Lobo, a terrible wolf, an opponent worthy of respect, slowly began to take on human qualities. He was no longer just a horrible pest that slaughters for no reason, but an animal worthy of admiration - smart, persistent and, above all, loyal to his family. And Seton suddenly began to think that he was no longer able to kill that old wolf. However, as much as he respected him, he knew that he had an obligation to finish the job he started, for which he had already taken a hefty down payment. And if he doesn't succeed, he will, for sure, be followed by many other hunters who want the famous scalp, but also huge sums of money, which were waiting for them as a reward.

And then one morning, two months after he went hunting, he saw strange paw prints from his horse on the edge of a nearby pond. He carefully dismounted and, nervously running his fingers over his forehead, began to call on his imagination for help. Nothing was clear to him here. For the first time, he saw Lobo's tracks so shifted. They were there for an hour, here for an hour, for an hour on one side of the pond, for an hour on the other. Everywhere! What happened? "It's strange. Didn't he eat poison bait by any chance? "Seton thought. "Then he is dead, somewhere in the bush. Then he saw a new series of tracks, which were also scattered all around, and which miraculously followed Lobo's, as if in footsteps. It seemed as if these two different series of traces intertwined and merged, repelled and attracted, and sometimes united into a single one.

"Is it possible?" Seton shouted, banging his forehead. "I have you! You're mine now! I have you, you in love wolf! " The villagers called her Blanka because only the peaks of the Rocky Mountains were lighter than her white fur (after which she got her name).

Fatal love It was not difficult to catch Blanka: a few lures, an ambush and one bullet were enough. Wolves are usually less careful during the mating season. The second stage of Seton's new plan followed, which required only a little rope and a little more patience. He tied one end of that rope to Blanka and the other to the saddle. So riding, slowly all the way to his hut, Seton left behind a recognizable scent trail, the trail of a slain wolf. He had no idea that the wolf in love was right behind them and that he had reached his hut the first night.

First, tired, he was awakened by a blow that came from the direction of the barn, where he laid Blanka's lifeless body. He grabbed his rifle with lightning speed and flew outside, but Lobo was far from the home of the bullets. "He hasn't shown himself to anyone in these two months, and now he's playing with his own life, he hasn't found his beloved," Seton later wrote in his diary. It was time for the months-long chase to end. The hunter immediately collected all the traps he had, a total of one hundred and thirty, and buried them around the hut.

On the morning of January 31, 1984, it was all over. Loba was found caught in as many as four traps. Seton only needed to finish him off, so helpless, with a shot from a rifle. For a long time, almost motionless, he stared at him and failed to pull the trigger. He couldn't stand the sight of this cruel four-legged outlaw, so he put the rifle back in its holster, took a camera out of his pocket and took the only photo of Lob that has survived to this day. Then he grabbed him by the fur above the door and carefully dragged him to the hut, convinced that he would recover by the next morning. The wolf remained silent and curled up, and when the Moon of Sharp Ears appeared in the evening, he listened to the call of his company. And he never answered them. Observing the almost unreal scene from the window of the whole hut, Seton left a written trace in the diary: "Like an eagle whose freedom has been stolen, like a lion whose power has been taken away, like a dove whose chosen one has been killed - everything dies of a broken heart." Early in the morning he found his motionless contorted body. The only thing he could do for him was lay him in a barn next to his Blanka. And so ended the old Lobo, the last great outlaw of the Wild West. But is his reign over? No, not at all. She was just beginning. Because, haunted by guilt and remorse, Seton threw away all his rifles and dared, as it will turn out later, on the most difficult campaign of his life - to radically change the established opinions about wolves and nature in general. In less than two weeks, he finished his first book. "Wild Animals I Knew" was his first attempt to put things back in their proper place, to portray himself as a criminal and Loba as a hero. No one has ever written like that about a beast, a predator. Never before has a book about animals caused so much confusion in bookstores that publishers were forced to reprint series of new editions and newspapers to buy publishing rights and transfer parts in sequels. True, that book is too romanticized, embellished, but it is in a way understandable, considering the kind of iron hearts through which the writer wanted to push his new bold stories about wolves. In it, Lobo continued to roam pastures and some new kingdoms as an unstoppable element, defying enemies. The myth touched the hearts of many. The former hunter did not stop only at these stories.

Armed with a touching book and sudden worldwide popularity, but immense stubbornness, he founded several associations that encouraged people to spend more time in nature, and was one of the founders of the Young Scouts of America. Using his new connections, including the American president, he fought for the establishment of the first national parks.

Lamija Ganic